(Music) >> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium, in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Storage accelerate, 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin sporting Prince today, with Dave Vellante sporting The Who. And I'm sandwiched, most importantly, between two Celtics fans. And the Warriors are across the bay. We'll save that for after the conversation. So we want to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Ken Ringdahl the VP of Global alliance Architecture. From Veeam, welcome. >> Great. Thank you, Lisa. >> Dave: Well the truth be told, we're afraid of the warriors, okay. We really don't want to play the Warriors. >> Oh really, alright. >> And we're not afraid of many people in Boston, but I don't know, they look pretty good. >> Well, I appreciate the honesty, that's pretty cool. >> Well... Though they lost last night. Right? We're going to start the sports talk now. >> Yep. >> Iguodala was out, they showed some foulability. So, anyway. >> We digress to- >> We'll be back to it later on in this segment stay tuned. >> Alright, so you're just fresh off Veeam On, last week. We're impressed that you still have a voice, you've recovered from that. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that are new with Veeam and Pure. So just a month ago, in April, new intergradation between VM availability platform, and Pure Storage flash a way to deliver business continuity, agility, intelligence for the Cloud era. Expand a little bit upon that. >> Yeah, sure, I mean really this integration with Pure Storage, in the VM backup and replication product, end of last year we introduced this new functionality called Universal Storage API. And what this really is, is a way for us to enable our partners to take control of their destiny a little bit more. It's a program we invite our partners into, you know Pure is one of the first that we integrated with, and invited into the program very early. We announced this last year, and we've now finished the integration, as you've mentioned, we announced it last month. It's now been out there, and I think the number I heard earlier today is that we've already had a couple hundred downloads and deployments. So that's just great adoption, and just shows the pent up demand for that. But what we've integrated is the ability for our partners, our storage partners in particular to integrate with our storage snapshot technology to really off load the snapshot from the VMware side, and really put more of it on the storage side, and take it really off the production environment. And so it's a better together story where you know we take the feature that we've introduced into the backup and replication, and Pure built this plug-in, and they integrate with their own APIs and we jointly test and develop, and release that plug-in. And they can install it with VM backup and replication, and it really takes the mention, it takes that load off the production environment. So that snapshot without this integration, it's a VMware snapshot, that snapshot stays open as long as the backup is. Which can be minutes, and you know tens of minutes potentially for a large system. But now we shrink that down literally to just seconds. So we take a VMware snapshot, we take the Pure snapshot, we close the VMware snapshot. And typically it's like 10-12 seconds long where as opposed to the minutes, and even tens of minutes from before. So, really it's really offloading a lot of that back up impact, and we're able to do it in a very secure quiesce fashion from the production environment. >> Lets roll back and understand that a little bit better. >> Ken, if you could explain it to us and our audience. In the 2008, seven, eight, nine timeframe. Virtualization Gem of VMware in particular started to take hold. And you ended up replacing a bunch of physical servers with virtual servers, which was awesome, because all those physical servers were underutilized, except for one major workload, which was backup. So when you did want to do the backup, you didn't have enough resources. Veeam's ascendancy coincided with that trend, so there was a simplicity component, but it seems like what you're describing now is another instantiation of offloading that bottle neck. So what was the journey to Veeam's efficiency in a virtualization environment? >> Ken: Yeah if you look at that journey, and Veeam really grew up in the virtualization age, right. So backup prior to VM, or virtualization was all agent based, it was physical. So everything was over the wire, and Veeam went and said, hey look you know we see VMware really sort of growing, and we see that trend towards virtualization, right, and at this point, what's the world 95 percent virtualized, at this point the only workloads that aren't virtualized are really legacy work loads. And so we made a significant leap forward in a data protection stance, by integrating with the hyper visors. So instead of off loading that into the individual guests, right. The Windows guest, the Linux guest. We said, okay we're going to go the hyper visor. Right? And we're going to do this in an agent less fashion, so that you don't have to go an visit every little, every system that you're looking to backup. That was sort of the first step, right. Now what we're saying is we can do even better. And we can off load the hyper visor, and off load that to the storage system. So we can have a very small impact on the hyper visor, really minimize that. And now really put that workload on the storage system which has a lot of extra cycles and availability, and we can go straight to the backup environment. And not through the VM, or through the hypervisor to get there. >> Dave: So VMware admins, they don't like snapshots because it's overhead intensive, it clogs up their system if you will. This capability makes that transparent, or irrelevant to them? >> It does, it minimizes them to such a small degree that it's a blip. You know it's a little blip on the radar, as opposed to when you snapshot a VM you're essentially quiescing that VM, so everything sort of slows down for a very short period of time. And what happens is that it spawns another virtual disc. So while that snapshot is open this other virtual disc is being written to. And then when you close that snapshot, and you remove that snapshot, that disc gets merged back in, right. This is generally how VMware snapshots work. And what we're saying is we're going to minimize as much as we possibly can. The data that goes in there, so if you think of a running virtual machine, if you're merging back in a Gigabyte disc versus a disc that has 10 Megabytes, you know that's going to be really, really quick, as opposed to, you know if you keep that snapshot open for a long period of time that merge operation, and it just slows things down, and we're trying to minimize that impact on the system. >> Lisa: So business benefits; I get the performance improvements that this integration with Pure facilitates, if we think of this in the context of digital business transformation, where companies that are doing well, have the ability to really glean actionable insights from their data to be able to drive, you know, new products and get products to