well hello everybody John Wallace here on thecube he's continuing our segments here on the AWS Global startup showcase we are at day three of Reinventing irking Zhang is joining us now he is the CEO co-founder of Jupiter one um first off before we get going talking about you know security and big world for you guys I know what's your take on the show what's been going on out here at re invent yeah yeah ring event has been one of my favorite shows there's a lot of people here there's a lot of topics of course it's not just cyber security a lot of cloud infrastructure and just technology in general so you get a lot you know if you go walk the floor you see a lot of vendors you look at us go into sessions you can learn a lot but you're the Hot Topic right everybody's focused on Cyber yeah big time and with good reason right because as we know the Bad actors are getting even smarter and even faster and even more Nimble so just paint the landscape for me here in general right now as you see uh security Cloud Security in particular and and kind of where we are in that battle well we are clearly not winning so I think that in itself is a bit of a uh interesting problem right so as a it's not just Cloud security if you think about cyber security in general as an industry it has it has not been around for that long right but if you just look at the history of it uh we haven't done that while so uh pick another industry say medicine which has been around forever and if you look at the history of Medicine well I would argue you has done tremendously well because people live longer right when you get sick you get access to health care and yeah exactly you have Solutions and and you can see the trend even though there are problems in healthcare of course right but the trend is is good it's going well but not in cyber security more breaches more attacks more attackers we don't know what the hell we're doing with that many solutions and you know that's been one of my struggles as a former CSO and security practitioner for many years you know why is it that we're not getting better all right so I'm going to ask you the question yeah okay why aren't we getting better you know how come we can't stay ahead of the curve on this thing that for some reason it's like whack-a-mole times a hundred every time we think we solve one problem we have a hundred more that show up over here exactly and we have to address that and and our attention keeps floating around yeah I think you said it right so because we're taking this guacamole approach and we're looking for the painkiller of the day and you know we're looking for uh the Band-Aids right so and then we ended up well I I think to be fair to be fair to your industry the industry moves so quickly technology in general moves so quickly and security has been playing catch-up over time we're still playing catch-up so when you're playing catch-up you you can almost only uh look at you know what's the painkiller of what's the band name of the day so I can stop the bleeding right but I do think that we're we're to a point or we have enough painkillers and Band-Aids and and we need to start looking at how can we do better fundamentally with the basics and do the basics well because a lot of times the basics that get you into trouble so fundamentally the foundation I if I hear you right what you're saying is um you know quick changing industry right things are moving rapidly but we're not blocking and tackling we're not doing the X's and O's and so forget changing and we we got to get back to the basis and do those things right exactly you can only seem so simple it seems so simple but it's so hard right so you can you can think about you know uh even in case of building a starter building a company and and in order at one point right so we're blocking uh blocking tackling and then when we grow to a certain size we have to scale we have to figure out how to scale the business this is the same problem that happens in security as an industry we've been blocking happening for so long you know we're the industry is so young but we're to a point that we got to figure out how to scale this scale this in a fundamentally different way and I'll give you some example right so so what when we say the basics now it's easy to to think that say users should have MFA enabled is one of the basics right or another Basics will be you have endpoint protection on your devices you know maybe it's Cloud strike or Sentinel one or carbon black or whatever but the question being how do you know it is working 100 of the time right how do you know that how do you know right you find out too exactly that's right and how do you know that you have 100 coverage on your endpoints those Solutions are not going to tell you because they don't know what they don't know right if it's not enabled if it's not you know what what's the negative that you are not seeing so that's one of the things that you know that's in the basic state that you're now covering so the fundamentals it really goes to these five questions that I think that nobody has a really good answer for until now so the five questions goes what do I have right is it important what's important out of all the things I have you have a lot right you could have millions of things what important now for those that are important does it have a problem and if it has a problem who can fix it because the reality is in most cases security teams are not the ones fixing the problems they're they're the ones identical they're very good at recognizing but not so good exactly identifying the owner who can fix it right right could be could be business owner could be Engineers so the the asset ownership identification right so so these four questions and and then over time you know whether it's over a week or a month or a quarter or a year am I getting better right and then you just keep asking these questions in different areas in different domains with a different lens right so maybe that's endpoints maybe that's Cloud maybe that's you know users maybe that's a product and applications right but it really boils down to these five questions that's the foundation for any good security program if you can do that well I think we cover a lot of bases and we're going to be in much better shape than we have been all right so where do you come in man Jupiter one in terms of what you're providing because obviously you've identified this kind of pyramid yes this hierarchy of addressing needs and I assume obviously knowing you as I do and knowing the company as I do you've got Solutions that's exactly right right and and we precisely answer those five questions right for uh any organization uh from a asset perspective right because all the the answers to all those these five questions are based in assets it starts with knowing what I have right right so the the overall challenge of cyber security being broke broken I I believe is fundamentally that people do not understand and cannot uh probably deal with the complexity that we have within our own environments so again like you know using uh medicine as an example right so in order to come up with the right medicine for either it's a vaccine for covid-19 or whether it is a treatment for cancer or whatever that case may be you have to start with the foundations of understanding both the pathogen and to the human body like DNA sequencing right without those you cannot effectively produce the right medicine in modern uh you know Medicine sure right so that is the same thing that's happening in cyber security you know we spend a lot of times you know putting band days in patches right and then we spend a lot of time doing attacker research from the outside but we don't fundamentally understand in a complete way what's the complexity within our own environment in terms of digital assets and that's that's almost like the DNA of your own work what is that kind of mind-blowing in a way that if again hearing you what you're talking about is saying that the first step is to identify what you have that's right so it seems just so basic that that I should know what I what's under my hood I should know what is valuable and what is not I should prioritize what I really need to protect and what maybe can go on the second shelf yeah it has been a tough problem since the beginning of I.T not just the beginning of cyber security right so in the history of I.T we have this thing called cmdb configuration management database it is supposed to capture the configurations of it assets now over time that has become a lot more complex and and there's a lot more than just it asset that we have to understand from a security and attack service perspective right so we have to understand I.T environments we have to understand Cloud environments and applications and users and access and data and as and all of those things then then we have to take a different approach of sort of a modern cmdb right so what is the way that we can understand all of those complexity within all of those assets but not just independently within those silos but rather in a connected way so we can not only understand the attack surface but only but also understand the attack path that connect the dots from one thing to another right because everything in the organization is actually connected if if there's any one thing that sits on an island right so if you say you have a a a a server or a device or a user that is on an island that is not connected to the rest of the organization then why have it right and it doesn't matter so it's the understanding of that connect connected tissue this entire map where this you know DNA sequencing equivalent of a digital organization is what Jupiter one provides right so that visibility of the fundamental you know very granular uh level of assets and resources to answer those five questions and how does that how do I get better at that then I mean I have you to help me but but internally within our organization um I mean I don't want to be rude but I mean do I have do I have the skill for that do I have um do I have the the internal horsepower for that or or is there some need to close that Gap and how do I do it you know I'll tell you two things right so so one you mentioned the worst skills right so let me start there so because this one is very interesting we also have a huge skills shortage in cyber security we will we've all heard that for years and and and and for a long time but if you dig deeper into it why is that why is that and you know we have a lot of you know talented people right so why do we still have a skills shortage now what's interesting is if you think about what we're asking security people to do is mind-boggling so if you if you get a security analyst to say hey I want to understand how to protect something or or how to deal with an incident and what you're asking the person to do is not only to understand the security concept and be a domain expert in security you're also asking the person to and understand at the same time AWS or other clouds or endpoints or code or applications so that you can properly do the analysis and the in the response it's it's impossible it's like you know if you have you have to have a person who's an expert in everything know everything about everything that's right it's impossible so so so that's that's one thing that we have to to resolve is how do we use technology like Jupiter one to provide an abstraction so that there's Automation in place to help the security teams be better at their jobs without having to be an expert in deep technology right just add the abstract level of understanding because you know we can we can model the data and and provide the analysis and visual visualization out of the box for them so they can focus on just the security practices so that's one and the second thing is we have to change the mindset like take vulnerability management as an example right so the mindset for vulnerability management has been how do I manage findings now we have to change it to the concept of more proactive and how to manage assets so let's think about uh you know say log4j right that that happened and uh you know when it happened everybody scrambles and said hey which which devices or which you know uh systems have log4j and you know it doesn't matter what's the impact we can fix it right going back to those questions that that I mentioned before right and then um and then they try to look for a solution at a time say well where's that silver bullet that can give me the answers now what what what we struggle with though is that you know I want to maybe ask the question where were you six months ago where were you six months ago where you could have done the due diligence and put something in place that help you understand all of these assets and connections so you can go to one place and just ask for that question when something like that you know hit the fan so so if we do not fundamentally change the mindset to say I have to look at things not from a reactive findings perspective but really starting from an asset-centric you know day one perspective to look at that and have this Foundation have this map build we can't get there right so it's like you know if I need direction I go to Google Maps right but the the reason that it works is because somebody has done the work of creating the map right right if you haven't if you don't have the map and you just at you know when the time you say I gotta go somewhere and you expect the map to magically happen to show you the direction it's not going to work right right I imagine there are a lot of people out there right now are listening to thinking oh boy you know and that's what Jupiter one's all about they're there to answer your oh boy thanks for the time of course I appreciate the insights as well it's nice to know that uh at least somebody is reminding us to keep the front door locked too that's just the back door the side doors keep that front door and that garage locked up too definitely um all right we'll continue our coverage here at AWS re invent 22 this is part of the AWS Global startup showcase and you're watching the cube the leader in high-tech coverage foreign

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I am Lisa Martin, excited to welcome back one of our distinguished alumni, Derek Manky joins me next. Chief security Insights and Global Threat Alliances at Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs. Derek, welcome back to the program. >> Yes, it's great to be here and great to see you again, Lisa. Thanks for having me. >> Likewise, yeah, so a lot has happened. I know we've seen you during this virtual world, but so much has happened with ransomware in the last year. It's unbelievable, we had this dramatic shift to a distributed workforce, you had personal devices on in network perimeters and non-trusted devices or trusted devices on home networks and lots of change there. Talk to me about some of the things that you and FortiGuard Labs have seen with respect to the evolution of ransomware. >> Yeah, sure, so it's becoming worse, no doubt. We highlighted this in our Threat Landscape Report. If we just take a step back looking at ransomware itself, it actually started in the late 1980s. And it didn't, that was very, they relied on snail mail. It was obviously there was no market for it at the time. It was just a proof of concept, a failed experiment if you will. But it really started getting hot a decade ago, 10 years ago but the technology back then wasn't the cryptography they're using, the technique wasn't as strong as easily reversed. And so they didn't really get to a lot of revenue or business from the cyber criminal perspective. That is absolutely not the case today. Now they have very smart cryptography they're experts when say they, the cyber criminals at their game. They know there's a lot of the attack surfaces growing. There's a lot of vulnerable people out there. There's a lot of vulnerable devices. And this is what we saw in our threat landscape group. What we saw at seven times increase in ransomware activity in the second half of 2020. And that momentum is continuing in 2021. It's being fueled by what you just talked about. By the work from anywhere, work from home environment a lot of vulnerable devices unpatched. And these are the vehicles that the ransomware is the payload of course, that's the way that they're monetizing this. But the reality is that the attack surface has expanded, there's more vulnerable people and cyber criminals are absolutely capitalizing on that. >> Right, we've even seen cyber criminals capitalizing on the pandemic fears with things that were around the World Health Organization or COVID-19 or going after healthcare. Did you see an uptick in healthcare threats and activities as well in the last year? >> Yeah, definitely, so I would start to say that first of all, the... Nobody is immune when it comes to ransomware. This is such again, a hot target or a technique that the cybercriminals are using. So when we look at the verticals, absolutely healthcare is in the top five that we've seen, but the key difference is there's two houses here, right? You have what we call the broad blanketed ransomware attacks. So these aren't going after any particular vertical. They're really just trying to spray as much as they can through phishing campaigns, not through... there's a lot of web traffic out there. We see a lot of things that are used to open playing on that COVID-19 theme we got, right? Emails from HR or taxes and scams. It's all related to ransomware because these are how they're trying to get the masses to open that up, pay some data sorry, pay some cryptocurrency to get access to their data back. Oftentimes they're being held for extortions. They may have photos or video or audio captures. So it's a lot of fear they're trying to steal these people but probably the more concern is just what you talked about, healthcare, operational technology. These are large business revenue streams. These are take cases of targeted ransoms which is much different because instead of a big volumetric attack, these are premeditated. They're going after with specific targets in mind specific social engineering rules. And they know that they're hitting the corporate assets or in the case of healthcare critical systems where it hurts they know that there's high stakes and so they're demanding high returns in terms of ransoms as well. >> With respect to the broad ransomware attacks versus targeted a couple of questions to kind of dissect that. Are the targeted attacks, are they in like behind the network firewall longer and faster, longer and getting more information? Are they demanding higher ransom versus the broader attacks? What's what are some of the distinctions there besides what you mentioned? >> Yeah, absolutely so the targeted texts are more about execution, right? So if we look at the attack chain and they're doing more in terms of reconnaissance, they're spending more cycles and investment really on their end in terms of weaponization, how they can actually get into the system, how they can remain undetected, collecting and gathering information. What we're seeing with groups like Ragnar Locker as an example, they're going in and they're collecting in some cases, terabytes of information, a lot, they're going after definitely intellectual property, things like source code, also PII for customers as an example, and they're holding them. They have a whole business strategy and plan in mind on their place, right? They hold them for ransom. They're often, it's essentially a denial of service in some cases of taking a revenue stream or applications offline so a business can't function. And then what they're doing is that they're actually setting up crime services on their end. They, a lot of the the newest ransom notes that we're seeing in these targeted attacks are setting up channels to what they call a live chat support channel that the victim would log into and actually talk directly live to the cybercriminal or one of their associates to be able to negotiate the ransom. And they're trying to have in their point of view they're trying frame this as a good thing and say, we're going to show you that our technology works. We can decrypt some of the files on your system as an example just to prove that we are who we say we are but then they go on to say, instead of $10 million, we can negotiate down to 6 million, this is a good deal, you're getting 30% off or whatever it is but the fact is that they know by the time they've gotten to this they've done all their homework before that, right? They've done the targets, they've done all the things that they can to know that they have the organization in their grasp, right? >> One of the things that you mentioned just something I never thought about as ransomware as a business, the sophistication level is just growing and growing and growing and growing. And of course, even other bad actors, they have access to all the emerging technologies that the good guys do. But talk to me about this business of ransomware because that's what it seems like it really has become. >> Absolutely, it is massively sad. If you look at the cybercrime ecosystem like the way that they're actually pulling this off it's not just one individual or one cyber crime ring that, let's say five to 10 people that are trying to orchestrate this. These are big rings, we actually work closely as an example to, we're doing everything from the FortiGuard Labs with following the latest ransomware trends doing the protection and mitigation but also working to find out who these people are, what are their tactics and really attribute it and paint a picture of these organizations. And they're big, we worked on some cases where there's over 50 people just in one ransomware gang. One of the cases we worked on, they were making over $60 million US in three months, as an example. And in some cases, keep in mind one of these targeted attacks like in terms of ransom demands and the targeted cases they can be an excess of $10 million just for one ransom attack. And like I said, we're seeing a seven times increase in the amount of attack activity. And what they're doing in terms of the business is they've set up affiliate marketing. Essentially, they have affiliates in the middle that will actually distribute the ransomware. So they're basically outsourcing this to other individuals. If they hit people with their ransomware and the people pay then the affiliate in the middle will actually get a commission cut of that, very high, typically 40 to 50%. And that's really what's making this lucrative business model too. >> Wow, My jaw is dropping just the sophistication but also the different levels to which they've put a business together. And unfortunately, for every industry it sounds very lucrative, so how then Derek do organizations protect themselves against this, especially knowing that a lot of this work from home stuff is going to persist. Some people want to stay home, what not. The proliferation of devices is only going to continue. So what are organizations start and how can you guys help? >> Start with the people, so we'll talk about three things, people, technology and processes. The people, unfortunately, this is not just about ransomware but definitely applies to ransomware but any attack, humans are still often the weakest link in terms of education, right? A lot of these ransomware campaigns will be going after people using nowadays seems like tax themes purporting to be from the IRS as an example or human resources departments or governments and health authorities, vaccination scams all these things, right? But what they're trying to do is to get people to click on that link, still to open up a malicious attachment that will then infect them with the ransomware. This of course, if an employee is up to date and hones their skills so that they know basically a zero trust mentality is what I like to talk about. You wouldn't just invite a stranger into your house to open a package that you didn't order but people are doing this a lot of the times with email. So really starting with the people first is important. There's a lot of free training information and security. There is awareness training, we offer that at Fortinet. There's even advanced training we do through our NSC program as an example. But then on top of that there's things like phishing tests that you can do regularly, penetration testing as well, exercises like that are very important because that is really the first line of defense. Moving past that you want to get into the technology piece. And of course, there's a whole, this is a security fabric. There's a whole array of solutions. Like I said, everything needs to be integrated. So we have an EDR and XDR as an example sitting on the end point, cause oftentimes they still need to get that ransomware payload to run on the end point. So having a technology like EDR goes a long way to be able to detect the threat, quarantine and block it. There's also of course a multi-factor authentication when it comes to identifying who's connecting to these environments. Patch management, we talk about all the time. That's part of the technology piece. The reality is that we highlight in the threat landscape report the software vulnerabilities that these rats more gangs are going after are two to three years old. They're not breaking within the last month they're two to three years old. So it's still about the patch management cycle, having that holistic integrated security architecture and the fabric is really important. NAC network access control is zero trust, network access is really important as well. One of the biggest culprits we're seeing with these ransom attacks is using IOT devices as launchpads as an example into networks 'cause they're in these work from home environments and there's a lot of unsecured or uninspected devices sitting on those networks. Finally process, right? So it's always good to have it all in your defense plan training and education, technology for mitigation but then also thinking about the what if scenario, right? So incident response planning, what do we do if we get hit? Of course we never recommend to pay the ransom. So it's good to have a plan in place. It's good to identify what your corporate assets are and the likely targets that cyber-criminals are going to go after and make sure that you have rigid security controls and threat intelligence like FortiGuard Labs applied to that. >> Yeah, you talk about the weakest link they are people I know you and I talked about that on numerous segments. It's one of the biggest challenges but I've seen some people that are really experts in security read a phishing email and almost fall for it. Like it looked so legitimately from like their bank for example. So in that case, what are some of the things that businesses can do when it looks so legitimate that it probably is going to have a unfortunately a good conversion rate? >> Yeah, so this is what I was talking about earlier that these targeted attacks especially when it comes to spear, when it comes to the reconnaissance they got so clever, it can be can so realistic. That's the, it becomes a very effective weapon. That's why the sophistication and the risk is rising like I said but that's why you want to have this multilayered approach, right? So if that first line of defense does yield, if they do click on the link, if they do try to open the malicious attachment, first of all again through the next generation firewall Sandboxing solutions like that, this technology is capable of inspecting that, acting like is this, we even have a FortiAI as an example, artificial intelligence, machine learning that can actually scan this events and know is this actually an attack? So that element goes a long way to actually scrub it like content CDR as well, content disarm as an example this is a way to actually scrub that content. So it doesn't actually run it in the first place but if it does run again, this is where EDR comes in like I said, at the end of the day they're also trying to get information out of the network. So having things like a Platinum Protection through the next generation firewall like with FortiGuard security subscription services is really important too. So it's all about that layered approach. You don't want just one single point of failure. You really want it, this is what we call the attack chain and the kill chain. There's no magic bullet when it comes to attackers moving, they have to go through a lot of phases to reach their end game. So having that layer of defense approach and blocking it at any one of those phases. So even if that human does click on it you're still mitigating the attack and protecting the damage. Keep in mind a lot of damages in some cases kind of a million dollars plus. >> Right, is that the average ransom, 10 million US dollars. >> So the average cost of data breaches that we're seeing which are often related to ransom attacks is close to that in the US, I believe it's around just under $9 million about 8.7 million, just for one data breach. And often those data breaches now, again what's happening is that the data it's not just about encrypting the data, getting access because a lot of organizations part of the technology piece and the process that we recommend is backups as well of data. I would say, organizations are getting better at that now but it's one thing to back up your data. But if that data is breached again, cybercriminals are now moving to this model of extorting that saying, unless you pay us this money we're going to go out and make this public. We're going to put it on paste and we're going to sell it to nefarious people on the dark web as well. >> One more thing I want to ask you in terms of proliferation we talked about the distributed workforce but one of the things, and here we are using Zoom to talk to each other, instead of getting to sit together in person we saw this massive proliferation in collaboration tools to keep people connected, families businesses. I talked a bit a lot of businesses who initially will say, oh we're using Microsoft 365 and they're protecting the data while they're not or Salesforce or Slack. And that shared responsibility model is something that I've been hearing a lot more about lately that businesses needing to recognize for those cloud applications that we're using and in which there's a lot of data traversing it could include PII or IP. We're responsible for that as the customer to protect our data, the vendor's responsible for protecting the integrity of the infrastructure. Share it with us a little bit about that in terms of your thoughts on like data protection and backup for those SaaS applications. >> Yeah, great question, great question tough one. It is so, I mean ultimately everybody has to have, I believe it has to have their position in this. It's not, it is a collaborative environment. Everyone has to be a stakeholder in this even down to the end users, the employees being educated and up-to-date as an example, the IT departments and security operation centers of vendors being able to do all the threat intelligence and scrubbing. But then when you extend that to the public cloud what is the cloud security stack look at, right? How integrated is that? Are there scrubbing and protection controls sitting on the cloud environments? What data is being sent to that, should it be cited center as an example? what's the retention period? How long does the data live on there? It's the same thing as when you go out and you buy one of these IOT devices as an example from say, a big box store and you go and just plug it into your network. It's the same questions we should be asking, right? What's the security like on this device model? Who's making it, what data is it going to ask for me? The same thing when you're installing an application on your mobile phone, this is what I mean about that zero trust environment. It should be earned trust. So it's a big thing, right? To be able to ask those questions and then only do it on a sort of need to know and medium basis. The good news is that a lot of CloudStack now and environments are integrating security controls. We integrated quite well with Fortinet as an example but this is an issue of supply chain. It's really important to know what lives upstream and how they're handling the data and how they're protecting it absolutely. >> Such interesting information and it's a topic ransomware that we could continue talking about, Derek, thank you for joining me on the program today updating us on what's going on, how it's evolving and ultimately what organizations in any industry need to do with protecting people and technology and processes to really start reducing their risks. I thank you so much for joining me today. >> All right it's a pleasure, thank you. >> Likewise Derek Manky I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Hi, welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020 Virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome from scale any one of our long Time Cube alumni. We have, all specially the chief product officer at agility. Hey, Paul, welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. It's been a long time, and it's just wonderful to be back. Thank you. >>This is our new virtual cube that appear where everybody is very socially distant but socially connected. So since it's been a while since we've had you on and your peers from stability tell us a little bit about scale and then we'll dive into what you're doing with HP, >>Okay? Absolutely. Let me give you kind of a pop down recap of where we're at. So interestingly, we're now it 10 year old company. We actually celebrated our never anniversary last year. Um, we still have our flagship product, the Ring, which we launched originally in 2000 and 10 that is distributed file and object storage software. But about three years ago, we added a second product called Zenko, which is for multi cloud data management. We do continue to invest in the ring a lot, both on the file side and the object side. The current release now is Ring eight. The target market for this is pretty broad, but we really focus on financial services institutions. That's a big base for us. We have something like half of the world's banks, about 60% of the world service providers, a lot of government institutions. But what's been fastest growing for us now is healthcare. We have a lot of growth there in medical imaging and genomics research. And then I guess the last thing I'll add is that partners are just super important to us. We continue to certify and test with SDI Solutions. I think we have 80 of them now deployed and ready to go. But there's a real focus here now on partners like Said Era and with a Iot and Splunk VM HP East or one. So those partners are critical to our business and we just love to partner with them. >>Do you been partners with HP for quite a while? Tell me about the evolution of the partnership as you've evolved your technology. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, cause I just noted this Ah, a couple of weeks ago. The company is 10 years old. We've been partners with HP for over half of that. It's about 5.5 years. The way to think about this is that we have a worldwide OM relationship with HP for the Apollo 4000 server line. The official name for our product is HP Apollo 4000 systems with scale itty ring scalable storage. Also quite a mouthful, but very descriptive. Ah, and then we work very closely with the HP storage and big data teams. I'm very tied into the product side, talking to the product managers, but also the marketing side and very much so. On the sales side, we've had super success with them in Europe, also here in the US, and there's growing business, but also in a P J in Japan. Specifically, >>you mentioned that one of the doctors right now that's really urging a healthcare and given the fact that we are three months into a global pandemic, anything that's interesting that you want to share in terms of how skeleton is helping some of your health care customers rapidly pivot in this very unprecedented time. >>Yeah, I would say that there's a couple of very notable trends here. The 1st 1 started a few years ago. We really, honestly didn't focus so much on health care until about 2000 and 17 18. But since that time, we now have something like 40 hospital hospital systems globally using our product and notably on H P E servers. Uh, and that's to retain medical images for long term retention. These are things like digital diagnostic images. MRI's CAT scans CT scans. These hospitals are mandated to keep them for a long term right, sometimes for five years, 10 years or even page patient Lifetime. I would say the newer thing that we're seeing now just in the last year or so is genomics research. There's so much concentration now on pharmaceutical and biotechnology around genomics. That data tends to be very voluminous, you know, it can go from hundreds of terabytes and petabytes, and moreover, they need to run simulations on that to do you know, fast iteration on different drug research. We've now been applied to that problem, and a lot of times we do it with a partner or something like a fast tier one file system and then us as the archive here. But we're seeing that the popularity of that just wrote tremendously within hospitals, hospital groups and also just dedicated research for biotechnology. >>The vault. You talked about volumes there, and the volumes are growing and growing each year as his retention periods, depending on the type of data, the type of of ah, imagery, for example. But from a use case perspective, what is it that you're helping your health care customers achieve? Is it is it backup targets? Is it disaster? Recovery is speed of access All the above. >>Yeah, so where we focus in health care is really on the unstructured data. This is all the file content that they deal with, you know, in a hospital. Think about all the different medical image studies that they have, things like digital files for CAT scans and MRI's. These are becoming huge files, you know. One multi slice X ray or digital scan, for example, can be gigabytes in size and profile, and that's per patient. Now think about the number of patients and the right attention of all of that. It's a perfect use case for what we do, which is capacity optimized storage for long term retention. But we can also be used for other things. For example, backups of the electronic patient records. Those are typically stored in databases, but they need to be backed up. What we found is that we're an ideal long term backup target. So the way hospitals look at us is that they can consolidate multiple use cases, undo our ring system on HP. They can grow it over time. They could just keep adding servers, and typically what they do is they start with a single use case, what they think of as a single modality, perhaps an imaging. And then they grow over time to encompass more and more and eventually think about a comprehensive image management system within a hospital. But those are popular today. Hospitals are also starting to look at other use cases. Obviously, we mentioned genomics, but hybrid cloud is coming at them as well. >>Talk to me about that as we see growing volumes of data, different types of modalities, lots of urgent need to you, said backup data, So data protection is critical. But as as healthcare organizations move to multi cloud, how considerate Ian HP help facilitate that migration? >>Yeah, So what we've noticed is, you know, there's both a feeling that they're fast and they're slow to embrace the public clouds. But one of the things that's obvious is that from a sass perspective, software as a service, they've really embraced it. Most of the big EMR systems, the electronic medical records, are already SAS based, so they are there, and in fact they're probably already multi cloud. But on the data management side, that's where we focus. And we hear a lot of use cases that would involve taking older data from on Prem and perhaps archiving it long term in a HIPAA compliant cloud in the US, for example, for long term retention. But there are other things. For example, they may want to push some data that they've generated on Prem to a public cloud like Amazon or azure, and do some kind of computing against it. Perhaps an analytic service, some kind of image recognition or, you know, image pattern detection. Um, the 3rd 1 that we see now in hybrid cloud is their interest in having second copies of the data so that they can continue operations. Right? I think we all know that hospitals have an absolute uptime need. They need to be running 24 by seven. One of the things that's starting to happen is rather than a second physical data center. They established a second site in a public cloud on and then they stage their applications and we can help with HP. Move the data from on Prem to the public cloud to have this sort of cloud disaster recovery solution. >>So cloud here interesting topic. Do you see there that in healthcare in particular, that hospitals and healthcare organizations are getting less concerned about cloud from a security perspective and more open to it as an enabler of scale? >>I think what they've seen is that the cloud vendors have really matured in terms of providing all of the hardening that you want in terms of data, privacy and data security. You know, 10 years ago, if you looked at the cloud, you would have been extremely nervous about putting your data up there. But now all of the right principles are there in terms of multi tenancy. Ah, secure authentication based on very strong keys. Encryption of the data. One of the first healthcare customers we worked with was completely ready to do this. But then, of course, they said, the images that we store in the cloud must be infected. So we were able to work in collaboration with them, to develop encryption and actually use their own management service for encrypting those images so that our system or the HP servers don't store the keys for encryption. So I would say yes, It's a combination of the cloud's becoming super mature. Some of them are now certified and compliant for this use case on, the customers are just sort of. They passed the first step of trying it on there really to sort of go into these use cases a little bit more broadly. >>And so with that maturity of the technologies and the more the willingness on the part of the customer to try and tell me how to HP and scale a go to market together. >>Yeah, so what we do is we've really focused on specific market verticals, healthcare being one of them, but there are others. Financial services is where we've had other success with them. The way we do it is that we first start by building very specific swim lanes. In HP parlance, that helps aimed the Salesforce on where we can provide a great solution not only with Ring but perhaps with complementary software. Like I mentioned H p e store once for data protection backup. They have other partner solutions that we just love to work with. Vendors like Wicca. Iot has a wonderful fast file system that is now useful in biotech. Um, and they use a system like the ring for storing the data from their file system and the snapshots in that. But the way it's been organized is really by vertical and to go and have specialized kind of teams that understand how to sell that message. We jointly sell with them, so their teams and our teams Goto calls together. It's obviously been very virtual, but we've usually collaborated very extensively in the field working kind of air cover at the marketing level, and now one of the newer things with obviously the new way of working is lots of virtual events were not only doing a discover virtual experience, but we started doing more and more webinars, especially with HP and these other joint part >>and carries in this new virtual era where everything like, he said, This is how we're communicating now. And thankfully, we have the technology. Couple questions on that related to sales and engagement. One. What are some of the things that the sales team but the joint sales teams are hearing now from customers that might be changing requirements given the Koven situation? First >>question. Yeah, I think what one of the things we've certainly seen is that almost nothing has slowed down in these industries. I mean, we're focused on industries that seem to kind of think long term, right? I obviously healthcare. They're dealing with the current crisis as much as they can. But what we've seen is that there still planning, right, so they want to build their I T infrastructure. They're certainly thinking about how to leverage hybrid cloud. I think that's it becomes very clear that they see that as not only a way to offer new services in the future, but also to save money today. They're very interested in that right. How can they save on capital expenses and human talent is an example. I think those have been the themes for us. You know, we do have some exposure to industries that might have a little bit more, you know, sensitivity to the current climate, things like travel related services. But honestly, it's been minor. And what we're finding is that even those companies are still investing in this kind of technology, really to think about the 2 to 3 and you're being horizon and beyond. >>Have you done any any messaging, your positioning changes? I know you also in product marketing or corporate marketing that relate to customers. You know, everybody prepares for different types of disruptions or natural disasters. But now we have this invisible disruptor. Any change in your messaging, your positioning either at stability or with the partnership with HP that will help customers understand if you're not on this journey yet, why they need to be >>so, Yeah, we have looked at how we message the technology and the solution, especially in the light of the pandemic. You know, we stayed true to kind of a top level hybrid cloud data management message, but underneath the covers, what do customers care about? They care about a solution that you provide, but they also care about what they pay for it. Let's let's be honest. One of the things we've done very historically is to have a very simplified pricing model. It's based on usable protected capacity. So the user says I have a petabytes of data. That's the license fee. It's not based on how much disk they have or how many copies they want to create or how many sites they want to spread it across. So one of the things we want to do is make that a little bit more clear. Eso that's come out a bit more in our messaging in recent months. The second is that what we feel is that customers really want to know us as a company. They want to feel assured that were here, that will support them in all cases and that were available at all times. And what that's translated into is a more of a customer community focus. We are very much carrying about, you know, our customers. We see them invest in our systems today, but they also continue to expand. So we're doing things like new community portals where they can engage us in discourse. They can ask questions live. We're online. We have a lot of tips and knowledge available for them. So I would say that those are the two changes that we put in our messaging, both on pricing and on a community involved >>and where community involvement is concerned. It's even more critical now because we can't get together face to face and have conversations or meetings or conferences as chief product officer. Imagine that was a lot of what you were doing before. Tell me what it is from your perspective to engage with the community, to engage with sales and your partners during this TBD timeframe of we don't know when we're going to get back together. What do you find? It works really well for continuing continuing that engagement. >>Yeah, I think the keyword for me has just been transparency. You know, customers have always bonded to know, really, what's what's going on behind the scenes. How does the tech work? Right? What's the architecture? And I think now what we're seeing is there sort of a ramp up on that. For example, what's very important for community is for people to know what's coming right? They want to know the roadmaps. They want to be alerted to new things that are not only the next quarter, but in the next year. Right? So I think that's our focus here is to make this community a place where people can learn absolutely everything so that they can plan not only for the next year, but like we said there, they're thinking three years and beyond. So we're going to do our best to be totally transparent and be expressed as we can possibly be >>transparent entrusted. Paul, those are two great words to end on. We Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube, sharing what's new at stability and with the HP partnership. >>It's been a pleasure. Lisa. Thank you for your time. >>Likewise. For my guest, Paul Scott. Sally, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(exciting music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation, here in Palo Alto, CA CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier your host of the CUBE. We're here with James Segil President and Co-Founder of Openpath Security. Hot start-up in a very cutting edge area that everyone can relate to physical security. But as that grows with the internet, the convergence of physical security with how people work online. It's been a huge issue, we've been covering IOT, we've been covering cloud security, we've been covering internet security. James, thanks for joining me today. >> It's great to be here, John. >> So, you guys are a young company in a very hot area. Great investors, you have a great background, we interviewed in the CUBE before, CUBE Alumni. Before we get into it, this is a super important area, I wanted you to take a minute to explain what you guys do. How long you've been around, what is Openpath? >> Sure, so you know, my partners and I are serial tech entrepreneurs out of L.A. this is our fourth company together over the last twenty years. You interviewed me when we were running EdgeCast. So, it's great to be back. You know, Openpath came from our own frustration. We're an Access Control company so we allow folks to enter office buildings, physical space, work space, using a security tool. That is not a badge. So, this is how we used to enter our prior buildings. So, this is actually my business partners badge pack just to get in and out of our offices, and we were basically tired of wearing dog tags or dog collar, however you want to call it, right? The whole idea was you can use your phone, your phone is your key. So, the credential to get into the office, into the building is on your phone, and mobile was a technology that hadn't really been introduced into the physical, sort of, property technology space before. And by bringing mobile to Bear as well as cloud technology, 'cause all the software's in the cloud. We were able to improve this value proposition and offer a cool solution. >> So, just quickly how, how long have you guys been out with the product and when was the company founded? >> So, we started the company three years ago and launched commercially about a year ago. You know, we spent two years building the technology, getting our patents, really getting everything, figured out. We have software and hardware, it's part of our solution. And so, when we launched a year ago, it was kind of like drinking from a fire hose. We literally had people coming and saying, finally, somebody figured out how to get rid of the badge and use my phone just so it will let me in. And since then we've raised a good amount of money and have been, you know just selling to basically everyone, yeah. >> Congratulations, this is a hot story, so I want to get into it. So, the origination story is, obviously you had to be a successful entrepreneur in the past. Being a serial entrepreneur has it's ups and downs, but you know, with the cloud, everyone thinks, Oh, Security is just a cloud problem. You guys are attacking a physical property, physical security, kind of bringing a DevOps ethos to this. I mean, when you hold those badges up, reminds me of the old janitor key ring. This is the digital ring. You know, all your access. So, clearly an opportunity to automate. >> Yeah. >> So clearly, kind of, obviously, the cloud mentality here. But, your impact is to, kind of, the kind of older industry. Explain this trend of property technology. I mean, most people can relate to their office space. >> Yeah. >> You know, waving the badge to get in, maybe VDI on the desktop or whatever's happening. I mean, talk about the the market place and the trend. >> So, you know, buildings, real estate for the most part, are very slow to move in adopting new technology. And I think, you've seen that in a lot of different industries. Certainly in real estate, there was a sort of slowness or unwillingness to move on past old techs. So, this works, it's an RFID badge. And you can use it and people are comfortable with it. It's worked for forty years. Prop-tech, Property Technology, is really a focus around innovating how you work with, interact with, and spend time at work, in office buildings. But it extends well beyond office, it extends into multi-family residential, health care, any building you really go to. And so, there is a lot money and there is a lot of entrepreneurs who are focused on, how do I improve the quality of every experience we have? When I go into an apartment building, when I got into a hospital, when I go to school, when I go to work and that's really what were focused. We're sort of thinking about that whole experience and reducing the friction in every step of how you interact with that building. >> You know, this used to be an IT problem, if your with big company you sign in, you on board, you get your laptop, you get your badge, someone probably enters your name into a database. And then if you leave it has to be deleted. Is you guys addressing that area? Talk about that piece of it because I think this is more real time, more person without the phone, for instance, your bridging the physical and the logical. Talk about the IT versus the old way of doing it. >> Yeah, so, you know, typically in the real estate world, there's an office manager, a facilities person, maybe, a physical security person, or even like real estate person and they're in charge, at least within the enterprise, of thinking about physical security. But what's happened is, there is a lot of exposure that we have to our data, to our personal safety, to everything really in the office. If you don't protect the physical space, from the thieves or bad actors who want to steal your data or hurt you. And so, all this money has gone into Cyber Security, the chief security officer, the IT department, they have unlimited budgets to go out and solve that problem, to protect the network. But they are literally leaving the front door open. And so, a lot of what is happening today in the enterprise is that the CISO, the Chief Security Team, the IT Team is starting to really gain denomination over this real estate and facilities space, and sort of say, hey, these systems need to work together. If I have a single source of truth to hold all my users and my employees in a single database, I want that to connect, not just to my salesforce.com instance but I want it to connect my Access Control system and how people enter the the building. >> Access Control also an IOT problem, Industrial IOT, we hear that area. Clearly a use case for that opportunity so clearly why you got some funding and I want to cover that in a second on origination story. But the question I have for you is, when you guys started the company and now that you are in market with customers, what's the main problem that you solve? What's like, I mean, you have to solve that one problem, what problem do you solve and where is the growth from there? >> So, I have two groups of sort of customers who I talk to. The first group are tenants or enterprise customers, and these folks who need to move into an office, and most of the choice around when to buy Access Control comes because you're building out space or your moving into an office. You need Access Control. It's not on the list of nice to haves, you need to be able to lock the door. So, when you move into a new office, you need to have internet connectivity, alright, you need to have Access Control, maybe an alarm system, sparkletts water or whatever it's going to be. And we're on that list. So, when people are investing in that capital infrastructure. They're going to future proof that investment, they're are going to choose Openpath. The second group we talk to are folks that are building buildings or renovating buildings. And that's asset managers, developers, property managers, landlords. And those constituents are looking to build a physical space that's both safe but allows them to attract folks to their building as tenants. And so, if you offer amenities, you offer a gym, a cool, sort of, you know, work space, and Access Control Technology it becomes an incentive for folks to want to come and office in your space. >> So, you know, you and I are techies. We love to buy that shinny new toy. The property type tech world, they not as innovative or have a propensity to just at the next thing because, they're about security, they're about that, locking doors. So, I got to ask you, what are some of the things, and they're getting more savvy now, I can see that, so it's clear. You can see most of the digital amenities. First, a start with WIFI, we don't have WIFI, you're done. Now, you're starting to see much more app, centric things happening on these locations. What are some of the areas that people are gravitating in terms that they like, in terms of features with Access Control? What is it enabling from a value stand point? Is it differentiate services, is it access to certain amenities, you mentioned some of that. What is some of the new things that are being created? >> Well, I think the first thing is that we're reducing some level of friction in interacting with you workspace. So, the fact that you can basically, keep your phone in your pocket or keep talking on your phone or keep it in your purse and just walk up to the door and have the door unlock because it knows you're there. That's not just kind of cool that's really just helping out the quality of your day to day experience. You know, ever since 9/11 when we upgraded the security experience almost everywhere. Whether you're entering an arena, a plane or a building that friction is something we are used to now and there is a push back that people want a little bit less friction even though they want that higher level of security. >> Not that I want to get doom day scenario. You mentioned 9/11, they were told to stay in their buildings when they could have been evacuated, everyone in New York knows that tragic story. Huge active shooter environment right now, it's just my kids went to an event in San Francisco. Literally, what is on the mind of people is, oh my God, is there going to be an active shooter? These are examples of things that could go wrong and in security this becomes an Apocalypse scenario that we've been talking about it takes that to get people to take action. So, can you help in those scenarios? How do you help someone either thwart those kinds of security attacks or help them get through them if somethings happening? Let's just say an active shooter comes into a building? >> Yeah, so we've thought a lot about that. And we have kids in schools and we actually have a lot of schools and houses of worship that are buying and installing our system. So, we have a couple different capabilities, lockdown is our latest release. And this is the capability from anyone, anywhere on any mobile phone in that building to enable a lockdown procedure. What I think is particularly valuable here is that if you're basically no where near the fire alarm which is where the lock down button might be as well, and you're stuck in a closet and or hidden away tryna to make sure you're not going to get shot. If you have your phone on you can enable a lockdown and because our plans are kind customized, you can enable a lockdown that let's say locks all the doors in the zone. But lifts up the garage gate so that first responders can get there. And we've seen proven the faster the first responders can get to the problem, whether it's, you know, an EMS person that's tryna to stem the bleeding on someone who is injured or whether it's a SWAT team-- >> Well that's actually proven you saw Gilroy, you saw the response in Dayton. Literally minutes taking those active shooter. >> Well, every second counts, so being able to have a lockdown that works fast, that's effective and that allows people to get through and the bad guys to sort of be isolated is important. The second thing is, we actually have integration with video systems, so you can send a live video feed instantly of every door that's locked down to the first responders. And they can actually see it right there on their iPhone where the bad guy is, what he is doing, real time, from the video systems. They can take over the video system, so it's a pretty-- >> So, it augments the security environment for good and bad scenarios. So, let's get a kind of more realistic scenario. Doomsday scenarios is kind of depressing, but it's real. Our people are planning and are protecting around that. One basic concept, and I got reprimanded at VMware was, I've been at the VMware campuses since they've been building it. But recently I was going to a meeting, and I knew it was building number four, or whatever it was. And I'm sitting there waiting at the door. Someone comes out and I went in and they call it tailgating. Turns out I didn't have a badge and the new person who was there really kind of got in my face and said, You tailgated, I'm like, I do it all the time, I'm like, okay, stop. So, okay, you don't tailgate a VMware anymore and I now know that. But this happens all the time. This is another common problem, I could be stealing laptops, I could be getting the plans at VMworld. I mean, whatever's going on. And this, bad things are happening with tailgating. That's a big thing isn't it? >> It is a big thing. Security experts are telling us it is one of the top three physical security challenges that enterprise CISO's are running into, tailgating. And what's happening is, people just like you, are well meaning are sneaking in. But, there's some bad actors that are sneaking in as well. So, we've got technology that have deployed with partners that actually count the people that are coming in through the door. And if there's two entries when you're only supposed to have one, we can actually track that and instantly make the meter go beep, beep, beep, beep and send an email alert to a security desk or to the individual themself with a video and a picture of the person who snuck in behind you. >> That is a great example, and I mentioned VMware in all seriousness. That actually had happened. There's a huge campus and the reason why, I just didn't want to go to the front I parked at the wrong garage and I didn't want to walk five buildings over. A little bit lazy but that's the point of the large buildings, where the security access comes in. For large campuses, whether it's Universities or corporate, that's the big challenge, right? Not just Access Control but management. >> It's management and so the idea, of sort giving and empowering people to be able to really quickly change, configure and access places. The fact that from your phone you can actually, as a manager change access privileges and give someone who's visiting a temporary pass. That's not one of these, but it's actually a virtual pass on your phone. That's really empowering. So, if you were coming to visit me at VMware, I'd send you a guest pass that gives you one hour access to five different doors and so that you wouldn't have to sneak in. You would basically be able to just use your phone to get in as a visitor for one hour. And after an hour you're not going to be able to get in. >> All right, so let's talk about the company. Openpath Security, you guys obviously targeting the physical space, Access Control, logical physical coming together seamless frictionless environment. Business model? How much funding did you get? What kind of investors do you have? Employee count? Product shipping status? Give us through the numbers. Give us the data. >> Sure, so we started the company three years ago, we came out a stealth mode a year ago and launched commercially, we had actually done our series A internally, we led that ourselves as the founders. And then, when we came out of stealth mode, we had a lot of great attention in the space. Emergence Capital is our lead investor in our series B. We raised $27 millions total. We've got a great team of folks, just under 16 employees. We are based in Los Angeles but we have offices in Indianapolis as well 'cause why not? It's the best place to be. And we're growing fast. We actually sell focused on commercial real estate, but have expanded to multi-family residential. Also, to schools, churches, houses of worship. And we are here in the U.S. now and we're growing internationally over the next two or three years. >> And the product is the a SaaS, managed service, physical? What's the story of the product? >> Yeah, so there's a combination of physical hardware but there is a 100% attached software to it. So, you install a reader at the door, a panel in the IT closet and it's wired as most traditional Access Control systems are but our software is all hosted in the cloud. As well, as the credential that is on the phone. And so, we sort of sell the hardware upfront and then you buy sort of a recurring annual fee associated with the number of doors you own. >> And so you get on the spec that be on the new building, so you do a little go to, you go to market as it is, getting on the design side, suppliers to the building. >> Yup, so, there's the developers, the architects, who put us into the spec. There the system integrators, these are the folks who are low voltage electricians, security system integrators who go out and actually deploy all the wiring you have in this building. They'll go ahead and do the WIFI network, the CCTV camera system, the alarm system and the Access Control system. And so, we have a national network of certified installers who go out, and that's actually how we go to market. We sell through them. >> And you have the software, it's a nice margin. And is there a cloud play here too? Is data stored in the cloud? >> Yeah. >> How are you guys handling some of the backend stuff? >> So, yeah, all the information is stored in the cloud. What's kind of important in a life safety environment is that you have a cloud system that runs it but that you can work if the internet is down. 