>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS Reinvented 2022 Live from the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas. We're happy to be back. This is first full day of coverage over here last night. We've got three full days of coverage in addition to last night, and there's about 50,000 people here. This event is ready, people are ready to be back, which is so exciting. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gill and Paul, it's great to be back in person. Great to be hosting with you >>And likewise with you, Lisa. I think the first time we hosted again, >>It is our first time exactly. >>And we come here to the biggest event that the cube ever does during the year. >>It's the Super Bowl of the >>Cube. It's it's elbow to elbow out there. It's, it's, it's full tackle football, totally on the, on the floor of reinvent. And very exciting. This, you know, I've been to a lot of conferences going back 40 years, long as I can remember. Been going to tech conferences. This one, the, the intensity, the excitement around this is really unusual. People are jazzed, they're excited to be here, and that's great to see, particularly coming back from two years of isolation. >>Absolutely. The energy is so palpable. Even yesterday, evening, afternoon when I was walking in, you just feel it with all the people here. You know, we talk to so many different companies on the Q Paul. Every company these days has to be a data company. The most important thing about data is making sure that it's backed up and it's protected, that it's secure, that it can be recovered if anything happens. So we're gonna be having a great conversation next about data resiliency with one of our alumni. >>And that would be Rick Scott, Rick, excuse me, Rick Scott, >>Rick Clark. Rick Clark, say Rick Scott, cloud sales Veritas. Rick, welcome back >>To the program. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here, you know, thank you so much. You're definitely very excited to myself and 40,000 of my closest cousins and friends all in one place. Yep. Or I could possibly go wrong, right? So >>Yeah, absolutely nothing. So, Rick, so Veritas has made some exciting announcements. Talk to us about some of the new things that you've >>Unveiled. Yeah, we've been, we've been incredibly busy and, you know, the journey that we've been on, one of the big announcement that we made about three or four weeks ago is the introduction, really, of a brand new cloud native data management platform that we call Veritas Alta. And this is a journey that we've been on for the better part of seven years. We actually started it with our, our flex appliances. We continued, that was a containerization of our traditional net backup business in, into a highly secured appliance that was loved by our customers. And we continued that theme and that investment into what we call a scale out and scale up form factor appliance as well, what we called flex scale. And then we continued on that investment theme, basically spending over a billion dollars over that seven year journey in our cloud native. And we call that basically the Veritas altar platform with our cloud native platform. And I think if you really look at what that is, it truly is a data management platform. And I emphasize the term cloud native. And so our traditional technologies around data protection, obviously application resiliency and digital compliance or data compliance and governance. We are the only, the first and only company in the world to provide really a cloud optimized, cloud native platform, really, that addresses that. So it's been fun, it's been a fun journey. >>Talk a little bit about the customer experience. I see over 85% of the Fortune 100 trust Veritas with their data management. That's >>A big number. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is incredible actually. And it really comes back to the Veritas older platform. We sort of built that with, with four tenants in mind, all driving back to this very similar to AWS's customer obsession. Everything we do each and every day of our waiting moments is a Veritas employee is really surrounds the customer. So it starts with the customer experience on how do they find us to, how do they procure our solutions through things like AWS marketplace and how do they deploy it? And the second thing is around really cost optimization, as we know, you know, to, to say that companies are going through a digital transformation and moving workloads to the cloud. I mean, I've got customers that literally were 20% in cloud a year ago and 80% a year later, we've never seen that kind of velocity. >>And so we've doubled down on this notion of cost optimization. You can only do that with these huge investments that I talked about. And so we're a very profitable company. We've been around, got a great heritage of over 30 years, and we've really taken those investments in r and d to provide that sort of cloud native technology to ultimately make it elastic. And so everything from will spin up and spin down services to optimize the cloud bill for our customers, but we'll also provide the greatest workload support. You know, obviously on-prem workloads are very different from cloud workloads and it's almost like turning the clock back 20 years to see all of those new systems. There's no standard API like s and MP on the network. And so we have to talk to every single PAs service, every single DB PAs, and we capture that information and protect it. So it's really has been a phenomenal journey. It's been great. >>You said this, that that al represents a shift from clouds from flex scale to cloud native. What is the difference there? >>The, the main difference really is we took, you know, obviously our traditional product that you've known for many media years, net backup. It's got, you know, tens of millions of lines of code in that. And we knew if we lifted and shifted it up into the cloud, into an I AEs infrastructure, it's just not, it obviously would perform extremely well, but it wasn't cost optimized for our customer. It was too expensive to to run. And so what we did is we rewrote with microservices and containerization, Kubernetes huge parts of that particular product to really optimize it for the cloud. And not only have we done it for that technology, what we now call alter data protection, but we've done it across our entire port portfolio. That was really the main change that we made as part of this particular transition. And >>What have you done to prepare customers for that shift? Is this gonna be a, a drop in simple upgrade for them? >>Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, one of the things that we introduced is we, we invest still very heavily with regards to our OnPrem solutions. We're certainly not abandoning, we're still innovating. There's a lot of data still OnPrem that needs to move to the cloud. And so we have a unique advantage of all of the different workload supports that we provide OnPrem. We continue that expansion into the cloud. So we, we create it as part of the Veritas AL Vision, a technology, we call it AL view. So it's a single painter glass across both OnPrem and cloud for our customers. And so now they can actually see all of their data protection, all our application availability, single collect, all through that single unified interface, which is really game changing in the industry for us. >>It's game changing for customers too, because customers have what generally six to seven different backup technologies in their environment that they're having to individually manage and provision. So the, the workforce productivity improvements I can imagine are, are huge with Veritas. >>Yeah. You you nailed it, right? You must have seen my script, but Absolutely. I mean, I look at the analogy of, you think about the airlines, what's one of the first things airlines do with efficiency? South Southwest Airlines was the best example, a standardized on the 7 37, right? And so all of their pilots, all of their mechanics, all know how to operate the 7 37. So we are doing the same thing with enterprise data protection. So whether you're OnPrem at the edge or in the cloud or even multi-cloud, we can provide that single painter glass. We've done it for our customers for 30 plus years. We'll continue to do it for another 30 something years. And so it's really the first time with Veritas altar that, that we're, we're coming out with something that we've invested for so long and put, put such a huge investment on that can create those changes and that compelling solution for our customers. So as you can see, we're pretty pumped and excited about it. >>Yes, I can >>Use the term data management to describe Alta, and I want to ask about that term because I hear it a lot these days. Data management used to be database, now data management is being applied to all kinds of different functions across the spectrum. How do you define data management in Veritas >>Perspective? Yeah, there's a, we, we see it as really three main pillars across the environment. So one is protection, and we'll talk a little bit about this notion of ransomware is probably the number one use case. So the ability to take the most complex and the biggest, most vast applications. SAP is an example with hundreds of different moving parts to it and being able to protect that. The second is application resiliency. If, if you look at the cloud, there's this notion of, of responsibility, shared responsibility in the cloud. You've heard it, right? Yep. Every single one of the cloud service providers, certainly AWS has up on their website, this is what we protect, here's the demarcation line, the line in the sand, and you, the customer are responsible for that other level. And so we've had a technology, you previously knew it as InfoScale, we now call it alter application resiliency. >>And it can provide availability zone to availability zone, real time replication, high availability of your mission critical applications, right? So not only do we do the traditional backups, but we can also provide application resiliency for mission critical. And then the third thing really from a data management standpoint is all around governance and compliance. You know, ac a lot of our customers need to keep data for five, 10 years or forever. They're audited. There's regulations and different geographies around the world. And, and those regulations require them to be able to really take control of their cloud, take control of their data. And so we have a whole portfolio of solutions under that data compliance, data government. So back to your, your question Paul, it's really the integration and the intersection of those three main pillars. We're not a one trick pony. We've been at this for a long time, and they're not just new products that we invented a couple of months ago and brought to market. They're tried and tested with eight 80,000 customers and the most complex early solutions on the planet that we've been supporting. >>I gotta ask you, you know, we talked about those three pillars and you talked about the shared responsibility model. And think of that where you mentioned aws, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google workspace, whatnot. Are you finding that most customers aren't aware of that and haven't been protecting those workloads and then come to you and saying, Hey guys, guess what, this is what this is what they're responsible for. The data is >>You Yeah, I, it's, it's our probably biggest challenge is, is one of awareness, you know, with the cloud, I mean, how many times have you spoken to someone? You just put it in the cloud. Your applications, like the cloud providers like aws, they'll protect everything. Nothing will ever go down. And it's kind like if you, unless your house was ever broken into, you're probably not gonna install that burglar alarm or that fire alarm, right? Hopefully that won't be an event that you guys have to suffer through. So yeah, it's definitely, it wasn't till the last year or so the cloud service providers really published jointly as to where is their responsibility, right? So a great example is an attack vector for a lot of corporations is their SAS applications. So, you know, whether it it's your traditional SA applications that is available that's available on the web to their customers as a sas. >>And so it's certainly available to the bad actors. They're gonna, where there's, there's gonna be a point they're gonna try to get in. And so no matter what your resiliency plan is, at the end of the day, you really need to protect it. And protection isn't just, for example, with M 365 having a snapshot or a recycle bin, that's just not good enough. And so we actually have some pretty compelling technology, what we call ALTA SAS protection, which covers the, pretty much the, the gamut of the major SAS technologies to protect those and make it available for our customers. So yeah, certainly it's a big part of it is awareness. Yeah. >>Well, I understand that the shared responsibility model, I, I realize there's a lot of confusion about that still, but in the SaaS world that's somewhat different. The responsibility of the SaaS provider for protecting data is somewhat different. How, how should, what should customers know about that? >>I think, you know, the, the related to that, if, if you look at OnPrem, you know, approximately 35 to 40% of OnPrem enterprise data is protected. It's kind of in a long traditional problem. Everyone's aware of it. You know, I remember going to a presentation from IBM 20 something years ago, and someone held their push hand up in the room about the dis drives and says, you need to back it up. And the IBM sales guy said, no, IBM dis drives never crash. Right? And so fast forward to here we are today, things have changed. So we're going through almost a similar sort of changes and culture in the cloud. 8% of the data in the cloud is protected today, 8%. That's incredible. Meaning >>That there is independent backup devoted >>To that data in some cases, not at all. And something many cases, the customer just assumes that it's in the cloud, therefore it's always available. I never have to worry about protecting it, right? And so that's a big problem that we're obviously trying to, trying to solve. And we do that all under the umbrella of ransomware. That's a huge theme, huge investment that, that Veritas does with regards to providing that resiliency for our >>Customers. Ransomware is scary. It is becoming so prolific. The bad actors have access to technologies. Obviously companies are fighting them, but now ransomware has evolved into, no longer are we gonna get hit, it's when, yeah, it's how often it's what's the damage going to be. So the ability to help customers recover from ransomware, that resiliency is table stakes for businesses in any industry these days. Does that, that one of the primary pain points that your customers are coming to you with? >>It's the number one pain point. Yeah, it's, it's incredible. I mean, there's not a single briefing that our teams are doing customer meetings where that term ransomware doesn't come up as, as their number one use case. Just to give you something, a couple of statistics. There's a ransomware attack attack that happens 11 times a second right around the globe. And this isn't just, you know, minor stuff, right? I've got friends that are, you know, executives of large company that have been hit that have that some, you know, multimillion dollar ransom attack. So our, our play on this is, when you think about it, is data protection is the last line of defense. Yes. And so if they break through, it's not a case, Lisa, as you mentioned, if it's a case of when Yeah. And so it's gonna happen. So one of the most important things is knowing how do you know you have a gold copy, a clean copy, and you can recover at speed in some cases. >>We're talking about tens of thousands of systems to do that at speed. That's in our dna. We've been doing it for many, many years. And we spoke through a lot of the cyber insurance companies on this particular topic as well. And what really came back from that is that they're actually now demanding things like immutable storage, malware detection, air gaping, right? Anomaly detection is sort of core technologies tick the box that they literally won't ensure you unless you have those core components. And so what we've done is we've doubled down on that investment. We use AI in ML technologies, particularly around the anomaly detection. One of the, the, the unique and ne differentiators that Verto provides is a ransomware resiliency scorecard. Imagine the ability to save uran a corporation. We can come in and run our analytics on your environment and kind of give you a grade, right? Wouldn't you prefer that than waiting for the event to take place to see where your vulnerability really is? And so these are some of the advantages that we can actually provide for our customers, really, really >>To help. Just a final quick question. There is a, a common perception, I believe that ransomware is an on premise problem. In fact, it is also a cloud problem. Is that not right? >>Oh, absolutely. I I think that probably the biggest attack vector is in the cloud. If it's, if it's OnPrem, you've certainly got a certain line of defense that's trying to break through. But, you know, you're in the open world there. Obviously with SAS applications in the cloud, it's not a case of if, but when, and it's, and it's gonna continue to get, you know, more and more prevalent within corporations. There's always gonna be those attack factors that they find the, the flash wounds that they can attack to break through. What we are concentrating on is that resiliency, that ability for customers to recover at speed. We've done that with our traditional appliances from our heritage OnPrem. We continue to do that with regard to resiliency at speed with our customers in the cloud, with partners like aws >>For sure. Almost done. Give me your 30 seconds on AWS and Veritas. >>We've had a partnership for the better part of 10 years. It's incredible when you think about aws, where they released the elastic compute back in 2006, right? We've been delivering data protection, a data management solutions for, for the better part of 30 years, right? So, so we're, we're Junos in our space. We're the leader in, in data protection and enterprise data protection. We were on-prem. We, we continue to be in the cloud as AWS was with the cloud service provided. So the synergies are incredible. About 80 to 85% of our, our joint customers are the same. We take core unique superpowers of aws, like AWS outposts and AWS Glacier Instant retrieval, for example, those core technologies and incorporate them into our products as we go to Mark. And so we released a core technology a few months ago, we call it ultra recovery vault. And it's an air gap, a mutable storage, worm storage, right Once, right? You can't change it even when the bad actors try to get in. They're independent from the customer's tenant and aws. So we manage it as a managed backup service for our customers. Got it. And so our customers are using that to really help them with their ransomware. So it's been a tremendous partnership with AWS >>Standing 10 years of accounting. Last question for you, Rick. You got a billboard on the 1 0 1 in Santa Clara, right? By the fancy Verto >>1 0 1? >>Yeah. Right. Well, there's no traffic. What does that billboard say? What's that bumper sticker about? Vertus, >>I think, I think the billboard would say, welcome to the new Veritas. This is not your grandfather's old mobile. We've done a phenomenal job in, in the last, particularly the last three or four years, to really reinvent ourselves in the cloud and the investments that we made are really paying off for our customers today. So I'm excited to be part of this journey and excited to talk to you guys today. >>Love it. Not your grandfather's Veritas. Rick, thank you so much for joining Paula, me on the forgot talking about what you guys are doing, how you're helping customers, really established that cyber of resiliency, which is absolutely critical these days. We appreciate your >>Time. My pleasure. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guest and Paul Gilland, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Queue, which as you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging check coverage.

(calm music) >> Good morning from Miami. Lisa Martin here, live with The Cube, on the floor of IFS Unleashed. We are thrilled to be back with them after not seeing them for three years, of course, of obvious problems. But I'm very happy to be welcoming back one of our Cube alumni and the CEO of IFS, Darren Roos. Darren, it's great to have you back on The Cube. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> I was telling you before we started, it must have felt amazing, exhilarating this morning, walking out on stage, seeing that sea of people, of live bodies, and actually getting to engage with your customers and your ecosystem in person again. >> Yeah, it's great. You know, I think we've all dealt with all of the challenges that Covid have brought and I think just going back to something that feels very normal and, you know, getting to interact with people again at this scale is really unique and a great feeling to be back, back in the throes of normality. >> Exactly. In the throes of normality. Well, so much has changed since The Cube last caught up with you. I think it was 2019 in Boston. Talk to me about some of the specific things that you've learned during the pandemic that IFS has done 'cause there's a lot of momentum which we're going to uncover on the show today. >> Yeah. Look, I think when we met last in 2019, the focus then was really on building out our Field Service Management offering. We'd always been a contender in the ERP space and with some asset management capability, but the focus was really on establishing ourselves as a leader in the field service management space. And today we are the undisputed leader in field service managements, both from an analyst and customer recognition perspective and what we've also done is we've really focused on building out that asset management capability and, you know, today, again, we're the number one player in asset management. And when you think about how you bring those two things together and the way that asset and service-centric entities have to orchestrate their organizations to create what we call amazing moments of service for their customers, then you need a technology platform that can provide all of that and we do that, really best-of-breed capability across field service management, asset management and components of ERP, but on a single platform. So customers don't have to deal with the integration complexity that they would in a more heterogeneous environment. >> Which is critical for getting time-to-market, product-to-market services, new revenue streams, et cetera. But you're also the top three ERP vendor. One of the top three. >> Yeah, we're one of the top three ERP vendors. You're growing north of 20%, way more than the big guys. How are you doing it and and where do you win? >> Yeah, you know, I think, for so long, customers have had to choose, as I said, between this best-of-breed and best-of-suite and making compromises either on functionality or on integration and I think that, you know, we are very focused from an industry perspective. As I said, just now, we only focus on capabilities and in service and asset-centric industries, think utilities, aerospace and defense, et cetera and in that space, you know, we have a very compelling proposition, as you said. We can help customers go live faster. We can de-risk those implementations 'cause we have more depth of functionality that's suited specifically to their needs and that makes it compelling and that means that, in a world where we're competing against vendors who are very much horizontally-focused and that best-of-suite offering that they have means that the functionality's compromised or in a best-of-suite, best-of-breed world, that the integration is compromised. That's why we're winning and that's why we're outgrowing the competition and, you know, I think we, we just stay focused. We stay in our niche, we stay focused on our customers and creating value and, you know, that's our reason for being. >> So north of 10,000 customers so far. Has IFS always been vertically-focused or is that something that's come on in the last few years, maybe since you were tenured. >> Yeah, in the last five years we've really homed in on those assets and service-centric verticals and it's important, because when you think about what we do from a development perspective, you know, as we build the technology and we think about those emerging use cases around, you know, asset investment planning or asset performance management or asset monitoring or all of the things that our customers are thinking about, IOT, AI, augmented reality, all of which we're showcasing at the conference, you know, you want to do that with a very specific use case in mind because I've talked a little bit about field service management and asset management but none of our customers consume technology in that way. You know, if they're in oil and gas, then they're thinking about shutdown and turnaround and they're thinking about plant maintenance, they're thinking about specific use cases that are industry focused and that's how we build the technology. So, you know, I think that's the differentiator for us and, you know, there's a bunch of customers here and, you know, you'll see all of the, you know, the solar arrays and the wind farms and all the different things where we're demoing the capability that we have that is very industry focused. >> The industry focus is so, like you said, very differentiating, but also it's not just, "We're going where customers are." It's, "We're listening "and we're actually speaking the language "that our customers speak." That's differentiating from the many, many hundreds of tech leaders that I talk to, just so you know. >> A hundred percent. Well, look, I think the thing is, is that what we recognize, is that for us to be able to really create value for them in the specific vertical that they're in, it can't be that we stick a marketing label on it. And that industry flavor has to be ubiquitous from, you know, when we meet them and we're able to understand the problems that they're facing through to the way that we build the technology to address the problems, all the way through to the partners that we're working with who are then going to deliver that solution. They need to understand the industry and I think that, you know, it's a not a particularly level playing field because so many of our competition don't operate that way. They have a horizontal application, they have horizontal partners, and then a lot of the rest is marketing blurb. But, you know, I think the customers that we have here today are great, global, international brands. You know, we told some of the stories from the stage this morning, with companies like Southwest and the MRO solution that we delivered for them and we're immensely proud of that. And, you know, our focus is on just telling more of those stories and creating more of those stories and being able to point towards tangible value that our technology's created in record time. You know, that's the focus. >> Right. It's all about the business outcomes. We've got sitting across from our set here is the Aston Martin F1 car. Darren and I were talking before, we're both big F1 fans. I love hearing the smart factory from an F1 team's perspective, or hearing about aerospace and defense customers because you get to understand the commonalities of these businesses and how similar they are to other industries. They have some of the same huge challenges but getting a race car built between now and February of 23 for the next race season, the amount of manufacturing that has to go on, smart manufacturing, and knowing that IFS is really underpinning that, is fantastic. >> Well, it's more complex than that even, because they're not building a new car by February, you know, they're rebuilding the car every week and, you know, it's that kind of attention to detail and the speed and sense of urgency that is a great opportunity for us to showcase the technology and that's why we love the relationship with Aston Martin Racing, but, you know, being able to then leverage the learnings from that environment, which is super high paced and the cycle times are so much quicker, into, you know, industries which maybe don't move as fast, but are, you know, perhaps more mission critical, you know, like an airline or, you know, something equivalent to that. >> Well, if we think about the industries that that you're focused on, so many of them were the hardest hit during the last couple of years, where they're really arterial industries and IFS has really been focused on helping these folks transform digitally. Talk to me about IFS as really a catalyst of those companies' digital transformations. >> You know, interestingly, we, didn't see a ton of impact during Covid to our business but that's because, as you say, that they were hit but hits almost in a positive way because they were the ones that kept things going. You know, think about our customers like telcos or utilities or, you know, unfortunately our aerospace and defense customers, commercial aviation aside, but we have a bunch of defense organizations that are customers and, you know, they've had to keep going and what we've really focused on and it continues to be our focus, is how do we help those businesses to be more efficient? And this is increasing, especially with what's happening in the world today, is increasingly important to them. How do they drive operational efficiency? And I talked a lot about the power of IFS's capability on a single platform and how do we bring the orchestration of the different parts of their business, whether that's their customers, their assets and their people. How do you orchestrate those things in order to create operational efficiency and in IFS language, create those moments of service? And that's what we do, and because we are focused on creating those moments of service and we're helping those customers to be more efficient, you're helping them to drive loyalty and, you know, repeat business and increase value in their customers, you know, that's, we just became and become, more important to them. You know, it's not a system that they can turn off and go, you know, "We'll do without this for a while." You know, we're really underpinning that value creation for them. >> You're integral. You're mission-critical, really. Let's double click on the moments of service. I love that from a tagline perspective. It's also the title of your new book. Congratulations on the book by the way. Define that for the audience. I think they can get a sense of that but what is, and it's really IFS enabling its customers to deliver moments of service. Talk to me about that. >> You know, it's funny. As we were discussing it, it tends to get used as the moments of service that we provide for our customers but that's really not what it's about. Every industry, every business, when you talk to the CEOs of those businesses, they're thinking about how do they impact their customers. What are the things that they need to do? And every business, when you talk about this concept of a moment of service, every business has multiple moments of service and everything that we do is about helping those customers, irrespective of whether they are a utility and the service they're providing is a broadband service, or, sorry, a telco providing a broadband service, or a utility providing electricity. That customer flicks the switch and the power is there, or they, you know, they dial their phone and the phone call is there. That's one of the moments of service that they provide. It could be, you know, the engineer going in and activating that service and being able to let the customer know that they're arriving at a certain time and then that broadband being activated so that the customer can actually, you know, plan around their day. But those moments of service are what we enable and it does, it takes a tremendous amount for an organization to come together. We all, as a consumer, had an experience where, you know, we've had an expectation and we've been disappointed and that moment of service wasn't provided and almost in every single case it comes down to a fragmented selection of systems that weren't integrated, that weren't inter-operating. You know, the wrong technician shows up, he doesn't have the right equipment, he didn't know that your house, you know, didn't have a certain capability or piece of equipment in it and that's where it starts to fall down and that's the customer disappointment and that leaves the sour taste in their mouths. So everything that we've done, whether it's our customer satisfaction monitoring tool, Customable, or whether it's the asset management capability, the field service management, managing those techs, so that you get the right technician with the right parts, when they said they were going to be there. All of those things are really focused on those moments of service, and you know, as you said, what resonates with people is that everybody, as a consumer, you know, interacts with companies where they've been disappointed by a poor moment of service and they've had great moments of service. So it does resonate with everyone. >> It does, and I actually think moments of service, probably, in a hopefully post-pandemic world, are probably even more important, because I think one of the things, and you talked about this, we've all had these disappointing experiences in the last couple of years, that were magnified to some factor of X and I think patience has been in short supply. Probably not going to rubber band back. So being able to, through your technology, enable customers to deliver those moments of service that are critical to reducing churn, increasing revenue, turning revenue into recurring, is really a differentiator for your customers. It's an advantage for them. >> Well I think that, you know, the consumers, in general, are becoming more demanding. That's a trend that isn't going to change. Covid certainly accelerated that. That's one element and we think about kind of big macro trends that are impacting, you know, businesses today. The other thing is this big move towards servitization and we think about companies like Rolls Royce, who are a customer of ours, who, you know, they used to manufacture and sell engines that went on aeroplanes and other engines. And today they don't. They rent those by the hour. And at the point that you flip that dynamic from being, you know, making a product and selling it, to, you know, providing it as a service, the world changes completely because all of a sudden you have to think about, you know, "How well are we making these assets? "How are we going to monitor those assets? "How are we going to continue to service those assets?" And obviously longevity and quality becomes so much more important and your customer experience becomes so much more important because if they're not putting a big capital out there and they're just renting it from you, if you don't provide, you know, quality of service, then they'll simply go somewhere else, and our technology underpins those motions. So you've got these big trends of customer expectation going up and of course the servitization trend. >> Right. And we've actually got Rolls Royce's Nick Ward for Rolls Royce coming on the program later today, so we'll talk about the big pivot they've made and how IFS has really been transformative in that. Talk a little bit about, in our last few minutes, about supply chain. Obviously we know it's been quite a mess the last couple of years. I saw some research over the summer from IFS that said 66% of organizations are keeping more stock on hand, more organizations are increasing supplier numbers. How is IFS helping in that sense? >> Yeah, so I think it's all about visibility and I think if we can give customers visibility into their supply chains and their stock levels, their inventory, and of course, you know, what's required from a customer perspective, and again, it's this orchestration of different pieces, which in a heterogeneous non best-to-breed and suite world, means that customers maybe have to try and figure out how they're going to manage all those things across the different systems. In IFS it's all in one system. We give them visibility and control that they wouldn't ordinarily have and I think that's a huge point today when you know everybody's under pressure. You know, how much money you've got tied up in inventory. You know, what your supply chain cash levels look like is a huge challenge for businesses with increasing debt costs coming up now. So, you know, I think that being able to manage that more efficiently, having better visibility, being able to plan more effectively, so that you're, you know, if you're building up your stock supplies, it's because you need those stock and you know what order's coming and that's where, you know, having integrated capabilities is so important and that's what we provide. >> Visibility and control are absolutely critical. I know that energy is one of your vertical specialties. Talk to me a little bit about how you're helping customers in Ukraine from an energy perspective. Is IFS there helping organizations to navigate those headwinds? >> Yeah, so we're not in Ukraine. It's not a market that we operate in, but I think that what is, you know, ubiquitous now in the world, is energy crisis, given what's happening in Ukraine and I think that, as an industry, we see the utilities industry investing heavily in two areas. One is that continuity of service and being able to make sure that, again, it has predictability around what the requirements are and how they provide quality of supply and continuous supply, but the other thing is of course is, you've got this whole move towards sustainable energy and that's an area in which we are increasingly involved and again, like I said, you see a bunch of sustainable energy demos going on around here in being able to help companies make the transition as well as manage that new infrastructure and we've got a bunch of innovation around that coming in the next six months or so. >> Well, you're coming off a fantastic first half. We saw the results over the summer, ARR up 33%. I can only imagine the trajectory in second half. >> It is strong. >> Continuing to go up. >> We'll release our Q3 results soon and, in fact, all the numbers are improved on our half-year numbers, so really happy with that development. But it's, you know, it is a testament to our customers. It's a testament to the way in which they work with us to make sure that we can build differentiated capability and, you know, we continue to try and work with them and reciprocate that loyalty and, you know, that's our story. >> Synergy. Love it. Darren, thank you so much for coming on The Cube, sharing with us the great momentum that IFS has been having during your tenure, also during the pandemic, the great customer stories that really articulate your value. We appreciate your time and we look forward to unpacking more on the program today. >> Thank you Lisa. >> My pleasure. For Darren Roos, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live from Miami on the show floor of IFS Unleashed. Don't go away. My next guest joins me in just a minute. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage in Monaco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. Monaco Crypto Summit is the event and there's a big conversation later at the yacht club with Prince Albert and everyone else will be there, and it'll be quite the scene. And Rachel Wolfson is here. She's with Cointelegraph. They're the media partner of the event, the official media partner of the Monaco Crypto Summit. She's also MCing the event on stage, presented by DigitalBits. Rachel, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So I know you're busy, thanks for taking the time cause' you got to go jump back in and moderate, and keep things on track. This isn't an inaugural event. So DigitalBits has exploded on the scene. I just saw a thing on YouTube news around this soccer player in Rome, has DigitalBits logo on their jersey. They're a big to do cause everyone's popular and they got a couple teams. So real world, kind of, assets coming together, what's going on in the event that you're MCing? What's the focus? What's the agenda? What's some of the conversations like? >> Yeah, definitely. Well, it's a great event. It's my first time here in Monaco and I'm loving it. And I think that Monaco is really becoming the next crypto hotspot. Definitely in terms of Metaverse and Web3 innovation, I think that we're going to start seeing a lot of that here. That's what we're seeing today at the Summit. So a lot of the presentations that we're seeing are really focused on Web3 and NFT platforms, so for instance, obviously what DigitalBits is doing. We watched a video before the break on Ecosystem and the Metaverse that people can join and be a part of, in terms of real estate, but we're seeing a lot of innovation here today with that. I moderated a great panel with Britney Kaiser, Lauren Bissell, Taross, I'm blanking on his last name, but it was about blockchain and how governments are implementing blockchain. So that was also really interesting to hear about what the Ukrainian government is doing with blockchain. So there's kind of a mix, but I'd say that the overall theme is Web3 and NFTs. >> Yeah. Britney was mentioning some of that, how they're going to preserve buildings and artifacts, so that in case they're looted or destroyed, they can preserve them. >> Right. I think it's called the Heritage Fund. And I just think it's such an interesting use case in terms of how governments are using blockchain because the best use for blockchain in my opinion, is recording data, and having that data be permanent. And so when we can have artifacts in Ukraine recorded on the blockchain, you know by being scanned, it's really revolutionary. And I think that a lot of governments around the world are going to see that use case and say, "Oh wow, blockchain is a great technology for things like that." >> So DigitalBits had a press conference this morning and they talked about their exchange and some other things. Did you attend that press conference or did you get briefed on that? >> I did not attend the press conference. I was prepping for my MC role. >> So they got this exchange thing and then there's real interest from Prince Albert's foundations to bring this into Monaco. So Monaco's got this vibe, big time. >> Rachel: Right. There's a vibe (John chuckles) >> What does it all mean, when you're putting in your reporting? What do you see happening? >> So, I mean, I honestly haven't covered Monaco actually ever in my reporting. And John, you know I've been reporting since 2017, but the vibe that I'm getting just from this summit today is that Web3 and NFTs are going to be huge here. I'm speaking, I haven't... You know, there's a panel coming up about crypto regulations, and so we're going to talk a little bit about laws being passed here in Monaco in terms of Metaverse and digital identity. So I think that there are a few laws around that here that they're looking at, the government here is looking at to kind of add clarity for those topics. >> I had a couple guests on earlier. We were talking about the old days, a couple years ago. You mentioned 2017, so much has changed. >> Yes. >> You know, we had a up and down. 2018 was a good year, and then it kind of dived back and changed a little bit. Then NFTs brought it back up again, been a great hype cycle, but also movement. What's your take on the real progress that's been made? If you zoom out and look at the landscape, what's happened? >> Right. I mean, well, a lot has happened. When I first entered the space, I initially came in, I was interested in enterprise, blockchain and private networks being utilized by enterprises to record data. And then we saw public blockchains come in, like Ethereum and enterprises using them. And then we saw a mix. And now I feel like we're just seeing public blockchains and there's really... (John chuckles) But there's still our private blockchains. But today, I mean, we've gone from that in 2017 to right now, I think, you know, we're recently seeing a lot of these centralized exchanges kind of collapsing. What we've seen with Celsius, for instance, and people moving their crypto to hardware wallets. I think that the space is really undergoing a lot of transformation. It's really revolutionary, actually, to see the hardware wallet market is growing rapidly, and I think that that's going to continue to grow. I think centralized exchanges are still going to exist in custody crypto for enterprises and institutions, and you know, in individuals as well. But we are seeing a shift from centralized exchanges to hardware wallets. NFTs, although the space is, you know, not as big as it was a year ago, it's still quite relevant. But I think with the way the market is looking today, we're only seeing the top projects kind of lead the way now, versus all of the noise that we were seeing previously. So yeah, I think it's- >> So corrections, basically? >> Right. Exactly. Corrections. And I think it's necessary, right. It's very necessary. >> Yeah. It's interesting. You know, you mentioned the big players you got Bitcoin, Ethereum driving a lot. I remember interviewing the crypto kiddies when they first came out, it was kind of a first gen Ethereum, and then it just exploded from there. And I remember saying to myself, if the NFTs and the decentralized applications can have that scale, but then it felt like, okay, there was a lot of jocking for under the covers, under the hood, so to speak. And now you've got massive presence from all the VCs, and Jason Ho has like another crypto fund. I mean, >> Right. you can't go a day without another big crypto fund from you know, traditional venture capitalists. Meanwhile, you got investors who have made billions on crypto, they're investing. So you kind of got a diversity of investor base going on and different instruments. So the investor community's changing and evolving too. >> Right. >> How do you see that evolving? >> Well, it's a really good point you mentioned. So Cointelegraph research recently released a report showing that Web3 is the most sought after investment sector this year. So it was DeFi before, and Web3 is now leading the way over DeFi. And so we're seeing a lot of these venture capitalist funds as you mentioned, create funds allocated just to Web3 growth. And that's exactly what we're seeing, the vibe I'm getting from the Monaco Crypto Summit here today, this is all about Web3. It's all about NFT, it is all about the Metaverse. You know, this is really revolutionary. So I think we're definitely going to see that trend kind of, you know, conquer all of these other sectors that we're seeing in blockchain right now. >> Has Web3 become the coin term for Metaverse and NFTs? Or is that being globalized as all shifted, decentralized? What's the read on it? It seems to be like, kind of all inclusive but it tends to be more like NFT's the new thing and the young Gen Zs >> Yeah want something different than the Millennials and the Xs and the Boomers, who screwed everything up for everybody. >> Yeah. (John chuckles) No, I mean, it's a great question. So when I think of Web3, I categorize NFTs and the Metaverse in there. Obviously it's just, you know the new form of the internet. It's the way the internet is- >> Never fight fashion, as I always say, right? >> Right. Yeah. Right. (John chuckles) It's just decentralization. The fact that we can live in these virtual worlds and own our own assets through NFT, it's all decentralized. And in my opinion, that all falls under the category of Web3. >> Well, you're doing a great job MCing. Great to have you on theCube. >> Rachel: Thanks. I'd like to ask you a personal question if you don't mind. COVID's impacted us all with no events. When did you get back onto the events circuit? What's on your calendar? What have you been up to? >> Yeah, so gosh, with COVID, I think when COVID, you know, when it was actually really happening, (John chuckles) and it still is happening. But when it was, you know, >> John: Like, when it was >> impacting- shut down mode. >> Right. When we were shut down, there were virtual events. And then, I think it was late last year or early this year when the events started happening again. So most recently I was at NFT NYC. Before that, I was at Consensus, which was huge. >> Was that the one in Austin or Miami? >> In Austin. >> That's right, Austin. >> Right. Were you there? >> No, I missed it. >> Okay. It was a very high level, great event. >> Huge numbers, I heard. >> Yes. Massive turnout. (John chuckles) Tons of speakers. It was really informative. >> It feels like a festival. actually. >> It was. It was just like South by Southwest, except for crypto and blockchain. (John chuckles) And then coming up, gosh, there are a lot of events. I'll be at an event in Miami, it's an NFT event that's in a few months. I know that there's a summit happening, I think in Turkey that I may be at as well. >> You're on the road. You're traveling. You're doing a lot of hopping around. >> Yes I am. And there's a lot of events happening in Europe. I'm US-based, but I'm hoping to spend more time in Europe just so I can go to those events. But there's a lot happening. >> Yeah. Cool. What's the most important story people should be paying attention to in your mind? >> Wow. That's... (Rachel chuckles) That's a big question. It's a good question. I think most, you know, the transition that we're seeing now, so in terms of prices, I think people need to focus less on the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum and more on innovation that's happening. So for instance, Web3 innovation, what we're seeing here today, you know, innovation, isn't about prices, but it's more about like actually now is the time to build. >> Yeah. because the prices are a bit down. >> Yeah. I mean, as, you know, Lewis Hamilton's F1 driver had a quote, you know, "It takes a team. No matter who's in the driver's seat, it's a team." So community, Wayne Gretzky skates where the puck is going to be I think is much more what I'm hearing now, seeing what you're saying is that don't try to count the price trade of Bitcoin. This is an evolution. >> Right. >> And the dots are connecting. >> Exactly. And like I said, now is the time to build. What we're seeing with the project Britney mentioned, putting the heritage, you know, on the blockchain from Ukraine, like, that's a great use case for what we're seeing now. I want to see more of those real world use cases. >> Right. Well, Rachel, thanks for coming on theCube. I really appreciate it. Great to see you. >> Thanks, John. >> And thanks for coming out of your schedule. I know you're busy. >> Thanks. Now you get some lunchtime now and get some break. >> Yeah. Get back on stage. Thanks for coming on. >> Rachel: Thank you. >> All right. We're here at the Monaco Crypto Summit. Rachel's MCing the event as part of the official media partner, Cointelegraph. Rachel Wolfson here on theCube. I'm John Furrier. More coverage coming after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to theCube special presentation of the Unstoppable Domains partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube. We have here, Cube alumni, Sandy Carter, SVP and channel chief of Unstoppable Domains. Sandy, great to see you. Congratulations on your new assignment. Exciting new company, and thanks for coming on for the showcase. >> Well, thank you, John. It's so fun to always be here with you through all my companies, it's really great. Thanks for having me. >> Well, it's been pretty amazing what's going on in the world right now. We just had the past Super Bowl which is the biggest event in the world around advertising, a lot of Web 3.0, crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. It's here, it's mainstream. We've talked off camera many times around the shifts in technology, cloud computing. We're now with Web 3.0 and some are even saying Web 4.0. (Sandy laughs) A lot of technology programmers, people who are building new things are all in the Web 3.0 world. It's really going mainstream. So what's your view on that? I see you're in it too. You're leading it. >> I am in it too. And it's so exciting to be at the verge of the next technology trend that's out there. And I'm really excited about this one, John because this is all about ownership. It's about members not users. It's quite fascinating to be honest. >> What is Web 3.0? What is Web 3.0? Define it for us 'cause you have a good knack for putting things in the perspective. People want to know what does this Web 3.0? What does it mean? >> Okay, great. That's a great question. In fact, I have just a couple of slides because I'm a visual learner. So I don't know if you guys could pop up just a couple of slides for us. So first to me, Web 3.0 is really all about this area of ownership and that's whether it's in gaming or art or even business applications today. In fact, let me show you an example. If you go to the next slide, you will see like with Twitter, and John, you and I were there, I was the first person to onstage announce that we were going to do tweets during a major event. And of course I started on Twitter back in 2008, pretty early on. And now the valuation of Twitter is going up, I got a lot of value and I helped to attract a lot of those early users. But my value was really based on the people, building my network, not based on that monetary valuation. So I really wasn't an owner. I was a user of Twitter and helped Twitter to grow. Now, if you go with me to the next slide you'll see just a little bit more about what we're talking about here and I know this is one of your favorites. So Web 1.0 was about discovery. We discovered a lot of information. Web 2.0 was about reading the information but also contributing with that two-way dialogue with social but Web 3.0 is now all about membership, not being a user but being a member and therefore having an ownership stake in the power of what's coming. And I think this is a big differential, John, if I had to just nail one thing. This would be the big differential. >> That's awesome. And I love that slide because it goes to the progression. Most people think of web 1.0 data, the worldwide web, web pages, browsers, search engines, Web 2.0, better interfaces. You got mobile, you got social networks. And then it got messy, bots and misinformation, users of the product being used by the companies. So clearly Web 3.0 is changing all that and I think the ownership thing is interesting because you think about it, we should own our data. We should have a data wallet. We should have all that stored. So this is really at the heart of what you guys are doing. So I think that's a great way to put it. I would ask you what's your impression when people you talk to in the mainstream industry that aren't in Web 3.0 that are coming in, what's their reaction? What do they think? What do they see? >> Well, a lot of what I see from Web 2.0 folks is that they don't understand it, first of all. They're not sure about it. And I always like to say that we're in the early days of Web 3.0. So we're in that dial up phase. What was that? Was that AOL? Remember that little that they used to make? >> (laughs) You've got mail. >> Yeah, you've got mail. That's right. That's where we are today with Web 3.0. And so it is early days and I think people are looking for something they can hang their hat on. And so one of the things that we've been working on are what would be the elements of Web 3.0? And if you could take me to one more slide and this will be my last slide, but again, I'm a very visual person. I think there are really five basic assumptions that Web 3.0 really hangs its hat on. The first is decentralization, or I say at least partially decentralized because today we're building on Web 2.0 technology and that is okay. Number two is that digital identity. That identity you just talked about, John where you take your identity with you. You don't have identity for Twitter, an identity for LinkedIn, an identity for a game. I can take my identity today, play a game with it, bank with it, now move on to a Metaverse with it, the same identity. The other thing we like to say is it's built on blockchain and we know that blockchain is still making a lot of improvements but it's getting better and better and better. It's trustless, meaning there's no in between party. You're going direct, user, member to institution, if you would. So there's no bank in between, for example. And then last but not least, it's financially beneficial for the people involved. It's not just that network effect that you're getting, it's actually financially beneficial for those folks. All five of those give us that really big push towards that ownership notion. >> One thing I would point out, first of all, great insight, I would also add and and love to get your reaction to it, and this is a great lead into the news, but there's also a diversity angle because this is a global phenomenon, okay? And it's also a lot of young cultural shift happening with the younger generation, but also technologists from all ages are participating and all genders. Everything's coming together. It's a melting pot. It's a global... This is like the earth is flat moment for us. This is an interesting time. What's your reaction to them? >> Absolutely and I believe that the more diverse the community can be, the more innovative it will be. And that's been proven out by studies, by McKenzie and Deloitte and more. I think this is a moment for Web 3.0 to be very inclusive. And the more inclusive that Web 3.0 is, the bigger the innovation and the bigger the power and the bigger that dream of ownership will become a reality. So I'm 100% with you on the diversity angle for sure. >> So big new news tomorrow launching. This is super exciting. First of all, I love the acronym, but I love the news. Take us through the big announcement that you're having. >> Yeah. So John, we are so excited. We have over 55 different companies joining together to form Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, or we call it WOW3. Unstoppable WOW3. And the mission is really clear and very inclusive. The first is that we want to make Web 3.0 accessible for everyone. The second is we don't want to just say we want it accessible for everyone, we want to help with that first step. We're going to be giving away $10 million worth of domains from Unstoppable which we believe is that first step into Web 3.0. And then we're going to be action oriented. We don't want to just say we're going to help you get started or just say that Web 3.0 is accessible, we're going to launch education, networking, and events. So for example, we've got our first in person event that will occur at South by Southwest. Our first virtual event will occur on March 8th which is International Women's Day and there'll be two components of it. One is an hour YouTube Live so that people can come in and ask questions and then we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. So almost every half an hour or every hour on the hour, you're going to have these amazing women talk to you about what is DeFi? What is minting? What is Web 3.0 all about? Why gaming in Web 3.0? I mean, it's just going to be phenomenal. And in that we want to support each other as we're moving forward. This whole concept of from the very beginning, we want Web 3.0 to be diverse. >> And I want to also point out that you've got some activities on the March 8th International Women's Day but it's always every day in this community because it's a community. So this whole idea of community inclusion continues every day. Talk about those activities you're having on March 8th. Can you share what's happening on International Women's Day? >> Yeah, so first we're going to have a YouTube Live where we're going to go in detail into what is Web 3.0? What is DeFi? What is an NFT and why do they exist? Then we're going to have this 24 hour Twitter spaces where we've got all these different guest speakers from the 55 different companies that are supporting the initiative. We're also going to launch a list of the 100 most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're going to do that twice a year. And we decided John not to do the top women, but the women that are inspirational, who are pioneering the trail, who are having an impact. And so we want it to be a community. So it's 100 of the most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're also setting up a Web 3.0 Women's Speakers Bureau. So I cannot tell you, John, how many time people will call me up and they'll be like, "We really want you to speak here." And when I really get down to it, they really want me because I'm a woman that can speak about Web 3.0 but there are so many women who can do this. And so I wanted to have a place where everybody could come and see how many different diverse people we have that could speak out this. >> Yeah, and that's a great thing because there are a lot of women who can speak on this. They just have to have their voices found. So there's a lot of discovery in that format. Is there any plans to go beyond? You mentioned some workshops, what other things... Can you give another quick highlight of the things else you're doing post the event? >> Yeah, so one of the big things post the event is working with Girls in Tech, and I know you know Adriana. We are going to host on their platform. They have a platform for mentoring. We're going to host a track for Web 3.0 and during International Women's Day, we're going to auction off some NFTs that will contribute to that mentoring platform. So we've got folks like Lazy Lions and Bella and Deadheads that are going to donate NFTs. We'll auction those off and then that will enable the ongoing platform of Girls in Tech to have that mentoring that will be available for the next generation. We'll also do events, both virtually through Twitter spaces and other means as well as in-person events. I just mentioned at South by Southwest which I'm really looking forward to. We're going to have our first in-person event on March the 12th. It's going to be a brunch. A lot of the women told me, John, that they go to all these Web 3.0 or crypto events and everything's like a frat party in the evening. And they're like, "Why can't we just have a nice brunch and sit down and talk about it?" (John laughs) So at South by Southwest that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have a brunch and we're going to sit down and talk about it with all of these companies. And John, one of the things that's amazing to me is that we have over 55 companies that are all coming together to support this initiative. To me, that was just overwhelming. I was hoping to get about 20 companies and so far we have 55. So I'm feeling so excited and so empowered by what I see as the potential for this group. >> Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations. That's a really great thing you're doing. If you need place on theCube to post those videos, if you can get copies, we'd be glad to share them as well 'cause it's super important to get all the great minds out there that are working on Web 3.0 and have them showcased. I got to ask you now that you're in the trenches now, doing all this great work. What are some of the buzzwords that people should know about in Web 3.0? You mentioned to five main pillars as well as the ownership, the paradigm shift, we got that. What are some of the buzzword that people should know about? How would you rank those? >> Well, I think there are a couple. Let's see. I mean, one is if you think about it, what is a decentralized application? Some people call them Dapps. Dapps, you'll hear that a lot. And a decentralized application just means that you are leveraging and using multiple forms. There's no centralization of the back end. So everything is decentralized or moving around. Another is the gas fee. This comes up a lot, many people think, "Oh yeah, I put gas in my car." But a gas fee in Web 3.0 is you're actually paying for those decentralized computers that you're using. So in a centralized land, a company owns those computers. In a decentralized land, since you're using all these different assets, you've got to pay for them and that's what the gas fee is for. The gas fee is to pay for those particular types of solutions. And many of these terms that we're talking about minting, what is an NFT, we'll be explaining all of these terms on International Women's Day in that 24 hour Twitter space as well. >> We'll look forward to that Twitter space. We'll share as well. In the Web 3.0 world, when you look at it, when you look at what Unstoppable's doing, it's a paradigm shift. You laid it out there. What is the bottom line? What's the most practical thing people are doing with the domains? 'Cause it is definitely headroom in terms of capability, single sign on, you own your own data, integrating into wallet and decentralized applications and creating this new wave just like the web. More web pages, better search. More pages, the search has to get better, flywheel kicking in. What's the flywheel for Unstoppable? >> Well, I think the flywheel is the really around digital identity. It's why I came to Unstoppable because I believe that the data about you should be owned by you and that identity now travels with you. It's your wallet, it's your healthcare data, it's your educational records, and it's more. So in the future, that digital identity is going to become so much more important than it is today. And oh my gosh, John, it's going to be used in so many different ways that we can't even imagine it now. So for me, I think that digital identity and it really puts that ownership right in the hands of the members, not in anyone else's hands, a company, a government, et cetera. It puts the ownership of that data in your hands. >> I just love these big waves, these shifts, because you mentioned healthcare. Imagine an NFT is that sign on where you don't have to worry about all these HIPAA regulations. You can just say, "Here's me. Here's who I'm trusted." And they don't even know my name, but they know it's trusted. >> And everything just trickles down from there. >> That's right. >> And all the databases are called. It's all immutable. I got my private key. It unlocks so much potential in a new way. Really is amazing. >> I agree. And even just think about education. I was with Arizona State University and so my daughter took some classes at a community college and I wanted to get those classes and have those credits available for her university. How hard is that? Just to get that education and everything is paper and I had to physically sign, I had to physically mail it. It was pretty crazy. So now imagine that your digital identity contains all of your degrees, all of the skills that you've gone through all of your experiences, John. You told me before the show, all different experiences that you have that I didn't know about. I'm sure a lot of people didn't. What if you had that piece of you that would be available that you could use it at any time. >> It's locked in LinkedIn. There's a silo. Again, I'm a huge believer in silo busting going on. This new generation is not going to tolerate experiences that don't fit their mission. They want to have liberation on their data. They don't want to be the product. They want to have the value. >> That's right. >> And then broker that value for services and be able to be horizontally scalable and pop around from place to place without logging in again or having that siloed platform have the data like LinkedIn. You mentioned my resume's on basically LinkedIn, but I got webpages. I got some stories. I got videos. I'm all over the place. I need an NFT. >> And just think about LinkedIn, John. You could say that you graduated from Yale and didn't even graduate from Yale because nobody double checks that but in a wallet, if Yale actually sent that information in so you could verify it. It's that verification that's done over the blockchain, that immutable verification that I find to be very powerful. And John, we were just chatting with some companies earlier today that are Web 2.0 companies and they're like, "Oh, okay. All this is just for people? It's just for consumers?" And I was like, "No, this is for B2B. You've got to start thinking about this as a company." So for example, if you're a company today, how are you going to entice users to let you see some of their data? How are you going to look at ownership when it might be done via a dow and maybe a part of a piece of art, a part of a company, a part of real estate, like Parcel who you guys are going to talk to later on. Look at how that is going to change the world. It's going to change the way funds are raised. It's going to change the way you buy carbon credits, the way you buy art. If you're a consumer company, think about games and endgame economics. People are now playing game that money is real and your brand could be positioned. Have you thought about that? >> Yeah, I think that point you mentioned earlier about Twitter being the user, you had some personal connection, we didn't monetize it. Now with Web 3.0, you own it. One of the things that I see happening and it's coming out a lot of the Unstoppable interviews as well as what we're seeing in the marketplace is that the communities are part owners of the talent of whether it's an artist, a music artist, could be theCube team. The communities are part of the fabric of the overall group ownership. So you're starting to see you mentioned dows, okay? It's one kind of it. So as users become in control of their data and owning it, they're also saying, "Hey I want to be part of someone else." Artists are saying, " Be my stockholder. Own my company." >> That's right. >> So you start to see ownership concept not just be about the individual, it's about the groups. >> Right. And it's about companies too. So I'm hoping that as part of our Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, we do have several companies who have joined us that are what I would say, traditionally Web 2.0 companies, trying to go over the chasm into Web 3.0. And I do think it's really important that companies of all types and sizes start looking at the implication of that ownership model and what that does. So for example, it's a silly one, but a simple one. I bought a Lazy Lion. It was actually part of my signing bonus, which is also interesting. My signing bonus was an NFT and now my Lazy Lion, I now own that Lazy Lion but the artist also gets a potential percentage of that. I can put my Lazy Lion on a t-shirt. I could name a store after my Lazy Lion because now it's mine. I own it. I own that asset. And now myself and the artists are teamed together. We're like a joint venture together. It's fascinating new models and there are so many of them. After ETHDenver, I was reading some of the key takeaways. And I think the biggest key takeaway was that this space is moving so fast with so much new information that you really have to pick one or two things and just go really deep so that you really understand them versus trying to go so wide that you can't understand everything at one time and to keep up it's a mission today to keep up. >> That interesting example about the Lazy Lion, the artist in relationship with you, that's a smart contract. There's no law firm doing that. It's the blockchain. Disintermediation is happening. >> It's trustless. Back to those five things we talked about. It's on the blockchain, it's decentralized at least partially, it's a digital identity, it's financially beneficial to you and it's trustless. That's what that is. It's a smart contract. There's no in between >> Can't change. It's immutable. Can't hack. Once it's on the blockchain, you're good to go. Sandy, well, congratulations. Great to see you. Unstoppable Women of Web3, WOW3. Great acronym. We're going to support you. We're going to put you on our March 8th site we're putting together. Great to have you on. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the big news. >> Thank you so much, John. Great to be on. >> Okay, this is theCube coverage of Unstoppable Domain partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Sandy Carter. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cube and unstoppable domain, special showcase women of web three or well, three I'm super excited for this season. We have three great guests, Sandy Carter, the SVP and channel chief of unstoppable domains. Noel Bailey managing director for the entertainment, AKA disco leper. That's her handle NFT handle. We'll talk more about that. And Kristen Mirabella, Bella director of business development, Gemini all in the web three world here for women of web three. Welcome to the show. So what a great announcement, Sandy? What is the wow three women of web three. And why did you announce it on stumbled domains? Web three. >>Awesome. Well, thanks John. So today we are so excited to announce unstoppable women of web three. And one of the things that we noticed ourselves plus 60 plus companies is that we need more diversity in the web three space. So our mission is to make web three more accessible for everyone to help women with that first step and be very action oriented. So we're going to launch education, networking and events as we move forward. And we're real excited to start today, March 8th, we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. We have a YouTube live. We're going to be auction and off some NFTs to donate to girls in tech, a not-for-profit who is also going to launch a mentoring platform for women in web three. We'll also be announcing a hundred inspirational women's and Webster, and I can take up the entire time talking about all we have in store to make web three accessible to everyone. >>That's awesome. We're going to unpack that lot of things to talk about there. I'm really looking forward to it, neural, your, you got a great story here. What are the lazy lions and, and the queen so to speak and what are you guys doing? And tell us about your handle. >>That's a lot of questions there. John, why don't we start with that? So, I mean, I started my NFT journey about six months ago only, and I got really lucky in entering into the space for the lazy lions to start with and the Kings and existing Queens that were kind of in that space to begin were incredibly welcoming. I literally like, I love being the person in the room that asked the dumb question, because if I, if I can ask it, then, you know, there's, there's a hundred other people there that aren't asking that question. And so when I stepped into the, you know, the pride space with Twitter and discord, getting to know the lazy lions before I even got into my first project, they were incredibly welcoming. Like any question that I asked they had an answer for. And so, you know, why we're kind of wondering with unstoppable and supporting that? >>Well, one, once we, once through that space, I got introduced to queen Sandy as well. You know, she's part of the pride and, and one of the lazy lions and again, yeah, it's that whole symbiotic relationship where you've got, you know, Kings and Queens, men and women kind of in the pride, but it's not just about men and women either. It's the diversity aspect where it's people from all different cultures, backgrounds all around the world. And so, you know, getting in and learning and growing together in this brand new space that we're all part of creating. And then Unstoppables a huge part of that with the gateway to allowing people to kind of get into it, to begin. So it just all makes sense. We're going to expense. >>Okay, we're going to unpack that in a minute, but Kristen w what's going on with Gemini and web three, what's going on in the ecosystem there? How are you supporting the women of web three initiative? >>Really excited. Gemini is an exchange and custodian. We offer access to cryptocurrencies. We are your access points. We're the access point for women who are trying to embrace their own financial freedom and build their own story, be economically empowered and interacting with web three in a way that's going to be increasingly necessary. As, as this continues to build, Gemini is really excited to be able to provide a platform for education for anyone and especially women who are looking to build their knowledge base around what's happening in cryptocurrency. How can they interact with it? How can they make really good financial decisions as they look to interact with networks, you know, within defy, what tokens do they want to be able to, you know, purchase, move off of a centralized platform like Geminis. We are very regulated. We're very secure as an access point to be able to interact with cryptocurrencies and use crypto to interact with this ecosystem that's growing. You can, you know, as a woman decide on a really good idea on how you want to embrace that financial freedom of interacting with the protocol that might unlock your potential to be more financially independent, make really good decisions about the future of what your, your family might need economically, you know, in Gemini as an access point for that, as far as crypto and other digital assets go is where we were really proud that we can power that network. >>So we have to chip and I got the lazy lions. You have the unstoppable, all three of you guys are in the middle of all the action and it's super game-changing. It's also a cultural shift. You seeing a lot of young, the young generation, as well as senior experienced people coming in, certainly technologists are coming in, business leaders are coming in and it just feels like a whole nother cultural shift. So we have to ask you, what are you guys most excited for in this roadmap for women of web three what's on your mind? What do you guys see? What's the vision? >>Well, I'll start first. You know, one of the things that I'm really excited about is getting women to experience web three, not just book learning, but really get in there and interact and play with it. So for example, John, there is a game called de-central land. They sell land. And what they're going to help us do is to build a virtual women of web three headquarters inside of the game. And as women go there, they're going to experience, you know, logging in, they're going to experience crypto, like Kristin does talked about they'll experience. NFT is like disco, just talked about. And so it won't just be book smart. They'll be able to get in there and do and see and play, which I think is the best way to learn about web three. >>For me, I'd say, I mean, honestly, I'm most excited about getting it started. There's been so much work kind of going into this to begin with. And, and this space is, is also new and constantly growing and kind of evolving, changing as we go because we're pioneers kind of in this space, really. Like we all have web three. And so getting it started and it continues to grow and evolve from there, which is, you know, a lot to do with kind of community driven initiatives what's happening in the market and the space at the time as well. So super get it started, build it. And it keeps growing from there. >>Christine, what's your vision to what, how do you see this evolving what's what do you hope for and what are some of the things you're excited about? >>I couldn't agree more. What I think is really exciting is that again, if you're looking to learn about this, you know, Sandy you're so right, you're not gonna learn about really how to unlock the potential of this ecosystem by reading about it. You have to get in there, find crypto, come to Geminis platform, open an account, understand what it means to buy cryptocurrency, buy Bitcoin, understand what you're comfortable with. Use resources like our crypto pedia, to understand the differences between tokens, the differences between layers. Why would you buy this token and transfer it off of the platform where you're looking to interact with three, maybe you're looking at these web three applications and you want to understand what generating income through one of these looks like you really got to start with the basics, but start here, purchase something, move it off. You know, test it, use little, little amounts. >>You don't have to buy a full Bitcoin. I think that that's a common misconception with people who are really starting to get interested in the space, especially as they start to learn about cryptocurrency, buy a tiny piece, you know, you don't need to sell the farm, move it off the platform, learn a little bit about how you can interact, build a community around yourself. There are a lot of women who are learning how to do this and through NFTs and through other interests that you might naturally have, you can really embrace the technology and understand what it can do for you. >>You know, you, you mentioned that in the early days of Bitcoin, even a theory of giving it away was a big part of that kind of early days of community. And Earl, you mentioned the word pride as part of the lazy lions community is a big part of this. Sandy, you know, this you've seen communities develop over the years, this new kind of community dynamic is a network effect, but it's also people centric. It's also about reputation. So it's about being open and collaborative. I mean, it sounds like a bunch of cliches jammed together, but this is kind of the world we're in for web three. Can you guys share your thoughts on that and get a reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I just wanted to jump on kind of what Kristin was mentioning there as well. You know, like, and Sandy, like get in there, get started, like have a little taste, have a little of this watch learn and then kind of tying into your community aspect there, ask the questions, get into, and you know, the two, the couple of main spaces, there are discord and Twitter, which, and again, I signed up my Twitter account in 2014 and I pretty much didn't touch it, like from 2015 kind of onwards, like now learning and getting in and growing with this space, that's kind of where the mediums are to start with with that. So yeah. Get in and get started and, and ask the questions on the way >>Sandy, you see Twitter and discord as the primary. >>Yeah. Yeah. There's so many this guy, right. Because you know, I'm on, I'm now on telegram. I'm on disbarred, I'm on Twitter, I'm on signal. I just got invited to signal groups. So this is one of the areas that we need to work on for web three. I think all of us would agree is just that interface. Part of the reason that we're launching this is because it is hard today, right? Web three is hard. And so there's multiple communications channels, you know, and that's why we love, you know, partners like Jim and I, who are making it easier and lazy lions who are setting up these communities. You know, when you buy in it of T you're really not, I guess you are buying the NFT for value, but you're also buying into the community disco. And I have been meeting actually every Saturday night for a while now with the rest of the Queens, planning out women of web three, Kristin and Jim and I, and I have been meeting together it's about the people and the networking and the tribe that you're part of as well. You really nailed it on the community piece. >>You know, ever since we started talking about it unstoppable, I got to say, I've been wanting to get the cube and FTS going because it is a community dynamic, but it's also this got practical usage of is there's data behind it. There's actually real use cases. Can you guys share your thoughts on how you see the use cases being applied specifically to the world, but also to, to women of web three to Wasn't go first. >>Yeah. We're also polite. We're all quite polite. And do you want to go first? You're one of our partners, we'll let you start us off. >>Sorry. I didn't want to and want to jump in there and they want to get started a real applications of, of what this looks like. I think goes back to an idea I had at the top of the call as there's clarity, as that continues to emerge as web three continues to build. And we understand what this really means. I think many would say that there's, you know, lack of clarity around what web three means. Maybe there are some platforms that are slightly more centralized than others. If we think of what web three in general represents, you know, it's this idea of decentralization empowering you through ownership of your data, empowering you through the ability to do things in a decentralized way, but you're not able to do on web two. And I think the real application of transition of where we are today into what this becomes is, you know, I think we keep nailing it on the head. >>You really have to get out there and practice. You have to understand what this transition means for you and what does it mean for what you're trying to achieve? So if my personal stance is, is really solid in where, you know, your financial future is rooted. And if we're talking about cryptocurrency in your ability to interact with these networks, like we've been saying, you have to practice, you have to understand and learn what you're getting yourself into. But I also think there's this element of being okay with making mistakes, but you are talking about your financial future. You're talking about something that's there really high stakes around making mistakes means starting with really good partners. You can start with platforms like Gemini. You can start with platforms like unstoppable domains and know that the foundation has been laid for you to be able to test these grounds. >>I think that what this becomes and what is really important here is knowing that there are going to be a few centralized points that are your access to this web of three, to this broader ecosystem. But being able to trust that these platforms have security in mind. So the security first mindset that empowers you to then go be in charge of data, privacy, being able to take charge of really what your interaction with the rest of this world means. And being, being able to trust that the foundational layer that you're entering that world through is one that can be trusted. I think that as we look at the real world application of this finding that right starting point is really important. >>Yeah. And I w I would just add John to, to what Kristen just said. There are also B2B use cases here. So we want to make sure that, you know, there's a lot of consumer work, but there's also B to B as well. So, you know, imagine you're in decentral land or you're in sandbox a game. If you're a retailer or in a consumer business, you can place your products or your portfolio inside of that game, there is now decentralized finance that's out there. How does that play a role in your company and the way that you're financing for your company? Not just for yourself, like Kristin mentioned, but also for your company. And then dowels, of course, fractional ownership of different things. We're seeing, you know, funding change. SPACs turning into dowels, all of this. If you look at our 24 hour Twitter space, I'm S I can't wait. I think I'm going to actually do a 24 hour bins for myself because >>That's a college come on. We gotta do. >>Right. I know this guy will be with me. Right. And just that last time I did, that was new. Yeah. >>Well, super exciting. I mean, wow, wow. Three could be a doubt. I mean, the vision here is really amazing. I am so impressed. I think this is a great thing because it could go anywhere. What do you guys see at Dow in the future merging communities and merging tribes together? How do you guys have you guys talked about that? What's the, what's the thought process there? >>We actually did talk about doing a Dow. We decided to kick off first and get everybody up to speed on what it was before we jumped into a doubt, which I think is pretty advanced and sophisticated. And so, you know, part of what we also see is if you look at part of the membership, you'll see women of blockchain, women of data BFF. I mean, all these women's groups coming together to unite as long with, along with a lot of major companies, web to companies, Google Deloitte I'll chair, with the who's, who of web three, you've got Gemini, you've got, you know, consensus, you've got blockchain.com. So, you know, I love this because we are coming together for a movement, not for individual companies, but to have an impact on the industry to really educate women. And John, I forgot one of the really cool things we're also announcing today is our first 100 inspirational women of web three. In fact, disco helped me come up with the name of that, because we do want to highlight as examples, all of these great women that are in the space so that we each can reach back and pull others forward. >>Okay, now we've got to get into the, the disco leopard, let's put the lower third up there so we can see it. And the name that's tell us about the story here. And what does it mean to you? Take us through the thought process, the experience and how you envision this unfolding. Cause it's an NFT. You have one it's >>Yeah, totally. I guess. I mean, starting with, so the disco leopard kind of piece to it as well, like in this new space, in the, in the web space, first of all, you get to like, come up with your own identity. So I got to pick this go leopard, like if he doesn't want to be a disco leopard. And so even just coming up with the journey of like, what is your identity with that? And then, you know, you go through that path of being doxed, meaning being revealed, people kind of know who you are or not, or keeping it, you know, kind of a name on the side, that's all. Okay. Like it's all part of that whole decentralized space, which is super exciting. So just so you know, like the disco leper feeds, you know, optimist glass, half full, you know, pessimist, glass, half empty. And then the third piece to that was disco leopard equals. Awesome. And that's where I saw it. And I'm like, that's me a hundred percent. I'm >>Trying to get your lower third, had your name next to it, >>But that's okay. I'm all right with that. I don't mind. So, you know, getting, getting into that to start with, and then, you know, when we were talking about partners and coming into this safe space as well, and yeah, absolutely kind of technology based partners infrastructure to make sure that we're, we're safe and we've got a smooth gateway kind of coming in, but I'm also gonna put communities into partnerships as well, because there are so many NFT projects, you know, defy gaming projects, et cetera, finding your people, finding the community that resonates with you and it's different for everyone. And that's a beautiful thing, but you get to kind of find like-minded people and join them. >>You know, I've been thinking this for about a long, long time, and I thought I was just weird, but now that it's happening, you guys are in the middle of it. The, your identity is so important now, and you could have a community and tribe to belong to, but yet traverse other tribes and move around. This is kind of the whole prospect of unstoppable, right? So Sandy, this is like a great future. You can be protected in a trusted tribe or community, and then still move around to others and engage. It's almost like a packet moving around a network. It's really about people too, on the internet. This is a total complete game changer. It wasn't really, it's not really possible prior to this. >>Yeah. I mean, if you look at all the members, you can move from a metaverse, you can move into gaming, you can go into defy, we've got NFT communities. And, and I love, you know, like you said, traversing, those communities, like we're going to do an auction and we've had donated NFTs. So disco and lazy lions, the queen of lazy lions are donating a lazy lion. Crypto chicks are gonna donate something. If you don't know what these are, these are all NFT communities that have their own identities as well. We have Deadheads NILAH and the long neck ladies, which is started by a 13 year old girl, who's going to talk on one of our Twitter spaces about how she had 13 earned millions of dollars and became times first artist in residence. So there's just, I mean, there's so much potential here and just look at all these amazing women on the screen. You know, I think web three, the face of web three is female. >>That's awesome. Any final thoughts for you guys and, and the session here, it's amazing. First of all, I'm so excited to, to have this conversation and be included and be included into the group here. Thank you for having me closing thoughts on women of web three, how people can get involved, what you guys aspire to be, what are some of the goals can take us through that? >>I guess for me looking at, you kind of asked the question of, you know, what we're most excited about with what's coming up with the international women's day. And, and, you know, what's beyond that. I'm really excited about what unstoppable are doing in introducing the gateway from web two to web three, because that whole 24, the, the events that we have coming on today is, you know, information, education, openness, how to use it, but what's coming beyond there. And it is that transition from web to, and how to, how do we even, like, I'm about to learn that as well. And as I said, I've been in that, in this NMT journey for six months learning thus far, but what does it look like to get into a web three experience and the web page and that design and look and feel so that next step of learning and getting into it. And again, anyone that's kind of being involved in this conversation now you'll be the first people stepping into that space as web three really comes to life. And it is the new web. Very exciting, >>Great. >>I couldn't agree more neural. What I think excites us the most is the level of interest and the level of engagement that we're seeing an unprecedented levels. These and what's coming next is that you're going to see more and more women and more, more people as part of these communities, as we've talked about wanting to learn, wanting to engage and wanting to be part of this and numbers that we really haven't even seen still yet. We've just scratched the surface. And what I want to ask everyone to do is not to wait not to wait until you feel like you're behind. Take action. Now go to our crypto pedia page, open an account at Gemini, start to interact with cryptocurrencies, understand what it means to take, you know, a crypto or digital asset off of a platform and interact with some of these networks, understand what it means to own, and then empty look at unstoppable domains and understand how you can start to dip your toe in. We really want to empower everyone with the knowledge of what you can do here, and we couldn't be more excited about the future >>Also Sandy final word. >>Yes. So I'm excited about a new world where diversity helps shape the next movement. You know, we've seen web one and web two shaped by, you know, homogeneous groups. And what I'm looking forward to is the future, because we know that innovation is driven by diversity of thought. And so for me, I'm really excited about today international women's day, where we're launching all these educational sessions, you know, Kristen mentioned don't wait, get involved, disco, you know, talked a lot about the potential of going from web two to web three. We hope to see tons of women learning from the web to world. And then I just have to say, I mean, if we could get this across in the virtual world, we're then going to also host an in real life I R L event at south by Southwest. So I'm real excited to be back in person to John so that I can actually give my, my fellow colleagues hugs as well. >>I can't wait to be in person. Thank you so much for coming on this. A great program today is international women's day, but every day is women of web three day. Thanks for sharing great insight. I'm looking forward to more conversations and seeing what happens and participating in any way that I can. And thanks for having me and including me in the conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. This is the cubes conversations here in the showcase women of web three. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to theCube special presentation of the Unstoppable Domains partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube. We have here, Cube alumni, Sandy Carter, SVP and channel chief of Unstoppable Domains. Sandy, great to see you. Congratulations on your new assignment. Exciting new company, and thanks for coming on for the showcase. >> Well, thank you, John. It's so fun to always be here with you through all my companies, it's really great. Thanks for having me. >> Well, it's been pretty amazing what's going on in the world right now. We just had the past Super Bowl which is the biggest event in the world around advertising, a lot of Web 3.0, crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. It's here, it's mainstream. We've talked off camera many times around the shifts in technology, cloud computing. We're now with Web 3.0 and some are even saying Web 4.0. (Sandy laughs) A lot of technology programmers, people who are building new things are all in the Web 3.0 world. It's really going mainstream. So what's your view on that? I see you're in it too. You're leading it. >> I am in it too. And it's so exciting to be at the verge of the next technology trend that's out there. And I'm really excited about this one, John because this is all about ownership. It's about members not users. It's quite fascinating to be honest. >> What is Web 3.0? What is Web 3.0? Define it for us 'cause you have a good knack for putting things in the perspective. People want to know what does this Web 3.0? What does it mean? >> Okay, great. That's a great question. In fact, I have just a couple of slides because I'm a visual learner. So I don't know if you guys could pop up just a couple of slides for us. So first to me, Web 3.0 is really all about this area of ownership and that's whether it's in gaming or art or even business applications today. In fact, let me show you an example. If you go to the next slide, you will see like with Twitter, and John, you and I were there, I was the first person to onstage announce that we were going to do tweets during a major event. And of course I started on Twitter back in 2008, pretty early on. And now the valuation of Twitter is going up, I got a lot of value and I helped to attract a lot of those early users. But my value was really based on the people, building my network, not based on that monetary valuation. So I really wasn't an owner. I was a user of Twitter and helped Twitter to grow. Now, if you go with me to the next slide you'll see just a little bit more about what we're talking about here and I know this is one of your favorites. So Web 1.0 was about discovery. We discovered a lot of information. Web 2.0 was about reading the information but also contributing with that two-way dialogue with social but Web 3.0 is now all about membership, not being a user but being a member and therefore having an ownership stake in the power of what's coming. And I think this is a big differential, John, if I had to just nail one thing. This would be the big differential. >> That's awesome. And I love that slide because it goes to the progression. Most people think of web 1.0 data, the worldwide web, web pages, browsers, search engines, Web 2.0, better interfaces. You got mobile, you got social networks. And then it got messy, bots and misinformation, users of the product being used by the companies. So clearly Web 3.0 is changing all that and I think the ownership thing is interesting because you think about it, we should own our data. We should have a data wallet. We should have all that stored. So this is really at the heart of what you guys are doing. So I think that's a great way to put it. I would ask you what's your impression when people you talk to in the mainstream industry that aren't in Web 3.0 that are coming in, what's their reaction? What do they think? What do they see? >> Well, a lot of what I see from Web 2.0 folks is that they don't understand it, first of all. They're not sure about it. And I always like to say that we're in the early days of Web 3.0. So we're in that dial up phase. What was that? Was that AOL? Remember that little that they used to make? >> (laughs) You've got mail. >> Yeah, you've got mail. That's right. That's where we are today with Web 3.0. And so it is early days and I think people are looking for something they can hang their hat on. And so one of the things that we've been working on are what would be the elements of Web 3.0? And if you could take me to one more slide and this will be my last slide, but again, I'm a very visual person. I think there are really five basic assumptions that Web 3.0 really hangs its hat on. The first is decentralization, or I say at least partially decentralized because today we're building on Web 2.0 technology and that is okay. Number two is that digital identity. That identity you just talked about, John where you take your identity with you. You don't have identity for Twitter, an identity for LinkedIn, an identity for a game. I can take my identity today, play a game with it, bank with it, now move on to a Metaverse with it, the same identity. The other thing we like to say is it's built on blockchain and we know that blockchain is still making a lot of improvements but it's getting better and better and better. It's trustless, meaning there's no in between party. You're going direct, user, member to institution, if you would. So there's no bank in between, for example. And then last but not least, it's financially beneficial for the people involved. It's not just that network effect that you're getting, it's actually financially beneficial for those folks. All five of those give us that really big push towards that ownership notion. >> One thing I would point out, first of all, great insight, I would also add and and love to get your reaction to it, and this is a great lead into the news, but there's also a diversity angle because this is a global phenomenon, okay? And it's also a lot of young cultural shift happening with the younger generation, but also technologists from all ages are participating and all genders. Everything's coming together. It's a melting pot. It's a global... This is like the earth is flat moment for us. This is an interesting time. What's your reaction to them? >> Absolutely and I believe that the more diverse the community can be, the more innovative it will be. And that's been proven out by studies, by McKenzie and Deloitte and more. I think this is a moment for Web 3.0 to be very inclusive. And the more inclusive that Web 3.0 is, the bigger the innovation and the bigger the power and the bigger that dream of ownership will become a reality. So I'm 100% with you on the diversity angle for sure. >> So big new news tomorrow launching. This is super exciting. First of all, I love the acronym, but I love the news. Take us through the big announcement that you're having. >> Yeah. So John, we are so excited. We have over 55 different companies joining together to form Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, or we call it WOW3. Unstoppable WOW3. And the mission is really clear and very inclusive. The first is that we want to make Web 3.0 accessible for everyone. The second is we don't want to just say we want it accessible for everyone, we want to help with that first step. We're going to be giving away $10 million worth of domains from Unstoppable which we believe is that first step into Web 3.0. And then we're going to be action oriented. We don't want to just say we're going to help you get started or just say that Web 3.0 is accessible, we're going to launch education, networking, and events. So for example, we've got our first in person event that will occur at South by Southwest. Our first virtual event will occur on March 8th which is International Women's Day and there'll be two components of it. One is an hour YouTube Live so that people can come in and ask questions and then we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. So almost every half an hour or every hour on the hour, you're going to have these amazing women talk to you about what is DeFi? What is minting? What is Web 3.0 all about? Why gaming in Web 3.0? I mean, it's just going to be phenomenal. And in that we want to support each other as we're moving forward. This whole concept of from the very beginning, we want Web 3.0 to be diverse. >> And I want to also point out that you've got some activities on the March 8th International Women's Day but it's always every day in this community because it's a community. So this whole idea of community inclusion continues every day. Talk about those activities you're having on March 8th. Can you share what's happening on International Women's Day? >> Yeah, so first we're going to have a YouTube Live where we're going to go in detail into what is Web 3.0? What is DeFi? What is an NFT and why do they exist? Then we're going to have this 24 hour Twitter spaces where we've got all these different guest speakers from the 55 different companies that are supporting the initiative. We're also going to launch a list of the 100 most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're going to do that twice a year. And we decided John not to do the top women, but the women that are inspirational, who are pioneering the trail, who are having an impact. And so we want it to be a community. So it's 100 of the most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're also setting up a Web 3.0 Women's Speakers Bureau. So I cannot tell you, John, how many time people will call me up and they'll be like, "We really want you to speak here." And when I really get down to it, they really want me because I'm a woman that can speak about Web 3.0 but there are so many women who can do this. And so I wanted to have a place where everybody could come and see how many different diverse people we have that could speak out this. >> Yeah, and that's a great thing because there are a lot of women who can speak on this. They just have to have their voices found. So there's a lot of discovery in that format. Is there any plans to go beyond? You mentioned some workshops, what other things... Can you give another quick highlight of the things else you're doing post the event? >> Yeah, so one of the big things post the event is working with Girls in Tech, and I know you know Adriana. We are going to host on their platform. They have a platform for mentoring. We're going to host a track for Web 3.0 and during International Women's Day, we're going to auction off some NFTs that will contribute to that mentoring platform. So we've got folks like Lazy Lions and Bella and Deadheads that are going to donate NFTs. We'll auction those off and then that will enable the ongoing platform of Girls in Tech to have that mentoring that will be available for the next generation. We'll also do events, both virtually through Twitter spaces and other means as well as in-person events. I just mentioned at South by Southwest which I'm really looking forward to. We're going to have our first in-person event on March the 12th. It's going to be a brunch. A lot of the women told me, John, that they go to all these Web 3.0 or crypto events and everything's like a frat party in the evening. And they're like, "Why can't we just have a nice brunch and sit down and talk about it?" (John laughs) So at South by Southwest that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have a brunch and we're going to sit down and talk about it with all of these companies. And John, one of the things that's amazing to me is that we have over 55 companies that are all coming together to support this initiative. To me, that was just overwhelming. I was hoping to get about 20 companies and so far we have 55. So I'm feeling so excited and so empowered by what I see as the potential for this group. >> Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations. That's a really great thing you're doing. If you need place on theCube to post those videos, if you can get copies, we'd be glad to share them as well 'cause it's super important to get all the great minds out there that are working on Web 3.0 and have them showcased. I got to ask you now that you're in the trenches now, doing all this great work. What are some of the buzzwords that people should know about in Web 3.0? You mentioned to five main pillars as well as the ownership, the paradigm shift, we got that. What are some of the buzzword that people should know about? How would you rank those? >> Well, I think there are a couple. Let's see. I mean, one is if you think about it, what is a decentralized application? Some people call them Dapps. Dapps, you'll hear that a lot. And a decentralized application just means that you are leveraging and using multiple forms. There's no centralization of the back end. So everything is decentralized or moving around. Another is the gas fee. This comes up a lot, many people think, "Oh yeah, I put gas in my car." But a gas fee in Web 3.0 is you're actually paying for those decentralized computers that you're using. So in a centralized land, a company owns those computers. In a decentralized land, since you're using all these different assets, you've got to pay for them and that's what the gas fee is for. The gas fee is to pay for those particular types of solutions. And many of these terms that we're talking about minting, what is an NFT, we'll be explaining all of these terms on International Women's Day in that 24 hour Twitter space as well. >> We'll look forward to that Twitter space. We'll share as well. In the Web 3.0 world, when you look at it, when you look at what Unstoppable's doing, it's a paradigm shift. You laid it out there. What is the bottom line? What's the most practical thing people are doing with the domains? 'Cause it is definitely headroom in terms of capability, single sign on, you own your own data, integrating into wallet and decentralized applications and creating this new wave just like the web. More web pages, better search. More pages, the search has to get better, flywheel kicking in. What's the flywheel for Unstoppable? >> Well, I think the flywheel is the really around digital identity. It's why I came to Unstoppable because I believe that the data about you should be owned by you and that identity now travels with you. It's your wallet, it's your healthcare data, it's your educational records, and it's more. So in the future, that digital identity is going to become so much more important than it is today. And oh my gosh, John, it's going to be used in so many different ways that we can't even imagine it now. So for me, I think that digital identity and it really puts that ownership right in the hands of the members, not in anyone else's hands, a company, a government, et cetera. It puts the ownership of that data in your hands. >> I just love these big waves, these shifts, because you mentioned healthcare. Imagine an NFT is that sign on where you don't have to worry about all these HIPAA regulations. You can just say, "Here's me. Here's who I'm trusted." And they don't even know my name, but they know it's trusted. >> And everything just trickles down from there. >> That's right. >> And all the databases are called. It's all immutable. I got my private key. It unlocks so much potential in a new way. Really is amazing. >> I agree. And even just think about education. I was with Arizona State University and so my daughter took some classes at a community college and I wanted to get those classes and have those credits available for her university. How hard is that? Just to get that education and everything is paper and I had to physically sign, I had to physically mail it. It was pretty crazy. So now imagine that your digital identity contains all of your degrees, all of the skills that you've gone through all of your experiences, John. You told me before the show, all different experiences that you have that I didn't know about. I'm sure a lot of people didn't. What if you had that piece of you that would be available that you could use it at any time. >> It's locked in LinkedIn. There's a silo. Again, I'm a huge believer in silo busting going on. This new generation is not going to tolerate experiences that don't fit their mission. They want to have liberation on their data. They don't want to be the product. They want to have the value. >> That's right. >> And then broker that value for services and be able to be horizontally scalable and pop around from place to place without logging in again or having that siloed platform have the data like LinkedIn. You mentioned my resume's on basically LinkedIn, but I got webpages. I got some stories. I got videos. I'm all over the place. I need an NFT. >> And just think about LinkedIn, John. You could say that you graduated from Yale and didn't even graduate from Yale because nobody double checks that but in a wallet, if Yale actually sent that information in so you could verify it. It's that verification that's done over the blockchain, that immutable verification that I find to be very powerful. And John, we were just chatting with some companies earlier today that are Web 2.0 companies and they're like, "Oh, okay. All this is just for people? It's just for consumers?" And I was like, "No, this is for B2B. You've got to start thinking about this as a company." So for example, if you're a company today, how are you going to entice users to let you see some of their data? How are you going to look at ownership when it might be done via a dow and maybe a part of a piece of art, a part of a company, a part of real estate, like Parcel who you guys are going to talk to later on. Look at how that is going to change the world. It's going to change the way funds are raised. It's going to change the way you buy carbon credits, the way you buy art. If you're a consumer company, think about games and endgame economics. People are now playing game that money is real and your brand could be positioned. Have you thought about that? >> Yeah, I think that point you mentioned earlier about Twitter being the user, you had some personal connection, we didn't monetize it. Now with Web 3.0, you own it. One of the things that I see happening and it's coming out a lot of the Unstoppable interviews as well as what we're seeing in the marketplace is that the communities are part owners of the talent of whether it's an artist, a music artist, could be theCube team. The communities are part of the fabric of the overall group ownership. So you're starting to see you mentioned dows, okay? It's one kind of it. So as users become in control of their data and owning it, they're also saying, "Hey I want to be part of someone else." Artists are saying, " Be my stockholder. Own my company." >> That's right. >> So you start to see ownership concept not just be about the individual, it's about the groups. >> Right. And it's about companies too. So I'm hoping that as part of our Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, we do have several companies who have joined us that are what I would say, traditionally Web 2.0 companies, trying to go over the chasm into Web 3.0. And I do think it's really important that companies of all types and sizes start looking at the implication of that ownership model and what that does. So for example, it's a silly one, but a simple one. I bought a Lazy Lion. It was actually part of my signing bonus, which is also interesting. My signing bonus was an NFT and now my Lazy Lion, I now own that Lazy Lion but the artist also gets a potential percentage of that. I can put my Lazy Lion on a t-shirt. I could name a store after my Lazy Lion because now it's mine. I own it. I own that asset. And now myself and the artists are teamed together. We're like a joint venture together. It's fascinating new models and there are so many of them. After ETHDenver, I was reading some of the key takeaways. And I think the biggest key takeaway was that this space is moving so fast with so much new information that you really have to pick one or two things and just go really deep so that you really understand them versus trying to go so wide that you can't understand everything at one time and to keep up it's a mission today to keep up. >> That interesting example about the Lazy Lion, the artist in relationship with you, that's a smart contract. There's no law firm doing that. It's the blockchain. Disintermediation is happening. >> It's trustless. Back to those five things we talked about. It's on the blockchain, it's decentralized at least partially, it's a digital identity, it's financially beneficial to you and it's trustless. That's what that is. It's a smart contract. There's no in between >> Can't change. It's immutable. Can't hack. Once it's on the blockchain, you're good to go. Sandy, well, congratulations. Great to see you. Unstoppable Women of Web3, WOW3. Great acronym. We're going to support you. We're going to put you on our March 8th site we're putting together. Great to have you on. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the big news. >> Thank you so much, John. Great to be on. >> Okay, this is theCube coverage of Unstoppable Domain partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Sandy Carter. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, >>yeah. Hello and welcome to Day two at Beyond. I am so excited that you've chosen to join the building a vibrant data ecosystem track. I might be just a little bit biased, but I think it's going to be the best track of the day. My name is Mallory Lassen and I run partner Marketing here, a thought spot, and that might give you a little bit of a clue as to why I'm so excited about the four sessions we're about to hear from. We'll start off hearing from two thought spotters on how the power of embrace can allow you to directly query on the cloud data warehouse of your choice Next up. And I shouldn't choose favorites, but I'm very excited to watch Cindy housing moderate a panel off true industry experts. We'll hear from Deloitte Snowflake and Eagle Alfa as they describe how you can enrich your organization's data and better understand and benchmark by using third party data. They may even close off with a prediction or two about the future that could prove to be pretty thought provoking. So I'd stick around for that. Next we'll hear from the cloud juggernaut themselves AWS. We'll even get to see a live demo using TV show data, which I'm pretty sure is near and dear to our hearts. At this point in time and then last, I'm very excited to welcome our customer from T Mobile. They're going to describe how they partnered with whip pro and developed a full solution, really modernizing their analytics and giving self service to so many employees. We'll see what that's done for them. But first, let's go over to James Bell Z and Ana Son on the zero to search session. James, take us away. >>Thanks, Mallory. I'm James Bell C and I look after the solutions engineering and customer success teams have thought spot here in Asia Pacific and Japan today I'm joined by my colleague Anderson to give you a look at just how simple and quick it is to connect thought spot to your cloud data warehouse and extract value from the data within in the demonstration, and I will show you just how we can connect to data, make it simple for the business to search and then search the data itself or within this short session. And I want to point out that everything you're going to see in the demo is Run Live against the Cloud Data Warehouse. In this case, we're using snowflake, and there's no cashing of data or summary tables in terms of what you're going to see. But >>before we >>jump into the demo itself, I just like to provide a very brief overview of the value proposition for thought spot. If you're already familiar with thought spot, this will come as no surprise. But for those new to the platform, it's all about empowering the business to answer their own questions about data in the most simple way possible Through search, the personalized user experience provides a familiar search based way for anyone to get answers to their questions about data, not just the analysts. The search, indexing and ranking makes it easy to find the data you're looking for using business terms that you understand. While the smart ranking constantly adjust the index to ensure the most relevant information is provided to you. The query engine removes the complexity of SQL and complex joint paths while ensuring that users will always get thio the correct answers their questions. This is all backed up by an architecture that's designed to be consumed entirely through a browser with flexibility on deployment methods. You can run thought spot through our thoughts about cloud offering in your own cloud or on premise. The choice is yours, so I'm sure you're thinking that all sounds great. But how difficult is it to get this working? Well, I'm happy to tell you it's super easy. There's just forced steps to unlock the value of your data stored in snowflake, Red Shift, Google, Big Query or any of the other cloud data warehouses that we support. It's a simple is connecting to the Cloud Data Warehouse, choosing what data you want to make available in thought spot, making it user friendly. That column that's called cussed underscore name in the database is great for data management, but when users they're searching for it, they'll probably want to use customer or customer name or account or even client. Also, the business shouldn't need to know that they need to get data from multiple tables or the joint parts needed to get the correct results in thought spot. The worksheet allows you to make all of this simple for the users so they can simply concentrate on getting answers to their questions on Once the worksheet is ready, you can start asking those questions by now. I'm sure you're itching to see this in action. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Anna to show you exactly how this works over to you. Anna, >>In this demo, I'm going to go to cover three areas. First, we'll start with how simple it is to get answers to your questions in class spot. Then we'll have a look at how to create a new connection to Cloud Data Warehouse. And lastly, how to create a use of friendly data layer. Let's get started to get started. I'm going to show you the ease off search with thoughts Spot. As you can see thought spot is or were based. I'm simply lobbying. Divide a browser. This means you don't need to install an application. Additionally, possible does not require you to move any data. So all your data stays in your cloud data warehouse and doesn't need to be moved around. Those sports called differentiator is used experience, and that is primarily search. As soon as we come into the search bar here, that's what suggestion is guiding uses through to the answers? Let's let's say that I would wanna have a look at spending across the different product categories, and we want Thio. Look at that for the last 12 months, and we also want to focus on a trending on monthly. And just like that, we get our answer straightaway without alive from Snowflake. Now let's say we want to focus on 11 product category here. We want to have a look at the performance for finished goods. As I started partially typing my search them here, Thoughts was already suggesting the data value that's available for me to use as a filter. The indexing behind the scene actually index everything about the data which allowed me to get to my data easily and quickly as an end user. Now I've got my next to my data answer here. I can also go to the next level of detail in here. In third spot to navigate on the next level of detail is simply one click away. There's no concept off drill path, pre defined drill path in here. That means we've ordered data that's available to me from Snowflake. I'm able to navigate to the level of detail. Allow me to answer those questions. As you can see as a business user, I don't need to do any coding. There's no dragon drop to get to the answer that I need right here. And she can see other calculations are done on the fly. There is no summary tables, no cubes building are simply able to ask the questions. Follow my train or thoughts, and this provides a better use experience for users as anybody can search in here, the more we interact with the spot, the more it learns about my search patterns and make those suggestions based on the ranking in here and that a returns on the fly from Snowflake. Now you've seen example of a search. Let's go ahead and have a look at How do we create a connection? Brand new one toe a cloud at a warehouse. Here we are here, let me add a new connection to the data were healthy by just clicking at new connection. Today we're going to connect Thio retail apparel data step. So let's start with the name. As you can see, we can easily connect to all the popular data warehouse easily. By just one single click here today, we're going to click to Snowflake. I'm gonna ask some detail he'd let me connect to my account here. Then we quickly enter those details here, and this would determine what data is available to me. I can go ahead and specify database to connect to as well, but I want to connect to all the tables and view. So let's go ahead and create a connection. Now the two systems are talking to each other. I can see all the data that's available available for me to connect to. Let's go ahead and connect to the starter apparel data source here and expanding that I can see all the data tables as available to me. I could go ahead and click on any table here, so there's affect herbal containing all the cells information. I also have the store and product information here I can make. I can choose any Data column that I want to include in my search. Available in soft spot, what can go ahead and select entire table, including all the data columns. I will. I would like to point out that this is important because if any given table that you have contains hundreds of columns it it may not be necessary for you to bring across all of those data columns, so thoughts would allow you to select what's relevant for your analysis. Now that's selected all the tables. Let's go ahead and create a connection. Now force what confirms the data columns that we have selected and start to read the medic metadata from Snowflake and automatically building that search index behind the scene. Now, if your daughter does contain information such as personal, identifiable information, then you can choose to turn those investing off. So none of that would be, um, on a hot spots platform. Now that my tables are ready here, I can actually go ahead and search straight away. Let's go ahead and have a look at the table here. I'm going to click on the fact table heat on the left hand side. It shows all the data column that we've brought across from Snowflake as well as the metadata that also brought over here as well. A preview off the data shows me off the data that's available on my snowflake platform. Let's take a look at the joints tap here. The joint step shows may relationship that has already been defined the foreign and primary care redefining snowflake, and we simply inherited he in fourth spot. However, you don't have toe define all of this relationship in snowflake to add a joint. He is also simple and easy. If I click on at a joint here, I simply select the table that I wanted to create a connection for. So select the fact table on the left, then select the product table onto the right here and then simply selected Data column would wish to join those two tables on Let's select Product ID and clicking next, and that's always required to create a joint between those two tables. But since we already have those strong relationship brought over from Snow Flag, I won't go ahead and do that Now. Now you have seen how the tables have brought over Let's go and have a look at how easy is to search coming to search here. Let's start with selecting the data table would brought over expanding the tables. You can see all the data column that we have previously seen from snowflake that. Let's say I wanna have a look at sales in last year. Let's start to type. And even before I start to type anything in the search bar passport already showing me all those suggestions, guiding me to the answers that's relevant to my need. Let's start with having a look at sales for 2019. And I want to see this across monthly for my trend and out off all of these product line he. I also want to focus on a product line called Jackets as I started partially typing the product line jacket for sport, already proactively recommending me all the matches that it has. So all the data values available for me to search as a filter here, let's go ahead and select jacket. And just like that, I get my answer straight away from Snowflake. Now that's relatively simple. Let's try something a little bit more complex. Let's say I wanna have a look at sales comparing across different regions, um, in us. So I want compare West compared to Southwest, and then I want to combat it against Midwest as well as against based on still and also want to see these trending monthly as well. Let's have look at monthly. If you can see that I can use terms such as monthly Key would like that to look at different times. Buckets. Now all of these is out of the box. As she can see, I didn't have to do any indexing. I didn't have to do any formulas in here. As long as there is a date column in the data set, crossbows able to dynamically calculate those time bucket so she can see. Just by doing that search, I was able to create dynamic groupings segment of different sales across the United States on the sales data here. Now that we've done doing search, you can see that across different tables here might not be the most user friendly layer we don't want uses having to individually select tables. And then, um, you know, selecting different columns with cryptic names in here. We want to make this easy for users, and that's when a work ship comes in. But those were were sheet encapsulate all of the data you want to make available for search as well as formulas, as well as business terminologies that the users are familiar with for a specific business area. Let's start with adding the daughter columns we need for this work shape. Want to slack all of the tables that we just brought across from Snowflake? Expanding each of those tables from the facts type of want sales from the fax table. We want sales as well as the date. Then on the store's table. We want store name as well as the stay eating, then expanding to the product we want name and finally product type. Now that we've got our work shit ready, let's go ahead and save it Now, in order to provide best experience for users to search, would want to optimize the work sheet here. So coming to the worksheet here, you can see the data column that we have selected. Let's start with changing this name to be more user friendly, so let's call it fails record. They will want to call it just simply date, store name, call it store, and then we also want state to be in lower case product name. Simply call it product and finally, product type can also further optimize this worksheet by adding, uh, other areas such as synonyms, so allow users to use terms of familiar with to do that search. So in sales, let's call this revenue and we all cannot also further configure the geo configuration. So want to identify state in here as state for us. And finally, we want Thio. Also add more friendly on a display on a currency. So let's change the currency type. I want to show it in U. S. Dollars. That's all we need. So let's try to change and let's get started on our search now coming back to the search here, Let's go ahead. Now select out worksheet that we have just created. If I don't select any specific tables or worksheets, force what Simply a search across everything that's available to you. Expanding the worksheet. We can see all of the data columns in heat that's we've made available and clicking on search bar for spot already. Reckon, making those recommendations in here to start off? Let's have a look at I wanna have a look at the revenue across different states for here today, so let's use the synonym that we have defined across the different states and we want to see this for here today. Um yesterday as well. I know that I also want to focus on the product line jacket that we have seen before, so let's go ahead and select jacket. Yeah, and just like that, I was able to get the answer straight away in third spot. Let's also share some data label here so we can see exactly the Mount as well to state that police performance across us in here. Now I've got information about the sales of jackets on the state. I want to ask next level question. I want to draw down to the store that has been selling these jackets right Click e. I want to drill down. As you can see out of the box. I didn't have to pre define any drill paths on a target. Reports simply allow me to navigate to the next level of detail to answer my own questions. One Click away. Now I see the same those for the jackets by store from year to date, and this is directly from snowflake data life Not gonna start relatively simple question. Let's go ahead and ask a question that's a little bit more complex. Imagine one. Have a look at Silas this year, and I want to see that by month, month over month or so. I want to see a month. Yeah, and I also want to see that our focus on a sale on the last week off the month. So that's where we see most. Sales comes in the last week off the month, so I want to focus on that as well. Let's focus on last week off each month. And on top of that, I also want to only focus on the top performing stores from last year. So I want to focus on the top five stores from last year, so only store in top five in sales store and for last year. And with that, we also want to focus just on the populist product types as well. So product type. Now, this could be very reasonable question that a business user would like to ask. But behind the scenes, this could be quite complex. But First part takes cares, or the complexity off the data allow the user to focus on the answer they want to get to. If we quickly have a look at the query here, this shows how forceful translate the search that were put in there into queries into that, we can pass on the snowflake. As you can see, the search uses all three tables as well shooting, utilizing the joints and the metadata layer that we have created. Switching over to the sequel here, this sequel actually generate on the fly pass on the snowflake in order for the snowflake to bring back to result and presented in the first spot. I also want to mention that in the latest release Off Hot Spot, we also bringing Embraced um, in the latest version, Off tosspot 6.3 story Q is also coming to embrace. That means one click or two analysis. Those who are in power users to monitor key metrics on kind of anomalies, identify leading indicators and isolate trends, as you can see in a matter of minutes. Using thought spot, we were able to connect to most popular on premise or on cloud data warehouses. We were able to get blazing fast answers to our searches, allow us to transform raw data to incite in the speed off thoughts. Ah, pass it back to you, James. >>Thanks, Anna. Wow, that was awesome. It's incredible to see how much committee achieved in such a short amount of time. I want to close this session by referring to a customer example of who, For those of you in the US, I'm sure you're familiar with who, Lou. But for our international audience, who Lou our immediate streaming service similar to a Netflix or Disney Plus, As you can imagine, the amount of data created by a service like this is massive, with over 32 million subscribers and who were asking questions of over 16 terabytes of data in snow folk. Using regular B I tools on top of this size of data would usually mean using summary or aggregate level data, but with thoughts. What? Who are able to get granular insights into the data, allowing them to understand what they're subscribes of, watching how their campaigns of performing and how their programming is being received, and take advantage of that data to reduce churn and increase revenue. So thank you for your time today. Through the session, you've seen just how simple it is to get thought spot up and running on your cloud data warehouse toe. Unlock the value of your data and minutes. If you're interested in trying this on your own data, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial of thoughts. What cloud? Right now? Thanks again, toe Anna for such awards and demo. And if you have any questions, please feel free to let us know. >>Awesome. Thank you, James and Anna. That was incredible. To see it in action and how it all came together on James. We do actually have a couple of questions in our last few minutes here, Anna. >>The first one will be >>for you. Please. This will be a two part question. One. What Cloud Data Warehouses does embrace support today. And to can we use embrace to connect to multiple data warehouses. Thank you, Mallory. Today embrace supports. Snowflake Google, Big query. Um, Red shift as you assign that Teradata advantage and essay Bahana with more sources to come in the future. And, yes, you can connect on live query from notable data warehouses. Most of our enterprise customers have gotta spread across several data warehouses like just transactional data and red Shift and South will start. It's not like, excellent on James will have the final question go to you, You please. Are there any size restrictions for how much data thought spot can handle? And does one need to optimize their database for performance, for example? Aggregations. >>Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, as we've just heard from our customer, who there's, there's really no limits in terms of the amount of data that you can bring into thoughts Ponant connect to. We have many customers that have, in excess of 10 terabytes of data that they're connecting to in those cloud data warehouses. And, yeah, there's there's no need to pre aggregate or anything. Thought Spot works best with that transactional level data being able to get right down into the details behind it and surface those answers to the business uses. >>Excellent. Well, thank you both so much. And for everyone at home watching thank you for joining us for that session. You have a few minutes toe. Get up, get some water, get a bite of food. What? You won't want to miss this next panel in it. We have our chief data strategy off Officer Cindy, Housing speaking toe experts in the field from Deloitte Snowflake and Eagle Alfa. All on best practices for leveraging external data sources. See you there

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 live I'm Lisa Martin. Really exciting topic coming up for you next, please. Welcome Blake shoulda, founder and CEO of boom supersonic Blake. It's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having me, Lisa, and your background gives me all the way with what we're going to talk about in the next few minutes or so, but supersonic flight has existed for quite a long time, like 50 or so years. I think those of us in certain generations remember the Concorde for example, but the technology to make it efficient and mainstream is only recently been approved by or accepted by regulators. Tell us a little bit about boom, your mission to make the world more accessible with supersonic commercial flight. Well, a supersonic flight has >> actually been around since 1949 when Chuck Yeager broke the speed barrier or sorry, the sound barrier. >>And as, as many of you know, he actually passed yesterday, uh, 97. So very, very sad to see one of the supersonic pioneers behind us. Uh, but, uh, but as I say goodbye to Jaeger, a new era of supersonic flight is here. And if you look at the history of progress and transportation, since the Dawn of the industrial revolution, uh, we used to make regular progress and speed. As we went from, uh, the horse to the iron horse, to the, the boats, to the, the early propeller airplanes that have the jet age. And what happened was every time we made transportation faster, instead of spending less time traveling, we actually spent more time traveling because there were more places to go, more people to meet. Uh, we haven't had a world war since the Dawn of the jet age. Uh, places like Hawaii have become, uh, a major tourist destination. >>Uh, but today, uh, today it's been 60 years since we've had a mainstream re uh, step forward and speed. So what we're doing here at boom is picking up where Concord left off building an aircraft that flies faster by factor to the, anything you can get a ticket on today. And yet is 75% more affordable than Concorde was. So we want to make Australia as accessible as a why yesterday. We want to enable you to cross the Atlantic, do business, be home in time, detect your kids into bed, or take a three-day business trip to Asia and let you do it in just 24 >> hours. I like the sound of all of that. Even getting on a plane right now in general. I think we all do so, so interesting that you, you want to make this more accessible. And I did see the news about Chuck Yeager last night. >>Um, designing though the first supersonic airliner overture, it's called in decades, as you said, this dates back 60 years, rolling it out goal is to roll it out in 2025 and flying more than 500 trans oceanic routes. Talk to me about how you're leveraging technology and AWS to help facilitate that. Right. Well, so one of the really fascinating things is the new generation of airplanes, uh, are getting born in the cloud and then they're going to go fly through actual clouds. And so there are, there are a bunch of revolutions in technology that have happened since Concord's time that are enabling what we're doing now, their breakthroughs and materials. We've gone from aluminum to carbon fiber they're breakthroughs and engines. We've gone from after burning turbo jets that are loud and inefficient to quiet, clean, efficient turbo fans. But one of the most interesting breakthroughs has been in a available to do design digitally and iteration digitally versus, uh, versus physically. >>So when conquer was designed as an example, they were only able to do about a dozen wind tunnel tests because they were so expensive. And so time consuming and on, uh, on our XP one aircraft, which is our prototype that rolled out in October. Um, uh, we did hundreds of iterations of the design in virtual wind tunnels, where we could spin up a, uh, a simulation and HPC cluster in AWS, often more than 500 cores. And then we'd have our airplanes flying through virtual wind tunnels, thousands of flights scenarios you can figure out which were the losers, which were the winners keep iterating on the winners. And you arrive at an aerodynamic design that is more efficient at high speed. We're going very safely, very quickly in a straight line, but also a very smooth controllable for safe takeoff and landing. And the part of the artist supersonic airplane design is to accomplish both of those things. One, one airplane, and, uh, being able to design in the cloud, the cloud allows us to start up to do what previously only governments and militaries could do. I mentioned we rolled out our XP one prototype in October. That's the first time anyone has rolled out a supersonic civil aircraft since the Soviet union did it in 1968. And we're able to do as a startup because of computing. >>That's incredible born in the cloud to fly in the cloud. So talk to me about a lot of, of opportunity that technology has really accelerated. And we've seen a lot of acceleration this year in particular digital transformation businesses that if they haven't pivoted are probably in some challenging waters. So talk to us about how you're going all in with AWS to facilitate all these things that you just mentioned, which has dramatic change over 12, uh, when tone test for the Concord and how many times did it, >>Uh, I mean for 27 years, but not that many flights, never, it never changed the way mainstream, uh, never, never district some of you and I fly. Right. Um, so, so how, how are we going all in? So we've, you know, we've been using AWS for, uh, you know, basically since the founding of the company. Uh, but what we, what we're doing now is taking things that we were doing outside of the cloud and cloud. Uh, as an example, uh, we have 525 terabytes of XP one design and test data that what used to be backed up offsite. Um, and, and what we're doing is migrating into the cloud. And then your data is next. Your compute, you can start to do these really interesting things as an example, uh, you can run machine learning models to calibrate your simulations to your wind tunnel results, which accelerates convergence allows you to run more iterations even faster, and ultimately come up with a more efficient airplane, which means it's going to be more affordable for all of us to go to go break the sound barrier. >>And that sounds like kind of one of the biggest differences that you just said is that it wasn't built for mainstream before. Now, it's going to be accessibility affordability as well. So how are you going to be leveraging the cloud, you know, design manufacturing, but also other areas like the beyond onboard experience, which I'm already really excited to be participating in in the next few years. >>Yeah. So there's so many, so many examples. We've talked about design a little bit already. Uh, it's going to manifest in the manufacturing process, uh, where the, the, the, the, the supply chain, uh, will be totally digital. The factory operations will be run out of the cloud. You know, so what that means concretely is, uh, you know, literally there'll be like a million parts of this airplane. And for any given unit goes through their production line, you'll instantly know where they all are. Um, you'll know which serial numbers went on, which airplanes, uh, you'll understand, uh, if there was a problem with one of it, how you fixed it. And as you continue to iterate and refine the airplane, this, this is one of things that's actually a big deal, uh, with, with digital in the cloud is, you know, exactly what design iteration went into, exactly which airplane and, uh, and that allows you to actually iterate faster and any given airline with any given airplane will actually know exactly what, what airplane they have, but the next one that rolls off the line might be even a little bit better. >>And so it allows you to keep track of all of that. It allows you to iterate faster, uh, it allows you to spot bottlenecks in your supply chain before they impact production. Um, and then it allows you to, uh, to do preventive maintenance later. So there's to be digital interpretation all over the airplane, it's going to update the cloud on, you know, uh, are the engines running expected temperature. So I'm gonna run a little bit hot, is something vibrating more than it should vibrate. And so you catch these things way before there's any kind of real maintenance issue. You flag it in the cloud. The next time the airplane lands, there's a tech waiting for the airplane with whatever the part is and able to install it. And you don't have any downtime, and you're never anywhere close to a safety issue. You're able to do a lot more preventively versus what you can do today. >>Wow. So you have to say that you're going to be able to, to have a hundred percent visibility into manufacturing design, everything is kind of an understatement, but you launched XQ on your prototype in October. So during the pandemic, as I mentioned, we've been talking for months now on the virtual cube about the acceleration of digital transformation. Andy, Jassy talked about it in his keynote at AWS reinventing, reinventing this year, virtual, what were some of the, the, the advantages that you got, being able to stay on track and imagine if you were on track to launch in October during a time that has been so chaotic, uh, everywhere else, including air travel. >>Well, some of it's very analog, uh, and some of it's very digital. So to start with the analog, uh, we took COVID really seriously at Bo. Uh, we went into that, the pandemic first hit, we shut the company down for a couple of weeks, so we'd kind of get our feet underneath of us. And then we sort of testing, uh, everyone who had to work on the airplane every 14 days, we were religious about wearing masks. And as a result, we haven't had anyone catch COVID within the office. Um, and I'm super proud that we're able to stay productive and stay safe during the pandemic. Um, and you do that, but kind of taking it seriously, doing common sense things. And then there's the digital effort. And, uh, and so, you know, part of the company runs digitally. What we're able to do is when there's kind of a higher alert level, we go a little bit more digital when there's a lower alert level. >>Uh, we have more people in the office cause we, we still really do value that in-person collaboration and which brings it back through to a bigger point. It's been predicted for a long time, that the advent of digital communication is going to cause us not to need to travel. And, uh, what we've seen, you know, since the Dawn of the telephone is that it's actually been the opposite. The more you can know, somebody even a little bit, uh, at distance, the hungry you are to go see them in person, whether it's a business contact or someone you're in love with, um, no matter what it is, there's still that appetite to be there in person. And so I think what we're seeing with the digitization of communication is ultimately going to be very, um, uh, it's very complimentary with supersonic because you can get to know somebody a little bit over a long distance. You can have some kinds of exchanges and then you're, and then the friction for be able to see them in person is going to drop. And that is, uh, that's a wonderful combination. >>I think everybody on the planet welcomes that for sure, given what we've all experienced in the last year, you can have a lot of conversations by zoom. Obviously this was one of them, but there is to your point, something about that in-person collaboration that really takes things can anyway, to the next level. I am curious. So you launched XB one in October, as I mentioned a minute ago, and I think I read from one of your press releases planning to launch in 2025, the overture with over 500 trans oceanic routes. What can we expect from boom and the next year or two, are you on track for that 2025? >>Yeah. Things are going, things are going great. Uh, so to give a sense of what the next few years hold. So we rolled out the assembled XB one aircraft this year, uh, next year that's going to fly. And so that will be the first civil supersonic, uh, flying aircraft ever built by an independent company. Uh, and along the way, we are building the foundation of overture. So that design efforts happening now as XB one is breaking the sound barrier. We'll be finalizing the overture design in 22, we'll break ground in the factory in 23, we'll start building the first airplane and 25, we'll roll it out. And 26 we'll start flight tests. And, uh, and then we'll go through the flight test methodically, uh, systematically as carefully as we can, uh, and then be ready to carry passengers as soon as we are convinced that safe, which will be right around the end of the decade, most likely. >>Okay. Exciting. And so it sounds like you talked about the safety protocols that you guys put in place in the office, which is great. It's great to hear that, but also that this, this time hasn't derailed because you have the massive capabilities of, to be able to do all of the work that's necessary, way more than was done with before with the Concorde. And that you can do that remotely with cloud is a big facilitator of that communication. >>Yeah. You're able to do the cloud enables a lot of computational efficiencies. And I think about the, um, many times projects are not measured in how many months or years exactly does it take you to get done, but it's actually much easier to think about in terms of number of iterations. And so every time we do an airplane iteration, we look at the aerodynamics high speed. We look at the low speed. We look at the engine, uh, we look at the, the weights. Uh, we look at stability and control. We look at pilots, light aside, et cetera, et cetera. And every time you do an iteration, you're kind of looking around all of those and saying, what can I make better? But each one of those, uh, lines up a little bit differently with the rest now, for example, uh, uh, to get the best airplane aerodynamically, doesn't have a good view for the pilot. >>And that's why Concord had that droop nose famously get the nose out of the way so we can see the runway. And so we're able to do digital systems for virtual vision to let the pilot kind of look through the nose of the runway. But even then