market faster. Is this actually going to facilitate a company being able to get new products to market faster? >> Absolutely, so there a feature inside of VM backup and replication we call data labs. And what data labs is, is the ability to take a production snapshot, in this case, we're talking about a pure snapshot, and be able to stand that up in a sandbox environment. And you can run DEV tests, you can apply your Windows' patches in an environment that literally matches production. And it's a key differentiator. It's a key differentiator for Veeam, and it's enabled by the Pure Snapshot integration that you have this environment, and even if you have an infected system, you go put it over in data labs, it's sandboxed, so you can put in a private network so it doesn't have any connectivity. Say if you have a worm, or some other ransom ware, you can run analytics, you can run diagnosis on any of that, and not worry about it infecting any other environment, nor does it put work load on your production environment. So you get patched Tuesday, right, and we all know that Windows' patches don't always go as they seem, right? So data labs, let's take that Pure snapshot, let's stand up a virtual environment, which exactly matches production, let's test that patch, right. And we have confidence there, so when we go to production, we have confidence because we've already done it. We've already run that in production. So there's a lot of value in that capability. >> So we were at Veeam On last week fresh off the Kool-Aid injection. It's all orange here, it was all green at Veeam in Chicago. The messaging there was all about multi-cloud and hyper availability in this multi-cloud world. We're hearing a lot about cloud like function here, but of on prem activity. Of course multi-cloud includes on prem, so I wonder if you could dove tail your messaging last week, what you're seeing in the field, and what you're seeing with the partnership with companies like Pure. >> Yeah no question. I mean the Veeam platform, and really you saw it last week at Veeam On we talked kind of about sort of private cloud, and public cloud and our ability to orchestrate, and really stretch across all those environments, and we know that customer all the way from SMB all the way up to enterprise, right. They have remote offices, branch offices some of them use the cloud, some of them use multiple data centers, and really they need their data protection to be able to stretch across those environments. They don't want point solutions in each of those locations. They want a platform that they can trust, and have visibility, right. That's one of the five stages that we talked about about hyper availability, like last week. Is visibility, they want visibility across those clouds. Phase two is aggregation, they want to be able to aggregate all these different places. And that's what we provide our customers with the platform is backup, visibility, aggregation, orchestration, automation. And we provide them on different stages of that journey for our customers. We have different products, services and integration actions with our partners, that really help our customers along that journey. >> We know from our research, the crew at Wiki Bond does some great work on this. We know that data protection, and orchestration are moving up on the list of CXO priorities. At the same time, for a lot of IT practitioners who are under real budget constraints it's like trying to sell more insurance to a 24 year old. So those are kind of two countervailing trends, what are you seeing in the market place? >> What we're seeing is customers, you know down time is really is gone. I mean, I think last week we heard in one of our keynotes, you know you roll back a couple of years, you were talking about availability in terms of five-nines, right? Now it's zero. I mean people don't talk about down time because down time can't exist, and customers need that sense of security and availability. You know, it will happen, lets face it even Amazon, the best data centers in the world, go down, right, there's been some notable S3 outages, but it's about how fast can you recover. And you're talking about low RPOs, and one of the things that this week at Pure Accelerate we're hearing a lot about rapid recovery, flash blade, and the ability and you take rapid recovery and flash blade, and you combine that with the Veeam platform and our instant recovery, and you can get to near zero time recovery, in your environments. To really provide that security, and lets face it, time is money for a lot of our customers, right? So they longer they're down, the more time their losing money, they need availability, and the RPOs are near zero these days. = [Dave] The other thing, if I may just follow up, just one follow up. The other thing our research shows is the average Fortune 1000 company, over a three or four year period is leaving, literally, a billion plus dollars on the table because of poorly architected backup, or inadequate backup. So that's a huge opportunity for you and others, obviously. There's a lot of opportunity right now for vendor turn. That's the other thing our research shows, is that people aren't wed to their backup and recovery vendor. So, does that resonate with customers, are they because of digital, for example, are you seeing that tipping point, that critical mass occur, and then if you could tie that in to sort of your partnership with Pure, I'd be interested in that. >> Sure, yeah, no doubt about it. We're seeing customers, you know, they want that flexibility and that portability. One of the things we do with out platform, it's one of our unique selling features is is that it is agnostic, right. And I'll tie it back to Pure in a moment, but you know when we back up, we back up in a storage agnostic fashion. So any Veeam backup that lands on a disc on the tape anywhere, can be reconstituted, can be re imported, so even if you have a full disaster scenario, we can go stand that back up some where else, and fully consume that backup and restore it, and we have direct restore capabilities. We can port those backups and direct restore them. For example, a direct restore Azure, for example. So that flexibility, and portability is extremely valuable. Now, bring that back to Pure, some of the things we're doing around rapid recovery around the snapshot integration, we talked about is we're really enabling customers to have high performing primary storage environments. High performing secondary storage environments. And really bring that together in a way that works. We talked about multi cloud, right, you know, remote data centers and work across, and aggregate and give visibility. That's really where the Veeam Pure story together, becomes really strong because you've got an incredibly high performing primary and secondary with a highly flexible, portable secondary data protection environment. And you get the capability to get to the cloud. You know DL, a lot of customers looking to the cloud for DR, because they don't have to stand up infrastructure there. When they need it, they can spin it up, and then they can bring it back. And there's a lot of value there. >> I hear a lot of harmony, but I actually read