(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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(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. Two great guests Linda Tong, general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Garrick Linn, architect of operations at Match.com. Thanks for joining us. We're talking about AppDynamics, Match.com and customer experience. Mainly around cloud migration. So Linda, great to see you and Garrick, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you again. Thank you for having us. >> Same here. >> Linda, you're a CUBE alumni. we've talked about cloud migration application performance, modern application development, all powered by the Cloud, right? So this is really key and people are relying on the cloud and cloud scale and data to drive the digital transformation, the digital services and applications right now. How has the pandemic affected your customers and their expectations for digital experiences? >> Oh boy, I mean the pandemic has been, it has been rough for our customers, you know, and part of that is what Garrick's going to tell you a little bit more about today, but folks are seeing this increase in expectancy of accelerated speed and delivering innovation, building great applications and iterating on them quickly. And frankly, their customers' demands we're engaging with them through digital services. And that has led to this massive increase in, one, the types of technologies that they're consuming to build and deliver these applications. And two the complexity upon how they actually wrap their arms around it and understand what's going on and deliver these great experiences. And so it's been a rough road for our customers and what we find with AppDynamics and Cisco is our ability to partner with our customers to help them wrap their arms around that complexity. >> John: Garrick, I'd love to get your commentary on this because I'll say, Match.com has been at large-scale for many, many years, and now the pandemic comes in now a new user experience, more accelerated, more action, more things are happening, right? So this is truly the hybrid world coming together. I mean, it is kind of the same game, but kind of new patterns are emerging. What have you seen in the pandemic around the expectations and the services and you guys are providing in the digital experiences? >> Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, Match has been around for quite some time. We've been here for over 25 years. We have an interesting mix, heterogeneous, technology, some old stuff, some new stuff. A lot of the mentality that we try to bring is to innovate. The pandemic was, it brought a lot of uncertainty. We weren't really sure how people were going to react. Was it going to be everybody kind of hunkers down on dating definitely is something that requires human interaction in multiple levels. And it turned out that people were still very much interested in getting to a place where they can find human connections and you know Match as a premium product tries to make that delightful. And so we had our hands full, especially at the beginning, things like, by checking the video features, how does that work? What are the expectations? Is that going to creep people out? If we try to offer that, are they going to use it? How are they going to date? How are they going to talk? How can we make sure that they're safe? All these kinds of things went into it. And so when we have been using AppDynamics for you know, years now, well before the pandemic, and we use that in order to get a gauge, not just on the type of traffic and load, but also, "Hey, you've got these new features, "how do they fit into this huge complex environment?" And so some of those timelines that maybe were a little bit more relaxed were very much accelerated, And like a lot of companies, we had to figure out how to deliver on that. >> John: Yeah, Linda, I want to get your thoughts. We've talked about in the past, AppDynamics has been a leader in really accelerating the value for customers. Now with the pandemic, you mentioned these new experiences are being pulled in from the physical world, right? So you have things that were happening on digital in the application space. Now you have more experiences coming in because there's no places to meet face to face. Now it's coming together, but people have been seeing the value. Well, if I can't meet in person Match.com are going to do some things, new things, online chat, whatever. This dynamic of old way, new way is changing and cloud is powering that. What are you seeing in terms of your customers' journeys around what was once pre-pandemic and now post-pandemic? >> Well, a big part of that is more and more of these experiences rely on digital services and these amazing sort of ways to connect with each other and in a very digital space, expectations of customers have changed. So not only do you experience applications and you want it to be simple, easy to use, delightful, and it delivers on the needs that you want. But on top of that, you expect it to be performant. You expect it to be secure. You expect there to be frankly, no hiccups whatsoever, because now this is your way to connect with others. This is your way to find dates or go on dates. And the last thing you want, is watching your screen pixelate, as you're trying to have an important conversation. And these kinds of experiences and these challenges as people build more and more of these digital services to build these connections, frankly, require a lot more of folks like Garrick and his team. They now have to deliver amazing experiences with perfect performance, no security risks, no bumps in the night. And that's really tough, right? Expectations have gone through the roof. >> John: Yeah, the whole story on that one point, just to kind of add live in this was that that whole concept of moving fast used to take months, right? I mean, weeks, months, now it's days and hours. So months to weeks, days and hours but Garrick, this is the challenge. This is the opportunity with the cloud. Can you just take us through your cloud journey and your goals and some of the impacts that has had on your transition to the cloud? What does that look like? >> Yeah, so we've had our on-prem data centers for quite some time, and we started putting our toe in, I guess, although it was a kind of intense at the beginning, just trying to get people on board and to say, "Hey, this is possible." We started out with a fairly small SWAT team then managed within a couple of months, working closely with our developers. We have a lot of smart people, you know, with background or overall, just security folks over devs to just demonstrate that we could do it. So we managed to take something like 80% of our front end traffic for most of the day, just kind of spinning that up, learning lessons from that, knowing what we didn't know. AppDynamics, if we didn't have that would have been almost impossible to get a read if for no other reason, then just one little tidbit. We used to have a data center in Virginia. And so physics being what it is, you know, there's just been a flight that we have to contend with. And for a couple, few years, we hadn't had the 30 millisecond or so round trip latency on there. So all of a sudden we're going back to the cloud that reintroduced this latency. So what does that mean? Will you be asked to sort of glide by and absorb it? How do we track it? How can we figure out what the Delta is between, you know, here's how we've done things on-prem. Here's how it looks out here. If you are the cross, you know, calls and, you know, AppDynamics was what we used to be able to get a read and say, "Hey, look, it isn't as good as we know we can make it, but it's something, it's a starting point. Here's why, we can show you the graphs. We can show you the data. Let's do this thing." So we then pulled back and we have focused this year on actually our affinity apps, which is a collection of applications that are also going to be okay just in, and so we've been asked to get those completely migrated over. We're going to be running in hybrid mode for a while. We're going to need to be able to compare apples to apples, apples to orangutans, all that. And this is one of the main things for you, we describe. >> {John] If I can just follow up on that just real quick, because I think this is a good point. You got the data points, you double down on that. You're looking at real data, and then you look at success and you double down, that's the playbook. So, and the other thing is that you guys actually have a real operation that's running full throttled, right? (John laughs) So, yeah, so I can see that nice balance. What does the future look like beyond that? Because when you got a business that's scaling, it's running, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet. You got to continue to push the envelope. >> Yup, so, and no, exactly right. Again, we're a premium product. And so we've got to back that up. And that means, maintaining high availability. And so over the next few years, we're going to be looking at what have we already do? What can we move in piecemeal kind of way where it makes sense? What are the things that we can rethink? We're also using AppDynamics as part of our containerization initiative. You know, we've got lots of virtual infrastructure, but what is it, again, what does it look like on-prem, in a container, go down the list of different things that might be different. And then to be able to compare that to what it looks like, in the cloud. So it's going to be a while yet, but like a lot of companies, when we got into this, we didn't think it was going to be done in six months. Even if we have to deliver those features at a much faster rate, we know that the long haul, we got to make smart decisions and plan the capacity, and, you know, get there. (chuckles) >> John: That's a real pragmatic approach. Linda, you and I both are sports fans. We've talked in the past about sports, and the old adage, what inning are we in growth? It's to use that baseball metaphor. I would say it's a double header, game one won by the cloud, game two is happening now. And the trend is this end-to-end mature, operationally focused customer base. And IT, where IT has shifted to the cloud right now. And they're having this new view of what modern is. End-to-end, understanding different stacks relative to applications. It's not as simple as it was before, but it's relevant. Can you share your views on how that's playing out because, or do you agree with that? And do you see that as an important part of the customer? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's, that complexity that the IT organizations are seeing now, as they fully adopt the cloud for all their new applications and start to migrate some of their existing applications over. That world is only increasing in complexity. The way that you can virtualize your applications, break them out into millions of services, the dependencies you have on third party applications or SaaS services. These things only add that many more data points that you now have to cover and think about and make sure that those things deliver upon their SLAs, right? And wrapping your arms around that requires a partner to help you separate signal from noise. Because now you're going into a world without simplicity that you just mentioned has gotten to some point where it's beyond what you can actually sort of keep in your mind. Beyond what you can just look at data and sift through and understand, you really need tools and systems that come together, and understand that data for you and start to represent your business to you in a new way and abstract away those layers of complexity. While you do that, because I think, as you talk about those innings, that first inning, second inning, or rather first game, second game in the series, it's not a full migration to the cloud, right? There are going to be some applications that stay on-prem that stay in their traditional environments and may never move. And then some of them are going to go hybrid. Some will keep parts of the applications on-prem, and they're going to start to modularize components of it. And so it's not going to be sort of a mass scale migration. And then we're all in the promised land. And we deal with the cloud complexity. It's going to be ever increasing complexity. As we now introduce so many variants of applications, so many variants of technology, and what people are going to need is someone who can help them cover that entire estate and understand it at scale. >> John: Yeah, I mean, I think it's the enterprise conversion, if you will of cloud operations on-premises because of the reasons. And now you've got the edge. Garrick, this is the whole kind of end-to-end stack conversation view. And by the way, there isn't one tech stack to rule them all because you have different use cases. You might have an application that needs a financial gateway or have other capabilities. So integration's huge. This only increases the point Linda was making about complexity behind the scenes. How does AppDynamics help you with this for Match.com? >> So we have quite a bit of infrastructure, you know, a lot of it is shared, well, most of all, maintaining, sandboxes for user data and that sort of thing. And so now the navigating that space is always interesting. So for instance, one of the new things that we have coming out is Star.com It's out there right now. It's a dating site that's geared towards single parents. It does share some of the infrastructure, but we're realizing what that means, how is that different, how our registration flow is different, how our subscription flow is different. Where are the things that DevOps are actively trying to improve on and rethink? That's one of the things that we try to focus on when we're trying to kind of pick out, like, is this a good candidate to move over to the cloud sooner or later? Is this a good candidate for something that needs to be maybe bake a little bit more? And having established those baselines with the shared infrastructure, and having a pretty good understanding of how they react, how they work really helps us, you know, tee up these new initiatives and in front of those needs in a more efficient way. So yeah, absolutely. >> John: What's some of the activity you guys seen? And what's the peak activity on Match.com these days? >> Yeah, so dating apps in general, but not so particular we use a nested or breast fractal peak, and it's a pattern that, from what they told me back in the old days, took a little while to realize was a thing. And not just like, oh we changed something and then did this and produced that. So every evening is our peak basically. So with taking time zones into account, obviously, in the United States from about five to 10 o'clock at night or so, we get this, growing, burst of traffic. So that can be anywhere from 23% sometimes. It kind of varies. Then we have a weekly peak where every, you know, Sunday and Monday we expect a higher amount of traffic than we would other days. And it kind of makes sense from an Archer psychology kind of standpoint where, you know, you're coming off of dates, you're trying to set dates up. That's where a lot of that activity is. And then we have a yearly peak, which goes from around Christmas to President's day. Believe it or not, it's President's day, it's not Valentine's day. And so the sort of thing where when we're trying to plan for capacity and we do a lot of, what cost squeeze tests, were not quite as I guess, engineering, but hey, what does it look like if we go down in capacity by 50%, what happens? where are the weak points? A January, Monday night is very different from a May, Thursday in June (chuckles). So we have to predict, we can anticipate some of that, but we don't know for sure, a lot can change in a year. So when we're preparing for a yearly peak, we really have to pay attention. We have to prep. We have to plan for that and work with that to figure out how we can get through it and maintain that level of service. >> That's awesome, and AppDynamics to help you to do that. I'd love to get a bot to give me the optimal dating times, to share with my single friends. Great stuff. Linda, thank you for coming. Great to see you. Congratulations on a great case study. Great story. How large-scale applications and are working in the modern cloud. So congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Awesome, thank you, so good to be here. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>mm Welcome back to the huge covered cubes coverage of VM world 2021. The virtual edition tom gillis is back on the cube. He's in S. V. P at VM ware and the GM of network and advanced security at the company. Tom. Always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be back here on the cube. I really enjoyed it. We've we've been, we've known each other for I don't want to count how many years but more than a few. Uh it's always an interesting conversation. >>We've had a lot of face to face interactions a couple years in a row were virtual. We'll be back together at some point. I'm >>calling. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually on the road with customers. So it's starting to happen. >>Yeah, us too. We did uh we did public sector summit in D. C. This week. I'm heading out to Vegas next week for a show. So it is, it is starting to happen. So just a matter of time hey, >>when I start >>with with your your scope of responsibilities? Network and advanced security, you're kind of putting those two areas together. Very important. It makes sense synergistically. But how are you guys thinking about that? Maybe you could add some color. >>Yeah, sure thing. Um So network in advance security means all things security of Myanmar. So it's carbon black with our endpoint product, NsX in the data center. It's our tons of service mesh for cloud native applications to all the security stuff that goes into our anywhere workspace. Um and you know, I think you you probably get the message here dave at the end where there's three big waves that we're trying to ride. You know, multi cloud computing platform, which is our hallmark, is what we're known for running out across every cloud. It's the cloud native applications, building tools for new modern apps. And then really kind of the future of both networking and compute is being defined by this anywhere workspace. Our mission is to put security and connectivity into all of that. That makes it work. That makes it work well at scale. And so it made sense to put all that under one roof. Uh, I'm the guy and that's what we're doing. >>Yeah, you talk about that anywhere workspace, which, You know, it was always kind of a great vision and then it was somewhat aspirational, but then it became not only reality, but a mandate over the past 15, 18 months and that has that ripples through two implications on networking, even getting flatter and the security implications. So, all those things are coming together >>there really are. You know, I think we can't under estimate the profound impact that covid and the kind of work from home has had on our lives on society were still turning through what those implications are, but in networking it's cause for a fundamental rethink and for 20 years I've been doing networking and for 20 years we had this notion of a demarcation point networks defined as something that it was a DMZ, right? And, and on one side of that, TMZ was a dirty, untrusted internet, who would scary the other side is the clean, blissful corporate network where you know, only butterflies and unicorns exist and you know, wherever you were in the world, your traffic would be back hauled through that dems so that it could be scrubbed. And if you ever used tools like we're using now zoom, you know, you realize that that experience of back hauling traffic through traditional VPN is pretty simple. And so, so across the industry, enterprises are saying, you know what, there's got to be a different way instead of moving by traffic to the security services. What if I turn that upside down, That's what we're doing a VM ware, which we're taking those security services that we live in the DFc. We're doing what VM ware does well, which is defined them as software and then running them in hundreds of points of presence around the world. Hundreds. And so we effectively moved the security close to the users wherever the users are instead of the other way around. And that's the way we think we'll be building networks in a post pandemic world. >>Yeah. And that talks to the trend of this hyper decentralized system that's basically everywhere now, you know, even even out to the edge. And so, so you now have this, you know, zero trust used to be a buzzword and, and again, it's become this, this mandate. You guys actually did some, I think it was you who did some really interesting research post the solar winds hack on. Talking about things like island hopping and explaining how malware was getting in self forming and some of the insidious ways in which the, the adversaries and, and that is a function of a lot of things. The adversaries are obviously highly capable. Uh, they're motivated because it's lucrative and, and, and they keep upping the game on the good guys if you will. >>Yeah, it's nuts. But, and so so think about the impact that ransomware has had. Uh, and also to your point about the anywhere workspace. I'm right now in boston, I could, you know, tomorrow I'm going to be in texas and the day after that I'll be in san Francisco. So I'm popping all over the place, you know, we're back meeting customer's going wherever they want us to be. But wherever I am, I'm able to connect and, and my traffic needs to be protected. Now in boston it was a ransomware attack against the ferry. We're not talking about a bank or like a sophisticated, you know, sort of organization, it's a ferry that moves people from Cape Cod to an island across the water and it disrupted that ferry for days. So so at VM ware, we're measuring all the inner workings of what's happening in the data center and we collect more than eight trillion with a T eight trillion events per week and that allows us to be able to identify these anomalies like ransomware. And so just in the last 90 days we've stopped more than a million ransomware attacks. 1.1 million ransomware attacks that we stopped within six seconds, More than a million ransomware attacks in the last 90 days. