(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm excited to be joined by one of our CUBE alumni, John Maddison, the EVP of Products and the Chief Marketing Officer at Fortinet. John, welcome back to the program. Good to see you. >> Hi, Lisa. Good to be here again. >> So we last saw you at the Fortinet Championship back in September, a few months ago, but we've had the opportunity to speak a number of times this year. I've also had the chance to talk with Derek Manky, at FortiGuard Labs. There's been so much going on. Let's kind of break down some of the main challenges that enterprises are facing still. And there's four of them here that you're going to address as we wrap up 2021 head into 2022. And then let's also talk about what Fortinet sees as the solution, the cybersecurity mesh architecture. Let's go ahead and kick off with some of those challenges as we know so much has gone on throughout landscape that work from anywhere is so persistent, but what are some of the main things enterprises are facing still? >> Yeah, there's a lot, it's very dynamic right now. And you know, I've been in cybersecurity almost 20 years now and there's always been these three drivers around the infrastructure changes the threat landscape and regulatory. And I think when you look at the infrastructure changes, this work from anywhere, which is, you know, kind of the hybrid mode where I'm in the office today, it could be hopefully in the future, traveling and home. That's going to be here for some time, it seems. And so, you know, enterprises are now saying, I need a longer term strategy around that. I can't just say flip on the VPN and a bit of endpoint security. So that definitely enterprises are thinking that's going to be here for at least another couple of years. I think they're still running very fast to get the digital infrastructure in place. And so, and you're seeing network security and the application journey continuing and securing all those things. And then there's, you know, there's the threat landscape, which, you know, we've said, I think back at the PGA, we're seeing this huge increase in ransomware. And yes, there's still activity going on and trying to breach data and intellectual property and identity and credit cards. But just about every industry now is seeing attacks and it could be financial, it could be manufacturing, ransomware attacks that's continues. And then I think there's the, there's a couple of other things. There's the supply chain things which are also happening, but we're definitely I was just speaking to a customer a minute ago and they were finding a very hard to find the right skilled professionals around cybersecurity. And it kind of, it's like a hierarchy. I need to find somebody, it's hard to find somebody in IT. It's hard to find somebody in cybersecurity and IT. Is hard to find somebody in IT, cybersecurity and container. And so, you know, the more you go in depth, the harder it becomes and it's not even finding people, just retaining people as well. And so, you know, recently Fortinet committed to training another million. We've already trained to 750,000, but training another million people by 2025 in cybersecurity. >> That's outstanding. We've talked about that skills gap before in a number of conversations about all the work that 40 minutes doing, including with veterans, which is something near and dear to my heart, but the work from anywhere I wanted to talk with you about that because that presents a lot of challenges for organizations. And I was reading some stats that a significant percentage of enterprises expect that this is going to increase in 2022. How can it increase from where it is now? What are some of the things that you're seeing and how can Fortinet help customers address this persistent challenge? >> Yeah, well, I think it's increased or it's just the ratio between home and at work and travel might be changing. And again as I said, I think a lot of companies said, well, let's just put something in place now and it's going to go away. Well, it isn't going away. And so what Fortinet are looking to do, and I think it's not just one point product. It is a combination of technologies. It could be end point security. We're even looking at you know, at home networking through our own devices or our partnership with Linksys. It is looking at that zero trust architecture. It is looking at more network security, whether it be in the data center or in a cloud. I think what's important though, is two things. One is that no matter if you're on the network, off the network or traveling per se, then you need the user experience to be the same or simple. I can't just change the way I work because I'm at home versus travel versus you know, in the office. And the security needs to be consistent on those three places as well. So our goal, when we bring some of those solutions together, zero trust and endpoint and network security and policy and identity is to give the same user experience, a simple user experience and the high level of enterprise security, no matter, you know, if you're on and off the network. And those are the key. And I think today customers kind of struggle because they probably got four or five vendors in those different areas and they're trying to make them to work and it's very hard. And so that's why we, you know, we put forward a more of a platform approach per use case with doing that. >> Let's talk about some of those key use cases. And you mentioned ransomware a minute ago, and I just as of a couple of days ago, Kronos is, you know, the latest big name organization to be hit. A lot of folks concerned so many big companies and small companies rely on them. It's not going to affect, you know, the last paycheck in December, but that's a use case that Fortinet has been covering for a long time. I think when we spoke a few months ago, 2020 to 2021 ransomware was up nearly 11 fold. What are some of the things going on there and how are you guys working with customers to address that as we enter 2022? >> Yeah. Well, I definitely think you also saw the, you know, the recent vulnerability, the Log4j and that sits in a lot of systems. Now that sits in a lot of customer systems. It sits in a lot of security systems as well, by the way. So we come back to this, you know, supply chain issue. And so customers kind of accepting that this is going to be as this attack surface of the network and cloud and devices and users and whether or not the network you know, keeps continuing to expand. They're going to accept that these zero days are going to come along. They're going to, they also understand the sophistication of the threats. We're seeing a lot of activity of the threats in the reconnaissance space, and they're looking at your external attack surface and working out how they can get in. And so, I think customers are accepting that this is just getting more sophistication, there's a bigger attack surface. And so what they're looking at is to deploy some more detection capabilities, more just training of people, not to click on stuff, but you know, building infrastructure so it's segmented, long-term though the only way to defend against these ransomware attacks is to usually platform that then allows you to build automation that long-term allows you to build some contextual engine. Why, when, where, what are you doing, otherwise it's just going to be too hard, just trying to bolt together, you know, 10 or 15 products from vendors that don't get on well, none the best of times. So yeah, that's, it's long, it's a longterm architecture is the only thing that's going to work for customers. >> And for a long time, I think probably since I've known you John, Fortinet has been talking about the security fabric. Now Gartner is talking about the cybersecurity mesh architecture. Talk to me about those two. How similar is that? How leading edge was Fortinet and describe what a cybersecurity mesh architecture is? >> Well, it always takes a while for Gartner to catch up with us, but they, if I'm in a joking Gartner please except the apologies. That, you know, I think they've started to talking about this cybersecurity mesh architecture mesh. And what the saying is that, you know, these products need to talk to each other. And yes you can send things off into a central location for SIM or operational management, but really need to talk to each other and transfer exchange, threat intelligence. They need to be able to exchange policy long. They also need to be able to build automation. You know, a really good example is if our EDR system detects that your laptop has got a virus or a vulnerability, then I can, the EDR system will tell the zero trust policy manager don't allow access application. Or it could if you're on the network, you could tell the Wi-Fi, take off, take them off the network. So this automation is integration is the real long-term goal of the Gartner mesh. It's always been the long-term goal of Fortinet. Yes, we do individual products. You can buy them, but the real power long-term is to get that automation built into the platform. And as I said, even longer term start applying contextual rules, which will be super powerful in stopping, you know, attacks and breaches. >> Tremendous amount of power and capabilities that that context will provide. I was looking at some stats from Gartner and they said that by 2024, which is we're two years basically away from that organizations that do adopt this cybersecurity mesh architecture to integrate security tools, to work as a collaborative ecosystem, significant reduction in the financial impact of security incidents by 90%. That's huge and I know that you guys also have integrations with over 450 third-party technology partners as part of the security fabric. So you're ahead of the game. >> Well, it's not saying, you know, just buy from Fortinet, that's what you need to do, but it's not saying that at all. What, I think what Gartner is saying, and what we've been saying is that take a use case like work from anywhere and then build your platform, a platform for that use case. Now, what we are saying is, again, it's not saying you go from 30 products down to one, you go from 30 products down to maybe five or six platforms, but those platforms need to work together. They also need to exchange threat intelligence and policy and build automation. And so I think the platform approach, every CSO I speak to is just tired of buying another product, another product. They just want to get something that works and is automated long-term. And so the platform and the Gartner mesh. It's a slightly different concept, but something else we call convergence. Okay. So consolidation is consolidation of the vendors, but you may still have the same number of products. You still may have an end point in a zero trust and an email. Convergence is different where we bring it together and eliminating individual products. A really good example of that is SD-WAN that brings together security and application routing. And that goes back to a concept that Fortinet had since our beginning 20 years ago. And that is the original internet that we still use a lot today really has no idea who you are, what device are you using, where are you going, what application, what's the content, no clue, it just connects you. And so that leads to a lot of security being bolted on afterwards in different places. And so this convergence, we call it security different networking, where you start to integrate the security, which may be contextual, it maybe identity, maybe application running like SD-WAN, maybe content like next gen firewall. You bring those together. Now, when you do that, you face some compute challenges. And we've been one of the pioneers and building asics that allow this acceleration to bring this convergence together. But that's another area that's happening as well. It's different from consolidation, but it's bringing together that security and networking so you're not bolting things together as you go forward. >> Different from consolidation, but incredibly important to be able to reduce those silos as businesses are facing some of the challenges that you talked about, the persistence of work from anywhere, the threat landscape, the cybersecurity skills gap. >> Yeah. And you can do this convergence in different places. So you can do it at the cloud edge because you can throw a lot of compute at it. At the one edge, you probably need a asic approach, data center edge, a 5G edge. There's the LAN edge, which is the connectivity. Cause I sometimes have people go, well, let's just put all the security in the cloud, but now yes, you do need security in the cloud. You needs security from the cloud before the cloud, but there's also security needed these ages. And there's also another area that's been under huge attack now is operational technologies. So manufacturers, energy, gas, everyone is really got some physical infrastructure. Even a branch you can consider to be operational technology and they got cameras and other capabilities. So that, especially for the traditional operational technology, that's hard to open up. Because you need access, you need remote access and what's a seeing a huge amount of attacks there. In that world, you know, you've got to put the security there, physically with it to make sure you secure those components. >> What about the, from a challenge perspective John, we talked a lot in the last year, 18, 20, 22 months, I'm losing count of the acceleration of digital. What are some of the security opportunities there that provides Fortinet to help customers solve that if the acceleration is happening faster than the, some of the, you know, that their security infrastructure can keep pace. What are some of the opportunities there for you guys to help customers address that problem? >> Well, this is always been a battle between security and networking. You know, networking is gone from this 400 times faster than it was before. Security is still a lot of it's software. And so, you know, what you don't want to do is and the security team saying is say no all the time. No, don't do that project, it's too insecure. Stop doing that. No slow down on that. And that's, you know, always been an issue for security in that people think of it as a tax or a burden that slows things down. That's why I come back to this convergence. When you're building a network, the security should be inside that. Should be built and integrated. So if I'm building my one edge, which connects my building to a cloud or whatever, when I put that connectivity in there to an SD-WAN device, it should have security integrated inside it. The same effect I found building, you know, a data center or a cloud capability. So I think, you know, customers are you know, security teams can't stop the business from moving forward and building these applications wherever they may be in retail or manufacturing or healthcare. And so they just need to take a different approach to enable that speed of acceleration and to our minds having it totally integrated and converge is the only way you're going to be able to achieve the speed and the security at the same time. >> And that speed is critical as is a security. But let's talk about that cybersecurity skills gap. Something that I think I read recently is in its fifth year, we've talked about this before, but as you alluded to at the beginning of our conversation, Fortinet is very dedicated to training, lots of individuals. Talk to me about that skills gap. And you talked that it also affects people, companies being able to retain talent. How are you guys helping to address? >> Yeah, we did actually a survey a few months ago, a 2500 cybersecurity professionals. And, you know, one really revealing fact was about, I think it was about 70% said they'd had an incident because of the lack of training. Now that could be people who are just clicking on things. Okay. Versus somebody who doesn't, is not trained enough to see a threat. So I think, you know, the question going to go, but either way, the 70% of that, you know, is attributed to that breach. And so it's so, so important. And right from the start Fortinet has provided training. We provide free training to our partners, free training to our customers. I have a quite a large team that's building on the curriculum. So we supply curriculum and gear to over 450 universities and colleges. You mentioned the re-skilling of the veterans as well, over 2000. And to us, it's very important. So this commitment to get people trained because in the end there's, yeah, there's always a people part of this problem, whether it be people clicking on things or whether it be people not understanding and configuring crying, and then people having passwords of one two three or whatever. All these things, all these human things need to get, you know, we need to get educated and trained on it. So we'll continue that. I think a million's probably not enough. It's probably should be two million, but we'll try our best to get people trained as much as possible. And the other thing that I also saw in the survey was that once certified employees thought that was extremely important. It does take a lot of time. So, you know, one of our NSE 4 courses on our firewalls takes a week. It does a lot of things to learn. So one thing we're going to try and do is try and modularize a bit more so we can break it up a bit. But there's going to be a problem. It's kind of like the supply chain, the supply is not there, the people, this is right. The chips, they're not there. They're not there, you've got to try and fix it and expand the training and education of people. >> And I think that's fantastic that Fortinet has been dedicated to that for so long. Look forward to hearing how you guys, the progress that you make on that training 1 million folks. Will we see you at Accelerate in 2022? >> Yeah. Well, so Accelerate 22 is going to be a hybrid, of course. I'm actually, you can't really see here cause I've got my great office here. But in front of me is the window. I can actually see the Apple campus just over there. And this is our new campus in Sunnyvale, Silicon valley. We've got a pretty expensive training center and executive briefing center. So we're going to probably do in the morning of Accelerate 22, a live broadcast of some of the execs and some of our partners and customers, and then have some online stuff. So hybrid probably this year again. But a bit of physical presence. But yeah, we're expecting quite a few partners to, a few partners to be here, live and a few partners, obviously a lot of partners to tune in to the live broadcast. >> That's fantastic. I look forward to that hybrid event. John, great to see you as always. Thank you so much for the update and sharing what enterprises, the battles that they're facing, how Fortinet and the cybersecurity mesh can help. We look forward to seeing you in 2022. >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you. >> For John Maddison, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this CUBE conversation. We'll see you next time. (lively music)

(calm electronic music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation with Fortinet. I'm Lisa Martin. John Madison joins me, the CMO and EVP of products. John, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa. Good to be here. >> Good to see you. So, so much has changed since I last saw you. The move to remote work caused by the pandemic led so many organizations to invest in modern networking and security technologies. And we see, you know, the rise in the threat landscape that protecting digital assets is becoming even more and more urgent because the threats are continuing to escalate. Talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing with this current threat landscape. >> Yeah. Well, it keeps changing that's for sure. You saw some recent surveys where, you know, now companies are seeing, in terms of where employees are located, you know, 25% expecting to be in the office, 25% expected to be permanently in the home. And then there's this big 50% of hybrid, which we think will move a bit more towards the office as people get back in the office. But that's going to take some time. We're actually starting to move back in the office here in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale. but it's very different in every region in the U.S and regulations and laws around the world. And so we think it's going to be very much work from anywhere. There's a bit of travel starting as well. And so this work from anywhere concept is going to be very important to customers going forward. And the ability to change the dynamics of that ratio as they go forward. >> (indistinct) This work from anywhere that over- last year overnight sort of became an absolute essential. But now, as you said, we're going to have this hybrid model of some going back, some staying home and the security and the perimeter is dissolving. When you look at supporting customers and their remote work from anywhere, their new work from anywhere model, what are some of the things that are top of mind that you're hearing from customers? >> Well, I, you know, I sometimes hear this premise is disappearing. I think in some ways it's moving to the user and the devices. And there's this concept called zero trust network access which I've said in many occasions should be zero trust application access, but they named it that way which is going to be an important technology because as I said, it kind of moves that premise then to that user and previous technology that we had VPN technology was good technology. And in fact, a lot of companies, if you go back to when the pandemic started last year, put a lot of people on the VPN technology as quick as possible and it was reasonably robust. But as we go forward, what we're going to have to do is make sure that perimeter- at that perimeter, that users only get access to the applications they're using rather than the whole network. Eventually when they're on the network you need to make sure that it's segmented so they can't go everywhere as well. And so this zero trust network access or zero trust or zero trust access, there's lots of kind of different versions of it, is going to be very important concept for users. The other piece of it, I think, is also that it needs to be more intuitive to use, as anything you kind of have users do like the VPN where you had to kind of dial in and- or bring up- you're bringing up your connection and your IPsec connection, et cetera, et cetera means that people tend not to use it. And so to make it intuitive and automatic is going to be really important. >> Intuitive and automatic. One of the things that we also saw was this massive rise in digital transformation last year, right? SAS adoption, these SAS applications keeping many of us in collaboration. So I'm thinking, you know, in that sense with the perimeter changing and the work from anywhere, this consistent, secure internet connection among users at the branch or the branch of one has to be there to keep organizations productive and safe. How is the Fortinet enabling the ZTNA- this evolution of VPN? >> Yeah. That's another piece of it. So not only are users on and off the network or traveling so that- or both, so the applications are moving. So a lot of them are moved from data centers to public cloud in the form of infrastructure or SAS. We're now seeing customers actually move some applications towards the building or building compute or edge compute. So the applications keep moving which also causes this problem. And so another function of zero trust access or ZTNA is to not care where the application is. You rely on some technology and it's called proxy technology, which allows the proxy to track where the applications are. And for us, that sits inside of our firewalls. And that makes it very flexible. And so we've been able to kind of just ramp up that proxy against the policy engine, whether it be in the data center or in the cloud, or even on your premise. Even integrated inside a branch or something like that. That's going to be very important because, as you just said, those applications will just keep moving into different areas and different zones as you go forward. >> (Lisa) And that's probably going to be permanent for a lot of organizations. So it- so they haven't renamed it zero trust application access, like you think it should be. But when organizations are looking into zero trust network access, what should- what are some of the key things that they need to be looking for and mindful of? >> Yeah, (indistinct) And so it's probably the, you know, the number one conversation they've had over the last six months. I think people initially just had to get something working. Now they're looking seriously at a longer term architecture for their access, their user access and device access. I think what I find is that something like zero trust network access is more of a use case across multiple components. And so if you look inside it, you need a client component endpoint; you need a proxy that in front of the cloud capabilities; you need a policy engine; you need to use identity-based systems. If you haven't got- if you can't get an agent on the device, you may need a NAC system. And so usually what customers find is I've got four or five current- different vendors in those areas. And cybersecurity vendors are not the best at working together, which they were, because then we do better for customers. And so trying to get two vendors to work is hard enough, trying to get five or six is really hard. And so what they're looking at over time is to say, maybe I get the minimum basic ZTNA working. And then as I go forward, for example, what they really want is this continuing posture assessment. Well, you can do that with some EDR technology, but is that EDR technology integrated into your policy engine? No. So I think what customers are saying is, let me start with the base ZTNA with maybe two vendors. And then as I go forward implement a, you know, a fabric or a platform approach to get everything working together. 