recently, online, that a different analyst firm called the Pure Veeam relationship a match of opposites. Now they say opposites attract, and you've done a great job of talking about the integration, do you agree that it's a good blending of opposites, and if so what's that kind of symbiotic benefit that those bring to each other? >> Yeah, I don't know that I saw that report, but what I would say you know, there's a lot of synergy, we're growing at a very rapid rate, I think. When I looked at Pure, and I look at Veeam we grew 36 percent last year, I think Pure is growing at like 50 percent year over year. We have NPS scores, our NPS score is 73, we're really proud of that. The Pure NPS score, I think I saw- >> 83. >> Ken: 83. >> Dave: I didn't think it could be higher than 73. >> It's incredible. It is incredible, and I think there is a lot of synergy, the size of the organizations, I think the age of our organizations, the aggressiveness that we have, we have joint competitors in the market, so I think there's a lot of synergies between where we are as an organization, as Veeam, and where Pure is. I wish I read the article in terms of the opposites, because I'd love to understand. >> Personally, as a long time analyst, I would say the similarities are greater than the differences. >> Sure sounds like it. >> You're both about a billion dollars, you're both growing at lets call it 35-40 percent a year. You're both pursuing platforms, your both really aggressive, you're insanely passionate about your customers and winning. And you like colors, you like green, they like orange. Alright, we got to talk a little sports here. >> Lisa: Speaking of green. >> I'm going to start somewhere else though because I asked this question of a number of folks at Veeam On. If you were, Ken, if you were Robert Kraft would you have traded Tom Brady? >> {Ken] No. >> Elaborate. >> I think when you look at a, the guy was the MVP of the league last year, so that by itself stands on it's own, but you have to look and the Patriots have always been about, sort of you know, trading or moving on a year or two early, versus a year or two late. So you could make that case with Tom Brady, but I think there's always exceptions, and when you look at, I mean he is basically like an adopted son of Robert Kraft and the organization. He's brought five Superbowls, he's basically, he built Patriot place, you know. Robert Kraft built Patriot place on the backs of Tom Brady and Bill Belichik to that extent. But how do you move on from someone who's brought you so much success, that has been under market. You know, get paid under market so that they can go and do other things, and have flexibility with the gap. I just don't know how you could move on from that. >> So, that's consistent now, I think it's four for four of people we've asked, Boston fans. So appreciate that feed back. Let's talk a little hoops, you know Celtics we were feeling pretty good, up two zip, now it's tied two-two. Houston, Golden state, tied two-two. Those two teams have proven they could win on the road, Celtics haven't proven that yet. What are your thoughts on that series? >> Yeah so certainly Cleveland came storming back, I think the stories of the down fall of the Cavs were clearly over exaggerated. They came back in a big way. I think they Celtics started to figure out the Cavs in quarters two, three, and four. They got themselves in a big hole in the first quarter in the last game. I feel good, the Celtics are nine and O at home this year in the post season. You know, it's basically the best of three, and they have two of them at home, so. The Cavs will have to break serve if they want to win the series. >> Dave: If they're lucky enough to get through to the finals, which would be unbelievable, do they have any shot against the Warriors? >> So, I think to say they have no shot is probably going a little too far, but- >> Dave: Got to play the game. >> You know you got to play the games, and the Celtics have, traditionally, matched up well against the Warriors. I mean least year, the Celtic actually came into Oracle, and broke, I don't know, what was it, like a 50 game home winning streak or something. So, you know, and that was a team that didn't have Kyrie, or Gordon Haywood, and I know they're still out so the future looks bright for the Celtics. But in the context of this years finals, certainly, if I were a betting man, I'd be putting my money behind the Warriors, but I don't doubt that Brad Stevens could come up with a scheme that could steal a couple of games, and make people in the Bay area feel a little uneasy. >> Would love to see a non Lebron Final, you know. >> Yeah I think as the words would like the Celts >> Sorry Brandon, sorry buddy. >> A little diversity, you know three years in a row we've had the same things, so I'll extend my support to the Celtics in honor of both of you guys. >> Alright, and we can talk, if they get to the finals then we can take it from there. >> I can't imagine what the day after the Superbowl was like for both of you. We won't go there. >> I still haven't recovered, so. >> (laughs) Awesome, well Ken, thanks so much for stopping by. Congrats on being a CUBE alumni, now. We look forward to seeing you Veeam World in just a few months time. >> Yes, great. Thank you. We'll be there for sure. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, Dave and I will be back with a wrap in just a moment. (music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a Cube conversation in our Palo Alto studio, the conference season hasn't got to full swing yet, so we can have a little bit more relaxed atmosphere here in the studio and we're really excited, as part of our continuing coverage for the Data Makes Possible sponsored by Western Digital, looking at cool applications, really the impact of data and analytics, ultimately it gets stored usually on a Western Digital hard drive some place, and this is a great segment. Who doesn't like talking about sports, and football, and advanced analytics? And we're really excited, I have John Pollard here, he is the VP of Business Development for Zebra Sports, John, great to see you. >> Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so before we jump into the fun stuff, just a little bit of background on Zebra Sports and Zebra Technologies. >> Okay well, first, Zebra Technologies is a publicly traded company, we started in the late 1960s, and really what we do is we track enterprise assets in industries typically like healthcare, retail, travel and logistics, and transportation. And what we've done is take that heritage and bring that over into the world of sports, starting four years ago with our relationship with the NFL as the official player tracking technology. >> It's such a great story of an old-line company, right? based in Illinois-- >> Yeah, Lincolnshire. >> Outside of Chicago, right? RFID tags, and inventory management, and all this kind of old-school stuff. But then to take that into this really dynamic world, A, of sports, but even more, advanced analytics, which is relatively new. And we've been at it for a few years, but what a great move by the company to go into this space. How did they choose to do that? >> Well it was an