they're, trade-offs like, how, how good of an actual window do you need? And so your ability to make progress in all of this is proportional to how quickly you can make it around that, that iteration loop, that design cycle loop. And that's, that's part of where the cloud helps us. And we've, we've got some, uh, uh, some stuff we've built in house that runs on the cloud that lets you basically press a button with a whole set of airplane parameters. And bam, it gives you a, it gives you an instant report. I'm like, Oh, was it that this is a good change or bad change, uh, based on running some pretty high fidelity simulations with a very high degree of automation. And you can actually do many of those in parallel. And so it's about, you know, at this stage of the program, it's about accelerating, accelerating your design iterations, uh, giving everyone of the team visibility into those. And then, uh, I think you get together in person as it makes sense to now we're actually hitting a major design milestone with over-treat this week and we're, COVID testing everybody and get them all in the same room. Cause sometimes that in-person collaboration, uh, is really significant, even though you can still do so much digitally. >>I totally agree. There's there's certain things that you just can't replicate. Last question since my brother is a pilot for Southwest and retired Lieutenant Colonel from the air force, any special training that pilots will have to have, or are there certain pilots that are going to be maybe lower hanging fruit, if they have military experience versus commercial flight? Just curious. >>Yeah. So our XB one aircraft is being flown by test pilots. There's one ex Navy one ex air force on our crew, but, uh, overture, uh, will be accessible to any commercial pilot. So, uh, think about it as if you're, if you're used to flying Boeing, it'd be like switching to Airbus, uh, or vice versa. So the, uh, Concord is a complicated aircraft to fly because they didn't have computers. And all the complexity, the soup of supersonic flight was right there and the pilots and an overture, all that gets extracted by software. And, uh, you know, the, the, the ways the flight controls change over speed regimes. You don't have to worry about it, but the airplane is handled beautifully, no matter what you're doing. And so, uh, and so there are many, many places to innovate, but actually pilot experience, not one of them, >>Because the more conventional you can make it for people like your brother, the easier it's going to be for them to learn the aircraft. And therefore the safer it's going to be to fly. I'll let them know, like this has been fantastic, really exciting to see what boom supersonic is doing and the opportunities to make supersonic travel accessible. And I think at a time when everybody wants the world to open up, so by 20, 26, I'm going to be looking for my ticket. Awesome. Can't wait to have you on board. Likewise for Blake shul, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the QS live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>> Announcer: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is The Cube Conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special live stream here in The Cube Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great panel discussion here for one hour, sponsored by Lumina PR, not sponsored but organized by Lumina PR. An authentic conversation around professionals in the news media, and communication professionals, how they can work together. As we know, pitching stories to national media takes place in the backdrop in today's market, which is on full display. The Coronavirus, racial unrest in our country and a lot of new tech challenges from companies, their role in society with their technology and of course, an election all make for important stories to be developed and reported. And we got a great panel here and the purpose is to bridge the two worlds. People trying to get news out for their companies in a way that's relevant and important for audiences. I've got a great panelists here, Gerard Baker Editor at Large with the Wall Street Journal, Eric Savitz, Associate Editor with Barron's and Brenna Goth who's a Southwest Staff Correspondent with Bloomberg Publications. Thanks for joining me today, guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So we're going to break this down, we got about an hour, we're going to probably do about 40 minutes. I'd love to get your thoughts in this power panel. And you guys are on the front lines decades of experience, seeing these waves of media evolve. And now more than ever, you can't believe what's happening. You're seeing the funding of journalism really challenging at an all time high. You have stories that are super important to audiences and society really changing and we need this more than ever to have more important stories to be told. So this is really a challenge. And so I want to get your thoughts on this first segment. The challenge is around collecting the data, doing the analysis, getting the stories out, prioritizing stories in this time. So I'd love to get your thoughts. We'll start with you, Brenna, what's your thoughts on this as you're out there in Arizona. Coronavirus on the worst is one of the states there. What are your challenges? >> I would say for me, one of the challenges of the past couple months is just the the sheer influx of different types of stories we've had and the amount of news coming out. So I think one of the challenging things is a lot of times we'll get into a bit of a routine covering one story. So early on maybe the Coronavirus, and then something else will come up. So I personally have been covering some of the Coronavirus news here in Arizona and in the Southwest, as well as some of the protests we've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement. And prioritizing that is pretty difficult. And so one thing that I I've been doing is I've noticed that a lot of my routine projects or things I've been working on earlier in the year are off the table, and I'll get back to them when I have time. But for now, I feel like I'm a little bit more on breaking news almost every day in a way that I wasn't before. >> Gerard, I want to get your thoughts on this. Wall Street Journal has been since I could remember when the web hit the scene early on very digital savvy. Reporting, it's obviously, awesome as well. As you have people in sheltering in place, both journalists and the people themselves and the companies, there's an important part of the digital component. How do you see that as an opportunity and a challenge at the same time because you want to get data out there, you want to be collecting and reporting those stories? How do you see that opportunity, given the challenge that people can't meet face to face? >> First of all, thank you very much for having me. I think as we've all discovered in all fields of endeavor in the last three months, it's been quite a revelation, how much we can do without using without access to the traditional office environment. I think one of the things that Coronavirus, this crisis will have done we all agree I think is that it will have fundamentally changed the way people work. There'll be a lot more people quite a bit more working from home. They'll be a lot more remote working. Generally, there'll be a lot less travel. So on the one hand, it's been eye opening. actually how relatively easy, I use that word carefully. But how we've managed, and I think it's true of all news organizations, how we've managed surprisingly well, I think, without actually being at work. At the Wall Street Journal, we have a big office, obviously in midtown Manhattan, as well as dozens of bureaus around the world. Nobody has really been in that office since the middle of March. And yet we've put out a complete Wall Street Journal product, everything from the print edition, obviously, through every aspect of digital media, the website, all of the apps, video, everything, audio, podcasts. We've been able to do pretty well everything that we could do when we were all working in the office. So I think that will be an important lesson and that will clearly induce some change, some long term changes, I think about the way we work. That said, I'd point to two particular challenges that I think we have not properly overcome. Or if you like that we have, the two impediments, that the crisis has produced for us. One is, as you said, the absence of face to face activity, the hive process, which I think is really important. I think that a lot of the best ideas, a lot of the best, the best stories are developed through conversations between people in an office which don't necessarily we can't necessarily replicate through the online experience through this kind of event or through the Zoom meetings that we've all been doing. I think that has inhibited to some extent, some of the more creative activity that we could have done. I think the second larger problem which we all must face with this is that being essentially locked up in our homes for more than three months, which most of us has been I think accentuates a problem that is already that has been a problem in journalism for a long time, which is that journalists tend to cluster in the major metropolitan areas. I think, a couple of years ago, I read a study which said, I think that more than three quarters of journalists work for major news organizations, print, digital TV, radio, whatever, live and work in one of four major metropolises in the US. That's the New York area, the Washington DC area, the San Francisco area and the LA area. And that tends to create a very narrow worldview, unfortunately, because not enough people either come from those areas, but from outside those areas or spend enough time talking to people from outside those areas. And I think the Coronavirus has accentuated that. And I think in terms of coverage, I'm here in New York. I've been in New York continuously for three and a half months now which is quite unusual, I usually travel a lot. And so my reporting, I write columns now, mainly, but obviously I talk to people too. But the reporting, the editing that we're doing here is inevitably influenced by the experience that we've had in New York, which has obviously been, frankly, devastating. New York has been devastated by Coronavirus in a way that no where else in the country has. And I think to some extent, that does, perhaps have undue influence on the coverage. We're all locked up. We're all mindful of our own health. We're all mindful of people that we know who've gone to hospital or have been very, very sick or where we are, we are heavily influenced by our own immediate environment. And I think that has been a problem if we had been, imagine if the journalists in the country, instead of being clustered in New York and LA and San Francisco had been sort of spread over Texas and Missouri and Florida, things like that. I think you'd have a very different overall accounting of this story over the last three months. So I think it's just, it's accentuated that phenomenon in journalism, which I think we're mindful of, and which we all need to do a better job of addressing. >> It's really interesting. And I want to come back to that point around, who you're collaborating with to get this, now we have virtual ground truth, I guess, how you collaborate. But decision making around stories is, you need an open mind. And if you have this, I guess, I'll call it groupthink or clustering is interesting, now we have digital and we have virtual, it opens up the aperture but we still have the groupthink. But I want to get Eric's take first on his work environment, 'cause I know you've lived on both sides of New York and San Francisco area, as well as you've worked out in the field for agencies, as well on the other side, on the storytelling side. How has this current news environment, journalism environment impacted your view and challenges and your opportunities that you're going after the news? >> Well, so there's there's a few elements here. So one, Barron's Of course, covers the world, looks at the world through a financial lens. We cover the stock market every day. The stock market is not the center of story, but it is an important element of what's been unfolding over the last few months and the markets have been incredibly volatile, we change the way that we approach the markets. Because everything, the big stories are macro stories, huge swings in stock prices, huge swings in the price of oil, dramatic moves in almost every financial security that you can imagine. And so there's a little bit of a struggle for us as we try and shift our daily coverage to be a little more focused on the macro stories as we're still trying to tell what's happening with individual stocks and companies, but these bigger stories have changed our approach. So even if you look at say the covers of our magazine over the last few months, typically, we would do a cover on a company or an investor, that sort of thing. And now they're all big, thematic stories, because the world has changed. And world is changing how it looks at the financial markets. I think one thing that that Gerard touched on is the inability to really leave your house. I'm sitting in my little home office here, where I've been working since March, and my inability to get out and talk to people in person to have some, some interface with the companies and people that I cover, makes it tougher. You get story ideas from those interactions. I think Gerard said some of it comes from your interactions with your colleagues. But some of that also just comes from your ability to interact with sources and that is really tougher to do. It's more formalistic if you do it online. It's just not the same to be on a Zoom call as to be sitting in a Starbucks with somebody and talking about what's going on. I think the other elements of this is that there's, we have a lot of attempts, trying new things trying to reach our readers. We'll do video sessions, we'll do all sorts of other things. And it's one more layer on top of everything else is that there's a lot of demands on the time for the people who are working in journalism right now. I would say one other thing I'll touch on, John, which is, you mentioned, I did use, I worked for public communications for a while, and I do feel their pain because the ability to do any normal PR pitching for new products, new services, the kinds of things that PR people do every day is really tough. It's just really hard to get anybody's attention for those things right now. And the world is focused on these very large problems. >> Well, we'll unpack the PR comms opportunities in the next section. But I want to to just come back to this topic teased out from Gerard and Brenna when you guys were getting out as well. This virtual ground truth, ultimately, at the end of the day, you got to get the stories, you got to report them, they got to be distributed. Obviously, the Wall Street Journal is operating well, by the way, I love the Q&A video chats and what they got going on over there. So the format's are evolving and doing a good job, people are running their business. But as journalists and reporters out there, you got to get the truth and the ground truth comes from interaction. So as you have an aperture with digital, there's also groupthink on, say, Twitter and these channels. So getting in touch with the audience to have those stories. How are you collecting the data? How are you reporting? Has anything changed or shifted that you can point to because ultimately, it's virtual. You still got to get the ground truth, you still got to get the stories. Any thoughts on this point? >> I think in a way what we're seeing is in writ large actually is a problem again, another problem that I think digital journalism or the digital product digital content, if you like, actually presents for us today, which is that it's often said, I think rightly, that one of the, as successful as a lot of digital journalism has been and thank you for what you said about the Wall Street Journal. And we have done a tremendous job and by the way, one of the things that's been a striking feature of this crisis has been the rapid growth in subscriptions that we've had at the Journal. I know other news organizations have too. But we've benefited particularly from a hunger for the quality news. And we've put on an enormous number subscriptions in the last three months. So we've been very fortunate in that respect. But one of the challenges that people always say, one of the one of the drawbacks that people always draw attention to about digital content is that there's a lack of, for want of a better words, serendipity about the experience. When you used to read a newspaper, print newspapers, when may be some of us are old enough to remember, we'd get a newspaper, we'd open it up, we'd look at the front page, we look inside, we'd look at what other sections they were. And we would find things, very large number of things that we weren't particularly, we weren't looking for, we weren't expecting to, we're looking for a story about such. With the digital experience, as we know, that's a much it's a much less serendipitous experience. So you tend to a lot of search, you're looking, you find things that you tend to be looking for, and you find fewer things that, you follow particular people on social media that you have a particular interest in, you follow particular topics and have RSS feeds or whatever else you're doing. And you follow things that, you tend to find things that you were looking for. You don't find many things you weren't. What I think that the virus, the being locked up at home, again, has had a similar effect. That we, again, some of the best stories that I think anybody comes across in life, but news organizations are able to do are those stories that you know that you come across when you might have been looking for something else. You might have been working on a story about a particular company with a particular view to doing one thing and you came across somebody else. And he or she may have told you something actually really quite different and quite interesting and it took you in a different direction. That is easier to do when you're talking to people face to face, when you're actually there, when you're calling, when you're tasked with looking at a topic in the realm. When you are again, sitting at home with your phone on your computer, you tend to be more narrowly so you tend to sort of operate in lanes. And I think that we haven't had the breadth probably of journalism that I think you would get. So that's a very important you talk about data. The data that we have is obviously, we've got access broadly to the same data that we would have, the same electronically delivered data that we would have if we'd been sitting in our office. The data that I think in some ways is more interesting is the non electronically delivered data that is again, the casual conversation, the observation that you might get from being in a particular place or being with someone. The stimuli that arise from being physically in a place that you just aren't getting. And I think that is an important driver of a lot of stories. And we're missing that. >> Well, Gerard, I just want to ask real quick before I go to Brenna on her her take on this. You mentioned the serendipity and taking the stories in certain directions from the interactions. But also there's trust involved. As you build that relationship, there's trust between the parties, and that takes you down that road. How do you develop trust as you are online now? Is there a methodology or technique? Because you want to get the stories out fast, it's a speed game. But there's also the development side of it where a trust equation needs to build. What's your thoughts on that piece? Because that's where the real deeper stories come from. >> So I wasn't sure if you're asking me or Gerard. >> Gerard if he wants can answer that is the trust piece. >> I'll let the others speak to that too. Yeah, it is probably harder to... Again, most probably most people, most stories, most investigative stories, most scoops, most exclusives tend to come from people you already trust, right? So you've developed a trust with them, and they've developed a trust with you. Perhaps more importantly, they know you're going to treat the story fairly and properly. And that tends to develop over time. And I don't think that's been particularly impaired by this process. You don't need to have a physical proximity with someone in order to be able to develop that trust. My sources, I generally speak to them on the phone 99% of the time anyway, and you can still do that from home. So I don't think that's quite... Obviously, again, there are many more benefits from being able to actually physically interact with someone. But I think the level of, trust takes a long time to develop, let's be honest, too, as well. And I think you develop that trust both by developing good sources. and again, as I said, with the sources understanding that you're going to do the story well. >> Brenna, speed game is out there, you got to get stories fast. How do you balance speed and getting the stories and doing some digging into it? What's your thoughts on all this? >> I would say, every week is looking different for me these days. A lot of times there are government announcements coming out, or there are numbers coming out or something that really does require a really quick story. And so what I've been trying to do is get those stories out as quick as possible with maybe sources I already have, or really just the facts on the ground I can get quickly. And then I think in these days, too, there is a ton of room for following up on things. And some news event will come out but it sparks another idea. And that's the time to that when I'm hearing from PR people or I'm hearing from people who care about the issue, right after that first event is really useful for me to hear who else is thinking about these things and maybe ways I can go beyond the first story for something that more in depth and adds more context and provides more value to our readers. >> Awesome. Well, guys, great commentary and insight there on the current situation. The next section is with the role of PR, because it's changing. I've heard the term earned media is a term that's been kicked around. Now we're all virtual, and we're all connected. The media is all virtual. It's all earned at this point. And that's not just a journalistic thing, there's storytelling. There's new voices emerging. You got these newsletter services, audiences are moving very quickly around trying to figure out what's real. So comms folks are trying to get out there and do their job and tell a story. And sometimes that story doesn't meet the cadence of say, news and/or reporting. So let's talk about that. Eric, you brought this up. You have been on both sides. You said you feel for the folks out there who are trying to do their job. How is the job changing? And what can they do now? >> The news cycle is so ferocious at the moment that it's very difficult to insert your weigh in on something that doesn't touch on the virus or the economy or social unrest or the volatility of the financial markets. So I think there's certain kinds of things that are probably best saved for another moment in time, If you're trying to launch new products or trying to announce new services, or those things are just tougher to do right now. I think that the most interesting questions right now are, If I'm a comms person, how can I make myself and my clients a resource to media who are trying to tell stories about these things, do it in a timely way, not overreach, not try insert myself into a story that really isn't a good fit? Now, every time one of these things happen, we got inboxes full of pitches for things that are only tangentially relevant and are probably not really that helpful, either to the reporter generally or to the client of the firm that is trying to pitch an idea. But I will say on the on this at the same time that I rely on my connections to people in corporate comms every single day to make connections with companies that I cover and need to talk to. And it's a moment when almost more than ever, I need immediacy of response, accurate information access to the right people at the companies who I'm trying to cover. But it does mean you need to be I think sharper or a little more pointed a little more your thinking about why am I pitching this person this story? Because the there's no time to waste. We are working 24 hours a day is what it feels like. You don't want to be wasting people's time. >> Well, you guys you guys represent big brands in media which is phenomenal. And anyone would love to have their company mentioned obviously, in a good way, that's their goal. But the word media relations means you relate to the media. If there's no media to relate to, the roles change, and there's not enough seats at the table, so to speak. So getting a clip on in the clip book that gets sent to management, look, "We're on Bloomberg." "Great, check." But is at it? So people, this is a department that needs to do more. Is there things that they can do, that isn't just chasing, getting on your franchises stories? Because it obviously would be great if we were all on Barron's Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, but they can't always get that. They still got to do more. They got to develop the relationships. >> John, one thing I would be conscious of here is that many of our publications, it's certainly true for journalists, true for us at Barron's and it's certainly true for Bloomberg. We're all multimedia publishers. We're doing lots of things. Barron's has television show on Fox. We have a video series. We have podcasts and newsletters, and daily live audio chats and all sorts of other stuff in addition to the magazine and the website. And so part of that is trying to figure out not just the right publication, but maybe there's an opportunity to do a very particular, maybe you'd be great fit for this thing, but not that thing. And having a real understanding of what are the moving parts. And then the other part, which is always the hardest part, in a way, is truly understanding not just I want to pitch to Bloomberg, but who do I want to pitch at Bloomberg. So I might have a great story for the Wall Street Journal and maybe Gerard would care but maybe it's really somebody you heard on the street who cares or somebody who's covering a particular company. So you have to navigate that, I think effectively. And even, more so now, because we're not sitting in a newsroom. I can't go yell over to somebody who's a few desks away and suggest they take a look at something. >> Do you think that the comm-- (talk over each other) Do you think the comms teams are savvy and literate in multimedia? Are they still stuck in the print ways or the group swing is they're used to what they're doing and haven't evolved? Is that something that you're seeing here? >> I think it varies. Some people will really get it. I think one of the things that that this comes back to in a sense is it's relationship driven. To Gerard's point, it's not so much about trusting people that I don't know, it's about I've been at this a long time, I know what people I know, who I trust, and they know the things I'm interested in and so that relationship is really important. It's a lot harder to try that with somebody new. And the other thing is, I think relevant here is something that we touched on earlier, which is the idiosyncratic element. The ability for me to go out and see new things is tougher. In the technology business, you could spend half your time just going to events, You could go to the conferences and trade shows and dinners and lunches and coffees all day long. And you would get a lot of good story ideas that way. And now you can't do any of that. >> There's no digital hallway. There are out there. It's called Twitter, I guess or-- >> Well, you're doing it from sitting in this very I'm still doing it from sitting in the same chair, having conversations, in some ways like that. But it's not nearly the same. >> Gerard, Brenna, what do you guys think about the comms opportunity, challenges, either whether it's directly or indirectly, things that they could do differently? Share your thoughts. Gerard, we'll start with you? >> Well, I would echo Eric's point as far as knowing who you're pitching to. And I would say that in, at least for the people I'm working with, some of our beats have changed because there are new issues to cover. Someone's taking more of a role covering virus coverage, someone's taking more of a role covering protests. And so I think knowing instead of casting a really wide net, I'm normally happy to try to direct pitches in the right direction. But I do have less time to do that now. So I think if someone can come to me and say, "I know you've been covering this, "this is how my content fits in with that." It'd grab my attention more and makes it easier for me. So I would say that that is one thing that as beats are shifting and people are taking on a little bit of new roles in our coverage, that that's something PR and marketing teams could definitely keep an eye on. >> I agree with all of that. And all everything everybody said. I'd say two very quick things. One, exactly as everybody said, really know who you are pitching to. It's partly just, it's going to be much more effective if you're pitching to the right person, the right story. But when I say that also make the extra effort to familiarize yourself with the work that that reporter or that editor has done. You cannot, I'm sorry to say, overestimate the vanity of reporters or editors or anybody. And so if you're pitching a story to a particular reporter, in a field, make sure you're familiar with what that person may have done and say to her, "I really thought you did a great job "on the reporting that you did on this." Or, "I read your really interesting piece about that," or "I listened to your podcast." It's a relatively easy thing to do that yields extraordinarily well. A, because it appeals to anybody's fantasy and we all have a little bit of that. But, B, it also suggests to the reporter or the editor or the person involved the PR person communications person pitching them, really knows this, has really done their work and has really actually takes this seriously. And instead of just calling, the number of emails I get, and I'm sure it's the same for the others too, or occasional calls out of the blue or LinkedIn messages. >> I love your work. I love your work. >> (voice cuts out) was technology. Well, I have a technology story for you. It's absolutely valueless. So that's the first thing, I would really emphasize that. The second thing I'd say is, especially on the specific relation to this crisis, this Coronavirus issue is it's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, make sure that what you're doing what you're pitching is not completely irrelevant right now. The last three months has not been a very good time to pitch a story about going out with a bunch of people to a crowded restaurant or whatever or something like that to do something. Clearly, we know that. At the same time, don't go to the other extreme and try and make every little thing you have seen every story you may have every product or service or idea that you're pitching don't make it the thing that suddenly is really important because of Coronavirus. I've seen too many of those too. People trying too hard to say, "In this time of crisis, "in this challenging time, what people really want to hear "about is "I don't know, "some new diaper "baby's diaper product that I'm developing or whatever." That's trying too hard. So there is something in the middle, which is, don't pitch the obviously irrelevant story that is just not going to get any attention through this process. >> So you're saying don't-- >> And at the same time, don't go too far in the other direction. And essentially, underestimate the reporter's intelligence 'cause that reporter can tell you, "I can see that you're trying too hard." >> So no shotgun approach, obviously, "Hey, I love your work." Okay, yeah. And then be sensitive to what you're working on not try to force an angle on you, if you're doing a story. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on the evolution of some of the prominent journalists that I've known and/or communication professionals that are taking roles in the big companies to be storytellers, or editors of large companies. I interviewed Andy Cunningham last year, who used to be With Cunningham Communications, and formerly of Apple, better in the tech space and NPR. She said, "Companies have to own their own story "and tell it and put it out there." I've seen journalists say on Facebook, "I'm working on a story of x." And then crowdsource a little inbound. Thoughts on this new role of corporations telling their own story, going direct to the consumers. >> I think to a certain extent, that's valuable. And in some ways, it's a little overrated. There are a lot of companies creating content on their websites, or they're creating their own podcasts or they're creating their own newsletter and those kinds of things. I'm not quite sure how much of that, what the consumption level is for some of those things. I think, to me, the more valuable element of telling your story is less about the form and function and it's more about being able to really tell people, explain to them why what they do matters and to whom it matters, understanding the audience that's going to want to hear your story. There are, to your point, there are quite a few journalists who have migrated to either corporate communications or being in house storytellers of one kind or another for large businesses. And there's certainly a need to figure out the right way to tell your story. I think in a funny way, this is a tougher moment for those things. Because the world is being driven by external events, by these huge global forces are what we're all focused on right now. And it makes it a lot tougher to try and steer your own story at this particular moment in time. And I think you do see it Gerard was talking about don't try and... You want to know what other people are doing. You do want to be aware of what others are writing about. But there's this tendency to want to say, "I saw you wrote a story about Peloton "and we too have a exercise story that you can, "something that's similar." >> (chuckles) A story similar to it. We have a dance video or something. People are trying to glam on to things and taking a few steps too far. But in terms of your original question, it's just tougher at the moment to control your story in that particular fashion, I think. >> Well, this brings up a good point. I want to get to Gerard's take on this because the Wall Street Journal obviously has been around for many, many decades. and it's institution in journalism. In the old days, if you weren't relevant enough to make the news, if you weren't the most important story that people cared about, the editors make that choice and you're on the front page or in a story editorially. And companies would say, "No, but I should be in there." And you'd say, "That's what advertising is for." And that's the way it seemed to work in the past. If you weren't relevant in the spirit of the decision making of important story or it needs to be communicated to the audience, there's ads for that. You can get a full page ad in the old days. Now with the new world, what's an ad, what's a story? You now have multiple omni-channels out there. So traditionally, you want to get the best, most important story that's about relevance. So companies might not have a relevant story and they're telling a boring story. There's no there, there, or they miss the story. How do you see this? 