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this problem it's everywhere. And you you reference Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a concept, it's a philosophy, is not a product by Zero Trust. You implement a Zero Trust model which says in a deep perimeter Rised world in a world where people like tom or hopscotch on all over the place and Dave's in boston and you know, I could be in san Francisco, we have to make the assumption that somehow some way, you know, our machine or a user has been compromised. And so you wrap each little piece of the infrastructure, each little piece of the application, you wrap it a protective armor to assume that everything around it is hostile and that's how we stop somewhere. That's how we can keep your infrastructure safe. And this is something you have and where does very uniquely because of the intrinsic attributes of our platform, our virtualization platform and our multi cloud platform. >>Yeah. You talk about the ferry anybody who's ever taken the ferry to Nantucket knows it's a pretty low tech operation and when that ferry goes down, it's one thing, it's, it's whether you can kind of understand that but people's lives get ruined, their vacations get ruined, they can't get off the island. Commerce comes to a grinding halt. It's extremely, extremely expensive really. >>For days, >>for days it was >>Like it wasn't a 20 minute outage. You know, it was like a fairy is not running for a couple things like that. That is a huge, huge, very high impact thing. And the fact that it was so pedestrian, like they don't have billions of dollars in the bank and you know, sort of super secret defense technologies, it's a ferry, you know, right, come on rental cars everywhere. So everywhere >>talk about your software approach two networking and security a little bit more. How that changes the experience for organizations generally, and developers specifically. >>So in a multi cloud world you can't always count on having physical infrastructure that you can touch. And in fact, do you really want to touch that stuff. And so our idea is that if you think about infrastructure, its job is to support the needs of the application. And so for example, in Kubernetes, we have the ability for developers say, look, here's my cool new application and this peace talks to this peace talks to this piece and nothing else. And so we can implement those types of controls using what we call a service smash, which allows us to, to make those connections smooth and seamless across clouds. Some of it could run on amazon, some of them could be running in a private cloud infrastructure. Some of them could be running in the traditional VM and in fact many complication applications do just that. So we can facilitate that communication back and forth and we have the ability to look for stuff that you just never happened because when you understand how an application is supposed to work, it allows you to spot, hey, wait a minute. That's not right. That's that, that's that, that don't like someone trying to manipulate the ferry system rather than somebody trying to board the ferry and get off. And I think, you know, there's a really interesting observation here, which is when you, when you, if you can see the inner workings of an application, like it looks for example, let's think about a mortgage payment application filed, a mortgage payment application and the Attackers has stolen a credential. They're going to get in. It's really hard to figure out a friend from foe. But once they get into mortgage payment application, I'm not going to pay my mortgage right? They do crazy anomalous things like wildly anomalous things. If you can see them, you can stop them and we have the unique ability to see them because we put the telemetry, the observation into our virtualization platform that runs on every cloud that runs wherever the user is. Right and pulling all that together into a central issue. That's something I think the N word to do uniquely and this is why we're having such success insecurity. >>I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about securing containers. You just sort of reference that but containers are moving target just a few short years ago, containers are ephemeral. You weren't you weren't gonna be running you know, your mission critical or business critical postgres in containers. But now that's changed. You're getting state. But so that's a moving target. How are you thinking about handling? You know, those kind of changes And what about the architecture allows you to be kind of future proof if you will. Sorry to use that >>word? No, no, it's a good question. So you've articulated right. So if you think about a traditional application, we used to always talk about three tiered web app, there's a web server is app server and the database a little more complicated than that. But you can usually go in and you could touch those three tiers. This box is the web tier. This box step here. This big box, is that it. And so security controls were built around this idea that you could you could wrap that relatively easily. We talk about a container based application And all these microservices. It's not three tiers anymore. It's 300 tears or maybe 3000 tears. Bitty little things, these little services that turn up and turn down and they all have a piece and so our view is that the A P is the new endpoint, the ap is where the action happens and not just the ap that faces the internet but all the inner workings, all the internal apps. And so because we put that application together, because we help the developers create those apaches, we have a unique understanding of how those apps are used and we're just introducing the ability to provide visibility around how are these epi is being used and then we can do anomaly detection and we are seeing a whole new set of attacks that are using legitimate apiece. They're not appease that are that are that are broken or malformed but the Attackers are finding ways to extract data from an API that maybe they shouldn't remember some of the facebook stuff where they had these Attackers were profiling users and there's no limit to how they could profile users and they were just expecting huge amounts of data that's an ap breach. These are the kind of problems that we can solve for our customers with these built in Tan Xue uh service mesh and api security controls >>you think about all these trends we're talking about and I want to ask you about how it's affected go to market because kind of the old days you had box sellers, they, you know, they would integrate VM ware or whatever. They you might have a specialist that was really good at ST for instance, S. A. P. And they were good partners. So that kind of value add developers have become a new channel for you and I wonder how you think about that, how they're now influencing their go to market. >>Yeah, that's that's a clear trend in the industry are absolutely right on, we call it moving left, right. So it's getting earlier and earlier in the development process. And so one of the things that renouncing at the show here is that the tons of community edition that makes it super easy for developers without putting down a credit card or making a big expensive commitment. They can start using these tools and get productive right away. And so so on top of that we build security controls that understand the total life cycle. So as the developers writing code, we're checking that code to make sure is this compliant doesn't have any known vulnerabilities. This is gonna break something. If you if you put it out there and then when you go to hit commit and say, all right, I'm ready to go, we've already done the homework to make sure the code is clean, we'll put it in the right place. So placing it into production in a way that is wrapped with the security that it needs the guardrails are in place and now we have this this X ray vision, this ability to look at the inner workings and understand the Ap is what's happening inside the application and identify anomalies. And lastly, once the thing is up and running we actually have the ability to measure we called posture and make sure that it doesn't drift from its intended configuration. All of this is done across every cloud. So this is, this is how we think we have a kind of new and very holistic approach to securing collaborative applications. >>Tom I want to ask you about telco transformation, I mean N F V kind of just barely scratched the surface in my view and now we're seeing with the edge and five G and the cloud there's some oh ransom. Really interesting opportunities going on in in telco say what you want about telcos? Yeah, there, you know the connectivity and Okay, fine. But one thing you say about the telco networks as they work, you know, and it actually did a great job during the pandemic. They had to pivot to landlines and and so when it comes to reliability and rock solid nous, those guys kinda kinda get it but they've got to be more flexible. So you see those two worlds colliding what's going on in in telco and and where does VM ware play? >>Yeah, sure thing. A huge amount of emphasis on telco, we've won some very large telco deals. Five G is not just a faster version of four G. 5G is a new take on what an edge network can do. It has the ability to run extremely high performance network connections and the ability to control the performance. So this idea of what's called network slicing, so you can guarantee a certain amount of latency or a certain amount of bandwidth. So combine that with this explosion of IOT devices. We're going to have an infinite number of devices. Every device you can imagine has a computer in it and it's spitting off giant amounts of data. We keep coming up with new and interesting ways to analyze that data to do things like, you know, control the self driving car to do things like create a customized retail experience to do things like help guide research for an oil company on the oil platform. Okay. These are all examples of edge computing. Now, the infrastructure that you need to protect those workloads is what we're defining and software. And putting it everywhere, Not just in the traditional data center where you might be in 1020 locations, we're talking about hundreds going into thousands of locations. And this is what the industry is calling sassy or secure access services. Edge. So where's your firewall? Your web proxy the controls that you need to protect those apps, where do they live? They're gonna live in the telco infrastructure And that stuff all runs on X 86 servers. So if you put in the data center services into this distributed architecture and you've got tons and tons of data that's being produced produced locally. Why would you want to remove the compute there and we think you can and will and this is this is why VM ware with our telco partners is uniquely suited to build the groundwork for this edge computing infrastructure. And I think edge computing is going to be the next big wave. So we went from private clouds to public clouds and public cloud was built on, you know, the scale out fault tolerant model as we move to edge computing, edge computing is going to be around applications that need huge amounts of data, very low latency and they're highly distributed. So they're going to run not in 10 or 20 locations but in 1000 more. And we can do all of this with our tons of kubernetes with our virtual networking infrastructure and our anywhere workspace and the secure access services, Edge, the pops that we're building and I think VM ware is probably one of the few if any companies that have all of these pieces that we can put together to make the Edge actually work. >>Yeah, exciting times and and all that data ai influencing at the edge of new processor models and you guys are thinking about all that stuff tom we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back in the queue. Great conversation. >>Always a pleasure. Thanks very much. David, Take care >>Alright you to keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Volonte. For the Cubes coverage of VM World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back.