'Cause it's just too hard with five or six vendors. >> Right. Is there, I'm curious if there's a shared responsibility model with customers working with different vendors; what actions and security responsibilities fall on the customer that they need to be aware of? >> Well, and it also comes back to this, you know, there's convergence of networking and security. And I've said a few times I'm definitely seeing CIOs and CSOs, security teams, and networking teams working much more closely. And especially when you've got a use case now that goes across security items and networking items and networking, the proxy has always been in the control of the networking team. Endpoint security is always been in the- you know, the security team. It's just forcing this convergence not just of the technologies itself but of the organizations inside enterprises. >> (Lisa) Well, and that's a challenging one for every organization is getting, you know, if you're talking about it in general, the business folks, the IT folks. Now this is not just a security problem. This is a problem for the entire corporation, as we just saw with the Colonial Pipeline. Ransomware is now becoming a household name. These are business-critical board-level discussions I imagine on the security side. How is Fortinet helping customers kind of bridge that gap between the biz folks and the IT folks where security is concerned? >> Yeah. You know, ransomware has been around quite a while. I think two years ago, we saw a lot of it in the schools. K-12 schools in the U.S. I think they're picking some richer targets now. The colonial one, I think there was a 4 million ransom. I think that they managed to get some of that money back. But, you know, instead of, you know, demanding $5,000 or $10,000 from a small business or a school they're obviously demanding millions from these larger companies. And you know, one of the problems with ransomware is, you know, it still relies heavily on social engineering. I don't think you can eliminate that people clicking on stuff, you know, a very small percentage still. I think what it means is you have to put some more proactive things in place, like the zero trust, like micro-segmentation, like web application file warning. All these capabilities to try and make your systems as strong as possible. So then put in detection and response systems to assume that someone's clicking on something somewhere just to help. But it's definitely the environment. You know, the threat environment. It's not really gotten more sophisticated; yes, there are still advanced threats. I fear more about those weaponized APTs and state sponsored, but there's definitely a huge volume of ransomware now going after, you know, not only, you know, meat processing factories, but pipelines and critical infrastructure as we go forward. That's the more worrying. >> (Lisa) Right. You bring up a good point about, sort of, people being one of the biggest challenges from a security perspective. Clicking on links, not checking to see if a link is bogus or legitimate. So, help me understand a little bit more how is zero trust can help maybe take some of that human error out of the equation? >> Well, because I think before, you know, when you got access, when you're off the network and you've got access to the network, you've got access to everything, okay. So once you're on the network, and I think the Colonial Pipeline was a good example where traditionally, operational technology networks, physical networks sort of separate from the IT network and they had something called an air gap. And that air gap meant you really couldn't get to it. Now when people had to be remote because of the pandemic, they started taking these air gaps. And so now we had remote access. And so again, when you- when they got that remote access and they got into the network, they could- the network was very flat and you could see everything you can go anywhere. And so that's what zero trust does. It kind of says, I kind of did the zero trust approach to you that I'm only going to allow you access to this application. And I'm going to keep checking on you to make sure you are you are who you say you are on a continuous basis. And that really provides a bit more safety. Now, I still- we still think you need to put things like segmentation in place and some other capabilities and monitoring everything else, but it just narrows the attack surface down from this giant network approach to a specific application >> Narrowing that is the right direction. How do organizations, when you're working with customers, how do they go- How do they evolve from a traditional VPN to zero trust? What are some of the steps involved in that? >> Well, I think it's, you know, what's interesting is customers still have data centers. In fact, you know, some of the customers who have legacy applications will have a data center for a long time. And in fact, what I find is even if you've implemented zero trust to a certain population, employee population, they still have VPNs in place. And sometimes they use them for the IT folks. Sometimes they use them for a specialized developers and stuff like that. And so I think it's going to be like everything, everything goes a hundred percent this way and it stays this way. And so it's going to be hybrid for a while where we see VPN technology and zero trust together. You know- our approach is that you can have both together and it's both on the same platform and it'll just gradually evolve as you go forward. >> What are some of the things you're looking forward to in the next year as this hybrid environment continues, but hopefully things start to open up more? What are some of the things that we can expect to hear and see from Fortinet? >> Well, I'm looking forward to getting out of my home office, that's for sure. >> (Lisa laughing) >> It's like I've been imprisoned here for eighteen months. >> I agree with you on that! So we'll try that. And, you know, I always thought I traveled too much before and now I'm contemplating on the travel piece. But from, you know, Fortinet's perspective, you know, our goal is to make sure that, you know, our customers can increase. We'll make sure they can protect themselves. And so we want to help them and keep working with them such that they put best practices in place and they start architecting longer-term to implement things like zero trust or sassy or some of these other capabilities. And so, you know, I think the- we've had a lot of interest with customers on these virtual sessions. I'm really looking forward to getting them back in our new building, our new executive briefing center, which we're opening up in the next few weeks. You may have more of those face-to-face and white boarding conversations with customers. >> Oh, that sounds so exciting. I agree with you on the travel front, but going from traveling a ton to none was a big challenge. But also, I imagined it'll be great to actually get to collaborate with customers again, and partners. You know, you can only do so much by Zoom. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things on the partnership front that we might be seeing. >> Yeah, our partners, you know, we're a hundred percent partner-driven company and partners are very important to us. And, you know, and that's why we always, when we introduce new technology, we work with the partners to make sure that they understand it. So for example, we provide free what they call an NSE training to all our partners. And then we also work with them very closely to put systems in their labs and the demos and make sure they can architect. And so partners are really important to us and, you know, making sure that they can provide value as part of a solution set to our customers, because customers trust them. And so we want to make sure that we work with our partners closely so they can help the customer implementing architect solutions as they go forward. >> That trust is critical. Right? I mean, we can talk about that at every event, every CUBE Conversation, the trust that an a customer has in you, the trust that you have in a partner and vice versa. That whole trust circle kind of goes along the lines with what we're talking about in terms of being able to establish that trust. So that threat landscape that's probably only going to continue to get bigger is in the trusted hands of folks like Fortinet and your partners to be able to enable those customers to narrow that threat landscape. >> Yeah, yeah. And so it could be the smallest partner to the largest service provider. We don't mind. We want to make sure that we're working with them to provide that implementation from the customers. And again, the word trust is sometimes overused, but that's what customers are looking for. >> (Lisa) So, John, point me to when our audience is some of the information that they can find on Dotcom about zero trust. What are some of the things that you think are great calls to action for the audience? >> Yeah. I mean, it depends. I think it depends on what level you want to get into where we have a bunch of assets, videos, and training but start at the very highest level, you know, why is zero trust something you need to implement? And then it goes down into more details and then even the architecture, long-term architecture and connectivity and implementation. So there's a lot of assets on Fortinet.com If you go on our training sessions, there's- all our training's free to our customers. And so you can go in all those NSE levels and look at the capabilities. So yeah, definitely it's a- it's an area of high interest from our customers. But as I say to them, it's more of a journey. Yes, you can implement something today really quickly, but will that work for you over the long-term in making sure you can take all the information from the, like I said, you know, how is the voice, the posture of that device? What is the device with an agent doing, you know, as my contextual engine integrated as well? So it's a journey for customers and, but you can start with something simple but you need to have that plan for that journey in place. >> I imagine though, John, it's a journey that is either accelerating, or with the threat landscape and some of the things that we've already talked about, is becoming an absolutely board-critical conversation. So, and on that journey, does Fortinet work with customers to accelerate certain parts of it? Because you know, these businesses have been pivoting so much in the last year and they've got to not just survive, but now thrive in this new landscape, this new hybrid work from home, work from anywhere environment and also with more threats. >> Yeah, no, it's a good point. And so, you know, even those internally are implementing it starting the most critical assets first. So let's say, you know, I've got somebody working on source code, they should be the first ones to get the zero trust implementation. I've got somebody asking from the internet to search for stuff. Maybe they're okay for now, but yeah. So you kind of prioritize your assets and users against, you know, the threat and then implement. That's why I'm saying you can roll it out across everyone as, you know, a certain version of it. But I think it's better to prioritize first the most important assets in IP and then roll it out that way. >> (Lisa) Great advice. >> Because some of- a lot of those assets are still sitting in the data center. >> Right. >> So they're not sitting in the cloud. >> Right. John, great advice. Thank you so much for joining me. Good to see you, glad all is well and that you will be able to get out of your home office. You're just days away from that. I'm sure that's going to feel great. >> Certainly is. And thank you, Lisa. >> Nice to see you. For John Madison, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (calm electronic music with piano)

>> Innovation Day, brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick, here with theCube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. It's a very cool space, I think it's grown up over a number of years as they've originated with some acquired companies, and now they got a huge setup here, and we had a big day today talking about customer experience, and really, if you look at the Comcast Voice Remote, and there's a lot of stuff going on that's maybe under the covers, you don't really give Comcast credit for, but they're actually doing a lot. And we're excited to, kind of dive into it a little bit deeper with our next guest, she's Annie Weskesser, she's a CMO of Uniphore. Annie, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here today. >> Absolutely. So what is Uniphore, for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> So Uniphore is a global leader in conversational service automation, and our vision is to bridge the gap between human and machine, through voice AI and automation. >> That's a mouth full. >> Yes. >> Conversational... >> Service. >> Service. >> Yes. >> So, people talk, and so you guys are heavily involved in voice. So what are the applications where people are using your voice? >> Yep, well primarily our focus is call centers. >> Okay. >> So large enterprises who have massive call centers, where we want to go in and help them with AI and automation, to help better listen to their customers, help better listen to the customers voice, and solve the problems in a faster manner. >> So I don't have to repeat my account number six different times to six different agents. >> Exactly, right. >> Or caught an in IVR cycle, or perhaps the chat that you were talking to doesn't-- The person on the phone, you have to repeat your story. This is something where the AI and automation will actually assist the agent to become a superhero. >> So, it's pretty interesting cause you know there's a lot of conversation about AI and ML, but really you know where it's going to have its impact is applied AI. >> Yes. And you said the company started out really more just on a pure voice, but now you're applying more and more kind of AI in the back end. So what kind of opportunities do you have now beyond just simply being able to do voice conversion?. >> To the first part of your question, the company started at IIT Madras back in 2008. And originally the focus of the company was really centered on voice, voice being the lowest common denominator and in Indie where the languages are 260 you know, potential languages to understand and maybe 25 at the top. We set out really to focus on voice and then realize that customer service was a large market and somewhere we can have a big impact. >> Right, right. So you reckon as you said a 100 different languages. >> A 100 different languages through our platform which is pretty incredible when you think about it. All of the different people calling in to customer service potentially or maybe through a chatbot or a voicebot to get their issues solved. >> And then you integrate in whatever the core system is that the customer services agent are using. >> Yes. >> So what are the types of tips and tricks that the call agent gets by using your guys service? >> So think about it as a platform where the customer can help they agents be more affective agents. So one of the things that call centers struggle with is something called after call work, where agents may spend two to three minutes after a call, summarizing the call. One of the things that our technology does and this is primarily for one of our customers who's a health care client. They said "Wouldn't it be great if we can automate that completely". So we've taken the after call work for one customer client, taken that two to three minutes down to 10 seconds, where that work that the agent would have done is completely summarized and the agent validates it, can correct it if needed and its completely done. So that not only saves the agent time to either pick up more calls and help other customers or it can get them of the phone in a quicker manner to save the call center more money. >> So that's doing more than just simply providing a transcript of the call which is something a different track than actually listening into to provide suggestions is actually taking it to the next level in terms of what categorizing, what type of call, the outcome etc. >> it's actually quite interesting because often times less than 1% of calls are listened to somewhere between 1 and 10% of calls are listened to in calls centers. So we can listen to a 100% of those calls in addition we offer something called that's more along the line of like a live agent coach to where the agent can concentrate on the conversation with the customer which is the primary thing listening to the customer. And our technology will serve you up coaching mechanism in terms of getting to faster resolution for the customer and getting them better insights to be almost a superhero of a agent. >> Right, and I would imagine the accuracy in terms of recording what happened in the call to go back and do the analytics and have a text base search you can do all types of analysis on those calls which was data that was probably just lost before right into (mumbles) >> You're exactly right. I think the accuracy is clearly a lot lower than if you were to have the AI and automation and Machine learning technology there. >> So the other conversation in the sit down that we had earlier today was really about driving a customer centric culture in your own company, not only just enabling it but really building it inside. I wonder if you could share some of the things that you guys have done to help make sure that everybody stays focused on the objective, which is the customer. >> Yip, I think it really starts at the top it starts with the leader of the organization. So we have a CEO whose extremely focused on customer centricity and in fact its our number one core value within the organization. So you see everyone from the CEO down to the rest of the organization completely focused on the customer and their needs. >> What about when the customer doesn't know what they need? What about you know, you bringing a new technology and your inviting a slightly different process or a slightly different change and your saying "Hey, this is actually a better way to keep text and transactions and we actually have a really coach that can help", you know, kind of guy to people. How do you help move customers to a place they don't necessarily know they want to go? >> Yeah, I mean you find that a lot, right. Its not necessarily the technology that we're providing for today but its having the innovation and having the foresight to create a platform that will be future proof. So that's critical, you know, I think that there are a lot of customers who might not know what they need today but that's our job to help them innovate and push the envelope on all things AI and automation. >> Right, I'm just curious to in terms of the impact of your technology on kind of the tracking software for those call center agents, right. So this is a group of people that have to process a lot of calls, you know everything is track to the minute and you know its funny I had a demo with Westworld and you know when Westworld's funny cause we started treating machines like machines and they wanted to be treated like people sometimes I wonder on some of these technologies You know is it enabling them to have more time to be more thoughtful, is it enabling them to have more time to get the better outcomes or is it sometimes perceived as 'oh my gosh you just trying to jam' you know, 'four more calls on in my hour by taking care of my two more minutes that I used to spend wrapping up the call". Do you think about those things and the end customer? >> The time is really the premium, right. So the number one focus is giving people time back and whether that's the customer who's calling in and you want to solve an issue and get them faster resolution or whether that's the agent that wants to free up more time in having the conversation with the customer, solving their problem and then getting of the phone I think that's the most effective way of doing it. >> Final question in terms of voice and the evolution of voice. `Cause I don't think people are really completely tuned in certainly not people old like we are. What are some of the conversations when people finally get, you know, kind of the enabler that voice communications opens up that's not necessarily available with texts or not necessarily available with other types of channels? >> Yeah, I mean I see it most easily in my children they expect everything to be voice enabled and so everything from the Comcast remote that they pick up in our living room everywhere they go when they see a remote they expect everything to be voice enabled. So that's really the future and I think a lot of customer service will be listening to your customers voice however, they want to communicate with you, whatever channel they want to communicate on. >> Great, really cool story Annie and thanks for taking the few minutes and sharing it with us. >> Yeah, thanks for inviting me. >> All right, she's Annie, I'm Jeff your watching theCube with the Comcast CX Experience Innovation day here at the Sillicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching see you next time.

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering Comcast Innovation Day. (smooth music) Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. Very cool facility right off the runway from Moffett. They got a ton of cool toys downstairs which I get to go play with, which I'm looking forward to, but today the conversation was all about CX, customer experience, and you know, Comcast is there. A lot of people like to watch their TVs, interacting with their cable systems for a long, long time, but there's a whole range of new and innovative things that are coming out from Comcast, and we're excited to have an engineer who's kind of down in the bowels here in the engine room building all this stuff. So like to welcome Mike Fine. He's a cable software architect for Comcast. Mike, great to see you. >> Likewise. >> So you had a really cool demo earlier, which is not a demo, right? I think this thing is-- >> Production. >> Now in production, it's called the X1 Eye Control. I think most people know what X1 is. What's X1 Eye Control? >> Yeah. X1 Eye Control is a web application that integrates with off-the-shelf accessibility hardware, so that could be a Tobii eye gaze rig, it could be something called a sip-and-puff, which let's users use their inhalation and exhalation to control the application, or any other off-the-shelf accessibility hardware that can mimic a mouse to a piece of software. >> Too, it's-- >> Yeah. The goal of the project was pretty simple. It was to let people with ALS and other conditions control their TVs independently. >> That's amazing, and you showed a great video. The gentleman on the video is using I think an eye gaze method, but you said you've got integrations to a number of different, you know, kind of ADA-approved interface devices. >> That's right, the journey that this project has taken has been interesting. We started with just the ALS use case, which was the eye gaze, but it turned out that one of our early users had control over his voice, which is somewhat unusual for ALS patients, and so he asked whether he could control it with his voice, so we did that work through he had Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was nice, so we did that work, and then of course given that we have the voice remote we decided could we make voice work for everybody, which we did, so now the application is on par with a physical remote, and then we even went further and let people type in voice commands, so in case somebody who's perhaps mute or had a speech impediment, or some sort of speech pathology issue that prevented them from using a voice, they could do that as well. >> It's really interesting, I mean you guys have so many kind of interface points to an ecosystem broader than simply what's available at Comcast, whether it's on the front end, as you said, with some of these interfaces with ADA devices, or on the backend if I want to watch my Netflix or I want to watch YouTube, or I want to watch, you know, a different service. You guys have really taken, you know, kind of an open, integrated approach to all these, one might argue, competitive threats to really bring it in as the customer wants to experience. Why did you do that, what's kind of the philosophy driving that? >> Yeah, well, the first thought that comes to mind is that none of it's possible without the right cloud APIs, so somebody very visionary years ago made the decision that everything you can do on your TV or on the mobile app you can do through the cloud, and so a project like this couldn't happen unless it was possible for a piece of software that somebody invented well after the fact to cause a TV to change channels unless there was that underpinning, so like any other piece of software it's a bit of an iceberg. There's a lot of stuff underneath that you don't realize as a user-- >> Right. >> But it's there and that's what makes it possible. >> Right, I'm just curious about some of the challenges in terms of moving UI and UX forward into places that people are not familiar with. And I've joked about it on a number of these interviews that, you know, I still get an email, not only from Comcast, but from Google and from Alexa, suggesting to me ways in which I might use voice. You know, as you sit back from a technologist what are some of the challenges you guys, you know, kind of anticipate, what are some of the ones you didn't anticipate, and how do you help us old people, you know, find new ways to interact with the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean there's a lot of us here that spend our days solving that exact problem, right? Part of it is is notifying you of interesting things through SMS or through mobile push, or the messages on the TV, so your team is playing in a game that you want to see, a movie that you've declared interest in has become cheaper, become free, or maybe even buyable if you wanted to do that. Obviously there's lots of AI and ML in terms of putting recommendations in front of you based on your viewing habits, based on broader trends across, you know, because you watch this, other people watch this, so we know this is probably a good solution for you as well, but yeah, we're all, there's a large number of us trying to optimize what we call "time to joy," from the time you pick up your remote to think about what you want to watch to the time you're actually watching something you want to watch; make that as seamless as possible. >> Preston said you guys get like a billion voice commands, what was the period of time? >> A month. >> A month. >> A month, yeah. (chuckles) >> So obviously a big, giant new dataset for you guys now to have at your disposal. >> What are some of the things that you're learning from that inbound, what can you do with it, how do you, you know, now use this direct touch with the customer to, again, kind of recycle and have another iteration on improved experience? >> Right, so voice is a lot like a text chat, like a bot interface in that it's an experience where users are telling you exactly what they want to do, so if a user sits in front of a traditional web application or mobile application and has trouble finding what they want to do, they can't figure out what button to press, what screen to go to, you have no idea, right? You can't infer that they're having a problem, but with voice or somebody interacting with a bot, they type exactly what they mean, or they say exactly what they mean, so we can mine those voice commands and find the popular ones that we don't at that point have implemented, and if we can iterate on that cycle fast enough we can quickly introduce new voice commands that our users are literally asking for as quickly as possible. >> Right. What about the stuff that customers are not asking for, because right? There's one line of thought, which is the customer knows best, but the customer doesn't know-- >> That's right. >> What they don't know. So how do you guys continue to look for more kind of cutting edge stuff that isn't necessarily coming back through a feedback loop? >> Right, yeah, so it's an interesting question. So we're trying to add other non-TV use cases into the mix, right, so controlling your IoT devices at home, controlling your security, seeing your cameras through the Set-Top Box, and so on. So you know, until those use cases exist nobody's asking for them, and so you do have to be a bit visionary in terms of what you want to put out there as voice commands. You know, luckily we have people who, well, we're all customers of the platform generally, so we know what it means to be a user, but you know, we have people that talk with users and have a general sense of what they want to do, and then we figure out what the right commands are. >> Right, not voice specifically, but let's unpack a little bit deeper into the impact of IoT. You know, Nest probably was the first kind of broadly accepted kind of IoT device in the home, and now you got Ring, which everybody loves to take pictures of people stealing their boxes from the front porch, but that puts you guys with the internet connectivity in a very different place than simply providing a football game or the entertainment. So as you think of your role changing in the house, specifically with now these connected devices, how do you think about new opportunities, new challenges that being the person in the middle of that is different than just sending a TV signal? >> Yeah, there's a lot of talk about trying to be the home OS. Certainly we are in a unique position being in the home, both in terms of the router and the internet, but also, you know, often frankly you know when your system's setup a human being came in and helps you understand how to best position the physical devices in your house, and so on, that other companies don't have, right? Those vendors just don't have that builtin advantage. Clearly security has become a big thing for us. Home automation, I sit very close to that group. They're doing amazing things with automating rules like, you know, "Tell me when my door's been open too long," and these sort of things, and so more and more the use cases start to converge, that, for example, when you say, "Good morning," we have this idea of scenes, all right. So when your morning starts you not only want to tune the TV, but you also want to crank up the lights and unlock the door and open the windows, or whatever, and when you go to bed, so the actions that are involved in those use cases span not just TV and not just internet, but all of it. >> Right, it's just funny because I don't think Comcast would be the first name that people would say when they're talking about voice technology and the transformational impact of voice technology, right? They're probably going to say Siri was the first and Alexa's probably the most popular, and you know-- >> Right. >> Google's got Lord knows how many inputs they have, but you guys are really sitting at a central place, and I might argue it's one of the more used voice applications-- >> Absolutely. >> Out there, so from kind of a technology leadership perspective you guys have a bunch of really unique assets in terms of where you are, what you control, what you're sitting on in terms of that internet. You know, how does that really help you and the team think about Comcast as an innovation company, Comcast as a cool tech company, not necessarily Comcast as what used to be just a cable company? >> Right, right. Well you know, as somebody in the valley with friends in the valley it's always interesting to try to differentiate reality from the view that many people have. You know, this is definitely much more than your dad's cable company. It's a consumer and electronic company as much as anything else. We very much position ourselves with all the, you know, with the FAANG companies, et cetera, so you know, when we talked about CX it's no longer the case that whatever's passable for a stodgy cable company passes as CX anymore. Now you're being compared to a set of customers, companies that are providing fantastic user experiences for their customers, and you're being held to that standard, so you know, there's a lot of pressure on us, which is great; we like that. We want to produce fantastic products, and yeah, I don't know if I have a great answer in terms of how to move forward in terms of melding it all together, but we have a lot of smart people in the hallways making that happen. (chuckles) >> So last question is really the impact of AI, because you know, we cover a lot of tech events and a lot of talk about AI, but you know, I think those of us around know that really where AI shines is applied AI in specific applications for specific U cases. So how are you guys, you know, kind of implementing AI, where are some of the opportunities that you see that you can do in the future that you couldn't do the past, whether it be just with much better datasets, whether it be with much faster connectivity and much better compute so that you can ultimately deliver a better customer experience using some of these really modern tools? >> Right, so some of the work is just making what you already do or experience better, so for example showing you recommendations, right? Just make that algorithm better, and so there's a great deal of effort, as you might expect, at a company like this on that problem, but there's also work being done to just take any interactivity between you and the system out of the picture completely. We talked a little bit about this earlier, that, for example, we're working on technology that when you turn your TV on in the morning it should probably tune to the channel that you normally tune to in the morning. That's a pretty simple problem, in a sense, but you know, if I watch your viewing patterns and I see that you turn on a particular news show in the morning, why should you have to pick up the remote and change it from what you watched the night before to that channel? It should just happen. We talked about the Smart Resume stuff, that's obviously a fantastic use case for end users, so there's, you know, it's not surprising it's being used all over the technology set. It's in the home automation world. You know, it's in A/B testing, so trying to figure out the right cohorts to try different things in front of, so it's everywhere as you would expect. >> Right, right, it's pretty amazing. I mean there's just so many things going on, you know, kind of under the covers, some that we can see, some that we can't see where you guys are really kind of progressing, you know kind of the leading edge, cutting edge customer experience with something that people interact with every single day. >> That's right. >> Yeah, cool stuff. Well Mike, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the Eye Control; really a cool story, and look forward to more publicity around that because that's a really important piece of technology. >> Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. >> All right. He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation Date to you by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back it ready? Geoffrey here with the Cube were in the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runways here. Moffett feels really cool place, a lot of fun toys and gadgets that I have not got to play with yet, but I got to do before I leave. But the conversation today is really about customer experience. We had a small panel this morning of experts talking about customer experience. What does that mean? How do we do a better job at it? And we're excited. Have an expert brought in just for this conversation. She's a net Franz, the founder and CEO of C X Journey, and it's great to see you. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Absolutely been a fun morning. >>What did you think? >>What were some of your impressions of the conversation this morning? You know >>what? It's always great to sit in a room with so many people who have been living and breathing this customer experience journey. And so it was great to hear what Comcast is doing. It was great to hear from some of the other folks in the room. What are some of the latest trends in terms of data and technology and where customer experiences headed? Yeah, it was awesome. >>So customer experiences, it's >>a little bit over. It's almost kind of digital transformation a little bit. Everyone's like experience, experience, experience. And that's a big, complicated topic. How do you help customers really kind of break it down, make it into something manageable, make it into something they can actually approach and have some success with >>us? So I spent a lot of my time working with clients who are brand new to this field, right? I had a former boss who said that they can't even spell C X. Right. So yes, so So yes. So I go in there and I really listen and understand what their pain points are and what they need help with and then get them started on that journey. Basically, soup did not see X strategy work. We typically start out making sure that the right foundation is in place in terms of the executives that they're all a line that they're all committed to this work. The culture. We've got the right culture in place. We've got, you know, some feedback from employees and from customers of what's going well and what's not. And then from there we dive right into a phase that I call understanding. And that's listening to customers listening to employees developing personas so that we can really understand who customers are and who are employees really are, and then also journey mapping to really walk in their shoes to understand the experience that they're having today and then design. Use that to design a better experience for tomorrow. So there's a lot of work that happens up front to make you know the things that we talked about in there this morning. >>Right? Happen. What's the biggest gap? Because everyone >>always talks about being customer centric. And I'm sure if you talk to any sea, of course, were customer centric and you know, we see it would like would like Amazon Andy Jassy and that team is just crazy hyper customer centric and they executed with specific behavior. So what's the part that's usually missing that they think their customer centric, but they're really not? >>Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head with the word execute, right? So there's a stat out there that's been out there for forever, and we know it. Every single company, every single business interviews or surveys us to death, right? So they have all this great feedback, but they do nothing with it. They just don't execute. They just don't act on it. And they've got such rich feedback and and and customers want to tell them, Hey, you're doing this well behaved. This is not going so well. So please fix it because we want to continue doing business with you. And so, yeah, it's about execution. I think that's one problem. The other problem is that they focus on the metrics and not on actually doing something with the feedback >>temporary experience. Do they just ignore it? Do they not have the systems to capture it? Are they are they kind of analysis? Paralysis? He just said they have all this great data, and I'm not doing anything about it. Why >>there it is that, too Analysis, paralysis. Let's just beat the numbers to death and and what's the What's the quote about beating the number until the beating the data until the talks >>kind of thing. You know, I don't know that something. I know I'm just mess that, >>but But yeah, they don't have the system in place to actually. Then take what they learn and go do something with it. And I think a big part of it. We talked about this in the room this morning, too. Was around having that commitment from the top, having the CEO say, Listen, we're doing this and we're going to when we listen to, our customers were going toe act on what we hear, So But they don't They don't have the infrastructure in place to actually go and then do it >>right. It's pretty interesting. You have, Ah, a deck that you shared in advance Eight Principles of customer centric city. Yes. And of the aid three are people people before products people before profits people before metrics. That sounds great, but it sounds contrary to everything we hear these days about measure, measure, measure, measure, measure. Right? It's human resource is it almost feels like we're kind of back to these kind of time. Motion studies in tryingto optimize people as if they're a machine as opposed to being a person. >>Yeah, well, it's It's not, because we have to. The way that we could think about is we have to put the human into this. That's what customer experience is all about, right? It's about putting the human in the experience. And it's interesting that you bring up that back because when I opened that talk, I'm show a comm your commercial from Acura, and it's if you've never seen it. It's called the test. If you can google it and find the video and it's really about. If we don't view them as dummies, something amazing happens. That's the tagline, right? And so it's really about people. The experience is all about people. Our business is all about people. That's why we're in business, right? It's all about the customer. It's for the customer. And who's gonna deliver that? Our employees? And so we've got to put the people first, and then the numbers will come >>right. Another one that you had in there, I just have to touch on was forget the golden rule, which which I always thought the golden rules of us. You know, he has the gold makes a >>rule. You're talking about a different golden, which is really treat. Treat others >>not the way you think they want, that you want to be treated but treat people the way that they want to be treated in such a small It's the pylons, but it's so important. >>It's so important. And I love this example that I share. Thio just recently read a book by Hal Rosenbluth called The Customer Comes Second, right, and to most people, that seems counterintuitive, but he's really referring to The employee comes more first, which I love, and I'm the example that he gives us. He's left handed and he goes into a restaurant. He frequents this restaurant all the time, and until I read this story, I never even thought about this. And now that I go to restaurants, I think about this all the time. The silverware is always on the right hand side, but he's left handed, so this restaurant that he frequents the waitress. He always seemed to have the same waitress she caught on, and so when when he would come into the restaurant, she would set the silvery down on the left hand side. for him that's treating people the way that they want to be treated. And that's what customer experience is all about, >>right? One of the topics that he talked about in the session this morning was, um, the reputation that service experiences really defined by the sum of all your interactions. And it's really important to kind of keep a ah view of that that it's not just an interaction with many, many interactions over a period of time that sounds so hard to manage. And then there's also this kind of the last experience, which is probably overweighted based on the whole. >>How do people >>keep that in mind? How did they How did they, you know, make sure that they're thinking that kind of holistically about the customer engagement across a number of fronts within the company. >>Well, you've got to think >>about it as think about it as a journey, not just touch points, not just a bunch of little touch points, because if you think about just the last experience or just a touch point, then you're thinking about transactions. You're not thinking about a relationship, and what we're trying to get at is customer relationships and not just transactional, you know, it's it's they're in, they're out, they're gone, right? So what? We want relationships. We want them to be customers for life. And and that's the only way that we're gonna do it is if we focus on the journey, >>right? What about the challenge of that which was special suddenly becomes the norm. And we talked a lot about, you know, kind of consumers ations of i t. Because as soon as I get great results on a Google search or, you know, I find exactly what I need on Amazon in two clicks and then to take that into whatever my be to be your B to C application as when Now those expectations are not being driven by what I promised to deliver. But they're being driven by all these third party app said. I have a no control up and they're probably developing at a faster pace of innovation that I can keep up housing people, you know, kind of absorb that deal with it and try to take some lessons from that in the delivery of their own application >>essay. You you brought up two things there which I want to address the 1st 1 to which was about the delighting customers. But to answer your question is really about focusing on your customers and your customers needs on. And that's why I talk a lot about customer understanding, right? It's it's about listening to your customers. It's about developing personas and really understanding who they are, what their pain points are, what their problems are, what needs. Are they trying to solve our problems? Are they trying to solve on and then walking in their shoes through journey, mapping? And that understanding allows us to design an experience for our customers, right for our customers. If we don't solve a problem up for our customers, they will go elsewhere and they'll get their problems solved elsewhere, right? So I think that's really important. The first part of your question was, our point was around delighting our customers, and you're absolutely right. We don't have to delight customers at every touch point. I know that's counter to what a lot of people might say or think, but to your point, once we delighted every touch point, now it becomes the new norm. It's an expectation that has now been set and now delight, Where does it stop? You know, Delight is here, and then it's here. And then it's here. And so So it's It's a whole different. So my thinking on that is that most businesses cannot delight at every touch point, and they certainly don't. Um, I think we need to meet expectations and the and the only way that we can do that is to listen and understand and and and then act on what we hear. And, um, most businesses are still very primitive, even when it comes to that, >>right? Okay. Give you the last word. What's what's the kind of the most consistent, easy to fix stumble that most customers are doing when you when you get engaged and you walk in, what's that one thing that you know with 90% confidence factor that when you walk in, this is gonna be, you know, one of these three or four little things that they should stop doing or that they should do just just just get off the baseline? >>Yeah, I think it's You know what I think it >>za combination of sort of speed and responsiveness. I'll give an example. I won't mean the company, but But I thought, man, in this day and age, this shouldn't be happening, right? It was a company that I contacted. I was supposed to set up an account and they said I couldn't for it just wasn't working. I tried different browsers, just wasn't working. So I sent them and eat. First. I tried to call, but I got stuck in Ivy are hell. And then I sent an email and my the email that I got back was an auto responder. That's I will reply within five business days. >>Five business days, Thio like, really, where? Why don't you just ask me to send a fax, right? You know, So So that's the kind >>of stuff that seriously I I want to solve that e mails like really in 2019. We're still responding in five business days. That's just that's just ludicrous. I think that's one of the and it's such it doesn't cost anything to respond in a timely manner and to respond at all right now. Here it is. It's been I haven't heard from them yet, so it's been like seven days now, so >>there's that just tweet tweet at the CEO going to, hopefully the >>CEO tweets and maybe doesn't tweet. >>I know, right? Yeah, well, in >>that you know nothing about opportunity for you because this is not an easy it's not an easy thing to do is it's hard to stay up with people's expectations and to drive new and innovative products when they don't necessarily even know how to engage with those things. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, The field is wide open because, like I said, there's still so many companies that are still just trying to get the basics right. So >>Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. Thanks for participating. Absolutely, She's in that. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time.

(futuristic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runway here at Moffett Field. Really interesting place, a lot of cool toys downstairs. But we had a conversation today about customer experience and kind of next gen customer experience, and how to drive a better customer experience so that you have a better customer relationship, and we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Kristy Schaffler, the director of customer experience for Comcast California regions. Kristy, great to see you. >> Thank you! Thanks for having me here, I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, we had this great little panel discussion talking about customer experience, but you kept coming back to employees, and really leading with employees before you worry about what's going on with the customer. Where does that mindset come from and how should people be prioritizing employees for the benefit of customers? >> So, you know, honestly, it all comes back to Comcast itself. It is a very strong employee culture. And so the company began as a small company, family owned, and I think that's what's permeated throughout the company as a whole. So when we started to introduced the best practices for a net promoter system overall, it was an easy grasp, I think, for employees to start looking at how is it that I'm going to be able to help overall? Because I think they're all out there trying to help each other. >> Right, well its funny, right? Because there's kind of two dynamics. There's a great dynamic of helping a teammate right? And this goes back to military rule and you fight for the person that you're with, and not necessarily some great cause or old white guys that are back thousands of miles away. But it's different in terms of getting bad news up to the boss. That's a really hard problem, and nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, and in fact, a lot of times, the bad news doesn't get up. >> Exactly. >> So how do you enable people to actually share the real bad news that they might be uncomfortable or not necessarily even addressable. >> Yeah, so what we did was we introduced our employees to the concept of elevations, and so what they do is they input an issue where they're struggling with helping out the customer. There's a barrier to them to be able to deliver the service we're expecting. And what happens is once that gets input, then that actually goes up into the region, we take a look at it and say "We can't really do anything with it here, but we can bump it up to the next level." That eventually gets to a point, especially in the case of employee tools, for example, where is has to go all the way up to the headquarters and there's a team that's ready and waiting for that to happen. So, when you tell them, "Hey, there's something broken here", they have to come back and respond within two weeks. They have to be able to get back with that employee to say "Here is what we're going to do about that" or maybe put on a map to say that we're going to eventually fix that. That communication goes directly back to the person who actually inputted. So, its a direct communication between the employee who's having the issue and the software developer who may actually own that tool. >> So it goes directly-- is it a special type of ticket, if you will? >> Exactly. >> That I want a post knowing that this is a-- I've decided its a high enough priority that I'm going to take the risk, and take the personal risk or professional risk to go ahead and escalate that up the chain of command? >> Right, so what I'm so proud about is we've gone back to the team and said "Give be your number one barrier that's holding you back?" . So they work it out amongst their peers about what they think should be the top issue. Then they get everybody else to watch that issue. Once you get a number of watchers on it, it becomes elevated into the company where it becomes a big issue, and its like Hey, there's a lot of people that look at this issue, want it resolved, and so as soon as they put that in, they assign it to the area that responsible, and that is a direction communication, because as soon as they comment, anybody who's watching that elevation gets an email in their inbox with the actual comment from the person who owns it. So, its a nice targeted communication for issues that they're having. >> So, is there any fanfare when there some big one that gets voted by the broader group that "Oh my gosh, this was a really big deal."? >> So recently, we had something that came up with our Xfinity Home, and so, as you probably know, we have the ability to have security where you can actually look at your cameras on your mobile app. And one of our technicians said "Hey guys, I'm hearing this from the customer.". So what they do is they come back in and they have a huddle with their team and have the discussion, and then that manager takes that and puts it into the system. What happened was it went straight back up to the person, they actually did a software update on it, And then our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience out of our corporate headquarters said "Hey guys, congratulations, that's fantastic! This got fixed!". Then that communication went directly back to the person who input it, so it's just a celebratory moment when you can be able to get that direct feedback from the customer, comes up through the employee. The employee's owning it as an issue that they can't solve personally, but they know to get it to the right people. >> Right. So you've talked a lot earlier today about employee tools, and so, you know, as you clearly there's something that you think is a great investment, how should people think about investment in employee tools actually manifesting itself in better customer experience with the company? >> Exactly. We actually had an elevation that was associated with that, where the employee was using a tool in the home, and when he was trying to check the health of the system, they found that there was a piece of the tool that was breaking off. And so, again, they took it back to the owner of that tool, and they worked with the manufacturer to go back and redesign that tool, so that meant that the customer was able to get better service, because of their tools aren't working, that's what they depend on to be able to serve our customers. >> Right. >> And so, it's key that we take care of them. >> So, just curious, to kind of wrap it up, what has the focus on the NPS, both the score as well as the process, you know, kind of, what's happened from then? Not only the, you know, the direct result in terms of changing in the score and execution details, but more kind of the second order and unintended consequences of that focus? >> Yeah so we've definitely seen our net promoter score increase year over year, so that's very exciting, and we're celebrating that, and we're not there yet, so we still have a ways to go. But the other thing that we're seeing is that the employees are feeling empowered. They're feeling like that they can bring back issues, but something that they share with everybody, they feel like they have a sense of "I can help direct where we need to focus our time and make sure that those issues are being addressed". So, we have an employee survey. It's actually called the ENPS, so actually, we send that out every other month, and ask for employees, you know, "How do you feel about the workplace?", "Are you motivated?". We have some of the highest scores of any company of employees that are motivated because we have set up this system to basically come back and say "Let us know where you need help", and we're coming back in and helping. So, I'm excited about it. >> Great, alright Kristy, well we need to have another followup conversation about NPS another time-- >> Definitely! >> --I need to get educated, but thanks for spending a few minutes, and inviting us to attend today's event. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Alright, she's Kristy, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back, get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, here in Sunnyvale, California. They had a really cool thing today, it was a customer experience day, brought a bunch of Comcast executives and a bunch of thought leaders in the customer experience base. We're excited to come down and sit in and talk to some of the guests, and really excited about our next guest, 'cause he's an anthropologist, he's Brian Solis, digital analyst, author, analyst, anthropologist, futurist, Brian, you've got it all going on, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. >> Course, this is a really great conversation, so, I'm happy to be here. >> So first off, just kind of impressions of the conversation earlier today, talking about customer experience, the expectation, consumerization of IT is something we talk a lot about, where people's expectations of the way this stuff is supposed to work, change, all the time, and what was magical and almost impossible, like talking on a cell phone in your car, suddenly becomes expected and the norm, so how do you think of this, as you look at these big, sweeping changes that we're going through? >> Well today's conversation I think has been sort of, a spotlight on what's most important, which is innovation not for the sake of innovation, but innovation for the sake of pushing the customer experience forward, changing customer behaviors in a way that's going to create a new standard for experiences, and that way you become the leader in engagement. Everybody else has to catch up to you, and what was so important is that we're here at a company with all the love that wasn't the best in customer experience several years ago, and now they're sort of one of the pioneers in what customer experience needs to be, from a technological standpoint, a customer service standpoint, and an overall experience standpoint, right? >> I want to jump into the voice capability specifically, because I don't think there's really enough accolades as to what Comcast has achieved with the voice remote, I think if you don't have it you don't know it's there, and the ability to migrate across hundreds or thousands of channels, multiple services, to find the show that you want with just the ask of your voice is amazing. What's even more amazing is trying to teach people to actually navigate that way, so changing people's behavior in the way they interact with devices is not a simple thing. >> So, it's come up, and it's an expression shared in many UI and UX circles, which is the best interface is no interface, and in many ways, voice was the next frontier, that's a frontier that was pioneered, I think at a mass level by Amazon and Alexa, Apple and Siri, Google and Ok Google, we're really starting to see that voice as a UI is much more natural, what makes it so complex is all of the back end, I think Comcast has done a really nice job in the simplistic linguistic engagement of saying the name of a TV show or a genre of shows or movies, and then the back end to be reimagined in order to bring you something that's not just this long list of stuff, that is much more intuitive and helps you get to what they call time to joy, much faster. That's game changing, right, but that isn't just something that Comcast looked, for example, to just Alexa, or anything specifically, it looked, and also, especially not to other cable companies. They looked to the best-in-class experiences in every area, to pick those parts and build something altogether new that becomes the new standard, and I think voice, one of the things that you and I were talking about, Jeff, earlier, was kids, there was a time when they would walk up to a screen and they still do to some regard, where they want to do this, but I have a three year old at home who has a toy remote control, and I had to record video from afar of just watching her talk into her toy remote, "Mickey Mouse Club, Mickey Mouse Club," and just sitting there, with all the patience in the world, nothing was happening but expecting that something was going to happen. And it's just a new standard. The other thing, though, is that we're not done, we now live in an era of AI, machine learning, automation, so personalization now is really going to start to build upon voice experiences where it's just simply turning on the TV is going to give you instant options of all of the things you're most likely going to want to watch all on one nav. >> Right, it's just, we say that and yet we still have qwerty keyboards, right, which were specifically designed to slow people down and yet now we're not using arm typewriters anymore, and we still have qwerty keyboards, so changing people's behavior is not easy, and it's interesting to see kind of these generational shifts based on the devices in which they grew up using, kind of define the way in which they expect everything else to work. But it's, I still get the email, maybe, or even, they