>> Live, from Washington, DC it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you buy Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Washington, DC with theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. It's a huge show, it's like the reinvent for public sector and it's really booming. Our theCUBE allumnis on Josh Stella, CEO of Fugue. And Peter O'Donoghue, Vice President of Service Application Services at Unisys. You guys are back for the third time. We first interviewed you guys last year here in that reinvent, as well. Good to you back, thanks for joining us again. >> Thanks for having us back on. >> Thanks yeah, great. >> I love to connect the dots. It's almost like the trajectory. And we were talking yesterday about Cloud and how Amazon and other Cloud players, and Stew brought up a term called having experience. And then we were talking about this economies scale. This is really where people who have done it over time, have got their requisite, experience, scar tissue, and learnings. Some jump to try to deliver everything at once. You guys have been together for a while working together. What's the update on the trajectory as you guys go Cloud first? What's the status, what's goin' on? >> You guys made an announcement this week right? >> Sure, yeah, yeah. So, yeah we at Unisys are super excited to announce our new Cloud offering called Cloud Forte. And your point about takin' the lessons from experience and really embedding those into a capability, that's really what Cloud Forte is about. I think, ya know, at a very high level Cloud Forte it's got two major kind of sets of capabilities. One is like subscription services, which is around management and governance of AWS. And actually we've designed it to solve like really tricky problems, that our public sector and frankly our commercial clients are really struggling with. And the second set of services are really professional services, that allow for any need to facilitate and catalyze adoption at scale. And actually they go head on addressing some of the trickiest problems in that space, as well. >> Well, take a minute and just explain, what does the product do? What's the value proposition of this new service? >> Okay. Well, at the management and governance tier, let me tell you what the problems that it solves. I can go into all the minutiae, but I think we could be here a while right? It solves some big problems. Problem one that it solves is, commercially, public sector, and actually federal wise organizations have a tough time managing the finances of AWS Cloud consumption. Actually having the transparency and visibility, and being able to comply with the Antideficiency Act, being able to manage funding, and also being able to tie it back to contracts and contract line owners sounds trivial enough, but it's really a thorn in the side of a lot of folks really trnna adopt Cloud. I would say the second element is what we're calling our command bundle. And the command bundle really kind of, it deliberately kind of solves the... It feels the gap of the shared responsibility model. I think we all here are deeply aware of what that means. But, that's really kind of the air gap, if you will, between while AWS it supports out of the box, and quite frankly what customers need to support. So, things like, classic things like service catalog management, patch management, back up and recovery, IT operations, incident management, asset management. All those things. We've built and we've constructed basically in a flexible framework. A light weight framework that allows folks to do, to go fast. But also has that enterprise level of governance that people people expect to see from the cloud. One of the key elements of our command bundle is what Josh's organization provides, is the Fugue policy engine. So, we find that in order to provide Cloud, it's really important to be able to have those guardrails. To provide basically a nanny like supervisor to make sure that what's deployed is compliant. And actually what's deployed and what's running in production, stays compliant with security policy. So, that's really what command is all about. >> Josh, how about what's under the hood? We've had a lot of conversation on policy and automation. It's third year in on our conversations. What's going on under the hood, what's happening with the things that you guys are doing with Unisys? >> Yeah, so when we last talked they hadn't announced this yet, so we couldn't quite explain what we're working on together. But, we're working with Unisys and other organizations to provide that full automation of the entire infrastructure layer. And it's just fire and forget infrastructure on Cloud. So, one of the things we're seeing consistently is people are really starting to struggle. The markets really maturing around the need to fully automate remediation of problems, detection and remediation. Where the old model of use a monitoring solution, throws a ticket over the wall, search for the pilot tickets. You might have hours, days, weeks, where you're exposed and your data leaks. And Fugue fixes that in under a minute. So, that's what we've been workin' on together and we love the partnership because Unisys has experience in the engagement on the federal side of the market. And Fugue is baked in to just provide all that goodness. >> What's the impact of that? Because you compared kind of the old way to the new way you guys are doing. Just kind of give some categorical or anecdotal color behind what the impact is from that. What does it do, save people's lives, saves time, money. What's the impact? >> Yeah, I'll tell ya the impact and I'll describe a use case. So, we're working with another customer and they came to us and said, in our hosted environments on AWS we have over 500 events a day, where configuration has drifted. And every one of those we have to investigate. We have to come up with a plan. Then we have to execute the plan. Then we have to write a report on how it will never happen again, 500 a day. So, with Fugue, every one of those just is automatically fixed and reported within about 30 seconds to a minute. So, the impact of this is a team of three completely overwhelmed folks, who were looking to hire 10 people to try to, as their Cloud presence group, they just had to staff a larger and larger Cloud services desk. Actually the three people that they have are now on to doing other work. Because it's just automated. >> So, Peter help connect the dots for us, for your customers on the federal side because we know there's been push back. Sometimes customer, oh automation sounds great, but ah wait, on the government side I've got regulations, I've got processes, I've got hurdles that we might need to do. So, how do we get beyond those? >> Well, I think that's a great question. I would say that, so as I was talking about the Cloud Forte offering that, there's a set of offerings in the professional services domain too. We actually have our accelerated bundle, right? And actually one of the things that we, we really believe as important as folks to adopt Cloud is, in order to leverage Cloud most effectively, you really need a mind shift. So, we have like two of the legs of our offerings went around the order of chain management. And kind of making that major transformation for human capital. And actually what really good looks like is folks who actually think Cloud natively, right? So, we find the most successful clients are folks who've kind of made that leap. The other kind of dimension is is around process and process change. And we see ITIL has been super affective and has been kind of a stone wall of enterprise IT for a long time. But, we see that as folks move to the Cloud one of the strong recommendations we make and we have process offerings, is how do we renew... My management in governance process is to actually embrace more DevOps thinking, embrace more of everything as code thinking, including policy. Because what we find is, as I think you're hinting at right, is as folks move to the Cloud you can kind of have like almost a goldilocks scenario. Where, like on one hand I've taken the really heavy weight processes and tools from my data center into my thinking, and I've got now kind of a Porsche 911, but I've put donut wheels on it and I can't move very quickly, and I'm kind of frustrated with it, right? On the other extreme, I've got like the SharePoint era of 2005, 2006 where it is the wild west. It's pandemonium, and God only knows what's goin' on right there. So, what we're trynna do is is really looking for effective enterprise and having transparent governance, making sure that the great lessons learned of before are there. But, we have like a light weight extensible frame work that we have the nanny guardrails on it, so we can understand where this policy drifts. >> And the beauty of this is ya know the APIs giveth and the APIs taketh away. The APIs are why we can go so fast, but it's also why it's really easy to hurt yourself. That's what Fugue is there for. We let you go just as fast, and when can show that all those processes, like in ITIL having a CMDB, that's a side affect of running Fugue. You can query Fugue and you've got your configuration data. >> How you made them go fast, I get that. But how do you protect from breaking, what's the other half? >> Yeah, sure, so the Fugue approach, and Unisys are doing some other things on top of this. But, the Fugue approach is you cannot deploy something unless it is both correct and meets policy and compliance. >> That's the guardrails you're talking about. >> That's the guardrails. And unlike anything else, Fugue tells you exactly how you got it wrong, why, and how to fix it. So, it's not just a big no, at the end of the process. It's hey, on 147 you're not allowed to have unencrypted volumes so change that. Then once the infrastructure is provision, so it must be correct up front, once it's provisioned Fugue will never let it drift again. Again, within 30 seconds to a minute we've seen it needs changed, and we've fixed it. And what that means is... >> Intelligence. >> It is. >> You bring intelligence do it, ya fix it, again this the, this is why I love the automation whole Cloud thing. The non believers don't understand the value of this. I call them the Cloud non believers because this is just game changing. You mentioned the point about the efficiency of people not having to bulk up manual labor to lock down and just open up so many security holes. Peter, I've got to ask you, I hate to put you on the spot here, what's it like now working with Fugue? You guys have done a lot of work together. What's the outcomes? Tell us about the experience. And what is it about their solution that really helps you out? >> Okay, sure. Well, I mean I think the most obvious ya know, response there is is the fact that we've baked it in, and it's part of the solution, it's one of the core tenants, and components within our command bundle. That in itself is a major part of our strategy. What we find in our customers, ya know we do find clients actually kind of range in where they are in terms of their Cloud adoption. And we're also finding with our Cloud Forte bundle folks actually will adopt different parts of it at different times. But, actually we do find clients are very interested... Actually, I think our best clients are folks who actually have been been playing with CI/CD and they've been playing with Cloud. But, they've actually kind of started to see that the sprawl affect is actually starting to happen. And they're looking to have speed, but also security at the same time. We find that the integration of Fugue, and that just, that kind of, that insane Cloud native thinking, and this kind of like ability to speak AWS natively as a native language is really important differentially, when we bring a joint solution to our client. >> How many of the scale pieces created? Josh I want to give you that final word on your, give us an update on your business. What's goin' on? What's the value possession look like now? Obviously, automation we're believers, we just talked about that. But, where's it go next? What's up with Fugue? >> Sure, so what's up for Fugue, all kinds of things over the next quarter or two that we'll be releasing. That I can't quite talk about yet, or my product lead will kill me. But, one of the things we've put a ton of work into is around pre-building libraries of policy for our customers. So, Nist 800-53 for federal we've implemented a lot as policy now. PCI, HIPPA, all kinds of standards, so that when they purchase Fugue they just get these out of the box. It's amazing to watch somebody who's been on Cloud for a little while bring up the Fugue compose or a visualization engine, go discover all their infrastructure, and then do import HIPPA, and find all the little red dots of where they're actually, have been running wrong, fix it all in less than an hour, and not worry about it again. So, we're doing a lot of business in federal. We're doing a lot of business with partners. And we're also doing a lot of business in commercial now, mostly on the larger enterprise side. The value prop is really around that controlling sprawl over time and automated remediation. There's lots of kinds of automation that are partial, unless the system like Fugue does can fix everything, if there are any gaps in that, you're back to manual world. So, it's a kind of binary scenario, so yeah. >> You kind of never give it up, unless you can fully let go of it. >> That's right, that's right. >> Awesome, well congratulations on the part, you want to... >> Can I pull string on that though, I mean I think this another great concrete example of why we like working with you guys. It's part of our business obviously, I would say one of the major blockers getting folks to the Cloud is what do we do with ATOs that folks already have? And how do I bring those security credidations into the Cloud? So, if you think of you know where I think the industry is going to go next, is automation frameworks that allow me to quickly figure out what I inherit, what controls or balance I need to address as I move to the Cloud. But, the fact that Fugue is looking at natively kind of having as a primary citizen of their policies, this idea of those Nist controls, that's going to help provide transparency and visibility. So, that's actually going to be key part of being able to shorten the time to get to an ATO. >> Well, that certainly accelerates the discovery piece. >> Absolutely. >> Then ya kind of understand what ya have first and then you attack it with automation. >> Exactly. >> And everything seems more efficient, that's the goal right? >> Yeah, so this is why you know the true believer there's concrete reality there. Which is I can demonstrate, but I can demonstrate in real time that I'm complying all the time. I mean we've never really had that before, right? >> Yes. I mean again, this wave is coming. And love the commentary again. Public sector is very interesting, it's just being disrupted heavily and at a highly accelerated rate. You guys are doing a great job. Good to see ya Josh, Peter great to see you. CUBE coverage here in Washington, DC. Bringing all the action expected from us, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us, we'll be right back with more after this short break. 