'Cause this is the blend, this is the gray area that I see. It's certainly a good story, depending on who you're talking to, the 10 people who like it. >> I think there's no question. We're in the news business, topicality matters. You're going to have a much better chance of getting your story, getting your product or service, whatever covered by the Wall Street Journal, Barron's or anywhere else for that matter, if it seems somehow news related, whether it's the virus or the unrest that we've been seeing, or it's to do with the economy. Clearly, you can have an effect. Newspapers, news organizations of all the three news organizations we represent don't just, are not just obviously completely obsessed with what happened this morning and what's going on right now. We are all digging into deeper stories, especially in the business field. Part of what we all do is actually try to get beyond the daily headlines. And so what's happening with the fortunes of a particular company. Obviously, they may be impacted by they're going to be impacted by the lockdown and Coronavirus. But they actually were doing some interesting things that they were developing over the long term, and we would like to look into that too. So again, there is a balance there. And I'm not going to pretend that if you have a really topical story about some new medical device or some new technology for dealing with this new world that we're all operating in, you're probably going to get more attention than you would if you don't have that. But I wouldn't also underestimate, the other thing is, as well as topicality, everybody's looking at the same time to be different, and every journalist wants to do something original and exclusive. And so they are looking for a good story that may be completely unrelated. In fact, I would also underestimate, I wouldn't underestimate either the desire of readers and viewers and listeners to actually have some deeper reported stories on subjects that are not directly in the news right now. So again, it's about striking the balance right. But I wouldn't say that, that there is not at all, I wouldn't say there is not a strong role for interesting stories that may not have anything to do what's going on with the news right now. >> Brenna, you want to add on your thoughts, you're in the front lines as well, Bloomberg, everyone wants to be on Bloomberg. There's Bloomberg radio. You guys got tons of media too, there's tons of stuff to do. How do they navigate? And how do you view the interactions with comms folks? >> It looks we're having a little bit of challenge with... Eric, your thoughts on comm professionals. The questions in the chats are everything's so fast paced, do you think it's less likely for reporters to respond to PR comms people who don't have interacted with you before? Or with people you haven't met before? >> It's an internal problem. I've seen data that talks about the ratio of comms people to reporters, and it's, I don't know, six or seven to one or something like that, and there are days when it feels like it's 70 to one. And so it is challenging to break through. And I think it's particularly challenging now because some of the tools you might have had, you might have said, "Can we grab coffee one day or something like that," trying to find ways to get in front of that person when you don't need them. It's a relationship business. I know this is a frustrating answer, but I think it's the right answer which is those relationships between media and comms people are most successful when they've been established over time. And so you're not getting... The spray and pray strategy doesn't really work. It's about, "Eric, I have a story that's perfect for you. "And here's why I think you you should talk to this guy." And if they really know me, there's a reasonable chance that I'll not only listen to them, but I'll at least take the call. You need to have that high degree of targeting. It is really hard to break through and people try everything. They try, the insincere version of the, "I read your story, it was great. "but here's another great story." Which maybe they read your story, maybe they didn't at least it was an attempt. Or, "if you like this company, you'll love that one." People try all these tricks to try and get get to you. I think the highest level of highest probability of success comes from the more information you have about not just what I covered yesterday, but what do I cover over time? What kinds of stories am I writing? What kinds of stories does the publication write? And also to keep the pitching tight, I was big believer when I was doing comms, you should be able to pitch stories in two sentences. And you'll know from that whether there's going to be connection or not, don't send me five or more pitches. Time is of the essence, keep it short and as targeted as possible. >> That's a good answer to Paul Bernardo's question in the chat, which is how do you do the pitch. Brenna, you're back. Can you hear us? No. Okay. We'll get back to her when she gets logged back in. Gerard, your thoughts on how to reach you. I've never met you before, if I'm a CEO or I'm a comms person, a company never heard of, how do I get your attention? If I can't have a coffee with you with COVID, how do I connect with you virtually? (talk over each other) >> Exactly as Eric said, it is about targeting, it's really about making sure you are. And again, it's, I hate to say this, but it's not that hard. If you are the comms person for a large or medium sized company or even a small company, and you've got a particular pitch you want to make, you're probably dealing in a particular field, a particular sector, business sector or whatever. Let's say it says not technology for change, let's say it's fast moving consumer goods or something like that. Bloomberg, Brenna is in an enormous organization with a huge number of journalist you deal and a great deal of specialism and quality with all kinds of sectors. The Wall Street Journal is a very large organization, we have 13, 1400 reporters, 13 to 1400 hundred journalist and staff, I should say. Barron's is a very large organization with especially a particularly strong field coverage, especially in certain sectors of business and finance. It's not that hard to find out A, who is the right person, actually the right person in those organizations who's been dealing with the story that you're trying to sell. Secondly, it's absolutely not hard to find out what they have written or broadcast or produced on in that general field in the course of the last, and again, as Eric says, going back not just over the last week or two, but over the last year or two, you can get a sense of their specialism and understand them. It's really not that hard. It's the work of an hour to go back and see who the right person is and to find out what they've done. And then to tailor the pitch that you're making to that person. And again, I say that partly, it's not purely about the vanity of the reporter, it's that the reporter will just be much more favorably inclined to deal with someone who clearly knows, frankly, not just what they're pitching, but what the journalist is doing and what he or she, in his or her daily activity is actually doing. Target it as narrowly as you can. And again, I would just echo what Eric and I think what Brenna was also saying earlier too that I'm really genuinely surprised at how many very broad pitches, again, I'm not directly in a relative role now. But I was the editor in chief of the Journal for almost six years. And even in that position, the number of extraordinarily broad pitches I get from people who clearly didn't really know who I was, who didn't know what I did, and in some cases, didn't even really know what Wall Street Journal was. If you can find that, if you actually believe that. It's not hard. It's not that hard to do that. And you will have so much more success, if you are identifying the organization, the people, the types of stories that they're interested in, it really is not that difficult to do. >> Okay, I really appreciate, first of all, great insight there. I want to get some questions from the crowd so if you're going to chat, there was a little bit of a chat hiccup in there. So it should be fixed. We're going to go to the chat for some questions for this distinguished panel. Talk about the new coffee. There's a good question here. Have you noticed news fatigue, or reader seeking out news other than COVID? If so, what news stories have you been seeing trending? In other words, are people sick and tired of COVID? Or is it still on the front pages? Is that relevant? And if not COVID, what stories are important, do you think? >> Well, I could take a brief stab at that. I think it's not just COVID per se, for us, the volatility of the stock market, the uncertainties in the current economic environment, the impact on on joblessness, these massive shifts of perceptions on urban lifestyles. There's a million elements of this that go beyond the core, what's happening with the virus story. I do think as a whole, all those things, and then you combine that with the social unrest and Black Lives Matter. And then on top of that, the pending election in the fall. There's just not a lot of room left for other stuff. And I think I would look at it a little bit differently. It's not finding stories that don't talk on those things, it's finding ways for coverage of other things whether it's entertainment. Obviously, there's a huge impact on the entertainment business. There's a huge impact on sports. There's obviously a huge impact on travel and retail and restaurants and even things like religious life and schooling. I have the done parents of a college, was about to be a college sophomore, prays every day that she can go back to school in the fall. There are lots of elements to this. And it's pretty hard to imagine I would say to Gerard's point earlier, people are looking for good stories, they're always looking for good stories on any, but trying to find topics that don't touch on any of these big trends, there's not a lot of reasons to look for those. >> I agree. Let me just give you an example. I think Eric's exactly right. It's hard to break through. I'll just give you an example, when you asked that question, I just went straight to my Wall Street Journal app on my phone. And of course, like every organization, you can look at stories by sections and by interest and by topic and by popularity. And what are the three most popular stories right now on the Wall Street Journal app? I can tell you the first one is how exactly do you catch COVID-19? I think that's been around since for about a month. The second story is cases accelerate across the United States. And the third story is New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, tell travelers from areas with virus rates to self isolate. So look, I think anecdotally, there is a sense of COVID fatigue. Well, we're all slightly tired of it. And certainly, we were probably all getting tired, or rather distressed by those terrible cases and when we've seen them really accelerate back in March and April and these awful stories of people getting sick and dying. I was COVID fatigued. But I just have to say all of the evidence we have from our data, in terms of as I said earlier, the interest in the story, the demand for what we're doing, the growth in subscriptions that we've had, and just as I said, little things like that, that I can point you at any one time, I can guarantee you that our among our top 10 most read stories, at least half of them will be COVID-19. >> I think it's safe to say general interest in that outcome of progression of that is super critical. And I think this brings up the tech angle, which we can get into a minute. But just stick with some of these questions I just want to just keep these questions flowing while we have a couple more minutes left here. In these very challenging times for journalism, do byline articles have more power to grab the editors attention in the pitching process? >> Well, I think I assume what the questioner is asking when he said byline articles is contributed. >> Yes. >> Contributed content. Barron's doesn't run a lot of contributing content that way in a very limited way. When I worked at Forbes, we used to run tons of it. I'm not a big believer that that's necessarily a great way to generate a lot of attention. You might get published in some publication, if you can get yourself onto the op ed page of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, more power to you. But I think in most cases-- >> It's the exception not the rule Exception not the rule so to speak, on the big one. >> Yeah. >> Well, this brings up the whole point about certainly on SiliconANGLE, our property, where I'm co founder and chief, we basically debate over and get so many pitches, "hey, I want to write for you, here's a contributed article." And it's essentially an advertisement. Come on, really, it's not really relevant. In some case we (talk over each other) analysts come in and and done that. But this brings up the question, we're seeing these newsletters like sub stack and these services really are funding direct journalism. So it's an interesting. if you're good enough to write Gerard, what's your take on this, you've seen this, you have a bit of experience in this. >> I think, fundamental problem here is that is people like the idea of doing by lines or contributed content, but often don't have enough to say. You can't just do, turn your marketing brochure into a piece of an 800 word with the content that that's going to be compelling or really attract any attention. I think there's a place for it, if you truly have something important to say, and if you really have something new to say, and it's not thinly disguised marketing material. Yeah, you can find a way to do that. I'm not sure I would over-rotate on that as an approach. >> No, I just briefly, again, I completely agree. At the Journal we just don't ever publish those pieces. As Eric says, you're always, everyone is always welcome to try and pitch to the op ed pages of the Journal. They're not generally going to I don't answer for them, I don't make those decisions. But I've never seen a marketing pitch run as an op ed effectively. I just think you have to know again, who you're aiming at. I'm sure it's true for Bloomberg, Barron's and the Journal, most other major news organizations are not really going to consider that. There might be organizations, there might be magazines, digital and print magazines. There might be certain trade publications that would consider that. Again, at the Journal and I'm sure most of the large news organizations, we have very strict rules about what we can publish. And how and who can get published. And it's essentially journal editorials, that journal news staff who can publish stories we don't really take byline, outside contribution. >> Given that your time is so valuable, guys, what's the biggest, best practice to get your attention? Eric, you mentioned keeping things tight and crisp. Are there certain techniques to get your attention? >> Well I'll mention just a couple of quick things. Email is better than most other channels, despite the volume. Patience is required as a result because of the volume. People do try and crawl over the transom, hit you up on LinkedIn, DM you on Twitter, there's a lot of things that people try and do. I think a very tightly crafted, highly personalized email with the right subject line is probably still the most effective way, unless it's somebody you actually, there are people who know me who know they have the right to pick up the phone and call me if they really think they have... That's a relationship that's built over time. The one thing on this I would add which I think came up a little bit before thinking about it is, you have to engage in retail PR, not not wholesale PR. The idea that you're going to spam a list of 100 people and think that that's really going to be a successful approach, it's not unless you're just making an announcement, and if you're issuing your earnings release, or you've announced a large acquisition or those things, fine, then I need to get the information. But simply sending around a very wide list is not a good strategy, in most cases, I would say probably for anyone. >> We got Brenna back, can you hear me? She's back, okay. >> I can hear you, I'm back. >> Well, let's go back to you, we missed you. Thanks for coming back in. We had a glitch on our end but appreciate it, bandwidth internet is for... Virtual is always a challenge to do live, but thank you. The trend we're just going through is how do I pitch to you? What's the best practice? How do I get your attention? Do bylines lines work? Actually, Bloomberg doesn't do that very often either as well as like the Journal. but your thoughts on folks out there who are really trying to figure out how to do a good job, how to get your attention, how to augment your role and responsibilities. What's your thoughts? >> I would say, going back to what we said a little bit before about really knowing who you're pitching to. If you know something that I've written recently that you can reference, that gets my attention. But I would also encourage people to try to think about different ways that they can be part of a story if they are looking to be mentioned in one of our articles. And what I mean by that is, maybe you are launching new products or you have a new initiative, but think about other ways that your companies relate to what's going on right now. So for instance, one thing that I'm really interested in is just the the changing nature of work in the office place itself. So maybe you know of something that's going on at a company, unlimited vacation for the first time or sabbaticals are being offered to working parents who have nowhere to send their children, or something that's unique about the current moment that we're living in. And I think that those make really good interviews. So it might not be us featuring your product or featuring exactly what your company does, but it still makes you part of the conversation. And I think it's still, it's probably valuable to the company as well to get that mention, and people may be looking into what you guys do. So I would say that something else we are really interested in right now is really looking at who we're quoting and the diversity of our sources. So that's something else I would put a plug in for PR people to be keeping an eye on, is if you're always putting up your same CEO who is maybe of a certain demographic, but you have other people in your company who you can give the opportunity to talk with the media. I'm really interested in making sure I'm using a diverse list of sources and I'm not just always calling the same person. So if you can identify people who maybe even aren't experienced with it, but they're willing to give it a try, I think that now's a really good moment to be able to get new voices in there. >> Rather than the speed dial person you go to for that vertical or that story, building out those sources. >> Exactly. >> Great, that's great insight, Everyone, great insights. And thank you for your time on this awesome panel. Love to do it again. This has been super informative. I love some of the engagement out there. And again, I think we can do more of these and get the word out. I'd like to end the panel on an uplifting note for young aspiring journalists coming out of school. Honestly, journalism programs are evolving. The landscape is changing. We're seeing a sea change. As younger generation comes out of college and master's programs in journalism, we need to tell the most important stories. Could you each take a minute to give your advice to folks either going in and coming out of school, what to be prepared for, how they can make an impact? Brenna, we'll start with you, Gerard and Eric. >> That's a big question. I would say one thing that has been been encouraging about everything going on right now as I have seen an increased hunger for information and an increased hunger for accurate information. So I do think it can obviously be disheartening to look at the furloughs and the layoffs and everything that is going on around the country. But at the same time, I think we have been able to see really big impacts from the people that are doing reporting on protests and police brutality and on responses to the virus. And so I think for young journalists, definitely take a look at the people who are doing work that you think is making a difference. And be inspired by that to keep pushing even though the market might be a little bit difficult for a while. >> I'd say two things. One, again, echoing what Brenna said, identify people that you follow or you admire or you think are making a real contribution in the field and maybe directly interact with them. I think all of us, whoever we are, always like to hear from young journalists and budding journalists. And again, similar advice to giving to the advice that we were giving about PR pitches. If you know what that person has been doing, and then contact them and follow them. And I know I've been contacted by a number of young journalists like that. The other thing I'd say is and this is more of a plea than a piece of advice. But I do think it will work in the long run, be prepared to go against the grain. I fear that too much journalism today is of the same piece. There is not a lot of intellectual diversity in what we're seeing There's a tendency to follow the herd. Goes back a little bit to what I was saying right at the opening about the fact that too many journalists, quite frankly, are clustered in the major metropolitan areas in this country and around the world. Have something distinctive and a bit different to say. I'm not suggesting you offer some crazy theory or a set of observations about the world but be prepared to... To me, the reason I went into journalism was because I was always a bit skeptical about whenever I saw something in any media, which especially one which seemed to have a huge amount of support and was repeated in all places, I always asked myself, "Is that really true? "Is that actually right? "Maybe there's an alternative to that." And that's going to make you stand out as a journalist, that's going to give you a distinctiveness. It's quite hard to do in some respects right now, because standing out from the crowd can get you into trouble. And I'm not suggesting that people should do that. Have a record of original storytelling, of reporting, of doing things perhaps that not, because look, candidly, there are probably right now in this country, 100,00 budding putative journalists who would like to go out and write about, report on Black Lives Matter and the reports on the problems of racial inequality in this country and the protests and all of that kind of stuff. The problem there is there are already 100,000 of those people who want to do that in addition to probably the 100,000 journalists who are already doing it. Find something else, find something different. have something distinctive to offer so that when attention moves on from these big stories, whether it's COVID or race or politics or the election or Donald Trump or whatever. Have something else to offer that is quite distinctive and where you have actually managed to carve out for yourself a real record as having an independent voice. >> Brenna and Gerard, great insight. Eric, take us home close us out. >> Sure. I'd say a couple things. So one is as a new, as a young journalist, I think first of all, having a variety of tools in your toolkit is super valuable. So be able to write long and write short, be able to do audio, blogs, podcast, video. If you can shoot photos and the more skills that you have, a following on social media. You want to have all of the tools in your toolkit because it is challenging to get a job and so you want to be able to be flexible enough to fill all those roles. And the truth is that a modern journalist is finding the need to do all of that. When I first started at Barron's many, many years ago, we did one thing, we did a weekly magazine. You'd have two weeks to write a story. It was very comfortable. And that's just not the way the world works anymore. So that's one element. And the other thing, I think Gerard is right. You really want to have a certain expertise if possible that makes you stand out. And the contradiction is, but you also want to have the flexibility to do lots of different stories. You want to get (voice cuts out) hold. But if you have some expertise, that is hard to find, that's really valuable. When Barron's hires we're always looking for people who have, can write well but also really understand the financial markets. And it can be challenging for us sometimes to find those people. And so I think there's, you need to go short and long. It's a barbell strategy. Have expertise, but also be flexible in both your approach and the things you're willing to cover. >> Great insight. Folks, thanks for the great commentary, great chats for the folks watching, really appreciate your valuable time. Be original, go against the grain, be skeptical, and just do a good job. I think there's a lot of opportunity. And I think the world's changing. Thanks for your time. And I hope the comms folks enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for joining us, everyone. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here in the Cube for this Cube Talk was one hour power panel. Awesome conversation. Stay in chat if you want to ask more questions. We'll come back and look at those chats later. But thank you for watching. Have a nice day. (instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. In our remote studio, we have a quarantine crew here during this COVID-19 crisis. Here talking about the crisis and the impact to business and overall work. Joined by a great guest Dustin Kirkland, CUBE alumni, who's now the chief product officer at Apex Clearing. This COVID-19 has really demonstrated to the mainstream world stage, not just inside the industry that we've been covering for many, many years, that the idea of at-scale means something completely different, and certainly DevOps and Agile is going mainstream to survive, and people are realizing that now. No better guest than have Dustin join us, who's had experiences in open source. He's worked across the industry from Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, Google, Canonical. Dustin, welcome back to the CUBE here remotely. Looking good. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks, John. Last time we talked, I was in the studio, and here we are talking over the internet. This is a lot of fun. >> Well, I really appreciate it. I know you've been in your new role since September. A lot's changed, but one of the things why I wanted to talk with you is because you and I have talked many times around DevOps. This has been the industry conversation. We've been inside the ropes. Now you're starting to see, with this new scale of work-at-home forcing all kinds of new pressure points, giving people the realization that the entire life with digital and with technology can be different, doesn't have to be augmented with their existing life. It's a full-on technology driven impact, and I think a lot of people are learning that, and certainly, healthcare and finance are two areas, in particular, that are impacted heavily. Obviously, people are worried about the economy, and we're worried about people's lives. These are two major areas, but even outside that, there's new entrepreneurs right now that I know who are working on new ventures. You're seeing people working on new solutions. This is kind of bringing the DevOps concept to areas that quite frankly weren't there. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, without a doubt, I mean, the whole world has changed in 30 short days. We knew something was amiss in China. We knew that there was a lot of danger for people. The danger for business, though, didn't become apparent until vast swathes of the work force got sent home. And there's a number of businesses and industries that are coping relatively well with this. Certainly those who have previously adopted, or have experienced, doing work remotely, doing business by video, teleconference, having resources in the cloud, having people and expertise who are able to continue working at nearly 100% capacity in 100% remote environments. There's a lot of technology behind that, and there are some industries, and in particular, some firms, some organizations, that were really adept and were able to make that shift almost overnight. Maybe there were a couple bumps along the way, some VPN settings needed to be tweaked, and Zoom settings needed to be changed a little bit, but for many, this was a relatively smooth transition, and we may be doing this for a very long time. >> Yeah, I want to get your thoughts, before we get into some of the product stuff that you guys are working on and some other things. What's your general reaction to people in your circles, inside industry and tech industry, and outside, what are you seeing a reaction to this new scale, work from home, social distancing, isolation, what are your observations? >> Yeah, you know, I think we're in for a long haul. This is going to be the new normal for quite some time. I think it's super important to check on the people you care about, and before we get into dev and tech, check on the people you care about, especially people who either aren't yet respecting the social distancing norms and impress upon them the importance that, hey, this is about you, this is about the people you care about, it's about people you don't even know, because there are plenty of people who can carry this and not even know. So definitely check on the people that you care about. And reach out to those people and stay in touch. We all need one another more than ever, right? I manage a team, and it's super important, I think, to understand how much stress everyone is under. I've got over a dozen people that report to me. Most of them have kids and families. We start out our weekly staff meeting now, and we bring the kids in. They're curious, they want to know what's going on. First five, 10 minutes of our meeting is meet the family. And that demystifies some of what we're doing, and actually keeps the other 50 minutes of the meeting pretty quiet in our experience. But it's really humanized an aspect of work from home that's always been a bit taboo. We laugh about the reporter in Korea whose kid and his wife came in during the middle of a live on-air interview. There's certainly, I've worked from home for almost 12 years, like, those are really uncomfortable situations. Until about a month ago, when that just became the norm. And from that perspective, I think there's a humanization that we're far more understanding of people who work from home now than ever before. >> It's funny, I've heard people say, you know, my wife didn't know what I did until I started working at home. And comments to seeing people's family, and saying, wow, that's awesome, and just bringing a personal connection, not just this software mechanism that connects people for some meeting, and we've all been on those meetings. They go long, and you're sitting there, and you're turning the camera off so you can sneeze. All those things are happening. But when you start to think about, beyond it being a software mechanism, that it's a social equation right now. People have shared experiences. It's been an interesting time. >> Yeah, and just sharing those experiences. We do a think internal on our Slack channel every day. We try to post a picture. We call it hashtag recess, and at recess we take a picture of walking the dogs, or playing with the kids, or gardening, or whatever it is, going for a run. Again, just trying to make the best of this, take advantage of, you know, it's hard working from home, but trying to take advantage of some of those once in a lifetime opportunities we have here. And my team has started pub quiz on Fridays, so we're mostly spread across, in the U.S., so we're able to do this at a reasonable hour, but the last couple of Fridays, we've jumped on a Zoom, downloaded a pub trivia game, most of us a crack a beer, or glass of wine, or a cocktail, and you know, it's just, it actually puts a punctuate mark on the end of the week, puts a period on the end of the week. Because that's the other thing about this, man, if you don't have some boundaries, it's easy to go from an eight or nine hour normal day to 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days, Saturday bleeds into Sunday bleeds into Monday, and then the rat race takes over. >> You got to get the exercise. You have a routine. That's my experience. What's your advice for people who are working at home for the first time? Do you have any best practices? >> I actually had a blog post on this about two weeks ago and put up almost a shopping list of some of the things that I've assembled here in the work from home environment. It's something I've been doing since 2008, so it's been there for a good long while. It's a little bit hard to accumulate all the technology that you need, but I would say, most important, have a space, some kind of space. Some people have more room or less, but even just a corner in a master bedroom with a standup desk, some space that is your own, that the family understands and respects. The other best practice is set some time boundaries. I like to start my day early. I'll try to break more a little bit for that recess, see the family some, and then knock off at a reasonable hour, so establish those boundaries. Yeah, I've got a bunch of tips in that blog post I can shoot you after this, but it's the sort of thing that, be a bit understanding, too, of other people in this situation for the first time, perhaps. So you know, offer whatever help and assistance you can, and be understanding that, man, things just aren't like they used to be. >> That's great advice. Thanks for the insights. Want to get to something that I see happening, and this always kind of happens when you see these waves where there's a downturn, or there's some sort of an event. In this case it's catastrophic in the way it vectored in like this and the impact that we just discussed. But what comes out of it is creativity around entrepreneurial activity, and certainly reinvention, businesses reforming, retrenching, resetting, whatever word, pivot, digital transformation, there's plenty of words for it. But this is the time where people can actually get a lot done. I always comment, in my last interview I did, you know, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was sheltering in place, and Isaac Newton invented calculus, so you can actually get some work done. And you're starting to see people look at the new technology and start disrupting old incumbent markets, because now more than ever, things are exposed. The opportunity of recognition becomes clearer. So I wanted to get your thoughts on this. You're a product person, you've got a lot of product management skills, and you're currently taking this DevOps to financial market with fintech and your business, so you're applying known principles and software and tech and disrupting an existing industry. I think this is going to be a common trend for the next five years. >> Yeah, so on that first note, I think you're exactly right. There will be a reckoning, and there will be a ton of opportunities that come out of this for the already or the rapidly transformed digital native, digital focused business. There will be some that survive and thrive here. I think you're seeing a lot of this with the popularity of Zoom that has spiked recently. I think you're going to see technologies like DocuSign being used in places that, some of those places that still require wet signatures, but you just can't get to the notary and sign a, I don't know, a refi on your mortgage or something like that. And so I think you're going to see a bunch of those. The biggest opportunities are really around our education system. I've got two kids at home, and I'm in a pretty forward thinking school district in Austin, Texas, you know, but that's not the norm where our teachers are conducting classes and assignments over Zoom. I've got a kindergartener and a second grader. There's somewhat limits to what they can do with technology. I think you're going to see a lot of entrepreneurial solutions that develop in that space, and that's going to go from K through 12, and then into college. You think about how universities have had to shift and cancel classes, and what's happening with graduation. I've got a six and an eight year old, and I've been told I need to save $200,000 apiece for each of them to go to college, which is just an astounding number, especially to someone like me, who went to an inexpensive public university on a scholarship. Saving that kind of money for college, and just thinking about how much more efficient our education system might be with a lot more digital, a lot more digital education, digital testing and classes, while still maintaining the college experience, what that's going to look like in 10 years. I think we're going to see a lot of changes over these next 18 months to our educational system. >> Dustin, talk about the event dynamics. Physical events don't exist currently. Certainly, when they do come back, they should, and they will, the role of the virtual space is going to be highlighted and new opportunities will emerge. You mentioned education. People learn, not just for school, whether they're kids, whether they're professionals, learning and collaboration, work tools are going to reshape. What's your take on that marketplace, because we got to do virtual events. You can't just replicate a physical event and move it to digital. It's a complex system. >> Yeah, you're talking about an entire industry. We saw the Google Events, Google Next, Google IO, the Microsoft Events, just across the, I'm here in Austin, Texas, all of South by Southwest was canceled, which is just, it's breathtaking. When does that come back, and what does it look like? Is it a year or two or more from now? Events is where I spend my time, and when I get on a plane, and I fly somewhere, I'm usually going to a conference or trade show. Think about the sports industry. People who get on a plane, they go to an NFL game. John, I don't have all the answers, man, but I'm telling you, that entire industry is rapidly, rapidly going to evolve. I hope and pray that one day we're back to a, I can go back to a college football game again. I hope I can sit in a CUBE studio at a CUBE Con or an Open Stack or some other conference again. >> Hey, we should do a rerun, because I was watching the Patriots game last night, Tom Brady beating the Chiefs, October from last year. It was one of the best games of the season, went down to the wire, and I watched it, and I'm like, okay, that's Tom Brady, he's still in the Patriot uniform on the TV. Do we do reruns? This is the question. Right now, there's a big void for the next three months. What do we do? Do we replay the highlights from the CUBE? Do we have physical get togethers with Zoom? What's your take on how people should think about these events? >> Yeah, you know, the reruns only go so far, right? I'm a Texas Aggie, man. I could watch Johnny Football in his prime anytime. But I know what happened, and those games are just not as exciting as something that's a surprise. I'm actually curious about e-sports for the first time. What would it look like to watch a couple of kids who are really good at Madden Football on a Playstation go at it? What would other games that I've never seen look like? In our space, it's a lot more about, I think, podcasts and live content and staying connected and apprised of what's going on, making-- Oh, we locked up there for a second. It's, I think it's going to be really interesting. I'm still following you guys. I certainly see you active on social media. I'm sort of more addicted than ever to the live news, and in fact, I'm ready to start seeing some stuff that doesn't involve COVID-19, so from that perspective, man, keep churning out good content, and good content that's pertinent to the rest of our industry. >> That's great stuff. Well, Dustin, take a minute to explain what you're doing at Apex Clearing, your mission, and what are you guys excited about. >> Yeah, so Apex Clearing, we're a fintech. We're a very forward-focused, digitally-focused fintech. We are well positioned to continue servicing the needs of our clients in this environment. We went fully remote the first week of March, long before it was mandatory, and our business shifted pretty seamlessly. We worked through a couple of hiccups, provisioning extra VPN IP addresses, and upgrading a couple of service