talked about here at Comcast, where instead of just saying NCAA Football, it knows I like to watch Stanford football, it suggests, maybe you should just say Stanford football, so there's still kind of a lot of education, surprising amount of education that has to happen. >> Yes and no, if you think about the conversation, I often talk about it in terms of iteration and innovation, iteration is doing the same things better, innovation is creating new value, and if you look at the evolution of the remote control, I mean just go back 50 years, it has gotten progressively worse over time, in fact on average, today's remote control has 70 buttons on it, and if you think about iteration in that regard, we've completely started to fail in the user interface, I don't know that anybody has mastered their relationship with the remote control except for some geeks, so I think if anything, voice is going to change the game for the better. >> Yeah, I was in the business for a long time, and now I know what killed the VCR, right, was the flashing 12, nobody could ever get their flashing 12, and for all the young people, look it up on the internet, you'll figure out what a VCR and a flashing 12 is. So you talk about something called Generation C, what is Generation C, why should we be paying attention? >> Look, I think voice is a good example of Generation C, so anybody who uses, you mentioned qwerty, right, I don't know that I've actually even used qwerty in a sentence in a really long time, but I'm old enough to, I trained on a manual typewriter back in the day, so it doesn't mean that I don't get it, it means that my behaviors and my expectations as a human being have changed, because of my relationship, my personal relationship, so for example, in consumerization of technology and IT, my personal relationship has changed with technology, and so what I had found in my research over the years was especially when it comes to customer experience, if you study a customer journey, and you look at demographics of these personas that we've created, you can see specifically that people who live a mobile-first lifestyle, regardless of age, will make decisions the same way, they're increasingly impatient, they're demanding, they're self-centered, I call 'em accidental narcissists, they, time, convenience are really important, they want personalization, their standards are much different than the personas that we've developed in the past, and so I gave it a name, which is Generation C, because it wasn't one, where C stood for connected, it wasn't one bound by age, or traditional demographics, education, income, it was defined by shared interests, behaviors, and shared outcomes, and it was a game changer for all things, if you're going to point innovation or customer experience or whatever it is, and you're going to aim at that growing customer segment, then they're going to have a different set of needs than your traditional customer, right? >> But it's so bizarre, again, how quickly the novel becomes expected baseline, and how the great search algorithm that we get out of Google, which is based on lots and lots and lots and lots of data, and a bunch of smart people and a whole bunch of hardware and software, suddenly now we expect that same search result if we're searching on, pick some random retailer or some other random website, when in fact, that is special, but we have this crazy sliding scale of what's expected and how can companies stay out in front of that, at least chase close behind, 'cause it's a very different world in how fast the expectations change. >> I'm sorry, I totally spaced out 'cause my attention span went away. I'm just kidding, I'm kidding. >> Well I didn't even get to the attention economy question yet. >> It's, you're competing at a much different level today, and I think that's what so disruptive for companies, is that they're still thinking that momentum and progress and experience and performance and success, I have to say that success is the worse teacher when it comes to innovation because you're basing your decisions on the future based on things that you did in the past. So what do companies need to get, is that the customers change, I'll give you an example. I think in many ways, companies compete against Uber, right, because Uber has changed the game for what it takes to get a service brought to you, and to give it to you and take you where you need to go, where time and convenience are big factors of that. So for example, one of the things I studied was how long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open Lyft in certain markets, and the reason that I wanted to do that was I wanted to show that the number went down every single year. Now, for example, Uber will advertise in Sydney that the average pickup time is three minutes and 39 seconds, because it knows it adds a competitive advantage over everybody else, because it's important, because once that experience happens to you and you get something your way fast, you're not going to suddenly realize, when you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles, that "Well, I understand that this isn't Uber, "and therefore I shouldn't expect "to have things done at a much more efficient "and personal manner." You take that mindset subconsciously to everything you do, so while it's a threat, it's also an opportunity, but you got to break that executive mindset to say, "How can we take "best-in-class experiences across the board, "and how can we apply it to what we do?" >> Yeah, again, an interesting concept in the conversation earlier today, where there was a question about ROI, and you threw it back as ROE, return on experience, so how should people start to adjust their thinking, because the thing on, return on investment implies almost a very small kind of direct impact, kind of one to one benefit, where really, return on experience implies a much broader, kind of accidental benefits, benefits across a lot of parameters that you may or may not necessarily be measuring, it's a very, a much better way to measure your investment. >> Look, it's almost impossible to get away from the ROI conversation, it's important, executives have to make decisions based on what they know the outcomes are going to be, a lot of this is, you don't know what you don't know, and so if you can tie some types of rudimentary metrics that are going to show progress and also return, it helps, but at the same time, I always say, what happens in the ROI equation if I equals ignorance, what's the return of ignorance? What's the return of not doing something, and so what I tried to demonstrate in a book I wrote about experience design, which was called X, it was, let's break it down to what we're actually trying to do, the word experience actually means an emotional reaction to a moment, and so for example, in a high sales pitch situation like a dealership for an automobile, that's not a good experience. If you have to call customer service, you've probably not had a good experience, and all of those things are emotional, so if you can design for emotional outcomes, where people are going to feel great in the moment and feel great afterwards, that is a metric that you can have a before and after state. The likelihood of attaching that emotion to things like loyalty, customer lifetime value, growth, then you can get to your ROI in a different way, but you have to first do it with intention. >> Yeah, Brian, fascinating conversation, we could go all day, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for joining today, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Thank you, thank you, it was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation date. You want to You by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back already. Jeffrey here with the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's right in Sunnyvale, not too far from Moffitt. And they had a special day today, really all about customer experience and invited. Ah, lot of industry people around to dig into the issues and find out What is it that's all about customer experience. We're excited to have our next guest. He's ripped Gerber, the chief marketing and innovation officer from Velocity Rip. Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me here. >>Absolutely. Shade. It's over. People aren't familiar with velocity. Give us the give us the overview. >>A terrific velocity builds mobile and cloud applications 100% on Salesforce. To extend the customer experience into deep into industries such as communications, media, health insurance, government, energy and utilities, we extend the power of the cloud that power of sales force to help these companies compete to transform on to win and improve their customer experiences. >>So what's the tie with Comcast >>tied with Comcast? Well, Comcast is certainly a very innovative media company and of itself in a big sales force customer and some things that they're doing and that we learned about today and some of the technologies that we saw very exciting in terms of how they're integrating you knew content displays and products new ai ai technologies wth the assisted your voice activation modules that we saw others very exciting. So you're a Comcast, like many of us here in Silicon Valley, Certainly are on ah, on some amazing journeys with taking these enabling technologies in making our lives as consumers and customers. And business is so much better, >>right? So you talked about, you know, digital transformation. And he called them the Big Four for your customers, you know, Social Cloud, Mobile and Analytics. How are you seeing those things, Matt? Back? The digital transformation. It's such a big, chewy term. How do you help people kind of zero in on specific, actionable things and initiatives that they can start to see success? >>Right, Right. So we're about a decade in in terms of those transformation technologies that I listed earlier today in our panel, Social Cloud Mobile and Analytics, and we were about 10 years into these, and so many might say we're in a post digital world now and entering what we call a customer engagement world. I mean, so you take these technologies which are amazing in of themselves. You combine them together. Ah, and then you start creating the kinds of experiences that new companies that are cropping up disrupting industries and existing organizations are taking to do things better, faster, less expensive. So one of things that we talked about today is there's a lot of legacy technology. A stack. Let's take C R M, for example, where you have very old technologies that are there that are keeping companies back that are holding back those experiences because of the way that the on premise software has been customized. And it's kind of sticking their and new companies like Salesforce, which is, in fact, a new company. If you think in Silicon Valley, timelines have come in and created this amazing experience level on top that and that we work with Salesforce. It extended even further in those industries to create these these amazing technologies. Ah, pulling up the data from the legacy systems bringing in Social Mobile analytics. Aye aye, and creating an experience that is seamless, almost invisible to you as a consumer or as a business. And so that's when we talk about digital transformation. It's not just the digital part of it. It's the transformation of the entire technology stack inside of an organization of the processes that they're following, sometimes the teams and the people. And it's sometimes the entire industry and of itself, >>right? But is it is it hard to get a B to B vendor to think about delivering their product in the form of inexperience? Right. We hear it all the time, obviously, and and B to C, and everyone's trying to sell experiences and everybody wants experiences, and Gen X wants experiences. But if you think of a sales force application and delivering kind of CR and capability to some sales person on the line, how did they rethink that delivery in the form of an experience for that user? >>Sure, many of the existing ah metrics or benchmarks that you might have as a consumer Ah, business is air now being held to a CZ well, so Comcast is a terrific example where there's a B to see as well as it be to be sales organization on divisions and whether it's the contracting process that you might have with Comcast as a business or the sign up process you might have as a consumer, your expectations are growing exponentially in terms of seamless, fast, intuitive, personal. In those technologies that we work with, the velocity and salesforce together help enable that kind of experiences for companies. Media companies like Comcast, >>for example, right? The other piece of it, we talked about a lot in the in the room before we got out here is driving it internally with your own employees and really driving kind of, ah, customer centric culture and attitude and two degree experience within your own culture so that those people are then able to deliver that to your customer. How are you doing that at velocity? What are some of the priorities that you set in this area? Right >>velocities Five years old, we are one of the fastest ah growing clout, cos actually, in the world today, one of the reasons for that key driver is our core values. We say where values lead company, our 1st 2 values out of our seven, our customers first. And people are the core. And so you can't take. You can't do what we're doing Ah, and grow how we're growing and serve the customers with the results that they're getting the way that we're doing without those two customer first, customer centric strategy. Ah, and emphasis. But then people are People are at the very core of that, and they combine to basically deliver the kinds of results that we're delivering. Whether it's building innovative technologies, helping our customers with Salesforce implement those technologies and helping the leadership of those of those customers that we have you measure, benchmark and demonstrate. Ah, to they're consistencies the results that they're getting from those investments. >>Awesome. Well, thanks for Ah, for joining us today and you're at the event and taking a few minutes on the Cube. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, he's rip. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Q worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. See you next time. Thanks for watching

>> Of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube, covering Comcast innovation day brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's a really cool space right off of Buffet. And they're doing a lot of new technologies here. It's not the only Innovation Center in the country but it's one here in our backyard. And we're excited to be here. Comcast is having a special event talking about really CX, customer experience. They brought together a bunch of super smart people invited us to stop by and we're going to share some of that with you. And we're excited for our very first guest he's Preston Smalley, the VP of product management of Comcast, Preston great to meet you. >> Good to meet you too, Jeff. >> So really cool event today. We talked about a lot of different things about customer experience and really all the applications that are on the front edge that define that customer experience. And you guys are doing a ton of innovation there. >> No, we are I mean I think it's, we were talking just this morning about all the different ways that we're trying to meet customers, where they're at and building products really around those needs, right? >> Yes, so I think the one of the ones that doesn't get enough credit not enough conversation is the voice. And I've got the voice remote at home. And it's really fascinating, especially in the context of there's so many places that what I'm looking for might be and I don't really know what the licensing and arrangements are that you guys have set up with Hulu or with Netflix or with HBO or if it's on HBO on demand or HBO live. So to be able to have kind of a single point of reference to just push that button and say, "Stanford football," and have it show up, it's amazing. >> No, it really is and I think you know, the voice remote has been one of those big hits where you know, people always love their TV remote but, you know, a number years back we started exploring, could we put a voice you know, search capability directly into that remote. And I think what's great is people they're really leaning into it. So we're seeing a billion voice commands happening a month, >> Billion? >> A billion, one b. Through the remote and I think it's just become a part of their life. Right? And I think it's everything from the simple to saying NBC into the remote to the more complicated things like Notre Dame football or what's my WiFi password? or whatever the things they might be asking out of their device. >> So curious on the development side was like about features, but what were some of the real hurdles that you guys knew you had to overcome? And what were some of the surprise hurdles that you didn't necessarily anticipate? >> Sure. I mean, I think the ones you knew about were we've got to be able to translate speech to text and you know, there's there's existing infrastructure that allows for that and doing that with high accuracy. But the good news is we actually had a head start in organizing the content. And so we already had dealt with text based searching of all the different TV shows and movies and such. And so we had all that base of knowledge that we could then tap into. We're now at a stage where that kind of covers the basics but we're trying to understand how do you both increase the breadth and depth of the kinds of commands that you will do through the voice remote. And so you mentioned some at the beginning things like being able to search, not just the content that we bring but things like Netflix or Amazon Prime or soon Hulu. And so partnering with those companies, you get all that information in a way that works very well with the voice remote. >> Right and then you even have it bilingual, right? You even have Spanish and English. >> That's right. >> And it can flip it can switch back and forth on the fly. >> That's right, yeah, so we support both those languages, including a combo a mixed mode where in households where you're seeing both Spanish and English be interwoven, it'll actually even work in those contexts. And then recently, we've also introduced Canadian French and so we license our technology to Rogers and video Tron up in Canada. And so we've now introduced that capability as well. >> That's great, So a long time ago we interviewed Domino's and it's when they first introduced app ordering. And at first you think well app ordering but there was all this like second order benefits that Domino's replied in terms of accuracy of the orders and supply chain impact. So I'm curious if there's some, you know, kind of second order benefits that you guys are realizing with voice that maybe you didn't think, you know, what are some of the surprises that have come out of that? >> Well, that's a good, good question. I think in terms of surprises, it's the types of things that people are looking for you now have, you now have the ability to figure out what kinds of things people are interested in which you wouldn't have been able to know in a typical browse setting. So for example, we support now over 150 apps on X1 as far as third party streaming apps but we know the ones that we don't support because people are saying and into the remote, whereas we wouldn't have got that information prior. >> Right. >> And so now we can actually go and try and meet those needs. >> Now ,it's interesting. You talk about meeting people where they are and you know, one of the things that's happening today is people have all these options, right? They can get it through their Comcast service if they're doing that but you know they may want to have a direct relationship with Hulu is one that you picked out or with Netflix or this historical ones, you guys now are enabling an option for those people that choose to directly engage with those content providers and just use Comcast, as an internet provider. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there. >> Yeah, sure. So obviously, we've had strength in the, in the TV space, and being able to organize and aggregate all that streaming content with your traditional television content. What we've done now is take that investment in X1 and pivot it into a new product this year, we call Xfinity flex. And what that product does is it's a streaming device that should be comfortable for an internet only subscriber that they hook up to their TV. It's 4K, HDR, wireless. And through that device, they're able to aggregate all of that streaming content in one place. So whether it's app content that they may already have an existing subscription from or it's ad supported internet content or maybe they want to buy some more content from us right? And so we'll bundle and sell those subscriptions directly and include that as well. And we've actually been pretty surprised, you know, you take something like Netflix which is highly penetrated in the United States we're pretty surprised how many people are still signing up new as a Netflix subscriber in our service and so by just making it easy and just one click away we found that people are they're opting to do that. >> Right, I'm sure they're happy to hear that in Los Gatos just down the road >> Exactly. No, they're a great partner and either way we're helping them >> Right, right >> They're trying to reach what they call kind of the Netflix nevers people that maybe just hadn't gotten Netflix prior, right? And so we're helping them with that. >> Well, it's really interesting, you know, kind of the you know, kind of TV versus computer you speeding the TV's kind of your passive experience, you're sitting on the couch and you just kind of watching where the computer was more two way and then there was dual screen kind of activity, but you guys are bringing a lot of the stuff that was only available on your pc or your phone now directly into the Comcast experience, you know whether it's YouTube or whatever. So it really it's kind of blurring those lines. But I want to shift gears a little bit about, you know, kind of the role of the internet in homes today, has now expanded beyond entertainment. It's expanded beyond information and IoT now is entering the home probably the biggest one is nested, connected thermostats and connected door bells and ring and you know, we're seeing videos from people's rings all over the place. You guys are sitting again, right in the middle of that ecosystem. So how does IoT and connected devices and thermostats and refrigerators and doorbells impacted the way you guys think about delivering internet into the home? >> Well, I think it's really been a watershed moment for the company, moving from, if you go years back to bringing internet to the wall and making it available in the home to saying look, we've got to actually really control the coverage of that WiFi in the home and make sure that it reaches all the corners of the home but then also providing the control that people want of the devices in there we know that for power users we're seeing today, 20 connected devices on the home network. And I know my house, I'm up to 50, right? And I think what customers don't have and don't want is an IT person directly in their home. They want it to just work naturally and easily. >> Right. >> And so one measurement of success that I know is how often my mother in law gives me a call saying, "Hey, Preston, yeah, this thing's not working in my house." It's got to be really easy and straightforward. >> Right and then just in terms of just being a backhauler and the internet traffic that you guys are hearing because all those connected device or your kids devices, they all want 4k streaming, they're watching movies, you know, come down and watch TV on the big screen, no, no, no, you know, I'm watching it in the room. How does that kind of change the way you guys think about delivering bandwidth cause 4K is a lot more, go to NAB, you're just going to soon be 8K's and 12K's and all kinds of crazy stuff. So your role in actually just delivering bandwidth has changed significantly over the last over a year. >> Absolutely, I mean, there was a stat on bandwidth that surprised me even just to look at it, which is in, in the last 18 years, Comcast has increased bandwidth 17 times. And it's just every, you know, we just keep increasing that because the demand is there, you know, 4K takes, you know, more than your 1080p then did your SD and the more streaming that's happening, it's just, it's requiring more bandwidth, so we're happy to provide that. You know, we now offer one gig internet across all of our homes, we reached 56 million homes, I think it's the most in the United States as far as one gig availability. And so regardless of how much bandwidth you want to take, we're going to bring that to you. And I think recognizing that we also need that coverage in the home and out of the home through Xfinity WiFi hotspots, just trying to bring that there. But you mentioned kids too, I wanted to build on that which is, you know, I'm a parent and being able to control how and where my kids go in the internet is important. And so, you know, being able to put limits, whether it's bed time limits on their devices or we've recently introduced in our testing app base limits. So you could say they can't use Instagram or they can only use it 30 minutes a day. And so being able to have that kind of control puts you in the driver's seat as the parent of kids in the home. >> Preston, I think you're going to be busy for a little while here at the innovations center. >> We are for sure. >> All right, well, thanks for spending a few minutes we could talk all day but we'll have to leave it there. >> All right, thanks Jeff. >> Thanks a lot. He's Preston, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (distinct music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back, everyone, we're your live coverage with the Cube here in San Francisco for Google Cloud Next 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. I've got two great guests here from Google. Guemmy Kim, who's a group product manager for Google, Google Security Access and Christiaan Brand, Product Manager at Google. Talking about the security key, fallen as your security key and security in general. Thanks for joining us. >> Of course, thanks for having us. >> So, actually security's the hottest topic in Cloud and any world these days, but you guys have innovation and news, so first let's get the news out of the way. All the work, giz, mottos, all of the blogs have picked it up. >> [Christiaan Brand] Right. >> Security key, titan, tell us. >> [Christiaan Brand] Okay, sure. Uh, high votes on Christiaan. So uh, last year and next we introduced the Titan Security Key which is the strongest form of multifactor certification we offer at Google. Uh, this little kind of gizmo protects you against most of the common phishing threats online. We think that's the number one problem these days. About 81% of account breaches was as a result of phishing or bad passwords. So passwords are really becoming a problem. This old man stat uh making sure that not only do you enter your password, you also need to present this little thing at the point in time when you're logging in. But it does something more, this also makes sure that you're interacting with a legitimate website at the point in time when you're trying to log in. Easy for users to fool victim to phishing, because the site looks legitimate, you enter your username and password, bad guy gets all of it. Security key makes sure that you're interacting with a legitimate website and it will not give away it's secrets, without that assurance that you're not interacting with a phishing website. >> [Christiaan Brand] News this week though is saying that these things are really cool and we recommend users use them. Uh, especially if you're like a high-risk individual or maybe an enterprise user or acts sensitive data you know Google call admin. But what we're really doing this week is we are saying "okay this is cool" but the convenience aspect has been a bit lacking right? Uh, I have to carry this with me if I want to sign in. This week we are saying this mobile phone, now also does the exact same thing as the Security Key. Gives you that level of assurance, making sure you're not interacting with the phishing website and the way we do that is by establishing a local Bluetooth link between the device you're signing in on and the mobile phone. It works on any Android N so Android 7 and later devices this week. Uh and essentially all you need is a Google account and a device with Bluetooth capability to make that work. >> Alright, so, we come to a show like this and a lot of people we geek out as like okay what are the security places that we are going to button, the cloud, and all of these environments. We are actually going to talk about something that I think most people understand is okay I don't care what policies and software you put in place, but the actual person actually needs to be responsible and did you think