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>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering the AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Here, in Las Vegas for TheCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017 Amazon Web Service's Annual Conference. It's a zoo every year. Forty-five thousand people. Just seven years ago they couldn't get 4000 people to come, now the business exploding. Eighteen billion dollars of infrastructure, completely changing the game. I'm John Furrier. Our next two guests are Josh Stella who is the CEO of Fugue and Peter O'Donoghue, vice president of application services at Unisys Federal. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back. >> Thank you. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> So you guys are in the heart of it. We've talked many times about the DevOps ethos at the Amazon public sector event. Man, it's a changing of the guard happening in front of our eyes. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Seeing a whole new way of re-imagining how to deploy services in kind of the old school infrastructure world. But now taking over the applications. This is disruption. Share some insight, what's going on? >> Well, actually I really appreciate your lead in because, we're seeing like lots of big patterns happening at the same time, particularly with, my business that I look after, that I look at, is the federal sector. And actually, I think in the precursor we were talking about federal used to be slower and more staid. And that's still true in some cases, but actually the rate of acceleration is really taken off, but I think the big patterns we're seeing is you know, the CIO who looks at the Cloud as compute, network, and storage, that CIO is alive and well, and actually we sell and we provide managed services to that type of business. But we're seeing kind of like a greater focus and greater concentration on folks who actually want, they see the Cloud as really kind of an inflection point to break with tradition and actually to be able to consume native services, so they can actually affect and bring mission outcomes more effectively. In my own experience I've seen like two mission customers in a space of months to be able to solve like really serious problems and significant problems that they faced, but they wouldn't have been able to do it without being able to access RDS or ELB or Lamda, and these are becoming like the essential building blocks, the Lego blocks, if you will, of building modern Cloud native applications. >> So you're saying they solved the problem that was unique right there on the spot, which is great, you know, good job Cloud. But the question really is, would that ever have been solved in the old model? They would have been probably in a room arguing over architecture. I mean a lot of this is about looking at a solution, jumping on it, making it happen, not sitting in a room arguing. >> That's right. >> Get RFP out there. >> Josh: Yeah, exactly. Well, I think a lot of this has to do with infrastructure and policy as code. Because if you can express these thing as code, you can try things in an hour or two, instead of having to go through the RFP, sit on a whiteboard, waterfall design it. You can experiment without fear of failure because the costs are so low. And that's also bleeding over into public sector as well. >> I heard a quote this morning, I'll share it with you. I know it's a public sector kind of quote. The guy was up onstage really presenting how he transformed his entire, you know, I won't say the name to protect the innocent, but it was pretty massive transformation. He goes, "We couldn't use Amazon a few years ago because it was too cool." Meaning it's new. So the government's kind of like, well, you know, it's not yet tested, security. And security's always been the issue for this one group. He goes, "But now it's not cool to use it, so we can use it." Meaning, it's proven. So, it's kind of the opposite. When it's boring it's cool. When it's boring it must be good. Kind of a federal mindset, I won't try to pitch into the whole federal too much there, but the reality is tried, proven, tested, certified. There are some serious things that have to go on in both enterprise and now on federal. Amazon is continuing to move the needle while doing the heavy work. I mean, that's hard. So once they break through that, then you got the creativity going on. So take us through where we are in this, because the GovCloud is pretty disruptive. How far are we in the Cloud game in you guys' opinion of that getting the job done, checking the boxes of the certifications. I know there's FedRAMP, there's a bunch of other stuff. Is that mostly done right now? I mean how much more work is needed before everyone goes, okay Cloud is the standard? >> Well actually, (mumbles) >> Well let me try to answer, and I think Josh'll have an opinion on, too. Is I think the FedRAMP certification, I think, has been, I would say, probably if not the single most, one of the most important kind of factors in amplifying or accelerating Clouded option in the federal government. And actually, we've also seen that manifest in the state and local markets as well. Which is, we don't really have an equivalent, but if you're on FedRAMP, that's definitely good enough for us. That has become the defacto standard. But we find, though, is, and actually this is where, we really appreciate a product like Fugue, is actually folks find that, I mean actually, you asked about like major patterns or major trends. Like another major trend that we see, and actually I'll kind of come back to your question is, is that there's a significant shortage in talent and knowledge and skills to be able to manage the Cloud, and actually it's such a phenomenally different kind of mindset, so, like to properly govern and manage the Cloud, is actually a really difficult thing. So, you know, >> Good point. >> As a tradition, we got a lot of managed service provider business in our history. And if you look at, say Amazon, you know some folks would look at it as almost an existential threat. But in fact, we don't. It just means that you need to move into a different place in the stack to add value. And actually that place for us is that, you know, in terms of being able to amplify and accelerate that, the planning for, the migrating to, the running workloads in, in a scalable way, cost effective way, securely, and being able to build Cloud natively, our customers are really struggling with that. And they can do it, we've seen them do it one offs, but to be able to do a scale, so being able to really attack the knowledge gap from a human resource perspective? >> John: Great point. >> But also, encapsulating that into templatizing and putting nanny guardrails in are really important. Well that's a great point. There was a conversation I was involved in this morning with the CIA where they basically admitted, we got a lot of smart people, we can build a Cloud. Running and maintaining it... >> Josh: That's right. >> Are two different things. So this is kind of a false trap that a lot of people could fall into. Oh yeah, the Cloud, it's no problem. >> Josh: Yeah. >> So this is where the issues come in. Thoughts on that? >> Yes. >> And what you guys are doing? So I think we've entered the second phase of Clouded option. The first phase was kind of shadow IT bought them up. When I was at AWS I'd go into a customer, they'd say we're not on the Cloud. And then we found out we had 130 accounts that were swiped credit cards. >> John: Don't tell anyone. >> Yeah, don't tell anybody. Help us... >> Secret region. >> Help us sort this out. >> How is this the prototype? Honest, that's right. >> But now the market has changed. And so whether it's commercial or federal or other spaces, we're now in this phase two where these are strategic adoption of Cloud at an enterprise level. And to do that you need automation, you need repeatability, you need consistency, you need policy enforcement, and so that's where a system like Fugue packages all that together, which accelerates the whole operation of that. You know, I don't like the term centralized, because what Fugue allows you to do is assert some things and then decentralize the innovation aspect. >> It reminds me of the whole fabric and the whole grid days. But you bring up a good point, phase two is about kind of grownup Cloud. And so, that begs the question, now what are you guys working on, Unisys and, what's the story between your partnership? Talk about that. Because you know, people are relying on you guys as suppliers, so you have to stand alone and be successful. We talked about your company, but partnering is now important. >> Peter: That's right. >> Who you partner with and why, and what's the outcome options for the customers? >> Well, we're super excited about our relationship with Fugue. And actually primarily, as I talked earlier, we do see the big challenges that the market has right now. There is this huge gap from a knowledge and talent perspective. And also, the pioneers have gone into the Cloud, but now you have to have the settlers there. So how do we kind of attack those at the same time? So, when we're looking for a management platform, you know, we look for three things that really were important to us. The first is, is what I call expressiveness. So actually, I've got a lot of experience implementing kind of like more IT ops, like classical, like Cloud broker solutions, and we found that, you know, in order to be able to build a solution quickly for customers, you need to be able to express yourself. I mean, you can't manage and you can't govern, and you can't meter, you can't bill for, you can't apply policy for what Dr Vogels calls the primitives, right? So if I've only got like three or four primitives, my ability to manage and govern is really limited, right? It's almost like, the metaphor I would use would be maybe somebody gives you a keyboard, you got a half a dozen keys on there, and you're trying to write the great American novel. You can't do that, right? So, expressiveness, being able to articulate the right models and templatize and govern. That's kind of concern number one. Concern number two that we think is really important is, is it kind of goes at that knowledge management piece. We're making a major investment within Unisys Federal, and we're looking at hundreds and hundreds of our associates to be trained and certified, and we're building it a Cloud (mumbles) enablement. But we're looking to encapsulate our best practices and templatize those. So to the point... >> And Josh fits in there what, from a software standpoint? >> Well, he actually provides the way for us to capture that knowledge. So, in terms of what our policies in terms of governing say, you know, load balancers or EC2 instances or you know, how we're gonna manage S3 and gonna protect S3. You know, policies and best practices up and down the stack. Like, even governance processes around dev test environments. We're not gonna leave dev environments flapping in the wind for months on end where people are running up big bills, right? >> John: Got it. >> So Josh's product helps us manage that. And the third thing is what I call like the nanny rails. Now my daughter has just learned how to drive a car. And some of the choices that we made, we took into consideration like lane changing things and like crash avoidance and so and so forth. So, what we want, and actually Josh brought this up very elegantly is, is we want, the forward-leaning federal agencies to be able to go quick. But we want to put the guardrails behind them and have like that nanny kind of supervision behind them so that if things start drifting out of compliance we can drag them back. >> You can notify them, right? >> Some instrumentation. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> And management. >> Well, it's not just notification with Fugue. We don't let you do the wrong thing. And then if somebody goes in later and breaks it, we fix it. So instead of mean time to response of 15 minutes for your monitoring solution, then however long for somebody to pick up the notification, then to respond to it. With Fugue, within 30 seconds we've seen it and we've fixed it. And so that is a real game changer in terms of... >> Yeah, you guys are very impression with DevOps, they way you connect it. And the theme is connecting the tech to business. And in this case it's government, but that's your customer. What's new with you guys? Any announcements here? What's the story? >> Oh yeah, we have... >> Give us the update quick. >> Thank you very much. We have two big announcements. So it used to be, to use all the great management features of Fugue you had to build things using Fugue. So as of today you can download the new version of the system, you can point it at your existing AWS infrastructure. We autogenerate code and diagrams to show you what you're running. You can compare policy against that. So you don't have to write any code. And then when you've got it right, you can just apply Fugue to that. You can import that infrastructure into Fugue management. So a lot of our customers are telling us we have years of development on AWS. It was not done using best practices. We allow you to go back and fix that really quickly without recreating your infrastructure. >> So go in, do some maintenance without breaking it, tearing it down, building it up. >> and then you get all the benefits of Fugue enforcement. Every 30 seconds we examine the environment. If anything breaks we fix it. And so the ability to just pull that into Fugue and do it easily. >> Well it's great that you guys are successful. Congratulations on the partnership with Unisys. Big name, brand name. You guys obviously experienced, trusted advisors and partners to Federal. Personal question for you, Josh. You know, as you look back at the Amazon mothership. >> Josh: Yes. >> You gotta be like, damn that was a good ride. As an alumni and an extender, you're bringing that DNA to your company that you founded. What's it like? I mean, you feel good? You got a spring in your step? You kinda wish you were back on the mothership? >> Oh no, you know it's great working with AWS because I love doing what I'm doing now more than anything I've ever done. And they are great partners to us. They are so helpful. So I love coming back and seeing all my friends at Amazon. >> They're all bosses now. They're managers. >> Josh: That's right, that's right. >> Promoted. >> But being able to go out and do something that's really your vision, there's nothing like it in the world. >> John: I agree. >> Yeah. >> Being an entrepreneur certainly you can control your own destiny. It's a lot of fun, lot of passion. >> Josh: Yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Josh: Thank you. >> The Fugue CEO here with his partner in Unisys here in theCUBE. Live coverage day one. We've got two more live days. It'll be wall to wall. Big parties tonight. Lot of events, lot of action. Forty-five thousand people here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Manhattan, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, New York City 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> And we are live here at the Javits Center, continuing on theCUBE, our coverage of AWS Summit 2017, here in Midtown. Starting to wind down, tail end of the day but still a lot of excitement here on the show floor behind us, as there has been all day long. Joining us now along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, is Josh Stella, who is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fugue, a Washington DC and Frederick, Maryland based company. Josh, thanks for being with us. >> Gentlemen, thanks for having me on theCUBE. >> You bet, first time, I think, right? >> Nope, second time. >> Oh, sorry, second time. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so a CUBE vet. >> A CUBE vet, there you go. >> Alright, so for our folks, viewers at home who might not be too familiar with Fugue. >> Josh: Sure. >> Tell us a little bit about what you do and I'm always curious about the origin of the name. Where'd that, you know, where that came from. >> Sure thing, sure. So what Fugue is, is an infrastructure automation system for the Cloud. So, it builds everything you need on the Cloud. It constantly monitors and operates it. It corrects it if anything goes wrong and it gives you a full view of everything in your infrastructure. We like to say you go fast. That's why you're going to Cloud, is to be able to go fast. You need to be able to see everything and get it right. Fugue gives you all of those capabilities at a different level than anything else out there. The name actually comes from music. From a form of musical composition called a fugue. And there might be some folks in the audience who remember Hofstadter's book Godel, Esher, Bach. That was actually where the idea came from. That and there aren't many English words left that are real words and I didn't want to make something up. >> So, you could get the website for it, so it was good to go? >> Yeah, we used fugue.co so that was part of it, sure. >> It worked out for you, then. >> It worked out, yeah. >> Well, for a guy I know who's big into astronomy, I guess Cloud would be, that seems to make sense, right? That you'd be tied into that. Just in general, Cloud migration now. What we're seeing with, this massive paradigm shift, right? >> Yes. >> That's occurring right now. What's in your mind, the biggest driver, you know, of that? Why are people now seriously on the uptake? >> Sure, so when I was at AWS, most of the growth that we saw was sort of, bottom-up. We would go into a new customer and they'd say, we didn't think we were on Cloud. And then we looked and there are 130 Cloud accounts, on AWS, scattered throughout the organization. That was kind of the first motion of Clouded option. We're really now in the second wave and this wave is strategic. It's where CIOs, CEOs and CTOs are saying this is the right way to go. They do security well, it's more cost-effective. More than anything, it allows us to move fast, iterate, be disruptive ourselves. Instead of letting the other guys, who are moving fast on Cloud disrupt us. So these are the big drivers. What Fugue does, is it allows your Cloud desk, and almost any of these organizations that are in this, sort of, phase two motion. It's not all bottom up. They're starting to say, how do we really want to get our hands around this? And so, what Fugue allows you to do is let your developers go even faster than they could without it but where things like policy has code, and infrastructure has code, are just baked in from the front. So, your developers can go really quickly, iterate and the system will actually tell them when they're doing something that isn't allowed by, for example, a regulatory regime or a compliance requirement. And, once you've built those things, Fugue makes sure their always running properly. So, it's a really powerful technology for migration. >> Josh, I'm wondering if you could take us in that dynamic you just talked about because the stuff where, the developers were just playing with it, we definitely saw it, you know. My joke, when I went to an audience was like, there's two types of customers out there. Those that know their using AWS and those that don't realize that they are using AWS. >> Josh: Yeah, exactly. >> But, when you switch to the top-down, it's, how do you get buy-in? How do you get, you know, that developer and the operator, you know, all on the same page. And, even you say today, most companies say, I have a Cloud strategy, but everybody's strategy is different and there's still, kind of, the ink's drying and as, you know, most people say, strategy means it's good for today. maybe not two years from now. >> Josh: Yeah. >> But, what are you seeing in the customer base, as some of those organizational dynamics, strategy dynamics. >> Sure, so, what we're seeing are, people are confused I think, still, about where this whole thing's going. There's a lot of clarity about where it's been, what it can do for you now. That's coming into a clear focus. But, we're in this moment of, not just moment, decade of huge change in computing. And we're still probably less than halfway through this sea change. So, I'd say the strategy, what we advise people, is the strategy has to be really thinking more about the future, that is unknown. As much as the present, that's known. And that's a difficult thing to do. Our approach to that has been, and then, how do you unify the, kind of, the intentions of the executives and the developers. Well, with developers you have to give them great tools. You have to give them things they want to use. You can't impose, kind of, these old enterprising systems on them. They will find ways around it. So, with Fugue, we wrote this very elegant functional programming language where the developers have far more power to do infrastructure as code than with anything else. It's a very beautiful, elegant language. Lots of developer tooling around that. We're just coming out within the next couple of weeks, here, an open beta on a visualization system. So, as you're writing your infrastructure as code, you automatically can see a diagram of everything that will be deployed. So, developers really like those aspects of Fugue. We speak their language. I'm the CEO, I've been a developer for 30 years. From the other side of the equation though, the executive level, the leadership of the organization, they need assurance that what's being built is going to be correct. Is going to be within the bounds of what's allowed by the organization and can adapt to change as it comes down the pike. So, and this gets back to strategy. So, we have the kind of, everything being built with virtual machines and attached disks. And now, you know, containers are really a huge trend, a really great trend but it's not the end. You have things like Lambda. You have things like machine learning as services. And the application boundaries around all of those things, the ones that are there now, and where it's going in the future. And so Fugue is very much architected to grow with that. >> Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious what you're seeing from customers. It used to be, I think back to, you know, virtualization. It was, you know, IT was a cost center and how do we squeeze money out. Then it was, how can IT respond to the business? And now, you know, the leading edge customers, it's how's IT driving business? I think about machine learning, you know, IOT, a lot of the customers we've talked to, that are using serverless, it's you know, I can be more profitable from day one. I can react much faster. What are the dynamics you're seeing? Kind of the role in IT and, you know, the business? >> Yes, thanks, that's a great question. So, you know, software's eating the world and the Cloud is software, if you do it right. The use of the Cloud is software. And so, we're definitely seeing that. Where it used to be that IT was this big fixed cost center, and you were trying to just get more efficiency out of it. You know, maybe extend your recap cycles if you could get away with it, kind of. Now, it's really a disruptive offensive capability. How am I going to build the next thing that expands my market share? That goes after, other people are trying to be disruptive. So, you have to be able to go really, really fast in order to do that, yeah. >> So, one of the announcements today was the AWS migration hub. And it sounds great, I've got all of these migrations out there and it's going to help them put together but it reminds me of, kind of, we have the manager of managers. Because, there's so many services out there, you know, public Cloud, you know, it used to be like, oh Cloud's going to simplify everything. It's like, no, Cloud is not simplifying anything. We always have, kind of, the complexity. How do you help with that? How are customers grappling with the speed of change and the complexity. >> Josh: Sure. >> It is now? >> So, through automation and code. And that's the whole way through the stack. People used to think about software just being application. Then in the more recent, I'd say in the last 18 months, people have really figured out that actually, no, the configuration of the system, the infrastructure, if you will, although even that's a bit anachronistic. Has to be code, so does security. Everything needs to be turned into code so that the build process is minutes, not days or hours. So, we have a customer in financial services, for example, that uses Fugue to build their entire CICD pipeline and then integrate itself with it, so that all of their infrastructure and security policies are completely automated whenever a developer does a pull request. So, if they do a pull request, out comes an infrastructure. If that infrastructure did not meet policy, it's a build fail. So, the way you adapt to all this complexity is through automation. And it's going to get worse, not better as these services proliferate. And as the application boundaries are drawn around wider and wider classes of services. >> Yeah, and that's I guess to ask about. Is that, if I come in to the Cloud and I have X workload, you know, and it's. And all of a sudden, here comes this and here comes that. Now I can do this, now I have new capabilities. And it's growing and growing. My managing becomes a whole different animal now, right? >> Josh: Yes. >> How do I control that? How do I keep a handle on that and not get overwhelmed by the ability to do more and then people within my own company wanting to do more. >> Yeah, so what you're getting at there, I think, is that people go into this thinking the day one problem is the hard one. It's not. >> John: Mine's going to be when it becomes exponentially larger. >> Yeah, and the day two on problem is the hard one. Now I've built this thing. Is it right anymore? >> John: Right. >> Is it doing what it's supposed to do? Who owns it? >> Right, so all these things are what Fugue was built to address. We don't just build stuff on Cloud. We monitor it every 30 seconds and if anything gets out of specification we fix it. So the effect of this is, as you're building and building and building, if Fugue is happy, your infrastructure is correct. So you no longer have to worry about what's out there, it is operating as intended at the infrastructural layer. So, I think that you're exactly right. You get to these large scales and you realize, wow, I have to automate everything. Typically inside of enterprises, they're kind of hand rolling a bunch of point solutions and bags of python and bash script to try to do it. It's a really hard problem. >> So Josh, it's been a year since you came out of stealth, you know, what's been exciting? What's been challenging? What do you expect to see by the time we catch up with you a year from now? >> Yeah, sure, so what's been exciting is the amount of real traction and interest we're getting out of, like, financial services, government and health care, those kinds of markets. I'd say, it's also been exciting to get the kind of feedback that we have from our early customers, which is, they really become evangelists for us and that feels great when you give people a technology that they don't just use but they love. That's very exciting. A year from now, you're going to see a lot from us. Over the next six to nine months, in terms of product releases. We're going to be putting something out at reinvent, I can't get too much into it. That really changes some of the dynamics around things like being able to adopt Cloud. So, a lot of exciting stuff's coming up. >> It sounds like you've got a pretty interesting runway ahead of you. And you certainly have your hands full. But I think you've got a pretty good hand on it. So, congratulations on a very good year. >> Thank you. >> And we wish you all the best success down the road as well. >> Great, thanks for your time. >> You bet, Josh,thank you. Josh Stella from Fugue joining us here on theCUBE. Back with more from the Javits Center, we're at Midtown Manhattan at AWS Summit 2017.

