(gentle music) >> Hello and welcome today's session theCUBE presentation of AWS Startup Showcase powered by theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, for your host of theCUBE. This is a session on breaking through with DevOps data analytics tools, cloud management tools with MontyCloud and cloud management migration, I'm your host. Thanks for joining me, I've got two great guests. Venkat Krishnamachari who's the co-founder and CEO of MontyCloud and Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, solution architect research computing group St. Louis University. Thanks for coming on to talk about transforming IT, day one day two operations. Venkat, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, John. So in this session, I really want to get into this cloud powerhouse theme you guys were talking about before on our previous Cube Conversations and what it means for customers, because there is a real market shift happening here. And I want to get your thoughts on what solution to the problem is basically, that you guys are targeting. >> Yeah, John, cloud migration is happening rapidly. Not an option. It is the current and the immediate future of many IT departments and any type of computing workloads. And applications and services these days are better served by cloud adoption. This rapid acceleration is where we are seeing a lot of challenges and we've been helping customers with our platform so they can go focus on their business. So happy to talk more about this. >> Yeah and Shruthi if you can just explain your relationship with these guys, because you're a cloud architect, you can try to put this together. MontyCloud is your customer, talk about your solution. >> Yeah I work at the St. Louis University as the solutions architect for the office of Vice President of Research. We can address St. Louis University as SLU, just to keep it easy. SLU is a 200-year-old university with more focus on research. And our goal at the Research Computing Group is to help researchers by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities that help them to advance their research. So here in SLU research portfolio, it's quite diverse, right? So we do research on vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence, and many other really interesting areas, and you know, it involves really large data sets. So one of the research computing groups' ambitious plan is to move as many high-end computation applications from on-prem to the AWS. And I lead all the cloud initiatives for the St. Louis university. >> Yeah Venkat and I, we've been talking, many times on theCUBE, previous interviews about, you know, the rapid agility that's happening with serverless and functions, and, you know, microservices start to see massive acceleration of how fast cloud apps are being built. It's put a lot of pressure on companies to hang on and manage all this. And whether you're a security group was trying to lock down something, or it's just, it's so fast, the cloud development scene is really fun and you're implementing it at a large scale. What's it like these days from a development standpoint? You've got all this greatness in the cloud. What's the DevOps mindset right now? >> SLU is slowly evolving itself as the AWS Center of Excellence here in St. Louis. And most of the workflows that we are trying to implement on AWS and DevOps and, you know, CICD Pipelines. And basically we want it ready and updated for the researchers where they can use it and not have to wait on any of the resources. So it has a lot of importance. >> Research as code, it's like the internet, infrastructure as code is DevOps' ethos. Venkat, let's get into where this all leads to because you're seeing a culture shift in companies as they start to realize if they don't move fast, and the blockers that get in the way of the innovation, you really can't get your arms around this growth as an opportunity to operationalize all the new technology, could you talk about the transformation goals that are going on with your customer base. What's going on in the market? Can you explain and unpack the high level market around what you guys are doing? >> Sure thing, John. Let's bring up the slide one. So they have some content that Act-On tabs. John, every legal application, commercial application, even internal IT departments, they're all transforming fast. Speed has never been more important in the era we are today. For example, COVID research, you know, analyzing massive data sets to come up with some recommendations. They don't demand a lot from the IT departments so that researchers and developers can move fast. And I need departments that are not only moving current workloads to the cloud they're also ensuring the cloud is being consumed the right way. So researchers can focus on what they do best, what we win, learning and working closely with customers and gathering is that there are three steps or three major, you know, milestone that we like to achieve. I would start the outcome, right? That the important milestone IT departments are trying to get to is transforming such that they're directly tied to the key business objectives. Everything they do has to be connected to the business objective, which means the time and you know, budget and everything's aligned towards what they want to deliver. IT departments we talk with have one common goal. They want to be experts in cloud operations. They want to deliver cloud operations excellence so that researchers and developers can move fast. But they're almost always under the, you know, they're time poor, right? And there is budget gaps and that is talent and tooling gap. A lot of that is what's causing the, you know, challenges on their path to journey. And we have taken a methodical and deliberate position in helping them get there. >> Shruthi hows your reaction to that? Because, I mean, you want it faster, cheaper, better than before. You don't want to have all the operational management hassles. You mentioned that you guys want to do this turnkey. Is that the use case that you're going after? Just research kind of being researchers having the access at their fingertips, all these resources? What's the mindset there, what's your expectation? >> Well, one of the main expectations is to be able to deliver it to the researchers as demand and need and, you know, moving from a traditional on-prem HBC to cloud would definitely help because, you know, we are able to give the right resources to the researchers and able to deliver projects in a timely manner, and, you know, with some additional help from MontyCloud data platform, we are able to do it even better. >> Yeah I like the onboarding thing and to get an easy and you get value quickly, that's the cloud business model. Let's unpack the platform, let's go into the hood. Venkat let's, if you can take us through the, some of the moving parts under the platform, then as you guys have it's up at the high level, the market's obvious for everyone out there watching Cloud ops, speed, stablism. But let's go look at the platform. Let's unpack that, do you mind pick up on slide two and let's go look at the what's going on in the platform. >> Sure. Let's talk about what comes out of the platform, right? They are directly tied to what the customers would like to have, right? Customers would like to fast track their day one activities. Solution architects, such as Shruthi, their role is to try and help get out of the way of the researchers, but we ubiquitous around delegating cloud solutions, right? Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect. It's as if you've instantly turned on a cloud solution architect that should, they can bring online and say, Hey, I want help here to go faster. Our lab then has capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts, drive consumption in the right way. One of the key things about driving consumption the right way is to ensure that we prevent a security cost or compliance issues from happening in the first place, which means you're shifting a lot of the operational burden to left and make sure that when provisioning happens, you have a guard rails in place, we help with that, the platform solves a problem without writing code. And an important takeaway here, John is that a was built for architects and administrators who want to move fast without having to write a ton of code. And it is also a platform that they can bring online, autonomous bots that can solve problems. For example, when it comes to post provisioning, everybody is in the business of ensuring security because it's a shared model. Everybody has to keep an eye on compliance, that is also a shared responsibility, so is cost optimization. So we thought wouldn't it be awesome to have architects such as Shruthi turn on a compliance bot on the platform that gives them the peace of mind that somebody else and an autonomous bot is watching our 24 by 7 and make sure that these day two operations don't throw curve balls at them, right? That's important for agility. So platform solves that problem with an automation approach. Going forward on an ongoing basis, right, the operation burden is what gets IT departments. We've seen that happen repeatedly. Like IT department, you know, you know this, John, maybe you have some thoughts on this. You know, you know, if you have some comments on how IT can face this, then maybe that's better to hear from you. >> No, well first I want to unpack that platform because I think one of the advantages I see here and that people are talking about in the industry is not only is the technology's collision colliding between the security postures and rapid cloud development, because DevOps and cloud, folks, are moving super fast. They want things done at the point of coding and CICB pipeline, as well as any kind of changes, they want it fast, not weeks. They don't want to have someone blocking it like a security team, so automation with the compliance is beautiful because now the security teams can provide policies. Those policies can then go right into your platform. And then everyone's got the rules of the road and then anything that comes up gets managed through the policy. So I think this is a big trend that nobody's talking about because this allows the cloud to go faster. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? >> No, precisely right. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. >> Yeah, you know, I just wanted to bring up one of the case studies that we read on cloud and use their compliance bot. So REDCap, the Research Electronic Data Capture also known as REDCap is a web application. It's a HIPAA web application. And while the flagship projects for the research group at SLU. REDCap was running on traditional on-prem infrastructure, so maintaining the servers and updating the application to its latest version was definitely a challenge. And also granting access to the researchers had long lead times because of the rules and security protocols in place. So we wanted to be able to build a secure and reliable enrollment on the cloud where we could just provision on demand and in turn ease the job of updating the application to its latest version without disturbing the production environment. Because this is a really important application, most of the doctors and researchers at St. Louis University and the School of Medicine and St. Louis University Hospital users. So given this challenge, we wanted to bring in MontyCloud's cloud ops and, you know, security expertise to simplify the provisioning. And that's when we implemented this compliance bot. Once it is implemented, it's pretty easy to understand, you know, what is compliant, what is noncompliant with the HIPAA standards and where it needs an remediation efforts and what we need to do. And again, that can also be automated. It's nice and simple, and you don't need a lot of cloud expertise to go through the compliance bot and come up with your remediation plan. >> What's the change in the outcome in terms of the speed turnaround time, the before and after? So before you're dealing with obviously provisioning stuff and lead time, but just a compliance closed loop, just to ask a question, do we have, you know, just, I mean, there's a lot of manual and also some, maybe some workflows in there, but not as not as cool as an instant bot that solve yes or no decision. And after MontyCloud, what are some of the times, can you share any data there just doing an order of magnitude. >> Yeah, definitely. So the provisioning was never simpler, I mean, we are able to provision with just one or two clicks, and then we have a better governance guardrail, like Venkat says, and I think, you know, to give you a specific data, it, the compliance bot does about more than 160 checks and it's all automated, so when it comes to security, definitely we have been able to save a lot of effort on that. And I can tell you that our researchers are able to be 40% more productive with the infrastructure. And our research computing group is able to kind of save the time and, you know, the security measures and the remediation efforts, because we get customized alerts and notifications and you just need to go in and, you know. >> So people are happier, right? People are getting along at the office or virtually, you know, no one is yelling at each other on Slack, hey, where's? Cause that's really the harmony here then, okay. This is like a, I'm joking aside. This is a real cultural issue between speed of innovation and the, what could be viewed as a block, or just the time that say security teams or other teams might want to get back to you, make sure things are compliant. So that could slow things down, that tension is real and there's some disconnects within companies. >> Yeah John, that's spot on, and that means we have to do a better job, not only solving the traditional problems and make them simple, but for the modern work culture of integrations. You know, it's not uncommon like you cut out for researchers and architects to talk in a Slack channel often. You say, Hey, I need this resource, or I want to reconfigure this. How do we make that collaboration better? How do you make the platform intelligent so that the platform can take off some of the burden off of people so that the platform can monitor, react, notify in a Slack channel, or if you should, the administrator say, Hey, next time, this happens automatically go create a ticket for me. If it happens next time in this environment automatically go run a playbook, that remediates it. That gives a lot of time back that puts a peace of mind and the process that an operating model that you have inherited and you're trying to deliver excellence and has more help, particularly because it is very dynamic footprint. >> Yeah, I think this whole guard rail thing is a really big deal, I think it's like a feature, but it's a super important outcome because if you can have policies that map into these bots that can check rules really fast, then developers will have the freedom to drive as fast as they want, and literally go hard and then shift left and do the coding and do all their stuff on the hygiene side from the day, one on security is really a big deal. Can we go back to this slide again for the other project? There's another project on that slide. You talked about RED, was it REDCap, was that one? >> Yeah. Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. >> So SCAER, the Sinfield Center for Applied Economic Research at SLU is also known as SCAER. They're pretty data intensive, and they're into some really sophisticated research. The Center gets daily dumps of sensitive geo data sensitive de-identified geo data from various sources, and it's a terabyte so every day, becomes petabytes. So you know, we don't get the data in workable formats for the researchers to analyze. So the first process is to convert this data into a workable format and keep an analysis ready and doing this at a large scale has many challenges. So we had to make this data available to a group of users too, and some external collaborators with ads, you know, more challenges again, because we also have to do this without compromising on the security. So to handle these large size data, we had to deploy compute heavy instances, such as, you know, R5, 12xLarge, multiple 12xLarge instances, and optimizing the cost and the resources deployed on the cloud again was a huge challenge. So that's when we had to take MontyCloud help in automating the whole process of ingesting the data into the infrastructure and then converting them into a workable format. And this was all automated. And after automating most of the efforts, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers. So MontyCloud's data platform also helped us with automating the risk, you know, the resource optimization process and that in turn helped bring the costs down, so it's been pretty helpful then. >> That's impressive weeks to days, I mean, this is the theme Venkat speed, speed, speed, hybrid, hybrid. A lot of stuff happening. I mean, this is the new normal, this is going to make companies more productive if they can get the apps built faster. What do you see as the CEO and founder of the company you're out there, you know, you're forging new ground with this great product. What do you see as the blockers from customers? Is it cultural, is it lack of awareness? Why aren't people jumping all over this? >> Only people aren't, right. They go at it in so many different ways that, you know, ultimately be the one person IT team or massively well-funded IT team. Everybody wants to Excel at what they're delivering in cloud operations, the path to that as what, the challenging part, right? What are you seeing as customers are trying to build their own operating model and they're writing custom code, then that's a lot of need for provisioning, governance, security, compliance, and monitoring. So they start integrating point tools, then suddenly IT department is now having a, what they call a tax, right? They have to maintain the technical debt while cloud service moving fast. It's not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to suddenly consume a brand new resource. And as you know, AWS throws up a lot more services every month, right? So suddenly you're not keeping up with that service. So what we've been able to look at this from a point of view of how do we get customers to focus on what they want to do and automate things that we can help them with? >> Let me, let me rephrase the question if you don't mind. Cause I I didn't want to give the impression that you guys aren't, you guys have a great solution, but I think when I see enterprises, you know, they're transforming, right? So it's not so much the cloud innovators, like you guys, it's really that it's like the mainstream enterprise, so I have to ask you from a customer standpoint, what's some of the cultural things are technical reasons why they're not going faster? Cause everyone's, maybe it's the pandemic's forcing projects to be double down on, or some are going to be cut, this common theme of making things available faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure is what cloud does. What are some of the enterprise challenges that they have? >> Yeah, you know, it might be money for right, there's some cultural challenges like Andy Jassy or sometimes it's leadership, right? You want top down leadership that takes a deterministic step towards transformation, then adequately funding the team with the right skills and the tools, a lot of that plays into it. And there's inertia typically in an existing process. And when you go to cloud, you can do 10X better, people see that it doesn't always percolate down to how you get there. So those challenges are compounded and digital transformation leaders have to, you know, make that deliberate back there, be more KPI-driven. One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is that the leadership decides that here are our top business objectives and KPIs. Now if we want the software and the services and the cloud division to support those objectives when they take that approach, transformation happens. But that is a lot more easier said than done. >> Well you're making it really easy with your solution. And we've done multiple interviews. I've got to say you're really onto something really with this provisioning and the compliance bots. That's really strong, that the only goes stronger from there, with the trends with security being built in. Shruthi, got to ask you since you're the customer, what's it like working with MontyCloud? It sounds so awesome, you're customer, you're using it. What's your review, what's your- What's your, what's your take on them? >> Yeah they are doing a pretty good job in helping us automate most of our workflows. And when it comes to keeping a tab on the resources, the utilization of the resources, so we can keep a tab on the cost in turn, you know, their compliance bots, their cost optimization tab. It's pretty helpful. >> Yeah well you're knocking projects down from three weeks to days, looking good, I mean, looking real strong. Venkat this is the track record you want to see with successful projects. Take a minute to explain what else is going on with MontyCloud. Other use cases that you see that are really primed for MontyCloud's platform. >> Yeah, John, quick minute there. Autonomous cloud operations is the goal. It's never done, right? It there's always some work that you hands-on do. But if you set a goal such that customers need to have a solution that automates most of the routine operations, then they can focus on the business. So we are going to relentlessly focused on the fact that autonomous operations will have the digital transformation happen faster, and we can create a lot more value for customers if they deliver to their KPIs and objectives. So our investments in the platform are going more towards that. Today we already have a fully automated compliance bot, a security bot, a cost optimization recommendation engine, a provisioning and governance engine, where we're going is we are enhancing all of this and providing customers lot more fluidity in how they can use our platform Click to perform your routine operations, Click to set up rules based automatic escalation or remediation. Cut down the number of hops a particular process will take and foster collaboration. All of this is what our platform is going and enhancing more and more. We intend to learn more from our customers and deliver better for them as we move forward. >> That's a good business model, make things easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something, and save money. And you're doing all those things with the cloud and awesome stuff. It's really great to hear your success stories and the work you're doing over there. Great to see resources getting and doing their job faster. And it's good and tons of data. You've got petabytes of that's coming in. It's it's pretty impressive, thanks for sharing your story. >> Sounds good, and you know, one quick call out is customers can go to MontyCloud.com today. Within 10 minutes, they can get an account. They get a very actionable and valuable recommendations on where they can save costs, what is the security compliance issues they can fix. There's a ton of out-of-the-box reports. One click to find out whether you are having some data that is not encrypted, or if any of your servers are open to the world. A lot of value that customers can get in under 10 minutes. And we believe in that model, give the value to customers. They know what to do with that, right? So customers can go sign up for a free trial at MontyCloud.com today and get the value. >> Congratulations on your success and great innovation. A startup showcase here with theCUBE coverage of AWS Startup Showcase breakthrough in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management with MontyCloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Dockercon live 2020. Brought to you by, Docker, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to the DockerCon 2020, #DockerCon20. This is The Cube virtual coverage with Docker on their event here. And we're in the studio in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, we're here with a great guest to talk about Docker Desktop, the Microsoft relationship, and the key news that's coming out. Ben De St Paer-Gotch is the product manager for Docker Desktop. Ben, great for coming on, thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. >> So obviously, this is a virtual conference, we wish we could be in person, but given the state of affairs we're going to do remotely, but the momentum Docker has is phenomenal, it's always been great with containers. It's the number one downloaded app around for developers. Microsoft just had their Build conference, which was again virtual as well, or digital, as they say, it's interchangeable. But clear momentum now with Docker as containers actually is the standard, you guys are doing great. What's the key news out of the Microsoft world for people who missed it last week with MS Build? >> Yeah, so last year at Build, Microsoft announced WSO2 to the Windows subsystem with Linux two. (mumbles) The mapping between the windows (mumbles) Which, went really well but it just didn't provide the same centered needed Linux experience. Last year, they announced Windows subsystem Linux two, (Provides an actual Linux one on windows machine, and we've been working hard with Microsoft over the last year to integrate proper desktop as a main desktop application for working with containers with WSO2. A build this year, Microsoft has gone on and announced that WSO2 is going to have a few new features, and it's going to have new features. (mumbles) Mention Linux graphical, Linux applications, you can access the file system, the installation is going to become a slicker which I guess I'm the most excited about that pitch. But the most exciting announcement is, they will be bringing GPU support to WSO2 which means that we will be able to provide and give you support through Docker desktop or container workloads that peoples are working on. And now we're launching Gray and Agua through containers and docks and desktops and Windows which is really cool because we haven't been able to do that before. >> So is this the first GPU support on Microsoft Windows for Docker, with Docker? >> It's, yeah, it's the first GPU Support for Docker Desktop or Mac or Windows. So, previously the hypervisor hasn't passed through the GPU, pretty much, which meant that we couldn't access it from Docker desktop. So Docker desktop isn't about a lightweight VM we sorts of plumb all that in for you. But we're limited about what we could get access to from the hypervisor, Microsoft putting this through and giving us access for the first time, we can actually, we can go. >> Not to go on a side tangent here, but you know, all these virtual events, and I was watching some of the build stuff as well, as well as us immediate streamers and doing stuff, you can see people's home rigs. And you talk to any Developer, video streamer, or anyone who is working remotely, if you don't have the best GPU's in there, I mean, this has just become, I mean, quite frankly, you need the GPU's. So this is important, it's not only from a vanity standpoint performance. Having that support, I'm going to want the best GPU's, I'm always going to be upgrading my machine for that extra power. What's the impact? What does it mean for me as a Developer? Does it increase stuff? What's the bottom line? >> As a Developer, it means you actually have access to it. So, especially when you're doing workloads on the CPU, you've got minimum amounts of power utilization you can do. When you're running workloads for an L Development, you have a lot of power up process you've got to log, to do your mobile training. So, in an element cycle, you're likely to have your application which you're going to use to produce a modeling, you're going to have training data. Taking that training data and producing a model requires lots of panel processing which is an enormous calculations in producing with finer waitings. Doing that on a CPU has to be done on a serial fashion rather than parallel, which is huge and intensive and takes a really long time. Whereas on a GPU, you can do all of that in parallel which massively reduces the amount of time it will take to run those training functions. Either just straight up in Linux or running them in a container, which as the more of people are looking at running container with workloads, it's how I first, the first team that I was on actually used Docker. I was working in Amazon Alexa, and my team picked up the opportunity to run our workload in container. And that was my first experience, so even though my team backed down, so I could see the system. >> Yeah, ML workloads automations could be critical of that performance. Okay, let's get into some of the momentum with Microsoft, you guys have obviously, builds over, we're here now at DockerCon, there's news. Could you share some of the tidbits for what's being talked about now with Docker and DockerCon. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, along with everything else we've been doing, we've been partnering with Microsoft trying to make the best experience generally with Docker desktop, and with WSO2 and with the VSCO. I've been working closely with Microsoft guys to actually try and improve our experience in Windows as it is today, and to improve some of those integrations with VSCO, and also working with the VSCO team on the Docker plugin for VSCO to give our feedback, and to hear feedback from those guys on the errors and issues they're seeing with Docker desktop and to really try to produce the best experience we can on Windows. End to end, from very front end running all the way through that first push, that first run on the cloud using Docker. >> So what is some of the new product management processes and customer support things that you guys are doing? This comes up a lot, obviously, we had a great conversation around shift left with security. That's great news there. You start to see a lot of this added value for Developers, wanted their support right? So how do I get things I need, and from a customer standpoint? It's kind of a moving train this world and it's only getting better and better from a Developer standpoint. But there's more complexity, it's got to be abstract the way you've got, you know, this new abstraction layers developing. You've got a lot of automation. How does the customer get the support they need in the same agile way that Developers are cranking out code? >> It's a really good question, it's something I think we're still working on as well. So, we're trying to working out and one of the big things I'm trying to work out is, how to make it easier for people to get started with Docker, and how do we also make sure with the things we build, we don't leave a cliff edge instead of a lining path. You don't get to a certain point in an easy process, and then the next step, takes you straight off a cliff, so that's not useful for anyone. So, producing those parts and those ways for people to learn and actually progress is something we're really trying to work out. How to make it natural from the first experience all the way through. From an actual support perspective, the other thing we're looking at, is we're trying to do more things in the open. We're really trying at Docker to bring as many of the new features and pieces we're developing which we have to do that in the open with community visibility, so that if people really want it fixed, they can open the PR and they can help us out. And then the last thing that my team really stood out was our Docker of having actions. As creators, someone already finished, could you do this? Someone else had a PR and emerged it. So, to a certain extent, you've got your one side which had you on board and this ever growth spiral and you keep learning. The other side is how'd you fix the board when you find an issue? In that one, we're really trying to work with the community, a lot more than we have in the last couple of years. >> Awesome, some folks watching, hit him up on Twitter, he's the Product Manager for Docker Desktop among other things. You guys are very transparent, you've got your Twitter handle on the lower third. People can chime in or just jump on the chat, we'll follow up and get you the info. Final question for you Ben, as you look at this reality we're in, there's kind of a holistic kind of moment now where people kind of realizing the new realities here. You're looking at the.. you get the keys to the kingdom with Docker Desktop, okay. You got some momentum with Microsoft, the developer role is moving fast and fast as the head room increases for capabilities with automation. And I know you mentioned a few of those things. GPU is now available. What's the future look like for these Developers? The next short, medium and long term? What's your view as you look out over the landscape because you've got to look at the product roadmap, your engagement with the community. Can you share some insight into how you're thinking about Docker Desktop going forward? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think what really interesting point as you say, which is that, if you look at sort of a lot of the Developer side of things that have sort of come out in the last like six months, six to eighteen months. The things I see, I see daily like you mention, things like orchestrating for containers gaining momentum. If you think about crossing the Kaizen model, we're just passed the early Dockers now. We're kind of into the early majority, but we're going to start to move over the next few years into the late majority. What that really means is that people here have been using one of two of these technologies. Maybe you've been using cloud, maybe you've been using Edge, maybe you've been using containers, maybe you've been using CICD, maybe you are using Expiration, maybe you're not. Maybe you've got a Microservice application, maybe it's a little bit of a mole rat. What we're really going to see is, you're going to start to see, all of these changes intersecting and overlapping. And people who have started to pick up model two of these will start to pick up all of them. And that's probably going to happen as we move into the majority of users. So from a what's coming instead of a lot of those thing that you see in best practice in the ideal Developer setup, so a beautiful CICD, a more of an orchestrated environment, Microservice architecture, we're going to see a lot more of that becoming the norm. But I think along with that, we'll also see a level of recognition coming along that a single Microservice alone doesn't provide value. And that's it's going to be some of those groups of services that will provide the user outcome. And that's where my focus is at the end which is you know, an authentication service is great but it doesn't provide value unless you give access to something as authentic. >> It's been issued that the new Docker is all about Developer experience. This is really the core mission. I mean, since the sale of the piece of morantis, Docker has retrenched and reinvented, but stayed core to its principles. Just share with the Developers who've been watching that are coming back into the ecosystem, what is this new Docker vibe? Share your thoughts. >> The new Docker vibe is about working in the open, and it's about solving problems for Developments. The original goal of Docker was to make it easy to pack and ship. It was to reduce Developer friction. As we move more into, sort of, the enterprise space, we worry more about Ops and DevOps. We're not trying to re-focus on Developer and if you sort of think there's two parts to the Developer life cycle, where you've got your work, where you're doing your creative work, where you're writing code. And then you've sort of got your part of the inner loop. And then you've got your part where you're trying to get that code out to production, you're trying to get your value to someone else. Instead of your outer loop, we're really trying to focus on the inner loop And sort of our mantra is that any bit for a Developer should spend as much as their time as possible creating new and exciting things and we're onto those holes that reduce those boring, Monday, repetitive tasks, that we're really trying to work out how we take those boring repetitive pieces and how do we make them just vanish like magic from new users or how do we reduce the friction for the experience from users? From both desktop and hub, we're really trying to bring those two together to achieve that. >> You know what's great about folks who have been in the class since day one. All of us have scar tissue experiences, you know the one thing that's constant is constant change. And one of the things that you guys have done at Docker, and hats off to the whole, you know, original team, is that brand of Docker has symbolized quality openness, and set the standard, I mean, if you look back and containers were really coming around, it's not a new concept. But Docker really set the industry on this path and it's been great to follow every DockerCon at TheCube coverage, but more importantly, as the demand for Developers to build these next wave of Cambrian explosion of applications. It's going to be more important than ever to have more of these abstractions, more of these tools in this real time, more Developers experience because there's more building going on. And it's not just one cloud, it's all clouds, it's all things. >> Yeah, I think it was like when IDC analyzed the future report a couple years ago, I think it was maybe the 2018 one. They said that maybe 2017. They said to date, we've built 500 millions applications worldwide and by 2023, we'll build another 500 million. The rate of creation is just insane, it's exponential growth of us producing more and more applications and connecting more and more devices to do them. The sheer volume of creation and the rate of new technology supporting, even with the rate of companies adopting, I guess more of a warm cloud. I think it's like 60 percent of companies are now more than one cloud provider. Maybe even more, maybe it's like 80 percent. It's ridiculous. >> I was just having this debate on Twitter about this multi-cloud. Someone tried to call us out saying, "Oh you guys were pooing on multi-cloud in 2016 and 18." I go "Look at, no one was Pooping on multi-cloud, it didn't exist." I had multiple clouds but there was no real use case. Now you're starting to see the use cases, where yeah, I had multiple clouds and I got Azure here, I got this over here. But no one wakes up and spreads their workloads wrong. This is going back a few years. Certainly the hybrid was developing, but I think now you're starting to see with networking and some of these inter-operable dynamics, you start to see innovation pockets in wide spaces in large market opportunities for start-ups and companies to thread the clouds together at the right place. So I think multi-cloud is becoming apparent from a use case stand point. Still a ton of work to do, I mean direct connects, got SLA's, I mean all kinds of stuff at the networking level but it is real. It's going to be one of those realities that everyone has, at least one or two, if not three. It could be optimization, this is what Developers do right? Solve problems. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean if nothing else, I've encounter a couple of companies even just where redundancy is handled by multi-cloud strategy. If you want to achieve more nines and you're just balancing workloads between two clouds. >> I mean, the Zoom news was really a testament to that because everyone got into a twist over that. Oh Zoom moves off Amazon, no they didn't move off Amazon, they went to Oracle, they got Adge, they're everywhere. Why wouldn't they be? They need to pass it, they fail over, they need fall tolerance, I mean, these are basic distributing computing concepts that is one on one. You've got to have these co-locations. And optimization for those clouds and the apps on Microsoft as well, so why wouldn't you do it? >> Exactly. And that's that hybrid, that multi-cloud, compounding that some of which you said earlier, that over changes when you're looking at how you go to CICD, how you're bundling these applications, creating more applications than ever. Coming back, sort of, with more AI workloads, much like GPU and you combine that with, sort of, last in the growth of age devices as well. It sort of makes for a really interesting future. And Docker is sort of, that summation SOV, what we're using to frame how we're thinking about our product and what we should be building. >> Great, for the audience out there, hit him up on Twitter, Ben's available, they're out in the open, if you're interested in how Docker makes life easier on the Windows platform, with the GPU support, they've got security now built in, shifting left. Give these guys a call and of course, we love the mission, out in the open. It's theCUBE's mission as well and great to chat with you. Ben, thanks for spending the time with me today. >> Been an absolute pleasure, thank you for having me. >> Okay, just TheCube's coverage, the virtual Cube with DockerCon co-creating together out in the open. DockerCon20, #Docker20, I'm John Fer with TheCube, stay tuned for our next segment, and thanks for watching. (ambient music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to You by spunk. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's live Cube coverage in Las Vegas. That's plunks dot com. 2019 thistles their annual customer conference, where they unleash all the new technologies, announce all the new things. Everyone's here. It's the 10th anniversary of Splunk dot com cubes. Seventh year we've been covering slung been quite the journey from scrappy, startup going public growth phase. Now market leader on Outside has to come to success from the products and the engineering. And, of course, the people in the field that that served customers. And we're here with Susan St Leger, who's the president of worldwide field operations. Thanks for coming back to see you. >>Thank you, John. It's exciting to be here. >>So in the keynote, bringing data to every outcome is really the theme. Um, you seem to got a spring to your step here. You excited this year? What an amazing successful show because you got a platform. But the proof is out there. You got that ecosystem. You got people building APS on top of it. It's kind of all coming together this year, >>It sure is experience. It's it's it's just it's a huge leap forward, and I think so. Much of it is a vision of data to everything. And if you think about it, we talk about. We want to bring data to every question, every problem in every action. And the biggest thing you're going to see that you did see in the show is it's no longer just about the Splunk index. We're going to help you get you get value out of data wherever it lives. >>You had some big news on acquisition front Signal FX. Big chunk of change for that company. Private hot category. Observe ability, which really taste is out. That next 20 mile stare in the marketplace, which is cloud native. >>That's a >>cloud Service is, which comes together in the platform with logging coming together. >>Yeah, so exciting Way looked hard at that entire market, and signal FX was definitely the right answer. They operated a scale similar to us. They know how to how to operate it that scale, and so they're gonna be able to serve our customers well. And our view of the world is it's going to be hybrid for a very long time. But they serve that new cloud native world better than anybody else. It's It's when you do monitoring the cloud native world. It's really interesting to think about it. It's all made up of Micro service is right. So thousands of Micro Service's hundreds, thousands of Micro Service's and so in traditional monitoring, it's always you're tryingto monitor things you know could go wrong. In a microt service landscape, you don't know everything that could possibly go wrong. And so it's a level of complexity that's just very different. And so it's all about instrument ing, so that when something does go wrong, you can solve it. >>You guys have a very loyal based customer base, and that's again testament success. But the product has changed, and the value problems is emerging even further with data. That's a big theme. Data to everywhere, everything and security has come up on the radar a few years ago, here, the show. But this almost is a full blown security show at this point, because security center of everything you can't ignore it's become a centerpiece of everything data, the access to the diversity, How is that impacting the field because you're not. I mean, I guess you're a security company enabler and solve security problems. Date is a big part of it. Sure, I was at shaping your operations, >>So I think the thing to understand is correct. We're not just a security company, but we are number one in the security Magic quadrant. We're number one in both I. D. C and Gardner, and so that's important. But what happens is all the data the equal act for security can also be used for all these other use cases. So, generally speaking, whatever you're collecting for security is also valuable for I t operations, and it's also valuable for many other use cases. So I'll give you an example. Dominoes, which is a great customer of ours. They're gone 65% of their orders now come in digitally, okay? And so they monitor the entire intend customer experience. But they monitor it not only from a nightie operations perspective. That same data that they used righty operations also tells them you know what's being ordered, what special orders are being made and they use that data for promotions based upon volume and traffic and timing. they actually create promotion. So now you're talking about the same data that he collected for security night operations you can actually use for promotions, which is marketing is >>not a lot of operating leverage in data. You're getting out this. The old model was is a database. Make a queer. You get a report. Little time problem there. But now you have. Well, that other date is over there in another database. Who runs that data? So the world has certainly changes now, data needs to be addressable. This seems to be a big theme here on undercurrent. I know data to everywhere is kind of global theme, but don't diverse data feeds a I cracked and address ability allows for application access. >>Correct. So we look at the entire data landscape and say, we want to help you get data value out of your data wherever it lives. And it's right now, we've changed to the point where we are operating on data in motion, which is with data stream processor, which is hugely beneficial. You mentioned you know, a I m l way actually do something so unique from an ML perspective because we're actually doing the ml on the live streaming so, so much more valuable than doing it in batch mode. And so the ability to create those ML models by working on live data is super powerful. >>Good announcement. So you guys had the data processor. You have the search fabric, >>data fabric search, >>real time and acceleration our themes there. I want to get your thoughts on your new pricing options. Yes. Why now? What's that mean for customers? >>So if we want to bring data to everything, we have to allow them to actually get all the data right? So we needed to give them more flexible models and more alternative models. So for some people and just motto is very comfortable. But what they want it was more flexibility. So if you look at our new traunch pricing are predictable pricing, there's a couple of things that we've done with it. Number one is from 125 gig all the way up to unlimited. We'll show your predictable pricing so you don't have to guess. Well, if I move from 20 terabytes 2 50 what's that gonna cost me? We're gonna tell you, and you're gonna know and so That's one. The second thing is you don't have to land on the exact ingest. So before, if you bought a terabyte, you got a terabyte. Right now there's a traunch from 1 to 2 terabytes. There's a trunk from 2 to 5 terabytes. And so it gives the customers flexibility so that they don't have to worry about it coming back to buy more right away. >>So that's kind of cloud by as you go variable pricing. Exactly. I want your thoughts on some of the sales motions and position and you guys have out in the field. Visa VI. The industry has seen a lot of success and say Observe ability. For instance, Southern to Rick and Kartik About this. Yes, you guys are an enterprise software cloud and on premises provider you Enterprise sales motion. >>Yes, >>there's a lot of other competition up there that sells for the SNB. They're like tools. What's the difference between an offering that might look like Splunk but may be targeting the SNB? Small means business and one that needs to be full blown enterprise. >>Yeah, so I think the first and foremost most of the offerings that we see land in S and B. They have scale issues over time, I and so what we look at it and say is and they're mostly point products, right? So you can you can clutter up your environment with a bunch of point products, doing all these different things and try and stitch them together. Or you can go with this fun clock for him. So which allows you thio perform all of the same operations, whether B I t Security or Data Analytics in general. But it really isn't. It's about having the platform. >>You guys, what reduced the steps it takes to implement our What's the value? I guess. Here's Here's the thing. What's the pitch? So I'm on Enterprise. I'm like, Okay, I kept Dad. I got a lot of potential things going on platform. I need to make my data work for me any day to be everywhere. I au g Enterprise Cloud. What's the Splunk pitch? >>So our pitches were bringing dated everything, and first and foremost it's important. Understand why? Because we believe at the heart of every problem is a data problem. And we're not just talking t and security. As you know, you saw so many examples. I think you talk to his own haven earlier this week. Right? Wildfires is a data problem New York Presbyterian is using using us for opioid crisis. Right? That's a data problem. So everything's a data problem. What you want is a platform that can operate against that data and remove the barriers between data and action. And that's really what we're focused on. >>He mentions own haven that was part of Splunk Ventures Fund. You have a social impact fund? Yes, what's the motivation line that is just for social good? Is there a business reason behind it or both? >>What's this? So we actually have to social focuses. One is long for good, and that is non profit. What we announced this, what we announced a couple weeks ago that we reiterated yesterday was the spunk, social impact funds, a splint venture social impact fund, and this is to invest in for profit companies using data for social good. And the whole reason is that we look at it and so we say we're a platform. If you're a platform, you want to build out the ecosystem, right? And so the Splunk Innovation Fund splint Ventures Innovation Fund is to invest in new technology focused on that that brings value out of data. And on the other side, it's the spunk. Social impact. Thio get data companies that are taking data and creating such a >>Splunk for good as Splunk employees or a separate nonprofit. And >>it's not a separate nonprofit entity, but it is what we what we invest in. Okay. >>Oh, investing in >>investing in non for profit. Exactly like when we talked about the Global Emancipation Network right, which uses Splunk to fight human trafficking. That's on the nonprofit side. >>So take me through. This is a really hot area we've been covering for good because all roads I want now is for bad. Mark Zuckerberg's testifying from the Congress this morning kind of weird to watch that, actually, but there's a lot of good use cases. Tech tech can be shaped for good. A lot of companies are starting and getting off the ground for good things, but they're kind of like SMB, but they want the Splunk benefit. How do they engage with spunk if I'm gonna do ah social impact thing say cube for good? I got all this Tech. How do I engage punk? I wanted, but I don't know what to do. Have access to tools? How do I buy or engage with Splunk? >>Yes, start parties. Fund managers is making sure it's not just money, right? It's money, its access to talent. It's access to our product. And it's, you know, help with actually thinking through what they're trying to achieve, so it really is the entire focus. It's not just about the tech, Thea. Other thing I would say is you saw that we put out a Splunk investigate, and you also saw us talking about spunk, business slow and mission control. Those air now all built on a native SAS platform. And so the ability for our ecosystem now to go build on a native son platform is going to be incredibly powerful. >>So you expect more accelerated opportunities that all right, what's your favorite customer success stories? I know it's hard to pick your favorites, like picking a favorite child may be filled with the categories. Most ambitious class clown class favorite me. What's the ones you would call a really strong, >>so hit on a couple of my lover Domino story and the other one that I love, that I touched on. But I want to expand on because I think it's an amazing story. Is New York Presbyterian on using the Yes See you sprung for traditional security for private patient privacy. They also use it for medical devices. But here's the thing they use it for to help the opioid crisis. And you're like, How is opioid crisis a data problem? What they do is they actually correlate all the data that so doctors are prescribing the opioids who they're prescribing them to a number of prescriptions being building their pharmacy and then the inventory of opioids. Because they actually have sensors on all the cabinets where they get the opioids, they correlate all the data, and they make sure that if they understand if opioids being stolen from the hospital, because what people don't understand is that the opioid a lot of big part of the opioid crisis starts with hospitals to say of such a big volume of opioids. And so that, to me, is just I guess I love it because it's a great customer success story. But it's also again, it's so much fun doing good problem. >>A lot of deaths. I gotta ask you around your favorite moments here dot com, and you're a lot of conversations in your customer conversations this year. Let's do a little Splunk of the Cube right now can take the patterns, all the data, your meetings. What's the top patterns that are emerging? What are some of the top conversation themes that just keep popping up with customer? Specifically, >>I think the biggest thing is that they have seen more innovation unleash this year than they have ever seen in one year from Splunk. The other thing is that we've gone far outside of our traditional spunk index right and that the portfolio has grown so much and that we're allowing them to operate and get value out of the data wherever it lives. So data in motion and then you saw in data fabric search. We'll let you query not only the Splunk indices, but also H D. F s and s three buckets and more buckets to come. So more sinks if you will. So, really, what we're trying to do is say, we're just going to be your date a platform to help you get value >>Susan, you're a great leader and slung. Congratulations on your success again. They continue to grow every year. Splunk defies the critics. Now you're a market leader. Culture is a big part of this. What is your plans this year To take it to the next level? You're president of field worldwide, field operations, global business landscape. What are some of your goals and objectives on culture >>and the culture? So thank you, Jon. First of all, for your comments and were so committed to our culture, I think you know, as you grow so quickly, it takes a real effort to stay focused on culture way, have an incredible diversity and inclusion program. Onda We do way. It's a business imperative for us. Every single leader has diversity, diversity, inclusion, focuses and targets. And so I think that's a huge part of our culture. And the reason I say that, John, I don't know if you've ever heard about a 1,000,000 data points. Did anybody ever way Always talk about, you know in different different settings will share a couple of our 1,000,000 data points. What we want to make sure is a culture is that way. >>We >>have our employees showing up with their authentic self and because you do your best work when you can show up is your authentic self. And so we have people share a handful of their 1,000,000 data points at all different times throughout the year to get to know each other as individuals, as human beings and really understand what matters to each other. And I love that 1,000,000 data points culture, and I got that. We truly live it. And again it's It's about authenticity. And so I think that's what makes us incredibly special. >>And inclusion helps that trust >>fund elaboration, yes, and also just add to that. We're very proud of the fact that we made the fortune list this year for best places to work for women. So it shows that our focus, you know, we started. We started revealing our metrics just about two years ago, and we've had significant improvement way. Believe that what you focus on what you measure is what you improve. So we started measuring and improving it, and this year we made the list for a fortune that's called walking. It is Congratulations. Thank you. We're very excited about >>awesome on global expansion. I'm assuming is on the radar. Well, >>always, especially at this point. We're ready to double down and some of the tier one mark. It's a lovely for sure >>wasn't saying. Legend. President of worldwide field operations here inside the Cube. Where day to slung dot com 10th anniversary of their customer conference Our seventh year covering Splunk Amazing Ride They continue to ride the big wave. Thats a Q bring you all the data on insights here. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering Activia 2019 data-driven to you by Activia welcome to Boston everybody this is Dave Volante and I'm here with stupid man finally still in our hometown you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering actifi Oh data-driven hashtag data-driven 19 activity it was a company that is focus started focused on copy data management they sort of popularized the term the I the concept the idea of data virtualization there's big data digital transformation all the buzz it's kind of been a tailwind for the company and we followed them quite closely over the years poly st. Claire is here she's the CEO of the state of Massachusetts that's chief of ditch and chief data officer Holly thanks for coming on the Q thanks for having me so it's kind of rare that somebody shares the title of chief digital officer of chief data officer I think it's rare right now I think that would change you think it will change I think those two roles will come together I just think data fuels our digital world and it both creates the content and also monitors how we're doing and it's just inevitably I think either they're gonna be joined at the hip or it's gonna be the same person that's interesting I always thought the chief data officer sort of emerged from this wonky back-office role data quality of this careful the word walking okay well yeah let's talk about that but the chief digital officer is kind of the mover the shaker has a little marketing genius but but okay so you see those two roles coming together that maybe makes sense because why because there's there some tension in a lot of organizations between those two roles well I think the challenge with the way that sometimes people think about data is they think about it's only a technical process data is actually very creative and you also have to tell a story in order to be good with it it's the same thing as marketing but it's just a little bit of a different hue a different type of audience a different type of pace there's a technical component to the data work but I'm looking at my organization that I'm surrounded by additional technical folks CTO CSO privacy officer CIO so we have a lot of supports that might take away some of those roles are scrunched in under the data officer or the digital so I used to turn wonky before it kind of triggered you a little bit but but you're a modeler you're a data scientist your development programmer right no but I know enough to I know enough to read code and get in trouble okay so you can direct coders and you have data scientists working for you yeah right so you've got that entire organization underneath you and your your mission is blank fill in the blank so our mission is to use the best information technology to ensure that every users experience with the Commonwealth is fast easy and wicked awesome awesome Holly our team just got back from a very large public sector event down in DC and digging into you know how our agency is doing with you know cloud force initiatives how are they doing the city environments you were state of Massachusetts and you know rolled out that that first chief data if you keep dipped officer gets a little bit of insight inside how Massachusetts doing with these latest waves of innovation uh well you know we have our legacy systems and as our opportunities come up to improve those systems our reinvest in them we are taking a step forward to cloud we're not so dogmatic that it's cloud only but it's definitely cloud when it's appropriate I do think we'll always have some on-prem services but really when it's possible whether it's a staff service off-the-shelf or it's a cloud environment to make sense than we are moving to that in your keynote this morning you you talked about something called data minimalism yeah and wonder if you could explain that for audience because for the longest time it's been well you want to hoard all the data you want to get all the data and you know what do you do with it how do you manage you right right I mean data's only as good as your ability to use it and I often find that we're ingesting all this data and we don't really know what to do with it or really rather our business leaders and decision-makers can't quite figure out how to connect that to the mission or to act properly interrogate the data to get the information they want and so this idea is an idea that's sort of coming a little bit out of Europe and or some of the other trends we see around some cyber security and hacking worlds and the idea is this actually came from fjords Digital Trends for 2019 is data minimalism the idea is that you strongly connect your business objectives to the data collection program that you have you don't just collect data until you're sure that it supports your objectives so you know one of the things that I also talked about in the keynote was not just data minimalism but doing a try test iterate approach we often collect data hoping to see that we can create a change I think we need to prove that we can create the change before we do a widespread scalable data collection program because often we collect data and you still can't see what you're doing has an effect within the data the signals too strong or too too weak or you're asking the wrong question of the data or it's the wrong plectra collection of the technique and that's largely driven from a sort of privacy a privacy privacy the reality of how costly sometimes the kennedys but you know storage of data is cheap but the actual reality of moving it and saving it and knowing where it is and accessing it later that takes time and energy of your of your actual people so I think it's just important for us to think carefully about a resource in government we have a little less resources sometimes in the private sector so we're very strategic on what we do and so I think we need to really think about the data we use if the pendulum swings remember back to the days of you know 2006 the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure said okay you got to keep electronic records for whatever seven years of depending on industry and people said okay let's get rid of it as soon as we can data was viewed as a liability and then of course all the big data height we've talked about a little bit in your in your speech everybody said I could collect everything throw it into a data Lake and we all know those became data swamps so do you feel like the pendulum is swinging and there's maybe a little balance are we reaching an equilibrium is it going to be a you know hard shift back to data as a liability what are your thoughts well I think isn't with any trend there's always a little bit of a pendulum swing as we're learning it's with it with the equilibrium is equilibrium is I think that's a great word I think the piece that I neglected to mention is the relationship to the consumer trust you know for us in government we have to have the trust of our constituents we do have a higher bar than public sector in terms of handling data in a way that's respectful of individuals privacy and their security of their data and so I think to the extent that we are able to lend transparency and show the utility and the data we're using and that will gain the trust of our users or customers but if we continue to do things behind the scenes and not be overt about it I think then that can cause more problems I think we face is organizations to ask ourselves is having more data worth the sort of vulnerability introduces and the possible liability of trust of our of our customers when you betray to test over your customers it's really hard to replace that and so you know to a certain extent I think we should be more deliberate about our data and earn the trust of our customers okay how how does Massachusetts look at the boundary of data between the public sector and the private sector I've talked to you know some states where you know we're helping business off parking by giving you know new mobile apps access to that information you talked a little bit about health care you know I've done interviews with the massive macleod initiative here locally how do you look at that balance of sharing I think it is a real balance you know I don't think we do very much of it yet and we certainly don't share data that were not allowed to by law and we have very strict laws here in Massachusetts the stricter at the ten most states and so I think it's very strategic when we do share data we are looking for opportunities when we can when I talk about demand driven data I look forward to opening the conversation a little bit to ask people what data are they looking for to ask businesses and different institutions we have throughout the Commonwealth what data would help you do your job better and grow our economy and our jobs and I think that's a conversation we need to have over time to figure out what the right balances someday it'll be easier for us to share than others and some will never be able to share the first data scientist I've ever met is somebody I interviewed the amazing Hilary Mason and she said something that I want to circle back to something you said in your talk if she said the hardest part of my job or one of the hardest parts is people come to me with data and and it's the most valuable thing I can do is show them which questions to ask and you have talked about well what's a lot of times you don't know what questions to ask until you look at the data or vice versa what comes first the chicken or the egg what's your experience pin well I do think we need to be driven by the business objectives and goals it doesn't mean there's not an iterative process in there somewhere but you know data wonks we can we can just throw data all day long and still might not give you the answer there forward but I think it's really important for us to be driven by the business and I think executives don't know how to ask the questions of the data they don't know how to interrogate it or honestly more realistically we don't have a date of actually answers the question they want to know so we often have to use proxies for that information but I do think if there's an iterative after you get to a starting point so I do think knowing what the business question is first I know you gotta go but I want to ask your last question bring it back to the state where both Massachusetts residents and your services it sounds like you're picking off some some good wins with a through the fast ROI I mean you mentioned you know driver's license renewals etc how about procurement has procurement been a challenge from the state standpoint you are you looking at sort of the digital process and how to streamline procurement that is a conversation that the secretary what is currently in and I think it's a good one I don't think we have any any solutions yet but I think we have a lot of the issues that were struggling with but we're not alone all public sectors struggling with this type of procurement question so we're working on it all right last question there's quick thoughts on you know what you've seen here I know you're in and out but data-driven yeah it's a great theme it's a really exciting agenda there's people for all these different organizations and approaches to data-driven you know from movie executives and casting to era it's just really exciting to see the program it's Nate Claire thanks so much I'm coming on the queue thank you great to meet you okay keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break well the cube is here at data-driven day one special coverage we'll be right back

(funky music) >> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Day three of our live coverage from Dell Technologies World 2019 continues. Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman and we're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Michael St-Jean, Principal Marketing Manager for Red Hat Storage. Michael welcome. >> Thanks Lisa. Hi Stu. >> So day three this event is still pretty loud around us. This has about we're hearing upwards of fifteen thousand people. A lot of partners. Give us your perspective on Dell Technologies World 2019. >> I got to tell you this is an awesome show. I got to tell you the energy, and not just in the sessions but out on the show floor as well. It's amazing. And some of the conversations that we've been having out there around things like emerging technologies, emerging workflows around artificial intelligence, machine learning things like that. And the whole adoption around hybrid cloud, it really speaks to all of the things that we're doing, the initiatives that we're leading at Red Hat. So it's a great validation of all of the things that we've been working on for the past 10, 15, 20 years. >> And you had a long-standing relationship with Dell. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> 18 years or so? >> Yeah, yeah we've had not just a long relationship but very collaborative relationship with Dell over the past 18 years. It's something like If you take a look at some of the initiatives that we've been working on, we have ready architectures around open stack, around open shift. We have just, we have highlighting a few things here around Microsoft sequel server, around SAP HANA. And actually, we're really talking a lot around open shift and a ready architecture that we've developed, that we have architecture guides, deployment guides all around open shift and open shift container storage for Dell hardware. And actually, next week at our Red Hat Summit event, you should really take a look on Wednesday morning our keynote, our EVP Paul Cormier will be talking about some great, new, very interesting initiatives that we've been working with Dell on. >> Alright well Michael I'm excited we're going to have theCUBE at Red Hat Summit in Boston. It's our sixth year there. I'll be one of the hosts there. John Walls will be there with me. We're going to have Paul Cormier on the program. (laughs) Jim Whitehurst hacking the keynote. It's actually not a secret Satya Nadella and Ginni Rometty will both be up on the main stage there. And just my perspective you were talking about hybrid cloud. As you said, Red Hat Summit, I've been for many years. That hybrid cloud, that adoption. They're both open stack at the infrastructure layer and up to the application with open chip. Something we've been hearing for years and you're right. The general themes seem to echo and resonate here as to what I've been hearing at Red Hat. Can you help expand a little bit those conversations you're having here? I love you talking about some of that app modernization analytics that are going on there. How does that fit into the ready architectures that Dell's offering? >> Sure. Well I represent our storage business unit. So a lot of times, the conversations I'm having over there at the booth are kind of revolving around storage and storage growth. How data is expanding, how do we deal with the scalability of that? How do we deal with persistence of storage and containers for staple applications, things of that nature. But really, at the end of the day as I'm listening to some of the other conversations that my colleagues are having over there, it's really about how do we get work done? How do we now move into these areas where we need that cloud like experience not just in a public cloud or even in a private cloud but everywhere that we touch infrastructure. We need to have that simplified cloud-like experience. >> So just point on your subject area. Talk about the containerization and what's happening with storage pieces. Give us that layer between the infrastructure layer because let me say I believe the t shirt I saw was Linux is container, containers are Linux. So Linux has lived on Dell hardware for a long time. But anything that users should understand about the differentiation between whether they were bare metal or virtualized in the past and containerized environments today? >> Yeah well I like to say that you can't spell Red Hat without storage. (laughs) I don't know that that's particularly true but (laughing) >> It sells good. >> It sells good. Yeah so storage is near and dear to my heart but really at the end of the day, you can't have storage sitting in an island, it has to integrate and be collaborative with the rest of the portfolio that we're expanding out for our customers solving real issues, real problems. And so we've been watching industry trends and certainly these are things like that from an industry we've been looking at over the past five, 10 years so nothing new but we see the evolution of certain things like for example developers and data analysts, data scientists, these people are really charged with going out there and making dramatic differences, transforming their companies, their organizations. And as that transformational application, service development or bringing back insights on data is really integral to a company's ability to transform or differentiate in the industry. They have to be much, much more agile. And it seems that they are more and more taking over a lot of the role that we would normally see traditional I.T. managers making a lot of the purchasing decisions. A lot of the industry trends show that these folks, developers, data analysts are actually making some of those I.T. decisions now. And of course, everything is really being developed as cloud native. So we see cloud native as being more of the new norm. And if you kind of look at the expansion of data, Lisa Spellman a couple of days ago said "Hey look. "We've seen data double in the past two years "but we're only using two percent of that data." >> Two percent? >> Two percent. >> Wow, it's not very much. >> Yeah. And if you look at IDC mentioned that the data sphere has now grown to over 33 Zettabytes. A zettabyte is a billion gigabytes. So put that into perspective. Alright. 33 Zettabytes. By 2025, they project that we're going to grow to 175 Zetabytes. How can we make better use of that data? A lot of that data is coming from IOT type applications. You look at trends, traffic trends and how that might be correlated to weather activities or other events that are going on or archeological digs or all sorts of just information that is brought back. How do we make best use of that information? And so the need for scalability in a hybrid cloud environment, has become more and more of a key industry trend as the data sphere continues to grow. And I think across all three of those, that's really driving this need for hyper convergence and not just hyper convergence in the traditional sense. we've seen hyper convergence in the field for probably about five, 10 years now. But initially it was kind of a niche play and it was based on appliances. Well the past two years, you've seen the Gardner reports on hyper convergence really talking about how it is moving and evolving to more of a software defined nature. And in fact, in the past Magic Quadrant around hyper convergence, you see Red Hat show up. Something that is probably not known that Red Hat has hyper converged offerings. It's something that actually we didn't get into it just because the analysts were suggesting it. We had customers come to us and they were trying to put together Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat virtualization, storage, et cetera et cetera with varying degrees of success with that because they were doing it more or less as a project. And so we took upon ourselves to develop that, put it into a product and start to develop it with things like Ansible for deployment management. We have dedupe and compression with our virtual data optimization products, virtual GPUs, et cetera. So we're really in that space now too. >> Yeah Michael I mean it really from our standpoint it was a natural extension of what happens if you look at what hyper converged was, it was simplification and it had to be tight integration down at the OS level or the virtualization level. As a matter of fact, when we first wrote our research on it, we called it server SAN because it was the benefits of storage area network but built at the server level. So we said those OS manufacturers. Now I have to admit, I called out VMware and Microsoft are the ones that I considered the biggest ones. But as a natural fit that Red Hat would look out of that environment and if you look at the leaders in the marketplace today, we're here, VMware is here, their softwares piece. Techtonic has transitioned to be a software company. So yeah, welcome to the party. It's been a fun ride to watch that over the last five years. >> Yeah absolutely. >> So let's talk about customers and this spirit of collaboration. You just mentioned sort of the entrance into HCIs being really driven by the voice and the actions and the needs of Red Hat customers. You guys have three major pillars, themes that you have been delivering at Dell Technologies World. Talk to us a little bit about this and how your customers are helping to drive what you're delivering here and what you'll be delivering in the future. >> Yes certainly. I mean that's the whole open source model. And we don't we don't just contribute to the open source community but we develop enterprise grade infrastructure solutions for customers based on the open source way. And so essentially, as I think of it these market trends that I was talking about. It's not that we're leading them or that we're following them. It's we're tightly integrated with them because all of these industry trends are being formulated as we're in progress. It's a great opportunity for Red Hat to really express what we can do with our customers, with our partners, our developers, the folks that we have on our staff that are working directly in the community. Most products that we work on, we're the number one contributor for. So it's all very special opportunity for us. I would say from a storage perspective, what we've really focused on this year is around three main pillars. One is around data portability for those application portability projects that we see in open shift. So being able to offer an enterprise grade persistent storage for stateful applications that are running in these containerized environments. Another area is around that hybrid cloud scalable storage. And this is something that being able to scale that storage to hundreds of petabytes is kind of a big deal (laughs) and especially as we see a lot of the workloads that we've been working with customers on around data analytics and now artificial intelligence, machine learning. Those types of data lakes type projects where we're able to, by using open stack or open shift, we're able to do multi-tenant workforce workload isolation of the work that all of these people are doing while having a shared data context underneath with Red Hat storage. And then the third is around hyper convergence. I think we've touched on that already. >> Yeah so Michael before letting you go I have to touch on the hot thing that everybody needs to understand what's going. The ripple that will be felt throughout the industry. And I'm not talking about a certain 34 billion dollar pending acquisition. (laughs) Constant in the last, most of my career there has been a certain logo that I would see at every conference and that Red Hat that I got my first one, I don't know, 15, 16 years ago. So the shadow man has been deprecated. There's a new Red Hat logo. >> Oh yeah yeah. And we just brought out the new logo today. So a great segue into actually, it was last night, they pulled down the old logos, they put the new logos on the buildings, pretty much around the world. I think it's May Day in Europe. So maybe some of that will happen tomorrow or. Trying to think of what time it is, probably tonight. So yeah it's a great new logo and it's, our old logo has been over, it was around for 19 years since 2000. And it came back from a lot of feedback from customers but also from people who didn't know Red Hat, didn't know what we did. And quite honestly, some of them said that shadow man looked a little sneaky. (laughing) >> I guess on the rise of all those cyber challenges, maybe they're right. >> (laughs) so we have a new logo just launched today. Very proud of it, we're looking forward to working with everybody in the industry and go forward with all these new, wonderful opportunities that we have. >> I look forward to pointing out to all the vendors that they're now using the old Red Hat logo just like they do for every other vendor in this space when it changes. >> As of how many hours ago. (laughing) >> Well it'll be interesting to see and hear what Stu and team uncover at the summit next week in terms of the impact of this brand. We thank you so much for your time Michael, >> Absolutely. >> joining Stu and me on theCUBE. I guess it is just after day of day three. It's hard to tell right it's all blending in together. (laughs) Well we thank you for your time and your insight. >> Thank you very much and see you next week Stu. >> Exactly. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from day three of our coverage of Dell technologies world 2019. Thanks for watching. (light music)

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covered conf 18 got to you by Splunk welcome back to our land Oh everybody I'm Dave Volante with my co-hosts two minima and you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're brought here by Splunk toises Splunk off 18 hashtag spunk conf 18 Susan st. Leger is here she's the president of worldwide field operations at Splunk Susan thanks for coming on the cube thanks so much for having me today so you're welcome so we've been reporting actually this is our seventh year we've been watching the evolution of Splunk going from sort of hardcore IT OPSEC ops now really evolving in doing some of the things that when everybody talked about big data back in the day and spunk really didn't they talked about doing all these things that actually they're using Splunk for now so it's really interesting to see that this has been a big tailwind for you guys but anyway big week for you guys how do you feel I feel incredible we had you know we've it announced more innovations today just today then we have probably in the last three years combined we have another big set of innovations to announce tomorrow and you know just as an indicator of that I think you heard Tim today our CTO say on stage we to date have 282 patents and we are one of the world leaders in terms of the number of patents that we have and we have 500 pending right so if you think about 282 since the inception of the company and 500 pending it's a pretty exciting time for spunk people talk about that flywheel we were talking stew and I were talking earlier about some of the financial metrics and you know you have a lot of a large deal seven-figure deals which which you guys pointed out on your call let's see that's the outcome of having happy customers it's not like you turn to engineer that you just serving customers and that's what what they do I talk about how Splunk next is really bringing you into new areas yeah so spike next is so exciting there's really three three major pillars if you will design principles to spunk next one is to help our customers access data wherever it lives another one is to get actionable outcomes from the data and the third one is to allow unleash the power spunk to more users so there really the three pillars and if you think about maybe how we got there we have all of these people within IT and security that are the experts on Splunk the swing ninjas ful and their being they see the power of spunk and how it can help all these other departments and so they're being pulled in to help those other departments and they're basically saying Splunk help us help our business partners make it easier to get there to help them unleash the power spunk for them so they don't necessarily need us for all of their needs and so that's really what's what next is all about it's about making it again access data easier actionable outcomes and then more users and so we're really excited about it so talk about those new users I mean obviously the ITA ops they're your peeps so are they sort of advocating to you into the line of business or are you probably being dragged into the line of business what's that dynamic like yeah it's definitely we're customer success first and we're listening to our customers and they're asking us to take them that should go there with them right there being pulled that they know that what we what we say with our customers what are what our deepest customers understand about us is everybody needs funk it's just not everyone knows it yet and I said they're teaching their business why they need it and so it's really a powerful thing and so we're partnering with them to say how do we help them create business applications more which you'll see tomorrow in our announcements to help their business users you know one of the things that strikes us if we were talking it was the DevOps gentleman when you look at the companies that are successful with so-called digital transformation they have data at the core and they have sort of I guess I don't want to say a single data model but it's not a data model of stovepipes and that's what he described and essentially if I understand the power of Splunk just in talking to some of your customers it's really that singular data model that everybody can collaborate on with get advice from each other across the organization so not this sort of stovepipe model it seems like a fundamental linchpin of digital transformation even though you guys haven't been using that overusing that term thank you sort of a sign of smug you didn't use the big data term when big data was all hot now you use it same thing with digital transformation you're a fundamental it would seem to me to a lot of companies digital transformation that's exactly if you think about we started nineteen security but the reason for that is they were the first ones to truly do digital transformation right those are just the two the two organizations that started but exactly the way that they did it now all the other business units are trying to do it and that same exact platform that same exact platform that we use there's no reason we can't use it for those other areas those other functions but but if we want to go there faster we have to make it easier to use spunk and that's what you're seeing with spunk next you know I look at my career the last couple of decades we've