about things? Explain a little bit what you do, and the security pieces that you know individuals need to be thinking about and how you help them and recommend for them that they can be more secure. >> In general, yeah, I think one of the things that we see from talking to real users and customers is that people tend to underestimate the risks that they are under. And so, we've talked to people like people in the admin space or people who are in the political space and other customers of Google cloud. And they are like, why do I even need to protect my account? And like, we actually had to go and do a lot of education to actually show them that they're actually in much higher risk than they think they are. One of the things that we've seen over time, is phishing obviously is one of the most effective ways that people's accounts get compromised and you have over 70% of organizations saying that they have been victims of phishing in the last year. Then the question is, how do we actually then reduce the phishing that's happening? Because at the end of the day, the humans that are in your organization are going to be your weakest link. And over time, I think that the phishers do recognize that and they'll employ very sophisticated techniques and to try to do that. And so what we tried to do on our end is what can we do on from an algorithmic and automatic and machine side to actually catch things that human eye can't catch and Security Key is definitely one of those things. Also employed with a bunch of other like anti-phishing, anti-spear phishing type things that we will do as well. >> This is important because one of the big cloud admin problems has been human misconfiguration. >> Yeah. >> And we've seen that a lot on Amazon S3 Buckets, and they now passed practices for that but this has become just a human problem. Talk about what you guys are doing to help solve that because if I got router, server access I can't, I don't want to be sharing passwords, that's kind of of a past practices but what other tech can I put in place? What are you guys offering to give me some confidence if I'm going to be using Google cloud. >> Yeah well, I think one of the things is that as much as you can educate your workforce to do the right things like do they recognize phishing emails? Do they recognize that uh, you know this email that is coming from somebody who claims is the CEO, isn't and some of these other techniques people are using. Uh again, like there's human fallacy, there's also things that are just impossible for humans to detect. But fortunately, especially with our Cloud Services, we have very advanced techniques that administrators can actually turn on and enforce for all of the users. And this includes everything from advanced, you know malware and phishing detection techniques to things like enforcing security keys across your organization. And so we're giving administrators that power to actually say, it's not actually up to individual users, I'm actually going to put on these much stronger controls and make it available to everybody at my organization. >> And you guys see a lot of data so you have a lot of collective intelligence across a lot of signals. I mean spear phishing is the worst, it's like phishing is hard to solve. >> [Christiaan Brand] If you think about we have a demo over here just a couple of steps to the right here uh, where we take users through kind of what phishing looks like. Uh, we say that over 99.99% of kind of those types of attack will never even make it through right? The problem is spear phishing as you said, when someone is targeting a specific individual at one company. At that point, we might have not seen those signals before uh that's really where something like a Security Key kind of comes in. >> That's totally right. >> [Christiaan Brand] At that very last line of defense and that's basically what we are targeting here that .1% of users. >> Spear phishing is the most effective because it's highly targeted, no patter recognition. >> Yeah >> So question, one of the things I like we are talking about here is we need to make it easier for users to stay secure. You see, too often, it's like we have all these policies in place and use the VPN and it's like uh forget it, I'm going to use my second phone or log in over here or let me take my files over here and work on them over here and oh my gosh I've just bypassed all of the policy we put in place because you know, how do you just fundamentally think about the product needs to be simple, and it needs to be what the user needs not just the corporate security mandate? >> Yeah, I mean that's a great question. At Google we actually try a nearly completely different way of like kind of access to organizational networks. Like, for example Google kind of deprecated the VPN. Right? So for our employees if we want to access data uh on the company network, we don't use VPNs anymore we have something called kind of BeyondCorp that's like more of a kind of overarching principle than a specific technology. Although we see a lot of companies, even at the show this year that doing kind of technology and product based on that principle of zero trust or BeyondCorp. That makes it really easy for users to interact with services wherever they are and it's all based on trust on the endpoint rather than trust on the network, right? What we've seen is data breaches and things happen you know? Malicious software crawls into a network and from that point it has access to all of the crown jewels. What we are trying to say is like nowhere in being at a privilege point in the network gives you any elevated access. The elevated access is in the context that your device has, the fact that is has a screen lock, the fact that it's maybe issued by your corporation, the fact that it's approved, I don't know, the fact that is has drive instruction turned on, uh you know it's coming from a certain you know location. Those are all kind of contextual signals that we use to make up this uh, you know, our installation of BeyondCorp. This is being offered to customers today, Security Keys again, plays a vital part in all of that. Uh, you know there's trust in the end point, but there's also trust in authentication. If the user is really who they say they are, uh and this kind of gives us that elevated level of trust. >> I think this is a modern approach, that I think is worth highlighting because the old days we had a parameter, access methods were simply, you know, access servers authenticated in and you're in. But you nailed, I think the key point which is: If you don't trust anything and you just say everything is not trustworthy, you need multi-factor authentication. Now, this is the big topic in the industry because architecturally you have to be set up for it, culturally you got to buy into it. So kind of two dimensions of complexity, plus you're going down a whole new road. So you guys must do a lot more than just two factor, three factor, you got to imbed it into the phone. It could be facial recognition, it could be your patterns. So talk about what MFA, Multi-factor Authentication, how's it evolving and how fast is MFA evolving? >> Well, I think the point that you brought up earlier, that it actually has to be usable. And when I look at usability, it has to work for both your end users as well as the idea administrators who are uh putting these on for the systems and we look at both. Uh, so that's actually why we are very excited about things like the built in security key that's on your phone that we launched because it actually is that step to saying how can you take the phone that you already have that users are already familiar using, and then put it into this technology that's like super secure and that most users weren't familiar with before. And so it's concepts like that were we try to merry. Uh, that being said, we've also developed other kind of second factors specific for enterprises in the last year. For example, we are looking at things like your employee ID, like how can an organization actually use that were an outside attacker doesn't have access to that kind of information and it helps to keep you secure. So we are constantly looking at, especially for enterprises, like how do we actually do more and more things that are tailored for usability for both support cause, for the IT organization, as well as the end users themselves. >> Maybe just to add to that, I think the technology, security keys, even in the way that it's being configured today which is built into your phone, that's going into the right direction, it's making things easier. But, I think we still think there's a lot that can be done uh to really bring this technology to the end consumer at some point. So, we kind of have our own interval roadmap, we are working towards in making it even easier. So hopefully, by the time we sit here next year, we can share some more innovations on how this has just become part of everyday life for most users, without them really realizing it. >> More aware of all brain waves, whatever. >> Full story. Yup, yup, yup. >> One of the things that really I think struck a cord with a lot of people in the Keynote was Google Cloud's policy on privacy. Talk about, you on your data, we don't uh you know, some might look and say well uh I'm familiar with some of the consumer you know, ads and search and things like that. And if I think about the discussion of security as a corporate employee is oh my gosh they're going to track everything I am doing, and monitoring everything I need to have my privacy but I still want to be secure. How do you strike that balance and product and working with customers to make sure that they're not living in some authoritarian state, where every second they're monitored? >> That's a good question. Kim if you want to take that, if not I'm happy to do. >> Go ahead. >> Alright, so that is a great question. And I think this year we've really try to emphasize that point and take it home. Google has a big advertising business as everyone knows. We are trying to make the point this year, to say that these two things are separate. If you bring your data to Google Cloud, it's your data, you put that in there. The only way that data would kind of be I guess used is with the terms of service that you signed up for. And those terms of service states: it's your data, it'll be access the way that you want it to be access. And we are going one step further with access transparency this year alright. We have known something where we say well even if a Google user or Googler or Google employee needs access to that data on your behalf, lets say you have a problem with storage buckets, right, something is corrupted. You call uh support and say hey please help me fix this. There will be a near real time log that you can look at which will tell you every single access and basically this is the technology uh we've had in production for quite some time internally at Google. If someone needs to look... >> Look at the data. >> Right, exactly right if I need to look at some you know customers data, because they followed the ticket and there's some problem. These things are stringently long, access is extremely oriented, it's not that someone can just go in and look at data anywhere and the same thing applies to Cloud. It has always applied to Cloud but this year we are exposing that to the user in these kind of transparency reports making sure that the user is absolutely aware of who's accessing their data and for which reason. >> And that's a trust issue as well, it's not just using the check and giving them the benefit... >> [Christiaan Brand] Absolutely. >> But it's basically giving them a trust equation saying look they'll be no God handle access... >> Right, right, exactly. >> You heard with Uber and these other stories that are on the web, and that's huge for you guys. I mean internally just you guys are hardcore on this and you hear this all the time. >> Yeah uh >> Separate building, Sunnyvale... >> No, not separate building. But you know uh, so I've worked in privacy as well for a number of years and I'm actually very proud like as a company I feel like we actually have pushed the floor front on how privacy principles actually should be applied to the technology uh and for examples we have been working very collaboratively with regulators around the world, cause their interest is in protecting the businesses and the citizens kind of for their various countries. And uh we definitely have a commitment to make sure that you know, whether it's organization's or individuals like their privacy actually is protected, the data is secure, and certainly the whole process of how we develop products at Google like there's definitely privacy checkpoints in place so that we're doing the right thing with that data. >> Yeah, I can say I've been following Google for a long time. You guys sometimes got a bad rep because it's easy to attack Google and you guys to a great job with privacy. You pay attention to it and you have the technology, you don't just kind of talk about it. You actually implement it and you dog food it as to or you eat and drink your own champagne. I mean that's how bore became, started became Kubernetes you know? And Spanner was internal first and then became out here. This is the trend that Google, the same trend that you guys are doing with the phones, testing it out internally to see if it works. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Absolutely right, so Security Keys will start there like we uh Krebs published an article last year, just before the event saying we had zero incidents of possible phishers with Googlers since they deploying the technology. We had this inside Google for a long time, and it was kind of born out of necessity, right. We knew there was positive phishing was a problem, even Googlers fall for this kind of thing. It's impossible to train your users not to fall for this type of scam, it just is right. We can view any location all we want, but in the end like we need technology to better protect the user, even your employees. So that's were we started deploying this technology, then we said we want to go one step further. We want to kind of implement this on the mobile phone, so we've been testing this technology internally uh for quite a few months. Uh, kind of making sure that things are shaping out. We released this new beta this week uh so it's not a J product quite yet. Uh, you know as you know there is Bluetooth, there is Chrome, there is Android, there's quite a few things involved. Android Ecosystem is kind of a little bit fragmented, right, there is many OEMs. We want to make this technology available to everyone, everyone who has an Android phone, so we are kind of working on the last little things but we think the technology is in a pretty good place after doing this "drinking of champagne." >> So it's got to be bulletproof. So now, on the current news just to get back to the current news, the phone, the Android phone that has a security key is available or is it data that is available? >> [Christiaan Brand] So it's interesting. In on the Cloud side, the way that we normally launch products there is we do an alpha, which is kind of like a closed liked selection. The moment that we move and do beta, beta is open, anyone can deploy it but it has certain like terms of service limitation and other things. Which says hey don't rely on this as your sole way of accessing an account. For example, if you happening to try and sign in on a device that doesn't have Bluetooth the technology clearly will not work. So we're saying please make sure you have a backup, please keep a physical security key for the time being. But start using this technology, we think for the most popular platforms it should be well shaken out. But beta is more of a designation that we kind of reserve for saying we're starting... >> You're setting expectations. >> But also, one thing I want to clarify that just because it's in beta it doesn't mean it less secure. The worst thing that will happen is that you can be locked out of your account because you know, the Bluetooth could fail to communicate or other things like that. So I want to assure people, even though it's beta you can use it, your account is secure. >> Google has the beta kind of uh which means you either take it out to a select group of people or set expectations on terms of service. >> Right. >> Just to kind of keep an eye on it. But just to clarify, which phones again are available for the Android? >> [Christiaan Brand] Uh, we wanted to make sure that we cover as large a population as possible, so we kind of have to look at the trade offs, you know at which point in time we make this available going forward. Uh, we wanted to make sure that we cover more than 50% of the Android devices out there today. That level that we wanted to reach, kind of coincided with the Android 7, Android Nougat, is kind of the line that we've drawn. Anything Android 7 and above, it doesn't have to be a Pixel phone, it doesn't have to a Nexus phone, it doesn't have to a Samsung phone, any phone 7 and up should work with the technology. Uh and there's a little special treat for folks that have a Pixel 3 as you alluded to earlier we have the Titan M chip that we announced last year in Pixel. There we actually make use of this cryptographic chip but on other devices you have the same technology and you have the same assurance. >> Well certainly an exciting area both on from a device standpoint, everybody loves to geek out on the new phones as Google I know is coming up I'm sure it'll be a fun time to talk about that. But overall, on Cloud security is number one, access, human, errors, fixing those, automating, a very important area. So we're going to be keeping track of what's going on, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> And sharing your insight, I appreciate it. >> Of course, thanks for having us. >> Okay, live Cube coverage here in San Francisco. More after this short break. Here Day 3 of 3 days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman, stay with us, we'll be back after this short break. (energetic music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. We are in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And we have a couple of guests joining us now from the A-Team, cue the music rights too. We've got Phoebe Goh, Cloud architect from NetApp, and we've got Paul Stringfellow, one of our CUBE alumni, technical director of Gardner Systems, one of NetApp's partners. Guys thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. >> You're welcome. >> In your matching outfits! >> Thank you for having us. >> So first of all, this morning, before the general session started, I saw both of you on camera talking a little bit about the A-Team. For our audience who might not be familiar with that, I know it's been around for five years. Phoebe, talk to us a little bit about the A-Team, who composes it, obviously we've got a channel partner, it's not just NetAppians, but give our viewers a little bit of an overview of the A-Team. >> NetApp really appreciates our advocates from channel partners and also from our customers. We really love hearing from them, and we also love giving them back information about what we do, and where we're going with our vision and our strategy. So, we have channel partners on the A-Team as well as customers, and technical advisors from NetApp, such as myself, and we get together every now and then at events like Insight, and we also bring them to Sunnyvale where they are given some information about what's coming up with our strategy. >> And this is a small group of about maybe 30 people. Paul how long have you been part of the A-Team, and what has that, what you have learned from some of the other folks that are on that team? >> It's a great question, I've been a part of the team for three years, and it's kind of a symbiotic relationship almost in that it kind of works both ways. I think there's lots of value for NetApp in the partnership, in that they get to hear kind of from channel partners on the street, about what people actually think of their technology. It also works in that we get to see quite a lot of pre-release information, and it gives us the opportunity to feed back to NetApp directly from the things that we see out in the channel about what customers actually want, and then we can feed that back into NetApp, and we've seen over kind of the five years of the team, we've seen product strategies change, we've seen new products come to market, because of that direct feedback. And then from our side, when we talk to our customers, there's real value in being able to say that we've got that direct relationship with NetApp, we've got that access to their executives, and access to their research team. It works really well both ways for us. >> In the keynote this morning, we heard George Kurian talk about digital transformation, and one of those pieces is that hybrid multi cloud is the defacto IT architecture, Paul I would love to get your feedback as a channel partner, what this kind of hybrid multi cloud means to your customers, means to your business. >> So I think the idea of hybrid I think, it's different for a lot of people, so in lots of cases, hybrid for some organizations may be that their entire data center remains on prem within their own walls, however they might be using a software service, an Office 365, they may be using a Dropbox, and I don't think kind of the definition that George was talking about this morning when he talked about hybrid cloud. My little take on what George talked about as well with hybrid cloud , I think he's understanding that it exists, understand that public cloud is a thing, that the Azures, that the AWSs, the Googles, play a part in a way that some organizations are working. That's not necessarily the way your organization wants to work, so understanding that it's there, designing an architecture that recognizes that, and makes sure that if you ever want to use those kind of services in the future, that you'll be able to do so, but it's equally valid to say, actually, public cloud isn't for us. As long as you make that as a decision, and don't just fall into it because you've not really thought about it, that's a perfectly valid strategy. >> I really agree with what you were saying. So often when we talk about hybrid and multi-cloud, we're talking about infrastructure. >> Paul: Yep. >> And there's more than just infrastructure, a thing that I've been saying for a few years, let's follow the applications, and even more importantly, let's follow the data. I love we get some international viewpoints here because sometimes North America, it's like oh let's talk only about public cloud and seems to be kind of a monolithic thing. Phoebe, I would love to get your viewpoint, what are you hearing from customers when they talk about cloud, what does that mean for them, and how's NetApp and NetApp's channel partners helping them sort through this new future? >> Definitely, our customers and our channel partners are talking a lot about cloud, creating, adding agility to their business, allowing them to move faster, and to be more flexible, and what NetApp is looking to do is really enable that and speed that up for, no matter where you are in the globe, whether you're in Australia, or in America, or in Europe, that you can achieve those business outcomes that you really want, and we know that the cloud is going to help us get there, so we really want to help them use the data the best ways, and use the technology that makes sense for the business to be able to get to public cloud. >> How are you hearing, a lot of the messaging coming out, NetApp is data driven, it's the data authority, lot of transformation that NetApp's undergone in its 26 year history, I'd love to get your both of your perspectives before we wrap here about how are customers embracing that as looking to NetApp and its ecosystem partners to help them embrace this hybrid multi-cloud environment in which they live, and look at NetApp as part of their core cloud strategy, rather than data management storage? >> I'm actually really excited about this because I love collaborating and talking our customers and our partners, and what I find is that they're coming to us and saying, "Wow, we didn't know you guys did that, and "you're not even, you're not selling us something, you're "really helping us get there." We're having a conversation about how we can really get there, get to their business outcomes, rather than trying to push a product, where I find that we get to have really collaborative conversations, Paul? >> Actually, I couldn't agree more, I think that what data fabric, what this kind of hybrid cloud model means to our customers, is it opens up a much wider conversation. We're not having a conversation about storage, we're not talking to a partner saying, would you like to buy some NetApp, as a customer, because that can be, that's a yes no, I use something else, I'm not interested in NetApp or I'd love to buy some NetApp. Actually, if we can have a data conversation that talks about how do you want to use this, what are the business outcomes that you'd like to achieve, what is it you are trying to do as a business, let's help data be part of that transformation. >> Guys, thanks so much for stopping by having a quick convo, especially Phoebe since you've been in Vegas for four days already, and your voice is hanging on by a thread. Paul, Phoebe, thanks so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, pleasure, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, from Las Vegas NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic music)