(energetic techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its partner, Ecosystem. >> Interviewer: So what can Fugue do for you? Well, I'm going to guess that they can take your agency to the Cloud. >> Josh: You're, you're correct, Jeff. >> John W.: That's exactly what I'm looking at over here, the Fugue booth here, on the show floor at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Welcome inside, live on theCUBE channel, John Wells and John Furrier, and Josh Stella, who is the founder, and CEO of Fugue. Did I get it right, by the way? >> You did get it right. >> Jeff: You're taking the agencies to the Cloud, correct. >> Taking agencies to the Cloud, taking companies to the Cloud, too, but of course, this is worldwide public sector, so we're focused on the agencies today. >> Yeah, we were just talking before this even started, just a little historical background here, you were with Amazon back in 2012, when this show started, and you told me that your commission with your colleagues was to get 600 attendees. >> Yeah, we wanted to get 600, I think we got 750, which is classic Amazon style, right. >> John W.: Bonus year. >> We go over. But yeah, over 10,000 registered this year, it's amazing. >> Which shows you that this explosive growth of this area, in terms of the public sector. So let's talk about Fugue a little bit. >> Sure. >> Before we dive a little bit, share with our viewers, core competencies, what your primary mission is. >> So Fugue is an automation system. Fugue is a way to completely automate the Cloud API surface. It's true infrastructure as code, so unlike a deployment tool that just builds something on Cloud, Fugue builds it, monitors it, self-heals it, modifies it every time, alerts if anything drifts, and we've added a layer to that for policy as codes. So you can actually express the rules of your organization, so if you're a government agency, those might be NIST or FISMA rules. If you're a start-up, those might be, we don't open SSH to the world. Those can be just expressed as code. So Fugue fully automates the stack, it doesn't just do deployment, and we just released the team conductor, that will manage dozens of AWS accounts for you, so many of our customers in financial services, and other enterprises have many, many AWS accounts. Fugue allows you to kind of centralize all of that control without slowing down your developers. Without getting in the way of going fast. >> John W.: And what, why is that big news? >> It's big news because in the past, the whole core value prop of Cloud is to go fast, is to innovate, iterate, be disruptive, and move quickly. What happens, though, is as you do that, at the beginning, when you're starting small, it looks pretty easy. You can go fast. But you learn pretty quickly over time that things get very messy and complex. So Fugue accelerates that going-fast part, but keeps everything kind of within the bounds of knowing who's running things, knowing what resources you're actually using. Who built what, who has permissions to do what. So it's really this foundational layer for organizations to build and control Cloud environments. >> Josh, one of the things we talked about in the opening was the government's glacial case of innovation over the years. But the pressure is on the innovate. So the, lot of emphasis on innovation. In an environment that's constrained by regulation, governance, policies. So they have kind of an Achilles heal there, but Cloud gives them an opportunity at a scale point to do something differently, I want to dip into that, but I'll set this question up by quoting a CIO I chatted with who's in the government sector. He's like, "Look, Cloud's like, jumping out of a plane "with a parachute I didn't even know was going to open up." So this is kind of a mindset, he was over generalizing, but again, to the point is, trust, scale, execution, risk. >> Mhm, mhm. >> It's a huge thing. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys solve that problem for the agencies that want to go to the Cloud, because, certainly they want to go there, I think it's a new normal as Werner said. What do you guys do to make that go away? How do you make it go faster? >> Sure, so Amazon and other Cloud vendors have done a great job of building a very highly trusted, low level infrastructure that you can put together into systems. That's really the core offering. But there's still, in government agencies, as you point out, this need to follow rules and regulations and policies, and check those. So, one of the things Fugue does, is allows you to actually turn those rules into executable compiled code. So, instead of finding out you're breaking a rule a month later, in some meeting somewhere, that's going to loop back, it'll tell you in ten milliseconds. And how to fix it. So we allow you to go just as fast as anyone can on Cloud, but meeting all those extra constraints and so on. >> So you codify policies, and governance type stuff, right? >> That's part of what we do, but we also automate the entire infrastructure and grid. >> So this is the key, this is what I want to kind of jump to that next point. That's cool, but it would make sense that machine learning would probably be like an interesting take away. Cuz' everyone talks about training, data models, and it sounds like what you're doing, if you codify the policies, you probably set up well for growing and scaling in that world. Is that something that's on your radar? >> Sure. >> How do you guys look at that whole, okay I've got machine learning coming down the pike, everyone wants to get their hands on some libraries, and they want to get to unsupervised at some point. >> Yes, yeah it's a great question. So Fugue is really a bridge to that future where the entire infrastructure layer is automated and dynamic. And that's what you're talking about, where you have machine learning that are helping you make decisions about how to do computing. A lot of folks aren't ready for that yet. They're still thinking about the Cloud as kind of a remote data center, in our view, it's actually just a big distributed computer. And so, when you think about things like whether it's machine learning, or just algorithms to run over time that modify these environments to make them more efficient. Fugue is definitely built to get you there, but we start where you're comfortable now, which is just the first thing we have. >> Yeah of course, when you're still early to tells in the water, all kinds of data issues, you see the growth there. So the question is, what is the low hanging fruit for you? What are the use cases? Where are you guys winning, and what's new with your codifying the policies that you're releasing here? What's the use cases, and what're you guys releasing? >> Yeah, so common use case for us is integration with CI, CD, and DevOps for the entire infrastructure chain. So, you'll have organizations that want to go to a fully automated deployment management of infrastructure. And what they've learned in the past is, without Fugue, they might get some of the deployment automated, with a traditional CM tool or something like this, but because they're not doing the self healing, the constant maintenance on the environment, the updating of the environment, the alerting on it, there's a big missing link in terms of that automation. So, we're getting a lot of resonance in the financial services sector, and folks who are sophisticated on Cloud, and are doing large-scale Cloud operations. So, if you think about, uh, Netflix can build full automation for themselves, because they're Netflix. But not everyone fits in that boat. So Fugue is sort of the sorts of capabilities that Netflix built in a very specific way for themselves, we don't use their tools. We're a general purpose solution to that same class of problems. So, really, where we're winning is in automation of, again, deployments and operations of those deployments, but also in things like policy. We're seeing that not just in government but in the private sector as well. >> What are the big bottlenecks, what are the roadblocks for the industry? >> The roadblocks for the industry certainly are bringing, sort of, a legacy patterns to Cloud. Imagining it's a remote data center, thinking of it as virtual machines and storage, instead of just, infinite compute, and infinite resources that you put together. >> John F.: So the mindset's the bottleneck. >> Absolutely, it's cultural, yeah, yeah. And skillset, because in the DevOps Cloud world, everything should be code, and therefore everyone has to be a developer. And so, that's a little new. >> Is scale a big issue for you guys, with your customers? Is that something that they're looking for? And what's the kind of, scope of some of your customers and your use cases in government Clouds. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean, a lot of us came from AWS, so we know how to build things at scale. But yeah, y'know, a lot of folks start small with Fugue, but they go to very large, very quickly, has been our experience. So, scale across dozens, or hundreds AWS accounts-- >> That's where the automation, if they're not set up properly, bites them in the butt pretty much, right? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, we get a lot of that too. Going back in and helping people put their system back together the right way for Cloud, because they went there from the-- >> Alright, so what's the magnified learnings from this, from your experience with your company, mobile rounds of finance, you guys are well financed, one of the best venture capitals, the firm's NEA, great backer, you guys are doing well. Over the years, what have you learned, what's the magnification of the learnings, and how do you apply it to today's marketplace? >> Um, we are in a massive transition. We're just beginning to see the effects of this transition. So, from 1947 until the Cloud, you just had faster, smaller, Von Neumann machines in a box. You had any ax that got down to the size of your wristwatch. The Cloud is intrinsically different. And so there is an opportunity now, that's a challenge, but it's a massive opportunity to get this new generation of computing right. So I'd say that the learnings for me, as a technologist coming into a CEO role, are how to relate these deeply technical concepts to the world in ways that are approachable, and that can show people a path that they want to get involved with. But I think the learnings that I've had at AWS and at Fugue are, this is the beginning of this ride. It's not going to end at containers, it's not going to end at Lambda, it's going to continue to evolve. And the Cloud in ten years is going to look massively different than it does now. >> So, when you said, "to get it right," the computer, I mean, such as, or in what way, I mean, we have paths right, routes you could take. So you're saying that there are a lot of options that will be pitfalls, and the others that would be great opportunities. >> Well, that's absolutely right. So, for example, betting on the wrong technologies too soon, in terms of where the Cloud is going to finally land, is a box canyon, right. That's an architectural dead end. If you cannot compose systems across all these disparate Cloud surfaces, the application boundary, the system boundary is now drawn across services. You used to be able to open an IDE, and see your application. Well, now that might be spread across virtual machines, containers, Lambda, virtual discs, block storage, machine learning services, human language recognition services. That's your application boundary. So, if you can't understand all of that in context, you're in real trouble. Because the change is accelerating. If you look at the rate of new services, year over year in the Cloud, it's going up, not down. So the future's tougher. >> So, if I'm a government service, though, and I think John just talked about this, I'm just now getting confidence, right? >> Yes. >> I'm really feeling a little bit better, because I met somebody to hold my hand. And then I hear on the other hand, say, we have to make sure we get this right. So now all of a sudden, I'm backing off the edge again. I'm not so sure. So how do you get your public sector client base to take those risks, or take those daring steps, if you will. You know, we've had a lot of really great conversations and have a lot of great relationships in public sector, what we're seeing there is, like in the commercial world. I mean, public sector wasn't that far behind commercial on Cloud. When I was at Amazon, y'know, five years ago, I worked mostly with public sector costumers, and they were trying hard there, they were champions already, moving there. So, one of the things that Fugue does very effectively is, because we have this ability to deterministically, programmatically follow the rules, it takes it off of the humans, having to go and check. And that's always the slow and expensive