(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)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We are not in the Palo Alto studio, We are in Napa Valley for a special CUBE event. And we have a great CUBE alumni guest remoting in from Seattle, Napa, Seattle. Venkat Krishnamachari, CEO and Co-founder of MontyCloud, CUBE alumni. Venkat, welcome back to the CUBE. Great to see you. >> It is great to see you again, John. Thank you for taking time. >> So we've had previous conversations on the CUBE. You guys were advanced technology partner with AWS. And startup showcase is going on again, we're back for a revisit there for special session. We're going to go into deep dive on MontyCloud. You've had tremendous success with very large enterprises with your product. Congratulations, and you're just emerging really into rapid growth. Take a minute to explain for the viewers who is MontyCloud and what's going on. >> Sure thing, John. So we are an autonomous cloud operations company. Like you call it, we are also an advanced technology partner, a public sector partner, and an Amazon certified cloud management partner. What we do is we help IT teams simplify their cloud operations. With our platform, our customers, without adding any specialized cloud skills or adding any multiple point tools, they can still enable their teams to provision, manage, operate the Cloud and reduce the ongoing cloud operations cost by 70%. That's what we do for our customers. >> You guys are solving a real problem that's emerging very quickly. It's actually a more of an opportunity, less of a problem, but it means a problem if you don't address it. And that is the cloud migration is going next level. Meaning, people are re platforming to the cloud with cloud operations. But now they're starting to leverage the cloud services and there's more and more coming on every day. Look at what server less is doing and the impact of microservices, just everything is changing fast and people are refactoring their businesses with cloud services. This is where it starts to get into what they call day two operations, where you got to be day one every day and create innovation. But now you've got this day two, where reliability, security, new things have to be nailed down and secured and stabilized. And so this is a big trend. You guys have a solution here. Could you take a minute and talk about the specific problem that you see customers and how you guys solve it? >> Sure thing. So customers like you rightly say, John, they're rapidly adopting the cloud. And what we are seeing here is there is a challenge of not just onboarding and consistent provisioning, which they perform on the metaphorical day one. They are also burdened with multiple operations. Like you called out, right? Keeping the security of your application, high compliance, maintaining visibility into who's using what, why some things are costing more or sometimes, sometimes they're not costing appropriately, right? Having a position on all of that is now an increasing burden and the responsibility on the IT team and the IT teams are increasingly being held accountable to the business objectives because business objectives are getting closely tied with cloud and digital transformation. That's the area we help and solve. >> So I want to ask you one of the questions that's come up a lot. And this is, and I don't mean to put you on the spot here at Venkat, but I think it's important to address a lot of people say, Hey, I'm buying into this misdirection. I just don't have the staff. My IT guys can't be trained fast enough. I got them on a re-skilling track. I got to find some talent. This is becoming not just how to provision stand up applications, put them in the cloud and grow them talent, the talent equation. Can you talk about how you see that problem being solved and how, what are you guys doing to help them? >> Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I might skip some things to go directly to some of the value we'll be at, right? With our platform, imagine adding a highly skilled cloud solutions architect in under 10 minutes to your teams. That's one of the value of our platform. Customers are trying to hire more and more cloud solution architects. They're trying to upscale their own team members so that they can enable the rest of the company to consume the cloud safely, which means a cloud solutions architect role is not only the safe building blocks that others can reuse, but also put governance guardrails, and drive for accountability so that developers can move fast. That's one of the areas customers are struggling to hire and up-skill with our platform within 10 minutes, you can turn on autonomous cloud solution architect, which comes in, helps you fast track provisioning. Customers can deploy any kind of application pattern from networking to data services, to Silva based or container based applications. We have pre-built well architected solutions in the platform that acts like your own cloud solution architect. We address that skill gap immediately, their platform on the day one aspect of things. >> Yeah, I love it. It's like, you know, the old joke AI bots are bots are automating things. You're essentially automating like key specialized roles that traditionally were expensive. I mean, it's hard to find talent at that level. So I think that's a major wave coming and I think you guys are on top of it. So definitely want to hear more about that. I do want to get your thoughts while I have you here about cloud operations day one operations, day two operations, Venkat, define for me what you consider day one operations. >> Yeah. Day one operations involve helping your teams consume the cloud and fast track your digital transformation would an ability to have developers move fast, right? That's kind of day one, right? The top-down leadership decides let's go to the cloud. They have the enabled teams to consume it, and safely. That is an area we help. One, a typical thing we've learned in our conversations with customers, John, is this. Right, It's very expensive to let teams provision like the wild wild west, right? And then later pull back control. Later, drive for accountability. Oftentimes we see that customers end up in a spot where they wonder why this is costing them so much more than they originally taught. A lot of that is because consuming the cloud from day one itself has to be thought through, has to have well-architected principles in mind. So we help in that area. We call this shifting left, right? Customers, if they... the best way, right? The best way to consume the cloud and the right way to do it is to ensure that when you provision itself, there is a notion of well-architected principles in place security compliance costs are being addressed in the provisioning aspects. So we help there, for example, a fortune hundred customers for us, right? They were looking to fast track the application modernization and they were under pressure to do that. They use MontyCloud's pre-built templates, which are well-architected. That teams were able to fast track provisioning of the resources, enable the developers with the CICB pipeline that they needed and they could move their application fast. The key thing here is post moving the application. They found that the approach we took to solve in the day, one problem automatically reduces the amount of time they need to spend to drive for who owns the resources. Why is it costing so much? All those problems go away to a certain degree. If you think about day one, the right way. That's one area we helped with. And that's how we think about day one, reduce the ongoing burden from day one itself. >> Day one's great. You give them a blank, check the provisioning, all the services. And next thing you know, you're racking up a big bill. The engineers are building and they're waiting, but what do we build? Great stuff. First of all, engineers want to get access that's critical. And we know that that's where the innovation comes from Right, now, I want you to talk about day two operations because this, this where it starts to get really interesting when you start to reign it in, you know, the old expression, let chaos reign and then rein in the chaos. So define day two operations for us, what is day two operations mean for you? >> Okay. So this is our deep, you know, hypothesis that was driven by a really rich conversation with customers, right? Ongoing operations in the cloud is the responsibility of multiple teams. And the cloud providers are expecting consumers and the customers in this case to have a shared portion of their responsibility, right? Security is a shared responsibility. Compliance is a shared responsibility. Cost management is a shared responsibility. And then the ongoing uptime and MTTR, like the meantime to resolution, they are all responsibilities are wholly sitting on the customer side. All of this put together impact the bottom line of the business because more and more businesses are now cloud businesses powered by cloud applications, managing this entire set of problems, and challenges, is what we call us day two operations. >> One of the things you guys have been known for in the industry, in your customer base and within some of the geek community is you guys turn it teams into cloud powerhouses that's been said, what does that mean? What can you take me through that? Because I mean, we know what IT teams do. They could provision gear, they'd be mostly on premises. And they move to the cloud. They still got to do all the things that it stands to do, but then they got cloud and they got automation. So, but explain to me how you guys have transformed IT teams into cloud powerhouses. >> Sure. So maybe the customer example will help. Right? One of her fortune funded launch, you know, global customer before they're at the cloud, they had a five member team watching over a farm of servers, right? More 10,000 servers for compliance needs. Their physician wants to move those servers to the cloud. And, and in essence, move applications to the cloud and continue to provide compliance to their entire organization. In that they started up-skilling the five member team. When they met MontyCloud, we offered them a solution that not only help them govern those servers in the cloud with a very simple no-code approach, we also gave them four of their headcount back. They were able to repurpose four members on the team to other projects because we attached them that we attached with them compliance bot. We asked this question right to customers. Wouldn't it be? Wouldn't it be awesome, if you're able to quickly add a cloud operations engineer, a cloud security engineer, a cloud compliance engineer, to every application in a dedicated manner? Customers go, how do we do that, right? Well, we have anonymous bots that have been built for this purpose and the comprehensive real-time bots that customers can fine- tune to their environments, and it's as if you added a dedicated cloud compliance engineer. In this particular case, there's a large customer is now operating a 10,000 plus server farm with MontyCloud compliance bot with another individual on the team. And the other four