opportunity that just came to them through an RFP, the NFL had investigated different technologies to track players including optical and a GPS-based technologies, and now of course with Zebra, our location and technologies are based on RFID. And so we just took the heritage and our capabilities of really working at the edge of enterprises in those traditional industries from transactional moments, to inventory control moments, to analytics at the end, and took that model and ported it over to football, and it's turned out to be a very good relationship for us in a couple of ways. We've matured as a sports business over the four years, we've developed more opportunities to take our solutions, not just in-game but moving them into the practice facilities for NFL teams, but it's also opened up the aperture for other industries to now appreciate how we can track minute types of information, like players moving around on the football field, and translating it into usable information. >> So, for the people that aren't familiar, they can do a little homework. But basically you have a little tag, a little sensor, that goes onto the shoulder pads, right? >> There's two chips. >> Two chips, and from that you can tell where that player is all the time and how they move, how they fast they move, acceleration and all the type of stuff, right? >> Correct, we put two chips inside of the shoulder pads for down linemen, or people who play with their hands on the ground, we put a third chip between the shoulder blades. Those chips communicate with receiver boxes that have been installed across the perimeter or around the perimeter of a stadium, and they blink 12 times per second. And that does tell you who's on the field, where they are on the field, and in proximity to other players on the field. And once the play starts itself, we can see how fast they're going, we can calculate change of direction, acceleration and deceleration metrics, we can also see, as you know with football, interesting information like separation from a wide receiver in defensive back, which is critical when you're evaluating players' capabilities. >> So, this started about four years ago, right? >> Yes, we started our relationship with the league in-game, four years ago. >> Okay, so I'd just love to kind of hear your take on how the evolution of the introduction of this data was received by the league, received by the teams, something they'd never had before, right? Kind of a look and feel and you can look at film, but not to the degree and the tightness of tolerances that you guys are able to deliver. >> Well, like any new technology and information resource, it takes time to first of all determine what you want to do with that information, you have an idea when you start, and then it evolves over time. And so what we started with was tagging the players themselves and during the time, what we've really enjoyed in working with the NFL is that the league has to be very pragmatic and thoughtful when introducing new technologies and information. So they studied and researched the information to determine how much of this information do they share with the clubs, how much do they share with the fans and the media, and then what type of information sharing, what does that mean in terms of impact of the integrity of the game and fair competition. So, for the first two years it was more of a research and testing type of process, and starting in 2016 you started to see more of an acceleration of that data being shared with the clubs. Each club would receive their own data for in-game, and then we would start to see some of that trickle out through the NFL's Next Gen Stats brand banner on their NFL.com site. And so then we start to see more of that and then what I think we've really seen pick up pace certainly in 2017 is more utilization of this information from a media perspective. We're seeing it more integrated into the broadcasts themselves, so you have like kind of a live tracking set of information that keeps you contextually involved in the game. >> Right. And you were involved in advanced analytics before you joined Zebra, so you've been kind of in this advanced stats world for a while. So how did it change when you actually had a real-time sensor on people's bodies? >> Yeah it does feel a bit like Groundhog Day, right? I started more in the stats and advanced analytics when I worked for STATS LLC. In 2007, I developed a piece of software for the New Orleans Saints that they used to track observational statistics to game video. And it was a similar type of experience in starting in 2009 and introducing that to teams where it took about three or four years where teams started to feel like that new information resource was not a nice to have but a need to have, a premium ingredient that they could use for game planning, and then player evaluation, and also the technology could provide them some efficiencies. We're seeing that now with the tracking data. We just returned from the NFL Combine a couple weeks ago, and what I felt in all the conversations that we had with clubs was that there was a high level of appreciation and a lot of interest in how tracking data can help facilitate their traditional scouting and player evaluation processes, the technology itself how can it make the teams more efficient in evaluating players and developing game plans, so there's a lot of excitement. We've kind of hit that tipping point, if I may, where there's general acceptance and excitement about the data and then it's incumbent upon us as a partner with the league and with the teams for our practice clients to teach them how to use the analytics and statistics effectively. >> So I'm just curious, some of the specific data points that you've seen evolve over time and also the uses. I think you were talking about a little bit off camera that originally it was really more the training staff and it was really more kind of the health of the player. Then I would imagine it evolved to now you can actually see what's going on in terms of better analysis, but I would imagine it's going to evolve where coaches are getting that feedback in real-time on a per-play basis and are making in-game adjustments based on this real-time data. >> Well technically that's feasible today but then there's the rules of engagement with the league itself, and so the teams themselves, and the coaches, and the sideline aren't seeing this tracking data live, whether it be in the booth or on the sidelines. Now in a practice environment, that's what teams are using our system for. With inside of three seconds they're seeing real-time information show up about players during practice. Let's take an example, a player during practice who's coming back from injury. You might want to monitor their output during the week as they come back and they make sure that they're ready for the game on a week to week basis. Trainers are now able to see that information and take that over to a position coach or a head coach and make them aware of the performance of the player during practice. And I think sometimes people think with tracking data it's all about managing in the health of the player and making sure they don't overwork. Where really, the antithesis