part. So we can give a lot of assurance to these government agencies that, for example, if one of their development teams chooses to deploy something to Cloud, in the past, they'd have to go look for that. Well, with Fugue, they literally cannot deploy it, unless it's correct. And that's what I mean by "get it right." Is the developer, who's sitting there, and I've been a developer for decades, they want to do things by the rules. They want to do things correctly. But they don't always want to read the stack of books like this, and follow, y'know, check their boxes. So, with Fugue, you just get a compiler error and you keep going. >> Josh, I wanted to ask you about a new category we see emerging, it's really not kind of mainstream yet, by Wikibon research, and still getting in theCUBE, we get to see things a little bit early. Plus we have a data science team to skim through the predictive analytics. One thing that's clear is SAS businesses are emerging. So, SAS is growing at an astounding rate, platform is a service, and infrastructure's a service, I mean, Javassist doesn't think to see it that way, I don't you do either. It's infrastructure and SAS pretty much. So pretty much, everyone's going to, at some point, be a Cloud service provider. And there'll be a long tail distribution, we believe, on niche, to completely huge, and the big ones are going to be the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Google, but then there's going to be service providers that is going to emerge. They're going to be on Clouds, with governments, so we believe that to be true. If you believe that to be true, then the question is, how do I scale it? So, now I'm a solution architect in an enterprise. And like you said, it's intrinsically different in the Cloud than it was, say on premise, or even the critical traditional enterprise computing. I've got to now completely change my architectural view. >> Yes. >> If you think it's a big computer, then you've got to be an operating systems guy. (laughs) You've got to say, okay, there's a linker, there's a load, there's a compiler, I've got subsystems, I got IO. You got to start thinking that way. How do you talk to your friends, and colleagues, and customers around how to be a new solutions architect. >> Yeah, so I think it's a balancing act. Because we are this transition stage, right. The modern Cloud is still a Prius. (chuckles) And the future Cloud is the Tesla, in terms of how customers use it. We're in this transition phase in technologies, so you have to have one foot in both camps. Immutable infrastructure patterns are incredibly important to any kind of new development, and if you go to the Fugue.cosite or O'Reily, we wrote a little book with them on immutable infrastructure patterns. So, the notion there is, you don't maintain anything, you just replace it. So you stand a compute instance, Verner likes to talk about, these are cattle, not pets, Y'know, or paper cuff computing, that's right. You never touch it, you never do configuration management, you crumple it up, throw it away, and make a new one. That's the right new pattern, but a lot of the older systems that people still rely upon don't work that way. So, you have to have a foot in each camp as a solutions architect in Cloud, or as the CEO of a Cloud company. You have to understand both of those, and understand how to bridge between them. And understand it's an evolution-- >> And the roles within the architecture, as well. >> That's right. >> They coexist, this coexistence. >> Absolutely. You know, it's interesting you said, "everyone's going to become a service provider." I'd put that a little differently, the only surface that matters in the future is APIs. Everything is APIs. And how you express your APIs is a business question. But, fundamentally, that's where we are. So, whether you're a sales force with a SAS, I really don't like the infrastructure and SAS delineation, because I think the line's very blurred. It's just APIs that you compose into applications. >> Well, it's a tough one, this is good debate we could have, certainly, we aren't going to do it live on theCUBE, and arm wrestle ourselves here, and talk about it. But, one of the things about the Cloud that's amazing is the horizontal scalability of it. So, you have great scalability horizontally, but also, you need to have specialty, specialism at the app layers. >> Josh: Yes. >> You can't pick one or the other, they're not mutually exclusive. >> Josh: That's right. >> So, you say, okay, what does a stack look like? (laughs) If everything's in API, where the hell's the stack? >> Yeah, well that's why we write Fugue. Because Fugue does unify all that. Right, you can design one composition in Fugue. One description of that stack. And then run the whole thing as a process, like you would run Apache. >> So you're essentially wrapping a system around, you like almost what Docker Containers is for microservices. You are for computing. >> And including the container's managers. (John F. Laughs) So that's just one more service to us, that's exactly right. And, y'know, you asked me earlier, "how does this affect agencies?" So one thing we're really excited about today is, we just announced today, we're live on GovCloud, so we support GovCloud now, you can run in the commercial regions, you can run in GovCloud, and one of the cool things you can do with Fugue, because of that system wrapping capability, is build systems in public regions, and deploy them on GovCloud and they'll just work, instead of having to figure out the differences. >> Oh that's what what you think about the Cloud, standing up's something that's a verb now. "Hey I'm going to stand this up." That's, what used to be Cloud language, now that's basically app language. >> I think what you're getting at here is something near to my heart, which is all there are anymore are applications. Talking about infrastructure is kind of like calling a chair an assembly of wood. What we're really about are these abstractions, and the application is the first class citizen. >> I want to be comfortable, and sit down, take a load off. >> Josh: That's right, that's right. >> That's what a chair does. And there's different versions. >> John W.: You don't want to stand up, you want to sit down. >> And there's different, there's the Tesla of the chairs, and then there's the wooden hard chair for your lower back, for your back problems. >> Josh: Exactly, exactly. >> The Tesla really is a good use case, because that points to the, what I call, the fine jewelry of a product. Right, they really artistically built amazing product, where the value is not so much the car, yeah there's some innovations with the car, you've got that, with electric. But it's the data. The data powering the car that brings back the question of the apps and the data, again, I want to spend all my time thinking about how to create a sustainable, competitive advantage, and serve my customers, rather than figure out how to architect solutions that require configuration management, and tons of labor. This is here the shift is. This is where the shift is going from non-differentiated operations to high-value added capabilities. So, it's not like jobs are going up. Yeah, some jobs are going away, I believe that. But, it's like saying bank tellers were going to kill the bank industry. Actually, more branches opened up as a result. >> Oh yeah, this is the democratization of computing as a service. And that's only going to grow computing as a whole. Getting back to the, kind of, fine jewelry, you talked about data as part of that, I believe another part of that is the human experience of using something. And I think that is often missing in enterprise software. So, you'll see in the current release of Fugue, we just put into Beta a very, we've spent about two years on it, a graphic user interface that shows you everything about the system in an easily digestible way. And so, I think that the, kind of, the effect of the iPhone on computing in the enterprise is important to understand, too. The person that's sitting there at an enterprise environment during their day job gets in their Tesla, because they also love beautiful things. >> Well, I mean, no other places for you guys to do that democratization, and liberation, if you will. The government Cloud, and public sector, is the public sector. They need, right now they've been on antiquated systems for (chuckles) yeah, not only just antiquated, siloed, y'know, Cobol systems, main framed, and they've got a lot of legacy stuff. >> There is, there's a lot of legacy stuff, and they're a lot of inefficiencies in the process model in how things get done, and so, we love that AWS has come in, and when we were there, we helped do that part. And now with Fugue, we want to take these customers to kind of, the next level of being able to move forward quickly. >> Well, if you want to take your agency to the Cloud, Fugue is your vehicle to do that. Josh Stella, founder, CEO. Thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much. >> We appreciate it. We'll continue, live from Washington, D.C. Nation's capital here, AWS Public Sector Summit, 2017 on theCUBE. >> John F.: Alright, great job, well done. (upbeat techno music)

>>From Las Vegas, it's the cube cuddle EMC world 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now your host, John furrier. Welcome >>Back everyone. We are here, live in Las Vegas for EMC world 2012. I'm John Ferrari, the founder of Silicon angle and host of the cube. And we are extracting the signal from noise. And one of our traditions at EMC world is to do a conversation and panel discussion around women of the world with Stella Lowe, who is VP of global communications for EMC and Susan Carter, Nico, who's the founder and CEO of authentic leadership. Stella. Every year we do this as one of my favorite things. As we wrap up EMC world, soon, it may be Dell world or Dell EMC, whatever that kind of turns into. Yeah, I wish you can't comment. Cause your communications is, is to talk about kind of the human side of what's going on. And the theme for EMC was modernization of enterprise, you know, infrastructure, speed, performance, scalability. And you've taken this theme this year with women of the world to modernizing your career in an era of change. And tell me about what that was this year. >>Yeah, absolutely. John. So yeah, we were in this, um, tech industry is changing all the time, but right now we're in this kind of unprecedented change. Um, you, this, this is gonna be a lot of consolidations is the thinking over the next two years, a lot of people find a lot of companies finding their dance partners. In some ways we've already found our dance partner, which is Dell, but there's gonna be a lot of that going on. And um, and there's definitely a lot of change happening here at EMC. So we wanted to make sure that we were focusing on how to own modernize and direct your career within this sea of tremendous James. >>So Susan, I want to get your take on this because we are living as the theme of the show is, is a transformation happening, which means there are certainly change and there's big bets being made in the business that requires people process and technology transformation. People is a big part of it. And people have to be bold. There's some gambling, there's some bets and with that will come maybe some missteps or some failures and how you can overcome that will define ultimately your success to take maybe little failures, not big failures, but like, but this is part of the evolution of innovation. How does that affect people, specifically women, as they're in this now converge workforce, male, men and women coming together. What's your thoughts on this? >>Well, men and women alike change is hard, right? So as industries converge as merchants and acquisitions happen, you know, the industry itself is in such a massive transformation mode. It's requiring people of all of all levels and in all fields, but particularly in the world of technology to completely redefine their skillsets, their relevance, the way they're going to actually help sort of step into this new era of digital technology. So it's causing, you know, ripple effects of reinvention and change all over the place. You know, we all to change as human beings at a very personal level. What does it mean for me? And so a big part of what we discussed today at the conference was just, how do you sort of lean into that change and how can you begin to look at your own potential and your own skillsets from, with a different lens? >>You know, um, we tend to box ourselves in as far as our potential goes and we say, okay, I've been in this functional area for all of my career. So I guess my opportunities sit squarely in this box. And we talked a lot about the value of sort of reinventing and taking a hard look at our transferable skill sets. So the attributes that we have as, as human beings that could let be leveraged into other roles or expanded roles and the skill sets that have made us so successful in what we're doing today. So how might we bust that open and find new opportunities in this world of change? And it's pretty important that we do it now. I mean, there was a, um, it was announced just a few days ago that in 2015, there were 359 new CEOs announced, uh, in the top two and a half thousand companies around the world. Only 10 were women, John 10, 10 out of 359. It's shocking. So if we're going to change, reverse that trend, we've got to start reversing that rate from that >>Consistent though across all industry, even venture capital, which has really highlighted in Silicon Valley where we live and that's obvious a male dominate, but now there's no women VCs. Now cowboy ventures is a bunch of them that are coming together and Hey, we can play ball each other. >>What does it surprise you that there's less women learning about tech now learning, you know, in tech education now than there was in the eighties? I mean, so, so we've already got to grapple with this and, and, and change the course of this. And, and women have got to start taking responsibility for their own