individuals were given back to other projects. This is what we mean by empowering our customers and making that cloud team, the traditional IT teams into cloud powerhouses. They can do more with less and they can keep track of the cloud consumption in the right way. And they can do that without having to write a single line of code. That's what our platform promises. >> Awesome. Well, great stuff. As enterprise buyers are out there looking at solutions, you know, they always try to, you know, separate the winners from the not so good winners, if you will, that'd be, be polite. Jerry Chen regionally has been talking about this paper castles in the cloud where you can build moats within the cloud and build on other people's clouds. So that brings up the question that I wanted to ask you about MontyCloud. Your competitive advantage and how you compare vis-a-vis the competition and how should customers would potentially evaluating your platform and your services look at you long-term are you going to, what kind of value proposition are you offering them? Cause that's always top of mind in enterprise, you know, these guys got to be around, what, are they like me? They're going to solve my problem and help me transform. Will they deliver the value? So the question is, how are you guys competing? Can you address that please? >> Yeah. Like we, like, we have been sharing, you know, more than competition. It's the customer, right? That is so much more customer challenge to solve and solve it in a way that's most meaningful to customers. The competition is good to have because they sometimes show us the way, but customers really tell us both their stated needs and the implied needs that we find out, right? John, we are the only comprehensive cloud management platform that enables our customers in every step of the cloud transformation, right? You will find a, you will find in the market, point tools that help with security, point tools that help with compliance, provisioning infrastructure as code solutions that you have to learn and write code and do. There's a lot going on. We are the only comprehensive platform that thinks about customers from the day one. From onboarding to provisioning and consumption to governance, to security, compliance, and ongoing operations with costs and context in mind, we are the only platform that offers that to our customers. And all of that, without the customers having to write a single line of code, they can fast track as if they onboarded a cloud center of excellence in their team with the MontyCloud platform. That's our biggest differentiation. And this comes from deep understanding of the customers, interconnected problems, because you don't only solve provisioning and then forget context, you don't solve only context and cost and forget security. All of these are interconnected challenges. So you need an interconnected solution. That's what we're building. >> I think that interconnected systems, mindset really is about the bridge to the future. And if you can be with the customer together and build that bridge and cross over together, that's to me is a relationship oriented value proposition. I think that's really needed in this transformative market. So congratulations. I love the mindset there. I've got to ask you. I know you've got a lot of customers and you can't say their names on camera. A lot of large enterprises give us a taste of some of the things they say to you like, "Hey, Venkat, I love your service because blank. What do they, what are some of the anecdotal sayings that customers say about MontyCloud? >> Oh, we have some customers we can talk about. Some of the customers are going to come back on the stage actually St. Louis university is going to be coming on the QV event that's coming up soon, right? So a bunch of customers, we can talk about some customers. We are, you know, deeply working with them and we've solved some problems for them. So what we typically hear from customers is this, right? A lot of vendors come in and ask our teams to up-skill and they teach our teams how to manage cloud. Your solution helps us focus on our KPIs. That's what we repeatedly hear from customers, right? Being able to help the customer. Look, it's not the customers, you know, primary focus to build and maintain a cloud center of excellence that also involves dealing with multiple point tools that involves constantly keeping up with the growing footprint, that involves up-skilling the team constantly. You know, it's great that you have a cloud focus, but every customer that we've engaged with, even the large customers tell us that the fact that they can go back to focusing on their KPIs, whether the application is providing services to their customers, how much uptime is, is, is directly impacting their business. What are the costs of per transaction? Those are the important things they really want to focus on. So consistently our customers are able to come back and validate that when MontyCloud gets involved with them, they're able to shift that focus back to their business, as opposed to trying to focus on things that is basically becoming an essential problem. They need to solve. That's the common theme. We get us feedback and we continuously learn from that and continue to improve that. >> Awesome, great stuff. Venkat, great to have you on again, the CUBE Conversation at The Update, while I got you, take a minute to put a plug in for the company where you guys at on status, state of the company, are you guys looking to hire... sound bites? Anything you want to share? Give a quick minute plug for MontyCloud. >> Yeah, sure thing, John. Hey, we are a startup. We are always hiring. We're always trying to find the smartest people that we want to work with. We want people to come in and kind of show us what to do, right? So give us a shout out. From a growth perspective, John, the market is, you know, booming, right? We are, we are with the small team, which I will give a shout out to my team, right? We have like 23, 23 member team, right? Being able to go deliver to a world-class cloud management platform, expectations and deliver to fortune hundred companies means they are thinking about the problem space deeply. So those who are interested in that kind of, you know, accelerated delivery to customers, you know, do more with less attitude are welcome to engage with us from a self look to the company perspective. Here's what we offer. We offered a free trial today. Our platform can be turned on and start delivering value to customers. In under 10 minutes, we can go to MontyCloud.com, sign up for a free trial, connect their cloud accounts. Within few minutes, they're going to get free recommendations on where they can optimize costs. Where they can improve security. What are the compliance issues they can solve? And they'll get full visibility into the environment, all in just about a few clicks. And that is a value prop our platform offers on an ongoing basis. They can further customize the platform to their needs. So I invite everybody to go try MontyCloud.com. >> All right, Venkat, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Great example of how the cloud can enable startups to be a supplier for the biggest companies in the world. MontyCloud again, start-up successful in the cloud. This is what it's all about. The new model, new, new manufacturing. It's the cloud. I'm John Furrier with The CUBE. Thanks for watching this CUBE Conversation.

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to ASML day. My name is Yasmin Joffey. I'm the director of systems engineering for ASML at HPE. Today. We're here and joined by my colleague, Don wake, who is a technical marketing engineer who will talk to us about the date and the life of an it administrator through the lens of ASML container platform. We'll be answering your questions real time. So if you have any questions, please feel free to put your questions in the chat, and we should have some time at the end for some live Q and a. Don wants to go ahead and kick us off. >>All right. Thanks a lot, Yasir. Yeah, my name is Don wake. I'm the tech marketing guy and welcome to asthma all day, day in the life of an it admin and happy St. Patrick's day. At the same time, I hope you're wearing green virtual pinch. If you're not wearing green, don't have to look that up if you don't know what I'm scouting. So we're just going to go through some quick things. Talk about discussion of modern business. It needs to kind of set the stage and go right into a demo. Um, so what is the need here that we're trying to fulfill with, uh, ASML container platform? It's, it's all rooted in analytics. Um, modern businesses are driven by data. Um, they are also application centric and the separation of applications and data has never been more important or, or the relationship between the two applications are very data hungry. >>These days, they consume data in all new ways. The applications themselves are, are virtualized, containerized, and distributed everywhere, and optimizing every decision and every application is, is become a huge problem to tackle for every enterprise. Um, so we look at, um, for example, data science, um, as one big use case here, um, and it's, it's really a team sport and I'm today wearing the hat of perhaps, you know, operations team, maybe software engineer, guy working on, you know, continuous integration, continuous development integration with source control, and I'm supporting these data scientists, data analysts. And I also have some resource control. I can decide whether or not the data science team gets a, a particular cluster of compute and storage so that they can do their work. So this is the solution that I've been given as an it admin, and that is the ASML container platform. >>And just walking through this real quick, at the top, I'm trying to, as wherever possible, not get involved in these guys' lives. So the data engineers, scientists, app developers, dev ops guys, they all have particular needs and they can access their resources and spin up clusters, or just do work with the Jupiter notebook or run spark or Kafka or any of the, you know, popular analytics platforms by just getting in points that we can provide to them web URLs and their self service. But in the backend, I can then as the it guy makes sure the Kubernetes clusters are up and running, I can assign particular access to particular roles. I can make sure the data's well protected and I can connect them. I can import clusters from public clouds. I can, uh, you know, put my like clusters on premise if I want to. >>And I can do all this through this centralized control plane. So today I'm just going to show you I'm supporting some data scientists. So one of our very own guys is actually doing a demo right now as well, called the a day in the life of the data scientist. And he's on the opposite side, not caring about all the stuff I'm doing in the backend and he's training models and registering the models and working with data, uh, inside his, you know, Jupiter notebook, running inferences, running postman scripts. And so I'm in the background here, making sure that he's got access to his cluster storage protected, make