been talking about oh well there's going to we're gonna leverage data and there's go where we want to be predictive on the models but that the latest wave of kind of AI ml and deep learning what I heard what you're talking about and in the Splunk next maybe you could talk a little bit about why it's real now and why we're actually going to be able to do more with our data to be able to extract the value out of it and really enable businesses sure so I think machine learning is that is at the heart of it and you know we we actually do two things from a machine learning perspective number one is within each of our market groups so IT security IT operations we have data scientists that work to build models within our applications so we build our own models and then we're hugely transparent with our customers about what those models are so they can tweak them if they like but we pre build those so that they have them in each of those applications so that's number one and and that's part of the actionable outcomes right ml helps drive actionable outcomes so much faster the second aspect is the ML TK right which is we give the our customers in ml TK so they can you know build their own algorithms and leverage everything all of the models that are out there as well so I think that two-fold approach really helps us accelerate the insights that we give to our customers Susan how are you evolving your go-to-market model as you think about Splunk next and just think about more line of business interactions so what are you doing on the go-to-market side yeah so the go to market when you think about reaching all of those other verticals if you will right it's very much going to be about the ecosystem all right so it's it's going to be about the solution provider ecosystem about the ISV ecosystem about the big the si is both boutique and the global s is to help us really Drive Splunk into all the verticals and meet their needs and so that will be one of the big things that you see we will obviously still have our horizontal focus across IT and security but we are really understanding what are the use cases within financial services what are the use cases within healthcare that can be repeated thousands of times and if you saw some of the announcements today in particular the data stream processor which allows you to act on data in motion with millisecond response that now puts you as close to real-time as anything we've ever seen in the data landscape and that's going to open up just a series of use cases that nobody ever thought of using spoil for so I wonder what you're hearing from customers when they talk about how do they manage that that pace of change out there I really like I walked around the show floor stuff I've been hearing lots people talking about you know containers and we had one of the your customers talking about how kubernetes fits into what they're doing seems like it really is a sweet spot for spunk that you can deal with all of these different types of information and it makes it even more important for customers to come to you yeah as you heard from Doug today in our keynote our CEO and the keynote it is a messy world right and part of the message just because it's a digital explosion and it's not going to get any slower it's just going to continue to get faster and I know you met with some of our customers earlier today and if'n carnival if you think about the landscape of NIF right I mean their mission is to protect the arsenal of nuclear weapons for the country right to make them more efficient to make them safer and if you think about all of it they not only have traditional IT operations and security they have to worry about but they have this landscape of lasers and all these sensors everywhere and that and when you look at that that's the messy data landscape and I think that's where Splunk is so uniquely positioned because of our approach you can operate on data in motion or at rest and because there is no structuring upfront I would I want to come back to what you said about real-time because that you know I oh I've said this now for a couple years but never used to use the term when Big Data was at its the peak of what does a gardener call it the hype cycle you guys didn't use that term and and so when you think about the use cases and in the Big Data world you've been hearing about real time forever now you're talking about it enterprise data warehouse you know cheaper EDW is fraud detection better analytics for the line of business obviously security and IT ops these are some of the use cases that we used to hear about in Big Data you're doing like all these now and sort of your platform can be used in all of these sort of traditional Big Data use cases am i understanding that problem 100% understanding it properly you know Splunk has again really evolved and if you think about again some of the announcements today think about date of fabric search right rather than saying you have to put everything into one instance or everything into one place right we're saying we will let you operate across your entire landscape and do your searches at scale and you know spunk was already the fastest at searching across your global enterprise to start with and when we were two to three times faster than anybody who compete it with us and now we improve that today by fourteen hundred percent I don't I don't even know where like you just look at again it ties back to the innovations and what's being done in our developer community within our engineering and team in those traditional use cases that I talked about in big data it was it was kind of an open source mess really complex zookeeper is the big joke right and always you know hive and pig and you know HBase and blah blah blah and we're practitioners of a lot of that stuff that's it's very complex essentially you've got a platform that now can be used the same platform that you're using in your traditional base that you're bringing to the line of business correct okay right it's the same exact platform we are definitely putting the power of Splunk in in the users hand so by doing things like mobile use on mobile and AR today and again I wish I could talk about what's coming tomorrow but let's just say our business users are going to be pretty blown away by what they're going to see tomorrow in our announcements yeah so I mean I'm presuming these are these are modern it's modern software micro services API base so if I want to bring in those open source tool tools I can in fact what you'll actually see when you understand more about the architecture is we're actually leveraging a lot of open-source and what we do so you know capabilities a spark and flink and but what we're doing is we're masking the complex the complexity of those from the user so instead of you having to do your own spark environment your own flink environment and you know having to figure out Kafka on your own and how you subscribe to what we're giving you all that we're we're masking all that for you and giving you the power of leveraging those tools so this becomes increasingly important my opinion especially as you start bringing in things like AI and machine learning and deep learning because that's going to be adopted both within a platform like use as yours but outside as well so you have to be able to bring in innovations from others but at the same time to simplify it and reduce that complexity you've got to infuse AI into your own platform and that's exactly what you're doing it's exactly what we're doing it's in our platform it's in our applications and then we provide the toolkit the SDK if you will so users can take it to another level all right so you've got 16,000 customers today if I understand the vision of SPARC next you're looking to get an order of magnitude more customers that you of it as addressable market talk to us about the changes that need to happen in the field is it just you're hitting an inflection point you've got those you know evangelists out there and I you know I see the capes and the fezzes all over the show so how is your field get ready to reach that broader audience yeah I think that's a great question again once again it will I'll tell you what we're doing internally but it's also about the ecosystem right in order to go broader it has to be about this this Splunk ecosystem and on the technology side we're opening the aperture right it's micro services it's ap eyes it's cloud there's there's so much available for that ecosystem and then from a go-to-market perspective it's really about understanding where the use cases are that can be repeated thousands of times right that the the the big problems that each of those verticals are trying to solve as opposed to the one corner use case that you know you could you could solve for one customer and that was actually one of the things we found is when we did analysis we used to do case studies on Big Data number one use case that always came back was custom because nothing was repeatable and that's how we were seeing you know a little bit more industry specific issues I was at soft ignite last week and you know Microsoft is going deep on verticals to get specific as to you know for IOT and AI how they can get specific in those environments I agreed I think again one of the things that so unique about Splunk platform is because it is the same platform that's at the underlying aspect that serves all of those use cases we have the ability in my opinion to do it in a way that's far less custom than anybody else and so we've seen the ecosystem evolve as well again six seven years ago it was kind of a tiny technology ecosystem and last year in DC we saw it really starting to expand now you walk around here you see you know some big booths from some of the SI partners that's critical because that's global scale deep deep industry expertise but also board level relationships absolutely that's another part of the the go-to markets Splunk becomes more strategic this is a massive Tam expansion that where we are potentially that we're witnessing with Splunk how do you see those conversations changing are you personally involved in more of those boardroom discussions definitely personally involved in your spot on to say that that's what's happening and I think a perfect example is you talk to Carnival today right we didn't typically have a lot of CEOs at the Splunk conference right now we have CEOs coming to the spunk conference right because it is at that level of strategic to our customers and so when you think about Carnival and yes they're using it for the traditional IT ops and security use cases but they're also using it for their customer experience and who would ever think you know ten years ago or even five years ago of Splunk as a customer experience platform but really what's at the heart of customer experience it's data so speaking of the CEO of Carnival Arnold Donald it's kind of an interesting name and and so he he stood up in the States today talking about diversity doubling down on diversity as an african-american you know you frankly in our industry you don't see a lot of african-americans CEOs you don't see a ton of women CEOs you don't see the son of women with with president in their title so he he made a really kind of interesting statement where he said something to the effect of forty years ago when I started in the business I didn't work with a lot of people like me and I thought that was a very powerful statement and he also said essentially look at if we're diverse we're gonna beat you every time your thoughts as an executive and in tech and a woman in tech so first of all i 100% agree with him and i can actually go back to my start i was a computer scientist at NSA so i didn't see a lot of people who looked like me and so from that perspective I know exactly where he's coming from and I am I'll tell you at Splunk we have a huge investment in diversity and not because it's a checkbox but because we believe in exactly what he says it's a competitive edge when you get people who think differently because you came from a different background because you're a different ethnicity because you were educated differently whatever it is whether it's gender whether it's ethnicity whether it's just a different approach to thinking all differentiation puts a different lens and and that way you don't get stove you don't have stovepipe thinking and I what I love about our culture at spunk is that we we call it a high growth mindset and if you're not intellectually curious and you don't want to think beyond the boundaries then it's probably not a good fit for you and a big part of that is having a diverse environment we do a lot of spunk to drive that we actually posted our gender diversity statistics last year because we believe if you don't measure it you're never going to improve it and it was a big step right to say we want to publish it we want to hold herself accountable and we've done a really nice job of moving it a little over 1% in one year which for our population is pretty big but we're doing really unique things like we have all job descriptions are now analyzed there's actually a scientific analysis that can be done to make sure that the job description does not bias whether men are women whether men alone or whether it's you know gender neutral so that that's exciting obviously we have a big women in technology program and we have a high potential focus on our top women as well what's interesting about your story Susan and we spent a lot of time on the cube talking about diversity generally in women in tech specifically we support a lot of WI t and we always talk him frequently we're talking about women and engineering roles or computer science roles and how they they oftentimes even when they graduate with that degree they don't come into tech and what strikes me about your path is your technical and yet now you've become this business executive so and I would imagine that having that background that technical background only helped in terms of especially in this industry so there are paths beyond just the technical role one hundred percent it first of all it's a huge advantage I believe it's the core reason why I am where I am today because I have the technical aptitude and while I enjoyed the business side of it as much and I love the sales side and the marketing side and all of the above the truth of the matter is at my core I think it's that intellectual curiosity that came out of my technical background that kept me going and really made me very I took risks right and if you look at my career it's much more of a jungle gym than a ladder and the way you know I always give advice to young people who generally it's young women who ask but oh sometimes it's the young men as well which is like how did you get to where you are how do I plan that how do I get and the truth of the matter is you can't if you try and plan it it's probably not going to work out the exactly the way you plan and so my advice is to make sure that you every time you're going to make a move your ask yourself what am I going to learn Who am I going to learn from and what is it going to add to my experience that I can materially you know say is going to help me on a path to where I ultimately want to be but I think if you try and figure it out and plan a perfect ladder I also think that when you try and do a ladder you don't have what I call pivots which is looking at things from different lenses right so me having been on the engineering side on the sales side on the services side of things it gives me a different lens and understanding the entire experience of our customers as well as the internals of an organization and I think that people who pivot generally are people who are intellectually curious and have intellectual capacity to learn new things and that's what I look for when I hire people I love that you took a nonlinear progression to the path that you're in now and it's speaking of you know the the technical I think if you're in this business you better like tech or what are you doing in this business but the more you understand technology the more you can connect the dots between how technology is impacting business and then how it can be applied in new ways so well congratulations on your careers you got a long way to go and thanks so much for coming on the queue so much David I really appreciate it thank you okay keep it right - everybody stew and I'll be back with our next guest we're live from Splunk Don Capcom 18 you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover Madrid 2017. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Jesse St. Laurent is here. He's the CTO of Hyperconverged at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and he's joined by Jacobus Steyn, who is the GM of IT Operations at Key Price Insurance at South Africa. >> That's correct. King Price Insurance, yeah. >> Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Jesse, good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> What's happenin' at Discover? Hyperconverged, all the rage. Taking over the world. >> Yeah. (laughs) Hyperconverged taking over the world. I think, yeah, virtual machines continue to be a big challenge for customers, right? They're still exploding. As much as we talk about all the other cool things that are happening in the industry, a lot of times, it's the old unsolved problems that just won't go away, right? And it's funny to call VMs the old problem, but in some ways, they're kind of forgotten at times as we talk about next generation stuff. But, the reality is, you know, hyperconvergence still growing like crazy, still helping the customers simplify that management experience. So, for us, that's, you know, running on the Gen 10 platform from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. You know, just rock solid server platform in terms of delivering customers the same thing we've been delivering, right, which is that predictable performance and simple management experience to provide IT for them. >> Yeah, VM ware's the new legacy and we should all have such a legacy. And okay, Jacobus, let's get into it. First, tell us about your organization, Key Price. >> Yeah, so, King Price is a short term insurance company in South Africa started off about five years ago by a very innovative CIO. So, he's been in the insurance industry most of his life. But, he didn't like what he was doing in the insurance industry, so he kinda like wanted to reinvent the whole insurance industry. So, he came up with this one of a kind business model. And our biggest selling point today is that as your car value depreciates on a monthly basis, so does your insurance premium, and that is our biggest selling point in the short term industry when it comes to vehicles. And that's really been taking off in South Africa. And I was telling some other guys this morning, it's actually surprising that nobody else in South Africa has tried to copy that 'cause it's a winning model for us. >> Dave: Sorry, that happens monthly? >> Monthly, yeah, we decrease your premium on a monthly basis. >> You guys sell it to the U.S.? (laughing) >> (laughs) Not yet. But yeah, definitely on the maps. >> Dave: I mean, it's so logical, right? The replacement costs are going down, so why wouldn't your premiums go down? >> Yeah, one thing, it is quite logical. So it is, there's obviously a lot of questions about how your repair costs goes up on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis, and the RAND dollar is not always very healthy for us. But, I mean, we do all the math in the background and it makes sense. It's more valuable to retain a customer on the book, than having to replace a customer every five or six months. So, keeping a customer on the books while decreasing it's premium, in the long run, it make a lot more sense. >> So if you could keep churn below a threshold and maintain that customer relationship for a long enough period of time, you get profitable. >> Yeah, 'cause I mean, in South Africa, especially, the short term insurance industry is extremely competitive. So, the acquisition cost of the customer is very high. We've got various forms of leads coming in via websites and partners and things like that. But the price just to get a customer on the books is extremely high, so the longer the customer stays on the book, the sooner he pays off all his acquisition. And that way, we actually return that into the customer. >> Radio ads are the big thing in the U.S. for-- I don't know if that's the case in South Africa, I mean... >> We've tried a few radio ads. It's not-- >> It's not the main technique? >> No, no, definitely not- >> What is? What is the main channel? Is it online or-- >> So, we're very big on social media. So, the one thing that we've adopted from the get-go is definitely technology. And that is evident in every aspect of our business. So, we really push social media. We've got a whole team looking after social media. We've got brand ambassadors working at our business. We do some TV ads, but again, that's quite pricey. Some billboards still, yeah, little radio ads, but predominantly-- >> Social's productive, then. >> It is. >> Alright, let's get it. I love talking about your business, especially disruptors to the insurance business. I mean, it's just sitting there waiting to get disrupted, so-- Let's get into the infrastructure side, maybe paint a picture for us. What's that look like? >> Yeah, so, when I joined the company about two and a half years ago, they were just starting with this whole virtualization thing, so it was kind of like new to them. Having started up just five years ago, it was like a hundred IT guys working there, but some of them were working in marketing and some of them were working in management. So, it was all over the show. And my main job was actually just to consolidate in that entire environment and get them on this journey. With the competitive of the market, it's really important for us to get proper product to market quickly and that's one of the challenges that I faced from day one is that our inability to actually get product to market because of a lack of proper infrastructure, the turn around times in getting environments up and running. And it was literally to the point where we were detrimental to the business. We were causing serious downtime. Business was running major losses almost on a monthly basis because systems were down. They were ill managed. And then, luckily for us, we came across the guys from HP SimpliVity and they came in there. We deployed some of their technology on a proof of concept basis, you know, development space 'cause that was our biggest burning challenge at that point. The developers shouting for environments and we just couldn't provide that. So, we thought, you know what, let's invest this in a development space and see how it goes and if it works, we'll see how it goes from there. I think they dropped three cubes there, commissioned them, started moving their development teams across and two months, three months later, when the guys from HP were there to pick up their POC cubes, we just said, "No way, guys. Where do we sign for this? (laughing) You're not taking this out of my server room." And from there, it just, the adoption into the production environment was so quick. We instantly order three more cubes for the production environment. So, there's still that definite split between production and development. And that just allowed us to actually allow the developers, again, to get almost fresh daily copies of the production environment, to allow them to develop products to do some modeling against the production environment in their own spaces. And that's really lifted their performance to such an extent that we now got that whole agile sprint running in two week cycles. >> So, we've done some research. It suggests that when you bring this kind of infrastructure into the development world, you can actually get as high as seven X productivity improvement in developers. Have you seen those kinds of jumps? >> Yeah, definitely. The one challenge that we had, so the guys from development were really trying to adopt a whole agile development methodology. But, again, the infrastructure was a detriment to them 'cause they were hoping to have the environments up and running by Tuesday morning when their sprint would start, but then, two, three days later, we were still trying to restore copies of the databases onto their environments. So, they ended up with three days left of their two week sprint. So, I mean, that alone, the fact that we can have the environments up and running within hours, that's definitely a major improvement for them. And mid sprint, we can actually just decommission their environment, restore it back for them. So, infrastructure is no longer the showstopper in the development team and it's definitely just taken off for them. >> Common story of land and expand, dev impact, productivity impact. How's that compare? >> I think it is a common thread. And I think, you know, one of the other things that happens typically is from a land and expand perspective, those first systems go in. They're for POC, they're for development environment, and the theory is, they're isolated. And then, what happens is everybody realizes that it's easier to provision. It's more agile for the development team. It's easier for IT. And suddenly, the old environment just kind of atrophies and the new environment keeps growing. So, if you look at your environment, you had some traditional infrastructure within your environment. How much has that expanded versus the SimpliVity environment since you went live with SimpliVity? >> Yeah, we have actually-- We no longer are investing in that portion of our infrastructure 'cause it's... It's still, I mean, it's good technology and it's still valuable to us, but we will just put that on a normal run out. Things that we cannot get value from a SimpliVity perspective like, well, like, I think I was telling Jesse this morning, we've got a method of contracting because we are entirely paperless, our method of contracting is literally the call that you make to the client to close this policy deal. So, that is our proof if there is a claim or whatever the case might be. So, all those recordings we need to keep for seven years. So, those are the type of things that we saw in an all traditional infrastructure currently 'cause there's no deduplication there. There's no compression of any value there, so we're just chipping all that old kinda like-- >> Pure archive. >> Yeah, pure archive type of approach to that environment, yeah. >> Did you feel like you've achieved a substantially similar operating model to what people talk about with the public Cloud on PRIM? >> I think that the ease of deployment and the fact that it is so so simple-- I mean, the guy that's currently doing it, it's one guy, so again, our team is not very big. We've got the one guy looking after the entire server infrastructure environment. But the ease of deploying that and the fact that it's so simple, he can do it from anywhere and it's literally one or two clicks and he's got it up and running. It's, for us, it's definitely really very similar. >> I mean, that's the goal, right? I mean, it's kinda why you got into this business is-- >> So, before the acquisition, SimpliVity's theme was to simplify IT. With Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, it's to simplify hybrid IT. But the message in the approach hasn't changed. If we can give IT cycles back to focus on things that return value to the business, that's the goal at the end of the day, right? It's taking time away back from all those tasks that, the classic keeping the lights on tasks, allow the business to do something productive. >> But it's also to make the cycles that remain that much more valuable as well. >> Yeah, absolutely, and anything we can do that takes, you know, day to day management tasks off the plate of the IT organization, allows them to be that much more productive, you know, developers having their whole sprints, I mean, that's night and day in terms of productivity back to the business. In terms of the performance that customers see in their environment, what you're-- You have a critical nightly batch job in your environment, right? >> Yeah. >> And what was your pre and post experience there? >> So, the one thing that we do, I mean, the monthly decrease, that's a big cycle job that runs very often in our environment. So, it's all part of the financial billing cycles that run, so we've got this one job that runs at, I think it's actually on a weekly basis, and that would kick off on a Sunday evening and we would literally have the guys from the finance team getting up, starting the job, and sitting there, waiting for 14 hours for this job to complete. Number one, the environment was not very trustworthy, so they had to be up to make sure that it actually completes. And post or actually migrate-- Us migrating them onto the SimpliVity environment, the guy phoned me up the next morning and said, so he got up at one, kicked off the job, and two hours later, it was done. And he said, something must be wrong. This can't be happening. (laughs) So, that's literally, that's 12 hours saved time. The challenge we had that that job actually ran into our production environment or office hours, so the effect that health had on our entire business was just bad, bad for IT, bad for rep for IT. >> Alright, last question. >> When it failed. >> Sorry? >> When it failed. >> Well, even if it ran, it ran for 14 hours. It had ran into business hours. If it failed-- >> But it wasn't bad for the business after you got to two hours. >> No, no, no, I mean, that was like by three in the morning it's all sorted. And even if you had the failure on the job itself, you could just rerun it like once or twice and it would still be outside business hours. >> Alright, last question. For each of you. Your respective to dos. Jacobus, what on your to do list, then Jesse what's on HPE's HCI to do list? You first. >> Yeah, so King Price is definitely seriously looking at expanding internationally. So, what we are busy doing is to actually redesign our entire architecture structure of our infrastructure and our network and our security. So, we are busy planning to deploy another active data center. We'll probably be in South Africa still, but to get that full value of the RAM optimization that the SimpliVity offer, the compression that we can see to actually have a proper duplicate data center up and running to ensure business continuity. >> Yeah, for us, the market knows us for our product in the VCR market, in the VMR market. Real next growth area for us is around Hyper-V, so big excitement there around seeing that market expand. We've seen a lot of excitement from customers around multi-hypervisor. That's an area both with what's happening with SimpliVity from a platform perspective, as well as the other technologies from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise really coming together to offer that multi-Cloud experience for customers. >> Excellent, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. It's great to see you again. >> Thanks for having us. Jesse, Jacobus. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Dave: Good luck, go forward. >> Yeah, great stuff. >> Okay, keep it right there, everybody. Peter and I will be back at Discover Madrid to wrap right after this short break. (techy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. For the last few years, hyper-converged infrastructure has been one of the hot topics, and I'm happy to welcome back to the program Jesse St. Laurent, who is the chief technologist of hyper-converged software group-- Sorry, software-defined hyper-converged and cloud group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. A slightly longer title than last time I interviewed Jesse. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks Stu, it's great to be here. >> Alright, so hyper-converged has had a lot of hype. Hyper-converged has also had a lot of customers, a lot of dollars. First of all, I have to say, I think it's the-- You're the first employee of SimpliVity that we've had on since the acquisition. We've had the pleasure of knowing-- I've known you since before SimpliVity, but we've been watching SimpliVity since stealth mode, a $650 million acquisition in cash for HPE, so congratulations on that. >> Thanks. >> Stu: What have you been doing since the acquisition? >> I think one of the biggest changes, really, is going from being a product company, where, in reality, startups, if you're going to be successful, you have to focus on one thing, and you have to do it well. And for SimpliVity, well, we spent a lot of time building technology that was much more broadly applicable from an industry perspective. Taking it to market, it had to be narrow, and that's why we focused specifically on hyper-convergence. But we always felt that, and you and I have talked about this long ago, that some of the underpinnings of our technology really were about this concept of a data fabric. So, fast-forward to today, SimpliVity is no longer a single-product company, right? We're part of a portfolio company that has technology that spans the entire hybrid IT marketplace. >> Jesse, I want you to look back for a little bit for us. >> Sure. >> As I've said, you've ridden this wave. I sometimes joke, I'm still yet to find a CIO that had a convergence problem. (Keith laughs) But you're solving real customer problems. Obviously, you've got a lot of customers. As you look back, what have you learned along the way? What are some of those key drivers that kind of got you to where you are, and what's changed in the conversations recently for your customers? >> I think it's always been about simplification. The strange thing is SimpliVity always talked about simplifying IT, right? Whenever any of us talked about what the company did, the first slide was, "Our mission is to simplify IT," and I didn't know it prior, but after the acquisition, HP's, one of the core strategies of the company, is to simplify hybrid IT, which aligns remarkably well. I think that's the common thread for SimpliVity, is we've seen the product evolve, and the use cases of all of early on, smaller customers, much larger enterprises over time, different use cases, ranging from data centers to kind of extreme robo examples. I think, really, the thread through that is hybrid IT's complicated, right, and what I think is a common thread through all of what we see on the floor here, for the most part, is IT is really hard. I always use the term, "the messy middle." In the end of the day, vendors like to make the world seem binary, right? It's either, you're either public cloud or you're private cloud, or you're either x or y, and the reality is no customer I've ever seen has come in in the morning and said, "You know what? "Today, we're going to flip this switch, "and everything is going to go from the mainframe "to open systems, or open systems, you know, bare metal, "to virtualization, or virtualization to containers." Customers live in a very messy world, and that's where simplification is that theme. >> So Jesse, no matter the technology, technologists, we love to say scale break stuff. SimpliVity is used to scale, but coming into HPE, much different sized organization, organization that looks at the industry a little bit differently than SimpliVity does, how has things changed for your view now that you're inside of HP? >> Yeah, I mean one of the things that is a huge change is we're everywhere, right? SimpliVity talked about being in tens of countries before, and we were excited about that, and for a startup, the number was huge. >> Keith: Right. >> It paled in comparison to the footprint of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In one of the first couple weeks of the acquisition, I was presenting to some customers, and Meg Whitman was part of the discussion as well, and I said, "One of the biggest changes will be "we will be in 90% of the opportunities "where somebody's talking about hyper-convergence," and Meg stopped me and said, "No, no no. "We will be in 100% of the opportunities where someone's talking about hyper-convergence." And just to a scale perspective, that's a scale that no startup has ever experienced. You can't be everywhere, and that's a huge transition just in terms of enabling a global sales force to be able to be everywhere. >> Jesse, I'd like to get your take. People talk about software's eating the world. We live in a software-defined world right now. You know, cloud's a lot of software, but hardware still has an impact. We all know virtualization, boy, you know, some of those underlying things. The devil's in the details on networking and storage specifically. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, obviously your solution is predominantly software, but now you have a lot more hardware that goes with it. I know you've done a lot of the integration on that. What, has anything changed as to how you think of the software and hardware? And I'd love to hear a little insight as to that integration work. Anything surprise you or excite you coming into the HPE family? >> Yeah, I think, let me talk about a little bit of the SimpliVity hardware view and how that's evolved because I think it's an interesting transition, which is we've always based our technology on one, our accelerator that just made everything faster and more predictable. It was a core part of our technology, but we've always talked about having a software-optimized version of the stack, as well, and doing that across a whole suite of hardware platforms was never a simple thing to do because there was one SimpliVity, and there were a lot of hardware platforms out there. What we've seen now is, we're going into an environment where there's one suite of hardware technology, and it's a company that has a massive amount of expertise in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, developing hardware technologies. So where SimpliVity had an accelerator, one of the things that I didn't think about in advance of the acquisition is a whole bunch of people coming to us, saying, "We've got some really interesting ideas "on how to take what you've built around this accelerator, "and make it really fast." You imagine when you own the chassis, when you own the motherboard, when you own everything about the platform, the idea of putting a card in, well, yeah, well that's easy, but what else can you do? When you have an army of people that can build hardware, you can do all sorts of really cool stuff. So I think what you'll see is, actually, us doing two separate things more. You'll continue to see a hardware-optimized version of everything SimpliVity's done for years now. It seems a little strange to say "years," but years now. That's not going to go away, in fact, it's going to get even better, but at the same time, there're form factors and there're places where you want to run in software, whether it's to be extra small, whether it's to bounce down the road in a Humvee, whether it's to be in an airplane; there's a whole bunch of reasons you want to do that. So you'll actually see us having a portfolio that embraces both sides of that. >> So one last question around that hardware and software abstraction. HPE, while a lot of expertise, you have to be a little bit overwhelmed. DL380, which you guys are supporting now, DL580, Synergy, where are we going to see SimpliVity next in HPE's massive hardware profile? >> Yeah, my hope is you see it everywhere, but it takes time to get there. I think one of the things that's most exciting about this transformation that SimpliVity will go through is really becoming a data fabric company. So hyper-convergence isn't going away, and hyper-convergence will come to other platforms, whether it's a one-year platform or a four-year platform, more sockets, higher density. I think you'll see all those things over time. You'll also see, what does it mean to be part of a software-defined stack, living in a composable world, right? I think those things fit together really well, and you'll see a lot of cool stuff coming around that. We're seeing the biggest boost in terms of exposure in the market. It has caused huge SimpliVity product growth in the market. Now what we want to do is broaden that portfolio to be in a lot of other places in the market. >> Alright, well Jesse, we really appreciate catching the update. We're surely going to be watching as to how composable infrastructure and the portfolio of the HPE offerings fit in with SimpliVity, so thanks so much for joining us. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017 Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of WiDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are at Stanford University, as you know we are every year, having some wonderful conversations with some very inspiring women and men in data science and technical roles. I'm very pleased to introduce Tracy Zhang, my co-host, who is in the Data Journalism program at Stanford. And Tracy and I are pleased to welcome our next guest, Rhonda Crate, Principal Data Scientist at Boeing. Great to have you on the program, Rhonda. >> Tracy: Welcome. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Were you always interested in data science or STEM from the time you were young? >> No, actually. I was always interested in archeology and anthropology. >> That's right, we were talking about that, anthropology. Interesting. >> We saw the anthropology background, not even a bachelor's degree, but also a master's degree in anthropology. >> So you were committed for a while. >> I was, I was. I actually started college as a fine arts major, but I always wanted to be an archeologist. So at the last minute, 11 credits in, left to switch to anthropology. And then when I did my master's, I focused a little bit more on quantitative research methods and then I got my Stat Degree. >> Interesting. Talk about some of the data science projects that you're working on. When I think of Boeing, I always think of aircraft. But you are doing a lot of really cool things in IT, data analytics. Talk about some of those intriguing data science projects that you're working on. >> Yeah. So when I first started at Boeing, I worked in information technology and data analytics. And Boeing, at the time, had cored up data science in there. And so we worked as a function across the enterprise working on anything from shared services to user experience in IT products, to airplane programs. So, it has a wide range. I worked on environment health and safety projects for a long time as well. So looking at ergonomics and how people actually put parts onto airplanes, along with things like scheduling and production line, part failures, software testing. Yeah, there's a wide spectrum of things. >> But I think that's so fantastic. We've been talking, Tracy, today about just what we often see at WiDS, which is this breadth of diversity in people's background. You talked about anthropology, archeology, you're doing data science. But also all of the different opportunities that you've had at Boeing. To see so many facets of that organization. I always think that breadth of thought diversity can be hugely impactful. >> Yeah. So I will say my anthropology degree has actually worked to my benefit. I'm a huge proponent of integrating liberal arts and sciences together. And it actually helps me. I'm in the Technical Fellowship program at Boeing, so we have different career paths. So you can go into management, you can be a regular employee, or you can go into the Fellowship program. So right now I'm an Associate Technical Fellow. And part of how I got into the Fellowship program was that diversity in my background, what made me different, what made me stand out on projects. Even applying a human aspect to things like ergonomics, as silly as that sounds, but how does a person actually interact in the space along with, here are the actual measurements coming off of whatever system it is that you're working on. So, I think there's a lot of opportunities, especially in safety as well, which is a big initiative for Boeing right now, as you can imagine. >> Tracy: Yeah, definitely. >> I can't go into too specifics. >> No, 'cause we were like, I think a theme for today that kind of we brought up in in all of our talk is how data is about people, how data is about how people understand the world and how these data can make impact on people's lives. So yeah, I think it's great that you brought this up, and I'm very happy that your anthropology background can tap into that and help in your day-to-day data work too. >> Yeah. And currently, right now, I actually switched over to Strategic Workforce Planning. So it's more how we understand our workforce, how we work towards retaining the talent, how do we get the right talent in our space, and making sure overall that we offer a culture and work environment that is great for our employees to come to. >> That culture is so important. You know, I was looking at some anitab.org stats from 2022 and you know, we always talk about the number of women in technical roles. For a long time it's been hovering around that 25% range. The data from anitab.org showed from '22, it's now 27.6%. So, a little increase. But one of the biggest challenges still, and Tracy and I and our other co-host, Hannah, have been talking about this, is attrition. Attrition more than doubled last year. What are some of the things that Boeing is doing on the retention side, because that is so important especially as, you know, there's this pipeline leakage of women leaving technical roles. Tell us about what Boeing's, how they're invested. >> Yeah, sure. We actually have a publicly available Global Diversity Report that anybody can go and look at and see our statistics for our organization. Right now, off the top of my head, I think we're hovering at about 24% in the US for women in our company. It has been a male majority company for many years. We've invested heavily in increasing the number of women in roles. One interesting thing about this year that came out is that even though with the great resignation and those types of things, the attrition level between men and women were actually pretty close to being equal, which is like the first time in our history. Usually it tends on more women leaving. >> Lisa: That's a good sign. >> Right. >> Yes, that's a good sign. >> And we've actually focused on hiring and bringing in more women and diversity in our company. >> Yeah, some of the stats too from anitab.org talked about the increase, and I have to scroll back and find my notes, the increase in 51% more women being hired in 2022 than 2021 for technical roles. So the data, pun intended, is showing us. I mean, the data is there to show the impact that having females in executive leadership positions make from a revenue perspective. >> Tracy: Definitely. >> Companies are more profitable when there's women at the head, or at least in senior leadership roles. But we're seeing some positive trends, especially in terms of representation of women technologists. One of the things though that I found interesting, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Rhonda, is that the representation of women technologists is growing in all areas, except interns. >> Rhonda: Hmm. >> So I think, we've got to go downstream. You teach, I have to go back to my notes on you, did my due diligence, R programming classes through Boeings Ed Wells program, this is for WSU College of Arts and Sciences, talk about what you teach and how do you think that intern kind of glut could be solved? >> Yeah. So, they're actually two separate programs. So I teach a data analytics course at Washington State University as an Adjunct Professor. And then the Ed Wells program is a SPEEA, which is an Aerospace Union, focused on bringing up more technology and skills to the actual workforce itself. So it's kind of a couple different audiences. One is more seasoned employees, right? The other one is our undergraduates. I teach a Capstone class, so it's a great way to introduce students to what it's actually like to work on an industry project. We partner with Google and Microsoft and Boeing on those. The idea is also that maybe those companies have openings for the students when they're done. Since it's Senior Capstone, there's not a lot of opportunities for internships. But the opportunities to actually get hired increase a little bit. In regards to Boeing, we've actually invested a lot in hiring more women interns. I think the number was 40%, but you'd have to double check. >> Lisa: That's great, that's fantastic. >> Tracy: That's way above average, I think. >> That's a good point. Yeah, it is above average. >> Double check on that. That's all from my memory. >> Is this your first WiDS, or have you been before? >> I did virtually last year. >> Okay. One of the things that I love, I love covering this event every year. theCUBE's been covering it since it's inception in 2015. But it's just the inspiration, the vibe here at Stanford is so positive. WiDS is a movement. It's not an initiative, an organization. There are going to be, I think annually this year, there will be 200 different events. Obviously today we're live on International Women's Day. 60 plus countries, 100,000 plus people involved. So, this is such a positive environment for women and men, because we need everybody, underrepresented minorities, to be able to understand the implication that data has across our lives. If we think about stripping away titles in industries, everybody is a consumer, not everybody, most of mobile devices. And we have this expectation, I was in Barcelona last week at a Mobile World Congress, we have this expectation that we're going to be connected 24/7. I can get whatever I want wherever I am in the world, and that's all data driven. And the average person that isn't involved in data science wouldn't understand that. At the same time, they have expectations that depend on organizations like Boeing being data driven so that they can get that experience that they expect in their consumer lives in any aspect of their lives. And that's one of the things I find so interesting and inspiring about data science. What are some of the things that keep you motivated to continue pursuing this? >> Yeah I will say along those lines, I think it's great to invest in K-12 programs for Data Literacy. I know one of my mentors and directors of the Data Analytics program, Dr. Nairanjana Dasgupta, we're really familiar with each other. So, she runs a WSU program for K-12 Data Literacy. It's also something that we strive for at Boeing, and we have an internal Data Literacy program because, believe it or not, most people are in business. And there's a lot of disconnect between interpreting and understanding data. For me, what kind of drives me to continue data science is that connection between people and data and how we use it to improve our world, which is partly why I work at Boeing too 'cause I feel that they produce products that people need like satellites and airplanes, >> Absolutely. >> and everything. >> Well, it's tangible, it's relatable. We can understand it. Can you do me a quick favor and define data literacy for anyone that might not understand what that means? >> Yeah, so it's just being able to understand elements of data, whether that's a bar chart or even in a sentence, like how to read a statistic and interpret a statistic in a sentence, for example. >> Very cool. >> Yeah. And sounds like Boeing's doing a great job in these programs, and also trying to hire more women. So yeah, I wanted to ask, do you think there's something that Boeing needs to work on? Or where do you see yourself working on say the next five years? >> Yeah, I think as a company, we always think that there's always room for improvement. >> It never, never stops. >> Tracy: Definitely. (laughs) >> I know workforce strategy is an area that they're currently really heavily investing in, along with safety. How do we build safer products for people? How do we help inform the public about things like Covid transmission in airports? For example, we had the Confident Traveler Initiative which was a big push that we had, and we had to be able to inform people about data models around Covid, right? So yeah, I would say our future is more about an investment in our people and in our culture from my perspective >> That's so important. One of the hardest things to change especially for a legacy organization like Boeing, is culture. You know, when I talk with CEO's or CIO's or COO's about what's your company's vision, what's your strategy? Especially those companies that are on that digital journey that have no choice these days. Everybody expects to have a digital experience, whether you're transacting an an Uber ride, you're buying groceries, or you're traveling by air. That culture sounds like Boeing is really focused on that. And that's impressive because that's one of the hardest things to morph and mold, but it's so essential. You know, as we look around the room here at WiDS it's obviously mostly females, but we're talking about women, underrepresented minorities. We're talking about men as well who are mentors and sponsors to us. I'd love to get your advice to your younger self. What would you tell yourself in terms of where you are now to become a leader in the technology field? >> Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting question because I always try to think, live with no regrets to an extent. >> Lisa: I like that. >> But, there's lots of failures along the way. (Tracy laughing) I don't know if I would tell myself anything different because honestly, if I did, I wouldn't be where I am. >> Lisa: Good for you. >> I started out in fine arts, and I didn't end up there. >> That's good. >> Such a good point, yeah. >> We've been talking about that and I find that a lot at events like WiDS, is women have these zigzaggy patterns. I studied biology, I have a master's in molecular biology, I'm in media and marketing. We talked about transportable skills. There's a case I made many years ago when I got into tech about, well in science you learn the art of interpreting esoteric data and creating a story from it. And that's a transportable skill. But I always say, you mentioned failure, I always say failure is not a bad F word. It allows us to kind of zig and zag and learn along the way. And I think that really fosters thought diversity. And in data science, that is one of the things we absolutely need to have is that diversity and thought. You know, we talk about AI models being biased, we need the data and we need the diverse brains to help ensure that the biases are identified, extracted, and removed. Speaking of AI, I've been geeking out with ChatGPT. So, I'm on it yesterday and I ask it, "What's hot in data science?" And I was like, is it going to get that? What's hot? And it did it, it came back with trends. I think if I ask anything, "What's hot?", I should be to Paris Hilton, but I didn't. And so I was geeking out. One of the things I learned recently that I thought was so super cool is the CTO of OpenAI is a woman, Mira Murati, which I didn't know until over the weekend. Because I always think if I had to name top females in tech, who would they be? And I always default to Sheryl Sandberg, Carly Fiorina, Susan Wojcicki running YouTube. Who are some of the people in your history, in your current, that are really inspiring to you? Men, women, indifferent. >> Sure. I think Boeing is one of the companies where you actually do see a lot of women in leadership roles. I think we're one of the top companies with a number of women executives, actually. Susan Doniz, who's our Chief Information Officer, I believe she's actually slotted to speak at a WiDS event come fall. >> Lisa: Cool. >> So that will be exciting. Susan's actually relatively newer to Boeing in some ways. A Boeing time skill is like three years is still kind of new. (laughs) But she's been around for a while and she's done a lot of inspiring things, I think, for women in the organization. She does a lot with Latino communities and things like that as well. For me personally, you know, when I started at Boeing Ahmad Yaghoobi was one of my mentors and my Technical Lead. He came from Iran during a lot of hard times in the 1980s. His brother actually wrote a memoir, (laughs) which is just a fun, interesting fact. >> Tracy: Oh my God! >> Lisa: Wow! >> And so, I kind of gravitate to people that I can learn from that's not in my sphere, that might make me uncomfortable. >> And you probably don't even think about how many people you're influencing along the way. >> No. >> We just keep going and learning from our mentors and probably lose sight of, "I wonder how many people actually admire me?" And I'm sure there are many that admire you, Rhonda, for what you've done, going from anthropology to archeology. You mentioned before we went live you were really interested in photography. Keep going and really gathering all that breadth 'cause it's only making you more inspiring to people like us. >> Exactly. >> We thank you so much for joining us on the program and sharing a little bit about you and what brought you to WiDS. Thank you so much, Rhonda. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Tracy: Thank you so much for being here. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Alright. >> For our guests, and for Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin live at Stanford University covering the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. Stick around. Next guest will be here in just a second. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson, day four of MWC '23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles, and we're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries. It's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge Gateway Product Technologist at Dell Technologies, and Scott Waller, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you, what is the Open Innovation Lab? >> So it was hatched three years ago. Ideated about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran startup ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if you're familiar with MSDN. And they came three years ago and said, how does CSPs working with someone like T-Mobile who's in our backyard, I'm from Seattle. How do they monetize the edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing. The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners, Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Aspirant, you name it. The enterprise folks who are also in the connectivity business. And with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstars where it's investment first and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR or AI type of application or observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsoft's of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've had 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars. And it's really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing in folks like Expedo and GenXComm and Firecell. Start up private companies that are around here they were cohorts from our program in the past. >> That's awesome because I've often, I mean, I've seen Dell get into this business and I'm like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is. >> We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. >> Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? >> Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers laptops, et cetera. But what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments and it allows customers to do analytics, data collection at the edge. And what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range. There's no fan in this and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery. And then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it, you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. >> So tell us about the brewery story. And you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery. They're taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, "We can help you with this problem." Explain the story. >> Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. >> It's in Framingham, Mass. >> Framingham, Mass, correct. And basically, we talked to him, and we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, a kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges. And what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late. A batch of scrap. This allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. >> Okay. Amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? >> Yeah, actually this is the final product. >> Explain that. >> As Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network So we wanted to keep the IT/OT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using Telit deviceWISE, their dashboarding application, that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then when we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spill beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones 'cause they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook. This is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle. This one's in the crashing cycle where they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. >> And they're doing all that from this dashboard. >> They're doing all from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor instead of walking a hundred yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, "Oh, that's red. That's out of range." They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now, too. So this is real time from Boston. >> Dave: Oh okay. >> Scott: This is actually real time from Boston. >> I'm no hop master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. >> We literally just lit this up last week. So we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around. This is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. Then now they're also training and learning. And we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries might be able to use. >> So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system. The device that you have here has essentially wifi antennas on the back. >> Warren: Correct. >> Pull that up again if you would, please. >> Now I've seen this, just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. >> Correct. >> That's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into wifi so the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. >> Fermentation tanks. >> Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are wifi. That's a wifi signal that's going into this. Is that correct? >> Scott: No. >> No, it's not. >> It's a hard wire. >> Okay, okay. >> But, you're right. This particular gateway. >> It could be wifi if it's hard wire. >> It could be, yes. Could be any technology really. >> This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G, but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on wifi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were ifm, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway and then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner Telit that has deviceWISE software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. >> We're talking about a small business here. I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network. And so they wanted, it is very common when we talk about industrial internet of things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. >> Warren: Correct. >> They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. >> Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, their payroll, all of their kind of the way they run their business on their IT network and you don't want to have the same traffic out on the factory floor on that network, so it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. So we installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down, they didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. It was like we were invisible there and we spun the thing up and within two days, very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. >> Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. It's like 99% of the companies on the planet. What are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? >> Yeah, I could talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple years running my own little IoT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. It's my hometown. But in the Ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deploying it. But because we have the vast amount of hops there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and InBev and Heineken they've got great IoT platforms. They've done it. They're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't, when we talk about IT/OT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just, I get local broadband and I get wifi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit of it was the education. I have got years in IT/OT security in my background so that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them. And now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they're inherently aware of what should be done so they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue Model. >> Well, what should they do? >> We came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use. Because I've toured dozens of breweries in Washington, the exact same scenario, analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? It keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range, because the chiller fails, >> They ruined. >> That's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read-only. We're not changing any of the process. We augmented on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process. But now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best, it means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. >> It's like St. Louis Buds, when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds 'cause they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made them all the same. >> Must be an East coast thing. >> It's an old guy thing, Dave. You weren't born yet. >> I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. >> We like the hops. >> We weren't 21. Do me a favor, clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone's familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. >> It's really the factory floor. You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your emails, stuff like that. Where the ransomware usually gets infected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. >> David: What's the 'O' stand for? >> Operation. >> David: Operation? >> Yeah, the operations side. >> 'Cause some people will think objects 'cause we think internet of things. >> The industrial operations, think of it that way. >> But in a sense those are things that are connected. >> And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well. So a machine, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you'd think if there's a lot of traffic on that network, it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted in design that it never touches the internet inherently without having to go through a security gateway which is what we did. >> You mentioned the large companies like InBev, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market? Or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-size company? >> For this particular solution, I think so, yeah. Because the cost to entry is low. I mean, you talk about InBev, they have millions of dollars of budgets to spend on OT. So they're completely automated from top to bottom. But these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US. Vermont, Washington state, they're completely manual. A lot of these guys just started in their garage. And they just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. In our booth we're serving beer, and all these kind of topics, it brings people together. >> And it lets the little guy compete more effectively with the big giants. >> Correct. >> And how do you do more with less as the little guy is kind of the big thing and to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, "Great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine?" Same materials in the end. A vessel of some sort, maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same, the sensors are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talking about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and then we integrated them in and used the set of platforms that we could. How do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf. And there's four different companies in the solution. >> We were having a conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. >> Yeah, correct. And it's one of the things with the gateway and having flexibility the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it. It had a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, at a larger facility, I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh, heck yeah, they probably could do it. And they might have a private 5G network, but let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. >> Is that how the CSPs fit here? How are they monetized? >> Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile and so we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. >> So small manufacturing, agriculture you mentioned, any other sort of use cases we should tune into? >> I think it's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, I see it in IoT deployments all over the world. Just the simple starter kits 'cause a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform, where he's got to hire a bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. >> Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that, it's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year 'cause I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story's about, just giving visibility into the process. >> It's very cool, and like you said, it gets people excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big TAM? >> Yeah, so one thing that Dell brings to the table in this space is people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell and companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for our customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. >> So we're talking to billions, tens of billions. Do we know how big this market is? What's the TAM? I mean, come on, you work for Dell. You have to do a TAM analysis. >> Yes, no, yeah. I mean, it really is in the billions. The market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. We're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but the possibilities are endless. >> Yeah, that's tip of the spear. Guys, great story. >> It's scalable. I think the biggest thing, just my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a Packet Core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there. And I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor, and now he can do something that, we're providing connectivity he had never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we got the telco size units that we can put. So it's very scalable. It's just a great suite of offerings. >> Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Good to be with you today. >> Stop by for beer later. >> You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, we're here live at the Fira in Barcelona MWC '23 day four. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE everyone Lisa Martin here. On the ground in Las Vegas at COUPA INSPIRE 2022. This is our second day of coverage here. There's been about 2,400 to 2,500 folks at the event. This year people are ready to come back. I've been happy to talk with lots Coupa folks, their partners, their customers and I've got both a customer and a partner here with me. Heidi Banks joins us, the Senior director of Global Procurement at Jabil. Heidi it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me give. >> Give the audience an overview of Jabil and what you guys do. >> So Jabil is a $30 billion manufacturing solutions partner that provides contract manufacturing services for 450 of the world's largest and most premier brands around the globe. Most people don't know our name but we're the wonderful face behind the name. >> Well you guys had, I was looking at some stats, over 260,000 employees across 100 locations. Very customer centric you guys are, as is Coupa, this good obviously synergy there but you had some objectives from a global procurement perspective. What were those? What were some of the challenges that you wanted to solve? >> So about seven years ago, Jabil went on a journey to identify what challenges we had out in the indirect procurement space. Being such a large global company, we had no idea what we were spending on indirect at the of time. After a little bit of digging, we found out that we had over 2 billion in spend that was untapped from a category management perspective. And so we knew that we needed to grow as a company and PaaS technology as a foundation, as our goal and our mission in the company is to be the most technologically advanced manufacturer solutions partner for our customers. >> Was there any sort of one thing or a compelling event seven years ago that caused you guys to go, "We need to be really getting our hands around this indirect spend?" >> So we started off by bringing in category managers and they were doing amazing job delivering savings in our contracts, but we had no way to deliver that out to the company. And the company being so big in so many different jurisdictions in countries around the world, you could negotiate the best contract in the world, but if you couldn't communicate it out to your users then it was a challenge to really capture that savings and make sure we were delivering bottom line savings to the company. >> And you guys are, we're talking about three different SAP ERP systems so a lot of technology in the environment. What were some of the core technology requirements that Jabil had when it came looking for a business plan management solution? >> Yeah, so we were looking for something that was very user friendly. Of course, Coupa takes that box very well. Also something that could drive governance and policy controls again challenging being such a global organization and making sure that things were going according to our policy into our global category managers to be sourced and negotiated for the company. We looked for one that was end to end from a business spend management platform perspective. We wanted something that was integrated and could cover three ERP systems from one pane of glass across the company. So we could get great analytics without having to search in so many different places. >> That is so key. I was talking with Rob, I was talking with Raja and they were all talking about how those silos still exist and how they're helping organizations like Jabil break those down and give them that single pane of glass, as you mentioned, to be able to see, to get that visibility into indirect spend, for example. Talk to me about the solutions that you implemented from Coupa. >> So we started off with Coupa's procure to pay system. Really our focus was to get off of our old system as quickly as we could and get everyone managing on the same policy controls approval flows. We then also had analytics, so we had Coupa AIC and brought in analytics and in the last year and a half I've also deployed strategic and tactical sourcing through Coupa as well, and spend guard from a audit control and compliance perspective. >> So then that the phrase "sweet synergy" that actually probably means a lot to you Coupa was talking about that during the keynote this morning. Your Jabil is living that sweet synergy kind of experience through Coupa >> That's right. As we source in Coupa and we can see, are there different behaviors that we need to look into maybe suppliers that are bidding at the last minute and winning or less than that desirable number of suppliers coming in or duplicate invoices and being able to really look through that and see spend patterns that we would never otherwise uncover is highly important to us from a compliance standpoint, we've gotten a great value out of that solution. >> And in terms of value, one of the things I know that was important to you when you were looking for the right technology partner, was you wanted to involve other folks within the organization across IT, other lines of business. Talk to me about how important that was to bring in that cross-functional team to help make the right decision. >> Yeah, that was one of the most critical things that we did. We needed to make sure, especially being an SAP shop right, we needed to make sure that we were standing back and really being impartial in our decision and driving a non-biased decision in that RFP process. And so we got our executives together, talked to them about the value drivers and the ROI that we could do if we had all of the right support from the right departments, so that we could avoid resistance as we tried to deploy in such a rapid way. So we brought IT, legal, users together, procurement and in advance did a balanced scorecard approach to say these were the important factors that we had whether it was IT infrastructure, whether it was capabilities to make sure that when we came out of that decision and we picked a solution, we could all look at each other and have a handshake and say it was the right decision for us as a company, and so no departments had push back at that point because of that approach that we took. >> An objective approach that you took. >> That's right. >> Let's talk about some of the outcomes look at, actually let's not, let's talk about your deployment first, 'cause you guys started with probably your most challenging sites whereas other folks might go. Let's start with the low hanging fruit and kind of work our way up. Jabil said, "Nope, we're going to flip the script on that." >> That's right. So we, we went with what we call an east to west strategy. We are heavily concentrated in our Asia markets and so we were also wanted to deliver our ROI as quickly as possible and get our spend into the system as quickly as possible. So we we went live with 12 sites, 11 mega sites in China and our corporate headquarters in St. Petersburg in order to get that spend in as quickly as possible and get our ROI delivered. So we started in China and the US then in our second phase deployed the rest of Asia and then the US and North America and then over to Europe. So we went regional from a time zone perspective but also just I say, go bold. I hear a lot of people that start small and then grow but if you want to deliver that ROI and get your money out of that system as soon as possible go big or go home. >> I like that go big, go home. It's like Mick Ebeling was talking about this morning from not impossible labs commit and then figure it out. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> You know what? That's actually brilliant advice because it's probably the opposite that a lot of us want to be we want to be able to figure this out and then go, okay we can do that. And he said no >> Yeah >> To the opposite. >> To the opposite >> Did you have to get buy-in from those cross-functional folks to say we want to start with our most challenging sites first, was that a team decision? >> That was a decision that we did just basically to get that ROI delivered. And we also had a really strong team that still partners with our Coupa admins today that were really invested in getting onto a solution where they can automate and drive control and compliance. And so not only do we involve the team in the solution selection, but also in the global design. So we brought different cross-functional departments together into one location together, we made all of our decisions on how we were going to configure Coupa So that way again all of our divisions and departments had buy-in to how we were going to move forward and then we went from there. >> Well then, and in that case everybody feels like they have a stake >> That's right >> In the issue they have a vested interest >> That's right. >> Which is critical for these types of large projects to be successful. >> That's right. So they were involved in the RFP process so they knew why we were doing it and they were then involved and the design and how we were going to set it up so that they knew that they had a vested interest in how it was going to perform in the end. And then of course there were things that we had to tweak. So we needed to have a design committee that we could come back to and make changes as we needed to, make changes throughout the projects. You don't always get every single decision right. The first time, but you need to be nimble and make changes first and get consensus across the company. >> Right. Talk to me about some of the outcomes I know I've seen a lot of stats in your case study and I always love those numbers always jump out at me. Talk to me about some of those metrics based business outcomes that Jabil is achieving so far. >> Yeah. So in the last four years we've had a heavy focus on catalog. So actually in the last few months, we've gone from 20 to 30% by using Coupa analytics and drilling really into the details and putting really great category strategies in order to drive more catalog penetration. We've got great stats around electronic invoicing especially in certain countries where people think it's not possible. >> Right. >> There's a great change management story we have for what we've achieved in our Asian markets around electronic invoicing and from an ROI perspective, we were able to deliver 3X our ROI by the end of year two which we projected would take three years to do and 7X by year four. So we had a very conservative and achievable ROI that got the buy-in and then we were able to accelerate it by being aggressive, but also with a great solution it was easy to then get that done. >> Can you talk a little bit about the change management that you were able to achieve in the Asian market change management is the difficult thing to do. People are resistant to change, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is sometimes the change comes in there's nothing you can do about it but how did you affect that change management within that culture in the Asian market? >> Yeah. So with the executive buy-in that we had because they knew that there was high potential for us to deliver an ROI. We had executive sponsorship that helped us get through some of those barriers. So if we decided not to bring certain users into the system, for example and there was pushback that they needed to have access we had executive messaging as to why from a policy governance and control standpoint we couldn't break that. So we used our executives' voice and their support to do that. But also we brought in a great system that was user are friendly and so we didn't get a lot of resistance in, in that sense. So they actually embraced the change compared to the solution we had in place before. So by making the right selection from a user centric company we also didn't get as much resistance there as well. >> That's nice the path of least resistance is good especially if you're not exactly sure if you're going to find it, but verifying that and getting that ROI is is probably a big, a big win. Talk to me a little bit about you guys liked Coupa so much you had such, you mentioned 3X ROI within, you said the first year? >> With after year two >> After year two >> Yeah. >> 3X ROI, you liked it so much you decided to become a Coupa partner. Talk to me about that. What does that mean? What are you guys doing as partner? >> Yeah, so this is a super exiting thing for us to adventure into. So we pride ourselves on our theme as built for practitioners by practitioners. We've run the system every single day. We've been running it for years. So my team members are deep in the knowledge and capabilities of Coupa it's functionality, how to manage it every day, how to get the most you out of it and we want to share that knowledge with other Coupa customers to get the most value out of their system as well. So whether that's optimization and helping them get more out of their system or whether it's roadmap or assessments in our perspective, or even doing net new implementations we're excited to venture into that area of services with Coupa as a partner. >> Or have you guys started doing that yet? >> Today is our first Coupa inspire as a partner, which is exciting. And we literally just got started in the last few months. So we are working on getting our first customer here hopefully very shortly and have had a lot of of really great conversations with customers at the show so far. >> That's one of the great things that Coupa took the risk to bring us all together because there's they have a phenomenal community of which you guys have been a part now you said I believe about seven years, but there's nothing that replaces the connections that you make in the community that is grown from doing events like this. I imagine that you've gotten to talk with a lot of prospect >> Yes. >> Prospective customers who, what, how did you do this? This seems like an impossible feat that you've gotten to share with them. This is doable, here's how we did it. >> That's right. So fortunately I've been at previous inspires as well. So I've gotten to talk to people that I haven't seen in a couple of years, which is always exciting. I've been able to talk to customers that I've done, referrals for with Coupa before that are now Coupa customers and we get to talk about that and also those perspective customers and helping them know that it is doable, it is achievable you can get consensus in a decentralized company where all the sites if you have lots, lots of sites and countries have their own autonomy, you can do it. You can do it fast. You can do it effective if you take the right approach. And so it's exciting to get here and share that opportunity and our adventure and our journey with Coupa and the journey is only just beginning. >> Right, what are some of the things that you are excited about in terms of the innovations that they've announced at the event? I know Coupa is very much symbiotic with its customers that the community very much generates a lot of the direction in which the technology goes. But what are some of the things that you've heard announced that you thought, yes, they're going they continue to go in the right direction. >> Yeah. So there's some actual foundational capabilities around things like payment agreements and group carts and things that actually we've contributed through either customer cabs or VP sessions with design, just doing collaboration together but I'm also excited to see some of their price benchmarking that they're doing so that we can know how well are we doing and from our pricing standpoint and also where they're going supply chain I'm excited to see where they're going with that. Being a big supply chain company ourselves, we're hoping that all turns out to be something that we can innovate with Coupa on and hopefully have in the future as well. >> Well, as they said, Rob said it to me just an hour ago, they're tip of the iceberg but what its seems that you've become Heidi yourself and Jabil is really kind of an influencer within the Coupa community. We appreciate you coming by theCUBE, sharing with us what you've accomplished and how you're expanding your Coupa partnership into helping other companies. >> Great. Thank you again for having me today. >> My pleasure. >> All right. >> For Heidi Banks, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of COUPA INSPIRE 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around my next guest joins me momentarily. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> On June 21st in Cambridge mass at the Sinclair in Harvard Square, Tech Tackles Cancer is back after a COVID hiatus with live band karaoke and some local tech celebrities raising money for a great cause. The Cube is a media sponsor of the event and Josh Epstein, local marketing exec and one of the events organizers is here to tell us more. Josh, good to see you, welcome. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> So tell us about this event. What's going on? What are the logistics? How's that all work? >> Yeah, we're super excited. So as you said, June 21st at the Sinclair in Harvard Square, Sinclair, if you haven't been there is just the great old school rock club. So we'll be there from 6:00 to 10:00. We will have live band karaoke. So the main event and kind of the primary fundraising approach here is that we have some celebrity technology rock gods these featured performers like Chris Lynch who was the founder of Tech Tackles Cancer, who are are raising money from basically now, up until June 21st. Then at the event, their fundraising will culminate with them singing a live song backed by a live band. And the awards will be given out to the most money raised, the best performance and the best stage presence. So it will be a lot of fun. >> So the fundraising format is I sign up to sing do the karaoke with a live band which is a little bit different. And then I raise as much dough as possible. So obviously that's competitive. >> It's competitive, I think that we ask for a minimum of $10,000 targeted for each of the fundraisers but knowing these guys, knowing guys like Chris Lynch, they don't like to lose. So the bet here is that people are going to go out, they're going to hit their network and they are going to look to kind of raise the most money. So we anticipate this to be a great event with a lot of money raised and a lot of fun. >> So we have a graphic from Alex. If you could bring that up of the people who have signed up for this already. We got Steve Duplessie, founder of of ESG, senior analyst. They sold their company to Tech Target, which is awesome. Congratulations to those guys and thank you for stepping up. George Hope, who heads partner sales for HPE, Joe Lemay of Rocketbook Nathan Hall from Pure Storage, system engineering guy and of course, Steiny, Ken Steinhardt from Infinidat. He was at EMC, he's the field CTO now. He's going to be up there singing. So of course, Chris. >> Absolutely, these are just the early entrance here. So we just started really working our networks. And obviously, I'm a Boston tech guy kind of working the storage networks, the networking networks and kind of the other folks that are around. So as we come out of stealth here in April and start really recruiting, we anticipate having probably 10 to 15 of these featured performers, really fundraising performers that we'll sing. And then we're also obviously soliciting broader donations from anyone who wants to come to the event or just give to the cause and the corporate sponsorships as well. >> All right, so you got corporate sponsorships. You can sing, you can donate you can be there just to support it. That's fantastic and the awards, how's that work? >> Yeah, so we're excited. So first off, most money raised wins an award. So we'll have a leaderboard on the website, we'll be able to kind of track who's raised what, at the event, we're going to have some celebrity judges that will be actually voting for their favorites and then have a crowdsource component as well. So we'll introduce what that mechanism is. But as people, either at the events or a watching in streamed live on LinkedIn live, we'll actually vote for their favorite performance as well as their their pick for best stage presence which we know in rock and roll is half the battle. >> Now this cause has raised a bunch of, I think last time, you guys did this, it was probably a quarter million or close to it and you support multiple causes. What causes are you supporting? >> Sure, yeah, actually I think since they founded the event several years ago they raised over $2 million. This year for this format where we're looking, we can really up our game here but this year we're supporting two really great causes that are both focused on pediatric cancer. The first is St. Batrick's that is really committed to raising funds for research to really help stamp out pediatric cancer really. The approach to researching cures and treatments to pediatric cancer is very different from regular adult cancer. So St. Batrick's does a great job of picking those research projects that really target in on those pediatric cancer causes. And then the second is one mission. And one mission really outlooks to help make pediatric cancer patients that are spending time in the hospital, making their time less stressful, less painful, less sad, less boring. And so they do a lot of fundraising and contributions targeting children's hospitals, really around the country for those pediatric cancer floors. >> Josh, amazing cause. Thanks so much for coming onto the Cube and explaining all that. >> Great, thanks David. >> All right, June 21st, go to ttcfund.org, Tech Tackles Cancer fund, ttcffund.org for more information and you can donate. We'll see you there. (soft music)

>>Hello, welcome to the special cube conversation. I'm John for your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. We're still remoting in getting great guests in events are coming back. Next few weeks, we'll be at a bunch of different events and you'll see the cube everywhere, but this conversation's about network challenges in a distributed hybrid workforce era. We've got a team say he principal, product manager, edge networking solutions, a Dell technologies and Rob McBride channel and partner sales engineer at versa networks. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this cube conversation, >>John. Thank you, John. >>So first of all, obviously with the pandemic and now we're moving out of the pandemic, even with Omnichron out there, we still see visibility into kind of back to work and events and it's, but it's clearly hybrid environment cloud hybrid work. This has been a huge opening of everyone's eyes around network security provisioning, you know, unexpected disruptions around everyone being worked at home. Nobody really forecasted that. The fact that the whole workforce would be remote coming in. So again, put a lot of pressure on the network challenges over over the past two years. How is it coming out of this different what's your guys' take on this. >>Yeah, to then when we start looking at it, let's kind of focus a little bit on challenges, you know, you know, when this all kind of started off, obviously, as you stated, right, everyone was kind of taken by surprise in a way, right? What do we do? We don't know what to do at this moment. And you know, I go back and I remember a customer giving me a call, you know, when they were at first looking at, you know, your traditional land transformation and one of the changed their branches to do something from an SD perspective. And then the pandemic hit. And their question to me was Rob, what do I do? Or what do I need to start thinking about now, all of a sudden to your point, right? Everyone now is no longer in the office and how do I get them to connect. >>And more importantly, now that I can maybe figure out a way to connect them, how do I actually see what they're doing and be able to control what they're actually now accessing? Because I no longer have that level of control as of them coming into the office. And so a lot of customers, you know, we're, we're beginning to develop kind of homegrown solutions, look at various different things to kind of quick hot patches, if you will, to address the remote workers coming in and things of that nature. And we'll be seeing kind of progression through all this as a, as, as opposed to just solving, getting a user, to connect into the, into an environment that it can provide, you know, continuity for. They started coming up with other challenges to the point of security. They started, you know, I have other customers calling me up and saying, you know, I I've now got a ransomware problem, right? >>So, you know, what do I do about that? And what are the things I need to kind of consider with respect to now I'm much more vulnerable because my, my, my branch has state has basically become much more diversified and solutions and things that they're looking for, regardless, obviously around security connectivity, there they've been challenged with addressing how do they unify their levels of visibility without over encumbering themselves and how they actually manage now this kind of much more kind of distributed kind of network if you will. Right? So things around, you know, looking at, you know, acronyms around from like a Z TNA or, you know, cloud security and all this fun stuff starts coming into play. But what it, what it points to is that the biggest challenge ideas, how does, how do they converge networking and security together and provide equitable and uniform policy architecture to identify their users, to connect and access the applications that are relevant to the business and be able to have that uniformity between whether it's the branch for them being remote. And that's part of what we've kind of seen as this progression to the last two years and kind of solutions that they're looking for to kind of help them address that. It's almost like >>It's a good thing in a way. It actually opens up the kimono and say, Hey, this is the real world we've got to prepare for this next generation a TIF. I want to get your take because, you know, remember the old days we were like, oh yeah, we've got to prepare for these scenarios where maybe 30% will be dialing on the V land or remotely, you know, it's not 30%. It was like 100%. So budgets aren't out of whack and yet they want more resiliency at the edge. Right. So, so one, I didn't budget for it. They didn't predict it and it's gotta be better, faster, cheaper, more skier. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so John, the difference is, is that, you know, Dell, for instance, as already was already working towards this distributed model, right? The pandemic just accelerated that transformation. So, so when customers came to us and said, oh, we've got a problem with our workforce and our users being so geographically suddenly dispersed, you know, we had some insight that we could immediately lean on. We had already started working on solutions and building those platforms that can help them address those, those problems. Right. Because we'd already done studies before this, right. We had done studies and we'd come back on this whole work from home or remote office scenario. And, and the results were pretty unanimous in that customers were, all users were always complaining about, you know, application performance issues and, and, you know, connectivity issues and, and things like that. So we, we, we kinda knew about this. And so we were able to proactively start building solutions. And so, you know, so when a customer comes, there's like Rob was talking about, you know, their infrastructure, wasn't set up for everybody to suddenly move on day one and start accessing all the corporate resources where the majority of the organization is accessing corporate resources from away from campus. Right? So we, we, we have solutions, we've been building solutions and we have guidance to offer these customers as they try to modernize that network and address these problems. >>Well, that's a great segue to the next topic. Talk track is, you know, what is a network? What is network monetization? Right. So let's, let's define that if you don't mind, well, I got you guys here. You're both pros get that sound bite, but then let's get into the benefits of the outcomes from what that enables. So if you guys want to take a stab at defining what is network modernization mean? >>I think there's a lot of definitions, or it kind of depends on your point, your point of view of where you're, where you're responsible for, from a network or within the stack, you know, are from a take obviously is, you know, working, working from a vendor. And with solutions that we provide modernization is really around solutions that begin to look at more software defined architectures and definitions to begin a level of decoupling between, you know, points of control, hardware and software, and other kinds of points of visibility and automation to the point where, where things are let's, let's kind of put an air quotes in a sense of being more digitized. And in the sense, like even how we're looking at things from a consumerization perspective, but looking at things a much more, more cloud aware cloud specific cloud native in built automation, as well as inbuilt kind of analytics where things are much more in a, in a broader SDN, kind of a construct would be a form of a definition from a, from a, from a, from a monetization perspective. >>Now, do the other element of your, kind of a question in regards to, it's kind of the benefits that come as a result of this. So as customers have been in the last 24 months, looking at different solutions to address part of what we've been talking about, part of it is you want, when you're looking at, whether it's like you're using a word like sassy to kind of define, you know, how are enterprises looking for ZTE and they based solutions or cloud security to augment their, their overall needs. The benefits that they're finding are simplicity of management, because they're now looking for more uniform solutions that can address secure access for remote workers, in addition to their own kind of traditional access, as it relates to their offices to better visibility. Because as this uniformity of this kind of architecture, the now able to actually really see the level of context, right? >>I can see you, John, as far as where you're coming in and access and what applications on what devices. And now I have a means to actually apply a policy to that matters to me as the business, from an IP perspective, to protect me as the business, but also to ensure that you're actually authorized and accessing things that I have from an it regular reg regulations perspective. So benefits and the summary are kind of like Mo in bill automation, better, you know, things get done faster, things repair on their own in a different way, as a result of automation, greater visibility. Now they have much more greater insights into what we are doing as users of the overall it infrastructure and better overall control. That's been ultimately simplified as result of consolidation and unification. >>That's awesome. Insight. I T what's your take on the benefits of ma network modernization? >>So I'd like to sort of double down on, on, you know, something Rob said, right? So the visibility, right? So enhanced visibility in layman's terms, that just means more insight, more insight means the ability to implement best practices around application usage, application performance, more insights means control that it departments are, are meeting. They need that to manage and address security threats, right? To be able to identify an abnormal traffic pattern or unauthorized data movement, to be able to push updates and, and patches quickly. So, so it's really about, you know, that, that manageability, that that level of control gives them the ability to offer a resilient and secure underlying networking infrastructure. And then, you know, finally one of the key benefits is cost savings of, you know, everybody is trying to be more efficient. And so from, from our perspective, it's, it's really about building an open platform. >>You know, we've built a platform or an x86 based platform. We've we chose that because we wanted to tap into a mature ecosystem that, you know, customers can leverage as they, as they build their build towards their modernizing modernization goals. And so we're like tech leveraging technologies, like UCPs so universal customer premise equipments. And so that's really just an open hardware platform, but what you get by consolidating your network functions like routing and firewall, and when optimization you, and when you consolidate it all onto a single device, you get hardware savings, cost savings. You, you get operational savings as well, right? So you've it, common hardware infrastructure means a common deployment model means a streamlined operations means fewer truck rolls, right? So, so there's a tremendous amount of, of, of benefit from the cost standpoint as well, because from our perspective, it's really that what customers are looking for, they need enterprise grade solutions that can scale in a cost-effective manner. >>That's awesome. You guys mentioned sassy earlier. I'm like, first of all, software as a service is very sassy, big modern application movements. Always get my hair sassy. I think, you know, a kind of a term around SAS software as a service, but for you guys, it's talking about secure access service edge, which is a huge category growth right now where, you know, per security and networking, it's a huge discussion SD win fits into that somehow, because it used to be campus networking before now. It's everyone's world is the same. Now it's connected. So sassy is huge. How does that fit into SD when it's in the trend of the SAS at the same? What's the difference? Cause wan has been booming for the past decade as well in terms of trends. How are you guys seeing those converging in what's the difference? >>You know, I like to also agree with you, this thing has been booming the last couple of years, right. You know, kind of, kind of bread and butter part of what we've been doing, but, you know, to your question in regards to kind of its linkage relative to sassy, right. You know, as you articulated, right. It's the sassy secure access service edge from a definition of the acronym. So it's authority is first kind of good to kind of define a little bit, maybe for some of those that may not be overly familiar with it. And I like to kind of dumb it down a little bit into the point of sassy is really an architecture that is around, you know, the convergence of networking and security being put together in a uniform platform or service that is delivered from both the cloud, as well as addressing, you know, their, their kind of traditional land requirements. >>Now digging in sassy is broken to two little buckets, right? It's broken into a network layer and the six security layer and by its definition, right, by, by a particular analyst, the network component, a big portion of that is SD wan. And so SD wan providing that value associated to what does, you know, dynamic lanes, steering automation, application attachments, so on and so forth is a core element of the foundation of the network layer associates, associate sassy. And then the other element of zesty is around the security bit. And so they're very much intrinsically linked, whether, you know, for example, like versus just the kind of mentioned this here, the, the, the sassy cloud that we built for our customers to leverage for private access, public access, you know, secure internet CASBY, DLP type of services is built upon SQM. In addition to our customers that are using Guesty Lampard or traditional land are using SD wan to connect to that cloud. >>So it's very, very much linked and they kind of go hand in hand, depending on your approach to the broader architecture. And, you know, another point I'll bring into that. What, what it also highlights is that whether it's around sassy or not, when we, when in pertinent to everything we'd been other kind of been talking about, the other thing that's coming with sun intrinsically and natively is really the concept of security it's around, whether it's security at the branch, or whether it's around some form of, you know, identity management or a point of improving posture for the, for the enterprise to, you know, obviously the spec traffic at the branch where remotely, but what we're seeing at a trend wise, which, you know, part by customer adoption from our own platform, if you will, is basically security and SD Wang coming together, whether for your traditional land transformation, or as a result of sassy services for a hybrid needs of connectivity, right? Remote workers, hybrid workforce, going into the cloud for, for their connectivity needs and optimizations. In addition to obviously the, the enterprises branch transformations, >>I like that native aspect of it. We used to joke and call SD way in St. Cloud because it's, we're all using cloud technologies. Talk about the security impact real quick. If you don't mind, I want to just double click them what you mentioned there, because I think the cloud effication plus the security piece seems to be a key part of this dynamic. Is that true? Or did they get that right? What's what's this all mean with cloud vacation? Yeah, >>And I, I would, I, I, I agree with, I guess kind of where you're leading into that is, you know, review all of us you're right now. Exactly. In talking with you right now, right. John is, as you stated at the beginning, we're all remote. And so from a business perspective, right, we are accessing, or from an engagement we're accessing a cloud service. Now what's critical for us, as you know, obviously enterprise employees is that our means of accessing this cloud service needs to have some level of hardening. We need to protect, right. Not only our own asset that we're using, right. Our laptops or other machinery that you use to connect to the network, but in addition to protect our company, right? So our company also needs to protect them. So how can we do that? Right? How can we do that in a very fast and distributed way? >>Sure. We can put security endpoints at every location with every user and every home. And that's one means of, of a particular solution. So your point about cloud is now take all of that and bring it to the cloud where you'd have a much more distributed means, right? And much more dynamically, scalable approach to actually doing that level of inspection, posture and, and enforcement. And so that's kind of where the rubber meets the road, right, is for us to access those cloud applications. The cloud that we're using as a conduit for security, as well as network also is now even connected and optimized paths to applications like what we're using right now, right. To, to, to do this conversation. So that's kind of where it meets together. And the security element is because we're so diverse, we just need, we, we, we need to ensure, right. We're all much, we're much more vulnerable. Right? My home network is, you know, maybe arguably maybe not as secure as when I go into an office. Right? >>So most people, because you have worked for virtual networks, >>I can make that argument. Yes. Right. But you know, the average, most of us, remote workers, you know, our homes aren't as hard. And so we point a point of risk, right? And so, as we, as we go to cloud apps, we're more connected to the internet. Right. You know, the, the, the point of being able to do this enforcement from a sassy concept helps provide that improved posture for enterprises to secure their traffic and get visibility into that. >>All my network engineer, friends are secure, as you read about. And I always joked to the malware, you missed, missed the wrong network engineer. If I go after them, their house, spear fishing. And you're trying to get into your network. I'd say, if I want to bring this back, because what we're bringing up here is cloud is actually enabling more on premises because you're working at home. That's a premise, right? So you're also edge is a premise edge and cloud. And a cloud kind of eliminates all this notion of what is cloud and edge, but at the end of the day is where you are. Right. So having the performance and the security and the partnership that same with Dell, I know you guys have been on this for a while because I've been covering it, but the notion of edge completely changes now, because what does that even mean? Home's edge is the camp of data centers and edge the, the cars and edge, the telco monopoles and edge. This is a big deal. This is the unit about the unification. This is all about making it all work. What's your, what's your take on this from the Dell perspective. >>Yeah. And I think, I mean, it that's, I mean, you, you kind of summarize it, right. I mean, what does edge mean to you? Right. It's and then, so every time I have a conversation with, with somebody, I always start with, let's define what your edge is. And so, you know, from, from our perspective, from the Dell perspective is, you know, we believe that we want to provide enterprise grade infrastructure. We want to give our customers the right tools. And we're seeing that with this trend of a hybrid workforce, a geographically dispersed user base, we're seeing a tremendous need for, you know, from it departments for tools, for solutions that can give them the control that they can sort of push out into their networks to ensure a safe and secure external access to corporate resources. Right. And so that's what we're committed to is making sure that, that, that management layer by either developing the solutions, in-house bringing the right partners to the table and just ensuring that our customers have the right tools because this sort of trend, or this, this, this new normal is not going away. And so we have to adapt. >>So thanks for coming on, Rob, we'll give you the final word. What's changed the most, in your opinion, with customers, environments, around how they're handling their networks as we come out of the pandemic, which has proven kind of which projects are working, which ones aren't where to double down on what was screwed up. I mean, come on. This is, we're kind of seeing it all play out. What's your, what's your take on as we come through the pandemic and people come out of this, what's the big learning. Okay. >>Well that you need partners. Right. Okay. So it's not even from a vendor perspective. What I mean by partners is what we're finding and what I think a lot of other customers I've engaged with and others is this ain't easy for even as much as we can within the technology vendor market, right. It's to make things easier to do. There's a lot of technology and the enterprise, it is recognized. They need a lot of these building blocks, right. To, to accomplish a lot of different things, whether it's around automation, to, in other tools as, as auto was leading into. And so we're finding that, you know, a lot of our, our base or our interactions are really trying to identify an appropriate partner that can help not only talk to the technology, but help them actually understand all the various different, you know, multi-colored legal blocks, they've got to put together, but also help help them actually put that into a realization. >>Right. And, you know, and then be able to then give the keys to them so they can eventually drive the car. Right. And so the learning that we're seeing here is this is a lot of tech, there's a lot of new tech, new approaches to existing technology of things that they've actually done. And they're, they're, they're looking for help. Right. And so they're looking for kind of, let's call it like trusted advisor kind of status of people that can help explain the technology to them and then help them understand how do they put it together. So they can then ultimately accomplish our overall kind of, you know, other kinds of objectives from an it perspective. And the other learning that I'll just say, and then I'll, then I'll stop. Here is SD wan isn't dead, right? Yes. The man is actually still driving. And it's actually an impetus for a lot of other things that enterprise is actually doing, whether it's around, you know, sassy, oriented services, remote access, private access, and other things of that nature. >>I totally agree. I think the networking, stuff's still going to be so much innovation going on with the edge exploding as well. That the really great, amazing stuff happening. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation, great conversation, taking it to the edge network challenges in the distributed hybrid workforce era is about moving things around the internet, making them secure. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Very few physical events this year doing a lot of hybrid stuff. It's great to be back in hybrid event... Physical event land, 25,000 people here. Probably a little few more registered than that. And then on the periphery, got to be another at least 10,000 people that came in, flew in and out, see what's happening. A bunch of VCs, checking things out, a few parties last night and so forth. A lot of action here. It's like re:Invent is back. Matt Coulter is here. He's a technical architect at Liberty Mutual. Matt, thanks for flying in from Belfast. Good to see ya. >> Dave, and thanks for having me today. >> Pleasure. So what's your role as a technical architect? Maybe describe that, we'll get into a little bit. >> Yeah so I am here to empower and enable our developers across the globe to rapidly deliver business value and solve problems for our customers in a well-architected way that doesn't introduce problems or risks, you know, later down the line. So instead of thinking of me as someone who directly every day, build software, I try to create the environment where other people can rapidly build software. >> That's, you know, it's interesting. because you're a developer, right? You can use like, "Hey I code." That's what normally you would say but you're actually creating frameworks and business model so that others can learn, teach them how to fish, so we speak. >> Yeah because I can only scale, there's a certain amount. Whereas if I can teach, there's 5,000 people in Liberty Mutual's tech organization. So if I can teach the 5,000 to be 5% better, it's way more than me even if I 10Xed >> When did you first touch the Cloud? >> Personally, it would have been four/five years ago. That's when I started in the Cloud. >> What was that experience like for you? >> Oh, it was hard. It was very different to anything that we'd done in the past. So it's because you... Traditionally, you would have just written your small piece of code. You would have had a big application that was out there, it had been out there maybe 20 years, it was deployed, and you were just adding a couple of lines. Whereas when you start putting stuff into the Cloud, it's out there. It's on the internet for anyone there to try and hack or try to get into. It was a bit overwhelming the amount that you needed to learn. So it was- >> Was it worth it? >> Oh yeah. Completely. (laughing) So that's the thing, that I would never go back to the way we did things before. And that's why I'm so passionate, enthusiastic about the stuff I've been doing. Because to me, the amount of benefits you can get, like now we can deliver thing. We have teams going out there and doing discovery and framing with the business. And they're pushing well-architected products three days later into production. That was unheard of before, you know, this year. >> Yeah. So you were part of Werner's keynote this morning. Of course that's always one of the keynotes that's most anticipated at re:Invent. It's on the sort of last day. He's awesome. This is you know, 10th year of re:Invent. He sort of did a look back. He started out (chuckles) he's just a cool guy and very passionate. But talk about what your role was in the keynote. >> Yeah so I had a section towards the end of the keynote, and I was to talk about Liberty Mutual's serverless first journey. I actually went through from 2014 through to the current day of all the major Cloud milestones that we've hit. And I talked through some of the impact it's had on our business and the impact it's had on our developers. And yeah it's just been this incredible journey where as I said, it was hard at the start. So we had to spark this culture within our company that we were going to empower and enable our developers and we were going to get them excited about doing this. And that's why we needed to make it safe. So there was a lot of work went down at the start to make the Cloud safe for our developers to experiment. And then the past two years have been known that it's safe, okay? Let's see what it can do. Let's go. >> Yeah so Liberty Mutual has been around many many years, Boston-based, you know, East Coast-based, my home city. I don't live in Boston but I consider it my city. And so talk about your business a little bit because you're an established company. I don't know, probably a hundred years old, right? Any all other newbies nipping at your business, right? Coming in with low-cost products. Maybe not bringing as much protection as you dig into it. But regardless, you've got to compete with them technically. So what are some of the drivers in your business and how are you using the Cloud to sort of defend your turf and grow? >> Yeah so first of all, we're 109 years old. (laughing) Yeah. So absolutely, there's an entire insurtech market of people here gunning for the big Liberty Mutual because we've been here for so long. And our whole thing is we're focused on our customers. So we want to be there for people in their time of need. Because at a point in time whenever you need insurance, typically something is going wrong. And that's why we're building innovative solutions like a serverless call center we built, that after natural disaster, it can automatically process claims in less than four minutes. So instead of having to wait on hold for maybe an hour, you can just text or pick up the phone, and four minutes later your claims are through. And that's we're using technology always focused on the customer. >> That's unbelievable. Think about that experience, to me. I mean I've filed claims before and it's, it's kind of time consuming. And you're saying you've compressed that to minutes? Days, weeks, you know, and now you've compressed that to minutes? >> Yeah. >> Tell us more about how you did that. >> And that's because it's a fully serverless solution that was built. So it doesn't require like people to scale. It can scale to whatever number of our customers need to make a claim at that point because that would typically be the bottleneck if there's some kind of natural disaster. So that means that if something happens we can just switch it on. And customers can choose not to use it. You can always choose to say I want to speak to a person. But now with this technology, we can just make it easy and just go. Everything, all the information we know in the back end, we just use it and actually make things better for you. >> You're talking about the impact that it had on your business and developers. So how do you quantify that? Maybe start with the business. Maybe share some ways in which you look at that measure. >> Yeah, so I mean, in terms of how we measure the impact of the Cloud on our business, we're always looking at our profitability and we're always looking, as I say, at our customers. And ideally, I want our Cloud bill to go down as our number of customers goes up because that's why we're using the serverless fast mindset, we call it. We don't want to build anything we don't have to build. We want to take the best that's out there and just piece it together and produce these products for our customers. So yeah, that's having an impact on our business because now developers aren't spending weeks, months, years doing all this configuration. And they can actually sit down with the business and understand how we write insurance. So now we can start being innovative with our products and talking about the real business instead of everything else. >> When you say you want your Cloud bill to go down, you know, it reminds me like in the old days of IT budgeting, right? It was always slash, do more with less cut, cut, cut, right? And it was kind of going in cycles. But with the Cloud a lot of customers that I talk to, they were like, might be going down as a percentage of revenues but actually it might be going up as you launch more projects because they're driving revenue. There's a tighter tie between revenue and Cloud bill. How do you look at that? >> Yeah. So I mean, with every project, you have to look at the worth-based development often and whether or not it's going to hold this away in the market. And the key thing is with the serverless products that are being released now, they cost pennies if they're low scale. So you can actually launch a new product into the market and it maybe only cost you $20 to see if that thing would fit in the market. So by the time you're getting into the big bills you know whether or not you've got a market fit and you can decide whether you want to pivot. >> Oh wow. So you you've compressed, that's another business metric. You've compressed the time to get certainty around product market fit, right? Which is huge because you really can't go to market until you have product market fit (laughing) >> Exactly. You have to be. Thoroughly understand if it's going to work. >> Right because if you go to the market and you've got 50% churn. (laughing) Well, you don't want to be worried about the go-to market. You got to get back to the product so you can test that and you can generate. >> So that's why, yeah, As I said, we have developers who can go out and do discovery and framing on a potential product and deliver it three days later which (chuckles) >> How has the Cloud effected developer satisfaction or passion? I guess it's... I mean we're in AWS Cloud. Our developers, we tell them "Okay, you got to go back on-prem." They would say, "I quit." (laughing) How has it affected their lives? >> Yeah it's completely there for them, it's way better. So now we have way more ownership over any, you know, of everything we ever did. So it feels like you're truly a part of Liberty Mutual and you're solving Liberty's problems now. Because it's not a case of like, "Okay, let's put in a request to stand up a server, it's going to take six months. And then let's do some big long acquisition." It's a case of like, "Let's actually get done into the nitty gritty of what we going to build." And that's- >> How do you use the Cloud developer kit? Maybe you could talk about that. I mean, explain what it is. It's a framework. But explain from your perspective. >> Yeah so the Cloud typically, it started off, and lot of it was done by Cloud infrastructure engineers who created these big YAML files. That's how they defined all the stuff that's going to be deployed. But that's not typically the development language that most developers use. The CDK is in like Java, TypeScript, .NET, Python. The language is developers ready known love. And it means that they can use everything they already know from all of their previous development experience and bring it to the Cloud. And you see some benefits like, you get, I talked about this morning, a 1500 line YAML file was reduced to 14 lines of TypeScript. And that's what we're talking about with the cognitive difference for a developer using CDK versus anything else. >> Cognitive abstraction, >> Right? >> Yeah. And so it just simplifies your living and you spend more time doing cool stuff. >> Yeah we can write an abstraction for our specific needs once. And then everybody can use that abstraction. And if we want to make a change and make it better, everyone benefits instead of everybody doing the same thing all the time. >> So for people who are unfamiliar, what do you need? You need an AWS account, obviously. You got to get a command-line interface, I would imagine. maybe some Node.js often running, or is it- >> Yeah. So that's it. You need an AWS account, and then you need to install CDK, which is from Node Package Manager. And then from there, it depends on which way you want to start. You could use my project CDK patterns, has a whole ray of working patterns that you can clone among commands. You just have to type, like one command you've got a pattern, and then CDK deploy. And you'll have something working. >> Okay so what do you do day-to-day? You sort of, you evangelize folks to come in and get trained? Is there just like a backlog of people that want your time? How do you manage that? >> So I try to be the place that I'm needed the most based on impact of the business. And that's why I try to go in. Liberty split up into different areas and I try to go into those areas, understand where they are versus where they need to be. And then if I can do that across everywhere, you can see the common thesis. And then I can see where I can have the most impact across the board instead of focusing on one micro place. So there's a variety of tools and techniques that I would do, you know, to go through that but that's the crux of it. >> So you look at your business across the portfolio, so you have portfolio view. And then you do a gap analysis essentially, say "Okay, where can I approach this framework and technology from a developer standpoint, add value? >> Yeah like I could go into every single team with every single project, draw it all out and like, what we call Wardley map, and then you can draw a line and then say "Everything blue in this line is undifferentiated, heavy-lifted. I want you to migrate that. And here's how you're going to do it I've already built the tools for that." And that's how we can drive those conversations. >> So, you know, it's funny, I spent a lot of time in the insurance business not in the business but consulting with heads of application development and looking at portfolios. And you know, they did their thing. But you know, a lot of people sort of question, "Can developers in an insurance company actually become cool Cloud native developers?" You're doing it, right? So that's going to be an amazing transformation for your colleagues and your industry. And it's happening as we look around here (indistinct) >> And that's the thing, in Liberty I'm not the only one. So there's Tommy Gloklin, he's an AWS hero, and there's Diali Mikan, who's an AWS hero. And Diali is in Workgrid but we're still all the same family. >> So what does it mean to be an AWS hero? >> Yeah so this is something that AWS has to offer you to join. So basically, it's about impacting the community. It's not... There's not like a checklist of items you can go through and you're hero. It's you have to be nominated internally through AWS, and then you have to have the right intentions. And yeah, just follow through. >> Dave: That's awesome. Yeah so our producer, Lynette, is looking for an Irish limerick. You know, every, say I'm half Irish is through my marriage. Dad, you didn't know that, did you? And every year we have a St Patrick's Day party and my daughter comes up with limericks. So I don't know, if you have one that you want to share. If you don't, that's fine. >> I have no limericks for now. I'm so sorry. (laughing) >> There once was a producer from, where are you from? (laughing) So where do you want to take this, Matt? What's your future look like with this program? >> So right now, today, I actually launched a book called the CDK book. >> Dave: Really? Awesome. >> Yeah So me and three other heroes got together and put everything we know about CDK and distilled it into one book. But the... I mean there's two sides, there's inside Liberty. The goal as I've mentioned is to get our developers to the point that they're talking about real insurance problems rather than tech. And then outside Liberty in the community the goal is things like CDK Day, which is a global conference that I created and run. And I want to just grow those farther and farther throughout the world so that eventually we can start learning you know, cross business, cross market, cross the main instead of just internally one company. >> It's impressive how tuned in you are to the business. Do you feel like the Cloud almost forces that alignment? >> It does. It definitely does. Because when you move quickly, you need to understand what you're doing. You can't bluff almost, you know. Like everything you're building you're demonstrating that every two weeks or faster. So you need to know the business to do it. >> Well, Matt, congratulations on all the great work that you've done and the keynote this morning. You know, true tech hero. We really appreciate your time coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, for having me. >> Our pleasure. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE at AWS re:Invent. We are the leader global tech coverage. We'll be right back. (light upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is here, live at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. theCUBE has two sets today, two, not one, two, two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program at this event, it's a lot, talking about the next generation of cloud innovation with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners and we are pleased to welcome Walton Smith to the program, the public sector, director of strategic partnerships for Worldwide Technology, Walton welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's really amazing to be here and look forward to a great conversation. Isn't it great to be in person again? >> It's so nice to be in person, I mean I'm glad everybody's being safe and, and checking vaccine status and whatnot, but it's good to get back and, and, and work with people cause we can really drive innovation when, when we get together. >> Those hallway conversations or those conversations here at events that you just can't replicate by video conferencing, right? Not replicate that, you getting grabbed in the hall and say, hey, have you thought about leveraging XYZ to do something? To me that's what makes this conference great. >> Talk to me about what's going on at WWT. What are some of the, the things that you guys have been working on? >> It's a really exciting time at Worldwide, we're really working closely with AWS to drive innovation to the edge. We're excited about their outpost offering, we actually have one in our data center, Sandy announced it today in a partnership with Intel to, to allow our customers to try to work out use cases, to, to kick the tires, so to speak, to see how it works as well as our partners to get their ISV products certified on the outpost platform. >> So I'm familiar with your ATC in St. Louis, is that what you're referring to? >> That's correct. >> Give us a little, give us a little insight into what goes on there, I know it's pretty amazing from a customer perspective because you are agnostic. because you are agnostic. >> Walton: Correct. >> You're there to serve the customer, but tell me, tell me what happens in the ATC. >> We say we're agnostic, but we have our, our, our preferences because we know- >> sure, sure, okay. what actually works. But our ATC is our crown jewel, it's about a $600 million data center that we built solely for proof of concepts for our customers. So our, our top customers come in and say, I have this problem, how can I solve it? And so with us being the single biggest reseller of just about every ISV is out there, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, Dell compute next to NetApp storage with Cisco router on top of it to replicate what my customer has at the VA, for example, and then to be able to plug in an outpost to show how leveraging the outpost can give them a single pane of glass to be able to work on their workload, so the training that our FSI, Federal System Integrators have put into their staff or our government customers on the Amazon platform can now be driven into their data center, so it's really taking the cloud down to where the data is. >> In terms of public sector, what are some of the prominent use cases that you guys are helping customers to solve, especially given the tumultuous times that we're still living in? Sure, so what we saw during COVID especially was how most of the government agencies had the capability to allow say 5% to 10% of their workforce to work remotely. And then with COVID, they went to 95% to a 100% workforce. So, a lot of the time we've spent over the last year is how do we securely allow our government employees to get access to the information, because as we know, the government was more valuable than ever to get us through this pandemic, we had to give them the tools that they needed to be able to make the decisions to, to move the country forward. >> Talk about security if you will for a second, we have seen such a dramatic change in the security landscape, the threat landscape, ransomware as a service, it's, you know, the cyber criminals, lot of money in it, they're becoming far more brazen. What are some of the things that you're seeing specifically with respect to security use cases? >> It's, it's gone from, let me just buy everything that's out there and that'll give me security to, I need to have visibility into my environment, because if, if you look at target, it's a great case studies around that, they had all the tools, they just didn't tie it all together. And so as more and more nation state actors And so as more and more nation state actors try to attack our government, or it's a great way to make money, I mean, in, in this, in the presentation, Sandy's today, they talked about, if you looked at the GDP of what's been taken in ransomware, it's like the 10th biggest country in the world, I mean, it's scary and staggering how much money is lost. So what we think, going back to our ATC, we can stand up their environment, we can work with the top security providers in the world to show those customers how we can give them that visibility, the, the, the protection and the ability to get back up, because there's really only two types of organizations, those who've been hacked and those who don't know they've been hacked, they're going to get in, it's how do we mitigate the damage, how do we get them back up and running and how we protect my customers or have some of the most sensitive data in the world, how do we protect that so our government can keep us safe and keep us moving forward. >> Yeah, cause these days it's a matter of when we get hacked, not if. And of course we are only hearing about the large attacks. >> Walton: Correct. We don't hear about- all of the ones that go on day in and day out, I think, I think I saw a stat recently that a ransomware attack happens like once every 11 seconds. >> Correct, I mean, just walking through here, how many text messages you've gotten? You want a free iPad click here, I mean, they're, they're down to the individual level. It's a whole lot cheaper to give a couple people, really powerful laptops, pizza and beer, and have them go attack, than it is to, to set up a real business and so, unfortunately, as long as there's money in it, there's going to be bad actors out there. We think partnering with AWS and other partners can help build solutions. >> You know, WWT has had an interesting history because you didn't start with the dawn of cloud. >> Walton: Right. So you've been in the business of AT for a long time So you've been in the business of AT for a long time and logistics out of St. Louis in a lot of ways. What does that look like in terms of navigating that divide? You know, there's a, there's a whole storied history of companies that were not able to cross the divide from the mainframe era to the client server era, let alone to cloud. You seem to have, you seem to be doing that pretty well. >> I, I appreciate that, I mean, we're the biggest company no one's ever heard of. We're 14, $15 billion privately held firm, the same two guys that founded it, still run it today and all they want to do is do cool things, they want it to be truly the best place to work. So from day one, they've invested in training our staff, building the ATC to give us the tools we need to be successful and then because we're a trusted partner with Amazon Intel and our other partners out there, they're investing in us to help build solutions, so we have over 6,000 engineers, they get up every day, how do I build something that can help our customers really drive change and innovation? So it's been a really fun ride and the, the best is yet to come. >> Talk to me about your customer focus, you know, when we talk, here we are at reinvent, we always talk with AWS about their, you know, Dave, we talked about this customer obsession, the fact that they're working backwards from the customer, do you share that sort of philosophy? Does WWT share that philosophy with AWS? >> 100%?, if you go to WWT.com we've published everything that we have so you can get full access to our lab to learn about x ISV and go deep to learn about x ISV and go deep and see the million and a half labs we've built around, say Red Hat and go and get access to it. So we think that if we educate our customers, there are going to be customers for life, and they're going to come to us with their biggest problems. And that what's, is what's exciting and what enables us to, to really continue to grow. >> And how did the customers help you innovate? And that's one of the things we, I was thinking yesterday with, with this AWS flywheel of when Adam was introducing, and now we have a, now we have, and it was because he would say, we did this, but you needed more, but you being the customer needed more. >> 100%, it, it's we want our customers to come to us with their biggest problems, because that's when we, the exciting innovation works. And so the ability to sit down with the foremost expert in, in virus control and be able to, in, in virus control and be able to, what are the tools that she need to be able to get ahead of the next change to COVID? How can we give them the tools to do that? That's what we want to do, the scalability, the ability to reach out to others is what Amazon brings. So we can bring the data science, we can bring the understanding of the storage, the security, and the network and then AWS gives that limitless scalability to solve those problems and to bring in someone from Africa, to bring in someone from the European Union to, to work together to solve those problems, that's what's, what's exciting and then coming back to the outpost, to be able to put that in the data center, we know the data center is better than just about anybody out there, so it would be the ability to add innovation to them, to bring those part ISV partners together. It's really exciting that Intel is funding it because they know that if, if customers can see the art of the possible, they're going to push that innovation. >> One of the things we've also sort of thematically Dave and I with guests, and the other has been talking about this week is that every company has to be a data company, whether it's public sector, private sector, if you're not, or if you're not on your way, there's a competitor right here in the rear view mirror ready to take your place. How do you help public sector organizations really develop, embrace an execute a data full course strategy? >> So we have a cadre of over 125 data scientists that work every day to help organizations unlock their most valuable asset, that data, their people and be able to put the data in the right place at the right time and so by investing in those data scientists, investing in the networking folks to be able to look at the holistic picture is how we can bring those solutions to our customers, because the data is the new oil of, of the environment and sorry for my Southern twang on the oil, but it, but it truly is the most valuable asset they have and so, how do we unlock that? How do they pull that data together, secure it? Because now that you're aggregating all that data, you're making it a treasure trove for those bad actors that are out there, so you've got to secure it, but then to be able to learn and, and automate based on, on what you learned from that data. >> You know I, I think with hindsight, it's easy to, it's easy to say, well, of course WWT is where WWT is today. Five years ago, though, I think it would have been an honest question to ask, how are you going to survive in the world of cloud? And here we are, you've got outposts. >> Walton: Sure. >> And, and of course it makes sense because you're focused on customers, sounds like I'm doing a commercial for you, But I'm a fan- >> I'll gladly apreciate that- because I, I, I've worked with you guys in a variety of roles for a long time, seems like yesterday we were testing a bunch of different storage arrays of the ATC and now you've got outposts in cloud and you're integrating it together. It's really more of the same, I'm sure if we had your founders here, they'd tell you, Dave, it's all the same. >> Walton: Correct. It's all the same. >> It's AT, it's where, where's the compute, where's the storage, how do you get access to it and the cloud has given the ability to, to scale and do things you could never imagine. I think it's the reason we're here is because our leadership continues to invest and pushing that envelope to give people the freedom to go out with that crazy idea, what if we did this? And having the tools and the ability to do that is, is what, what drives our innovation and that's what we bring to our customers and our partners, that ability to innovate to, that ability to innovate to, to tackle that next problem. >> So what's the tip of the spear right now for you guys? What are you, what's, what's, what's kind of, what's next? What are you waiting to have delivered to the ATC to racket, stack and cable up? >> Lot's of stuff that I can't tell you about because there, there's things that Amazon is, is always working on that we work with before it, it's, it's made public, so there's a lot of really cool stuff in the pipeline, because the, as you think about moving to the data center, that's one thing, moving to truly to the edge, where you can help that war fighter, where you can help that mission, where you can do disaster recovery, leveraging the snowball family, the outpost family, and custom built tools that really allow for quick response and custom built tools that really allow for quick response to whatever that problem is, is that next front and that's where we've been for a long time, helping our, our war fighters and folks do what needs to be done. Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS to build the models, push it down to the edge because you don't have time or the bandwidth to get it back into the big cloud, to be able to put that compute and storage and analytics on the edge to make real time decisions, is what we have to do to stay relevant and that's where the joint partnership is really exciting. >> It's what you have to do to stay relevant, it's also what your customers need, cause one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that real-time data and access to it is no longer, longer a nice to have, this is business critical for everything. >> Correct and even if you have a fat pipe to get it, you need to make real time decisions and if you're in a really sandy space, excuse me, making hard decisions, you've got to get the best information to that soldier when, when they need it to, to save our lives or to save the other people's lives so it's, it's, it's not just a nice to have, it's mission critical. >> It is mission critical, Walton, thank you so much, we're out of time, but thank you for joining Dave and me talking about- >> Really enjoyed it. all the stuff going on with, with worldwide, the partnership with AWS, how you're helping really transform the public sector, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much, have a great conference. >> Thanks, you too. >> Okay, thanks. >> All right, from my buddy, Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. 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