[Narrator] From Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Accelerate Your Journey to AI, brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to a great conversation here from NetApp's Data Visionary Center. Specifically, we've got Monty Barlow from Cambridge Consultants. Monty is the head of Artificial Intelligence at a relatively well-known, august, consultant group. Monty, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, Peter. Pleased to be here. >> Monty, what we're going to do is we're going to spend a number of minutes talking about some of the trends and transformations that are being made by and wrought by AI. But let's start, what is Cambridge Consultants? >> So, Cambridge Consultants does technology, product, and service development for customers all across the world. Probably about 400 new projects starting each year. And what's a common thread in them is that they're technically difficult and innovative, so there's something really challenging about them they're typically strategic for our customers, and they're looking to do something disruptive and do it fast. >> So, you have a pretty broad range of customers that you're utilizing or you're working with. Let's ask the question then, give us some examples of some of the customer cases that you've been working on, specifically as it relates to AI. >> Sure, so we're working with everything from blue chips to startups, and what they're looking for is slightly different from AI. I can't talk about some of the confidential details but some really interesting applications, for example, one for me, is precision agriculture. We've heard a lot about improving crop yield, but we're reaching the point now where you can drive over a crop and recognize it from a weed and put water on just the crop and pesticide on just the weed, so you get a much better yield, you cut down on water, you cut down on pesticide, and it's a really nice application where it's a win-win for everything. >> So, as we think about some of these big issues associated with inventing technology and inventing AI-related stuff to do many of the things we're talking about, we also have to recognize that there's a social side of introducing AI. There's the invention and then there's the innovative side, which is in many respects the social things. How do you get people to adopt this stuff? What are the challenges that you're seeing customers face as they conceive how best to adopt AI and AI-related capabilities within markets? >> Sure. I think in most of the markets we work in, the benefits are becoming so clear that there's not a massive reluctance to adopt or difficulty. There's obviously in the public, those normal fears about loss of jobs, or safety or security, having machines do jobs for you that you might wish a person to do for you. And those are there in some markets like healthcare, in particular, but many markets see no such problems and the benefits of being able to do innovative things scaleably, flexibly, out performing humans in many cases, it just makes economic sense. >> So, is it just the numbers? Is that what big companies are doing to ensure more rapid time to value for AI related things, or are there other things big companies are doing to try to facilitate the introduction of some of these advanced technologies? >> It depends from company to company, there's all sorts of ways they're approaching this. Maybe trialing early services that introduce people gently to AI, get them accustomed to it, of course, that's what's been the case for social media. None of us believed we were using AI in the early days and then suddenly we realized that we're interacting with it on an almost daily basis. Through to targeted trials, all sorts of different approaches being taken. >> AI's been associated with a lot of different algorithmic forms. It's been a lot of different basic models for thinking about how you do it. Machine learning, deep learning, predictive analysis, recommendation analysis. What's the difference particularly between AI, machine learning, ML and deep learning, DL? >> OK, if I could take a step back for a moment, we've been working with AI for decades, and as you say, there's some really quite old school techniques out there. Decision support, expert systems, where the idea was that you embody the coder's, the programmer's knowledge in a system, and really, all it could do is replay that. So, at best it could act as well as the person who programmed it. >> Very rules-driven. >> Very, very rules-driven. We then, in the early 2000s, saw machine learning beginning to surface more, that's where a system learns, perhaps a few parameters from some data it does learn by itself, but it's doing something quite simple, you know it's from the vibrations in the road, counting the axles of the vehicles going past. Or in an industrial process monitoring temperature, pressure, and saying, "This process is going well." >> But not rules-driven, still data-driven? >> Data-driven. Deep learning just takes, that to a whole new scale. It is still machines learning from data but now a few parameters has become millions or billions. You can now point a camera at a road and recognize all of the different vehicle types, instead of just how many axles they've got, for example. >> And so, the notion of that is that it's a focus on patterns that it discovers out of the data, as opposed to rules or patterns that are put into the data by a developer or by a data person. >> Absolutely, you don't always know what insight you're going to derive from a data set. >> So, I understand that Cambridge Consultants uses a variety of technologies, but specifically, you're utilizing this NetApp and NVIDIA gear in your labs. Talk a little about that experience, how's that been? >> Sure. So, time is everything for us as a business, and for our customers. People want to be first to a particular market window and this AI is still at some level, experimental. We don't know what it's going to do in three or five years time. So, key to our business is a fast turnaround on proof of concepts, how would this work? What would happen? Perhaps our customer's got some data and they need to know if they need a trial to collect more. So, getting through jobs quickly is what matters most to us, and that's what the NVIDIA and NetApp equipment is all about. For GPUs, its the case of big parallel processing large models, crunching the numbers and adjusting the parameters quickly, but equally important is the ability to get data from storage into those GPUs, quickly. >> And so, there is a relationship between the characteristics of the hardware and the success of the AI efforts? >> Absolutely. And it's a really demanding application for file serving. It's the most demanding we've ever seen because it's potentially millions or billions of tiny files that have to be called up in different patterns, quite randomly, it's not just like for example, streaming video, it's too much to cache locally. You need really high performance equipment to manage the data quickly enough that you can learn something in days, and not in months. >> One of the crucial features of any AI development effort is this notion of a data pipeline. How you stage change to the data, where it is, knowing how to move it, when to move it, do it with speed, do it at scale. Talk a little bit about the differences between AI-driven data pipelines and some of the other data pipelines that have been out there. >> Sure. The difference we tend to see on AI is it's touching the real world more directly. So, you may have data coming in live from the edge, from sensors, and that's not as carefully clean, sanitized, formatted as you might expect in a normal, say, enterprise database or data application. So, knowing what to do with those difficult cases, how to format it, what to reject, what to feed in, and then at the other end, how to present that decision, because AI is often making some form of decision, how to present that efficiently back to humans or how to make a quick sensible decision based on that, how to steer the vehicle in the correct direction, how to highlight a cancer, whatever it is we're doing. That pipeline from data first coming in through intelligence and back again to the real world is longer and more complicated and sophisticated than any other data pipeline we've seen before. >> Now, it's that sophistication, that length, the duration of the transactions, for example, that increases the complexity, that ultimately, big companies working with Cambridge Consultants and others, have to address so that they can be successful, get that time to value. But as you think about ultimately the challenges that you're trying to address with customers, what is that you're seeing in their AI projects that are more consistently associated with success, or more, unfortunately, perhaps, consistently associated with having to do it again? >> Sure, I'll limit my answer to those I feel who are doing genuine AI because there is an element of people labeling anything AI. But assuming they are doing something that's only been possible in the last few years that is innovative, difficult and complicated, it's really reaching the right distance. It's stretching themselves the correct amount. So, going into a new market, with new data, a new algorithmic approach is dangerous. There'll be a lot of iteration, a lot of learning needed before that'll come good. If you can take an approach that's beginning to work in one vertical to another, or you can start with data you understand and know perhaps from a previous big data application and start to do more intelligent things with it, then you can achieve these kind of breakthrough innovations and really impressive systems that AI can today. >> So, novel data, practiced algorithms and hardware that works. >> And don't mix up too many new factors together, absolutely. >> Monty Barlow, head of Artificial Intelligence at Cambridge Consultants, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Sunnyvale California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering, Accelerate Your Journey to AI, Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, welcome to another conversation here from the Data Visionary Center at NetApp's headquarters in beautiful Sunnyvale California. I'm being joined today by Santosh Rao. Santosh is the Senior Technical Director at NetApp, Specifically Santosh we're going to talk about some of the challenges and opportunities associated with AI and how NetApp is making that possible. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, I'm excited to be here. Thank you for that. >> So, Santosh what is your role at Netapp? Why don't we start there. >> Wonderful, glad to be here, my name is Santosh Rao, I'm a Senior Technical Director at NetApp, part of the Product Operations group, and I've been here 10 years. My role is to drive up new lines of opportunity for NetApp, build up new product businesses. The most recent one has been AI. So I've been focused on bootstrapping and incubating the AI effort at NetApp for the last nine months now. Been excited to be part of this effort now. >> So nine months of talking, both internally, but spending time with customers too. What are customers telling you that are NetApp's opportunities, and what NetApp has to do to respond to those opportunities? >> That's a great question. We are seeing a lot of focus around expanding the digital transformation to really get value out of the data, and start looking at AI, and Deep Learning in particular, as a way to prove the ROI on the opportunities that they've had. AI and deep learning requires a tremendous amount of data. We're actually fascinated to see the amount of data sets that customers are starting to look at. A petabyte of data is sort of the minimum size of data set. So when you think about petabyte-scale data lakes. The first think you want to think about is how do you optimize the TCO for the solution. NetApp is seen as a leader in that, just because of our rich heritage of storage efficiency. A lot of these are video image and audio files, and so you're seeing a lot of unstructured data in general, and we're a leader in NFS as well. So a lot of that starts to come together from a NetApp perspective. And that's where customers see us as the leader in NFS, the leader in files, and the leader in storage efficiency, all coming together. >> And you want to join that together with some leadership, especially in GPU's, so that leads to NVIDIA. So you've announced an interesting partnership between NetApp and NVIDIA. How did that factor into your products, and where do you think that goes? >> It's kind of interesting how that came about, because when you look at the industry it's a small place. Some of the folks driving the NVIDIA leadership have been working with us in the past, when we've bootstrapped converged infrastructures with other vendors. We're known to have been a 10 year metro vendor in the converged infrastructure space. The way this came about was NVIDIA is clearly a leader in the GPU and AI acceleration from a computer perspective. But they're also seen as a long history of GPU virtualization and GPU graphics acceleration. When they look at NetApp, what NetApp brings to NVIDIA is just the converged infrastructure, the maturity of that solution, the depth that we have in the enterprise and the rich partner ecosystem. All of that starts to come together, and some of the players in this particular case, have had aligned in the past working on virtualization based conversion infrastructures in the past. It's an exciting time, we're really looking forward to working closely with NVIDIA. >> So NVIDIA brings these lighting fast machines, optimized for some of the new data types, data forms, data structures associated with AI. But they got to be fed, got to get the data to them. What is NetApp doing from a standpoint of the underlying hardware to improve the overall performance, and insure that these solutions really scream for customers? >> Yeah, it's kind of interesting, because when you look at how customers are designing this. They're thinking about digital transformation as, "What is the flow of that data? "What am I doing to create new sensors "and endpoints that create data? "How do I flow the data in? "How do I forecast how much data I'm going to "create quarter over quarter, year over year? "How many endpoints? what is the resolution of the data?" And then as that starts to come into the data center, they got to think about, where are the bottlenecks. So you start looking at a wide range of bottlenecks. You look at the edge data aggregation, then you start looking at network bandwidth to push data into the core data centers. You got to think smart about some of these things. For example, no matter how much network bandwidth you throw at it, you want to reduce the amount of data you're moving. Smart data movement technologies like SnapMirror, which NetApp brings to the table, are some things that we uniquely enable compared to others. The fact of the matter is when you take a common operating system, like ONTAP, and you can lear it across the Edge, Core and Cloud, that gives us some unnatural advantages. We can do things that you can't do in a silo. You've got a commodities server trying to push data, and having to do raw full copies of data into the data center. So we think smart data movement is a huge opportunity. When you look at the core, obviously it's a workhorse, and you've got the random sampling of data into this hardware. And we think the A800 is a workhorse built for AI. It is a best of a system in terms of performance, it does about 25 gigabytes per second just on a dual controller pair. You'll recall that we spent several number of years building out the foundation of Clustered ONTAP to allow us to scale to gigantic sizes. So 24 node or 12 controller pad A800 gets us to over 300 gigabytes per second, and over 11 million IOPS if you think about that. That's over about four to six times greater than anybody else in the industry. So when you think about NVIDIA investment in DGX and they're performance investment they've made there. We think only NetApp can keep up with that, in terms of performance. >> So 11 million IOPS, phenomenal performance for today. But the future is going to demand ever more. Where do you think these trends go? >> Well nobody really knows for sure. The most exciting part of this journey, is nobody knows where this is going. This is where you need to future proof customers, and you need to enable the technology to have sufficient legs, and the architecture to have sufficient legs. That no matter how it evolves and where customers go, the vendors working with customers can go there with them. And actually when customers look at NetApp and say, "You guys are working with the Cloud partners, "you're now working with NVIDIA. "And in the past you worked with a "variety of data source vendors. "So we think we can work with NetApp because, "you're not affiliated to any one of them, "and yet you're giving us that full range of solutions." So we think that performance is going to be key. Acceleration of compute workloads is going to demand orders of magnitude performance improvement. We think data set efficiencies and storage efficiencies is absolutely key. And we think you got to really look at PCO, because customers want to build these great solutions for the business, but they can't afford it unless vendors give them viable options. So it's really up to partners like NVIDIA and NetApp to work together to give customers the best of breed solutions that reduce the TCO, accelerate compute, accelerate the data pipeline, and yet, bring the cost of the overall solution down, and make it simple to deploy and pre integrated. These are the things customers are looking for and we think we have the best bet at getting there. >> So that leads to... Great summary, but that leads to some interesting observations on what customers should be basing their decisions on. What would you say are the two or three most crucial things that customers need to think about right now as a conceptualized, where to go with their AI application, or AI workloads, their AI projects and initiatives? >> So when customers are designing and building these solutions, they're thinking the entire data lifecycle. "How am I getting this new type of "data for digital transformation? "What is the ingestion architecture? "What are my data aggregation endpoints for ingestion? "How am I going to build out my AI data sources? "What are the types of data? "Am I collecting sensor data? Is it a variety of images? "Am I going to add in audio transcription? "Is there video feeds that come in over time?" So customers are having to think about the entire digital experience, the types of data, because that leads to the selection of data sources. For example, if you're going to be learning sensor data, you want to be looking at maybe graph databases. If you want to be learning log data, you're going to be looking at log analytics over time, as well as AI. You're going to look at video image and audio accordingly. Architecting these solutions requires an understanding of, what is your digital experience? How does that evolve over time? What is the right and optimal data source to learn that data, so that you get the best experience from a search, from an indexing, from a tiering, from analytics and AI? And then, what is the flow of that data? And how do you architect it for a global experience? How do you build out these data centers where you're not having to copy all data maybe, into your global headquarters. If you're a global company with presence across multiple Geo's, how do you architect for regional data centers to be self contained? Because we're looking at exabyte scale opportunities in some of these. I think that's pretty much the two or three things that I'd say, across the entire gamut of space here. >> Excellent, turning that then into some simple observations about the fact that data still is physical. There's latency issues, there's the cost of bandwidth issues. There's other types of issues. This notion of Edge, Core, Cloud. How do you see the ONTAP operating system, the ONTAP product set, facilitating being able to put data where it needs to be, while at the same time creating the options that a customer needs to use data as they need to use it? >> The fact of the matter is, these things cannot be achieved overnight. It takes a certain amount of foundational work, that, frankly, takes several years. The fact that ONTAP can run on small, form factor hardware at the edge is a journey that we started several years ago. The fact that ONTAP can run on commodity white box hardware, has been a journey that we have run over the last three, four years. Same thing in the Cloud, we have virtualized ONTAP to the point that it can run on all hyperscalers and now we are in the process of consuming ONTAP as a service, where you don't even know that it is an infrastructure product, or has been. So the process of building an Edge, Core, and Cloud data pipeline leverages the investments that we've made over time. When you think about the scale of compute, data and performance needed, that's a five to six year journey in Clustered ONTAP, if you look at NetApp's past. These are all elements that are coming together from a product and solution perspective. But the reality is that leveraging years and years of investment that NetApp engineering has made. In a a way that the industry really did not invest in the same areas. So when we compare and contrast what NetApp has done versus the rest of the industry. At a time when people were building monolithic engineered systems, we were building software defined architectures. At a time when they were building tightly cobbled system for traditional enterprise, we were building flexible, scale out systems, that assumed that you would want to scale in modular increments. Now as the world has shifted from enterprise into third platform and Webscale. We're finding all those investments NetApp made over the years is really starting to pay off for us. >> Including some of the investments in how AI can be used to handle how ONTAP operates at each of those different levels of scale. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Sontash Rao, Technical Director at NetApp, talking about AI, some of the new changes in the relationships between AI and storage. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it.

>> From Sunnyvale, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Accelerate Your Journey to AI. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris with Wikibon and theCUBE and we're broadcasting from theCUBE here from NetApp's data visionary center today. We've got a number of great conversations with some NetApp executives, specifically about the role that NetApp and AI are going to play together as the market evolves. And we're joined first by Jean English, who's a Senior Vice President and CMO of NetApp. Jean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great, thanks Peter, nice to see you again. >> Lot of great stuff to talk about, Jean, so let's start with this interesting relationship, NetApp, AI, the centerpiece of it is data. >> Yes. >> What does that mean? >> Absolutely. Well I think just to start, technology is changing everyday lives. Digital transformation really tops the strategic agenda of most CEOs today. When you think about what does that mean in terms of data, data is the lifeblood of an organization. And it has to really be able to seamlessly flow through that organization to really add value. So we think of data as the heart, and when we think about data and AI, we want to accelerate the journey to AI. But to do that, you have to be able to holistically manage your data. >> So as we think about the need to manage data, that says that there's a number of challenges that customers face. You have to be able to bring great technology, but in ways that allow customers to do things specifically with it. So talk a little bit about the relationship that NetApp is developing with its customers to try to ensure that that journey to AI can be accelerated. >> Absolutely. Well the first is really around when we think about digital transformation, and especially as AI is the heart of it, how are they going to get more connected to their customers? A better customer experience. An experience that allows them to feel connected not only to the experience they have with the company, but to their peers, and to their customers, as well as suppliers. We also know that we want to be able to think about what do customers need to do to create new value? And new business opportunities, new services, new companies? Companies are also looking at how do they optimize their operations? How do they even take out the cost of back office, and take out that capital to be able to fuel innovation, especially when it comes to customer engagement. AI is becoming more and more a part of how companies are doing each of those. They're using those analytics and insight to be able to power through that digital transformation, which is now really being seen as a data-driven digital transformation. >> Well, we certainly agree at Wikibon, SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE. We believe that the relationship between business and digital business is, in fact, that digital business uses data as an asset. >> Mhmm. >> There's a special class of customer, though, as we move forward, and that is some of the hyperscalers, the big cloud suppliers, who are participating in this process of driving so much innovation in the industry. Serving them is a particular challenge. Talk to us a little bit about how that works. >> Sure. Well, we are definitely seeing that there is a certain class of customers that are starting to think about what do they do to thrive on data? And not only can they thrive, but they have to be able to put data as an asset. It has to be at the top of the strategic agenda of the company. It has to be able to seamlessly flow through that company. We're seeing that they're called data thrivers. Those thrivers are set apart. They're driving bottom line revenue, they're driving increased customer acquisition, they're seeing definitely higher profit margins. But in all those results we notice that there's a few things they're really doing right, and they're getting it right. One of those is that they're using the cloud. They're using public clouds. They're using private clouds. They're acquiring more dev-op skills. They're hiring data scientists. They're really being able to think about how do they hire digital officers, data officers, and a lot of that is around how they want to leverage AI. We know that over 50% of companies will start to adopt AI next year. We know that they're going to start to leverage AI to gain better insight. These new roles of people are definitely the ones who are being able to think about how did they manipulate that data, how did they use that data to have a competitive advantage, and how did they leverage the cloud to get more services like AI from these big cloud providers. >> Well, it's pretty clear as you try to service that broad a range of potential customers that you have to have a couple of touchstones to keep coming back to. Increasingly, design has to be one of them. Thinking in terms of design great products, but also designing engagement, designing how you work with customers, designing how you work with partners. Now, you have, along with your team, has bought some of that data first, data-driven notions into how you've designed this data visionary center. Talk to us a little bit about how you have been using design to ensure that great experience across the board from NetApp. >> Absolutely. Well first, as NetApp thinks about how to holistically manage data, that was really the inception of data fabric. And data fabric was a vision, it was a strategy years ago. And we've been really working to see how do we bring that strategy alive? And being that data visionary for our customers thinks about from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. And what do we do to help bring that data fabric across so you can seamlessly manage data, integration points across all those environments, you can migrate data to the cloud, you can make sure you're consuming data services, like analytics and AI, and you're really being able to bring that value back. AI is at the center of that. We wanted to design an experience that brought data fabric to life for our customers. One, how did they modernize their current architectures? Especially with cloud-connected flash and what we're doing with AI. We wanted to make sure that we were thinking about "How did they build these private clouds? What do they need to do to really bring out applications at speed?" Third is we wanted to inspire innovation with the cloud. And the work we're doing with the cloud providers. We've had new services like cloud volumes that have been launching with AWS, with Azure as well as Google. And with all of the biggest clouds, we've been thinking about how do we bring that customer experience to life? That design comes forward through the data visionary center, where we are today. This center is where we want to actually have customers come in and be inspired by what they can do in their own digital transformation journey. We want to build trust with those customers and partners. We want them to know that we understand their industry, we understand their needs, we understand what's happening in the market. IOT, AI, what's happening with securing data. How did they think about leveraging the cloud to really maximize business impact? We want to be able to have frank conversations. Inform each other of our strategies. How did they then able to interpret those and internalize that information? The whole data visionary center's been based on "How do we help them to be able to grow? How do they partner with us so they can leverage our services to help them to maximize the value of data?" So we provide those opportunities. Hands-on kiosks, demos, learning, even being able to do what we've done with NVIDIA with an advanced solution around even our events at solution where they can start to play with AI in real time. Then we want to be able to enjoy the conversation here at the data visionary center, and talk about next steps in the journey ahead. So we're excited about the data visionary center. We just opened it a few months ago, and we're thrilled to be able to invite customers and partners to be here. >> So let's extrapolate, extend beyond the data visionary center and make the observation that marketing broadly has become altered, changed, transformed as a consequence of using data. Marketing at NetApp in particular is interesting because you're fundamentally marketing data-driven as a concept. So how is marketing's evolved experience with data informing how NetApp broadly engages customers and builds products? >> CMOs are becoming one of the top functions to really drive digital transformations. When you think about how do you connect and engage with customers more? How do you engage with them on a personalized level? How do you ensure that you're having that constant communication, online, offline? And continuously being able to build that relationship. Marketing's at the center of that. We're excited that we're a data-driven organization, and as a data-driven organization, we're having real business impact to the business and real customer engagement. We're excited that we're at the heart of what we're doing to transform the business. Not only from our branding and how we think about reinventing NetApp, we are data-driven company. We are data-driven as we think about that aspiration for our customers. Our data visionary concept is about how do we inspire people to want to bring all that data together and really simplify and integrate, and then unleash that potential for their own companies. Marketing is at the center of how we're engaging people, especially in the cloud. And as we have a no-touch experience and customers are engaging with us to be able to download trials, being able to see demos, being able to watch other customers and where they are on their own journey. But being able to surface that, again, digitally as well as offline and personal engagement. Analytics, big part of what we're doing to understand customer needs better. Understanding those needs from the solutions they expect from us, understand their needs from what they're enduring in the market, and then being able to help the company think about that in terms of road maps, think about that in terms of key messages, think about that in terms of real solutions and real engagement. >> Jean English, Senior Vice President and CMO of NetApp, thanks again for being on theCUBE >> Thanks, Peter. >> And talking about data-driven and marketing. >> Thank you. Nice to see you. >> Good to see you again.