sure it's, um, you know, his training models are up, he's got service endpoints, connecting him to, um, you know, his source control and making sure he's got access to all that stuff. So he's got like a taxi ride prediction model that he's working on and he has a Jupiter notebook and models. So why don't we, um, get hands on and I'll just jump right over it. >>It was no container platform. So this is a web UI. So this is the interface into the container platform. Our centralized control plane, I'm using my active directory credentials to log in here. >>And >>When I log in, I've also been assigned a particular role, uh, with regard to how much of the resources I can access. Now, in my case, I'm a site admin you can see right up here in the upper right hand, I'm a site admin and I have access to lots and lots of resources. And the one I'm going to be focusing on today is a Kubernetes cluster. Um, so I have a cluster I can go in here and let's say, um, we have a new data scientists come on board one. I can give him his own resources so he can do whatever he wants, use some GPU's and not affect other clusters. Um, so we have all these other clusters already created here. You can see here that, um, this is a very busy, um, you know, production system. They've got some dev clusters over here. >>I see here, we have a production cluster. So he needs to produce something for data scientists to use. It has to be well protected and, and not be treated like a development resource. So under his production cluster, I decided to create a new Kubernetes cluster. And literally I just push a button, create Kubernetes cluster once I've done that. And I'll just show you some of the screens and this is a live environment. So this is, I could actually do it all my hosts are used up right now, but I wouldn't be able to go in here and give it a name, just select, um, some hosts to use as the primary master controller and some workers answer a few more questions. And then once that's done, I have now created a special, a whole nother Kubernetes cluster, um, that I could also create tenants from. >>So tenants are really Kubernetes. Uh namespaces so in addition to taking hosts and Kubernetes clusters, I can also go to that, uh, to existing clusters and now carve out a namespace from that. So I look at some of the clusters that were already created and, um, let's see, we've got, um, we've got this year is an example of a tenant that I could have created from that production cluster. And to do that here in the namespace, I just hit create and similar to how you create a cluster. You can now carve down from a given cluster and we'll say the production cluster and give it a name and a description. I can even tell it, I want this specific one to be an AI ML project, um, which really is our ML ops license. So at the end of the day, I can say, okay, I'm going to create an ML ops tenant from that cluster that I created. >>And so I've already created it here for this demo. And I'm going to just go into that Kubernetes namespace now that we also call it tenant. I mean, it's like, multitenancy the name essentially means we're carving out resources so that somebody can be isolated from another environment. First thing I typically do. Um, and at this point I could also give access to this tenant and only this tenant to my data scientist. So the first thing I typically do is I go in here and you can actually assign users right here. So right now it's just me. But if I want it to, for example, give this, um, to Terry, I could go in here and find another user and assign him from this lead, from this list, as long as he's got the proper credentials here. So you can see here, all these other users have active directory credentials, and they, uh, when we created the cluster itself, we also made sure it integrated with our active directory, so that only authorized users can get in there. >>Let's say the first thing I want to do is make sure when I do Jupiter notebook work, or when Terry does, I'm going to connect him up straight up to the get hub repository. So he gives me a link to get hub and says, Hey man, this is all of my cluster work that I've been doing. I've got my source control there. My scripts, my Python notebooks, my Jupiter notebooks. So when I create that, I simply give him, you know, he gives me his, I create a configuration. I say, okay, here's a, here's a get repo. Here's the link to it. I can use a token, here's his username. And I can now put in that token. So this is actually a private repo and using a token, you know, standard get interface. And then the cool thing after that, you can go in here and actually copy the authorization secret. >>And this gets into the Kubernetes world. Um, you know, if you want to make sure you have secure integration with things like your source control or perhaps your active directory, that's all maintained in secrets. So you can take that secret. And when I then create his notebook, I can put that secret right in here in this, uh, launch Yammel. And I say, Hey, connect this Jupiter notebook up with this secret so he can log in. And when I've launched this Jupiter notebook cluster, this is actually now, uh, within my, my, uh, Kubernetes tenant. It is now really a pod. And if I want to, I can go right into a terminal for that, uh, Kubernetes tenant and say, coop CTL, these are standard, you know, CNCF certified Kubernetes get pods. And when I do this, it'll tell me all of the active pods and within those positive containers that I'm running. >>So I'm running quite a few pods and containers here in this, uh, artificial intelligence machine learning, um, tenant. So that's kind of cool. Also, if I wanted to, I could go straight and I can download the config for Kubernetes, uh, control. Uh well, and then I can do something like this, where on my own system where I'm more comfortable, perhaps coop CTL get pods. So this is running on my laptop and I just had to do a coop CTL refresh and give the IP address and authorization, um, information in order to connect from my laptop to that end point. So from a CIC D perspective from, you know, an it admin guides, he usually wants to use tools right on his, uh, desktop. So here am I back in my web browser, I'm also here on the dashboard of this, uh, Kubernetes, um, tenant, and I can see how it's doing. >>It looks like it's kind of busy here. I can focus specifically on a pod if I want to. I happen to know this pod is my Jupiter notebook pod. So aren't, I show how, you know, I could enable my data scientists by just giving him the, uh, URL or what we call a notebook service end points or notebook end point. And just by clicking on this URL or copying it, copying, you know, it's a link, uh, and then emailing it to them and say, okay, here's your, uh, you know, here's your duper notebook. And I say, Hey, just log in with your credentials. I've already logged in. Um, and so then he's got his Jupiter notebook here and you can see that he's connected to his GitHub repo directly. He's got all of the files that he needs to run his data science project and within here, and this is really in the data science realm, data scientists realm. >>He can see that he can have access to centralized storage and he can copy the files from his GitHub repo to that centralized storage. And, you know, these, these commands, um, are kind of cool. They're a little Jupiter magic commands, and we've got some of our own that showed that attachment to the cluster. Um, but you can see here if you run these commands, they're actually looking at the shared project repository managed by the container platform. So, you know, just to show you that again, I'll go back to the container platform. And in fact, the data scientist, uh, could do the same thing. Attitude put a notebook back to platform. So here's this project repository. So this is other big point. So now putting on my storage admin hat, you know, I've got this shared, um, storage, um, volume that is managed for me by the ESMO data fabric. >>Um, in, in here, you can see that the data scientist, um, from his get repo is able to through Jupiter notebook directly, uh, copy his code. He was able to run as Jupiter notebook and create this XG boost, uh, model. So this file can then be registered in this AIML tenant. So he can go in here and register his model. So this is, you know, this is really where the data scientist guy can self-service kick off his notebooks, even get a deployment end point so that he can then inference his cluster. So here again, another URL that you could then take this and put it into like a postman rest URL and get answers. Um, but let's say he wants to, um, he's been doing all this work and I want to make sure that his, uh, data's protected, uh, how about creating a mirror. >>So if I want to create a mirror of that data, now I go back to this other, uh, and this is the, the, uh, data fabric embedded in a very special cluster called the Picasso cluster. And it's a version of the ASML data fabric that allows you to launch what was formerly called Matt bar as a Kubernetes cluster. And when you create this special cluster, every other cluster that you create is automatically, uh, gets things like that. Tenant storage. I showed you to create a shared workspace, and it's automatically managed by this, uh, data fabric. Uh, and you're even given an end point to go into the data fabric and then use all of the awesome features of ASML data fabric. So here I can just log in here. And now I'm at the, uh, data fabric, web UI to do some data protection and mirroring. >>So >>Let's go over here. Let's say I want to, uh, create a mirror of that tenant. So I forgot to note what the name of my tenant was. I'm going to go back to my tenant, the name of the volume that I'm playing with here. So in my AIML tenant, I'm going to go to my source, control my project repository that I want to protect. And I see that the ESMO data fabric has created 10 and 30 as a volume. So I'll go back to my, um, data fabric here, and I'm going to look for 10 and 30. And if I want to, I can go into tenant 30, >>Okay. >>Down here, I can look at the usage. I can look at all of the, you know, I've used very little of the, uh, allocated storage that I want, but let's, uh, you know what, let's go ahead and create a volume to mirror that one. So very simple web UI that has said create volume. I go in here and I say, I want to do a, a tenant 30 mirror. And I say, mirror the mirror volume. Um, I want to use my Picasso cluster. I want to use tenant 30. So now that's actually looking up in the data fabric, um, database there's 10 and 30 K. So it knows exactly which one I want to use. I can go in here and I can say, you know, ext HCP, tenant, 30 mirror, you know, I can give it whatever name I want and this path here. >>And that's a whole nother, uh, demo is this could be in Tokyo. This could be mirrored to all kinds of places all over the world, because this is truly a global name, split namespace, which is a huge differentiator for us in this case, I'm creating a local mirror and that can go down here and, um, I can add, uh, audit and encryptions. I can do, um, access control. I can, you know, change permissions, you know, so full