of that is you can actually also identify players who aren't necessarily reaching their maximum output that will help them build throughout the week from peak performance during a game. And so a lot of teams like to say okay, I have a wide receiver, I know their max miles per hour, is, let's use an example, 20.5 miles an hour. He hasn't hit his max yet during the entire week, so let's get him into some drills and some sessions, where he can start hitting that max so that we reduce the potential for injury on game day. >> Right, another area that probably a lot of people would never think is you also put sensors on the refs. So you know not only where the refs are, but are they in the right positions technically and kind of from a best practices to make the calls for the areas that they're trying to cover. >> Right. >> There's got to be, was their a union pushback on this type of stuff? I mean there's got to be some interesting kind of dynamics going on. >> Yeah as far as the referees, I know that referees are tagged and the NFL uses that information and correlates that with the play calls themselves. We're not involved in that process but I know they're utilizing the information. In addition to the referees I should add, we also have a tag in the ball itself. >> [Jeff] That's right. >> 2017 season was the first year that we had every single game had a tagged ball. Now that tagged information in the ball was not shared with the clubs yet, the league is still researching the information, like they did with the players' stuff. A couple years of research, then they decide to distribute that to the teams and the media. So we are tracking a lot of assets, we also have tags in the first down markers and the pylons and I'll just cut to the chase, there are people who will say okay, does that mean you can use these chips and this technology to identify first down marks or when a ball might break the plane for a potential touchdown? Technically you can do that, and that's something the league may be researching, but right now that's not part of our charter with them. >> Right, so I'm just curious about the conversations about the data and the use of the data. 'Cause as you said there's a lot of raw data, and there's kind of governance issues and rules of engagement, and then there's also what types of analytics get applied on top of that data, and then of course also it's about context, what's the context of the analytics? So I wonder if you could speak to the kind of the evolution of that process, what were people looking at when you first introduced this four years ago, and how has it moved over time in terms of adding new analytics on top of that data set? >> That's one of my favorite topics to talk about, when we first started with the league and engaging teams for the practice solution or providing them analytics, they in essence got a large raw data file of XY coordinates, you can imagine (laughs) it was a gigantic hard drive-- >> Even better, XY coordinates. >> And put it into a spreadsheet and go. There was some of that early on and really what we had to do through the power of software, is develop and application platform that would help teams manage and organize this data appropriately, develop the appropriate reports, or interesting reports and analysis. And over the last two or three years I think we've really found our stride at Zebra in providing solutions to go along with the capabilities of the technology itself. So at first it was strength and conditioning coaches, plowing through this information in great detail or analytics staffs, and what we've seen over the last 24 months is director of analytics now, personnel staff, coaches as well, a broadening group of people inside of a football organization start to use this data because the software itself allows them to do so. I'll give an example, instead of just tabular information, and charts and graphs, we now take the data and we can plot them into a play field schematic, which as you know as we talked off camera you're very familiar with football, that just automates the process of what teams do today manually, is develop play cards so they can do self-study and advanced scouting techniques. That's all automated today, and not only that, it's animated because we have the tracking information and we can merge that to game video. So we're just trying to make the tools with the software more functional so everybody in the organization can utilize it beyond strength and conditioning, which is important, but now we're broadening the aperture and appealing to everybody in the organization. >> Do you do, I can just see you can do play development too, if you plug in everybody's speeds and feeds, you have a certain duration of time, you can probably AB test all types of routes, and timing on drops and now you know how hard the guy throws the ball to come up with a pretty wide array of options, I would imagine within the time window. >> Exactly, a couple of examples I could give, when we meet with teams we have every player, let's say on a team and we know all the routes they ran during an entire season. So you can imagine on a visualization tool, you can imagine, it's like a spaghetti chart of different routes and then you start breaking down the scenarios of context like we talked about earlier, it's third down, it's in the red zone, it's receptions. And so that becomes a smaller set of lines that you see on the chart. I'll tell you Jeff, when we start meeting with teams at the Combine and we start showing them their X or a primary receiver, or their slot receiver tendencies visually, they start leaning forward a bit, oh my goodness, we spend way too much time on the same route when we're targeting for touch down passes. Or we're right-handed too much, we have to change that up. That's the most gratifying thing, is that you're taking a picture and you're really illuminating and those coaches who intrinsically know that, but once they see a visual cue, it validates something in their head that either they have to change or evolve something in their game plan or their practice regimen. >> Well, that's what I was going to ask, and you lead right into it is, what are some of the things that get the old-school person or the people that just don't get that, they don't get it, they don't have the time, they don't believe it, or maybe believe it but they don't have the time, they're afraid to understand. What are some of those kind of light bulb moments when they go okay, I get it, as you said, most of the time if they're smart, it's going to be kind of a validation of something they've already felt, but they've never actually had the data in front of them. >> Right, that's exactly right. So that, the first thing is just quantifying, providing a quantifiable empirical set of evidence to support what they intrinsically know as professional evaluators or coaches. So we always say that they data itself and the technology isn't meant to be a silver bullet. It's now a new premium ingredient that can help support the processes that existed in the past and hopefully provide some efficiency. And so that's the first thing, I think the visual, the example I showed about the wide receiver tendencies when they're thrown