'Cause imagine if the Internet's down and you can't even get into the office to fix the internet. So, our system works offline as well as online. We store all the credentials locally. >> I remember interviewing Ring's founder at an Amazon event. Simple concept use the cloud. Same thing for you? Not a simple concept but you're in the spec use the cloud with a hundred percent attach rate. >> Exactly. >> All right, so what's the coolest thing that you see happening in this market for you guys? What's going on that you would say that's notable that you would think is important that people should pay attention to. >> There is a number of big trends. You know, we talked about one, right? Which is the whole change of, you know, combining physical security with cyber security and having those two really come together. I'd say the transition of IOT from just the home into the workspace is another big trend we are watching. People are just used to having an NEST on their wall or a Ring on their doorbell and the want Openpath on their door at work. And that's something else that we've seen as a big transition. People are getting used to having an easier experience and I think the final thing is how people use the workspace, right? People work all over the space now. It's not just at their cubicle and that's impacting. >> I got to get some commentary and understanding around the name Openpath because most people in these kind of areas that you're in have closed systems. You know, the HVAC system, I'm running an IOT like an operational technology. Information technology is a protocol based OSI model, open source. So, those worlds are colliding, we're covering that in the whole IOT, industrial IOT trend. Openpath Security? If it's open can I hack it, what's going the Openpath name? Tell us why Openpath? How are you open? Tell us the story behind the name? >> I'm really glad you asked. We were really frustrated when we analyzed the space, as investors and entrepreneurs in this category. We saw that all the systems that are out there, are incredibly closed. Their proprietary systems, they work on old protocols and they're not open. Ours is open. It's built on open API's. Every element of our technology can be connected to, right? And we have tons of developers who are integrating, just like they do in the web, with Openpath. And that's something you can't really do in the old physical Access Control World. So open is just correlating that. >> So, you that's from an ecosystems stand point, you guys enabling others to build on top of your stuff. >> Oh yeah, we've got Envoy the visitor management company. They've got an integration with our Access Control. Density, which is a really cool people counting tool. We've got Camo, a video integration tool. All these folks are integrating with us because it's open and it's really easy to do. >> Okay, so I got to ask the question. I'm now, I'm a building person designing the specs for the new campus, open? That sounds insecure. How do you guarantee that you're going to to be secure? I'm worried about security. How can a hacker get in, take over the physical space, shut it down, that's my concern. How do you address that? >> Yeah, no it's legit. So, what I often say to people is, let's see. You can have a badge, like this, right? And you can pick up my badge and find it anywhere you want, right? And now you're James, right? You can go take that, and you can get in anywhere you want. But I challenge you to try to use my phone. Try to unlock right now, right? >> There it is. (laughs) >> That super computer is encrypted, there's no way you're going to break that. This is the most secure way to enter anywhere. >> But if I get, that's an iPhone but with an Android I'd get some Malware on there. >> But the Malware that you get on your Android isn't necessarily going to allow you to authenticate our system. >> So, you're content, even though you might be on an open device, you guys are containing the app, security app on the device. >> Yeah, so the same protocols that we use on the internet to have secure HTTPS communication between any kind of client, your computer and a website. We're using that same hand off. Where we have rotating security certificates on this, as well as in the cloud, as well as on the panel. So, everything is fully encrypted end to end. And that gives us a level of security that's unmatched and unrivaled actually, in the Access Control space. >> James, thanks for coming on theCUBE, final just give a plug for the company. What's new, what's happening? What's going on Openpath? What's next for you guys? >> Well, if it's a plug openpath.com that's an easy one. But, I think for us, we're really growing in a way that people are excited about. I want to change the work day experience. So, everybody who's out there, who's tired of using a keycard and a badge, I want them to go to their boss and say, why can't we upgrade to Openpath? Go to your landlord and say, hey, I'm negotiating this into my tenant improvement. I want Openpath as a part of how I sort of access the building. The trends that we're really excited about, this lockdown technology, the Anti-Tailgating Technology. Those are really cool, sort of advantages that we give the enterprise and we're just excited to be helping people improve the quality of the workday. >> And what's the reason why you're winning deals? What's the one factor or two factors? Ease of use, open-ness, convince features? What's your-- >> I love it, you're selling my product for me. It's ease of use, it's the fact that it reduces a number of steps in the friction you experience personally everyday. And that the enterprise or the landlord experiencing managing a system, is less expensive and more secure. Kind of all the things you want. Plus, I mean, how much sense does it make that you don't have to carry around ten badges that you can actually just have it all on your phone. It just makes sense. >> Soon series C funding around the corner. (laughs) >> If you're interested, we should have a conversation. >> TheCUBE fund's not yet setup but when we get theCUBE venture capital fund will be in. >> That's good, you let me invest in your company, I'll let you invest in mine. >> We'll talk. James Segil, entrepreneur President, Co-Founder Openpath Security, hot start up here inside theCUBE. Featured startup here. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier. (exciting music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio; our actually brand-new studio, and I'm really excited to have I believe is a first-time guest, a long-time caller, you know, a long time listener >> Yeah, yep. first time caller, good buddy of mine Dave Graham, who is the director, is a director of emerging technologies: messaging at Dell Technologies. Disclaimer, Dave and I worked together at a company some of you might have heard on the past, it was EMC Corporation, which was a local company. Dave and I both left EMC, and Dave went back, after Dell had bought EMC. So Dave, thanks so much for joining, it is your first time on theCUBE, yes? >> It is the first time on theCUBE. >> Yeah, so. >> Lets do some, Some of the first times that I actually interacted with, with this team here, you and I were bloggers and doing lots of stuff back in the industry, so it's great to be able to talk to you on-camera. >> Yeah, same here. >> All right, so Dave, I mentioned you were a returning former EMC-er, now Dell tech person, and you spent some time at Juniper, at some startups, but give our audience a little bit about your background and your passions. >> Oh, so background-wise, yep, so started my career in technology, if you will, at EMC, worked, started in inside sales of all places. Worked my way into a consulting/engineer type position within ECS, which was, obviously a pretty hard-core product inside of EMC now, or Dell Technologies now. Left, went to a startup, everybody's got to do a start up at some point in their life, right? Take the risk, make the leap, that was awesome, was actually one of those Cloud brokers that's out there, like Nasuni, company called Sertis. Had a little bit of trouble about eight months in, so it kind of fell apart. >> Yeah, the company did, not you. >> The company did! (men laughing) I was fine, you know, but the, yeah, the company had some problems, but ended up leaving there, going to Symantec of all places, so I worked on the Veritas side, kind of the enterprise side, which just recently got bought out by Avago, evidently just. >> Broadcom >> Broadcom, Broadcom, art of the grand whole Avago. >> Dave, Dave, you know we're getting up there in years and our tech, when we keep talking about something 'cause I was just reading about, right, Broadcom, which was of course Avago bought Broadcom in the second largest tech acquisition in history, but when they acquired Broadcom, they took on the name because most people know Broadcom, not as many people know Avago, even those of us with backgrounds in the chip semiconductor and all those pieces. I mean you got Brocade in there, you've got some of the software companies that they've bought over the time, so some of those go together. But yeah, Veritas and Symantec, those of us especially with some storage and networking background know those brands well. >> Absolutely, PLX's being the PCI switched as well, it's actually Broadcom, those things. So yeah, went from Symantec after a short period of time there, went to Juniper Networks, ran part of their Center of Excellence, kind of a data center overlay team, the only non-networking guy in a networking company, it felt like. Can't say that I learned a ton about the networking side, but definitely saw a huge expansion in the data center space with Juniper, which was awesome to see. And then the opportunity came to come back to Dell Technologies. Kind of a everything old becoming new again, right? Going and revisiting a whole bunch of folks that I had worked with 13, you know, 10 years ago. >> Dave, it's interesting, you know, I think about, talk about somebody like Broadcom, and Avago, and things like that. I remember reading blog posts of yours, that you'd get down to some of that nitty-level, you and I would be ones that would be the talk about the product, all right now pull the board out, let me look at all the components, let me understand, you know, the spacing, and the cooling, and all the things there, but you know here it's 2019, Dave. Don't you know software is eating the world? So, tell us a little bit about what you're working on these days, because the high-level things definitely don't bring to mind the low-level board pieces that we used to talk about many years ago. >> Exactly, yeah, it's no longer, you know, thermals and processing power as much, right? Still aspects of that, but a lot of what we're focused on now, or what I'm focused on now is within what we call the emerging technology space. Or horizon 2, horizon 3, I guess. >> Sounds like something some analyst firm came up with, Dave. (Dave laughing) >> Yeah, like Industry 4.0, 5.0 type stuff. It's all exciting stuff, but you know when you look at technologies like five, 5G, fifth generation wireless, you know both millimeter waves, sub six gigahertz, AI, you know, everything old becoming new again, right? Stuff from the fifties, and sixties that's now starting to permeate everything that we do, you're not opening your mouth and breathing unless you're talking about AI at some point, >> Yeah, and you bring up a great point. So, we've spent some time with the Dell team understanding AI, but help connect for our audience that when you talk high AI we're talking about, we're talking about data at the center of everything, and it's those applications, are you working on some of those solutions, or is it the infrastructure that's going to enable that, and what needs to be done at that level for things to work right? >> I think it's all of the above. The beauty of kind of Dell Technologies that you sit across, both infrastructure and software. You look at the efforts and the energies, stuff like VMware buying, BitFusion, right, as a mechanism trying to assuage some of that low-level hardware stuff. Start to tap into what the infrastructure guys have always been doing. When you bring that kind of capability up the stack, now you can start to develop within the software mindset, how, how you're going to access this. Infrastructure still plays a huge part of it, you got to run it on something, right? You can't really do serverless AI at this point, am I allowed to say that? (man laughing) >> Well, you could say that, I might disagree with you, because absolutely >> Eh, that's fine. there's AI that's running on it. Don't you know, Dave, I actually did my serverless 101 article that I had, I actually had Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the General Manager of Dell servers, holding the t-shirt that "there is no serverless, it's just, you know, a function that you only pay the piece that you need when you need and everything there." But the point of the humor that I was having there is even the largest server manufacturer in the world knows that underneath that serverless discussion, absolutely, there is still infrastructure that plays there, just today it tends to primarily be in AWS with all of their services, but that proliferation, serverless, we're just letting the developers be developers and not have to think about that stuff, and I mean, Dave, the stuff we've had background, you know, we want to get rid of silos and make things simpler, I mean, it's the things we've been talking about for decades, it's just, for me it was interesting to look at, it is very much a developer application driven piece, top-down as opposed to so many of the virtualization and infrastructure as a service is more of a bottom-up, let me try to change this construct so that we can then provide what you need above it, it's just a slightly different way of looking at things. >> Yeah, and I think we're really trying to push for that stuff, so you know you can bundle together hardware that makes it, makes the development platform easy to do, right? But the efforts and energy of our partnerships, Dell has engaged in a lot of partnerships within the industry, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Graphcore, you name it, right? We're out in that space working along with those folks, but a lot of that is driven by software. It's, you write to a library, like Kudu, or, you know pyEight, you know, PyTorch, you're using these type of elements and you're moving towards that, but then it has to run on something, right? So we want to be in that both-end space, right? We want to enable that kind of flexibility capability, and obviously not prevent it, but we want to also expose that platform to as many people within the industry as possible so they can kind of start to develop on it. You're becoming a platform company, really, when it comes down to it. >> I don't want to get down the semantical arguments of AI, if you will, but what are you hearing from customers, and what's some kind of driving some of the discussions lately that's the reality of AI as opposed to some of just the buzzy hype that everybody talks about? >> Well I still think there's some ambiguity in market around AI versus automation even, so what people that come and ask us are well, "you know, I believe in this thing called artificial intelligence, and I want to do X, Y, and Z." And these particular workloads could be better handled by a simple, not to distill it down to the barest minimum, but like cron jobs, something that's, go back in the history, look at the things that matter, that you could do very very simply that don't require a large amount of library, or sort of an understanding of more advanced-type algorithms or developments that way. In the reverse, you still have that capability now, where everything that we're doing within industry, you use chat-bots. Some of the intelligence that goes into those, people are starting to recognize, this is a better way that I could serve my customers. Really, it's that business out kind of viewpoint. How do I access these customers, where they may not have the knowledge set here, but they're coming to us and saying, "it's more than just, you know, a call, an IVR system," you know, like an electronic IVR system, right? Like I come in and it's just quick response stuff. I need some context, I need to be able to do this, and transform my data into something that's useful for my customers. >> Yeah, no, this is such a great point, Dave. The thing I've asked many times, is, my entire career we've talked about intelligence and we've talked about automation, what's different about it today? And the reality is, is it used to be all right. I was scripting things, or I would have some Bash processes, or I would put these things together. The order of magnitude and scale of what we're talking about today, I couldn't do it manually if I wanted to. And that automation is really, can be really cool these days, and it's not as, to set all of those up, there is more intelligence built into it, so whether it's AI or just machine learning kind of underneath it, that spectrum that we talk about it, there's some real-use cases, a real lot of things that are happening there, and it definitely is, order of magnitudes more improved than what we were talking about say, back when we were both at EMC and the latest generation of Symmetrix was much more intelligent than the last generation, but if you look at that 10 years later, boy, it's, it is night and day, and how could we ever have used those terms before, compared to where we are today. >> Yeah it's, it's, somebody probably at some point coined the term, "exponential". Like, things become exponential as you start to look at it. Yeah, the development in the last 10 years, both in computing horsepower, and GPU/GPGPU horsepower, you know, the innovation around, you know FPGAs are back in a big way now, right? All that brainpower that used to be in these systems now, you now can benefit even more from the flexibility of the systems in order to get specific workloads done. It's not for everybody, we all know that, but it's there. >> I'm glad you brought up FPGAs because those of us that are hardware geeks, I mean, some reason I studied mechanical engineering, not realizing that software would be a software world that we live in. I did a video with Amy Lewis and she's like, "what was your software-defined moments?" I'm like, "gosh, I'm the frog sitting in the pot, and, would love to, if I can't network-diagram it, or put these things together, networking guy, it's my background! So, the software world, but it is a real renaissance in hardware these days. Everything from the FPGAs you mentioned, you look at NVIDIA and all of their partners, and the competitors there. Anything you geeking out on the hardware side? >> I, yeah, a lot of the stuff, I mean, the era of GPU showed up in a big way, all right? We have NVIDIA to thank for that whole, I mean, the kudos to them for developing a software ecosystem alongside a hardware. I think that's really what sold that and made that work. >> Well, you know, you have to be able to solve that Bitcoin mining problem, so. >> Well, you know, depending on which cryptocurrency you did, EMD kind of snuck in there with their stuff and they did some of that stuff better. But you have that kind of competing architecture stuff, which is always good, competition you want. I think now that what we're seeing is that specific workloads now benefit from different styles of compute. And so you have the companies like Graphcore, or the chip that was just launched out of China this past week that's configurable to any type of network, enteral network underneath the covers. You see that kind of evolution in capability now, where general purpose is good, but now you start to go into reconfigurable elements so, I'll, FPGAs are some of these more advanced chips. The neuromorphic hardware, which is always, given my background in psychology, is always interesting to me, so anything that is biomorphic or neuromorphic to me is pinging around up here like, "oh, you're going to emulate the brain?" And Intel's done stuff, BraincChip's done stuff, Netspace, it's amazing. I just, the workloads that are coming along the way, I think are starting to demand different types or more effectiveness within that hardware now, so you're starting to see a lot of interesting developments, IPUs, TPUs, Teslas getting into the inferencing bit now, with their own hardware, so you see a lot of effort and energy being poured in there. Again, there's not going to be one ring to rule them all, to cop Tolkien there for a moment, but there's going to be, I think you're going to start to see the disparation of workloads into those specific hardware platforms. Again, software, it's going to start to drive the applications for how you see these things going, and it's going to be the people that can service the most amount of platforms, or the most amount of capability from a single platform even, I think are the people who are going to come out ahead. And whether it'll be us or any of our August competitors, it remains to be seen, but we want to be in that space we want to be playing hard in that space as well. >> All right Dave, last thing I want to ask you about is just career. So, it's interesting, at Vmworld, I kind of look at it in like, "wow, I'm actually, I'm sitting at a panel for Opening Acts, which is done by the VMunderground people the Sunday, day before VMworld really starts, talking about jobs and there's actually three panels, you know, careers, and financial, and some of those things, >> I'm going to be there, so come on by, >> Maybe I should join startin' at 1 o'clock Monday evening, I'm actually participating in a career cafe, talking about people and everything like that, so all that stuff's online if you want to check it out, but you know, right, you said psychology is what you studied but you worked in engineering, you were a systems engineer, and now you do messaging. The hardcore techies, there's always that boundary between the techies and the marketings, but I think it's obvious to our audience when they hear you geeking out on the TPUs and all the things there that you are not just, you're quite knowledgeable when it comes about the technology, and the good technical marketers I find tend to come from that kind of background, but give us a little bit, looking back at where you've been and where you're going, and some of those dynamics. >> Yeah, I was blessed from a really young age with a father who really loved technology. We were building PCs, like back in the eighties, right, when that was a thing, you know, "I built my AMD 386 DX box" >> Have you watched the AMC show, "Halt and Catch Fire," when that was on? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so there was that kind of, always interesting to me, and I, with the way my mind works, I can't code to save my life, that's my brother's gift, not mine. But being able to kind of assemble things in my head was kind of always something that stuck in the back. So going through college, I worked as a lab resident as well, working in computer labs and doing that stuff. It's just been, it's been a passion, right? I had the education, was very, you know, that was my family, was very hard on the education stuff. You're going to do this. But being able to follow that passion, a lot of things fell into place with that, it's been a huge blessing. But even in grad school when I was getting my Masters in clinical counseling, I ran my own consulting business as well, just buying and selling hardware. And a lot of what I've done is just I read and ask a ton of questions. I'm out on Twitter, I'm not the brightest bulb in the, of the bunch, but I've learned to ask a lot of questions and the amount of community support in that has gotten me a lot of where I am as well. But yeah, being able to come out on this side, marketing is, like you're saying, it's kind of an anathema to the technical guys, "oh those are the guys that kind of shine the, shine the turd, so to speak," right? But being able to come in and being able to kind of influence the way and make sure that we're technically sound in what we're saying, but you have to translate some of the harder stuff, the more hardcore engineering terms into layman's terms, because not everybody's going to approach that. A CIO with a double E, or an MS in electrical engineering are going on down that road are very few and far between. A lot of these folks have grown up or developed their careers in understanding things, but being able to kind of go in and translate through that, it's been a huge blessing, it's nice. But always following the areas where, networking for me was never a strong point, but jumping in, going, "hey, I'm here to learn," and being willing to learn has been one of the biggest, biggest things I think that's kind of reinforced that career process. >> Yeah, definitely Dave, that intellectual curiosity is something that serves anyone in the tech industry quite well, 'cause, you know, nobody is going to be an expert on everything, and I've spoken to some of the brightest people in the industry, and even they realize nobody can keep up with all of it, so that being able to ask questions, participate, and Dave, thank you so much for helping me, come have this conversation, great as always to have a chat. >> Ah, great to be here Stu, thanks. >> Alright, so be sure to check out the theCUBE.net, which is where all of our content always is, what shows we will be at, all the history of where we've been. This studio is actually in Marlborough, Massachusetts, so not too far outside of Boston, right on the 495 loop, we're going to be doing lot more videos here, myself and Dave Vellante are located here, we have a good team here, so look for more content out of here, and of course our big studio out of Palo Alto, California. So if we can be of help, please feel free to reach out, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's three Cube covering M. I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M I. T. CDO I Q everybody, you're watching the cube we got. We go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise is day one of this conference. Chief Data Officer event. I'm Dave, along with my co host, Paul Gillen. Stuart Bond is here is a research director of International Data Corporation I DC Stewart. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. So your space data intelligence tell us about your swim lane? Sure. >> So my role it I. D. C is a ZAY. Follow the data integration and data intelligence software market. So I follow all the different vendors in the market. I look at what kinds of solutions they're bringing to market, what kinds of problems. They're solving both business and technical for their clients. And so I can then report on the trends and market sizes, forecasts and such, And within that part of what I what I cover is everything from data integration which is more than traditionally E T l change data capture data movements, data, virtualization types of technologies as well as what we call date integrity of one. And I'm calling data intelligence, which is all of the Tell the metadata about the data. It's the data catalogs meditating management's data lineage. It's the data quality data profiling, master data intelligence. It's all of the data about the data and understanding really answering what I call a entering the five W's and h of data. It's the who, what, where, when, why and how. Data. So that's the market that I'm covering and following, and that's why I'm >> here. Were you here this morning for Mark Ramsey's Yes, I talk. So he kind of went to you. Heard it started with the D W kind of through E T L under the bus. Well, MGM, then the Enterprise data model said all that failed. But that stuff's not going away, and I'm sure they're black. So still using, you know, all those all that tooling today. So what was your reaction to that you were not in your head and yeah, it's true or saying, Well, maybe there's a little we'll have what we've been saying. The mainframe is gonna go away for years and >> still around, so I think they're obviously there's still those technologies out there and they're still being used. You can look at any of the major dtl vendors and there's new ones coming to the market, so that's still alive and well. There's no doubt that it's out there and its biggest segment of the market that I followed. So there's no source tooling, right? Yes, >> there's no doubt that it's still >> there. But Mark's vision of where things are going, where things are heading with, with data intelligence really being at the Cory talk about those spiders talked about that central depository of information about knowledge of the data. That's where things are heading to, whether you call it a data hub, whether you call it a date, a platform, not really a one big, huge data pop for one big, huge data depository, but one a place where you can go to get the information but natives you can find out where the data is. You could find out what it means, both the business context as well as the technical information you find out who's using that data. You can find out when it's being used, Why it's being used in. Why do we even have it and how it should >> be used? So it's being used >> appropriately. So you would say that his vision, actually what he implemented was visionary skating. They skated to the puck, so to speak, and that's we're going >> to see more of that. Where are seeing more of that? That's why we've seen such a jump in the number of vendors that air providing data catalogue solutions. I did, Uh, I d. C has this work product calling market glance. I did that >> beginning of 2018. >> I just did it again. In the middle of this year, the number of vendors that offer data catalogue solutions has significantly interest 240% increase in the number of vendors that offer that now itself of a small base. These air, not exhaustive studies. It may be that I didn't know about all those data catalogue vendors a year and 1/2 ago, but may also be that people are now saying that we've got a data catalogue, >> but you've really got a >> peel back the layers a little bit. Understand what these different data catalysts are and what they're doing because not all of them are crediting. >> We'll hear Radar. You don't know about it. 99% of the world mark talked this morning about some interesting new technologies. They were using Spider Ring to find the data bots to classify the data tools wrangle the data. I mean, there's a lot of new technology being applied to this area. What? Which of those technologies do you think has the greatest promise right now? And how? How how automated can this process become? >> It's the spider ring, and it's the cataloging of the data. It's understanding what you've got out there that is growing crazy. Just started to track that it's growing a lot that has the most promised. And as I said, I think that's going to be the data platform in the future. Is the intelligence knowing about where your data is? You men go on, get it. You know it's not a matter of all. The data is one place anymore. Data's everywhere Date is in hybrid cloud. It's in on premise. It's in private. Cloud isn't hosted. It's everywhere. I just did a survey. I got the results back in June 2019 just a month ago, and the data is all over the place. So really having that knowledge having that intelligence about where your data is, that has the most promise. As faras, the automation is concerned. Next step there. It's not just about collecting the information about where your data is, but it's actually applying the analytics, the machine learning and the artificial intelligence to that metadata collection that you've got so that you can then start to create those bots to create those pipelines to start to automate those tasks. We're starting to see some vendors move in that area, moving that direction. There's a lot of promise there >> you guys, at least when I remember. You see, the software is pretty robust taxonomy. I'm sure it's evolved over the years. So how do you sort of define your space? I'm interested in How big is that space, you know, in terms of market size and is a growing and where do you see it going? >> Right. So my my coverage of data integration and data intelligence is fairly small. It's a small, little marketed. I D. C. I'm part of a larger team that looks a data management, the analytics and information management. So we've got people on our team like a damn vessel. Who covers the analytics? Advanced Analytics show Nautical Palo Carlson. He's been on the cable covers, innovative technologies, those I apologize. I don't have that number off the top. >> Okay, No, But your space, my space is it. That's that Software market is so fragmented. And what I d. C has always done well, as you put people on those fragments and you know, deep in there. So So how you've been ableto not make your eyes bleed when you do that, challenging so the data and put it all together. >> It's important. Integration markets about 66 and 1/2 1,000,000,000 >> dollars. Substantial size. Yeah, but again, a lot of vendors Growing number of events in the markets growing, >> the market continues to grow as the data is becoming more distributed, more dispersed. There's no need to continue to integrate that data. There's also that need that growing >> need for that date intelligence. It's not >> just, you know, we've had a lot of enquiries lately about data being fed into machine learning artificial intelligence and people realizing our data isn't clean. We have to clean up our data because we're garbage in garbage. Out is probably more important now than ever before because you don't have someone saying, I don't think that day is right. You've got machines were looking at data instead. The technology that's out there and the problem with data quality. It's on a new problem. It's the same problem we've had for years. All of the technology is there to clean that data up, and that's a part of what I saw. I look at the data quality vendors experience here, sink sort in all of the other data quality capabilities that you get from in from Attica, from Tahoe or from a click podium. Metal is there, and so that part is growing. And there's a lot of more interest in that data quality and that data intelligence side again so the right data can be used. Good data can be used to trust in that data. Can the increase we used for the right reasons as well That's adding that context. Understand that Samantha having all that metadata that goes around that data so that could be used. Most of >> it is one of those markets that you may be relatively small. It's not 100,000,000,000 but it it enables a lot of larger markets. So okay, so it's 66 and 1/2 1,000,000,000 it's growing. It is a growing single digits, double digits. It's growing. It's hovering around the double dip double. It is okay, it's 10%. And then and then who were the, You know, big players who was driving the shares there? Is there a dominant player there? Bunch of >> so infirm. Atticus Number one in the market. Okay, followed by IBM. And I say peas right up there. Sass is there. Tell End is making a good Uh, okay, they're making a nice with Yeah, but there there's a number of different players. There's There's a lot of different players in that market. >> And in the leading market share player has what, 10%? 15%? 50%? Is it like a dominant divine spot? That's tough to say. You got a big It's over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 right? So they've got maybe 1/6 of the market. Okay, so but it's not like Cisco as 2/3 of the networking market or anything like that. And what about the cloud guys? A participating in this guy's deal with >> the cloud guys? Yeah, the ClA got so there are some pure cloud solutions. There's a relative, for example. Pure cloud MBM mastered a management there. There's I'd say there's less pure cloud than there used to be. But, you know, but someone like an infra matic is really pushing that clouds presence in that cloud >> running these tools, this tooling in in the cloud But the cloud guys directly or not competing at this >> point. So Amazon Google? Yes, Those cloud guys. Yes. Okay, there, there. Google announced data flow back in our data. Sorry. Data fusion back. Google. >> Yeah, that's right. >> And so there they've got an e t l two on the cloud now. Ah, Amazon has blue yet which is both a catalog and an e t l tool. Microsoft course has data factory in azure. >> So those guys are coming on. I'm guessing if you talk to in dramatic and they said, Well, they're not as robust as we are. And we got a big install base and we go multi cloud is that kind of posturing of the incumbents or yeah, that's posturing. And maybe that's I don't mean it is a pejorative. If I were, those guys would be doing the same thing. You know, we were talking earlier about how the cloud guys essentially killed the Duke. All right, do you Do you see the same thing happening here, or is it well, the will the tool vendors be able to stay ahead in your view, >> depends on how they execute. If they're there and they're available in the cloud along with along with those clapper viers, they're able to provide solutions in the same same way the same elasticity, the same type of consumption based pricing models that pod vendors air offering. They can compete with that. They still have a better solution. Easton What >> in multi cloud in hybrid is a big part of their value problems that the cloud guys aren't really going hard after. I mean, this sort of dangling your toe in the water, some of them some of the >> cloud guys they have. They have the hybrid capabilities because they've got some of what they're what they built comes from on premises, worlds as well. So they've got that ability. Microsoft in particular >> on Google, >> Google that the data fusion came out of >> You're saying, But it's part of the Antos initiative. Er, >> um, I apologize. Folks are watching, >> but soup of acronyms notices We're starting a little bit. What tools have you seen or technology? Have you seen making governance of unstructured data? That looks promising? Uh, so I don't really cover >> the instructor data space that much. What I can say is Justus in the structure data world. It's about the metadata. It's about having the proper tags about that unstructured data. It's about getting the information of that unstructured data so that it can then be governed appropriately, making structure out of that, that is, I can't really say, because I don't cover that market explicitly. But I think again it comes back to the same type of data intelligence having that intelligence about that data by understanding what's in there. >> What advice are you giving to, you know, the buyers in your community and the sellers in your community, >> So the buyer's within the market. I talk a lot about that. The need for that data intelligence, so data governance to me is not a technology you can't go by data governance data governance is an organizational disappoint. Technology is a part of that. To me, the data intelligence technology is a part of that. So, really, organizations, if they really want a good handle, get a good handle on what data they have, how to use that, how to be enabled by that data. They need to have that date intelligence into go look for solutions that can help him pull that data intelligence out. But the other part of that is measurement. It's critical to measure because you can't improve what you're not measuring. So you know that type of approach to it is critical Eve, and you've got to be able to have people in the organization. You've got to be able to have cooperation collaboration across the business. I t. The the gifted office chief Officer office. You've gotta have that collaboration. You've gotta have accountability and for in order for that, to really be successful. For the vendors in the space hybrid is the new reality. In my survey data, it shows clearly that hybrid is where things are. It's not just cloud, it's not just on promise Tiebreak. That's where the future is. They've got to be able to have solutions that work in that environment. Working that hybrid cloud ability has got to be able to have solutions that can be purchased and used again in the same sort of elastic type of method that they're able to get consumers able to get. Service is from other vendors in that same >> height, so we gotta run. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your data. And I know we were fired. I was firing a lot of questions. Did pretty well, not having the report in front of me. I know what that's like. So thank you for sharing and good luck with your challenges in the future. You got You got a lot of a lot of data to collect and a lot of fast moving markets. So come back any time. Share with you right now, Okay? And thank you for watching Paul and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break from M I t cdo. Right back

you live from Miami Beach Florida 2019 brought to you by V we're back this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're here in Miami this is a wrap of v-mon 2019 two days of coverage I'm Dave Volante with my co-host Peterborough's our third year covering v-mon we started in New Orleans we've seen you know veeam go from what they called at this show act one to act two and we talked two years ago about you know to the our first V Mon about the ascendancy of Veeam being so tightly tied to the rise of virtualization and now we heard this year act to being cloud multi cloud and we heard a number of announcements that are in support of that we're going to talk about that but Peter there were three key announcements this week one was the the billion dollar you know milestone they actually you know they finally hit a billion dollars I've been talking about it for a while it's now official billion dollars on a trailing 12-month basis they're a profitable company veem and a focused billion dollar yeah I think that's really a very focused I mean they do some M&A but not a lot of M&A and that's because of NIH I mean you know these guys they trust themselves to write code it's also it's also sustained that simple value proposition right and that's a in a fundamental Dogma I think I think it's fair to say we we heard the announcement of the the the with Veeam a API infrastructure which which is key we're going to talk about that we I think there were two companies they announced partnerships with Nutanix with mine and exa grid both taking advantage of that there will be others can ring doll just told us you know maybe 10 to 12 it's not going to be an enormous number at least for secondary storage yeah but and but that'll knock down a large portion of the infrastructure market and then a Veeam availability Orchestrator version 2 which allows you to do if fast backups recover from from backups without having to go to a replicated you know off-site and some other capabilities they call the dynamic documentation and automating testing and some DevOps capabilities so you know the people seem pretty excited about that it wasn't a sea of announcements like you see it some of these things which I think Peter talks to the degree of focus that you were just mentioning you know they're not about your bragging rights and the number of announcements that they can make you know it's really all about extending that platform a lot of incremental announcements ratmir told us not a big roadmap company even though he did show a roadmap today but the roadmap he showed was a lot of near-term functional improvement so very function rich you know the the tagline of it just works but um let's see I think there's the first time you and I have done v-mon together I've been here your impressions look I love wandering the halls and talked into the actual attendees and seeing what they have to say so I spent about an hour hour and a half just doing some work in one of the hallways here and one of the reasons I do that is because it's an opportunity here with the attendees and the customers are talking about and what's important to them you've got a lot of these shows and everybody's buzzing about one or another product announcement you go here and everybody's talking about the problems that they're solving and I think that one of the reasons why we didn't have this frenzy of product announcements like we have in so many other places because the focus is though because a lot of companies want the focus to be on them I think what we heard here or what I heard here somewhat different was again customers trying to solve the problems and Veeam creating an opportunity for them to talk in terms of some of the new directions and some of the new products that being are being introduced but the focus stayed on the customer and the problems of trying to solve and that's that's what to my mind that's what successful companies focus on yeah and I come back to this notion of the with Veeam the whole API integration cloud hybrid cloud the edge V wants to be and they've laid they laid this vision out you know certainly last year and even started the year before of of essentially being that that that backup capability data protection capability across wherever your data lives you know on from in cloud now they really are focused on on backup and data protection they even say backups where it starts a lot of other companies like don't even use the term backup no it's not about backup it's about data management and data protection so it's interesting that veem is really focused on on backup and when you do what you did and talk to the customers what do you use the V for backup backup backup backup and so so they're not over rotating to that vision now they're many of their competitors are going hard after that and doing some great great marketing so the competitive dynamics are very interesting now you got cohesive e you got rubric doing really well with positioning as a modern architecture in veeam definitely not a legacy company their business is growing you've got you've got CommVault you've got Dell EMC Veritas IBM you know trying to hit single-digit growth trying not to decline I mean IBM in particular declined and then and really had to do a deal with CAD illogic to stop veem from eating its market share that's really what that deal was all about you saw Dell EMC kind of take its eye off the ball when it merged with with Dell EMC you know it was the leader in in purpose-built backup appliances it's made some announcements recently to try to get you know it's got some really good start back in the game right so you know you don't ever count those guys out Comicon vaults approached it differently they've got a large install base you know Veritas went through private equity and so they had some some other challenges but again they're investing and so it's a big market you know people are gonna go fight hard for it and then and then with with the outside funding that's come in it's really up the game now a lot of that funding is gonna go to promotion which again comes back to your point about focused R&D really really important to focus R&D on things that customers want that you're gonna solve a business problem so if you go back and just just to take your segmentation and we can kind of look at it in a couple of perhaps simple ways you've got you've got you've got veem and companies like beam who saw the hole virtualization and the need to do a better job of supporting and protecting and and replicating and backing up virtualized resources all hitting the market pretty hard and then you have the Delhi MCS and a lot of the other companies that you mentioned trying to sustain or keep pace with those guys and then you have the new guys the Dhruv is and what not are we talking about just cross cloud multi cloud backup on top of that you have and something we talked about with a couple of guests the security guys are looking at this and saying wait a minute you know data is data and protection and security are going to be increasingly difficult to separate because data is going to move and I have to be able to move security with the data it's going to be an inevitability it's we're talking about a cloud that allows us to more do more distribution of data because we're gonna do more distribution of work and the security is gonna have to move for the data so the security guys are gonna get in this the networking guys are gonna be asked some questions about the opportunity you got the old guard who is more focused on devices and managing and backing up devices trying to get back in you got the new guys you're saying let's let's lead the the the act to before you know the veins get there it's gonna be an extremely complex market but all of its gonna boil down to this simple fact I'm gonna distribute data in response to the work that needs to be performed and how am I going to manage the digital assets that I have to make that easy so that it doesn't explode and all of these companies at some point kind of the next phase of this is going to be on protecting data but can I turn it into a digital asset so here's what I saw I saw them talking about the idea of you know what we're gonna protect locally I'll suggest it over the course the next couple of years it's going to be we're gonna do you know data asset management with protection with where the actual act of protecting it is similar to the act of defining it as an asset so being able to you know use a a snapshot for a lot of different uses already happening now but adding services you know a consistent set of services on top of that through with veem and other resources allow them to do that and then move more of that what's today regarded as replication function into that protection side of things a lot more support for locally because that's where the services are going to become having the services are not having the services it's really going to be an essential question because we're gonna move more of this data out to where the work is going to be profound we often talk about customers having to place bets but but the the the vendors are having to place bets as well they're obviously betting on multi-cloud but but juxtapose for example what themes doing it was interesting to hear ken ring doll he answered your question about whether it was em through M&A and he answered in an M&A context but or maybe organic development around more security functions and he kind of said Never Say Never but really focused the team the engineering team is really focused on backup and data protection and what they call data management juxtapose that now with way say for instance what a daydream is doing X data domain guys built their own file system trying to bring both primary and secondary stores together yeah and which I like and I think it's really powerful themes taking a different approach they're saying and with with VM api's we're gonna partner with pure we're gonna partner with with Cisco we're gonna partner with Nutanix so different approach and they're gonna obviously you know claim the same capability hey we can do that too you know date tree I'm saying well we can do that too with just one mousetrap you know the integration points etc so it's gonna really be interesting to see how that all shakes out that that word seamless you know I said it sometimes triggers me if it really is seamless you know theme has a go to market advantage relative to you know the the Swiss Army knife approach if it's not seamless then you know ad atrium approach will have an event it's from a product standpoint you and I both know there's so much more to success than just having a great product absolutely you know and mentioned it but but here's you know it's interesting one of the thought about what will the roadmap the practical roadmap because FEMA's altered its roadmap in response to customer demand quite frankly very successfully and and and and you know you got to applaud him for doing so but one of the things we heard was it look we don't want we don't want to over promise on the engineering front because you've got a certain number of Engineers and a certain engineering capacity focus them on things that are creating value to the problems you're trying to solve the same things true within a lot of user shops you don't want to throw a whole bunch of new function to new requirements and a bunch of guys who are still themselves trying to evolve from backing up devices to now actually protecting data and and so there's a there's a natural evolution that's going to take place and I and I think veeam that's done a pretty good job of keeping their finger on what that pulse is it's it's what can be invented but also what can be innovated if we think of innovation as the customer adopting and applying it and betting it and changing their activities around it and I think themes done a pretty good job of navigating you know that what can customers really do right now not getting too far ahead so a lot of these guys that the natural tendency that you come from a product perspective and you say put more into the product and you know get the better check marks and you know have the better it's better statute is better factsheet and I think Veeam is taking a simpler approach almost an apple like approach is an enterprise sense and saying look give them what they can a candle give them what they can use give them what's going to generate value and as they master that give them a little bit more it reminds me of is you said Apple it reminds me of early EMC days when EMC brought out you know it's symmetric it was it would connect you know AIX solaris unisys obviously the IBM mainframe it had all the optionality all the connectivity and that's kind of what would be and then the features that it announced were really practical they clearly solved the problem now since then you know MCS evolved into the checkbox so we have more features than anybody that's what happens when you everybody wants right you have the customer base everybody wants and they say check we have that thin provisioning we have that too and you know we're gonna freeze the market that's the you know much more mature company in their defense it's also in response to an increasingly specialized and complex customer base they're trying to cover all the base and you know competitive guys eating that they're absolutely absolutely and the sales guys saying hey we need something and they've done a great job of doing that but but Veeam is very very focused on the optionality in four years they they wouldn't talk about bare metal and a couple of years ago would beam on the big thing was hey we said for years that were only virtualization well guess what now we do bare metal that was sort of the one the big announcement one year so they're they're very judicious about how they allocate their R&D you know capital and in you're seeing that you know translate into function that actually gets used actually give yeah I think it's a key point I think your analogy with EMC is actually really good Dave because if you go back thirty years when the EMC first started getting going what was the problem controllers on mainframes and mini-computers were getting incredibly complex it's you know the Daddy controllers and the amount of processing that was being put into that in the microcode was just overwhelming most people's ability to deal with it and so MC came along and said well if that's the problem can we fix it we put cash in that'll just make this whole system simpler and then they stayed true to that for a number of years and they turn into a beer mark and it's interesting I think it is a good analogy because what is the problem the problem is data's going to be more distributed it's going to be more central to a company's mission it's gonna be used by more functions and repurposed into more applications that have a greater diversity of RTO and RPO and as a consequence they're saying they seem to be saying we're going to do our best to pose much function to that protect side of things local as we possibly can so that people who aren't PhDs in computer science to perform a real business service by making all that stuff work and then will at the same time work very closely with third parties who can bring specialization of that secondary storage to bear as the specialization increases because it's going to increase and the other the other you know China MB a case study example that I would point to is the early days of Veritas when Jim when Jeremy Burton was running Merrick marketing it Veritas II sort of coined the language Jeremy calling the no hardware agenda a pure software a lot of function and they you know rose to a couple of billion dollar you know in revenue you know very very successful now have the big install base that everybody wants to eat it's just again reminiscent the pure software company they're not shipping boxes they're not shipping appliances they're they're not selling direct their pure channel play there's a big tamp to just continue to do virtualization like the big question is are they going to will their focus on what they're currently doing translate into focus on multi cloud and here at this conference they're claiming yes we've heard nothing that suggests that they won't be able to but there's a lot of new players out there who are looking at that space and saying you know what I can do that too and there's gonna be a lot of invention a lot of investment and you know there's good reasons to suspect it beans gonna be able to evolve successfully but there are a few areas where I think they're gonna have to focus more time in the big part of a CEOs job is Tam expansion and you know right now there are you know a billion out of fifteen let's call it so there's a long way to go but as you point out that multi-cloud appears like it's gonna be lucrative and there's a lot of different companies coming at it from from different angles you guys tell me we look at it is this big blob yeah this is gonna be incredibly specialized very fragmented I mean you got Cisco coming at it from a networking perspective RedHat coming from a past perspective Google you know partnering everybody Amazon right now ignoring it but you guarantee they're gonna be awesome and Microsoft has to be in it because of the huge estate of on-prem you know software and there's a dozen security guys are gonna be looking at this and saying oh look data in motion that's my service now is going to get its pieces so very interesting how that's all gonna shake out it's okay so wrap it up Peter you know kind of summarize your thoughts on the space v-mon so first beam on for me a lot of customers that we're talking about solving complex problems during their digital business transformation that's always good to hear got to a billion dollars that's a great milestone for any software company good reasons is the fact that beam is going to evolve into a company like Veritas like one of the big guys this is a company that's got legs and I think that the final one that I'd say not got legs but that they've got what it takes to be able to affect this transition they probably got the execution chops look we had a user on here who effectively said if you're not using if you're CIO and you're not using veem you're not competent and you know he said that that's not that's not a bad testimonial when you come down to it yeah and then the one thing that we have not talked about which is it shines through is culture yeah you know this company has a culture that is a winning culture it's a fun culture there's an accountability associated with it and and very customer orientation solutely up so that's the winning formulas have been fun sort of watching these guys grow and interacting with a number of their customers and you saw you saw a couple years ago Veeam saying okay we're going Enterprise so I ain't so easy there's just say we're going enterprise but in interestingly even though they've somewhat retrenched from that messaging they're having success in the enterprise clearly with their partnerships with guys like HPE at Cisco and NetApp and and others and so they're just gonna let it bake a little bit and go from there position of strength which is that you know kind of s in an MB do more simply with your protection environment is not a bad story a company of any size right right and okay Peter hey you spent great working with you thank you and thank you for watching guys great job awesome go to Silicon angle comm you'll see all the news the cube net is where we host all these videos and you'll see wiki bond comm has all the research Peter recently wrote a great piece on on data protection and how that markets involving check out our Twitter at the cube and at the cube 365 Twitter handles you'll see all kinds of clips coming out of this show and other shows let's see where we got a lot coming up good for you and what do you think so I think you're seeing as I said before a very practical approach to gaining foothold and in maintaining and growing in a market I like the business model this this company has been somewhat opaque you know european-based you know the Russian founders but and and most of us businesses outside of the US and and I think they're really coming into the mainstream now and Cube helps make it more transparent yeah absolutely and right because you can ask the questions of people and you know you get you get all kinds of different answers so and we're able to have you know independence on you know guys like Justin the firm's like the four five one guys that you know Gartner coming on and and it's fun to have those guys so so it's been great thank you for watching the cube go to the cube dotnet check out the events that are coming up we got a huge huge season May and June or our busiest months take a slight break in July although you know we'll be cranking this summer as well so thank you for watching everybody we're out Dave a lot day for Peterborough's we'll see you next time