careers and their own direction. >>What are some of the stories that you've heard this week at, at your event, as you guys talk with each other, what are some of the common patterns and stories that you're hearing? >>So we're certainly hearing from the women in the room, but they see that the impending change as exciting as an opportunity, but they're also, there's also some things anxiety around that change. There's definitely fear there and that's what we're seeing. Um, you know, and, and, um, you know, they need, people need to take that fair and use it as a catalyst for positive things. Right, right. I mean, 10 people tend to shut down when they're in environments of fear. And one of the things that we talked a great deal about was how do you sort of turn that around and, um, use that as a catalyst to take stock in not only sort of what your inherent capabilities are, but your vision for your life and the values that you hold dear and say, okay. So if my job serves my life, then what is my end game and what steps in choices can I make, you know, putting myself back in the driver's seat versus letting this this change. That's sort of at the, both of my macro level and the micro level, like sweet meander and, and, and create a, of a victim mentality. We talked a lot about sort of that empowerment and the accountability to sort of take charge of your own desks. >>It's interesting. You mentioned leaned in earlier. So Sheryl Sandberg's in my community in Palo Alto, Facebook friend, you know, where I'm involved a lot with some Facebook stuff. And I put, I've been following her lean in and I want to bring this up is you mentioned the word fearless. Um, you know, I've been called fearless, fearless. That's a guy thing, right. Guys can be fearless. Is it okay for women to be fearless and is lean in a fearless kind of vibes? It's not so much, I don't wanna get semantically tied on views, but this brings up a point that people get stuck on the semantics, but that kind of is a bias thing. Be more fearless and you'll get ahead versus lean in is a guess could be construed as a female version of fearless, the words matter. But at the same day, how does a woman become fearless? It doesn't matter. Yeah. >>So the other speaker that we had on the panel today, we were very lucky also to have Rashma, um, uh Rashma Sudani uh, and she, she, um, has the company, uh, founded the company, girls who code, and she says that women were brought up to be, uh, perfect. Whereas boys were brought up to be brave. So it's okay for a boy to climb a tree and go to the top. But with girls were like, no, no, sit in the chair, look pretty, be nice, you know, but be perfect. Um, and so women are very scared to go into areas that don't know because they're worried about making mistakes. And what we were trying to get over today was imperfection is okay, it's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to, you know, and you've got to get kind of get over that fear to do that. >>And it's the attributes Susan. So a woman and a man, they have different attributes. So maybe fearless my, Oh, he's feeling at the top of the tree, but every attribute in a diverse environment can contribute to a common outcome that makes it better. I mean, that's kind of the theme that I'm seeing. >>It's true. Um, fearlessness in you say words matter, uh, concept is kind of the same. We talked a lot about self con self-confidence and the, the contrast in the sexes, uh, when it comes to self-confidence and then so many women seem to sort of stop short of having that self confidence to step out and you say, be fearless to take risk to just sort of seize that moment and say, you know, what, if it doesn't work out, I can choose again. There's we just seem to stop short of being able to do that, where guys seem to be a little bit more comfortable. And part of it is the way we're raised, you know, women to be perfect. And we tend to be very, very quiet about those failures. And so it kind of sends that message. Like, I really need to set a stay away from those arenas where I just, I might not be a stunning success. >>So there was some discussion around men versus women in the imposter syndrome, which tends to afflict a lot of women, particularly women in business, where we kind of doubt our own worth as, as a leader, as a professional. And there's this fear that, you know, at some point we're going to be found out that we're really not as good as others around us think we are. And that drives a certain kind of behavior in the workplace. So, you know, um, workaholism, perfectionism, procrastination, just so afraid to make a mistake and be found out. So, you know, that seems to be, um, more characteristic of females than males. Um, there are just a lot of, there's a lot of complexity around >>The guys that are faking it, that good will be found out. It may be, maybe there's a thing there, but modernizing your career though. That's the theme? What is the pattern that, what does that mean? I mean, how, how do you talk to that? Because everyone wants, I mean, who doesn't want to be modern, right. And we're in the modern era, we want to be happy. We want to be cool when advance, okay. Advancement means you're climbing the ladder or you're, you're trying something new, which means you will fall and stumble. We all stumble when we learn is that part of the modernization is dealing with the environment and the change and the failure. >>Yeah, it is. In fact, um, the first thing that we talked about was the need to be incredibly strategic in this environment, we're business people. And when facing any business challenge, you tend to do scenario planning, right? And you say, well, if this happens, here's my strategy. Uh, if that happens, here's my strategy. So you say worst case, best case likely case. And, and when you start to develop strategies around how you're going to navigate those things, it gives you additional power and confidence to sort of move forward in your redefinition. So that's sort of that the first step in modernizing your career, we also talked a bit a bit ago about, um, understanding where you might have some self limiting beliefs about where you might play, you know, the, what arena, where you might, you might sit and so starting to sort of broaden your horizons. >>Um, yeah, definitely. I mean, uh, women will look at a job spec, um, and have a completely different perspective from men. So men will look at it and they'll say, well, I can do about 38% of this. So I'm going to go for this job. Um, women will look at it unless they can do 85% of it, or they've done that they have experienced in 85% of it. They won't even go for the job. So we have to start to really broaden our view of the types of jobs we can go for the types of opportunities we can go for and start to think more, well, much more openly. So be >>More aggressive on the job. Applicants was one was >>One. Yeah. Broaden your horizons. Think about this, the transferable skill sets that you have, that you can take into other areas. And, and don't be, don't be fair fearful of things that you haven't done before. >>So I had a public failure startup that was very funded and then the public failure and it's traumatizing. And I dealt with that and you know, this whole failure is rewarded in Silicon Valley. That's BS, in my opinion, people tolerate failure, but they loved the comeback. That's part of learning is coming back. And, but, you know, and so I had to deal with that until I was in my own way as a guy, but there's a post in Silicon Valley going around today, around a woman who failed. And she didn't know whether she should be vulnerable or just be that what'd you call it the imposter syndrome, fake it till you make it. And she was saying, no, I want to be vulnerable. Because what she found is by being vulnerable, people were helping her. So that brings up the concept of vulnerability, male, female, and two in the modern world. We have social networks now. So lean is a great example of some gravity around peer groups. Can you guys talk about that? Does that come up at all on your radar, in terms of the dynamic there around men versus women being vulnerable versus being strong and also the notion of networks and how that could be? >>Well, I think vulnerability is often tied to shame and that fear of shame causes people to hold back in sharing their real stories. You said something very important and that's that people care about what you've learned along the way. They don't necessarily care about what, you know, they care about what you've learned. Most people are comfortable talking about what they've learned when they're on the other side of that. So it's not in the, in the middle of that trail here, when you are just feeling horrible, you're feeling horrible. You're feeling like a failure. You're feeling embarrassed, you're feeling shame. So the ability to kind of step up to that is it's a tall order. Now you talked about social networks in this environment of social media. Authenticity is so important, right? So it's that happy balance. If you're not all that comfortable with being completely naked in that vulnerability, maybe there's a happy medium where you can share some of the challenges and things that you've been facing while not necessarily going all the way down to the, you know, to the bare nub of it. Um, I think we're right. >>So authenticity will track the right alchemy of, of help or it relationship as a way to signal to people. I mean, I guess, and that's just me. I love this concept. I mean, I feel like I should get you guys with my life coach. This is my lifestyle. So this is the next one. So, okay. So that's cool. I love that theme. I love this topic because that really helps you get through to the other side and gain to the other side. You're on the comeback. That's a learning what you've learned and applying what you've learned is a growth mindset. Now there's a lot of women, my age, I'm 50 that I've grown through the ranks and they get up to the top. And you mentioned the numbers, aren't that significant on the seat level of women it's lonely yet. They're being asked to be mentors down to the new generation of ladies coming up or women. And, but they're lonely at the top. How do they deal with that? As you're moving closer to the top, have they talked about that >>Only at the top? And I would like still, I was a senior executive at a big company and found that loneliness to be quite palpable. Right? Um, it's part of the choice you make to be in that arena, stepping up to that position of leadership. It often means that you're distancing yourself. You're being more, you're more concerned with being respected than you are being liked. And you know, there there's a, there's a new game, right? New parameters around your relationships like CEO's, um, who find solace in their peer relationships. I think that same goes for women. You know, you, you need to actively cultivate your formal and informal networks and they may be with, with, uh, peers outside of your company, outside of your functional area. Those relationships though are so important because you can become isolated and insulated. Um, people may not always come to you with the, with the truth. >>And so, you know, making sure that you keep those lines of communication and mutual support open is really pivotal. Now you mentioned mentorship. Um, I think it is incumbent on senior women to reach down and find opportunities to mentor other women and sponsor other women. You know, there's mentorship and sponsorship, and both are crucial in terms of sort of direct feedback and developmental advice on the mentorship side, but then sponsorship literally actively opening doors for other women and, and reaching a hand and helping them come up to because that's often where we find a gap. People think I had to claw my way up. It was a lot of work. So I'm just going to sort of protect myself and hang out and let everybody else kind of go on their own journey. We talked a lot today about the need to sort of reach down and help other women. >>So the takeaway there is develop your formal informal networks. That's a foundational really critical linchpin to the whole success. Um, what about now, as we look at the progression going forward, um, the skill development, you mentioned the job applications, a lot of these jobs that are going to come with the next industrial revolution as Michael Dell was pointing out, don't even exist today. So there might be an opportunity here as we look to the future. Did that come up at all on the radar of your sessions? >>Well, we talked, I think it comes back to really transferable skill sets. You need to take a look at what, what you do and who you are, bring it up a level because I got to tell you if you can manage well in ambiguity, if you can lead and motivate people. I mean, if you, there, there are certain attributes that, that pick the job. Yeah. If you have those, if you have those attributes and those skills, you can learn a discipline, but those inherent leadership skills are going to pay off the big time as this industry continues to redefine. And as you say, jobs that we don't even know exist yet, suddenly come onto the table. >>What surprises you the most in this, in the conversation around modernization, as you talk with folks out there, what's a trend that surprised you that you kind of knew about, but, Oh my God, this is really more acute or more explosive than in a good way, or in bad way. Anything you can share, like the literally like, wow, this is really more pressing than I thought, or this is actually more amazing than I thought. >>Yeah. Um, one of the things the Rushman talked about is women supporting other women. I mean, sometimes we are the worst critics of other women and, uh, you know, female bosses can be harder on female employees and so on. And I think there's got to be that kind of sisterhood, um, uh, around, uh, all of us have been bring women up as, as, um, Susan has said, support other women, uh, make sure that you are their back and they are watching yours. And, uh, it will help with the loneliness factor, but it also helps to, to bring