>> From Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Accelerate Your Journey to AI. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, with theCUBE and Wikibon, and we're here at the NetApp Data Visionary Center today to talk about NetApp, NVIDIA, AI, and data. We're being joined by two great guests. Jim McHugh is the Vice President and General Manager of Deep Learning Systems at NVIDIA, and Octavian Tanase is the Senior Vice President of ONTAP at NetApp. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Jim, I want to start with you. NVIDIA's been all over the place regarding AI right now. You've had a lot of conversations with customers. What is the state of those conversations today? >> Well, I mean, it really depends on the industry that the customer's in. So, AI at at its core, is really a horizontal technology, right? It's when when we engage with a customer and their data and their vertical domain knowledge that it becomes very specialized from there. So you're seeing a lot of acceleration where there's been a lot of data, right? So it's not any secret that you're seeing a lot around autonomous driving vehicles and the activity going there. Health care, right? Because when you can marry the technology of AI with the years, and years, and years of medical research that's going on out there, incredible things come out, right? We've seen some things around looking at cancer cells, we're looking at your retina being sort of the gateway to so many health indications. We can tell you whether you have everything from Dengue fever, to malaria, to whether you're susceptible to have hypertension. All of these kind of things that we're finding, that data is actually letting us to be superhuman in our knowledge about what we're trying to accomplish. Now the exciting thing is, if you grew up like we did, in the IT industry, is you're seeing it go into mainstream companies, so you're seeing it in financial services, where they for years were, quants were very specialized, and they were writing their own apps, and now they figured out, hey, look, I could broaden this out. You're seeing it in cybersecurity, right? For years, if you wanted to check malware, what did we do? We looked up the definition in a database and said, okay, yeah, that's malware, stop it, right? But now, they're learning the characteristics of malware. They're studying the patterns of it, and that's kind of what it is. Go industry by industry, and tell me if there's enough data to show a pattern, and AI will come in and change it. >> Enough data to show a pattern? Well, that kind of introduces NetApp to the equation. A company that's been, especially more recently, very focused on the relationship between data and business value. Octavian, what has NetApp seen from customers? >> Well, we know a little bit about data. We've been the stewards of that data in the enterprise for more than 25 years, and AI comes up in every single customer conversation. They're looking to leverage AI in their digital transformation, so we see this desire to extract more value out of the data, and make better decisions, faster decisions in every sector of the industry. So, it's ubiquitous, and we are uniquely positioned to enable customers to do their data management wherever data is being created. Whether the data is created at the edge, in the traditional data center, what we call the core, or in the cloud, we enable this seamless data management via the data fabric architecture and vision. >> So, data fabric, data management, the ability to extract that, turn it into patterns. Sounds like a good partnership, Jim? >> Yeah, no, we say, data's the new source code. Really, what AI is, we're changing the way software's written. Where, instead of having humans going in, do the feature engineering and feature sets that would be required, you're letting data dictate and guide you on what the features are going to be of software. >> So right now, we've got the GPU, Graphic Data Processing revolution, you guys driving that. We've got some real advances in how data fabric works. You have come together and created a partnership. Talk a little bit about that partnership. >> Well, when we started down this journey, and it began, really, in 2012 in AI, right? So when Alex Krizhevsky discovered how to create AlexNet, NVIDIA's been focused on how do we meet the needs of the data scientists every step of the way. So beginning started around making sure they had enough compute power to solve things that they couldn't solve before. Then we started focusing on what is the software that was required, right? So how do we get them the frameworks they need? How do we integrate that? How do we get more tuned, so they could get more and more performance? Our goal has always been, if we can make the data scientists more productive, we can actually help democratize AI. As it's starting to take hold, and get more deployments, obviously we need the data. We need it to help them with the data ingest, and then deployments are starting to scale out to the point where we need to make this easy, right? We need to take the headaches of trying to figure out what are all the configurations between our product lines, but also the networking product lines, as well. We have to bring that whole, holistic picture, and do it from there. So our goal, and what we're seeing, is not only we've made the data scientists more productive, but if we can help the guys that have to do the equipment for him more productive as well, the data scientists, she and he, can get back to doing what their real core work is. They can add value, and really change a lot of the things that are going on in our lives. >> So fast, flexibility, simpler to use. Does that, kind of, capture some of the, summarize some of the strategies that NetApp has for Artificial Intelligence workloads? >> Absolutely, I think simplicity, it's one of the key attributes, because the audience for some of the infrastructure that we're deploying together, it's a data scientist, and he wants to adopt that solution with confidence, and it has to be simple to deploy. He doesn't have to think about the infrastructure. It's also important to have an integrated approach, because, again, a lot of the data will be created in the future at the core, or at edge more than in the core, and more in the cloud than in traditional data center. So that seamless data management across the edge, to the core, to the cloud, it's also important. And scalability, it's also important, because customers who look to start, perhaps, simple, with a small deployment, and have that ability to seamlessly scale. Currently, the performance of the solution that we just announced, basically beats the competition by a 4x, in terms of the performance and capability. >> So as we think about where we're going, this is a crucial partnership for both companies, and it's part of a broader ecosystem that NVIDIA's building out. How does the NetApp partnership fit into that broader ecosystem? >> Well, starting with our relationship, when the announcement we made, it should be no secret that we engaged our channel partners, right? 'Cause they are that last mile. They are those trusted advisors, a lot of times, of our customers, and going in, and we want them to add this to their portfolio, take it out to 'em, and I think we've had resounding feedback, so far, that this is something that they can definitely take, and drive out. On top of that, NVIDIA is focused on, again, this new way of writing software, right? The software that leverages the data to do the things, and so we have an ecosystem that's built around our inception program, which are thousan%ds of startups. If you add to that the thousands of startups that are coming through Sand Hill, and the investment community, that are based around NVIDIA compute, as well, all of these guys are standardizing saying, hey we need to leverage this new model. We need to go as quickly as possible, and what we've pulled together, together, is the ability for them to do that. So whether they want to do the data center, or whether they want to go with one of our joint cloud providers and do it through their service, as well. >> So a great partnership that's capable of creating a great horizontal platform. It's that last mile that does the specialization. Have I got that right? >> You had the last mile helping reach the customers who are the specialization. The customers, and their data, and their vertical domain expertise, and what the data scientists that they have bring to it. Look, they're creating the magic. We're giving them the tools to make sure they can create that magic as easy as possible. >> That's great, so one of the things, Octavian, that Jim mentioned, was industries that are able to generate significant value out of data are moving first. One of the more important industries is IT Operations, because we have a lot of devices, we're generating a lot of data. How is NetApp going to use AI in your product set to drive further levels of productivity, from a simplicity standpoint, so customers can, in fact, spend more time on creating value? >> So interestingly enough, we've been users, or practitioners, of AI for quite a while. I don't know if a lot of people in the audience know, we have a predictive analytics system called Active IQ, which is an implementation of AI in the enterprise. We take data from more than 300 thousand assets that we have deployed in the field, more than 70 billion data points every day, and we correlate that together. We put them in a data lake. We train a cluster, and we enable our customers to drive value in best practices from the data that we collect from the broader set of deployments that we have in the field, so this is something that we are sharing with our customers, in terms of blueprint, and we're looking to drive the ubiquity in the type of solutions that we enable customers to build on top of our joint infrastructure. >> Excellent, Jim McHugh, NVIDIA, Octavian Tanase, NetApp. Great partnership represented right here on theCUBE. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE tonight. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back here, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the crossroads, it's 101 and 92 in San Mateo, California. A lot of popular software companies actually started here, I can always think of the Siebel sign going up and we used to talk about the movement of Silicon Valley from the chips down in the South Bay and Sunnyvale, and intel, really to a lot of software here in the middle of the peninsula. We're excited to be here at SnapLogic's headquarters for Innovation Day, and our next guest is Craig Stewart, he's the VP of product management. Craig, great to see you. >> Thank you very much. Welcome. >> Absolutely So, we're talking about API's, and we go to a lot of tech shows and the API economy is something that's talked about all the time. But really that has evolved for a couple reasons. One, is the proliferation of Cloud services, and the proliferation of applications in the Cloud services. We all know if you go to Google Cloud Next or Amazon re:Invent, the logo slide of absent services available for these things is tremendous. Give us kind of an update, you've been involved in this space for a long time, how its evolving what you guys are are working on here at SnapLogic. >> What we've seen change of late, is that not only is there a requirement for our customers to build API's, but also to then allow those API's to be consumed by their partners and networks out there. As a part of that, they may need to have more management of those API's, then we provide. We're very good at creating API's with inbound and outbound payload, parameters, all of those things, so we can create those data services via our API's, but customers then need to have a requirement now to add some functionality around. What about when I have a thousand users of these, and I need to be able to throttle them and those kinds of things. What we've seen happening is there's been this space of the full lifecycle API management technologies, which have been available for some time, and amongst those we've had Google Apigee kind of being the benchmark of those with the Apigee Edge platform, and in fact what we've done in this latest release is we've provided engineered integration into that Apigee Edge platform so that the API's that we create, we can push those directly into the Apigee Edge platform for them to do the advanced authentication, the monetization, the developer platform around it to develop a portal, all of those kind of things. In addition to that, we've also added the functionality to generate the open API specification, Swagger, as it's known, and to be able to take that Swagger definition to having generated it, we can then actually drop it into the API gateways provided by all of the different Cloud vendors. Whether it's Amazon with their API gateway or the Aggre gateway, all you need to do is then take that generated Swagger definition, and this literally is a right-mouse button, "open" API, and it generates the file for you, from there just drop that into those platforms and now they can be actually managed in those services directly. >> I want to unpack API lifecycle management, cos just for a 101 for people that aren't familiar. We think of API's and we know applications or making calls, and it's, "I'm sending data from this app to that app, "and this is pulling information from that app to this app." That's all pretty straightforward, but what are some of the nuances in lifecycle management of API's that your typical person really hasn't fought through that are A, super important and only increasing in relevance as more and more of these systems are all tied together. >> The use of those API's, some of the things around them that those platforms provide is some advanced authentication. They may be using, wanting to use OWA two-factor authentication, those kind of things. They may want to do some protocol translation. Many customers may know how to consume a SOAP service... generally Legacy, these days-- >> So funny that SOAP is now Legacy (laughs) >> It just cracks me up. I remember, the hottest thing since sliced bread >> Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I still have the Microsoft Internet Explorer four T-shirt-- >> When it was 95 Box too, I'm sure. But that's another conversation for another day. (laughs) >> The management of those API's adding that functionality to do advanced authentication, to do throttling... If you have an API, you don't want all of your back end systems to suddenly be overwhelmed. >> Jeff: Right. Right. >> One of those things that those full lifecycle platforms can do is throttle so that you can say this user may have only 10 requests a minute or something like that, so that stops the back end system being overwhelmed in the event of a spike in usage. That helps with denial of service attacks and those kind of things where you're protecting the core systems. Other things that they can do is the monetization. If you want to atrially expose an API for partners to consume but you want to charge them on that basis, you want to have a way of actually tracking those things to then be able to monetize that and to provide the analytics and the billing on top of it. There's a number of those different aspects that the full lifecycle provides on top of what we provide which is the core API that we're actually creating. >> Right. Is it even feasible to plug an API into a Cloud-based service if your service isn't also Cloud-based cos as you're speaking and talking about spikes, clearly that's one of the huge benefits of Cloud, is that you have the ability to spike whether it's planned or unplanned to massive scale depending on what you're trying to do and to turn that back down. I would imagine (laughs) if your API is going through that platform and you're connecting to another application, and it's Pepsi running a promotion on Superbowl Sunday, hopefully your application is running in a very similar type of infrastructure. >> Absolutely. You do have to plan for that elastic scalability. And that's one of those things with the SnapLogic platform, is it has been built to be able to scale in that way. >> Right. Now there's a lot of conversation too around iPass and integration platforms as a service. How do you see that mapping back to more of a straightforward API integration. >> What we're talking about in terms of API integration here, and the things that we've just recently added, this is the consumption of our API's. The iPass platform that we actually provide consumes API's, all sorts of different API's, whether they're SOAP or REST and different native API's of different applications. That we do out of the box. That is what we are doing, is API integration. >> Right. >> The new functionality that we've introduced is this added capability to then manage those API's from external systems. That's particularly where those external systems go beyond the boundaries of a company's own domain. It's when they need to expose those API's to their partners, to other third parties that are going to want to consume those API's. That's where you need those additional layers of protection. Most customers actually use those API's internally within their organization, and they don't need that extra level of management. >> Right. Right. But I would imagine it's an increasingly important and increasingly common and increasingly prolific that the API integration and the API leverage is less and less inside the building and much much more outside the building. >> It is certainly going a lot more outside the building because customers are recognizing their data is an asset. >> Right. Right. Then having it be a Cloud broker, if you will, just adds a nice integration point that's standardized, has scale, has reliability, versus having all these point-to-point solutions. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was going to say, As you look forward, I can't believe we're May 16 of 2018 already (laughs), the years halfway over, but what are you looking forward to next? What's kind of on the roadmap as this API economy continues to evolve, which is then going to increase the demands on those API's integration, those API's in management, as you said the lifecycle of the way all this stuff works together, what's kind of on the roadmap if we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> There's a lot of... settling down of what we've delivered that's going to take place, and on top of that, then the capabilities that we can add to add some additional capabilities that the customers want to use, even internally. Because even internally where they're not using a Cloud service, they have requirements to identify who in an organization is utilizing those things. So additional capabilities without having to go beyond the boundaries of the customers own domain. That's going to be some things like authentication, it's going to be some additional... Metrics of what's actually being used in those API's, the metrics on the API's themselves in terms of how are they performing, how frequently are they being called, and in addition to that, what's the response time on those things? So there's additional intelligence that we're going to be providing over and above the creation of the API's that we're looking to do for those customers, particularly inside the organization. >> It's very similar requirements but just different, right, because organizations, take a company like Boeing, or something, is actually not just one company, there's many, many organizations, you have all kinds of now with GDPR coming out, cut of data, privacy and management restrictions, so even if it's inside your four walls, all those measures, all those controls are still very very relevant. >> Very much so. Providing some additional capabilities around that is pretty important for us. >> Alright. Well Craig, you're sitting right on top of the API economy, so I think you'll keep busy for a little while. >> (laughs) That's for sure. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. >> Thank you. >> He's Craig Stewart, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

Live from Berlin Germany, it's the queue Covering NetApp insight 2017 brought to you by Neda Welcome back to the cubes live coverage of net app insight here in Berlin Germany I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Mark Bregman. He is the CTO of net app Thanks so much for coming on the cube Thanks for taking the time so you have been recently looking into your crystal ball to predict the future and you have some some fun sometimes counterintuitive Predictions about what we're going to be seeing in the next Year and decade to come right so so your first pitch in you said data will become Self-aware right what do you mean by that? Well the title is kind of provocative really the idea is that? Data is going to carry with it much more of its metadata Metadata becomes almost more important than the data in many cases and we can anticipate Sort of architectures in which the data drives the processing whereas today? We always have data is sort of a pile of data over here And then we have a process that we execute against the data that's our been our tradition in the computing world for a long long time as data becomes more self-aware the data as it passes through Will determine what processes get executed on it? So let me give you a simple analogy from a different field from the past in The communications world we used to have circuit switched systems There was some central authority that understood the whole network If you and I wanted to communicate it would figure out the circuit set up the circuit And then we would communicate and that's sort of similar to traditional Processing of data the process knows everything it wants to do it knows where to find the data. It does that it puts It somewhere else But in the communications world we move to packets which data, so now the packet the data Carries with it the information about what should happen to it And I no longer have to know everything about the network nobody has to know everything about the network I pass it to the nearest neighbor who says well I don't know where it's ultimately going, but I know it's going generally in that direction and eventually it gets there now Why is that better? It's very robust it's much more scalable and Particularly in a world where the rules might be changing. I don't have to necessarily redo the program I can change the the markup if you will the tagging of the data You can think of different examples imagine the data That's sitting in a autonomous vehicle and there's an accident now There are many people who want access to that data the insurance company the authorities the manufacturer the data has contained within it the Knowledge of who can do what would that data? So I don't have to now have a separate program that can determine Can I use that data or not the data says sorry you're not allowed to see this. This is private data You can't see this part of it Maybe the identify our data for the obviously the insurance company needs to know who the car owner is But maybe they don't need to know something else like where I came from The authorities might need both well he came from a bar So you can imagine that as an example if you the implications, yes marker are important for example if I Wanted to develop an application. That would be enhanced by having access to data I had to do programming to get to that data because some other application control that data and that data was defined contextually by that application right and so everything was handled by the application by moving the metadata into the data now I can bring that data to my Application more easily less overhead and that's crucial because the value of data accretes It grows as you can combine it in new and interesting ways so by putting the metadata end of the data I can envision a world where it becomes much faster much more Fasil to combine data and new and Exactly it. Also is easier to move the Processing through the data to the data because the processing is no longer a monolithic program It's some large set of micro services and the data organizes which ones to execute So I think we'll see I mean this is not a near-term prediction This is not one for next year because it requires rethinking How we think about data and processing, but I think we'll see it with the emergence of micro services compositional programming Metadata together with the data will see more functional programs little programs well That's your quick rush before we go on to the next one. It's almost like in the early night or the late 1970s It was networks of devices ARPANET the became the Internet and then the web was networks of pages And then we moved into networks of application services Do you foresee a day where it's going to be literally networks of data? Yes, and in fact That's a great example because if you think about what happened in the evolution of the web through what we called web 2.0 That the pages were static data They came alive in the web 2.0, and there was a much less of a distinction between the data and the program In the web layer right so that's what we're saying we see that emerging even further Next prediction was about virtual machines becoming rideshare machines well this is somewhat complementary to the first one they all kind of fit together and Here the idea is you know if we go back in the earlier days of IT it wasn't that long ago that if you needed? Something you ordered the server, and you installed it you owned it and then we got to the model of the public cloud, which is like a rental and by the same analogy if in the past if I wanted a vehicle I had to buy it and Then the rental car agencies came up, and I said well, you know when I go to Berlin I'm not gonna buy a car for three days I'll rent a car, but I can choose which car I want do I want the BMW, or do I want you know of Volkswagen That's very similar to the way the cloud works today. I pick what instances I want and They they meet my needs And if I make the right choice great and by the way I pay for it while I have