service, um, interactivity here. And of course this is using the web UI, but there's also rest API interfaces as well. So that is pretty much the, the brunt of what I wanted to show you in the demo. Um, so we got hands on and I'm just going to throw this up real quick and then come back to Yasser. See if he's got any questions he has received from anybody watching, if you have any new questions. >>Yeah. We've got a few questions. Um, we can, uh, just take some time to go, hopefully answer a few. Um, so it, it does look like you can integrate or incorporate your existing get hub, uh, to be able to, um, extract, uh, shared code or repositories. Correct? >>Yeah. So we have that built in and can either be, um, get hub or bit bucket it's, you know, pretty standard interface. So just like you can go into any given, get hub and do a clone of a, of a repo, pull it into your local environment. We integrated that directly into the gooey so that you can, uh, say to your, um, AIML tenant, uh, to your Jupiter notebook. You know, here's, here's my GitHub repo. When you open up my notebook, just connect me straight up. So it saves you some, some steps there because Jupiter notebook is designed to be integrated with get hub. So we have get hub integrated in as well or bit bucket. Right. >>Um, another question around the file system, um, has the map, our file system that was carried over, been modified in any way to run on top of Kubernetes. >>So yeah, I would say that the map, our file system data fabric, what I showed here is the Kubernetes version of it. So it gives you a lot of the same features, but if you need, um, perhaps run it on bare metal, maybe you have performance, um, concerns, um, you know, you can, uh, you can also deploy it as a separate bare metal instance of data fabric, but this is just one way that you can, uh, use it integrated directly into Kubernetes depends really the needs of, of the, uh, the user and that a fabric has a lot of different capabilities, but this is, um, it has a lot of the core file system capabilities where you can do snapshots and mirrors, and it it's of course, striped across multiple, um, multiple disks and nodes. And, uh, you know, Matt BARR data fabric has been around for years. It's, uh, and it's designed for integration with these, uh, analytic type workloads. >>Great. Um, you showed us how you can manage, um, Kubernetes clusters through the ASML container platform you buy. Um, but the question is, can you, uh, control who accesses, which tenant, I guess, namespace that you created, um, and also can you restrict or, uh, inject resource limitations for each individual namespace through the UI? >>Oh yeah. So that's, that's a great question. Yes. To both of those. So, um, as a site admin, I had lots of authority to create clusters, to go into any cluster I wanted, but typically for like the data scientist example I used, I would give him, I would create a user for him. And there's a couple of ways you can create users. Um, and it's all role-based access control. So I could create a local user and have container platform authenticate him, or I can say integrate directly with, uh, active directory or LDAP, and then even including which groups he has access to. And then in the user interface for the site admin, I could say he gets access to this tenant and only this tenant. Um, another thing you asked about is his limitations. So when you create the tenant to prevent that noisy neighbor problem, you can, um, go in and create quotas. >>So I didn't show the process of actually creating a Quentin, a tenant, but integral to that, um, flow is okay, I've defined which cluster I want to use. I defined how much memory I want to use. So there's a quota right there. You could say, Hey, how many CPU's am I taking from this pool? And that's one of the cool things about the platform is that it abstracts all that away. You don't have to really know exactly which host, um, you know, you can create the cluster and select specific hosts, but once you've created the cluster, it's not just a big pool of resources. So you can say Bob, over here, um, he's only going to get 50 of the a hundred CPU's available and he's only going to get X amount of gigabytes of memory. And he's only going to get this much storage that he can consume. So you can then safely hand off something and know they're not going to take all the resources, especially the GPU's where those will be expensive. And you want to make sure that one person doesn't hog all the resources. And so that absolutely quotas are built in there. >>Fantastic. Well, we, I think we are out of time. Um, we have, uh, a list of other questions that we will absolutely reach out and, um, get all your questions answered, uh, for those of you who ask questions in the chat. Um, Don, thank you very much. Thanks everyone else for joining Don, will this recording be made available for those who couldn't make it today? >>I believe so. Honestly, I'm not sure what the process is, but, um, yeah, it's being recorded so they must've done that for a reason. >>Fantastic. Well, Don, thank you very much for your time and thank everyone else for joining. Thank you.

>>Hi. Um, and thank you for inviting me to speak at the Entity Research Summit. And congratulations for NTT for setting up the neuroses club in the area. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about fully by deniable encryption and multiply the competition. And, uh, this is joint work with park from Harvard. And Santa will bring a, uh, she structurally right now in Russia during the rest. Um, so So so consider thesis, uh, two kids, which maybe some of you still remember its violence for check the incredible kids. And they are want they want to talk to each other privately without her mother learning what talking about. So here they are using this lead pipe, which is that cannot be secure Channel and and violent can say to that track that she doesn't want to do her homework and check it was the watch movie. And she knows that the judge will understand what she says. We hear what she says, but her mother, their mother, is not going to anything because it z this lead pipe. She doesn't know what they're talking about. Um and and and we know how to implement this actually in without lead pipes in the software will Do you have encryption, which, you know, you know, for I know, uh, 40 for the last 40 years or so, but actually for many more s. Oh, this is great. Encryption gives us private communication against, uh, eavesdropping adversary. So passive adversaries s but But you know that mothers can be more than passives. What if the mother he goes and asks Pilot that? What did you talk? What do you say to judge it So you know, if valid, really said, you know, used this'll end pipe. She can say whatever she wants to say. I actually said that I was study, and then the mother goes to judge. I can ask him what did about tell you, and she said that she was studied and the mother still cannot tell anything about what happened. She doesn't know trillions. Death was sent or not. Um, in fact, even if violence said that she was studying and and Jackson said something else that you know, she said she was she rather watch movie. Even then the mother doesn't know who was right. I mean, not from the pipe music. Look them in the eye and not this way, but not from the communication she doesn't. Andi. In fact, we could go on like this, and, you know, the lead type doesn't help at all to understand what really have. And this is really another very important form off this really secure channels that it doesn't allow external parties. Course, there's, uh, certain what really happened. Even when they asked to see all the internals of all the parties. In fact, even further, the Violet Jack Jack have no way to actually convince the mother that this is what happened. Even if you want, right, they have no way of actually proving to the mother that they said this and not the other thing with this lead pipe. So the question is can be obtained a similar effects with, you know, software encryption. Uh, can we have an encryption scheme that has the same sort of properties? So we know that Peoria, the total encryption doesn't have this property. That encryption leaves traces. So there's this cipher text that that the mother of the course of seized. Then when the mother goes toe the parties and you know the ballot judge, you can ask him uh, give me. Show me your randomness. Show me all the internals. I want to see what really? How you generated the text and how you decrypted it with no money. Encryption is only one way that, but inject, checking opened the suffer text, and therefore, there is no real privacy anymore. Um, so So this is the case. So so really to do to address this issue? The this this concept of deniable encryption that was considered, uh, you know, many years ago. Andi idea here is that you wanted encryption scheme that provides, uh, protection of privacy. Uh, on ability, toe keep private. You really, really, really value. And maybe, ah, fake or lie about what you say in a convincing way, even against such a course. Uh huh. So and so? So the idea is that, you know, So they actually do you think of three types here, So there is centered in apple. So we're just going us to center off the off the message. You know how How did you encrypt the message? Show me your encryption. Andalus Suing The decryption key is public. Um, and if you go to the receiver and ask him show me your decryption key. I want to see how you decrypted. And you can also think about natural case where the course actually goes to both parties and ask them for the for the internals and compares one against the other. Right? So this is the bite inability concept. Andi, you can, of course, naturally generalize it. Not just to encryption to, say, two party competition soon here, Violent and Jack. Jack. You know, uh, maybe not even trust each other fully, But they want toe compute together, you know? Or, you know, do they actually know a kid they both know and rapes in school, Right. So, So, So violent has her own list of kids, and she knows grapes and injection to, and they want to do this to Paris ST secure competition to figure out if they keep the both. And so if they have this ideal trusted party or stay for somewhere where they can actually do the security applications uh um, securely then they can, of course, learned the answer without learning anything else. And also, if the mother comes in after the fact and ask them, you know who I see that you were trying to figure out who very school, you know. So tell me what you did. Tell me your inputs them you are supposed to give me all the randomness. And And I want to know for the kids that you know, that vaping school. So if they were using such such a physically, I didn't secure gadget then, uh, then they can say You know why? You know? So So what is the state of, I don't know, anybody Invasion did Jack this theater and I got nothing into something or nothing. Jake Jackson. Consistency and off course. Mother has no way of knowing if this is true. No. And even if, uh, injected decides to tell the truth and actually tells is really important. Really put real randomness. And, uh, no