women forward. And I think that's always a surprise to me that women don't want to do that. And they, and they don't want to get involved in that. We should be paying that back and paying it. >>So is there anything that surprised you looking back at, and then the constitution here? >>I think I would echo what Stella said. It's, um, it's important to understand the role you may be playing in the plight that faces you. So, you know, we talk about women sometimes being their own worst enemy and trying to, to again, modernize and redefine what that relationship looks like and what that success looks like and how accountable we each are for, you know, moving forward and pushing the envelope. >>Okay. Final question. If you guys could each answer, this would be great. What advice would you give the people watching here live, and then on demand things that they could do to modernize their career in this change, uh, advice that you can surface and share insight around their opportunity, things that they could do differently or new, or, >>Yeah, I'll let Susan have the last word on this. Cause you'll have some fabulous advice, but you know, one thing I would say is, is, uh, be comfortable in your imperfection. You don't have to be perfect. You'd go for it, widen your spear of opportunities and, uh, you know, Matt Mo uh, Charlotte, your way and, and dream bigger and he dreamed bigger. You might, you know, you'll get somewhere bigger. Very good. Um, I would say first and foremost, one of the best things that you can do is challenge some of the beliefs that you might hold about what your potential next steps or career path might be, um, get clear on what your end game is for your life and what your values are, because that becomes a very important lens through which to view future opportunity, get, get really clear that you can always choose. >>Again. I think this fear of making a mistake and that you talked about fearlessness, um, you know, I think people tend to, to limit their opportunities because they think, wow, if I make this choice and it's mistake, then I'm done, but you can just turn around and make a new choice and begin again. And there are limitless choices that you can make. So a lot of this I find is mindset related. You know, we're heading into a, we are in a highly turbulent time. It's going to continue. We need to be agile in our thinking part of that is getting grounded in who we are and what are our potential could be getting clear on what we want because our jobs serve our life, not the, not the other way around and really sort of getting into the driver's seat versus letting whatever the change is, whether it's up here, the industry consolidation level, or whether it's down in, whether we're in the middle of a merger, or we've just gotten a new boss that we don't particularly click with, we can default to a victim mentality. So part of this is just saying, you know what, I am going to pick this thing up and I am going to manage to the change myself >>And we are living in a world where there's great opportunities, women of the world. Great segment. Thank you so much, Stella. We thank you so much, Susan, really great to have you guys sharing your insight here on the cube. Um, congratulations again, always my favorite conversation. I learned a lot, um, and I love, I feel like I'm learning so much and this is a world of diversity and it's great. And the outcome is diversity is fantastic. And I think that's what everyone's seeing. So congratulations on the great work. This is the queue here at EMC world 2016. I'm John for a, you're watching the cube >>Looking back at the history of it.

>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the cube covering EMC world 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas with the cube at EMC real 2015. I'm John ferry, the founder of Silicon Ang. I'm joined with two special guests. Stella Lowe. Who's the global communications at EMC runs, global communications and Amy Posey, neuro facilitator at peak teams. Welcome to the cube. >>So >>You had a session women of the world. We did it last year, but great cube session last year. Um, so I want to get a couple of quick questions. What's going on with women of the world, what you guys just came from there and you guys were on the panel and then what is a neuro facilitator? And then let's get into it. Let's talk about men and women, how we work together. >>Okay, great. So let's start with women of world. So, um, so last year we talked about the challenges that we face and how we reframe them into opportunities that we had some fantastic panelists, but this year I was really interested in the science behind men and women. So it's clear that we're different and we're all bled for success, but, but we're wired differently. And we kind of knew that already. I know we talked about it before John, but we now have the science behind it. We can look at brain scans and we can see that we, Oh, we have different brain patterns. We think differently, uh, different parts of the brain fire fire up when, in times of motivation and stress and people like Amy here, who've done lots of work into this, have having the stages. It was great to have her on the panel to discuss it. >>I'm going to give you a plug because EMC does all kinds of things with formula one cars, motorcycles, getting the data and understanding the race. But now you're dealing with people. So what is going on? Tell us what's up neuro facilitator and let's >>So a neuro facilitator is maybe the best made up job title in the world that I gave myself. So essentially what I do is I look at information about the brain and I curate the research that's out there. So there's a lot of new technology to actually read and look inside our heads. We all have a brain, but we don't necessarily all know how it works. So there's a lot more research and, and tools to read our brains and take a look inside. So what I do is I take that research and, and work with, um, neuroscientists and neurobiologist at Stanford, Columbia, UCLA, and, and reach out and figure out how do we take that information and make it easier, still attain. And I do it in the scope of leadership at organizations like EMC and other technology companies to figure out how do we work better? What information is out there? You know, soft skills and sort of relationship skills. I've always been sort of squishy, right? So now there's a lot more science and information about our brains that are informing it. The, the data's out there, what I do and what my job is, is to pull the data and figure out how do we make it into practical, useful applications for us at work at home, wherever we are. So that's essentially, I'm doing so you >>Guys discussed and how men and women are different. Actually look at the data. We have to give a lot of qualitative data. I mean, it keeps counselors in business. You know, the grant in the workforce, uh, balance is important, but we have a lot of that data, but what's the numbers. What is your findings? So >>What's interesting is looking at men and women's brains. What's fascinating is that we are more alike than dissimilar in looking at a brain. If you looked at a brain scan, one of a man and woman, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two, but they're now finding and looking at different parts of the brain in different functions. So for instance, men have approximately 6% more gray matter than women. So in terms of the gray matter, that's the thinking brain essentially, and women have more white matter than gray. Matter about 9% more than men. And the white matter is what connects the brain and communicate both front and back and side to side. And so you can make some extrapolation of that information and say, you know, men may focus more on issues, solutions, problems, whereas women sort of think more broadly or wider. >>So, I mean, there are generalities, but a lot of the sciences is fascinating. There's also some interesting science about the hippocampus, which is, um, sort of deep. If this is your brain, it's deep inside the brain and the hippocampus is the memory center. And it's what they're finding is that for women, they tend to store emotional memories more effectively. So happy, sad, fearful those types of emotions get stored more effectively in the hippocampus. Whereas men oftentimes during stress, the hippocampus actually has a challenge in making connections. So that's where, again, some of the, the focus and determination and silo viewed sometimes that men have in situations or problems comes into play. Um, there's one other piece, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is sort of within the brain and that's the brains error detector. And it turns out it's a little bit bigger in women. So women sort of tend to look for, uh, issues CA you know, problems, um, maybe less solution focused, especially under times of stress and, and a lot of this, data's interesting. >>It, it causes you to make some generalities, you know, not everybody is going to operate in that way. Your mileage may theory, but it's, it's good because it helps us inform some of the quirky behavior that we deal with at work and figuring out why, why don't you do that? Why do you do that and installed that women being better or women using more of the brain or less of the brain it's, it's, it's simply about we, we, if all brains away from differently, we both bring different things to the table. And how do you take both of those benefits and bring them forward into a better outcomes? >>Always great to talk about because in the workforce, people are different. And so differences is a term that we use, like, you know, with kids learn differently, some have evolved differently and men and women have had differences. So the data shows that that's clear. Um, I want to share a quote that my wife shared on Facebook. It says mother, um, well, a worried mother does better research than the FBI. So, um, I bring that up, you know, it's instinctual. So a lot of it's also biological and also environmental talk about the dynamics around that, that wiring, because you're wired by your upbringing too, that affects you. And what's the, what's the data show in the biology. >>So it's interesting because the, the key piece is that it's not just the biological brain differences. It's, it's a whole host of factors that leave a footprint on us, in our behavior. So it's our education, it's our, uh, you know, where we, where we grew up, our culture is part of that. It's also gender stereotypes that play a role in how we operate. And I think all of those things leave a footprint on a, an and lead us to different behaviors. And so you can't just say it's the, the, the information that's on our brains. It's a whole host of factors that influence. So my study of looking at how the brains are a little bit different and what the research is coming, it's, it's blended in with research around leadership and things like confidence and motivation in the workplace bias in the workplace. And they're, they're showing very different things. >>So for instance, if you think about confidence, we did an interesting exercise in the event at women of world. And I asked, you know, there's, there's a lot about confidence and confidence is essentially the will or motivation to act. So how many women in the room, uh, would raise the, you know, go up for a job that they were really interested in and fascinated by, but maybe weren't a hundred percent qualified for, like, how many of you have maybe turned down that job or decided not to apply because it wasn't the right time. Like you, you're pretty competent, but not a hundred percent confident in it. And it was funny because the majority, all the women's hands went up in the room. So then I asked him, I flipped the question in the room and I asked the men in the room. I said, okay, if you were only about 50% confident for a job that you were going up for, would you, of course, right. Like, yes, I >>Fabricate some stuff on their resume and you make >>Them look bigger. So, exactly. So what's interesting is testosterone plays a role in confidence and motivation at work. And it turns out men have 10 times the amount of testosterone as women do. So part of that is that aggression, but we both have it, but that, that aggressive factor, that idea to go after something, to be more confident, um, women are behind the curve in that, from the research that I've seen. So it takes more effort to, to, to be able to have the confidence, to go for it and to sort of break down those barriers that exist for women to, to go after those jobs that they want, even if it's not a hundred percent. And so we did a, an exercise in boosting confidence in testosterone called power posing. And Amy Cuddy out of Harvard does a, a whole Ted talk on it, which is fascinating. >>But the idea is that you, you know, you, you put your chest back, you put your hands on your hips and it helps boost your testosterone up to about 20%. And it reduces cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So it's a, it's a quick way. You don't do it in front of people. You do it sort of on the sly or else you kind of, you don't look very nice to others, but you, you boost your confidence doing that. And it's just a small sort of brain hack that you can do to give yourself an upper hand, knowing that knowing the science behind it. So it's a behavior changing type of research that's coming out, which I think is really, >>That's really interesting, but now it translates into leadership and execution in the workforce. So people are different than men and women are different that changes the dynamic around what good is, because if your point about women not asking for that job or having confidence to the field, like I'm not going to go for it, like a man bravado, whatever testosterone that's what mean that that's the benchmark of what drive means. So this came up with Microsoft CEO at the Anita board conferences, which we had a cube there. And, and this is a big issue. So how do HR, how do the managers, how do people recognize the differences and what does the data show, and, and can you