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 here in Barcelona, Spain. 7,700 here in attendance, here about all the Cloud Native technologies. I'm Stu Miniman; my cohost to the two days of coverage is Corey Quinn. And to help us break down what's happening in this ecosystem, we've brought in Jason Bloomberg, who's the president at Intellyx. Jason, thanks so much for joining us. >> It's great to be here. >> All right. There's probably some things in the keynote I want to talk about, but I also want to get your general impression of the show and beyond the show, just the ecosystem here. Brian Liles came out this morning. He did not sing or rap for us this morning like he did yesterday. He did remind us that the dinners in Barcelona meant that people were a little late coming in here because, even once you've got through all of your rounds of tapas and everything like that, getting that final check might take a little while. They did eventually filter in, though. Always a fun city here in Barcelona. I found some interesting pieces. Always love some customer studies. Conde Nast talking about what they've done with their digital imprint. CERN, who we're going to have on this program. As a science lover, you want to geek out as to how they're finding the Higgs boson and how things like Kubernetes are helping them there. And digging into things like storage, which I worked at a storage company for 10 years. So, understanding that storage is hard. Well, yeah. When containers came out, I was like, "Oh, god, we just fixed it for virtualization, "and it took us a decade. "How are we going to do it this time?" And they actually quoted a crowd chat that we had in our community. Tim Hawken, of course one of the first Kubernetes guys, was in on that. And we're going to have Tim on this afternoon, too. So, just to set a little context there. Jason, what's your impressions of the show? Anything that has changed in your mind from when you came in here to today? Let's get into it from there. >> Well, this is my second KubeCon. The first one I went to was in Seattle in December. What's interesting from a big picture is really how quickly and broadly KubeCon has been adopted in the enterprise. It's still, in the broader scheme of things, relatively new, but it's really taking its place as the only container orchestrator anybody cares about. It sort of squashed the 20-or-so alternative container orchestrators that had a brief day in the sun. And furthermore, large enterprises are rapidly adopting it. It's remarkable how many of them have adopted it and how broadly, how large the deployment. The Conde Nast example was one. But there are quite a number. So we turned the corner, even though it's relatively immature technology. That's the interesting story as well, that there's still pieces missing. It's sort of like flying an airplane while you're still assembling it, which makes it that much more exciting. >> Yeah, one of the things that has excited me over the last 10 years in tech is how fast it takes me to go from ideation to production, has been shrinking. Big data was: "Let's take the thing that used to take five years "and get it down to 18 months." We all remember ERP deployments and how much money and people you need to throw at that. >> It still takes a lot of money and people. >> Right, because it's ERP. I was talking to one of the booths here, and they were doing an informal poll of, "How many of you are going to have Kubernetes "in production in the next six months?" Not testing it, but in production in the next six months, and it was more than half of the people were going to be ramping it up in that kind of environment. Anything architecturally? What's intriguing you? What's the area that you're digging down to? We know that we are not fully mature, and even though we're in production and huge growth, there's still plenty of work to do. >> An interesting thing about the audience here is it's primarily infrastructure engineers. And the show is aimed at the infrastructure engineers, so it's technical. It's focused on people who code for a living at the infrastructure level, not at the application level. So you have that overall context, and what you end up having, then, is a lot of discussions about the various components. "Here's how we do storage." "Here's how we do this, here's how we do that." And it's all these pieces that people now have to assemble, as opposed to thinking of it overall, from the broader context, which is where I like writing about, in terms of the bigger picture. So the bigger picture is really that Cloud Native, broadly speaking, is a new architectural paradigm. It's more than just an architectural trend. It's set of trends that really change the way we think about architecture. >> One interesting piece about Kubernetes, as well. One of the things we're seeing as we see Kubernetes start to expand out is, unlike serverless, it doesn't necessarily require the same level of, oh, just take everything you've done and spend 18 months rewriting it from scratch, and then it works in this new paradigm in a better way. It's much less of a painful conversion process. We saw in the keynote today that they took WebLogic, of all things, and dropped that into Kubernetes. If you can do it with something as challenging, in some respects, and as monolithic as WebLogic, then almost any other stack you're going to see winds up making some sense. >> Right, you mentioned serverless in contrast with Kubernetes, but actually, serverless is part of this Cloud Native paradigm as well. So it's broader than Kubernetes, although Kubernetes has established itself as the container orchestration platform of choice. But it's really an overall story about how we can leverage the best practices we've learned from cloud computing across the entire enterprise IT landscape, both in the cloud and on premises. And Kubernetes is driving this in large part, but it's bigger picture than the technology itself. That's what's so interesting, because it's so transformative, but people here are thinking about trees, not the forest. >> It's an interesting thing you say there, and I'm curious if you can help our community, Because they look at this, and they're like, "Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes." Well, a bunch of the things sit on Kubernetes. As they've tried to say, it's a platform of platforms. It's not the piece. Many of the things can be with Kubernetes but don't have to be. So, the whole observability piece. We heard the merging of the OpenCensus, OpenTracing with OpenTelemetry. You don't have to have Kubernetes for that to be a piece of it. It can be serverless underneath it. It can be all these other pieces. Cloud Native architecture sits on top of it. So when you say Cloud Native architecture, what defines that? What are the pieces? How do I have to do it? Is it just, I have to have meditated properly and had a certain sense of being? What do we have to do to be Cloud Native? >> Well, an interesting way of looking at it is: What we have subtracted from the equation, so what is intentionally missing. Cloud Native is stateless, it is codeless, and it is trustless. Now, not to say that we don't have ways of dealing with state, and of course there's still plenty of code, and we still need trust. But those are architectural principals that really percolate through everything we do. So containers are inherently stateless; they're ephemeral. Kubernetes deals with ephemeral resources that come and go as needed. This is key part of how we achieve the scale we're looking for. So now we have to deal with state in a stateless environment, and we need to do that in a codeless way. By codeless, I mean declarative. Instead of saying, how are we going to do something? Let's write code for that, we're going to say, how are we going to do that? Let's write a configuration file, a YAML file, or some other declarative representation of what we want to do. And Kubernetes is driven this way. It's driven by configuration, which means that you don't need to fork it. You don't need to go in and monkey with the insides to do something with it. It's essentially configurable and extensible, as opposed to customizable. This is a new way of thinking about how to leverage open-source infrastructure software. In the past, it was open-source. Let's go in an monkey with the code, because that's one of the benefits of open-source. Nobody wants to do that now, because it's declaratively-driven, and it's configurable. >> Okay, I hear what you're saying, and I like what you're saying. But one of the things that people say here is everyone's a little bit different, and it is not one solution. There's lots of different paths, and that's what's causing a little bit of confusion as to which service mesh, or do I have a couple of pieces that overlap. And every deployment that I see of this is slightly different, so how do I have my cake and eat it, too? >> Well, you mentioned that Kubernetes is a platform of platforms, and there's little discussion of what we're actually doing with the Kubernetes here at the show. Occasionally, there's some talk about AI, and there's some talk about a few other things, but it's really up to the users of Kubernetes, who are now the development teams in the enterprises, to figure out what they want to do with it and, as such, figure out what capabilities they require. Depending upon what applications you're running and the business use cases, you may need certain things more than others. Because AI is very different from websites, it's very different from other things you might be running. So that's part of the benefit of a platform of platforms, is it's inherently configurable. You can pick and choose the capabilities you want without having to go into Kubernetes and fork it. We don't want 12 different Kubernetes that are incompatible with each other, but we're perfectly okay with different flavors that are all based on the same, fundamental, identical code base. >> We take a look at this entire conference, and it really comes across as, yes, it's KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. We look at the, I think, 36 projects that are now being managed by this. But if we look at the conversations of what's happening here, it's very clear that the focus of this show is Kubernetes and friends, where it tends to be taking the limelight of a lot of this. One of the challenges you start seeing as soon as you start moving up the stack, out through the rest of the stack, rather, and seeing what all of these Cloud Native technologies are is, increasingly, they're starting to be defined by what they aren't. I mean, you have the old saw of, serverless runs on servers, and other incredibly unhelpful sentiments. And we talk about what things aren't more so than we do what they are. And what about capabilities story? I don't have an answer for this. I think it's one of those areas where language is hard, and defining what these things are is incredibly difficult. But I see what you're saying. We absolutely are seeing a transformative moment. And one of the strangest things about it, to me at least, is the enthusiasm with which we're seeing large enterprises, that you don't generally think of as being particularly agile or fast-moving, are demonstrating otherwise. They're diving into this in fascinating ways. It's really been enlightening to have conversations for the last couple of days with companies that are embracing this new paradigm. >> Right. Well, in our perspective at Intellyx, we're focusing on digital transformation in the enterprise, which really means putting the customer first and having a customer-driven transformation of IT, as well as the organization itself. And it's hard to think in those terms, in customer-facing terms, when you're only talking about IT infrastructure. Be that as it may, it's still all customer-driven. And this is sometimes the missing piece, is how do we connect what we're doing on the infrastructure side with what customers require from these companies that are implementing it? Often, that missing piece centers on the workload. Because, from the infrastructure perspective, we have a notion of a workload, and we want workload portability. And portability is one of the key benefits of Kubernetes. It gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of scalability and deployment options, as well as resilience and other benefits. But the workload also represents the applications we're putting in front of our end users, whether they're employees or end customers. So that's they key piece that is like the keystone that ties the digital story, that is the customer-facing, technology-driven, technology-empowered story, with the IT infrastructure stories. How do we support the flexibility, scalability, resilience of the workloads that the business needs to meet its business goals? >> Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up that digital transformation piece, because I have two questions, and I want to make sure I'm allowing you to cover both of them. One is, the outcome we from people as well: "I need to be faster, and I need to be agile." But at the same point, which pieces should I, as an enterprise, really need to manage? Many of these pieces, shouldn't I just be able to consume it as a managed service? Because I don't need to worry about all of those pieces. The Google presentation this morning about storage was: You have two options. Path one is: we'll take care of all of that for you. Path two is: here's the level of turtles that you're going to go all the way down, and we all know how complicated storage is, and it's got to work. If I lose my state, if I lose my pieces there, I'm probably out of business or at least in really big trouble. The second piece on that, you talked about the application. And digital transformation. Speed's great and everything, but we've said at Wikibon that the thing that will differentiate the traditional companies and the digitally transformed is data will drive your business. You will have data, it will add value of business, and I don't feel that story has come out yet. Do you see that as the end result from this? And apologies for having two big, complex questions here for you. >> Well, data are core to the digital transformation story, and it's also an essential part of the Kubernetes story. Although, from the infrastructure perspective, we're really thinking more about compute than about data. But of course, everything boils down to the data. That is definitely always a key part of the story. And you're talking about the different options. You could run it yourself or run it as a managed service. This is a key part of the story as well, is that it's not about making a single choice. It's about having options, and this is part of the modern cloud storage. It's not just about, "Okay, we'll put everything in one public cloud." It's about having multiple public clouds, private clouds, on-premises virtualization, as well as legacy environments. This is what you call hybrid IT. Having an abstracted collection of environments that supports workload portability in order to meet the business needs for the infrastructure. And that workload portability, in the context of multiple clouds, that is becoming increasingly dependent on Kubernetes as an essential element of the infrastructure. So Kubernetes is not the be-all and end-all, but it's become an essentially necessary part of the infrastructure, to make this whole vision of hybrid IT and digital transformation work. >> For now. I mean, I maintain that, five years from now, no one is going to care about Kubernetes. And there's two ways that goes. Either it dries up, blows away, and something else replaces it, which I don't find likely, or, more likely, it slips beneath the surface of awareness for most people. >> I would agree, yeah. >> The same way that we're not sitting here, having an in-depth conversation about which distribution of Linux, or what Linux kernel or virtual memory manager we're working with. That stuff has all slipped under the surface, to the point where there are people who care tremendously about this, but you don't need to employ them at every company. And most companies don't even have to think about it. I think Kubernetes is heading that direction. >> Yeah, it looks like it. Obviously, things continue to evolve. Yeah, Linux is a good example. TCP/IP as well. I remember the network protocol wars of the early 90s, before the web came along, and it was, "Are we going to use Banyan VINES, "are we going to use NetWare?" Remember NetWare? "Or are we going to use TCP/IP or Token Ring?" Yeah! >> Thank you. >> We could use GDP, but I don't get it. >> Come on, KOBOL's coming back, we're going to bring back Token Ring, too. >> KOBOL never went away. Token Ring, though, it's long gone. >> I am disappointed in Corey, here, for not asking the question about portability. The concern we have, as you say: okay, I put Kubernetes in here because I want portability. Do I end up with least-common-denominator cloud? I'm making a decision that I'm not going to go deep on some of the pieces, because nice as the IPI lets things through, but we understand if I need to work across multiple environments, I'm usually making a trade-off there. What do you hear from customers? Are they aware that they're doing this? Is this a challenge for people, not getting the full benefit out of whichever primary or whichever clouds they are using? >> Well, portability is not just one thing. It's actually a set of capabilities, depending upon what you are trying to accomplish. So for instance, you may want to simply support backing up your workload, so you want to be able to move it from here to there, to back it up. Or you may want to leverage different public clouds, because different public clouds have different strengths. There may be some portability there. Or you may be doing cloud migration, where you're trying to move from on-premises to cloud, so it's kind of a one-time portability. So there could be a number of reasons why portability is important, and that could impact what it means to you, to move something from here to there. And why, how often you're going to do it, how important it is, whether it's a one-to-many kind of thing, or it's a one-to-one kind of thing. It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. >> Jason, last thing real quick. What research do you see coming out of this? What follow-up? What should people be looking for from Intellyx in this space in the near future? >> Well, we continue to focus on hybrid IT, which include Kubernetes, as well as some of the interesting trends. One of the interesting stories is how Kubernetes is increasingly being deployed on the edge. And there's a very interesting story there with edge computing, because the telcos are, in large part, driving that, because of their 5G roll-outs. So we have this interesting confluence of disruptive trends. We have 5G, we have edge computing, we have Kubernetes, and it's also a key use case for OpenStack, as well. So it's like all of these interesting trends are converging to meet a new class of challenges. And AI is part of that story as well, because we want to run AI at the edge, as well. That's the sort of thing we do at Intellyx, is try to take multiple disruptive trends and show the big picture overall. And for my articles for SiliconANGLE, that's what I'm doing as well, so stay tuned for those. >> All right. Jason Bloomberg, thank you for helping us break down what we're doing in this environment. And as you said, actually, some people said OpenStack is dead. Look, it's alive and well in the Telco space and actually merging into a lot of these environments. Nothing ever dies in IT, and theCUBE always keeps rolling throughout all the shows. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We have a full-packed day of interviews here, so be sure to stay with us. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> From Washington D.C. it's theCUBE. Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest off the keynote stage this morning Bailey Szeto who is the Vice President of Customer and Seller Experience IT at Cisco. Thanks for coming and joining us. >> My pleasure. >> All right so Bailey, I've actually, you know I've watched, and partnered, and worked with Cisco my entire career but you actually changed my view of something about Cisco in your keynote this morning. And that's, you know, you said that 99% of Cisco's 50 billion dollars plus is transacted online so I should be thinking of you more as like Amazon.com you know, than as, you know the networking giant I've know my entire career. >> Well You know it's certainly true that most of our revenue comes through our online presence but it's perhaps in a different manner than what you're thinking right? So obviously we do do some business direct and we might have some stragglers selling, buying something with a credit card, but that's not the bulk of our business. The bulk of our business is through primarily partners, resellers and when I say online I meant B to B transactions. >> No no. I totally understand Bailey and what I love is you're in Cisco IT. >> That's right. >> And therefore we're not going to talk about a lot of the networking pieces. We're going to talk about what runs Cisco's business and you have the pieces and you know client success and support and all those run, and even, I didn't even realize the employee engagement all runs through you know Cisco.com >> That's right. >> And I love you did a nice little video. Gave all of those that have been in the industry. You kind of go through and look at the history of like oh okay there's the HTML stuff I used to code. >> That's right, that's right. >> Back in the 90s through all of the updates and yeah we definitely-- >> I was just expecting the little triangle with the guy like shoveling dirt under construction. You know the shovel right? >> Yeah the 404 not found. >> That's right, that's right. >> I know if I go to Cisco.com/go/product name that usually was a short cut to get me to some of the things I care about but for those people who weren't here for the key note or who might not know as much give us a little bit about you know your purview and kind of the scale and scope of what you do. >> Yeah so at Cisco I'm in Cisco IT. But I'm responsible for supporting all of the revenue generation portions of the company. So that's specifically marketing and what they do, sales and what sales does. Cisco services is a very big part of our company so I support the services organization. And most recently Cisco's been on a journey to really kind of move from a once and done hardware sales motion to a full reoccurring revenue type of stream. So we've stood up the whole customer success motion. And so I run the IT portions of that as well. And last but not least you heard me mention that 85% of our revenue actually comes through our partners. So I support all the systems that are partners interact with as well. >> Yeah it's interesting so we've done theCUBE at Cisco Live the last two years. >> Sure. >> And there's a observation I made a year ago when I started going to that show. And it was you know, if I'm a networking person but this applies to you know most people in IT, I used to manage stuff I could touch and go, I understand where it is and how I touch it and everything. Now a lot of what I have to deal with is outside of my purview and therefore I need to get into that environment kind of pair that with you know companies like yourself that are inquisitive. And so you have lots of change going on and lots of things that are in your environment there so we know change is the only constant in our industry. >> Without a doubt. >> So maybe give us a little bit of those dynamics and how that impact what's happening in your world. >> Yeah so I mean we talked a bit about my responsibilities and one of this is Cisco.com It's probably one of the more important platforms that I'm responsible for from an IT perspective. But I also mentioned that Cisco's a very, we grow through acquisitions a lot. It's one of our basic business strategies. And so every time we buy a company it's a big rush to kind of take that acquired company and integrate their online presence into Cisco.com right? So once a company is acquired we don't want people to think of it as a separate company both from a kind of marketing perspective but more importantly we're actually integrating that product into our Cisco ecosystem as well. So just having to move all that technology into Cisco.com is certainly a big job. But I think you are maybe asking this from a different perspective as well which is to say okay you know new technology is being introduced all the time and while it makes sense from a company portfolio perspective I think as a former IT person you're going to agree with me it makes our jobs a little bit more difficult. It's both a blessing and a curse right? From the perspective it's a blessing in that we get this great new technology to incorporate and use in our running of the business but it also adds a lot of complexity and so it's pretty important that we have both the systems and processes to be able to manage all that complexity in our infrastructure really. >> All right so infrastructure monitoring. >> Yes. >> Something you spent a lot of time talking about. I guess I'll set it up when I talked to my friends in the networking space these days or a lot of it, the joke is if you say single pane of glass they are going to spell it P-A-I-N because we understand that there's not one tool to rule them all. >> Right. >> Yes that I might have a primary piece but in the virtualization world I had to plug in to V Center and you know Cisco has you know you laid out a broad portfolio of various tools up and down and across the stack from you know security down to physical and upper layer and plus all the acquisitions. So can you lay out a little bit as to you know where ScienceLogic fits and there's a number of Cisco's tooling that that integrates in with. >> Yeah so when I talked about our journey with ScienceLogic you know Cisco of course has a number of tool and capabilities to take care of the pieces that we are known for. For example Application Dynamics is a great company that we bought and provides great insight into application health. But obviously in a network perspective right we have Cloud Management software, security software that type of thing and so I think what we realized in Cisco IT what my team realized is that it really isn't about a single system to rule them all it's about trying to find multiple platforms that can work together and really share data so as to drive richer insights. And so I think maybe the industry has been on a bit of a wrong path think it's you know it's not Lord of The Rings, one ring to rule them all or whatever right? It's about being able to use multiple applications but having the right data insides move around as needed so that depending on your lens or your role in IT whether you're a network guy or an application guy that you're going to use the tool that's more most natural to yourself but pulling in the right amount of data from those other parts to be able to get the right insight. >> Yeah I saw your closing slide mirrored the theme we've seen at the show of superheroes. So the super power everybody needs in IT today is how do I leverage my data and we understand that it probably takes more like the Avengers to be able to put those together because data is everywhere. >> Yeah the funny thing is that that wasn't actually a set theme. I think we must all have Avengers on our mind because everyone independently came up with the super hero concept. >> Yeah no spoilers on End Game either way though. >> That's right, that's right. >> Excellent so you know can you just bring us inside of some of that ScienceLogic journey? My understanding you're probably the largest enterprised employment of it so you know