to in the red zone, that always gets people leaning forward a little bit. Also with running backs, third down in three plus yards, or third down in short situations, and my right-hander to left-hander when I'm on a certain hash. Again the visualization just allows them to really mark something in their head-- >> Just in the phase. >> Where it makes them really understand. Another example that's interesting is players who play on special teams who are also wide receivers, so as we know, linebackers and tight ends tend to be, and quarterbacks tend to be involved in special teams. Well is there an effect when they've covered kick offs and punts, a large amount of those in a game, did that affect them on side a ball play, for instance? Think about Julian Edelman two Superbowls ago, he played 93 snaps against the Atlanta Falcons. and when you look at the route-- >> [Jeff] He played 93 snaps? >> Yeah, between special, because it went into overtime, right? It was an offensive game-- >> And he's on all the-- >> He played a lot of snaps, he played 93 snaps. how does that affect his route integrity? Not only the types and quality of the route, but the depth and speed he gets to those points, those change over time. So this type of information can give the experts just a little bit more information to find that edge. And I have a great mentor of mine, I have to bring him up, Gill Brant, former VP of Personnel to Dallas Cowboys, with Tex Schramm and Tom Landry, he looks at this type of information and he says, what would a team pay for one more victory? >> So as we know, all coaches and professional organizations and college are looking for an edge, and if we can provide that with our technology through efficiencies and some type of support information resource then we're doing our job. >> I just wanted to, before I let you go, just the human factors on that. I mean, football coaches are notoriously crazy workers and, right, you can always watch more films. So now you're adding a whole new category of data and information. How's that being received on their side? Is it, are they going to have to put new staff and resources against this? I mean, there's only so many hours in a day and I can't help but think of the second tier or third tier coaches who are going to be on the hook for going through this. Or can you automate so much of it so it's not necessarily this additional burden that they have to take on? 'Cause I would imagine if the Cowboys are doing it, the Eagles got to do it, the Giants got to do it, and the Washington Redskins got to do it, right? >> Right, right, well each team as you might expect, their cultures are different. And I would say two or three years ago you started to see more teams hire literally by title, director of analytics, or director of football information, instead of sharing that responsibility between two or three people that already existed in the organization. So that staffing I think occurred a couple, two or three years ago or over the last two or three years. This becomes another element for those staffs to work with. But also along that process over the last two or three years is, really, I always try to say in talking to teams and I'll be on the road again here soon talking to clubs after pro days conclude, is forget about staffs and analytics and that idea. Do you want to be information driven, and do you want to be efficient? And that's something everybody can grasp onto, whether you're the strength and conditioning coach, personnel staff or scout, or a position coach, or a head coach, or a coordinator. So we try to be information driven, and then that seems to ease the process of people thinking I have to hire more people. What I really need to do is ask my people that are already in place to maybe be more curious about this information, and if we're going to invest in a resource that can help support them and make them more efficient, make sure we leverage it. And so that's our process that we work with, it varies by team, some teams have large, large expansive staffs. That doesn't necessarily mean, in my opinion the most effective staff is using information. Sometimes it's the organizations that run very lean with a few set of people, but very focused and moving in one direction. >> I love it, data for efficiency, right? In God we trust, everybody else bring data. One of my favorite lines that we hear over and over and over at these shows. >> In fact, I might borrow that next week. >> You could take that one, alright. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> Well John, thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by and participating in this Western Digital program, because it is all about the data and it is about efficiency, so it's not necessarily trying to kill people with more tools, but help them be better. >> That's what we're trying to do, I appreciate the opportunity and love to talk to you more. >> Absolutely, well hopefully we'll see you again. He's John Pollard, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC it's theCube covering .conf 2017 brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back here on theCube the flagship broadcast for Silicon Angle TV, glad to have you here at .conf 2017 along with Dave Vellante, John Walls. We are live in Washington, DC and balmy Washington, DC. It's like 88 here today, really hot. >> It's cooler here than it is in Boston, I here. >> Yeah, right, but we're not used to it this time of year. Brad Medairy now joins us he's an SVP at Booz Allen Hamilton and Brad, thank you for being with us. >> Dave: And another Redskins fan I heard. >> Another Redskins fan. >> It was a big night wasn't it? Sunday night, I mean we haven't had many of those in the last decade or so. >> Yeah, yeah, I became a Redskins fan in 1998 and unfortunately a little late after the three or four superbowls. >> John: That's a long dry spell, yeah. >> Are you guys Nats fans? >> Oh, huge Nats fan, I don't know, how about Brad, I don't want to speak for you. >> I've got a soft spot in my heart for the Nats, what's the story with that team? >> Well, it's just been post-season disappointment, but this year. >> This is the year. >> This is the year, although-- >> Hey, if the Redsox and the Cubs can do it. >> I hate to go down the path, but Geos worry me a little bit, but we can talk about it offline. >> Brad: Yeah, let's not talk about DC Sports. >> Three out of five outings now have not been very good, but anyway let's take care of what we can. Cyber, let's talk a little cyber here. I guess that's your expertise, so pretty calm, nothing going on these days, right? >> It's a boring field, you know? Boring field, yeah. >> A piece of cake. So you've got clients private sector, public sector, what's kind of the cross-pollination there? I mean, what are there mutual concerns, and what do you see from them in terms of common threats? >> Yeah, so at Booz Allen we support both federal and commercial clients, and we have a long history in cyber security kind of with deep roots in the defense and the intelligence community, and have been in the space for years. What's interesting is I kind of straddle both sides of the fence from a commercial and a federal perspective, and the