share your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, so I think a lot of it comes down to bias and bias is essentially a shortcut that we use in our brains to take less energy. And it's not a bad thing. It's, it's something we all do. And it's conscious and it's unconscious. So bias, I think is a key piece of that. And the research on bias is fascinating. It's very, it's, it's very popular topic these days, because I think being able to do a couple of things, be aware that there are hundreds of biases and they're both conscious and unconscious, uh, acknowledge that it exists, but not legitimize it not make that. Okay. The third piece is to, to counter it and, and being able to counter bias by making sure that people have opportunities. And even though you may have re removed hypothetical barriers explicitly stating that you want people, men, or women to apply for promotions, be this type of leader, not just assume that because there are no barriers that it's okay, but really be explicit in how you give people opportunities and let them know that they're out there. I think that's really key. >>Yeah. That brings up the point around work life balance, because, you know, I have a family of four, four kids it's stressful just in and of itself to have four kids, but then I go to the workforce and the same with women too. So there's also a home dynamic with leadership and biases and roles. Um, what's your take on any data on the how of that shifting persona realities, if you will, um, shapes the data. >>It's interesting because it's, it's something that we even talked about in the session that it's a struggle and, and, um, Bev career from Intel was talking about that. There's a period of time that actually is really tough to keep women in the workforce. And it's that time where you're growing your family, you're growing your career. And oftentimes things sort of struggle. And I, I read something recently around women in STEM careers, over a 10-year period, 42% of women drop out of the workforce in comparison to 17% of men. And so I think there's a lot, a ways to go in terms of being able to set up environments where working life is integrated, because it's, it's not even balanced anymore. It's integration. And how do you set up structures so that people can do that through how they work through how they connect with others. And, and to me, that's a big piece is how do you keep people in the workforce and still contributing in that critical point in time? And, you know, Intel hasn't figured it out. It's a tough challenge, >>Stamina. We're a big fans of women in tech, obviously because we love tech athletes. We'd love to promote people who are rock stars and technology, whether it's developers to leaders. And I also have a daughter, two daughters. And so two questions. One is women in tech, anything you could share that the data can talk to, to either inspire or give some insight and to, for the young women out there that might not have that cultural baggage, that my generation, at least our worse than older than me have from the previous bias. So motivating young daughters out there, and then how you deal with the career advice for existing women. >>So the motivating young women to get into tech, um, Bev shared a really absolutely fascinating statistic that between the ages of 12 and 18, it's incredibly important to have a male support model for young girls to get into STEM careers, that it was absolutely critical for their success. And it's funny because the question came up like, why can't that be a woman too? And what's interesting. And what we find is oftentimes we give men the short shrift when they try and support women, and we don't want to do that. We want to support men supporting women because when that happens, we all win. Um, and so I think that's a big piece of it is starting young and starting with male support as well as female support. So many women who, who cite men as, as he had mental was in that gray, you know, or in their daily life. And it's pretty important that they can feel that they can do that. >>And this goes back down the wiring data that you have the data on how we're were wired. It's okay, guys, to understand that it's not an apples to apples. So to speak, men are from Mars. Women are from beans, whatever that phrase is, but that's really what the data is. >>And being explicit to men to say, we want you to support women instead of having men take a back seat feeling like maybe this isn't my battle to fight. It's, it's really important to then encourage men to speak up to in those, those situations to, to think about sort of women in tech. One of, uh, a really interesting piece of research that I've seen is about team intelligence and what happens on teams and Anita Willy from Carnegie Mellon produced this really fascinating piece of research on the three things that a team needs to be more intelligent. It's not just getting the smartest people in the room with the highest IQ. That's a part of it. You want table stakes, you want to start with smart people, but she found that having women, more women on a team actually improved the team's overall intelligence, the collective intelligence and success of a team. So more women was the first one. The second was there's this ability and women tend to be better at it, but the ability to read someone's thoughts and emotions just by looking at their eyes. So it's called breeding in the mind's eye. So just taking a look and being able to sense behavior, um, and, and what someone's thinking and feeling, and then being able to adjust to that and pivot on that, not just focusing on the task at hand, but the cohesion of a team with that skill made a difference. >>It's like if it's a total team sport, now that's what you're saying in terms of how use sport analogy, but women now you see women's sports is booming. This brings up my, my, your, uh, awesome research that you just did for the folks out there. Stella was leading this information generation study and the diversity of use cases now with tech, which is why we love tech so much. It's not just the geeky programmer, traditional nail role. You mentioned team, you've got UX design. You have, um, real time agile. So you have more of a, whether it's a rowing analogy or whatever sport or music, collaboration, collaboration is key. And there's so many new disciplines. I mean, I'll share data that I have on the cube looking at all the six years and then even women and men, the pattern that's coming up is women love the visualization. It's weird. I don't know if that's just so it's in the data, but like data scientists that render into reporting and visualization, not like just making slides like in the data. Yeah. So, but they're not writing, maybe not Python code. So what do you guys see similar patterns in terms of, uh, information generation, it's sexy to have an iWatch. It's >>Cool. So like a cry from Intel on the panel, she gave a great statistic that actually, uh, it's more it's women that are more likely to make a decision on consumer tech than men. And yet a lot of the focus is about trying to build tech for men, uh, on the, you know, if consumer tech companies want to get this right, they need to start thinking about what are women looking for, uh, because, uh, they're the ones that are out there making these decisions, the majority of those decisions. >>Yeah. I mean, it's an old thing back in the day when I was in co, um, right out of college and doing my first startup was the wife test. Yeah. Everything goes by the wife because you want to have collaborative decision-making and that's kind of been seen as a negative bias or reinforcement bias, but I think what guys mean is like, they want to get their partner involved. Yeah. So how do, how do we change the biases? And you know, where I've talked to a guy who said, the word geek is reinforcing a bias or nerd where like, I use that term all the time, um, with science, is there, I mean, we had the, the lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins around the gender discrimination. She wasn't included. I mean, what's your take on all of this? I mean, how does someone practically take the data and put it into practice? >>I think the big thing is, you know, like I said, acknowledging that it exists, right? It's out there. We've been, I feel like our brains haven't necessarily adapted to the modern workplace and the challenges that we've dealt with because the modern workplace is something that was invented in the 1960s and our brains have evolved over a long time. So being able to handle some of the challenges that we have, especially on how men and women operate differently at the workplace, I think is key, but calling it out and making it okay to acknowledge it, but then counter where it needs to be countered where it's not right. And being explicit and having the conversations I think is the big piece. And that's what struck me with the Kleiner Perkins deal was let's have the conversation it's out there. A lot of times people are reticent to, to have the conversation because it's awkward and I need to be PC. And I'm worried about things. It's the elephant in the room, right. But it actually is. Dialogue is far better than leaving it. >>People are afraid. I mean, guys are afraid. Women are afraid. So it's a negative cycle. If it's not an out in the open, that's what I'm saying. >>And the idea is it's, what can we do collectively better to, to be more positive, to, to frame it more positively, because I think that makes a bigger difference in terms, in terms of talking about, Oh, we're different. How are we the same? How can we work together? What is the, the connection point that you bring, you bring, we all bring different skills and talents to the table. I think it's really taking a look at that and talking about it and calling it out and say, I'm not great at this. You're great at this. Let's, let's work together on what we can do, uh, more effectively, >>Okay. Team sports is great. And the diversity of workforce and tech is an issue. That's awesome. So I'd ask you to kind of a different question for both of you guys. What's the biggest surprise in the data and it could be what reinforced the belief or insight into something new share, uh, a surprise. Um, it could be pleasant or creepy or share it. >>Price to me is intuition. So we always talk about women having intuitions. I've had men say, you know, well, my wife is so intuitive. She kind of, she kinda gets that and I've had that in the workplace as well. And I think the biggest surprise for me was that we can now see, we've now proved the intuition. Intuition is a thing that women have, and it's about this kind of web thinking and connecting the dots. Yeah. So we sort of store these memories deep, deep inside. And then when we see something similar, we then make that connection. We call it intuition, but it's actually something it's a kind of a, you know, super recall if you like, and, and, and replaying that situation. But that I think was the biggest surprise to me, Amy. So I would think that the thing that, that always astonishes me is the workplace environment and how we set up environments sometimes to shoot ourselves in the foot. >>So, so often we'll set up, uh, a competitive environment, whatever it is, let's let's and it's internal competition. Well, it turns out that the way that the brain chemicals work in women is that competition actually froze us into, to stress or threat cycle much more easily than it does to men, but men need it to be able to get to optimal arousal. There's a lot of interesting research from Amy Ernest in, at Yale and, and that piece of how you can manipulate your environment to be more successful together to me is absolutely key. And being able to pull out elements of competition, but also elements of collaboration, you kind of knew it, but the science validates it and you go, this is why we need to make sure there's a balance between the two. So everyone's successful. So to me, that's the aha. I could listen to Amy all day and how we apply it to the workplace. That's the next big step. Yeah. >>Yeah. You guys are awesome. And thanks so much for sharing and I wish we could go long. We're getting the hook here on time, but is there any links and locations websites we can, people can go to to get more information on the studies, the science. So I, a lot of my day curating >>And looking for more research. So peak teams.com/blog is where I do a lot of my writing and suggestions. Um, it's peak teams, P E K T E M s.com. And so I run our blog and kind of put my musings every once in a while up there so that people can see what I'm working on. Um, but they can reach out at any time. And I'm on Twitter at, at peak teams geek. Speaking of geeks, I embraced the geek mentality, right? >>Well, we have, I think geeks comment personally, but, um, final point, I'll give you the last word, Amy, if you could have a magic wand to take the science and change the preferred vision of the future with respect to men and women, you know, working cohesively together, understanding that we're different decoupled in science. Now, what would you want to see for the environment work force, life balance? What would be the magic wand that you would change? >>I think being able to make women more confident by helping reduce bias with everybody. So being more keyed in to those biases that we have in those automatic things we do to shortcut and to be more aware of them and work on them together and not see them as bad, but see them as human. So I think that's my big takeaway is remove, remove more bias. >>Fantastic. Stella Lowe, and Amy Posey here inside the cube. Thanks so much. Congratulations on your great work. Great panel. We'll continue. Of course, we have a special channel on SiliconANGLE's dot TV for women in tech. Go to SiliconANGLE dot DV. We've got a lot of cube alumni. We had another one here today with Amy. Thank you for joining us. This is the cube. We'll be right back day three, bringing it to a close here inside the cube live in Las Vegas. I'm John Forney. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly music)