we always love to talk about scale and what that means and how it's been in your viewpoint. >> Yeah you know we actually before ScienceLogic we actually had our own system that Cisco IT wrote right and so you know as IT professionals we always think we can do it better than anyone else but we've reached a point where just so much technology and so much complexity came to the market that we really wanted to find a solution that would really kind of enable us to grow into the future with all the things that are happening right whether you're talking about Virtualization with Containers or you know Cloud native applications or Multicloud, these are all technology trends that have made our jobs in IT incredibly complex. And so we started to look for what could we replace our home grown monitoring platform with and ultimately we decided that ScienceLogic was the best fit for us. And since we've deployed it we as with most things we tend to stretch the scale especially with our vendors and so I think we are the largest ScienceLogic enterprise customer at this point. But we are seeing incredible benefits in terms of being able to connect ScienceLogic's Infrastructure Monitoring with our own Application Dynamics and really marry the two for those insightful bits that we get from both. >> All right so one of the big themed discussion here is that journey toward AI Ops. >> Yes. >> While we speak actually I've got a team in Mountainview that is at the DevNet Create Show which Cisco helped organize. >> Sure. >> We're doing two days of interviews there and DevSecOps is probably one of the key topics their going to be talking about. In your keynote this morning I heard IT Ops in a discussion there so bring us inside a little bit organizationally you know what you're seeing you know your viewpoint on these various trends that are you know helping to modernize you know transform operations. >> Yeah I think from a operations organization standpoint you're going to see the applications team and the infrastructure team work even closer together. Maybe one of the things that didn't really make super clear in my keynote this morning is I actually work on kind of the app side of the house right? I'm the direct interface to the business. And as such I actually don't interface with ScienceLogic directly but I'm a strong partner with my infrastructure team who are I think they are all sitting over there that do run ScienceLogic right and so in today's world you really can't just say oh this is infa problem they are going to deal with it. Because of that really big mix of well is it an infrastructure problem, is it an application health problem? And a lot of times it's both. And so organizationally it might be two separate organizations but the need to work together is you know even greater today than ever before. >> You're preaching to the choir. I mean when we launched Virtualization and then later when Containers came around there was the nirvana that oh I'm going to have some unit of infrastructure where the application people just don't need to worry about it. >> Right. >> You know serverless from it's name seems to imply that but we understand that eventually you know there's networking, there's storage, there's compute all underneath these kind of things. >> That's right. >> It's just repackaging so you know the applications important you know I'm long time infrastructure guy. >> That's right >> But, the number one rule is the reason we are here is to run that application and make sure your data you know gets where it needs to be otherwise you know we're not here just to power things. >> That's right. And I just realized I probably would get in trouble if I said it's actually the application, infrastructure, and of course the network all has to work together. >> Yeah well that's a given. Can you just we talked a little bit about App Dynamics you know when I think about Cisco you know broad portfolio, you know the SD-WAN, the ACI how do some of those fit into this discussion are there tie ins with what ScienceLogic is doing? >> It absolutely does. So as I talked about it when we talked about that collection of super heroes it's not a single super hero it's not a duo either it's really a big team. It's The Avengers right? And so when you think about Cisco's portfolio we have a lot of additional components needed to provide that modern operating IT operating platform right? So we talked about a lot about Application Dynamics we talked about ScienceLogic but what Cisco brings to the mix is things like ACI, Tetration, Policy Enforcement, Multicloud Management. So all those things again have to work together like The Avengers do to provide that modern platform. >> Yeah you mentioned multicloud and I know in your keynote you talked about AWS and GCP. >> That's right. >> How's Cloud changing things in your world? >> It absolutely is again it's I'll go back to the it's both a blessing and a curse right? The blessing is enormous capability that we get from the Cloud, enormous flexibility. As and example using Cisco.com as an example we host a lot of you know a lot of public information about our products and websites and data sheets and that type of thing on Cisco.com. And then a couple years ago we decided we're going to refresh the engagement of Cisco.com We wanted to make it much more personalized. We wanted to incorporate video. Those are all great things but the moment you try to throw video and guess what? Native video whether it be in English or French or Chinese or Japanese depending on where you are well that put an enormous strain on our infrastructure and if you had to travel if the packets had to travel from Japan to the United States to our data center that would slow things down. So we took advantage of Public Cloud to really kind of push out the content to the edges so that we could get localized content as close to the customer as possible. That's the great thing about it. But again the management of that increasing complexity right so both a blessing and a curse. AWS, GCP, we are using for doing a lot of video streaming work. And so again great capabilities from that platform as well. >> All right so we saw this week a lot of announcements of some of the integrations Service Now and App Dynamics were two of the ones that highlighted that I think impacted you. Anything from the announcements that is particularly excited you and I guess final on that is there anything roadmap wise that you know you'd be looking directionally for this phase to evolve towards? >> Yeah I think I was excited to see in fact that's one of the main reasons why we chose ScienceLogic in the first place was the quality and the amount of integrations that they have right? And so we're also a big Service Now customer and we see the benefits of automatically open cases in Service Now when ScienceLogic detects an issue as an example right? And I would say going forward we'll be looking to either have out of the box or if needed you know Cisco IT will build something even more integrations with the Cisco products. We already have App Dynamics but as I mentioned we have a lot of other components that are critical to the network and so we'll be looking for tighter integration and all this to drive really drive data together so that we can get to what I think what most people at this conference are hoping to achieve which is really driving towards automation and AI Ops right? So that's really the desire for I think for everyone attending this conference. It's certainly our desire in Cisco IT. And you know I'm looking forward to working with ScienceLogic to building out that roadmap. >> You know so I guess final question for you you talked about that automation, where are you when it comes to we look at you know things like machine learning and automation which if you listen to the analyst that spoke this morning is like you want to make sure you separate those things. >> That's right. >> We understand you know any of us that have done process and operations is you know you can automate a really bad process and it's not a good thing. >> That's right, that's right. >> So where are you on that journey? What do you see? You know what are the barriers that keep us from kind of the nirvana where you know oh geez I can actually just seal off the data center and let everything run? >> Right I think it's funny you mentioned Cisco Live so actually I present on a topic of AI at Cisco Live as well. So what this other speaker talked about really hit home with me understanding what is AI really. Because I think there's a general perception in the press that it's like this magical fairy dust you can just sprinkle on everything and it like makes everything perfect right? AI is really good at pattern recognition but you still need to put some check points and really have human beings kind of check the work of AI right? And so you know we actually have seen data center outages not Cisco but in the press when AI runs amok right? And so I think the first step of automation that's a given. We want to do that but that involves a lot of human beings kind of looking at the data and deciding okay these sequence of events can be cured by this set of automation. AI Ops is a something that's a whole different thing if you followed the definition of AI to say okay let the computer do it all on its own. I don't think we're there yet. I think we have a ways to go. And I certainly wouldn't trust want to trust our you know multi billion dollar business to AI Ops at this point in time. >> Well Bailey there's an event we did a couple years ago with a couple professors from MIT that are really forward looking on this and they say it's racing with the machines because people plus machines will always do better >> Yes. >> Than people alone or machines alone and hopefully that keeps some of us that are a little bit worried about the Skynets of the world taking over from getting a little bit too paranoid all of a sudden. >> I totally agree with that statement. In fact the quote that jumps in my head is "Better together". And I'll close with ScienceLogic App Dynamics better together. People AI better together. >> All right well Bailey since you ended on a perfect quote there thank you so much for joining and I hope to see you at Cisco Live San Diego. >> Fantastic, my pleasure. >> All right and thank you so much for watching theCUBE as always, I'm Stu Miniman here at ScienceLogic 2019 in Washington D.C. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube, we're at E3 at the LA Convention Center, 68,000 people milling around, but we've got kind of the backdoor access here to the Warner Brothers Games booth, so we're really excited to be back in here, the inner sanctum, talking about some of the new games coming out and we got Phill Ring, he's the Executive Producer of TT Games, Phil, great to see you. >> No, thank you very much for having me. >> Absolutely, so you're in charge of this wonderful game, that we've got on the wall behind us, the Lego DC Super-Villains? >> Sure, yeah, I'm lucky enough to be one of the incredibly talented team, 'cause we're really excited about this game, Lego DC Super-Villains is something we've actually been playing around with as an idea for a while, you get to be the villains, you get to be the bad guys, so we're really excited we actually finally get to show and talk about it. >> Right, after doing what, three games of Batman, so now you get a flip over, you get to be the Riddler or the Joker? >> Yeah, this is it, so with the kind of DC universe, we did the Lego Batman titles, but DC has amazing villains, you've got Joker, you've got Harley, you've got Lex and we were like you know what? Let's play as those, let's do something really cool, let's do a story where we're focusing on the villains, because we've never done it before, we think it'll be quite fun and hopefully people are gonna really enjoy it. >> Great, so it's coming out, so give the particulars for everybody at home, who's waiting to get their order in. >> Sure, so it's available October 16th, it's actually available for pre-order now and depending where you're pre-ordering it from, there's actually a really cool Lex Luthor power-suit mini figure you can get, so it features in the game and then you can actually have that model sat on your desk, so I'm really excited, I'm gonna run off and pre-order it as soon as I can, 'cause I want that figure. >> Well, that's cool, but the other feature you talked about before we turned on the cameras, you can actually make yourself into a Lego figure, right? >> This is really cool, yeah. So when we were looking at this game, we were sat there thinking, okay, villains are really, really cool, but I wonder what it would be like if I could put myself into this world, what happens if I'm playing with Joker and with Lex, so we decided to put the Character Customizer in, so right at the very beginning of the game, Commissioner Gordon's heading to find out some information about this new character and then you customize that character and that's your character, so you make whoever you want, as crazy as you want, there's loads of kind of depth to the Customizer, you can change decors, colors, torsos, facial features, hair pieces and then that character appears throughout the story, so they walk out in a cut scene and that's really cool and then that character unlocks new powers and abilities and becomes stronger as you play through the game. >> Right, so I'm just curious on kind of the evolution of the game, again you did some earlier versions, that weren't the same game, but you know, this one is kind of built onto that, what did you discover, in terms of how people play the game? One of my favorite topics is degree of difficulty, >> Sure. >> How do you figure out the degree of difficulty, to make it difficult enough from excited to attack a challenge and conquer it, but not so difficult, where I'm just banging my head against a wall and throw my controller out the window and say, I just can't get through this thing. >> So that's something that the team do really, really well. We always look at it and go, okay, we know that these games are for a younger audience or at least to start with, so we want something that an eight-year old kid, who may have never played a Lego game before can come along, have loads of fun with this world, so we're making sure that we're kind of educating the player, we have a new tutorial system in this game, where we can show little videos to go, so you've just unlocked this cool power, this is how it works. So we can kind of educate people, but then we know that we're gonna have like either fans of Lego games, but also like DC Comic fans, like we have people kind of telling us, "Oh, I play this with my wife and things," so they want a bit more of a challenge and that's when we get to go into like the Free Play world, so once you're playing the story, you can then go explore all these locations and you find the slightly trickier puzzles, where it's like, oh, I need to figure out what I need to do here, what character do I need, what ability do I need to use? So having that kind of accessibility, so it's really accessible to get into the game, but then there's loads of depth to it, >> Right. >> so that's really cool for us and it's one of these things that we're really kind of happy with, 'cause we also find that the eight-year old kids run around doing all the hard puzzles and we struggle with them, so sometimes it swings, so. >> I was gonna say, so what are some of the things you measure to see if you're hitting that objective? Is it time in a level? Is it time being in there? I mean, what are some of the factors, that you guys are actually looking and measuring to see if you maybe have to make an adjustment, based on the actual behavior? >> So we love getting people to play the game, so we bring kids in and we'll sit there, then we see them playing it and if they're getting stuck, if there's something that's not really kind of standing out to them, if they're spending too much time in an area, not knowing what they're doing, we'll go okay, right, we need to change that, we need to signpost that differently, we need to turn round and say, how can we make it clearer to the player, so they know what they do, but also keep the rewards, so that they feel like they've achieved, that they feel like they've figured it out. >> Right. >> So that's one of the things, like if someone's getting stuck on a level and they're there for like three, four, five minutes and they don't know what to do, we don't want that experience for people, so we'll sit there and go, okay, how can we make that clearer? Is there something we can do? Is there something we can maybe flash a piece of Lego or something and sit there and go, these Lego bricks, maybe you wanna smash those up and that's also really cool, 'cause villains get to smash things up. >> Right, right. >> and go, okay, if I break that, I can make that clearer, then the player will then know what to do and they'll be able to progress. >> So it's really signaling is really the big kind of, way to help them get over that, versus completely changing that piece of the play? >> Yeah, we really do think that we can hopefully change the puzzles to be able to do that, we have had instances though, where we sit there and go, actually, no one gets this, this is too complicated, back to the drawing board and so we'll rip a puzzle out and sit there and go, actually, how do we change this, this is overly complicated, it's too confusing, let's do something different, let's do something that's really cool and it also means that we get to go, let's have a second stab at it and sometimes we get really cool results from it and some of the puzzles are even better than what we had previously, so. >> And the other piece I think is really interesting is clearly these are very well-known brands, Lego's a very well-known brand, DC is a very well-known brand, so you've got a narrative, you've got a story, you have kind of the look and feel, at the same time you want players to be able to do all kinds of things and you don't necessarily know where they're gonna go, how they're gonna interact, so how do you kind of balance the play with the narrative? >> So one of the great things about this game is from a story point of view and a narrative, we actually, it's an original creation and we worked really closely with DC and that allows us to kind of really help with the kind of pacing of the adventure, so as you're playing through and you start off on the first level, when you're breaking out of a prison, you then get dropped into the Open World Hub and we get to signpost people and say, hey, you can go over here to continue the story, but if you wanna go off and explore, you do that, go for it, go see what you can find and then we kind of have something that allows players to keep coming back, because these worlds, we know that there are massive fans of them, so if you turn round to someone and say, you can go to Gotham City, they'll know where they wanna go, like if I'm a Batman fan, I'm like, I'm going to the Iceberg Lounge, I wanna see what it is. So we give players that freedom to really explore it, but then always kind of let them be able to kind of return to the story path and that's another thing that we think is really important, because when people are playing these games, we want them to be able to make the choices of how they play the game. >> Right, great, that's interesting, so if there is a place, that they want to go to, 'cause they love Gotham City, they're big fans of Batman and it's not there, you guys hear a lot of feedback? I mean, do people come back, so that you've got to pump that into the next iteration of the game and the next update? >> Yeah, we do, we listen to what fans do and we've been doing that for years, so ever since we've been doing these DC titles, we sit there and go, what do people wanna do, what do people wanna see? One of the things that I love is that we have massive DC fans in the office, so a lot of the stuff, we'll sit there and we'll see like requests coming in on social media going, I really hope this character's there and we get to look at our character list and go, yep, he's there, who put it in? And then we go chat with them and they go, of course I'm gonna include that character, I love them and some of them are really obscure. >> Right. >> But yeah, we love listening to feedback and seeing what people expect and what they want to see from this world. >> It's really interesting balance, 'cause you get all the leverage from those known brands, those known characters, those known stories, >> Sure. >> but at the same time, as you said, you've got a lot of people, that are really into it and they're gonna hold you to a standard, >> Yeah. >> to make sure, that you're representing everything as they think it really should be. >> Yeah, very much so and this is the other thing about having fans in the office is we keep ourselves to that high standard as well, we sit there and go, it needs to be right, like I am a fan of Gorilla Grodd, he needs to do everything I want him to do, because I know this character inside and out and so when we have people, who are that passionate about the game on staff, we just wanna be able to share that with the world and so when we hear feedback, that people go, "Oh, we love it, it's exactly what I wanted," it's like we love that, it's incredible to know that we kind of feel like we've got it right, we've got these characters right. >> It's so cool though, just the integration of the Legos with all these other brands and just the, and it's not even the Lego blocks, the Lego people and how well it's been able to be integrated with all these other brands and the integration just seems to work so, so, so well. >> Yeah, no, I've been lucky enough to be with TT for over 11 years now, so being able to work on these games and see how we can do a Lego version of these stories and these worlds and these universes, I'm so privileged to be able to do that and the Lego version is different, so Lego DC Super-Villains is a world of DC, that you won't see anywhere else, because it's our take on it, >> Right. >> it's the developer and working with DC, being able to go, let's make something cool and working really closely with Lego and going, what sets are you making? Let's put those in, that's really cool, so. >> It's awesome, alright, well Phill, thanks for taking a few minutes, congratulations on the game and good luck on October 16th. >> Great, thank you very much, thank you. >> Alright, he's Phill, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from E3 and LA Convention center. Thanks for watching. (dynamic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. Okay, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE, live here in Las Vegas at The Venetian, this is Informatica Worlds exclusive coverage with theCUBE, Informatica World 2018, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Jim Kobielus, analyst at Wikibon, SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE, our next guest is Tracy Ring, Vice President at Deloitte Consulting, great to see you again. >> You as well! >> So, love havin' you on, last year, you know, we go through all the interviews and, you know it always comes up, and this is important, you know we are passionate about women in tech, inclusion and diversity, huge topic, the job's never done, in fact, I was in New York last week for a blockchain event, and I wore a shirt that said: Satoshi's Female. (Tracy laughing) And I literally was getting so many high fives and, but it's not just women in tech, there's a role that men play, this is, sort of an ongoing conversation so. What's the state of the industry, from your perspective, how do you see it? Obviously the data world is, indiscriminate data is data, >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> It should be 50/50. >> Yeah, you know I think that the, the opportunity is multi-faceted, right? So we're in a place where technology is changing unbelievably fast, we're graduating nearly as many men as women in, fields of science, data analytics, computer engineering, etc. But what we're not seeing, a combination of women in leadership roles as much as we would expect, we're not seeing the retention of women in those roles. And for me, I'm really passionate about the fact that supporting, attracting, and keeping women in those roles, is really critical, right? There's an interesting facet to how this all really, really plays together, Deloitte for 20 years has a women initiative, right? 20 years of supporting women, embracing them, helping them support leadership roles and, and I think that the time is now. If not, it's long overdue, to really support them within this field. I also think that women in data, an initiative that we're launching this year, and having our launch event today, is sort of super timely because women in data is not women who only become CIOs, or will only become CDOs, these are women that will be the Chief Marketing Officers, the CHROs, and using data to tell their stories. >> You know, we had a guest on earlier, who was a man, but he was the head of the CDO for the Ireland Bank, and Peter Burris asked the question, said hey, where did you come from technical? No, he came from the business side, who knows technology, this is what you're getting at, and I think this is something that we've been seeing as a pattern that you don't rise up through the ranks and be super nerdy, although that's cool too, and there's a lot more STEM action but there's also multiple vectors into the field. You can come from business, and know tech, and a lot more tech is consumable, and learnable, either online, or through some sort of other proficiency so, this is a big story and so, how do you guys, looking at that, at Deloitte, I know Deloitte's got the track record, but this all scales beyond Deloitte, right? It's an industry thing. >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> How are you guys seeing this? How are you looking at helping people, either connect the dots, or support each other? What's some of the latest and greatest? >> Yeah, I mean I think Informatica is part of what has created the case for change, right? We've democratized data integration, we have, you know, made self-service analytics, we've put data in the cloud in everyone's hands, right? So technology is out there more, every single day, and I think the unique part is, is that, when we think about diversity wholistically, and I think of diversity from ages, and geographic, and gender, etc. I think really being able to take all of that diverse experience, and be able to listen to business user's requirements in a way that they can hear it! And listen for something different, right? And brings skills to bare, that aren't necessarily there. I think if we can build better technology, that's more future-proofed, based on having a diverse crowd listening, and trying to build something that's far more compelling than, you know, I asked for X, build me X. I think when we really do our clients, and the world of justice is when we, you know, someone asks for X, and you ask them 10 more questions, and heavy--what about this? And what, and what, and what? And I think really being much more inquisitive, giving people the ability to be inquisitive, and bringing more opinions to the table to be inquisitive. >> And bringing more diversity of practice, makes the applications better, so that's clear. We see that in some of the conversations we have, but I got to ask about the question of roles, what are you seeing, kind of, you look at the trends, are there certain roles that are, that are being adopted with women in tech more than others? Less, trending down, up? What are some of the trend lines on, either roles in tech, for women? >> Yeah, you know, I think that over all, when I had the opportunity, so when we decided, we're going to launch a program within Informatica. We want the women who are going to be the Chief Data Officers of tomorrow. And it was a great question because, actually what we ended up saying is, the Chief Data Officers of tomorrow could be so many different current roles right now, right? And how do we really, kind of, attract the right women into this cohort, support them for a long year and, provide them the forum to network, connect with others, understand different career paths. You know, looking at what we're seeing, you know, with GDPR, and regulations, and all these other things happening, you know, the concepts and roles that didn't even exist years ago, right, so data governance leads and, Chief Analytic Officers, and all of these-- >> James: Or Chief AI Officers! >> Exac--(laughing) >> How do we bring women into the hottest fields like AI, deep learning? If you look at the research literature, out of, both the commercial and the academic world, many of the authors of the papers are men, I mean, more than the standard ratio of men to women in the corporate space, near as I can tell, from my deep reading. How do you break women into AI, for example, when they haven't been part of that overall research community? That's just a, almost like a rhetorical question. >> Yeah, how do you not, you know, it's just impossible to not bring them to bear, the skills, the talent, the ingenuity, I think it's absolutely mandatory, and someone said to me, they said well, why are the men not invited to this event? Why are they not in the cohort? And I said, you know, because there's a component of all this, that we want to grow and foster and support, and create opportunities. You know, one of the women that sat on our board today said, you know, I'm not somebody who's going to golf, I'm not someone who's going to go to a sports game, I'm going to meet you in the board room, and we're going to talk about compelling topics there. And so I think it's about, encouraging and fostering a new way of networking that's more aligned with what women are interested in, and what, you know, sometimes we do best and, I think creating an opportunity for a different type of everything, in the way that we operate is important. >> I think self-awareness, for men, and this also, creating a good vibe, right? Having a good vibe is critical, in my opinion, and also, you know, not judging people right, you know, based upon, you have some women say, hey I like to get dressed up and that's what I am, some people who don't want to go to sports and, some guys want this, so I think generally, there needs to be, kind of a reset, like hey, let's just have an open mind and a good vibe. >> It's like lunch and learns, you know, lunch and learns are, are a great enabler for centers of confidence, to get together on a regular basis, to talk about business and technical-related things, but also it's a social environment. How can you build more of those kinds of opportunities into the corporate culture, where, they're not skewing, the actual socializing, to traditionally male-dominated hobbies or interests, or traditionally female-dominated hobbies or interests? How can you have, sort of a balance, of those kinds of socialization opportunities in a professionally appropriate environment that also involve a fair amount of shop talk? 