plans on some of the softwares, the service we buy, but besides that, our team has done just a marvelous job transitioning to remote. We are in the broker, dealer, and registered advisor space, so we provide the clearing services, which handles stock trades, equity trades, in the back end, and the custodial services. We actually hold, safeguard, the equities that our correspondents, we call our clients correspondents, their retail customers end up holding. So we've been around in our current form since about 2012. This was a retread of a previous company that was bought and retooled as Apex Clearing in 2012. Very shortly after that, we helped Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, a whole bunch of really forward-looking companies reinvent what it meant to buy and sell and trade securities online, and to hold assets in a robo advisor like Betterment. Today, we are definitely well-known, well-respected for how quickly and seamlessly our APIs can be used by our correspondents in building really modern e-banking and e-brokerage experiences. >> So you guys-- >> So that went-- >> Are you guys like a DevOps platform-- >> We're more like software as a service for fintech and brokerage. So our products are largely APIs that our correspondents use their own credentials to interact with, and then using our APIs, they can open accounts, which means get an account number from the systems that allows them to then fund that account, connect via ACH and other bank connectivity platforms, transfer cash into those accounts, and then start conducting trades. Some of our correspondents have that down to a 60-second experience in a mobile app. From a mobile app, you can register for that account, if you need to, take a picture of an IED, have all of that imported, add your tax information, have that account number associated with your banking account, move a couple hundred dollars into that banking account, and then if the stock market's open, start buying and selling stock in that same window. >> Great, well, I wanted to talk about this, because to the earlier bigger picture, I think people are going to be applying DevOps principles, younger entrepreneurs, but also, reborn, if you will, professionals who are old school IT or whatever, moving faster. And you wrote a blog post I want to get your thoughts on. You wrote it on April second. How we've adapted Ubuntu's time-based release cycles to fintech and software as a service. What is that all about? What's the meaning behind this post? You guys are doing something new, unique, or-- >> To this industry and to many of the people around me, even our clients and customers around me, this is a whole new world. They've never seen anything like it. To those of us who have been around Linux, open source, certainly Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, it's just standard operating procedures. There's nothing surprising about it, necessarily. But either it's some combination of the financial services world, just the nature of proprietary software, but also the concept of software as a service, SaaS, which is very different than Ubuntu or Kubernetes or Open Stack, which is released software, right. We ship software at the end of an Ubuntu cycle or a Kubernetes cycle. It's very different when you're a software as a service platform, and it's a matter of rolling out to production some changes, and those changes then going live. So, I wrote a post mainly to give some transparency, largely to our clients, our correspondents. We've got a couple hundred customers that use the Apex platform. I've met with many of them in a sort of one-on-many, one-to-one, one-on-many basis, where I'll show up and deliver the product road map, a couple of product managers will come and do a deep dive. Part of what we communicate to those customers is around, now, around our release cycles, and to many of them, it's a foreign concept that they've just never seen or heard before, and so I put together the blog post. We shared it internally, and educated the teams, and it was well-received. We shared it externally privately with a number of customers, and it was well-received, and a couple of them, actually a couple of the Silicon Valley based customers said, hey, why don't you just put this out there on Medium or on your blog or under an Apex banner, because this actually would be really well-received by others in the family, other partners in the family. So I'm happy to kind of dive into a couple of the key principles here, and we can sort of talk through it if you're interested, John. >> Well, I think the main point is you guys have a release cycle that is the speed of open source to SaaS, and fintech, which again, proprietary stuff is slower, monolithic. >> Yeah, the key principle is that we've taken this, and we've made it predictable and transparent, and we commit to these cycles. You know, most people maybe familiar with Ubuntu releasing twice a year, right, April and October, Ubuntu has released every April and October since 2004. I was involved with Ubuntu between 2008 and 2018 as an engineer, an engineering manager, and then a product manager, and eventually a VP of product at Canonical, and that was very much my life for 10 years, oriented around that. In that time, I spent a lot of time around Open Stack, which adopted a very similar model. Open Stack's released every six months, just after the Ubuntu release. A number of the members of the technical team and the committee that formed Open Stack came out of either Ubuntu or Canonical or both, and really helped influence that community. It's actually quite similar in Kubernetes, which developed independent, generally, of Ubuntu. Kubernetes releases on a quarterly basis, about every three months, and again, it's the sort of thing where it's just a cycle. It happens like clockwork every three months. So when I joined Apex and took a look at a number of the needs that we had, our correspondents had, our relationship managers, our sales team, the client-facing people in the organization, one of the biggest items that bubbled straight to the top is our customers wanted more transparency into our road maps, tighter commitments on when we're going to deliver things, and the ability to influence those. And you know what, that's not dissimilar from any product managers plight anywhere in the industry. But what I was able to do is take some of those principles that are common around Ubuntu and Kubernetes and Open Stack, which by the way, are quite familiar. We use a lot of Ubuntu and Kubernetes inside of Apex, and many of our correspondents are quite familiar with those cycles, but they'd never really seen or heard of a software as a service, a SaaS vendor, using something like that. So that's what's new. >> You've got some cycles going now. You've got schedules, so just looking here, just to get this out there, 'cause I think it's data. You did it last year in October, November, mid-cycle in January of this year. You've got a couple summits coming up? >> Yeah, that's right, we've broken it down into three cycles per year, three 16-week cycles per year. So it's a little bit more frequent than the twice a year Ubuntu, not quite as frenetic as the quarterly Kubernetes cycles. 16 weeks time three is 48. That leaves us four weeks of slack, really to handle Thanksgiving and Christmas and end of year holidays, Chinese New Year, whatever might come up. I'll tell you from experience, that's always been a struggle in the Ubuntu and Open Stack and Kubernetes world, it's hard to plan around those cycles, so what we've done here is we've actually just allocated four weeks of a slush fund to take care of that. We're at three 16-week cycles per year. We version them according to the year and then an iterator. So 20A, 20B, 20C are our three cycles in 2020, and we'll do 21A, B, and C next year. Each of those cycles has three summits. So to your point about we get together, back in the before everyone stopped traveling, we very much enjoyed twice a year getting together for CUBE con. We very much enjoyed the Open Stack summits and the various Ubuntu summits. Inside of a small company like ours, these were physical. We'd get together in Dallas or New York or Chicago or Portland, which is the four places we have offices. We were doing that basically every six weeks or so for one of these summits. Now they're all virtual. We handle them over Zoom. When they were physical, we'd do the summit in about three days of packed agendas, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Now that we've gone to virtual, we've actually spread it a little bit thinner across the week, and so we've done, we've poked some holes in the day, which has been an interesting learning experience, and I think we're all much happier with the most recent summit we did, spreading it over the course of the week, accounting for time zones, giving ourself, everyone, lunch breaks and stuff. >> Well, we'll have to keep checking in. I want to certainly collaborate with you on the virtual digital, check your progress. We're all learning, and iterating, if you will, on the value that you can do with these digital ones. Try to get that success with physical, not always easy. Appreciate, and you're looking good, looking good and safe. Stay safe, and great to check in with you, and congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, thanks, John. >> Appreciate it. Dustin Kirkland, chief product officer at Apex Clearing. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE, checking in with a remote interview during this time when we are getting all the information of best practices on how to deal with this new at-scale, the new shift that is digital, that is impacting, and opportunities are there, certainly a lot of challenges, and hopefully, the healthcare, the finance, and the business models of these companies can continue and get back to work soon. But certainly, the people are still sheltered in place, working hard, being creative, be the coverage here in the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios today. And obviously, what's top of the news is the coronavirus and COVID-19, and it's having a direct impact on anything where people get together. We're obviously really tied into the convention space. But we're excited to have an expert in the field coming at it from a different kind of point of view, more from the entertainment side. We'd like to welcome, calling in from Tennessee, Lauren Spahn. She is a partner for Shackelford, Bowen, McKinley, or excuse me, but yeah, McKinley & Norton. Lauren, great to see you. >> Hey there, how are ya? >> Jeff Frick: Good. So we were introduced through kind of the process of the South by Southwest cancellation. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about kind of what you do, what type of clients do you have, who do you guys kind of represent? >> Yeah, sure, so I practice primarily in entertainment law here in Nashville. But I work with a variety of people in the music industry, whether it be artists or music festivals, record labels, publishing companies, you name it, across the US. So I do a lot of work in L.A. and New York as well. And our firm specializes in a little bit of everything, but our national hub is kind of the spearhead for the entertainment and music practice. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause we're not so directly involved in entertainment, but we do go to a lot of conferences. And, I think, for us, the watershed moment this year was Mobile World Congress earlier this year in February, 100,000 people in Barcelona, Spain. That's a little unique because most of the main vendors are Asian in terms of all the mobile carriers and the handset tech carriers. But, you were saying before we turned the cameras on, that now the South By Southwest event cancellation is kind of sending the same shock waves if you will through the entertainment industry. >> Yeah, I mean South By Southwest obviously is a big coming together of multiple industries. You know, music, film, TV, technology, but it really was one of the first events that were canceled that impacted the music industry. And so, such a large conference to completely cancel, really just started, it was the tip of the iceberg, or I think what we are going to continue to see across the sphere in music whether its tours being canceled or music festivals that are being canceled, everything is kind of starting to ramp up, and were starting to see the effects from South By Southwest line. >> Jeff Frick: Right. So, one of the things that really is just kind of a splash of cold water, is these things are going down it just really highlights the interconnectedness of all these different parts of these events, right? whether it is the primary promoter or the primary bands in the case of South By Southwest or even the tech companies, but then there are tons and tons of secondary, third and other vendors that are involved from food and transportation and the list goes on and on. So, you're quoted quite often in the press about talking about force majeure and that this is something that kind of comes up in contract law when these types of events happen. So, I wonder if you can kind of explain the dictionary definition of force majeure and how do you see it kind of executed traditionally in a contract where maybe one person just can't uphold their part of the deal and how that contrasts with something like this, which is hitting kind of both sides of the agreement, if you will. >> Completely. So, I think it's important to step back and look at if we are going to use a music festival as an example. You have a contract, the music festival itself will have a contract with the artist, but they will also have contracts with their vendors, with the production team that comes in and sets up the staging and the sound and the light. There are a myriad of contracts and so, the language in each contract tends to govern the relationship between the festival and that third party. So, in this situation of let's use an artist, for example. There is different things in the contract that point to how you can cancel and what happens when you cancel. A force majeure is an example of that. And force majeure is something that is outside of the control of both parties. So, again, the festival and the artist. If something like the Coronavirus is coming, neither one of those parties can control that from happening. And so it typically relieves both parties of any obligation to move forward with the contract. What is important, though, is the language that's in that force majeure provision. So, you sometimes will see language like sickness or an epidemic. But then, you may not have that, and you may have language that says, a local or national state of emergency. So, depending upon the state you're in, depending upon the exact situation in the city that you are holding the event, all of those things can be looked or looked to to interpret whether or not the language that's in that force majeure contract will impact you or will give you the rights to cancel that event without having to pay additional money. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> And so, you know, not only that but you're then seeing it carried out through the insurance policies, as well. So, even if you have force majeure language whether or not the insurance company will help cover the losses for you again depends upon the exact language that's in your insurance policy. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> So, across the board, it really is a contractual right, that can differ for the different people that are involved. >> Right. But, there's the contractual, the language in the contract, but then there is kind of this random stuff that comes up. And, we hear kind of act of God kind of thrown up by insurance companies when it's something they haven't defined in all the fine language. And then, the other piece that we're hearing about a lot in the news here on Palo Alto, right is the specific descriptive terms used by the authorities. Is it a pandemic? Is it an outbreak? Is it a natural disaster? Is it a state of emergency called by the government? >> Or other. So, how does that figure in on something like we're experiencing? I don't know that we've seen anything quite like this before. >> You know, I was looking back through some contracts earlier this morning because I had a potential cancellation that was going to happen, and I mean some contracts go as far as to even describe the Swine Flu and similar things like that but we really are looking to the authorities to see what decision they are making on everything. And whether or not they are calling it a local state of emergency because a lot of times that exact definition or that exact cause is defined in the agreement . But, yeah, I mean really it comes down to small print wording in this situation, if you are looking at the contract itself to see what rights that you have. What I found is that people aren't going to the nitty gritty of at least the contracts, you're probably going to get into the nitty gritty of the insurance policy, if you have a chance of getting any kind of protection. But, at the end of the day, the artist doesn't want to go play a festival that could potentially cause their fans to have some outbreak of the Coronavirus. An event doesn't want to be liable for holding an event that could be connected with that, as well, because across the board, that creates a PR nightmare for whoever's making that decision. So, you're seeing people that are trying to work together to figure out exactly how we're going to handle things, and what we're going to do moving forward, because no one is going to win in this situation. >> [Jeff Frick} Right. Right. >> It's really just figuring out a way that we can all be in the best position possible across the board. >> Yeah. And I think that's what we're kind of seeing a lot too, where, you know, I think everyone is again instead of just one party that's not upholding their part of the deal and the other party getting screwed on that, this is really, you know, we're kind of in it together, this has kind of come down on both of our houses so how do we work together to minimize the pain and at least, kind of get through this window that we assume will pass at some point or at least the current heightened state will go. But, I just wonder if you have an opinion on, from a legal point of view, and it's not your space, so if you say no that's an okay answer, but, you know, if you look at kind of market forces is determining what is the appropriate action, right? Because we don't really know what's the right action. But, clearly, the market is defined based on activity and the University of Washington shutting down and Stanford shutting down >> Vanderbilt >> Almost is a self-imposed kind of semi-quarantine state, which is just, you know the latest now I think they get the local high school basketball game is they can only have 100 people in the stands in the biggest building they can find and everybody needs to spread out. So, it's just been very interesting to see you know kind of what is the appropriate response. What's the right response? Because ultimately it seems like it's driven by nobody wants to be the one that didn't take the max precautions and something bad happens. >> To be honest, I don't think that anyone really knows. You know, it really is the conversations right now are not the artist's agent calling the festival and saying we're absolutely not doing this The conversation is more so, hey what are you guys seeing? What are you guys thinking? What's the best way to handle this? You know, no one wants to put the consumers and the fans at risk. And, you know, until we have a better handle on exactly how we handle this type of situation, it's really going to be people doing their best to try to not create a situation that's going to, you know, cause some kind of massive outbreak. >> Right. Right. >> If you look at, you know, something like South By, no one wants to cancel, you know. It really impacts, not only the company and the event itself, but really everyone that's associated to it, has a financial hardship because of that decision, but the decision isn't made because someone wants to do it, it's made because collectively, you know, people are feeling like it needs to be done in order to keep people safe. >> Right. >> And if they didn't think that, they'd probably go ahead and try to hold the event and, you know, risk the liability. But, I think people truly want what's in the best interest of everyone. And that's why they are working together to try to figure this out. >> Yeah. Yeah. It really is driven home what social creatures we are when you start to kind of disconnecting crowds and groups of people from so many events and it just continues to ripple through whether it's our business, a convention business, the entertainment business, you know March Madness is coming up here in a very short order. What's going to happen there all the way down to you know, the local talent show for the local middle schoolers that they used to have before graduation, which is now canceled. So, it's interesting times. >> And I think for us, the biggest indicator in terms of just music festivals is going to be what happens with Coachella. And, you know, Billboard and Variety have reported that they're looking to potentially reschedule the event to October, if artists are able. And if not, they're going to have to completely cancel it for this year. And, you know, Coachella is such a massive festival that attracts people from all over the world. And if Coachella is canceled then I think there is a good chance that so long as this is continuing at the speed it is, that we're going to see a lot more music festivals canceled. >> When is Coachella scheduled? >> It starts in about a month. >> In about a month. >> So it's the second weekend in April, but they have to start production and really building out the grounds now. >> Wow. Wow. >> And so the decision kind of has to be made before then. And then, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a decision there in the next few days. >> Yeah. I think I would take the short if I was in Vegas, because there's just not enough data, I don't think, to go forward based on the current situation. I'm glad I'm not the one sitting in that chair. >> Yeah. It'd be a tough position. >> All right, well Lauren, well thank you for sharing your insight and, you know, it's great to get the perspective of another you know kind of industry that's all built around bring people together. And, I think we probably both would agree that this time will pass and we'll get a vaccine out, we'll get the growth curves to start to flatten out and go down which is where they need to go. And then you know I think it will be a different time, but hopefully things will get approximate a little bit more to normal in the not too distant future. >> Yeah, fingers crossed. I hope it gets figured out sooner rather than later and we can all have our summers full of conferences and festivals and the gathering of people. >> Yep. All right Lauren. Well thanks again for your time >> Thank you >> And have a great Tuesday. >> Awesome. You too. >> Alrighty. She's Lauren. I'm Jeff. Thanks for checking in on this Cube Conversation. We'll catch you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Fly from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here at in San Francisco, the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm job for your host. We are the very special guests, the COO of VMware, Sanjay Poonen, cube alumni. When you talk about security, talk about the modern enterprise as it transforms new use cases, new problems emerge. New opportunities exist here to break it down. Sanjay, welcome back. Thank you John. Always a pleasure to be on your show and I think it's my first time at RSA. We've talked a number of times, but nice to see you here. Well, it's a security guard. Well, this is really why I wanted you to talk, talk to you because operations is become now the big conversation around security. So you know, security was once part of it. It comes out and part of the board conversation, but when you look at security, all the conversations that we're seeing that are the most important conversations are almost a business model conversation. >>Almost like if you're the CEO of the company, you've got HR people, HR, organizational behavior, collaboration, technology, stack compliance and risk management. So the threat of cyber has to cut across now multiple operational functions of the business. It's no longer one thing, it's everything. So this is really kind of makes it the pressure of the business owners to be mindful of a bigger picture. And the attack velocity is happening so much faster, more volume of attacks, milliseconds and nanosecond attacks. So this is a huge, huge problem. I need you to break it down for me. >> Good. But then wonderful intro. No, I would say you're absolutely right. First off, security is a boardroom topic. Uh, audit committees are asking, you know, the CIO so often, you know, reports a report directly, sometimes, often not even to the CIO, to the head of legal or finance and often to the audit. >>So it's a boardroom topic then. You're right, every department right now cares about security because they've got both threat and security of nation state, all malicious, organized crime trying to come at them. But they've also got physical security mind. I mean, listen, growing a virus is a serious threat to our physical security. And we're really concerned about employees and the idea of a cyber security and physical security. We've put at VMware, cybersecurity and, and um, um, physical security. One guy, the CIO. So he actually runs vote. So I think you're absolutely right and if you're a head of HR, you care about your employees. If you're care ahead of communications, you care about your reputation and marketing the same way. If you're a finance, you care about your accounting systems and having all of the it systems that are. So we certainly think that holistic approach does, deserves a different approach to security, which is it can't be silo, silo, silo. >>It has to be intrinsic. And I've talked on your show about why intrinsic and how differentiated that intrinsic security, what I talked about this morning in my keynote. >> Well, and then again, the connect the dots there. It's not just security, it's the applications that are being built on mobile. For instance, I've got a mobile app. I have milliseconds, serious bond to whether something's yes or no. That's the app on mobile. But still the security threat is still over here and I've got the app over here. This is now the reality. And again, AirWatch was a big acquisition that you did. I also had some security. Carbon black was a $2 billion acquisition that VMware made. That's a security practice. How's it all coming together? Can you think of any questions? Blame the VMware because it's not just security, it's what's around it. >> Yeah. I think we began to see over the course of the last several years that there were certain control points and security that could help, you know, bring order to this chaos of 5,000 security vendors. >>They're all legitimate. They're all here at the show. They're good vendors. But you cannot, if you are trying to say healthy, go to a doctor and expect the doctor to tell you, eat 5,000 tablets and sailed. He just is not sustainable. It has to be baked into your diet. You eat your proteins, your vegetables, your fruit, your drink, your water. The same way we believe security needs to become intrinsically deeper parts, the platform. So what were the key platforms and control points? We decided to focus on the network, the endpoint, and you could think of endpoint as to both client and workload identity, cloud analytics. You take a few of those and network. We've been laboring the last seven years to build a definitive networking company and now a networking security company where we can do everything from data center networking, Dell firewalls to load balancing to SDN in this NSX platform. >>You remember where you bought an nice syrup. The industry woke up like what's VM ever doing in networking? We've now built on that 13,000 customers really good growing revenue business in networking and and now doing that working security. That space is fragmented across Cisco, Palo Alto, FIU, NetScaler, checkpoint Riverbed, VMware cleans that up. You get to the end point side. We saw the same thing. You know you had an endpoint management now workspace one the sequel of what AirWatch was, but endpoint security again, fragmented. You had Symantec McAfee, now CrowdStrike, tenable Qualis, you know, I mean just so many fragmented IOM. We felt like we could come in now and clean that up too, so I have to worry about to do >> well basically explaining that, but I want to get now to the next conversation point that I'm interested in operational impact because when you have all these things to operationalize, you saw that with dev ops and cloud now hybrid, you got to operationalize this stuff. >>You guys have been in the operations side of the business for our VMware. That's what you're known for and the developers and now on the horizon I gotta operationalize all the security. What do I do? I'm the CSO. I think it's really important that in understanding operations of the infrastructure, we have that control point called vSphere and we're now going to take carbon black and make it agentless on the silverside workloads, which has never been done before. That's operationalizing it at the infrastructure level. At the end point we're going to unify carbon black and workspace one into a unified agent, never been done before. That's operationalizing it on the client side. And then on the container and the dev ops site, you're going to start bringing security into the container world. We actually happened in our grade point of view in containers. You've seen us do stuff with Tansu and Kubernetes and pivotal. >>Bringing that together and data security is a very logical thing that we will add there. So we have a very good view of where the infrastructure and operations parts that we know well, a vSphere, NSX workspace one containers with 10 Xu, we're going to bring security to all of them and then bake it more and more in so it's not feeling like it's a point tool. The same platform, carbon black will be able to handle the security of all of those use cases. One platform, several use cases. Are you happy with the carbon black acquisition? Listen, you know, you stay humble and hungry. Uh, John for a fundamental reason, I've been involved with number of acquisitions from my SAP VMware days, billion dollar plus. We've done talking to us. The Harvard business review had an article several years ago, which Carney called acquisitions and majority of them fail and they feel not because of process of product they feel because good people leave. >>One of the things that we have as a recipe does acquisition. We applied that to AirWatch, we apply the deny Sera. There is usually some brain trust. You remember in the days of nice area, it was my team Cosato and the case of AirWatch. It was John Marshall and that team. We want to preserve that team to help incubate this and then what breve EV brings a scale, so I'm delighted about Patrick earlier. I want to have him on your show next time because he's now the head of our security business unit. He's culturally a fit for the mr. humble, hungry. He wants to see just, we were billion dollar business now with security across networking endpoint and then he wants to take just he's piece of it, right? The common black piece of it, make it a billion dollar business while the overall security business goes from three to five. >>And I think we're going to count them for many years to come to really be a key part of VMware's fabric, a great leader. So we're successful. If he's successful, what's my job then? He reports to me is to get all the obstacles out of the way. Get every one of my core reps to sell carbon black. Every one of the partners like Dell to sell carbon black. So one of the deals we did within a month is Dell has now announced that their preferred solution on at Dell laptops, this carbon bike, they will work in the past with silence and crowd CrowdStrike. Now it's common black every day laptop now as a default option. That's called blank. So as we do these, John, the way we roll is one on here to basically come in and occupy that acquisition, get the obstacles out of the way, and that let Patrick scaled us the same way. >>Martine Casado or jumbo. So we have a playbook. We're gonna apply that playbook. Stay humble and hungry. And you ask me that question every year. How are we doing a carbon black? I will be saying, I love you putting a check on you. It will be checking in when we've done an AirWatch. What do you think? Pretty good. Very good. I think good. Stayed line to the radar. Kept growing. It's top right. Known every magic quadrant. That business is significant. Bigger than the 100 million while nice here. How do we do a nice hero? NSX? It's evolved quite a bit. It's evolved. So this is back to the point. VMware makes bets. So unlike other acquisitions where they're big numbers, still big numbers, billions or billions, but they're bets. AirWatch was a good bet. Turned out okay. That the betting, you're being conservative today anyway. That's it. You're making now. >>How would you classify those bets? What are the big bets that you're making right now? Listen, >> I think there's, um, a handful of them. I like to think of things as no more than three to five. We're making a big bet. A multi-cloud. Okay. The world is going to be private, public edge. You and us have talked a lot about VMware. AWS expanded now to Azure and others. We've a big future that private cloud, public cloud edge number two, we're making a big bet on AB motorization with the container level 10 zoos. I think number three, we're making a big bet in virtual cloud networking cause we think longterm there's going to be only two networking companies in matter, VMware and Cisco. Number four, we're making a big bet in the digital workspace and build on what we've done with AirWatch and other technologies. Number five, and make it a big bet security. >>So these five we think of what can take the company from 10 to 20 billion. So we, you know, uh, we, we've talked about the $10 billion Mark. Um, and the next big milestone for the company is a 20 billion ball Mark. And you have to ask yourself, can you see this company with these five bets going from where they are about a 10 billion revenue company to 20. Boom. We hope again, >> Dave, a lot that's doing a braking and now he might've already shipped the piece this morning on multi-cloud. Um, he and I were commenting that, well, I said it's the third wave of cloud computing, public cloud, hybrid multi-cloud and hybrids, the first step towards multi-cloud. Everyone kind of knows that. Um, but I want to ask you, because I told Dave and we kind of talked about this is a multi-decade growth opportunity, wealth creation, innovation, growth, new opportunity multicloud for the generation. >>Take the, this industry the next level. How do you see that multicloud wave? Do you agree on the multigenerational and if so, what specifically do you see that unfolding into this? And I'm deeply inspired by what Andy Jassy, Satya Nadella, you know, the past leading up to Thomas Korea and these folks are creating big cloud businesses. Amazon's the biggest, uh, in the iOS pass world. Azure is second, Google is third, and just market shares. These folks collectively are growing, growing really well. In some senses, VM-ware gets to feed off that ecosystem in the public cloud. So we are firm believers in what you're described. Hybrid cloud is the pot to the multicloud. We coined that term hybrid thought. In fact, the first incantation of eco there was called via cloud hybrid service. So we coined the term hybrid cloud, but the world is not multi-cloud. The the, the key though is that I don't think you're gonna walk away from those three clouds I mentioned have deep pockets. >>Then none of them are going away and they're going to compete hard with each other. The market shares may stay the same. Our odd goal is to be a Switzerland player that can help our customers take VM or workloads, optimize them in the private cloud first. Okay? When a bank of America says on their earnings caller, Brian Warren and said, I can run a private cloud better than a public cloud and I can save 2 billion doing that, okay? It turns off any of the banks are actually running on VMware. That's their goal. But there are other companies like Freddie Mac, we're going all in with Amazon. We want to ride the best of both worlds. If you're a private cloud, we're going to make you the most efficient private cloud, VMware software, well public cloud, and going to Amazon like a Freddie Mac will help you ride your apps into that through VMware. >>So sometimes history can be a predictor of future behavior. And just to kind of rewind the computer industry clock, if you looked at mainframe mini-computers, inter networking, internet proprietary network operating systems dominated it, but you saw the shift and it was driven by choice for customers, multiple vendors, interoperability. So to me, I think cloud multicloud is going to come down to the best choice for the workload and then the environment of the business. And that's going to be a spectrum. But the key in that is multi-vendor, multi, a friend choice, multi-vendor, interoperability. This is going to be the next equation in the modern error. It's not gonna look the same as mainframe mini's networking, but it'll create the next Cisco, the create the next new brand that may or may not be out there yet that might be competing with you or you might be that next brand. >>So interoperability, multi-vendor choice has been a theme in open systems for a long time. Your reactions, I think it's absolutely right, John, you're onto something there. Listen, the multicloud world is almost a replay of the multi hardware system world. 