it not for the work It's getting done so if I forget to return that instance. I'm still getting charged But the rideshare is kind of like uber and we're starting to see that with things like serverless computing In the model that I say I want to get this work done The infrastructure decides what shows up in the same way that when I call uber I don't get to pick what car shows up they send me the one that's most convenient for them and me and I get charged for the work going from point A to point B. Not for the amount of time There's some differentiation if there is so cool Ah, they come to that and and so that's more like a rideshare But as you point out even in the rideshare world. I have some choices. I can't choose if I want a large SUV I might get a BMW SUV or I might get a Mercedes SUV I can't choose that I can't choose it the silver or black But I get a higher class and what we're seeing with the cloud Or these kind of instances virtual solutions is they are also becoming more specialized I might it might be that for a particular workload I want some instance that has have GPUs in them or some neural chip or something else In much the same way that The rental model would say go choose the exact one you want The rideshare model would say I need to get this work done and the infrastructure might decide this is best serviced by five instances with GPU or Because of availability and cost maybe it's 25 instances of standard processors because you don't care about how long it takes so It's this compromise and it's really very analogous to the rideshare model now coming back to the earlier discussion as The units of work gets smaller and smaller and smaller and become really micro services Now I can imagine the data driving that decision hailing the cab hailing the rideshare and driving What needs to be done? So that's why I see them in somewhat complementary and so what's the upshot though? For the employee and for the company I think there are two things one is you got to make the right decision? You know if I were to use uber to commute to Sunnyvale every day It'd break the bank, and it would be kind of stupid so for that particular task I own my vehicle But if I'm gonna go to Tahoe for the weekend, and I meet an SUV I'm not gonna buy one neither am I going to take an uber I'm in a rent one because that's the right vehicle on the other hand when I'm going from you know where I live to the marina within San Francisco, that's a 15 minute drive I On demand I take an uber and I don't really care now if I have 10 friends I might pick a big one or a small one But again that the distinction is there so I think for companies They need to understand the implications and a lot of times as with many people they make the wrong initial choice And then they have then they learn from it so You know there are people who take uber everywhere And I talked and I said I had a friend who was commuting to HP every day by uber from the city from San Francisco That just didn't make sense he kind of knew that but The next one is data will grow faster than the ability to transport it, but that's ok it doesn't sound ok it Doesn't sound ok and for a long time. We've worried about that. We've done compression, and we've done all kinds of things We've built bigger pipes And we've but we were fundamentally transporting data between data centers or more recently between the data center and the cloud big chunks of data What this really talks about is with the emergence of quality IOT in a broad sense? Telematics IOT digital health many different cases there's going to be more and more and more data both generated and ultimately stored at the edge and That will not be able to be shipped all of that will not be able to be shipped back to the core And it's okay not to do that because there's also Processing at the edge so in an autonomous vehicle where you may be generating 20 megabytes per hour or more You're not gonna ship that all back You're gonna store it you're gonna do some local processing you're gonna send the summary of it the appropriate summary back But you're also gonna keep it there for a while because maybe there's an accident and now I do need all that data I didn't ship it back from every vehicle But that one I care about and now I'm gonna bring it back or I'm gonna do some different processing than I originally Thought I would do so again the ability to Manage this is going to be important, but it's managed in a different way. It means we need to figure out ways to do overall Data lifecycle management all the way from the edge where historically that was a silo we didn't care about it Probably all the way through the archive or through the cloud where we're doing machine learning rules generation and so on but it also suggests that we're going to need to do a better job of Discriminating or demarcating different characteristic yen classes of data, and so that data at the edge Real-world data that has real-world implications right now is different from data that summarizes business events which is different from data that Summarized as things models that might be integrated something somewhere else And we have to do a better job of really understanding the relationships between data It's use its asset characteristics etcetera, would you agree with that absolutely and maybe you see the method in my madness now? Which is that data will have? Associated with it the metadata that describes that so that I don't misuse it you know think about The video data off of a vehicle I might want to have a sample of that every I don't know 30 seconds, but now if there's really a problem and it may be not an accident Maybe it's a performance problem. You skidded I'd like to go back and see why was there a Physical issue with the vehicle that I need to think about as an engineering problem was it Your driving ability was it a cat jumped in front of the car so But I need to be able to as you pointed out in a systematic way distinguish what data I'm looking at and where it belongs and where it came from The final prediction it concerns the evolution from Big Data to huge data so that is Really driven by the Increasing need we have to do machine learning AI Very large amounts of data being analyzed in near real time to meet new needs for business And there's again a little like many of these things There's a little bit of a feedback loop so that drives us to new architectures for example being able to do in memory analytics But in-memory analytics with all that important data. I want to have persistence technologies are coming along like Storage class memories that are allowing us to build persistent storage persistent memory We'll have to re our Kotak the applications, but at the same time that persistent memory data I don't want to lose it so it has to be thought of also as a part of the storage system Historically we've had systems the compute system, and there's a pipe and there's a storage system And they're separate they're kind of coming together, and so you're seeing the storage Impinge on the system the compute system our announcement of Plexus store acquisition is how we're getting there But at the same time you see what might have been thought of is the memory of the computer System really be an extended part of the storage system with all the things related to copy management backup and and And so on so that's really what that's talking about and you know it's being driven by another factor I think which is a higher level factor. We started in the first 50 years of the IT industry was all about automating processes That ran the business they didn't change the business. They made it more efficient accounting systems etc since probably 2000 there's been a little bit of a shift Because of the web and mobile to say oh I can use this to change the relationship with my customer Customer in density I can use mobile and and I can change the banking business Maybe you don't ever come to the bank for cash anymore even to an ATM because they've changed that The wave that's starting now which is driving This is the realization in many organizations, and I truly believe eventually in all organizations that They can have new data-driven businesses That are transforming their fundamental view of their business so an example I would use is imagine a shoe maker a shoe manufacturer well for 50 years. They made better shoes They had better distribution, and they could do better inventory management and get better cost and all of that with IT in the last Seven or ten years, they've started to be able to build a relationship with their client. Maybe they put some Sensors in the shoe, and they're doing you know Fitbit like stuff mostly for them That was about a better client relationship, so they could sell better shoes cuz I wrench eiated now The next step is what happens if they wake up and say wait a minute We could take all this data and sell it to the insurance companies or healthcare companies or the city planners Because we now know where everyone's walking all the time That's a completely different business But that requires new kind of lytx that we can't almost not imagine in the current storage model so it drives these new architectures And there is one more prediction, okay? Which is that and it comes back again? It kind of closed the whole cycle as we see these Intelligence coming to the data and new processing forms and so on we also need a way to change data management to give us really Understanding of data through its whole lifecycle one of the one example would be how can I ensure? That I understand the chain of custody of data the example of an automobile there's an accent well How do I know that data was an alter or? how can I know whose touch this data along the way because I might have an audit trail and So we see the emergence of a new Distributed and mutable management framework if when I say those two words together you probably think Blockchain which is the right thing to think but it's not the blockchain. We know today there may be something It's something like that But it will be a distributed and immutable ledger that will give us new ways to access and understand our data Once you open up the once you open up Trying to get the metaphor once you decide to put the metadata next to the data Then you're going to decide to put a lot more control information in that metadata Exactly, so this is just an extension said it kind of closes the loop exactly Mark well, thanks so much for coming on the show and for talking about the future with us It was really fun to have you on the show we should come back in a year and see if maybe you're right exactly exactly Thank you. I'm Rebecca night. We will have more from NetApp insight. Just after this

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApps. >> Welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program where we go out to events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. We're here at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay with two great guests, a senior executive, senior NetApp folks, are going to share some insight on what's going on. We have Mark Bregman is the Senior Vice President and CTO thanks for coming on. John Woodall VP of Engineering at Integrated Archive Systems. The first partner of NetApp going back in the day. Welcome to theCUBE thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So we've seen that movie before, you know every cycle of innovation there's always opportunities. Interesting now we're in a cycle where you can see some new waves out there coming in. And we think we're surfing on some waves now, but the tsunami's coming. Everything from blockchain down to just cloud growth like crazy. You guys have done extremely well. You've seen them before, these transitions. People are busy right now, your customers are super busy. They've got app development going on, DevOps, they've got security unbuckling from IT becoming critical, data governance. What should they know about in this transition that they may miss or they should pay attention to. >> Well, I would say that the thing that is probably the most profound is we've gone through a couple of big transitions, as you mentioned, in the industry as a whole. 20, 30 years ago we would talk to customers and they'd start with infrastructure and they'd talk about servers and storage. 10, 15 years ago they start with applications and they'd talk about their ERP or whatever software. That would decide then the infrastructure. Today they're starting with data and companies are realizing that data is the thing that's going to transform their business. And then based on that data, what software am I going to use and then talk about infrastructure. So the conversation's kind of turned around completely from where it was 20 years ago. >> John, you've been a partner, I see the partner landscape certainly changing. You seeing resellers and VAR's and I think, does the word VAB even exist, value added business? They're actually building their own tech because there's opportunities to be a service provider. Almost like a telco, who would have thought? >> It's crazy, it's crazy. I think I think from our perspective as a longtime partner, we've been successful with NetApp through transitions. We were talking before about the resiliency of NetApp in going through transitions. They've done it again, the keynote today filled with a lot of, what I call, mic-drop moments of yet another level of innovation. But you're right things have flipped almost 180 degrees in the discussion that starting with data, starting with a business outcome, as part of the discussion. It's not about what can I sell, it's about in solving the problem, do I accelerate the pace of my business. Do I open up new ways to monetize in my business. Do I drive efficiencies in my business that translate to the bottom line. As a reseller and as a partner, we have to transition with that because the discussion changes, the skill sets change and it becomes much more of a services play on the front-end and to help through and then becomes managed services, as you know, and that. >> Mark I want to ask your a question. We were joking with the product marketing team on the cloud earlier that you know the slogan should be, I don't know NetApp could do that. It just keeps happening, oh, I didn't know they did that. While that's kind of a history NetApp, but I want to ask something specific. We see it's a success out there in the cloud, you look no further than Amazon Web Services. Now Microsoft's kind of catching up to the rear, Google's there's some other people are trying to kind of get in there. But Amazon's the winner when it comes to the number of announcements you see an event and I'm sure at Reinvent coming up is going to be a tsunami of their bigger announcements, more services so it's a plethora. And so that's an indicator of success. And also the new differentiator, at scale, as you got to keep iterating, you guys have a slew of announcements, so running engineering and being the CEO. What's going on at NetApp? What's the conversation like, you have all these roadmaps, is it just all this innovation, is it part of the plan and just give us some insight into how this all works. >> Well, I think for a long time, maybe for the first 20 years of the company, we were almost like a one product company. The innovations were all in that lane. They were all, you know, make this a better product, make ONTAP better and customers love that because they were growing with us. What's happened is it's kind of exploded in multiple dimensions. So we continue to innovate in our core. But at same time we're having to say, how can we use this capability in a completely different way, in the cloud? How can we help customers manage their data, no matter where it is, not just on our ONTAP systems. We made the acquisition of a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, of SolidFire, to get into an area of a different approach to managing storage. And it's not sometimes people get it confused and they go that's how you got into flash. Frankly, we're already doing flash units and have flash in all of our product lines. The real reason we did that was to get into this more programmatic, scale out, API driven model of administration of storage. And we're having to do that in so many dimensions. so as we expand those dimensions, Of course we have to expand our innovation. We have to innovate at the given rate in each of threads. >> The old joke in Silicon Valley is you know get lucky once and you get rich. And it's hard, you know, the sophomore jinx whatever you want to call it, repeated successes is a sign of success and certainly as a partner you want to, you don't want to one trick pony at all. Now, I got to ask you, given the NetApp history of those successes, the data fabric is very good positioning I like that position because it's got a lot around it's super important, you think data is the new wave it's going to come bigger than cloud in terms of its impact. What from NetApp, for the customers that are watching and especially new customers, as you take new territory down with data, what is it about the NetApp portfolio, or the architecture the DNA that makes you guys relevant in this data fabric equation? Because you can't just get there overnight because of diseconomies of scale. What is it about NetApp that makes them super relevant? Couple things, one thing, what's the one thing? >> Well, I think I think it becomes back to I think you even said the term, DNA. It's what is it about NetApp, why are we one that's been around for 25 years and continue to make it through these transitions. And I think it's because, first of all, we don't rest on our laurels, we're not caught up in the innovator's dilemma of continuing to just refine what we already have. We'll do that, but we also recognize that there are emerging new customer needs. And our basic intellectual capital can be applied in different ways. So when I talk to our engineers, they don't talk about I build controllers that go into arrays that manage data. They realize that deeper down there's a kind of intellectual capital could go into a piece of software in the cloud. And there's a customer problem that we can go solve. So I think it's about being motivated by solving those customer data problems. >> So culture, some culture. >> It's culture. >> What are the products now, so you have a data, storage, storage stores data. So you don't need rocket science to figure out that you're storing data. >> I'll give you an example, there a lot of competitors in the flash storage business that have come into the market and basically gave up on us because we were late coming to that market. But we came in the market, we accelerated, we passed them, why is that? Partly, we built a good product at the flash storage layer. But more importantly we leveraged all of the storage management which we'd already built over 20 years. And so now we're suddenly out there with a very rock solid flash engine but it's supported by all the other capabilities which make it valuable to our customers. So it's not just, hey, here's a new tool, it's here's a new solution to your problem. And I think that's a big part of our DNA. And our technology side is we've been in data management for 20 years, we just never talked about it that way. >> So John, we had Dave Hitz on earlier, and he said that one of the keys to keeping away from the innovators dilemma has been that NetApp has leaned into the thing that will kill us. I tweeted that out, that's an awesome pull, that they've leaned into the things. As a partner though, that can be a bit scary. Technology is especially enterprise tech is a very stable thing. NetApp has been with ONTAP a very traditional partner even with fads and bringing those innovations to flash. How's that ride been for you guys over the past 25 years. >> It has been consistent, it has been a great partnership, and it continues to be a great partnership because as I look out and hone my portfolio of offerings and partnerships, NetApp stays very high in, that not just because we have a great run rate business, but because NetApp, in their innovation allows me to continue to solve problems with an existing partner, which makes us more efficient. Now, having said that we talked about you mentioned data fabric. That's a completely different discussion from a storage company. At first you think okay, I'm replicating data, I have a transport layer, that's fine. But what are you doing beyond that? I think you begin to see a new NetApp emerging as software defined. An organizing principle in my mind of the data fabric is it gives the customer freedom and flexibility that just buying storage doesn't give you. It gives them the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, next to the cloud, on-prem, as a virtual instance, as an AMI in the cloud, et cetera. So it allows the customer to place data and workloads where and when and how they want that makes sense for their business, not NetApp's business, or my business and so in that we're starting to see now with Anthony Lye's demo today of Cloud Orchestrator. >> Which, by the way, isn't shipping yet, but it's multi-cloud. >> Multi-cloud? >> It's multi-cloud instance. >> Yeah, that right there, and its applications, it's provisioning VM's, it's provisioning. >> If you guys get that to the market fast, it will be the first multi, True multi, orbiting call it real multi-cloud There's a lot of fake multi-cloud out there but that would be a real use case. >> And that's a completely different discussion so you know to kind of plagiarize, you can teach an old storage dog a new trick. So they transformed to meet the emerging needs of a new market, we are have to transform with them. So there's a bit of bumpiness that we're all going to experience as we learn that and do that. >> John, I just want to drill-down on that, I want to get also your both perspectives. What you're really teasing out with the Cloud Orchestrator demo in my mind, the impact of that demo significance is you guys as a storage company, now a data company, are enabling opportunities with the data. That's clearly what's happening, obviously, no debate there. But the impact is to developers. Now the developer dynamic is as these devops guys come in, there's new, there's re-skilling going on. So the biggest challenge of multi-cloud is each cloud has its own way to pipeline data or do things with data. So making that easy, I don't want to have to hire guys to program for each cloud. >> Mark: And they're hard to find. >> It's incredible, it's too hard. Abstracting that away is going to be a boon for the developer market. That's a new market, that's a different thing than NetApp. >> It's a very different market than we've been in before. >> So what are you doing? What's the plan, just continue to enable developers? >> Well, the comment you made earlier, about lean in to the thing that's going to kill you is exactly right, I wouldn't have said it quite like that but I'm not Dave Hitz. So we definitely, when we see a challenge we lean into it. And and that does two things, it's a little bit like, I don't know was it TaeKwonDo where you use the other competitors energy? >> I think it's judo. >> Think it's judo, use the other energy, the power the other opponent to win. And that's kind of what we're doing. I think when you do that it means we have to transform and our partners do, and you're a partner that's been with us long time, you've been through a lot of transitions. >> Yes we have. >> Well judo move is about leverage, and that's about having installed, you guys have that leverage with your customers. >> And the customers are moving as well, so we could try to keep them, hold them back. Or we can move with them and actually accelerate them to where they're going to our benefit, and to our partners benefit and I think that's what Dave was referring to. Well, Mark and John love to have you guys on, love to do a follow-up segment in Palo Alto, our offices are really across the yard from each other, certainly if you guys are in Sunnyvale This is a super important conversation. I'll give you guys the last word, impact to customers for NetApp with the new capabilities with data center innovation modernization, next gen data center, on-premise, true private cloud and power a horse in the cloud with data. All that working together in some cases end to end or in pieces whatever the customers is. What does it mean to the customer this new. >> I'll steal a line from our marketing teams and what it really means is it's going to enable customers to change the world with data. Transform their business, create new opportunities. >> It's a new wave in the economy. It's going to be disruptive and tumultuous for some. We have an opportunity to go into a customer and to help them find new ways, with their data, because the two key assets of company now is people and then data. So the people are there taking their data, allowing them to find new opportunities to go to market faster. NetApp's in a unique position. >> It reminds me of value creation, I mean a lot of stuff with blockchain you see the indicators, almost the Web1.0 again. You see in the new shift in architecture happening upside down it's almost reverse. >> The developer model's right. I mean you talk about Amazon, I think from 2008 until 2014 or 15 they introduced about three thousand new services on their platform. I don't see an average IT organization doing that. >> I think that rates gone up now. >> It's on an exponential growth there. >> I think we're starting to see the swim lanes, if you will, I'm calling them native clouds because they're so native. But they're also powering a new ecosystem and part of it, I wish we had more time to talk about the partner equation. There a lot of musical chairs going on in the partner ecosystem. You've been with NetApp from the beginning, congratulations. Congratulations on all the success on the platform and the product innovation. It's theCUBE bringing you the innovation and the data through our data fabric called theCUBE. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. >> Announcer: Coming off barrier breakers, status quo smashers, world.