commercial side, some of the major breaches really force a lot of these organizations to quickly get religion, and early on everything was very compliance driven and now it's much more proactive and the need to be much more both efficient and effective. The federal space is, I think in many cases, catching up, and so I've done a lot of work across .mil and there's been a lot of investment across .mil, and very secure, .gov, you know, is still probably a fast follower, and one of the things that we're doing is bringing a lot of commercial best practices into the government space and the government's quickly moving from a compliance-based approach to cyber security to much more proactive, proactive defense. >> Can you get, it's almost like a glacier sometimes, right, I mean there's a legacy mindset, in a way, that government does it's business, but I would assume that events over the past year or two have really prompted them along a little bit more. >> I mean there's definitely been some highly publicized events around breaches across .gov, and I think there's a lot of really progressive programs out there that are working to quickly you know, remediate a lot of these issues. One of the programs we're involved in is something called CDM that's run out of DHS, Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation, and it's a program really designed to up-armor .gov, you know to increase situational awareness and provide much more proactive reporting so that you can get real-time information around events and postures of the network, so I think there's a lot of exciting activities and I think DHS and partnership with the federal agencies is really kind of spearheading that. >> So if we can just sort of lay out the situation in the commercial world and see how it compares to what's going on in gov. Product creep, right, there's dozens and dozens and dozens of products that have been installed, security teams are just sort of overwhelmed, overworked, response is too slow, I've seen data from, whatever, 190 days to 350 days, to identify an infiltration, nevermind remediate it, and so, it's a challenge, so what's happening in your world and how can you guys help? >> Yeah, you know it's funny, I love going out to the RSA conference and, you know, I watch a lot of folks in the space, walking around with a shopping cart and they meet all these great vendors and they have all these shiny pebbles and they walk away with the silver bullet, right, and so if they implement this tool or technology, they're done, right? And I think we all know, that's not the case, and so over the years I think that we've seen a lot of, a lot of organizations, both federal and commercial, try to solve a lot of the problems through, you know, new technology solutions, whether it's the next best intrusion detection, or if it's endpoint, you know, the rage now is EDR, MDR, and so, but the problem is at the end of the day, the adversaries live in the seams, and in the world that I grew up in focused a lot around counter-terrorism. We took a data-centric approach to finding advanced adversaries, and one of the reasons that the Booz Allen has strategically partnered with Splunk is we believe that, you know, in a data-centric approach to cyber, and Splunk as a platform allows us to quickly integrate data, independent of the tools because the other thing with these tool ecosystems is all these tools work really well within their own ecosystem, but as soon as you start to mix and match best of breed tools and capabilities, they tend to not play well together. And so we use Splunk as that integration hub to bring together the data that allows us to bring our advanced trade-craft and tech-craft around hunting, understanding of the adversaries to be able to fuse that data and do advanced detection and help our clients be a lot more proactive. >> So cyber foresight is the service that you lead with? >> Yeah, you know, one of the things, having a company that's been, Booz Allen I think now is 103 years old, with obvious deep roots in the federal government, and so we have a pedigree in defense and intelligence, and we have a lot of amazing analysts, a lot of amazing, what we call, tech-craft, and what we did was, this was many many years ago, and we're probably one of the best kept secrets in threat intelligence, but after maybe five or six years ago when you started to see a lot of the public breaches in the financial services industry, a lot of the financial service clients came to us and said, "Hey, Booz Allen, you guys understand the threat, you understand actors, you understand TTPs, help educate us around what these adversaries are doing. Why are they doing it, how are they doing it, and how can we get out in front of it?" So the question has always been, you know, how can we be more proactive? And so we started a capability that we, or we developed a capability called cyber foresight where we provided some of our human intelligence analysts and applied them to open-source data and we were providing threat intelligence as a service. And what's funny is today you see a lot of the cyber threat intelligence landscape is fairly crowded, when I talk to clients they affectionately refer to people that provide threat intelligence as beltway book reporters, which I love. (laughter) But for us, you know, we've lived in that space for so many years we have the analysts, the scale, the tradecraft, the tools, the technologies, and we feel that we're really well positioned to be able to provide clients with the insights. You know, early on when we were working heavily in the financial services sector, the biggest challenge a lot of our clients had in threat intelligence was, what do I do with it? Okay, so you're going to send me, what we call a Spot Report, and so hey we know this nation-state actor with this advanced set of TTPs is targeting my organization, so what, right? I'm the CISO, I'm the CIO, should I resign? Should I jump out the window? (laughter) What do I do? I know these guys are coming after me, how do I actually operationalize that? And so what we've spent a lot of time thinking about and investing in is how to operationalize threat intelligence, and when we started, you kind of think of it as a pitcher and a catcher, right? You know, so the threat intelligence provider throws those insights, but the receiver needs to be able to catch that information, be able to put it in context, process it, and then operationalize it, implement it within their enterprise to be able to stop those advanced threats. And so one of the reasons that we gravitated toward Splunk, Splunk is a platform, Splunk is becoming really, in our mind, one of the defacto repositories for IT and cyber data across our client space, so when you take that, all those insights that Splunk has around the cyber posture and the infrastructure of an enterprise, and you overlay the threat intelligence with that, it gives us the ability to be able to quickly operationalize that intelligence, and so what does that mean? So, you know, when a security operator is sitting at a console, they're drowning in data, and, you know, analysts, we've investigated tons of commercial breaches and in most cases what we see is the analyst, at some