randomness here and violent tells still here. Nothing. Nothing that the mother has no way of knowing which one is like. She clearly some of one of them is language. Doesn't know which one. I mean, chicken again looked deep in the eye, but not from the communication. She cannot figure out. Um, so s so we want to get something like that for for two party competition. Uh, and and and again, eso again, again, again. The case that, you know, one is like going to the truth is still don't know. Um, so the question is there a protocol that that one is still behavior, and, uh, incredible. How do you define us? Uh, and the point is that, you know, Okay, 11 further thing toe. Think about, you know, this doesn't shouldn't end with two parties can think about three or more parties on, uh, and the same thing happens. You know, just maybe the trust structure, the consistency structure becomes more complicated. Uh, you know, you could buy groups of people which is consistent with each other and not without, um Okay, so So what are our results here? So first result is regarding encryption. So we come up with the first bite, the novel communication protocol. It's not encryption because it's three messages. Uh, so it is three messages, and it is this way need a reference string, which is like, programs in the sky. And but it's a short registering. I mean, one short programs that everybody in the world uses for the encryptions for the entire duration of time. and our assumptions are some expansion, Leo in one functions, uh, and on. But just to say that what was done previously? It was just senator deniable or receiver deniable, um, And then and nothing that we do is that actually way define and also obtained this extra property, which we call off the record inability which talks with you about the case where, as I said before, that one party, uh uh, is saying one thing and the other practicing nothing they insisted. So they cannot. There is no way for them to frame each other. Um, and the way the other result is regarding a multiparty function evaluation on Dhere, we come up with the first all deniable secure function evaluation for quote Well, you know, I mean, I mean that the protocol with the adversary or the coarser expect to see all off the transcript of the competition, including all the randomness in all the internal state of all the parties eso superiors results in this area always assumed that you know, either the course only can concourse on some of the parties or if you can force all the parties and there is some some physical gadget, uh, which is crucial information about the personnel puts and you know, nobody can see inside, so no, here, we actually that the Attackers see everything. Uh, because they think they see everything on we can still provide inability onda protocol. Also, our protocols also withstand inconsistencies. Mean the case off this off the record style that one party says one thing partisans don't think. But this is only in the case of two parties and only for functions where the input size is polynomial in play. Put size. Uh, domain. Um, so in this actually interested open question how to extend it beyond that. Uh, so just to say that this is kind of it's a surprising thing that you can even do such thing, because what it allows you to do is actually such to completely rewrite history. Eso you during your competition on. Then somebody comes, and that will show me everything that happened. All the runners, all the entire transcript, the competition from beginning to the end. And you can now tell them something else. Not something that really happened. I mean, they see, you know, the public messages they see it on thistle is un contestable, but you can show different internals that there are very different than what really happened. And still nobody can catch you. So it's really some sense. Uh, who knows what's really happened? Um, so anyway, so So this is the, uh this is the result. Let's just say a few words about fully deniable encryption. Uh, just toe give a more detailed So So So So, how do you define this? Fully deniable encryption. So first I want to say that, you know, if you just, uh if the parties have appreciate key then, uh, deniability is with these because what you know, you just in orderto cryptic message just want some part of the key. And this one temple is completely deniable, right? Because you can just take this self a text and claim that it was any message encryption off any message off your choice. But just, you know, extra it. But just coming up with the key, which is the Solvents Architects as a message of futures. So this is completely diamond by both parties, and even it's off the record because if the two parties say different things, there's no way to know what's right. So Eh, so what? But it means that, you know, the hard part is actually had to come up with this shirt key, uh, in a deniable way. So you can actually later argued that this key was an, um so s so we need kind of deniable key exchange, and then this is what we do. So we come up with this idea by by the application of what? This what this means. So it's a protocol, you know, for two parties, uh, change, keep with messages and which gives you the ability to life. Somebody asked you which was key and claim it was anything, uh, later. So more formally. So we have two parties. One You know, this is the key change protocol for one party, and this is the kitchen for the other party in each party also is equipped with this faking algorithm. This is s faking arctic. I keep, you know, Senator, receiver, Even though it's not teach change, it's affecting and breaking. Allows you to come up with fake randomness. That demonstrate kills anything and we want correctly since semantic security as usual and we want toe this s fake takes a transcript and the randomness and the old key in the nuclear that you want. Andi comes up with fake randomness such that, uh um and this is you know, that that consistent with this new key, k prime and the same for the receiver. It comes up with a new randomness. The assistant to the crime and the requirement is that, uh, the attack. I cannot tell the difference between the experiment when you know the key key was exchanged. These transcripts respecto the real key or the case where the key was exchanged, and then the faking accurately going folk What? The adversary seizes the actual transcript, but then opening to a different. So there's a distinguished group. Um, And then what if the parties that were okay then there is another requirement there that says that even if the parties you know, one of them face, the other one doesn't and they then you can't tell which one will effect in which one wants to tell the truth. Onda point is that this to this to produce properties together really give you what you would like for my dearly your channel, even with respect toe courses. Um, so just to point out that you know this, this properties hold only if the parties in the follow the protocol during the execution actually choose randomness is they should. Otherwise things does work. In fact, otherwise, there's nothing that could work because the party's chief from the beginning and just use the terroristic protocol instead of randomized or just, you know, just randomness, which is predetermined. And, of course, nothing you can do. Uh, however, you know, there are, of course, interesting situations where it is. You know, it's reasonable to trust that the parties are actually using the randomness Aziz instructed during the execution of the protocol, for instance, we're thinking about voting this something can be forced, uh, by the voting booth, but you know, other situations. But this is kind of like essentially eso maybe another minute to say a few words about, you know, just like construction. How it kind of works in, you know, in general. So So we have, like, a three months, three rounds protocols. So we have four programs, you know, two from each party don't to deal with the three messages. Then we have a faking program for each party, so the way it works, you know, first, the violent here is has this is Harris randomness and actually chooses the key that they're going Thio agree ahead of time. It inputs to the first program which is going to think of it is the office care program black box program. And there's the message. First message is basically a harsh appear f off the K and then the, uh and then the responder gets this message has its own randomness and outputs. Another message, which is the hash off the first message agronomists. And then the third message now is going to be a new encryption off the key on the hashes and the end to a previous messages. This is, ah, company encryption off this one long spring and then the fourth with the fourth program just takes the randomness off the receiver and the two messages and put it in. And then I'll put the key, which is decrypted essentially the Crips, the subtextual from here in the old checks, right? And then the faking programs. What they do, they just take those. The transcript and the cookie and the new key and the striking program here are puts a new randomness for the senator and this one There's a new randomness for the receiver and the way it does near random estrogen offering work eyes, uh, is again It's kind of fact natural a t least the face of it. It uses the seeking hidden triggers idea off, off, so high in waters for descending on the inability that, you know, trigger each one of those programs toe put actually write message even when you get this, uh, crime on eventually this k problems are Well, the problem is that this scene in triggers, you know, give you local consistency for each problem by itself. This was this was the east their goal. But there is no global consistency about those six programs together and and get the six programs together to be consistent with the fact that the key would actually keep prominent K is high in contribute. And this is something that we become the main challenge of this work. This also, I did this three messages because if you have only to then there is no way to get a double consistency. Ah, s O s. So this is, uh this is the test on just to say about, you know, the future. So definitely we want stronger than ability for for MPC. As I said, we just give partial results there on. Then there is kind of, like some very interesting questions. One is like in general, You know, we know that your is very nice, but in many cases, we actually can do things without, uh but in this situation with prosecution, but maybe the inability of one of the very few cases where actually, we don't have any other way to do things out of the Neo. Is it really essential? Can we prove it? You know, and if not, can we do without? Can we get around CRS? Can you actually do with public friend of mysterious? Uh, you know, and more generally? Uh, no. We actually, uh, sweated a lot. You know, spit blood. In order to make this thing work with Leo and because I always really hard to work with, you know, would agree toe, find some some some general set of tools to work more easily. I was there. Um, Louis, thank you very much on death's

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)