20 years ago, if you asked who was a multi hardware player before, it was Dell, HP at the time, IBM, now, Lenovo, EMC, NetApp, so and so forth and Silva storage, networking. The multicloud world today is Amazon, Azure, Google. If you go to China, Alibaba, so on and so forth. A Motiva somebody has to be a Switzerland player that can serve the old hardware economy and the new hardware economy, which is the, which is the cloud and then of course, don't forget the device economy of Apple, Google, Microsoft, there too. I think that if you have some fundamental first principles, you expressed one of them. >>Listen where open source exists, embrace it. That's why we're going big on Kubernetes. If there are multiple clouds, embrace it. Do what's right for the customer, abstract away. That's what virtualization is. Managed common infrastructure across Ahmed, which is what our management principles are, secure things. At the point of every device and every workload. So those are the principles. Now the engineering of it changes. The way in which we're doing virtualization today in 2020 is slightly different from when Diane started the company and around the year 2020 years ago. But the principals are saying, we're just not working just with the hardware vendors working toward the cloud vendors. So using choices where it's at, the choice is what they want. Absolutely, absolutely. And you're right. It's choice because it was the big workloads. We see, for example, Amazon having a headstart in the public cloud markets, but there's some use cases where Azure is applicable. >>Some use his word, Google's applicable, and to us, if the entire world was only one hardware player or only one cloud player, only one device player, you don't need VMware. We thrive in heterogeneity. It's awesome. I love that word. No heterogeneity provides not 3000 vendors. There's almost three, three of every kind, three silver vendors, three storage vendors, three networking vendors, three cloud vendors, three device vendors. We was the middle of all of it. And yeah, there may be other companies who tried to do that too. If they are, we should learn from them, do it better than them. And competition even to us is a good thing. All right. My final question for you is in the, yeah, the Dell technologies family of which VMware is a part of, although big part of it, the crown jewel as we've been calling them the cube, they announced RSA is being sold to a private equity company. >>What's the general reaction amongst VMware folks and the, and the Dell technology family? Good move, no impact. What we support Dell and you know, all the moves that they've made. Um, and from our perspective, you know, if we're not owning it, we're going to partner it. So I see no overlap with RSA. We partner with them. They've got three core pillars, secure ID, net witness and Archer. We partnered with them very well. We have no aspirations to get into those aspects of governance. Risk and compliance or security has been, so it's a partner. So whoever's running it, Rohit runs on very well. He also owns the events conference. We have a great relationship and then we'll keep doing that. Well, we are focused in the areas I described, network, endpoint security. And I think what Michael has done brilliantly through the course of the last few years is set up a hardware and systems company in Dell and allow the software company called Vima to continue to operate. >>And I think, you know, the movement of some of these assets between the companies like pivotal to us and so on and so forth, cleans it up so that now you've got both these companies doing well. Dell has gone public, we Hammer's gone public and he has said on the record, what's good for Dell is good, what's good for VMware and vice versa and good for the customer. And I think the key is there's no visibility on what cloud native looks like. Hybrid, public, multi, multi, not so much. But you get almost, it's an easy bridge to get across and get there. AI, cyber are all big clear trends. They're waves. Sasha. Great. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Um, your thoughts on the security show here. Uh, what's your, what's your take to, uh, definitive security shows? I hope it stays that way. Even with the change of where RSA is. >>Ownership goes is this conference in black hat and we play in both, uh, Amazon's conference. I was totally starting to, uh, reinforce, reinforce cloud security will show up there too. Uh, but we, we think, listen, there's what, 30,000 people here. So it's a force. It's a little bit like VMworld. We will play here. We'll play a big, we've got, you know, it just so happens because the acquisition happened before we told them, but we have two big presences here. We were at carbon black, um, and it's an important business for us. And I said, like I said, we have $1 billion business and security today by 30,000 customers using us in a security network, endpoints cloud. I want to take that to be a multi, multiple times that size. And I think there's a pot to do that because it's an adjacent us and security. So we have our own kind of selfish motives here in terms of getting more Mindshare and security. >>We did a keynote this morning, which was well received with Southwest airlines. She did a great job. Carrie Miller, she was a fantastic speaker and it was our way of showing in 20 minutes, not just to our point of view, because you don't want to be self serving a practitioner's point of view. And that's what's really important. Well finally on a personal note, um, you know, I always use the term tech athlete, which I think you are one, you really work hard and smart, but I got to get your thoughts. But then I saw you're not on Twitter. I'm on. When IBM announced a new CEO, Arvin, um, fishnet Indian American, another CEO, this is a pattern. We're starting to see Indian American CEOs running cup American companies because this is the leadership and it's really a great thing in my mind, I think is one of the most successful stories of meritocracy of all time. >>You're quick. I'm a big fan of oven, big fan of Shantanu, Sundar Pichai, something that Ellen, many of them are close friends of mine. Uh, many of them have grown up in Southern India. We're a different ages. Some of them are older than me and in many cases, you know, we were falling behind other great players like Vino Cosla who came even 10 to 15 years prior. And you know, it's hard for an immigrant in this country. You know, um, when I first got here and I came as an immigrant to Dartmouth college, there may have been five or 10 Brown skin people in the town of Hanover, New Hampshire. I don't know if you've been to New Hampshire. I've been there, there's not many at that time. And then the late 1980s, now of course, there's much more, uh, so, you know, uh, we stay humble and hungry. >>There's a part of our culture in India that's really valued education and hard work and people like Arvin and some of these other people are products. I look up to them, the things I learned from them. And um, you know, it's true of India. It's a really good thing to see these people be successful at name brand American companies, whether it's IBM or Microsoft or Google or Adobe or MasterCard. So we're, we're, I'm in that fan club and there's a lot I learned from that. I just love being around people who love entrepreneurship, love innovation, love technology, and work hard. So congratulations. Thank you so much for your success. Great to see you again soon as you put in the COO of VM-ware here on the ground floor here at RSA conference at Moscone, sharing his insight into the security practice that is now carbon black and VMware. All the good things that are going on there. Thanks for watching.

>> From Seattle, Washington, it's the Cube! Covering AWS Imagine, brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine EDU Conference, it's the second year of the conference, we came up last year, I think it was like 400 people, this year's like 800 people, like all the Amazons, it grows and grows and grows. Really again, specifically a carve out from the public sector group, all about education, that's K-12, that's higher education, it's community college education, it's retraining vets, it's a huge thing. We're really excited to have the ring leader this whole event, he's just coming off the keynote, he's Andrew Ko, he's a global education director for AWS, working for Teresa. Andrew, great to see you. >> Thank you very much for having us here. >> What an event! >> Yes! >> And good job on the keynote, you guys covered a lot of different segments. This education opportunity challenge-- >> Yah. >> Is so multifaceted. >> Yes. >> Now how do you kind of organize again, what are the ways that you kind of look at this opportunity? >> Well, that's a great point, we could go on for days and for so many of the important topics, but we've really broken it down into three themes that we've carried on from last year. Really wanted to help and assist when it comes to employability. As we talk about the growth of AWS Cloud, what we're finding is there's a tremendous amount of lack of skilled talent to really fulfill those demands. So workforce is one of those particular areas. Secondly, we're seeing a tremendous growth on machine learning. The way to really predict things, whether it's student success or research. Finally, we also have a third theme that is come around innovation and transformation. Not so much always about the IT, but how are people moving along quickly on their Cloud journey? And really enabling a lot of their stakeholders, like researchers, medical centers, as well as students, to really adopt and learn technology but also embrace it in very very new innovative ways. >> Right. It's it's funny, there was a video showed in the keynote with Andy and I just want to pull the quote where you said it's not about protecting today, the infrastructure-- >> Yup. >> And we've joked many times on air about if when the time machine and you pulled somebody from 1760 and they came here-- >> Andrew: Yah. >> The only thing they'd recognize is the schoolhouse, right? >> Andrew: Right. >> But you guys are really working to change that. Everything from really, Cloud as an infrastructure efficiency play-- >> Andrew: Right. >> All the way through Cloud as an enabler for innovation, doing some really crazy things with Alexa and some of the other projects that are underway. >> Absolutely. And and we always start with our customers first. They're really the ones that have that vision and want to ensure that it's improved, and so we're excited to be a part of that journey. And as just a couple examples on how that is starting to change, is through this adaptive way of looking at information and data, and as an example as I mentioned that we're going to have an incredible panel sessions of many of our speakers, and one of which I like to call out is with the California Community College. They have over 2.1 million students at any given year, and now with the technology, they can start to try to look at patterns of success for students, patterns of challenges, and really start to make education more interactive, which is a one-way like what you were mentioning maybe it was a hundred years ago. >> Right, with the chalkboard. (chuckles) >> So it's so funny with, we talk about ML and AI-- >> Yup. >> You know, everyone's talks in the paper about, you know, the machines are going to take all of our jobs, but if you go to the back pages of the paper, I don't know if they have that anymore-- >> Yah. (chuckles) >> There's a whole lot of open recs, right? >> Yup. >> People can't hire fast enough for these jobs-- >> Right. >> So it's actually that's a much bigger problem than them taking jobs away right now, so this re-skilling is really really significant. >> Absolutely. And we always say that there's not necessarily always a jobs gap, but it's really a skills gap that are going unfulfilled. So there is a change in a lot of the talents that are required, but that's why it's so important for us representing education. That's not just about the infrastructure but how do we better prepare not just the learners of today that need some re-skilling, but also the learners for tomorrow, and provide them a pathway in a way to be interested in it, but also more importantly, getting jobs. >> Jeff: Right. >> The end of day, it's not just about a learning thing, it's about an economic thing. And so we're finding all those announcements as you heard earlier, such as Brazil. With SENAI, they're going to now announce that this curriculum is going to be available for 2.5 million education learners across the entire country, working with 740 universities so we're really excited to be behind that, and we would love to take the credit but really it's our customers, it's our leaders, it's those individuals that are really cutting edge and making those things happen. >> Jeff: Right. So again, last year was a lot about the community college and the certification of those programs, the accreditation. This year you're introducing bachelor programs, and-- >> Yes. >> Really amazing statement in the keynote about the governor of the state of Louisiana-- >> Yes. >> Basically dictating the importance of having a four-year degree based on Cloud skills. That's pretty significant. >> It's exciting. I mean, and I would say, as living in Virginia we're excited to see Northern Virginia alongside with Santa Monica Community College and Columbus Day Community College jointly together created, it wasn't us that created it, it was actually the faculty members and we got together created it, and the governor of Louisiana just took it to the next level. He really, alongside with his leadership team, of the individual leaders of the state community colleges as well as the universities said not only are we going to adopt the two-year across the state but we're going to have it articulate, allowing for students to get credit at the four-year. >> Jeff: Right. >> And why that's important, Jeff, is that we want to make sure that the pathway has on-ramps of how and where you can intersect and to get re-skilled, but also off-ramps. Some of them may get jobs right away at community college, some of them want to go to a four-year and go have more deeper learning and a different experience so-- >> Jeff: Right. >> All those options are now open. >> Right. >> And having that governor just indicates that it's important at a massive massive scale. >> Jeff: Yah. So another thing, we we have to talk about Alexa right? I forget how many millions of units you said are sold-- >> Hundred million devices last time I checked, yah. 70,000 skills. >> Lots and lots of skills, right, the skills. So it's pretty interesting in terms of really kind of helping the universities, beside just be more efficient with the Cloud infrastructure but actually appeal to their customers' students-- [Andrew] Yah. >> In a very very different way. And a pretty creative way to use Alexa and what's what's fascinating to me is I don't think we've barely scratched the surface-- >> Andrew: That's correct. >> Of voice, as a UI. >> Andrew: Yah. >> We won't. We're old, we have thumbs. (chuckles) >> But the kids coming up, right? Eventually that's going to flip-- >> Andrew: Right. >> And it's going to be more voice than keyboards so you guys took an interesting tack from the beginning, opening up the API to let people program it, versus just learning-- >> Absolutely. >> Another method. So some exciting skills, what are some of the ones that that surprise you as you go around-- >> Well-- >> To visit these customers? >> There's so many of them, it's hard to announce and discuss all of them but I would definitely say yes, this next generation, not the old fuddy-duddies like me, learn very differently now. And they're expecting to learn very differently and I think voice and natural user interface is going to be the big thing that people are going to be comfortable to talk to things and have responses back, and some of the things that we announced with our partners, well actually a few weeks ago that we mentioned in the keynote, like Kahoot!, one of the larger interactive ways of young students learning from gamification. Now they can actually speak to it, and engage in much different ways rather than just typing on a keyboard or or coding or typing things in phones, so that's exciting. Or ACT. As you just mentioned earlier, you have a young rising sophomore in a university. They probably had to, she or he had to probably study in order to get into college. Well, what if there was a voice-enabled advisor of how to take the test and the examination and that's what ACT launched. >> Jeff: Right. >> Just some small examples, and now we want to extend that excitement by encouraging other education technology companies to enroll their application by South by Southwest that we're going to announce the winners there-- >> Jeff: Right. >> Next year. So to have a lot of energy, have the educators, and just build on that incredible momentum. >> Alright Andrew, so before I let you go, I know that you got a couple thousand people here waiting to talk to you. (chuckles) The other thing is you guys have gone outside the classroom, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> Really interesting conversation about helping active-duty marines learn how to use data. Really interesting conversations about bringing the big data revolution more heavily into research and more heavily into medical and more heavily into those types of activities that happen at top-tier universities. >> Andrew: Yah. >> Really different way to again apply this revolution that's been happening on the commercial side, the enterprise side into which we play, and and helping people adapt and and evolve and really embrace big data as a tool in solving these other problems. >> Absolutely. And I think you mentioned some very important points there. Number one for us, we always think of learners as individuals that are just growing up through the educational system. But we also have learners that are lifelong learners, that have changing careers or alternating changing, so we're excited to be a part of the announcement with Northern Virginia Community College where they created a special program for Marine Corps, so they can come out and learn data intelligence, that would be applied for all, but also focused with the Marine Corps individuals there to really learn another skill set and apply it to a new occupation. >> Jeff: In their active duty. This is not for when they come out-- >> Absolutely. >> For for re-train. This is in while they're in their >> Very important. >> In their existing job. >> Absolutely. And that so that when they come out they have now applied skills in addition to the skills that they've learned being in the Marine Corps, so that they can also become really productive right after their enlistment there. >> Jeff: Right. >> And then you mentioned about research, I mean that is also an exciting thing that people so often also forget, that education also extends out there, and so like UCLA, they've created a new department blending medicine as well as engineering to tackle very important research like cancer and genomics, and so those complicated facets are now no longer is IT a separate conversation, but it's an infused way where much more high-performance computing can handle some interesting research to accelerate the outcomes. >> Right. Well Andrew, well thanks for inviting us to be here for the ride. We've we've been along the AWS ride (chuckles) >> For a while, from summits in 2012 and reinvents so we know it's going to grow, we're excited to watch it, and we'll see you next year. >> Jeff, thank you very much, and the ride is just beginning. >> Alright. He's Andrew, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube, we're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine EDU Conference. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way, >> Welcome back to Vima on 2019 in Miami. Everybody, we're here at the Fountain Blue Hotel. This is Day two of our coverage of the Cube, the leader in live Tech. And I'm David Dante with Peter Bors. Pippen. Jay Raj is here. He's the vice president and CEO of Make A Wish America. Just that awesome foundation nonprofit people. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you for having me appreciate it. >> So make a wish. Children with wishes and have terminal illnesses. You guys make them come true. It's just a great organizations. Been around for a long time, I think, since the early eighties, right, >> 39 years and going >> years and hundreds of thousands of wishes made. So just how did you get Teo make a wish that all come about >> it? It wasn't interesting journey. I was consulting in I t for multiple big companies. And, you know, two years back, it was through a recruiting channel that I got an opportunity to start some conversations as the CIA and make a wish. Uh, the thing that got me in the opportunity was predominately about enterprises and just to give you a little bit off, make official operations. Make a Wish was Founded and Phoenix, Arizona. And but we also operate a 60 chapters across the United States that it is 60 chapters each of the chapter there 501 C three companies themselves with the CEO and abort. Essentially, it is 60 plus one. The national team kind of managing. All of the chapters are helping the chapters. National does not do any wish. Granting all the wish planning happens to the chapters. But National helps the chapters with the distribution of funding models brand. And thanks for That's a couple of years back in the national board talked about in our dream and mission, which is granting every eligible child the notion ofthe enterprise. You know, working as an enterprise came into four and it being a great piece off providing shared services and thanks for that. So I was brought on board and we took on I would call as the leader today said and dashes dream off. Bringing together all the 60 chapters and the city chapter's essentially are split across 120 locations. So Wade took on a project off. You know, combining our integrating all of their infrastructure needs into one place. And Phoenix without ada, sent a provider. You know, we worked with a partner. Phoenix. Now fantastic partners >> there. We had them on the other day. >> Yep, yep. Yeah, MacLaren. I mean, and the team, they did a great job. And, you know, when we had to move all of the data, everything from the 60 chapters applications everything into a centralized data center, locations that we managed right now from Make a Wish National office and provide a service back to the chapters That gives you a little bit off. You know, from behind the scenes. What happened? >> You provide the technical overview framework for all the 60 chapters. >> It almost sounds like a franchise model. >> It's what we call a Federated model back in the nonprofit. >> But but but but because make a wish is so driven by information. Yep. Both in the application as well as the programs to deliver thie brand promise. And the brand execution has got to be very, very closely tied to the quality of a shared services you provide >> exactly. Exactly. And like I said, the reason I talked about them being a separate companies themselves is you know, as I always say to my 60 CEOs, Ah, I should be able to provide the services because they wanted, because they have a choice to go outside and have their own partner. Another thing for that which they can. But they would want to work with the national team and get my, you know, work through our services rather than having have to because of the very it's A. It's a big difference when it comes to, but I've been lucky on privileged to you have these conversations with the CEO's. When I start talking to them about the need for centralization, the enterprise society assed much, there are questions when he start leading with the mission and the business notion of why we need to do that, it's It's fantastic. Everybody is in line with that. I mean, there's no question, then, as toe Hey, guys, uh, let me do all the Operation Manisha fight and leave it to me and I'll in a handler for you, and I let you guys go to what you do best. which is granting wishes. So then it becomes it doesn't become a question off, you know, should be a shouldn't way. And of course, to back that up. But I was talking to the dean, folks, It just solutions. Like VMware, Veeam. It makes it much simpler even from a cost prospect. You not for me to manage a bigger team s so that I can take those dollars and give it back to the business to grant another wish. So it's it's pretty exciting that >> way. So you set the standards. Okay, here's what you know, we recommend and then you're you're saying that adoption has been quite strong. Yeah, I remember Peter. Don't say easy. I used to run Kitty Sports in my local town in which is small town. And there was, you know, a lot of five or six or seven sports, and I was the sort of central organization I couldn't get six sports to agree that high man is 60 different CEO's. But that's okay. So not easy. But so how were you able to talk leadership or leading as we heard from Gino Speaker today? How were you able to get those guys, you know, aligned with your vision. >> Uh, it's it's been fantastic. I've had a lot ofthe good support from our executive came from a leadership team because leadership is always very important to these big initiatives are National board, which comprises off some of the that stuff best leaders in America and I have the fortune toe be mentored by Randy Sloan, who used to be the CEO of Southwest. And before that, you see a global CEO for, uh, you know, Popsicle. You know, he always told me, but but I mean CIA job. One thing is to no the technology, but completely another thing. Toe building relationships and lead with the business conversation. And so a typical conversation with the CEO about Hey, I need to take the data that you have all the I t things that you have and then me doing it. And then there are questions about what about my staff and the's conversations. Because you know, it's a nonprofit is a very noble, nice feeling, and you wouldn't want the conversations about, you know, being rift and things like that are being reduced producing the staff and thinks of that. But you know as he walked through that and show the benefits of why we doing it. They get it. And they've been able to repurpose many off the I. D functions back in tow, revenue generation model or ofhis granting in our team. And in many cases, I've been ableto absolve some off their folks from different places, which has worked out fine for me, too, because now I have kind of a power user model across the United States through which I can manage all these 120 locations. It's very interesting, >> you know, site Reliable and Engineering Dev Ops talks about thie error budget or which is this notion of doo. You're going tohave errors. You're going to have challenges. Do you want it in the infrastructure you wanted the functions actually generating value for the business? I don't know much about Make a wish. I presume, however, that the mission of helping really sick kids achieve make achieve a wish is both very rewarding, very stressful. He's gotta be in a very emotional undertaking, and I imagine it part of your message them has got to be let's have the stress or that emotional budget be dedicated to the kids and not to the technology >> completely agree. That's that. That's been one of my subjects, as you asked about How is it going about? It's about having the conversation within the context of what we talked about business and true business. Availability of data. You know, before this enterprise project data was probably not secure enough, which is a big undertaking that we're going down the path with cyber security. And you know, that is a big notion, misplaced notion out there that in a non profits are less vulnerable. Nobody. But that's completely untrue, because people have found out that nonprofits do not probably have the securing of walls and were much more weight being targeted nonprofits as a whole, targeted for cyber security crimes and so on and so forth. So some of these that I used to, you know, quote unquote help or help the business leaders understand it, And once they understand they get it, they ableto, you know, appreciate why we doing it and it becomes the conversation gets much more easier. Other What's >> the scope of the size of the chapters is that is a highly variable or there is. >> It is highly variable, and I should probably said, That's Thesixty chapters. We look at it as four categories, so the cat ones are what we call the Big Ice, the Metro New Yorkers and Francisco Bay Area. They're called Category one chapters anywhere between 4 1 60 to 70 staff. Grant's close to around 700 wishes you so as Make a Wish America, we ran close toe 15,600 wishes a year, and cat ones do kind of close to 700 15,600 400 to 700. And then you get into care to scare threes and cat for scat force are anywhere between, you know, given example Puerto Rico or Guam territory there. Cat Force New Mexico is a cat for three staff members Gammas operated by two staff members and 20 volunteers. They grant about 3 2 20 12 to 15 which is a year, so it's kind of highly variable. And then, you know, we talk about Hawaii chapter. It's a great example. They cat once predominate because of the fact that you know, they they do. There's not a lot ofthe wishes getting originated from how I but you know, Florida, California and how your three big chapters with a grand are a vicious ist with a lot of grant, you know, wish granting. So there's a lot off, you know, traffic through those chapters >> so so very distributed on diverse. What's the relationship between data and the granting of wishes? Talk about the role of data. >> Should I? I was say this that in a and I probably race a lot of fibrosis and my first introductory session a couple of years back when I John make a wish with the CEO's uh, when we had the CEO meeting and talk to them about I leaders the days off making decisions based on guts are gone. It has to be a data driven decision because that's where the world is leading to be. Take anything for that matter. So when we talk about that, it was very imperative going back to my project that the hall we had all of the data in one place or a semblance off one single place, as opposed to 60 different places to make decisions based on wish forecast, for example, how many wishes are we going to do? How many wishes are coming in? How's the demand? Was the supply matching up one of the things that we need to do. Budget purposes, going after revenue. And thanks for that. So data becomes very important for us. The other thing, we use data for the wish journeys. Essentially, that's a storytelling. You know, when I you know, it was my first foray into for profit Sorry, nonprofit. And me coming from a full profit is definitely a big culture shock. And one of the things they ask us, what are we selling? Its emotions and story. And that's our data. That is what you know. That's huge for us if we use it for branding and marketing purposes. So having a good semblance off data being ableto access it quickly and being available all the time is huge for us. >> Yeah, and you've got videos on the site, and that's another form of data. Obviously, as we as we know here, okay. And then, from a data protection standpoint, how do you approach that? Presume you're trying to standardize on V maybe is way >> are actually invested in veeam with them for a couple of years right now, as we did the consolidation of infrastructure pieces Veeam supporters with all of the backup and stories replication models. Uh, we're thinking, like Ratmir talked about act one wi be a part of the journey right now, and we're looking at active. What that brings to us. One of the things that you know, dream does for us is we have close to 60 terabytes of data in production and close to another 400 terabytes in the back of things. And, uh, it's interesting when they look about look at me equation, you think about disaster recovery back up. Why do you need it? What? The business use cases case in point. This classic case where we recently celebrated the 10th anniversary ofthe back wish bad kid in San Francisco, we have to go back and get all the archives you know, in a quick fashion, because they're always often requests from the media folks to access some of those. They don't necessarily come in a planned manner. We do a lot of things, a lot of planning around it, but still there are, you know, how How did that come about? What's the story behind? So you know, there are times we have to quickly go back. That's one second thing is having having to replicate our data immediately. Another classic case was in Puerto Rico. There was a natural disaster happened completely. Shut off. All the officers work down. We had to replicate everything what they had into a completely different place so that they could in a vpn, into an access that other chapters and our pulled in to help. They were close to 10 wish families close to 10 which families were stranded because of that. So, you know, gaining that data knowledge of where the family is because the minute of his journey starts. Everything is on us till the witch's journey ends. So we need to make sure everything is proper. Everything goes so data becomes very crucial from those pants >> you're tracking us. I mean, if you haven't been on the make a Wish site is some amazing stories. There I went on the other day. There's a story of ah, of 13 year old girl who's got a heart condition. Who wanted to be a ballerina. A kid with leukemia five years old wants to be a You want to be a chef. My two favorites, I'll share What? It was this kid Brandon a 15 year old with cystic fibrosis. I wanted to be a Navy seal. You guys made that happen. And then there was this child. Colby was 12 years old and a spinal muscular issue. You want to be a secret agent so very creative, you know, wishes that you ran >> way had another wish a couple of years last year in Georgia, where they wish kid wanted to go to Saturn. Yes, yes, it was huge. I mean, and you know the best part about us once we start creating those ideas, it's amazing how much public support we get. The community comes together to make them wish granting process. Great. Now. So I got involved in that. They gave the wish Kato training sessions to make sure that he is equipped when he goes into. And we had a bushel reality company create the entire scene. It was fabulous. So, you know, the way you talk about data and the technology is now some of the things I'm very excited about us usage off thes next Gen technology is like our winter reality to grant a wish. I mean, how cool would that be for granting a wish kid who is not able to get out of the bed. But having able to experience a the Hawaii is swimming. Are being in Disney World enough a couple of days? That's That's another use case that we talked about. That other one is to put the donors who pay the money in that moment off granting, you know, they are big major gift, uh, donors for make a wish. Sometimes we were not able to be part of a fish, but that would be pretty cool if you can bring the technology back to them and you know not going for them. You know pretty much everybody and make the ass through that rather than a PowerPoint or a storytelling, when the storytelling has to evolve to incorporate all of that so pretty excited >> and potentially make a participatory like, say, the virtual reality and then even getting in more into the senses and the that the smells. And I mean this is the world that we're entering the machine intelligence, >> which you still have to have, But you still have to be a functioning, competent, operationally sound organization. There've been a number of charities, make a wish is often at the top of the list of good charities. But there were a number of charities where the amount of money that's dedicated to the mission is a lot less an amount of money, dedicated administration of fundraising, and they always blame it. Systems were not being able to track things. So no, it's become part of the mission to stay on top of how information's flowing because it's not your normal business model. But the services you provide is really useful. Important. >> Sure, let me percent you the business conundrum that I have personally as a 90 leader. It takes close to $10,400 on an average to grant a wish. Uh, and, uh, partly because of me. But being part of the mission, plus me as a 90 leader wanting to understand the business more, I signed up. I'm a volunteer at the local Arizona chapter. I've done couple of expanding myself, and, uh, the condom is, if asked, if you want to go, uh, you know, do the latest and greatest network upgrade for $10,400 are what do you want to, uh, you know and make the network more resilient cyber security and all that stuff. What do you want to go grant? Another wish as a 90 leader probably picked the former. But as a volunteer, I would be like, No, it needs to go to the kid. It's Ah, it's It's an interesting kind of number, you know? You have to find the right balance. I mean, you cannot be left behind in that journey because at many points of time s I talked about it being a cost center. It being a back office. I think those days have clearly gone. I mean, we we evolved to the point where it is making you steps to be a participant b A b a enabler for the top line to bring in more revenues, tow no augment solutions for revenue and things. For that sofa >> rattles the experience or exact role citizens. And in your case, it's the experience is what's being delivered to the degree that you can improve the experience administratively field by making operations cheaper. Great. But as you said, new digital technologies, they're going to make it possible to do things with the experience that we could even conceive of. Five >> wears a classic example. Williams and Beam. I couldn't have taken the data from 60 chapters 120 locations into one single location manageable, and it reduced the cost literally reduce the cost of the 60 instances in one place without technology is like, you know what Sharia virtual machines. And and then to have a backup robust backup solution in a replication off it. It's fantastic. It's amazing >> there. And that's against here. You could give back to the dash chapters and backing, But thanks so much for sharing your story. You Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there. Buddy. Peter and I were back with our next guest. You watching the Cube live from V mon from Miami? 2019. We're right back. Thank you.