point, had a blinking red light on their screen that was an indicator of that particular breach. The problem is, how do you filter through the noise? That's a problem that this whole industry, it's a signal to noise ratio issue. >> So you guys bring humans to that equation, human intelligence meets analytics and machine intelligence, and your adversary has evolved, and I wonder if you can talk about that, it's gone from sort of hacktivists to organized crime and nation-states, so they've become much more sophisticated. How have the humans sort of evolved as well that your bridge to bear? >> Yeah, I mean certainly the bear to entry is lower, and so now we're seeing ransomware as a service, we're seeing attacks on industrial control systems, on IOT devices, you know, financial services now is extremely concerned about building control systems because if you can compromise and build a control system you can get into potentially laterally move into the enterprise network. And so our analysts now not only are traditional intelligence analysts that understand adversaries and TTPs, but they also need to be technologists, they need to have reverse engineering experience, they need to be malware analysts, they need to be able to look at attack factors in TTPs to be able to put all the stuff in context, and again it goes back to being able to operationalize this intelligence to get value out of it quickly. >> They need to have imaginations, right? I mean thinking like the bad guys, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean we spend a lot of time, we've started up a new capability called Dark Labs and it's our way to be able to unlock some of those folks that think like bad guys and be able to unleash them to look at the world through a different lens, and be able to help provide clients insights into attack factors, new TTPs, and it's fascinating to watch those teams work. >> How does social media come into play here? Or is that a problem at all, or is that a consideration for you at all? >> Well, you know, when we look at a lot of attacks, what's kind of interesting with the space now is you look at nation-state and nation-state activists and they have sophisticated TTPs. In general they don't have to use them. Nation-states haven't even pulled out their quote "good stuff" yet because right now, for the most part they go with low-hanging fruit, low-hanging fruit being-- >> Just pushing the door open, right? >> Yeah, I mean, why try to crash through the wall when you can just, you know, the door's not locked? And so, you know, when you talk about things like social media whether it's phishing, whether it's malware injected in images, or on Facebook, or Twitter, you know, the majority of tacts are either driven through people, or driven through just unpatched systems. And so, you know, it's kind of cliche, but it really starts with policies, training of the people in your organization, but then also putting some more proactive monitoring in place to be able to kind of start to detect some of those more advanced signatures for some of the stuff that's happening in social media. >> It's like having the best security system in the world, but you left your front door unlocked. >> That's right, that's right. >> So I wonder if, Brad, I don't know how much you can say, but I wonder if you could comment just generally, like you said, we haven't seen their best pitch yet, we had Robert Gates on, and when I was interviewing him he said, "You know, we have great offensive posture and security, but we have to be super careful how we use it because when it comes to critical infrastructure we have the most to lose." And when you think about the sort of aftermath of Stuxnet, when basically the Iranians said hey we can do this too, what's the general sort of philosophy inside the beltway around offense versus defense? >> You know, I think from, that's a great question. From an offensive cyber perspective I think where the industry is going is how do you take offensive tradecraft and apply it to defensive? And so by that I mean, think about we take folks that have experience thinking like a bad guy, but unleash them in a security operation center to do things like advanced hunting, and so what they'll do is take large sets of data and start doing hypothesis driven analytics where they'll be able to kind of think like a bad guy and then they'll have developers or techies next to them building different types of analytics to try to take their mind and put it into an analytic that you can run over a set of data to see, hey, is there an actor on your network performing like that? And so I think we see in the space now a lot of focus around hunting and red teaming, and I think that's kind of the industry's way of trying to take some of that offensive mentality, but then apply it on the defensive side. >> Dave: It just acts like kind of Navy Seal operations in security. >> Right, right, yeah. I mean the challenge is there's a finite set of people in the world that really, truly have that level of tradecraft so the question is, how do you actually deliver that at any level of scale that can make a difference across this broader industry. >> So it's the quantity of those skill sets, and they always say that the amazing thing, again I come back to Stuxnet, was that the code was perfect. >> Brad: Yeah. >> The antivirus guy said, "We've never seen anything like that where the code is just perfect." And you're saying it's just a quantity of skills that enables that, that's how you know it's nation-state, obviously, something like that. >> Yeah, I mean the level of expertise, the skill set, the time it take to be able to mature that tradecraft is many many years, and so I think that when we can crack the bubble of how we can take that expertise, deliver it in a defensive way to provide unique insights that, and do that at scale because just taking one of those folks into an organization doesn't help the whole, right? How can you actually kind of operationalize that to be able to deliver that treadecraft through things like analytics as a service, through manage, detection, and response, at scale so that one person can influence many many organizations at one time. >> And, just before we go, so cyber foresight is available today, it's something you're going to market with. >> Yeah, we just partnered with Splunk, it's available as a part of Splunk ES, it's an add-on, and it provides our analysts the ability to provide insights and be able to operationalize that within Splunk, we're super excited about it and it's been a great partnership with Splunk and their ES team. >> Dave: So you guys are going to market together on this one. >> We are partnered, we're going to market together, and delivering the best of our tradecraft and our intelligence analysts with their platform and product. >> Dave: Alright, good luck with it. >> Hey, thank you, thank you very much, guys. >> Good pair, that's for sure, yeah. Thank you, Brad, for being with us here, and Monday night, let's see how it goes, right? >> Yeah, I'm optimistic. >> Very good, alright. Coach Brad Medairy joining us with his rundown on what's happening at Booz Allen. Back with more here on theCube, you're watching live .conf 2017.