'cause that's what gets people bonding, promoted in their careers is that they do deep shop talk in the appropriate settings. >> Yeah, it's interesting, one of the women that I personally consider a mentor, she said if it wasn't for data, I wouldn't be where I am today. And she said, you know, I grew up in and industry where, unfortunately, I really didn't have a voice at the table, and my voice at the table came from data, it came from my ability to see connections, patterns, and detect things, and also for my ability to create networks of people, and make connections and pull things together in a way that my colleagues weren't doing. And, you know, when she tells that story I think that's, that's the template, right? >> John: That's the empowerment. >> We want to say, use everything at your bevy to bring the best value to your business end-users, and she's connecting the dots in a way that no one else had, and is using data as really, the impetis to really, solidify everything that she's saying, it's inarguable. >> That's a great story, it's a phenomenal story. >> It's just amazing. >> Once she got into power she really drove that hard, that's awesome. Well, let's take that to the next level, so, you know, I have a daughter as a junior at UCAL Berkeley, and she's a STEM girl, and so she's got a good vibe in there >> James: STEM girl, I have a stem girl too, mines 28 now. >> You know, and so, kind of aside, but she, turned away from computer science because, at, you know, in middle school the vibe wasn't there, right? And it was kind of a social thing, we mentioned social. You're advice to young women now? Because we're seeing people with the democratization, you see YouTube, you see all these tools, you got robots, you got makers, of course, you got data, you've seen a lot more touch points where people can, you know, ingratiate in unthreatened, un, you know, just, getting immersed in tech. So you have, you're starting to get people the taste of not being tracked into it. So, what's the advice for young folks trying to navigate? And is it networking groups, is it mentoring? What's the playbook in your mind? >> Yeah, I think it's a combination of everything that you've mentioned, right? I absolutely think that your network, and what one of my mentors calls your sleeper network, right? The network that's out there, the people that I worked with five years ago, and we worked, and were in a war room til two a.m. and you know, then I, I just got busy, right? And reactivating your sleeper networks, you know, having the courage to kind of, keep people apprised, using social media, in a way that people, you know, the number of people that say, oh I didn't know you were up to this, that, or the other, thank goodness you posted. And so, I think using all of the technology to your advantage. And I also think there's a component of someone, I mean, I had an MIS degree for undergrad, and I started out as a developer. >> You might have to explain what this is for the younger generation. (laughing) >> Oh, I know, how crazy is that! Oh my gosh, >> Is that in the DP department, was that in the DP department? >> Can you imagine. But I wasn't interested in technology that much, it was what was going to get me a job and, and I thought I would become a business analyst, I've stayed with it, and now really passionate about tech, but, I think there's a component of all this that, every job, you know, the CHROs, the CAOs, all of the roles that roll up, you know, every finance person I know that's exceptional, is phenomenal with data! Right? And so, I think, not only creating a network of people that are in the industry, but I think it's about telling the stories outside the industry, and telling the oh my gosh, you'll never believed what we learned today. And I think that's the magic of the stories, and being transparent. >> Well Tracy, you're an inspiration, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really love the story. I got to ask, what are you up to now? Tell us what's up with you, obviously you've moved on from MIS, Management Information Systems, part of the DP, Data Processing department, that's many computer days. >> Tracy: Oh my. >> Oh my God, we're goin' throwback there. >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> What're you up to now? What are you havin' fun with? >> Yeah, so my day job, I have the luxury of working across our cognitive analytic, and our PA alliances, which is an insane mouthful, but it means I get to work with some of our most exciting alliance partners that Deloitte is building solutions, and going to market, and getting really great customer stories under our belt. And I think really kind of blowing the doors off of, of what we did three years ago, five years ago, and 20 years ago, when MIS degrees were still being handed out, so. >> A lot more exciting now, isn't it. >> (laughing) It's way better now! So. >> I wish I was 23 again, you know, havin' a good time. (Tracy laughing) >> Yeah, so, really wholistically, seeing what we consider ecosystems and alliances, is, that's my day job. >> Tracy Ring, Vice President at Deloitte, great story, fun to have on theCUBE, also doing some great work, super exciting time, you got cloud, you got data, it really is probably one of the most creative times in the tech industry, it's super fun to get involved. This is theCUBE, here out in the open, at Informatica World in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Jim Kobielus, be back with more, stay with us! From Vegas, we'll be right back. >> Tracy: Thank you. (bubbly music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special CUBEConversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, the co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In theCUBE we're here with Alan Cohen, CUBE alumni, joining us today for a special segment on the future of technology and the impact to society. Always good to get Alan's commentary, he's the Chief Commercial Officer for Illumio, industry veteran, has been through many waves of innovation and now more than ever, this next wave of technology and the democratization of the global world is upon us. We're seeing signals out there like cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin to the disruption of industries from media and entertainment, biotech among others. Technology is not just a corner industry, it's now pervasive and it's having some significant impacts and you're seeing that in the news whether it's Facebook trying to figure out who they are from a data standpoint to across the board every company. Alan, great to see you. >> Always great to be here, I always feel like, I can't tell whether I'm at the big desk at ESPN or I've got the desk chair at CNBC, but that's what it's like being on theCUBE. >> Great to have you on extracting the signal noises, a ton of noise out there, but one of things of the most important stories that we're tracking is, that's becoming very obvious, and you're seeing it everywhere from Meed to all aspects of technology. Is the impact of technology to people in society, okay you're seeing the election, we all know what that is, that's now a front and center in the big global conversation, the Russian's role of hacking, the weaponizing of data, Facebook's taking huge brand hits on that, to emerging startups, and the startup game that we're used to in Silicon Valley is changing. Just the dynamics, I mean cryptocurrency raises billions of dollars but yet (laughs) something like 10, 20% of it's been hacked and stolen. It's a really wild west kind of environment. >> Well it's a very different environment. John, you and I have been in the technology industry certainly for a whole bunch of lines under our eyes over the years have gone there. My friend Tom Friedman has this phrase that he says, "Everybody's connected and nobody's in control," so the difference is that, as you just said, the tech industry is not a separate industry. The tech industry is in every product and service. Cryptocurrency is like, the concept of that money is just code. You know, our products and services are just code, it raises a couple of really core issues. Like for us on the security point of view, if I don't trust people with the products they're selling me, that I feel like they're going to be hacked, including my personal data, so your product now includes my personal information, that's a real problem because that could actually melt down commerce in a real way. Obviously the election is if I don't trust the social systems around it, so I think we're all at an, and I'd like to say world is still kind of like iRobot moment, and if you remember iRobot, it's like, people build all these robots to serve humankind and then one day the robots wake up and they go, "We have our own point of view on how things are going to work" and they take over, and I think whether it's the debate about AI, whether cryptocurrency's good or bad, or more importantly, the products and services I use, which are now all digitally connected to me, whether I trust them or not is an issue that I think everyone in our industry has to take a step back because without that trust, a lot of these systems are going to stop growing. >> Chaos is an opportunity, I think that's been quoted many times, a variety-- >> You sound like Jeff Goldblum in like Jurassic Park, yeah. (laughing) >> So chaos is upon us, but this is an opportunity. The winds are shifting, and that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs. The technology industry has to start working for us but we've got to be mindful of these blind spots and the blind spots are technology for good not necessarily just for profits, so that also is a big story right now. We see things like AI for good, Intel has been doing a lot of work on that area, and you see stars dedicated to societal impact, then young millennials, you see the demographic shift where they want to work on stuff that empowers people and changes society so a whole kind of new generation revolution and kind of hippie moment, if you look at the 60s, what the 60s were, right? >> Well there's people out in the street protesting, right? There were a couple of million women out in the street this weekend, so we are in that kind of moment again, people are not happy with things. >> And I believe this is a signal of a renaissance, a change, a sea change at enormous levels, so I want to get your thoughts on this. As technology goes out in mainstream, certainly from a security standpoint, your business Illumio is in that now where there's not a lot of control, just like you were mentioning before we came on that all the spends happening but no one has more than 4% market share. These are dynamics and this is not just within one vertical. What's your take on this, how do you view this sea change that's upon us, this tech revolution? >> Well, you know, think about it. You and I grew up in the era where clients server took over from main frame, right? So remember there was this big company called IBM and they owned a lot of the industry, and then it blew up for client server and then there were thousands of companies and it consolidated its way down, but when those thousands of new companies, like you didn't know what was going to be Apollo and what was going to be Oracle right? Like you didn't know how that was going to work out, there was a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty. I think now we're seeing this on a scale like that's 10x of this that there's so much innovation and there's so much connectedness going on very rapidly, but no one is in control. In the security market, you know, what's happening in our world is like, people said, okay I have to reestablish control over my data, I've lost that control, and I've lost it for good reasons, meaning I've evolved to the cloud, I've evolved to the app economy, I've done all of these things, and I've lost it for bad reasons because like am I, like I'm not really running my data center the way I should. We're in the beginning of a move in of people kind of reasserting that control, but it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle because the world itself is so much more dynamic and more distributed. >> It's interesting, I've been studying communities and online communities for over a decade in terms of dynamics. You know, from the infrastructural level, how packets move to a human interaction. It's interesting, you mentioned that we're all connected and no one's in control, but you now see a ground swell of organic self-forming networks where communities are starting to work together. You kind of think about the analog world when we grew up without computers and networks, you kind of knew everyone, you knew your neighbor, you knew who the town loony was, you kind of knew things and people watch each other's kids and parents sat from the porch, let the kid play, that's the way that I grew up, but it was still chaotic but yet somewhat controlled by the group. So I got to ask you, when you see things like cryptocurrency, things like KYC, know your customer, anti money laundering, which is, you know these are policy based things, but we're in a world now where, you know, people don't know who their neighbors are. You're starting to see a dynamic where people are-- >> Put the phone down. >> Asserting themselves to know their neighbor, to know their customer, to have a connected tissue with context and so your trust and reputation become super important. >> Well I think people are really, so like every time there is a shift in technology, there's scary stuff. There's the fuddy-duddy moment where people are saying, "Oh we can't use that," or "I don't know that," and you know, clearly we're in this kind of new kam-ree and explosion of this cloud mobile blah blah blah type of computing thing and ... Blah blah blah is always a good intersection when you don't have a term. Then things form around it, and just as you said, so if you think about 25 years ago, right, people created The WELL and there was community writing first bulletin boards and like now we have Facebook and you go through a couple of generations and for a while, things feel out of control and then it reforms. I personally am an optimist. Ultimately I believe in the inherent goodness of people, but inherent goodness leaves you open and then, you know, could be manipulated, and people figure these things out. Whether it's cryptocurrency or AI, they are really exciting technologies that don't have any ground rules, right? What's going to happen I believe is that people are going to reestablish ground rules, they're going to figure out some of the core issues, and some of these things may make it, and some of these things may not make it. Like cryptocurrency, like I don't know whether it makes it or not, but certainly the blockchain as a technology we're going to be incorporating in what we do, and maybe the blockchain replaces VPNs and last generation's way of protecting zeros and ones. If AI is figuring out how to read an MRI in five minutes, it's a good thing, and if the AI is teaching you how to exclude old folks for me finding jobs, it's a bad thing. I think as technology forms, there's always Spectre and 007, right? There's always good and bad sides and you know, I think if you believe-- >> I'm with you on that. I think value shifts and I think ultimately it's like however you want to look at it will shift to something, value activity will be somewhere else. Behind me in the bookshelf is a book called The World is Flat and you're quoted in it a lot as a futurist because you have inherently that kind of view, well that's not what you do for a living, but you're kind of in an opt-- >> Alan: Marketing, futurist, kind of same thing. >> Thomas Friedman, the book, that was a great book and at that time, it was game changing. If you take that premise into today where we are living in a flat world and look at cryptocurrency, and then over with the geo political landscape, I mean I just can't see why the Federal Reserve wouldn't reign in this cryptocurrency because if Japan's going to control a bunch of, or China, it's going to be some interesting conversations. I mean I would be like all over that if I was in the Federal Reserve. >> I think people-- Look, cryptocurrency's really interesting and I think people a little over-rotated. If you look at the amount of GDP that's invested in cryptocurrency, it's like, I don't know, there might've been, you know 20 years ago the same amount involved invested in Beanie Babies, right? I mean things show up for a while and the question is is it sustainable over time? Now I'm trained as an economist, you and I have had this conversation, so I don't know how you have a series of monetary without kind of governmental backing, I just don't understand. But I do understand that people find all kinds of interesting ways to trade, and if it's an exchange, like I mean what's the difference between gold and cryptocurrency? Somebody has ascribed a value to something that really has no efficacy outside of its usage. Yeah I mean you can make a filling or bracelets out of gold but it doesn't really mean anything except people agree to a unit of value. If people do that with cryptocurrency, it does have the ability to become a real currency. >> I want to pick your perspective on this being an economist, this is is the hottest area of cryptocurrency, it's also known as token economics, is a concept. >> Alan: Token economics. >> You know that's an area that theCUBE, with CUBE coins, experimenting with tokens. Tokens technically are used for things in mobile and whatnot but having a token as a utility in a network is kind of the whole concept, so the big trend that we're seeing and no one's really talking about this yet is instead of having a CTO, Chief Technology Officer, they're looking for a CEO, a Chief Economist Officer, because what you're seeing with the MVP economy we're living in and this gamification which became growth hack which didn't really help users, the notion of decentralized applications and token economics can open the door for some innovation around value and it's an economic problem, how you have a fiscal policy of your token, there's a monetary policy, what's it tied to? A product and a technology, so you now have a now a new, twisted, intertwined mechanism. >> Well you have it as part of this explosion, right? We're at a period of time, it feels like there's a great amount of uncertainly because everything's, you know, there's a lot of different forces and not everybody's in control of them, and you know, it's interesting. Google has this architecture, they call it BeyondCorp, where the concept is like networks are not trusted so I will just put my trust in this device, Duo Security's a great example of a company that's built a technology, a security technology around it which is completely antithetical to everything we know about networks and security. They're saying everything's the internet, I'll just protect the device that it's on. It's a kind of perfect architecture for a world like where nobody is in charge, so just isolate those, buy this, what is a device? It's a token too, it's a person, your iPhone's your personal token. Then over time, systems will form around it. I think we just have to, we always have to learn how to function in a different type of economy. I mean democracy was a new economy 250 years ago that kind of screwed around with most of the world, and a lot of people didn't think it would make it, in fact we went through two World War wars that it was a little on the edge whether democracy was going to make it and it seems to have done okay, like it was pretty good IPO to buy into. You know, in 1776. But it's always got risks and struggles with it. I think if, ultimately it comes together, it's whether a large group of people can find a way to function socially, economically, and with their personal safety in these systems. >> You bring up a great point, so I want to go to the next level in this conversation which is around-- >> Alan: You've got the wrong guy if you're going to the next level because I just tapped out. >> No, no, no we'll get you there. It's my job to get you there. The question is that everyone always wants to look at, whether it's someone looking at the industry or actors inside the industries across the board, mainly the tech and we'll talk about tech, is the question of are we innovating? You brought up some interesting nuances that we talk about with token economics. I mean Steve Jobs had the classic presentation where he had street signs, technology meets liberal arts. That's a mental image that people who know Steve Jobs, know Apple, was a key positioning point for Apple at that time which was let's make computers and technology connect with society, liberal arts. But we were just talking about is the business impact of technology, the economics, and that's just not like just some hand waving, making technology integrate with business. You're in the security business, There are some gamification technology, gamification that's business built into the products. So the question is, if we have the integration of business, technology, economics, policy, society rolling into the product definitions of innovation, does that change the lens and the aperture of what innovation is? >> I think it does, right? The IT industry's somewhere between three and four trillion dollars depends on how it counts in. It grows pretty slowly, it grows by a low single digit. That tells me as composite, like is that, that slow growth is a structural signal about how consumers of technology think in a macro sense. On a micro sense, things shift very rapidly, right? New platforms show up, new applications show up, all kinds of things show up. What I don't think we have done yet, to your point, is in this new integrated world, the role of technology is not just technology anymore. I don't think, you know you said you need Chief Economical Officer, what about Chief Political Officer? What about a Chief Social Officer? How many heads of HR make decisions about the insertion of systems into their business? And that's what this kind of iRobot concept is in my mind which is that you know, we are exceeding control of things that used to be done by human beings to systems and when you see control, the social mores, the political mores, the cultural mores, and the human emotional mores have to move with it. We don't tend to think about things like that. We're like, "I win and my competitors lose." Like technology used to be much more of a zero sum, my tech's better than yours. But the question is not just is my tech better than yours, is my customer better off in their industry for the consumption of my technology of inserting it into their offering or their service? You know what, that is probably going to be the next area of study. The other thing that's very important in whether, any of you have read Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, the nature of competition technology used to feel like a flat playing field and now the other thing that's rising is do you have super winners? And then what is the power of the super winners? So you mentioned whether it's Facebook or Google or Amazon or you know, or Microsoft, the FANG companies right? Their roles are so much more significant now than the Four Horsemen of the Nasdaq were in 2000 when you had Intel and Cisco and Oracle and Saht-in it's a different game. >> You're seeing that now. That's a good point, so you're reinforcing kind of this notion that the super players if you will are having an impact, you're mentioning the confluence of these new sectors, you know, government, policy, social are new areas. The question is, this sounds like a strategic imperative for the industry, and we're early so it's not like there's a silver bullet or is there, it doesn't sound like there, so to me that's not really in place yet, I mean. >> Oh no. We're not even in alpha. We have demo code for the new economy and we're trying to get the new model funded. >> John: That's the demo version, not the real version. It's the classic joke. >> Yeah this not the alpha or the beta version that like you're going to go launch it. If people think they're launching it, I think it's a little preliminary and you know, it's not just financial investment, it's like do I buy in? I'll tell you something that's really interesting. I've been visiting a bunch of our customers lately and the biggest change I'd say in the last two years is they now have to prove to their customers they're going to be good custodians of their data. Think about that, like you could go to any digital commerce you do, any website you use and you give them basically the ticket to the Furrier family privacy, you do, but you don't spend a lot of time questioning whether they're really going to protect your data. That has changed. And it's really changing in B2B and in government organizations. >> The role of data to us is regulation, GDPR in Europe, but this is a whole new dynamic. >> It's not just my data because I'm worried about my credit card getting hacked, I'm worried about my identity. Like am I going to show up as a meme in some social media feed that's substituted for the news? I don't want to use the FN word, but you know what I mean? It is a really brave new world. It's like a hyper-democracy and a hyper-risky state at the same time. >> We're living in an area of massive pioneering, new grounds, this is new territory so there's a lot of strategic imperatives that are yet not defined. So now let's take it to how people compete. We were talking before we came on camera, you mentioned the word we're in an MVP economy, minimum viable product concept, and you're seeing that being a standard operating procedure for essentially de-risking this challenge. The old way of you know, build it, ship it, will it work? We're seeing the impact from Hollywood to big tech companies to every industry. >> Well you've got a coffee mug for a company that does both. Amazon does MVP in entertainment, like we'll create one pilot and see if it goes as opposed to ordering a season for 17 million dollars to hey, let's try this feature and put it out on AWS. What's interesting is I don't think we've completely tilted but the question is will buyers of technology, of entertainment products, of any product start to say, "I'll try it." You know like, look, I've done four startups and I always know there's somebody I can go to get and try my early product. There are people that just have an appetite, right? The Jeffrey Moores, early adapter, all the way to the left of the-- >> They'll buy anything new. >> They'll try it, they're interested, they have the time and the resources, or they're just intellectually curious. But it was always a very small group of people in the IT industry. What I think that the MVP economy is starting to do is look, I Kickstarted my wallet. I don't know if I'm the only person who bought that skinny little wallet on Kickstarter, it doesn't matter to me, it had appeal. >> What's the impact of the MVP economy? Is it going to change to the competitive landscape like Peter Thiel was suggesting? Does it change the economics? Does it change the makeup of the team? All of the above? What's your thoughts on how this is going to impact? Certainly the encumbrance will seem to be impacted or not. >> I think two things happen. One, it attacks the structural way markets work. If you go back to classical economics, land, labor, and capital, and people who own those assets, now you add information as a fourth. If those guys were around now they would say that would be the fourth core asset, production, I'm sorry, means of production is the term. The people who can dominate that would dominate a market. Now that that's flattened out, you know, I think it pushes against the traditional structures and it allows new giants to kind of show up overnight. I mean the e-commerce market is rife with companies that have, like look at Stich Fix. A company driven by AI, fashions, tries to figure out what you like, sends it to you every month, just had a monster IPO. We invented, by the way the Spiegal Catalog, except like with a personal assistant and you know, it's changed that in just a short number of years. I think two things happen. One is you'll get new potential giants but certainly new players in the market quickly. Two, it'll force a change in the business model of every company. If you're in a cab in any city in the world, I'm not saying whether the app works there or not, Uber and Lyft has forced every cab company to show you here's the app to call the cab. They haven't quite caught up to the rest of the experience. What I think happens is ultimately, the larger players in an industry have to accommodate that model. For people like me, people who build companies or large technology companies, we may have to start thinking about MVPing of features early on, working with a small group, which is a little what the beta process is but now think about it as a commercial process. Nobody does it, but I bet sure a lot of people will be doing it in five years. >> I want to get your take on that approach because you're talking about really disrupting, re-imagining industry, the Spiegal catalog now becomes digital with technology, so the role of technology in business, we kind of talked about the intertwine of that and its nuance, it's going to get better in my opinion. But specifically the IT, the information technology industry is being disrupted. Used to be like a department, and the IT department will give you your phone on your desk, your PC on your desk or whatever, now that's being shattered and everyone that's participating in that IT industry is evolving. What's your take on the IT industry's disruption? >> Well look, it started 20 years ago when Marc Benioff and Salesforce decided to sell the sales forces instead of IT people, right? They went around to the end buyer. I don't think it's a new trend, I think a lot of technology leaders now figure out how to go to the business buyer directly and make their pitch and interestingly enough, the business buyer, if the IT team doesn't get on board, will do that. >> John: Because of cloud computing and ... >> Because of everything. The modern analog I think in our world is that the developers are increasingly in control. Like my friend Martin Casado up in Andreessen talks about this a lot. The traditional model on our industry is you build a product, you launch it, you launch your company, you work with the traditional analyst firms, you try to get a little bit of halo, you get customer references, those are the things you do and there was a very wall structured, for example, enterprise buying cycle. >> And playbook. >> Playbook, and there's the challenger sale and there's Jeffrey Moore and there's like seeing God. You've got your textbooks on how it's been done. As everything turns into code, the people who work with code for a living increasingly become the front end of your cycle and if you can get to them, that changes. Like I mean think about like, you know, Tom wrote about this actually in The World is Flat, like Linux started as a patchy. It didn't start with the IT department, it started with developers and there was the Linux foundation and now Linux is everything. >> There's a big enemy called the big mini computer, and not operating systems and work stations. >> Wiped out whole parts of Boston and other parts of the world, right? >> Exactly, that's why I moved out here. >> You filed client's server out here. >> I filed a smell of innovation. No but this is interesting because this location of industries is happening, so with that, so they also on the analog, so Martin's at Andreessen, so we'll do a little VC poke there at the VCs because we love them of course, they're being dislocated-- >> I don't (mumbles) my investors. >> Well no, their playbook is being challenged. Here's an example, go big or go home investment thesis seems not to be working. Where if you get too much cash on the front end, with the MVP economy we were just riffing on and with the big super powers, the Amazons and the Googles, you can't just go big or go home, you're going to be going home more than going big. >> I think they know that. I mean Dee-nuh Suss-man who's I think Chief Investment Officer at Nasdaq has a very well known talking line that there are half as many public companies as there were 10 years ago, so the exit scenario for our industry is a little bit different. We now have things like acqui-hires, right we have other models for monetization, but I think what the flip side of it is, we're in the-- >> Adapt or die because the value will shift. Liquidity's changing, which acqui-hires-- >> I think the investment community gets it completely and they spend a lot more time with the developer mindset. In fact I think there's been a doubling down focus on technical founders versus business founders for companies for just that reason because as everything turns to code, you got to hang out with the code community. I think there are actually-- >> You think there'll be more doubling down on technical founders? You do, okay. >> Yeah I think because that is ultimately the shift. There are business model shifts, but it's, you know, I mean like Uber was a business model shift, I mean the technology was the iPhone and GPS and they wrote an app for it, but it was a business model shift, so it can be a business model shift. >> And then scale. >> And then scale and then all of those other things. But I think if you don't think about developers when you're in our, and it's like we built Illumio because a developer could take the product and get started. I mean you can, developers actually can write security policy with our product because there's a class of customers, where as not everyone where that matters. There's other people where the security team is in charge or the infrastructure team is in charge but I think everything is based on zeros and ones and everything is based on code and if you're not sensitive to how code gets bought, consumed, I mean there's a GitHub economy which is I don't even have to write the code, I'll go look at your code and maybe use pieces of it, which has always been around. >> Software disruption is clear. Cloud computing is scale. Agile is fast, and with de-risking capabilities, but the craft is coming back and some will argue, we've talked about on theCUBE before is that, you know, the craftsmanship of software is moving to up the stack in every industry, so-- >> I think it's more like a sports league. I love the NBA, right? In the old days, your professional team, you'd scout people in college. Now they used to scout them in high school, now they're scouting kids in middle school. >> (laughs) That's sad. >> Well what it says is that you have to-- >> How can you tell? >> You know but they can, right? I think you know, your point about it craft, you're going to start tracking developers as they go through their career and invest and bet on them. >> Don't reveal our secrets to theCUBE. We have scouts everywhere, be careful out there. (laughs) >> But think about that, imagine it's like there's such a core focus on hiring from college, but we had an intern from high school two years ago. We hire freshman. >> Okay so let's go, I want to do a whole segment on this but I want to just get this point because we're both sports fans and we can riff on sports all day long. >> I'm just not getting the chance >> And the greatness of Tom Brady >> to talk about the Patriots. >> And Tom Brady's gotten his sixth finger attached to his hands for his sixth ring coming up. No but this is interesting. Sports is highly data driven. >> Alan: Yep. >> Okay and so what you're getting at here, with an MVP economy, token economics is more of a signal, not yet mainstream, but you can almost go there and think okay data driven gives you more accuracy so if you can bring data driven to the tech world, that's kind of an interesting point. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I mean look, I think you have to track everything. You have to follow things, and by the way, we have great tools now, you can track people through LinkedIn. There's all kinds of vehicles to tracking individuals, you track products, you track everything, and you know look, we were talking about this before we went on the show right, people make decisions based on analytics increasingly. Now the craft part is what's interesting and I'm not the complete expert, I'm on the business side, I'm not an engineer by training, but look a lot of people understand a great developer is better than five bad developers. >> Well Mark Andris' 10x is a classic example of that. >> There's clearly a star system involved, so if I think in middle school or in high school, you're going to be a good developer, and I'm going to track your career through college and I'm going to try to figure out how to attach. That's why we started hiring freshmen. >> Well my good friend Dave Girouard started a company that does that, will fund the college education for people that they want to bet on. >> Sure, they're just taking an option in them. >> Yeah, option on their earnings. Exactly. >> They are. >> It sounds like token economics to me. (laughs) >> You know you can sell anything. We are in that economy, you can sell those pieces. The good news is I think it can be a great flattener, meaning that it can move things back more to a meritocracy because if I'm tracking people in high school, I'm not worrying whether they're going to go to Stanford or Harvard or Northwestern, right? I'm going to track their abilities in an era and it's interesting, speaking about craft, you know, what are internships? They're apprenticeships. I mean it is a little bit like a craft, right? Because you're basically apprenticing somebody for a future payout for them coming to work for you and being skilled because they don't know anything when they come and work, I shouldn't say that, they actually know a lot of things. >> Alan, great to have you on theCUBE as always, great to come in and get the update. We'll certainly do more but I'd like to do a segment on you on the startup scene and sort of the venture capital dynamics, we were tracking that as well, we've been putting a lot of content out there. We believe Silicon Valley's a great place. This mission's out there, we've been addressing them, but we really want to point the camera this year at some of the great stuff, so we're looking forward to having you come back in. My final question for you is a personal one. I love having these conversations because we can look back and also look forward. You do a lot of mentoring and you're also helping a lot of folks in the industry within just your realm but also startups and peers. What's your advice these days? Because there's a lot of things, we just kind of talked a lot of it. When people come to you for advice and say, "Alan, I got a career change," or "I'm looking at this new opportunity," or "Hey, I want to start a company," or "I started a company," how is your mentoring and your advisory roles going on these days? Can you share things that you're advising? Key points that people should be aware of. >> Well look, ultimately ... I never really thought about it, you just asked the question so, ultimately, I think to me it comes down to own your own fate. What it means is like do something that you're really passionate about, do something that's going to be unique. Don't be the 15th in any category. Jack Welch taught us a long time ago that the number one player in a market gets 70% of the economic value, so you don't want to play for sixth place. It's like Ricky Bobby said, if you're not first, you're last. (John chuckles) I mean you can't always be first, but you should play for that. I think for a lot of companies now, I think they have to make sure that, and people participating, make sure that you're not playing the old playbook, you're not fighting yesterday's battle. Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind said, "There's a lot of money in building up an empire, "and there's even more money in tearing it down." There are people who enter markets to basically punish encumbrance, take share because of innovation, but I think the really inspirational is you know, look forward five years and find a practical but aggressive path to being part of that side of history. >> So are we building up or are we taking down? I mean it seems to me, if I'm not-- >> You're always doing both. The ocean is always fighting the mountains, right? That is the course of, right? And then new mountains come up and the water goes someplace else. We are taking down parts of the client server industry, the stack that you and I built a lot of our personal career of it, but we're building this new cloud and mobile stack at the same time. And you're point is we're building a new currency stack and we're going to have to build a new privacy stack. It's never, the greatest thing about our industry is there's always something to do. >> How has the environment of social media, things out there, we're theCUBE, we do our thing with events, and just in general, change the growth plans for individuals if you were, could speak to your 23 year old self right now, knowing what you know-- >> Oh I have one piece of advice I give everybody. Take as much risk as humanly possible in your career earlier on. There's a lot of people that have worked with me or worked for me over the years, you know people when they get into their 40s and they go, "I'm thinking about doing a startup," I go, "You know when you got two kids in college "and you're trying to fund your 401K, "working for less cash and more equity may not be "the most comfortable conversation in your household." It didn't work well in my household. I mean I'm like Benjamin Button. I started in big companies, I'm going to smaller companies. Some day it's just going to be me and a dog and one other guy. >> You went the wrong way. >> Yeah I went the wrong way and I took all the risk later. Now I was lucky in part that the transition worked. When I see younger folks, it's always like, do the riskiest thing humanly possible because the penalty is really small. You have to find a job in a year, right? But you know, you don't have the mortgage, and you don't have the kids to support. I think people have to build an arc around their careers that's suitable with their risk profile. Like maybe you don't buy into bitcoin at 19,000. Could be wrong, could be 50,000 sometime, but you know it's kind of 11 now and it's like-- >> Yeah don't go all in on 19, maybe take a little bit in. It's the play and run-- >> Dollar cost averaging over the years, that's my best fidelity advice. I think that's what's really important for people. >> What about the 45 year old executive out there, male or female obviously, the challenges of ageism? We're in economy, a gig economy, whatever you want to call, MVP economics, token economics, this is a new thing. Your advice to someone who's 45 who just says "Hey you're too old for our little hot startup." What should they do? >> Well being on the other side of that history I understand it firsthand. I think that you have an incumbent role in your career to constantly re-educate yourself. If you show up, whether you're a 25, 35, 45, 55, or 65, I hope I'm not working when I'm 75, but you never know right? (mumbles) >> You'll never stop working, that's my prediction. >> But you know have you mastered the new skills? Have you reinvented yourself along the way? I feel like I have a responsibility to feed the common household. My favorite part of my LinkedIn profile, it says, "Obedient worker bee at the Cohen household," because when I go home, I'm not in charge. I've always felt that it's up to me to make sure I'm not going to be irrelevant. That to me is, you know, that to me, I don't worry about ageism, I worry about did I-- >> John: Relevance. >> Yeah did I make myself self-obsolescent? I think if you're going to look at your career and you haven't looked at your career in 15 years and you're trying to do something, you may be starting from a deficit. So the question, what can I do? Before I make that jump, can I get involved, can I advise some small companies? Could I work part time and on the weekends and do some things so that when you finally make that transition, you have something to offer and you're relevant in the dialogue. I think that's, you know, nobody trains you, right? We're not good as an industry-- >> Having a good community, self-learning, growth mindset, always be relevant is not a bad strategy. >> Yeah, I mean because I find increasingly, I see people of all ages in companies. There is ageism, there is no doubt. There's financial ageism and then there's kind of psychological bias ageism, but if you keep yourself relevant and you are the up to speed in your thing, people will beat a path to want to work for you because there's still a skill gap in our industry-- >> And that's the key. >> Yeah, make sure that you're on the right side of that skill gap, and you will always have something to offer to people. >> Alan, great to have you come in the studio, great to see you, thanks for the commentary. It's a special CUBEConversation, we're talking about the future of technology impact the society and a range of topics that are emerging, we're on a pioneering, new generational shift and theCUBE is obviously covering the most important stories in Silicon Valley from figuring out what fake news is to impact to the humans around the world and again, we're doing our part to cover it. Alan Cohen, CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017, brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live here in Austin, Texas for the CNCF's two conferences, CloudNativeCon, which was yesterday, and two days, today and tomorrow, KubeCon for Kubernetes' conference. This is theCUBE, of course, from SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Dan Kohn, is the executive director of the CNCF, the man who put it all together. Congratulations. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Oh, absolutely. Thrilled to have you guys back here again. >> So you kind of doing a victory lap here now, high fiving each other? >> Dan: Great hugs. >> John: Great event. >> Laughing: I'm glad it's a good event, and I am hearing fantastic feedback that folks are thrilled to be here. But we sort of describe this moment for the organization and the community as being the end of the beginning. >> John: Yeah. >> Where we now have all the major cloud vendors, all of the biggest enterprise software companies. We have a core group of 14 projects anchored by Kubernetes, but tons and tons of work in front of us. >> And tons of success, so I'm just going to read a couple of highlights from yesterday. There's a lot today. Baidu joins the CNCF, a lot of scaling production application examples, 31 new silver end-user members joined, Alibaba Cloud update to platinum, CoreDNS 1.0, Containerd, Fluentd, Jaeger, tons of news. Obviously, we've been pumping out the coverage. Today, again, more and more great goodness. But really interesting is that you guys have put a frame around this community to allow it to grow, to fertilize the open source vibe, which is all cloud but yet scaled. And you put up a slide I want to get your reaction to that I thought was compelling yesterday during your keynote. It was the flywheel, circle, and it said projects, products, profit. >> Dan: Right. >> And not that you're promoting profit, but you're not hiding the ball, either, saying, hey, you know what? There's a lot of commercial interest in cloud, obviously. We saw AWS' success last week. And that is if you create good products in this community framework, there's profit to be had. >> Right. So first of all, I should admit to plagiarizing that slide from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. >> And similarly, I think you can look at a lot of aspects... >> It's an open source feature. >> Dan: Yes. >> Free for you to use. >> John: Right. >> Similarly, I think there's a lot of ways in which Kubernetes is trying to build on the success of Linux. And Jim even describes Kubernetes as the Linux of the cloud. >> John: Yeah. >> Stu: Yeah. >> John: That's a good point. >> Dan, one of the things we've been talking around Kubernetes is you talk about scale. >> Dan: Right. >> Talk about scale of the CNCF. You have 4 to 14 projects. People are a little worried when you get all the vendors around here and there's all these projects. It's a foundation thing, it's going to go off the rails. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Customers aren't going to have a voice. How do we make sure we kind of learn from some of the things that other projects have had challenges with in the past? >> And I think that's our advantage, which is the great thing about coming later than some of the other foundations, is we can look at where they had successes and where they had issues. And our aspiration for CNCF is to get to go make entirely new mistakes rather than replicating some of the issues that have come before. And so really from the beginning of CNCF, we had a somewhat unusual and frankly a little bit cumbersome charter where I describe it at times as a three-ring circus. We have a governing board made up of the vendors that are putting a lot of money into the community, but they don't get to run the projects and they don't even get to pick the projects. Instead, they appoint six of the nine members of an independent technical oversight committee, kind of like the Supreme Court. And then we have a third group in the end-user community that I'm thrilled to say is now up to 28 members in it. They appoint one of those folks. We finally got that working. We have Sam Lambert, the director of infrastructure at GitHub, who has just made a huge commitment to Kubernetes and is moving all their infrastructure over into it. Those seven appoint the last two. And so that body, and they just had their public meeting a couple hours ago. They feel very strongly about their independence, about their reputation, that they're trying to make very good judgments based on what they're seeing in the marketplace. >> That's interesting, the three-ring circle. I like how you put it. But let's talk about the end-user piece because I think that's critical. One of the things we were commenting earlier from the Lyft folks was you have a lot of end users who have built some large-scale systems out of their own sheer necessity. >> Dan: Definitely. >> And that is now being donated in. We saw Kubernetes come in with, you shepherded beautifully, went from Google, but you've got Lyft donating an amazing product convoy. >> This first convoy has a huge amount of excitement. And what was fun was, actually, on the same stage that they contributed back in LA in September, Uber contributed a separate project. Now, unlike Uber and Lyft, the two projects are in no way competitive- >> John: Yeah. >> Like Jaeger is really fantastic tracing one. But what they have in common is that they're companies that have had to grow from nothing to extremely high scale and then had problems that they solved. And they wanted to share that expertise with us. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. Because we've been speculating, on theCUBE, we've been kind of thinking, an editorial, but just that this is all good business. Now, that's pretty obvious, right? You're starting to see this kind of contribution, the gifts that keep on giving. These are significant code. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Not like, okay, let's start a little group and huddle and build something organically. You have real goodness coming in from Google, Uber, Lyft, and there's a million others. >> Dan: Right. >> How is that changing the game? Certainly accelerating it. That's really bringing goods to the table. >> Right. I think the whole... >> You have to manage it. >> Well, and for what it's worth, I don't actually manage the projects. And so we do provide a set of services- >> John: The community? >> -to them and we help them, we market them. But one of the unusual aspects of CNCF is that the projects do actually manage themselves. A little bit of guidance from the TOC, but we really are unusual in that sense. And that's one of the reasons the projects have been... >> And what's interesting is, to connect the dots, though, one step further, you're talking about a commercial entity donating massive intellectual property in the open for all the goodness of everyone else. But yet that flywheel is continuing. They're still using it. So it is inherently commercial dynamic. >> Right. And back to that circle, I think really the underlying concept is that companies agree that sharing key parts of their infrastructure has a huge amount of value to the whole ecosystem, to each other. And then they're absolutely eager to compete above that. And so you can look at it with the public clouds where we have now Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle all at the table. They are absolutely fierce competitors. But they're saying that this specific software infrastructure layer isn't the area that they want to compete. They want to compete on all the value-added services, customer service, et cetera. >> Dan, I wonder if you can speak to how CNCF connects to some of the broader communities out there. Things like Kata containers got announced coming out of the OpenStack group. You've got a serverless track happening here, kind of extends some of where Kubernetes is going. How does CNCF fit into the broader... >> Sure. And it's definitely the case that all the innovation out there cannot happen in CNCF. Most obviously, everything that we do, almost everything depends on Linux. And so that's our parent organization, the Linux Foundation. But we've had a good collaboration with Jonathan Bryce from OverStack. They have two booths on the floor here at the show. And we've spoken to Clear Containers and RunV, the two predecessors in the past. But the part that I'm particularly pleased with for Kata containers is that it is an OCI-compliant runtime, that's another sister organization, and is really designed to work well for Kubernetes. And then they can pitch that and let the market go decide which container runtimes they find the most valuable. >> Obviously a lot of traction here in terms of the sentiment around service meshes and pluggable lock-in textures. That's been very cool. But security came up. So I want to get your thoughts around security, obviously storage and these older models around how to deal with storage and networking. Obviously, always in the action. >> Yeah. >> But security is top of mind for everyone. How is that being addressed? You know, talk is out there... >> Sure. I mean our philosophy on this is that moving to cloud-native and particularly the continuous integration and continuous development that goes along with that is the most important step that you can do to help secure your infrastructure. And Equifax is the example everyone always brings up. But there was a case where they were using known insecure software and they didn't have the processes up to place where instead of doing quarterly updates or monthly updates, you want to be doing dozens of updates per day. And a cloud-native infrastructure allows you to do that. >> What's next for you? Because you've got great traction with both community response, and the community has been absolutely amazing, the quality of people, level has been great, but also at the funding sponsors. You've got a lot of people that are involved. What's next? What happens next? What do you envision happening? What's the plan, and then how do you view that evolving? >> Well, I hate to fall into the buzzword implosion here, but if you go back to the crossing the chasm metaphor, I think we're still very much just in the early adopter phase. 2018 could very well be the moment that we jump over to the early majority. And I do feel like this whole community now has the velocity to do that and that we're on track for it. But as that happens, there's just far, far more people who need to be educated so they understand the projects and the options and how to work with them. And then hopefully they go from just being consumers of these technologies to contributors and that we can welcome them into our community and hopefully get the advantage of their expertise as well. >> I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Stu and I were talking about. Stu, you and I were talking about the notion of value creation above the stack, and then how Kubernetes, although some could say being commoditized, but it's also creating value because with that consistency of Kubernetes, you can now create value. So we believe, and I want to get your reaction to this, because we think a whole new ecosystem dynamic will emerge of a new kind of ecosystem. And if this new app developer combined with software engineering, which is really going on, you're talking about the cloud, the app developers will just build in value, that value creation will be rewarded. That's where monetization will be happening. >> And if I could build off that... >> John: Yeah. >> Dan, I loved one of your opening comments. You quoted, "exciting times for boring infrastructure, "maybe too exciting." So this week we've been teasing out there's a lot of work to make that infrastructure boring. You've got everybody on this floor, the CNCF board, lots of new projects making that. Where the action is and what this is going to create is that application monetization and the speed and agility of being able to create these cool new cloud-native applications out there. So it's interesting dynamic, spans broad pieces of this, layers of the stack there. >> Yeah. Well, I will point out that there was an odd level of unanimity of just a ton of different leaders in the community, in keynotes from Craig McLuckie and Chen Goldberg and others where they all agree that Kubernetes is not by any means the ultimate answer or the final answer. I think everybody now expects to see Kubernetes as a core aspect of the infrastructure for software for the next decade or more. But there's a belief that there's a whole ton of value that needs to be added above it, particularly to try and show for a regular application developer who just has a PHP app or no-GS microservices or anything else what's the easiest way to go from having a piece of software and deploying it effectively. >> Dan, so it's interesting. You watch the people on the outside. They're like, oh, look at Kubernetes. They're all holding hands and saying Kumbaya. We know there's some spirited debates that happen- >> Dan: Definitely. >> In the code, some projects that are sometimes competing up there. Why has the community come together, and where are some of the areas that we still need to work on and improve to help customers going forward? >> And again, I think they have the big advantage of having watched other communities that didn't value community and consensus and the ability to work through their issues. And so thankfully, we just have a ton of really capable engineers who also have some of those social or personal qualities that they care about working these things out. And to date, at least, I think most of those disagreements have been settled pretty amicably and in a positive direction. I think there's still huge swathes of this space that are still up in the air. Storage is an obvious one where there's a ton of work going on in a storage working group of CNCF. Serverless is another where I think everyone agrees that the application deployment model of AWS Lambda is really exciting and has things that people should replicate and should be brought over to Kubernetes. But how that should happen, what the software is, et cetera, there's still, in fact, we have our first serverless track today here at KubeCon where several different competing approaches are all talking about what they'd like to do. >> Awesome stuff. And you also announced some dates for next year, December 11 and 13 in Seattle. >> Dan: Yes. >> Okay. >> Dan: That's a year from now. >> November 14 and 15 in Shanghai. >> Now, you and I met in Hangzhou in the lobby, which was just amazing. But I certainly am hoping to convince you to go back to China with us. This will be our first event... >> I got a three-year visa. >> Good, yeah, that's the exactly right one. But this will be our first event in China, which I think is just a huge opportunity. We now have Baidu, Tencent, Huawai, ZTE, a number of startups. There's just so much excitement for this space over there that we're really excited to satisfy. >> Stu: And Copenhagen in May. >> And that's the last one. Thank you. May 2 to 4 in Copenhagen, and we're really excited for the event, to bring it to Europe and the rest of the world. >> Okay. So you've been working like a dog, you've been working hard. I've seen you in China. It's serendipitous. But it's not without being mentioned that this has been great effort by your team and the Linux Foundation and Jim and the whole team. But congratulations. Are you having a pinch me moment? I know it's too early to do a victory lap. >> But you've got to be pretty excited. >> Yeah. It really has been a great thing for the foundation that we sort of accomplished many of our 2018 and 2019 goals this year. But I'm sure we're going to find plenty of stuff to do next year. >> And your goal for the next 6 to 12 months, what's on your top three to-do's, continue the momentum? Share your API for... >> Yeah. What's great is that we really have plenty of members. We'd always like to add new ones and serve the ones we have better. But right now, the focus is really about providing better services to our projects. All of them feel overworked. They would love help on documentation, on marketing, on messaging about it, and some of them need help with testing development and other things. So that's really what we're buckling down on. >> Great community are going to test them, being here on the ground, personally present at creation. And I was standing there with J.J. and Lew Tucker, OpenStack three years ago, talking about Kubernetes. We were kind of ripping. We couldn't have imagined, then, obviously, they bolted it on last year with your event. Now second year here, huge community... >> But you have 4,100 folks here, is more than the previous four events combined. >> Yeah, awesome. >> So it really is exciting. >> TheCUBE, always on the ground. And sometimes the squirrel finds a nut. We found a cloud-native foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. CNCF, Cloud-Native Compute Foundation, really a new, growing, and relevant community for cloud and a new way to do software and reimagine the future from software engineering to full application development, a new way. This is theCUBE's coverage, and we are here live in Austin. More live coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. [Techno Music]