(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2023 live from Stanford University. This is Lisa Martin. My co-host is Tracy Yuan. We're excited to be having great conversations all day but you know, 'cause you've been watching. We've been interviewing some very inspiring women and some men as well, talking about all of the amazing applications of data science. You're not going to want to miss this next conversation. Our guest is Gabriela de Queiroz, Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Microsoft. Welcome, Gabriela. We're excited to have you. >> Thank you very much. I'm so excited to be talking to you. >> Yeah, you're on theCUBE. >> Yeah, finally. (Lisa laughing) Like a dream come true. (laughs) >> I know and we love that. We're so thrilled to have you. So you have a ton of experience in the data space. I was doing some research on you. You've worked in software, financial advertisement, health. Talk to us a little bit about you. What's your background in? >> So I was trained in statistics. So I'm a statistician and then I worked in epidemiology. I worked with air pollution and public health. So I was a researcher before moving into the industry. So as I was talking today, the weekly paths, it's exactly who I am. I went back and forth and back and forth and stopped and tried something else until I figured out that I want to do data science and that I want to do different things because with data science we can... The beauty of data science is that you can move across domains. So I worked in healthcare, financial, and then different technology companies. >> Well the nice thing, one of the exciting things that data science, that I geek out about and Tracy knows 'cause we've been talking about this all day, it's just all the different, to your point, diverse, pun intended, applications of data science. You know, this morning we were talking about, we had the VP of data science from Meta as a keynote. She came to theCUBE talking and really kind of explaining from a content perspective, from a monetization perspective, and of course so many people in the world are users of Facebook. It makes it tangible. But we also heard today conversations about the applications of data science in police violence, in climate change. We're in California, we're expecting a massive rainstorm and we don't know what to do when it rains or snows. But climate change is real. Everyone's talking about it, and there's data science at its foundation. That's one of the things that I love. But you also have a lot of experience building diverse teams. Talk a little bit about that. You've created some very sophisticated data science solutions. Talk about your recommendation to others to build diverse teams. What's in it for them? And maybe share some data science project or two that you really found inspirational. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I do love building teams. Every time I'm given the task of building teams, I feel the luckiest person in the world because you have the option to pick like different backgrounds and all the diverse set of like people that you can find. I don't think it's easy, like people say, yeah, it's very hard. You have to be intentional. You have to go from the very first part when you are writing the job description through the interview process. So you have to be very intentional in every step. And you have to think through when you are doing that. And I love, like my last team, we had like 10 people and we were so diverse. Like just talking about languages. We had like 15 languages inside a team. So how beautiful it is. Like all different backgrounds, like myself as a statistician, but we had people from engineering background, biology, languages, and so on. So it's, yeah, like every time thinking about building a team, if you wanted your team to be diverse, you need to be intentional. >> I'm so glad you brought up that intention point because that is the fundamental requirement really is to build it with intention. >> Exactly, and I love to hear like how there's different languages. So like I'm assuming, or like different backgrounds, I'm assuming everybody just zig zags their way into the team and now you're all women in data science and I think that's so precious. >> Exactly. And not only woman, right. >> Tracy: Not only woman, you're right. >> The team was diverse not only in terms of like gender, but like background, ethnicity, and spoken languages, and language that they use to program and backgrounds. Like as I mentioned, not everybody did the statistics in school or computer science. And it was like one of my best teams was when we had this combination also like things that I'm good at the other person is not as good and we have this knowledge sharing all the time. Every day I would feel like I'm learning something. In a small talk or if I was reviewing something, there was always something new because of like the richness of the diverse set of people that were in your team. >> Well what you've done is so impressive, because not only have you been intentional with it, but you sound like the hallmark of a great leader of someone who hires and builds teams to fill gaps. They don't have to know less than I do for me to be the leader. They have to have different skills, different areas of expertise. That is really, honestly Gabriela, that's the hallmark of a great leader. And that's not easy to come by. So tell me, who were some of your mentors and sponsors along the way that maybe influenced you in that direction? Or is that just who you are? >> That's a great question. And I joke that I want to be the role model that I never had, right. So growing up, I didn't have anyone that I could see other than my mom probably or my sister. But there was no one that I could see, I want to become that person one day. And once I was tracing my path, I started to see people looking at me and like, you inspire me so much, and I'm like, oh wow, this is amazing and I want to do do this over and over and over again. So I want to be that person to inspire others. And no matter, like I'll be like a VP, CEO, whoever, you know, I want to be, I want to keep inspiring people because that's so valuable. >> Lisa: Oh, that's huge. >> And I feel like when we grow professionally and then go to the next level, we sometimes we lose that, you know, thing that's essential. And I think also like, it's part of who I am as I was building and all my experiences as I was going through, I became what I mentioned is unique person that I think we all are unique somehow. >> You're a rockstar. Isn't she a rockstar? >> You dropping quotes out. >> I'm loving this. I'm like, I've inspired Gabriela. (Gabriela laughing) >> Oh my God. But yeah, 'cause we were asking our other guests about the same question, like, who are your role models? And then we're talking about how like it's very important for women to see that there is a representation, that there is someone they look up to and they want to be. And so that like, it motivates them to stay in this field and to start in this field to begin with. So yeah, I think like you are definitely filling a void and for all these women who dream to be in data science. And I think that's just amazing. >> And you're a founder too. In 2012, you founded R Ladies. Talk a little bit about that. This is present in more than 200 cities in 55 plus countries. Talk about R Ladies and maybe the catalyst to launch it. >> Yes, so you always start, so I'm from Brazil, I always talk about this because it's such, again, I grew up over there. So I was there my whole life and then I moved to here, Silicon Valley. And when I moved to San Francisco, like the doors opened. So many things happening in the city. That was back in 2012. Data science was exploding. And I found out something about Meetup.com, it's a website that you can join and go in all these events. And I was going to this event and I joke that it was kind of like going to the Disneyland, where you don't know if I should go that direction or the other direction. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And I was like, should I go and learn about data visualization? Should I go and learn about SQL or should I go and learn about Hadoop, right? So I would go every day to those meetups. And I was a student back then, so you know, the budget was very restricted as a student. So we don't have much to spend. And then they would serve dinner and you would learn for free. And then I got to a point where I was like, hey, they are doing all of this as a volunteer. Like they are running this meetup and events for free. And I felt like it's a cycle. I need to do something, right. I'm taking all this in. I'm having this huge opportunity to be here. I want to give back. So that's what how everything started. I was like, no, I have to think about something. I need to think about something that I can give back. And I was using R back then and I'm like how about I do something with R. I love R, I'm so passionate about R, what about if I create a community around R but not a regular community, because by going to this events, I felt that as a Latina and as a woman, I was always in the corner and I was not being able to participate and to, you know, be myself and to network and ask questions. I would be in the corner. So I said to myself, what about if I do something where everybody feel included, where everybody can participate, can share, can ask questions without judgment? So that's how R ladies all came together. >> That's awesome. >> Talk about intentions, like you have to, you had that go in mind, but yeah, I wanted to dive a little bit into R. So could you please talk more about where did the passion for R come from, and like how did the special connection between you and R the language, like born, how did that come from? >> It was not a love at first sight. >> No. >> Not at all. Not at all. Because that was back in Brazil. So all the documentation were in English, all the tutorials, only two. We had like very few tutorials. It was not like nowadays that we have so many tutorials and courses. There were like two tutorials, other documentation in English. So it's was hard for me like as someone that didn't know much English to go through the language and then to learn to program was not easy task. But then as I was going through the language and learning and reading books and finding the people behind the language, I don't know how I felt in love. And then when I came to to San Francisco, I saw some of like the main contributors who are speaking in person and I'm like, wow, they are like humans. I don't know, it was like, I have no idea why I had this love. But I think the the people and then the community was the thing that kept me with the R language. >> Yeah, the community factors is so important. And it's so, at WIDS it's so palpable. I mean I literally walk in the door, every WIDS I've done, I think I've been doing them for theCUBE since 2017. theCUBE has been here since the beginning in 2015 with our co-founders. But you walk in, you get this sense of belonging. And this sense of I can do anything, why not? Why not me? Look at her up there, and now look at you speaking in the technical talk today on theCUBE. So inspiring. One of the things that I always think is you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see more people that look like you and sound like you and like me and like you as well. And WIDS gives us that opportunity, which is fantastic, but it's also helping to move the needle, really. And I was looking at some of the Anitab.org stats just yesterday about 2022. And they're showing, you know, the percentage of females in technical roles has been hovering around 25% for a while. It's a little higher now. I think it's 27.6 according to any to Anitab. We're seeing more women hired in roles. But what are the challenges, and I would love to get your advice on this, for those that might be in this situation is attrition, women who are leaving roles. What would your advice be to a woman who might be trying to navigate family and work and career ladder to stay in that role and keep pushing forward? >> I'll go back to the community. If you don't have a community around you, it's so hard to navigate. >> That's a great point. >> You are lonely. There is no one that you can bounce ideas off, that you can share what you are feeling or like that you can learn as well. So sometimes you feel like you are the only person that is going through that problem or like, you maybe have a family or you are planning to have a family and you have to make a decision. But you've never seen anyone going through this. So when you have a community, you see people like you, right. So that's where we were saying about having different people and people like you so they can share as well. And you feel like, oh yeah, so they went through this, they succeed. I can also go through this and succeed. So I think the attrition problem is still big problem. And I'm sure will be worse now with everything that is happening in Tech with layoffs. >> Yes and the great resignation. >> Yeah. >> We are going back, you know, a few steps, like a lot of like advancements that we did. I feel like we are going back unfortunately, but I always tell this, make sure that you have a community. Make sure that you have a mentor. Make sure that you have someone or some people, not only one mentor, different mentors, that can support you through this trajectory. Because it's not easy. But there are a lot of us out there. >> There really are. And that's a great point. I love everything about the community. It's all about that network effect and feeling like you belong- >> That's all WIDS is about. >> Yeah. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Like coming over here, it's like seeing the old friends again. It's like I'm so glad that I'm coming because I'm all my old friends that I only see like maybe once a year. >> Tracy: Reunion. >> Yeah, exactly. And I feel like that our tank get, you know- >> Lisa: Replenished. >> Exactly. For the rest of the year. >> Yes. >> Oh, that's precious. >> I love that. >> I agree with that. I think one of the things that when I say, you know, you can't see, I think, well, how many females in technology would I be able to recognize? And of course you can be female technology working in the healthcare sector or working in finance or manufacturing, but, you know, we need to be able to have more that we can see and identify. And one of the things that I recently found out, I was telling Tracy this earlier that I geeked out about was finding out that the CTO of Open AI, ChatGPT, is a female. I'm like, (gasps) why aren't we talking about this more? She was profiled on Fast Company. I've seen a few pieces on her, Mira Murati. But we're hearing so much about ChatJTP being... ChatGPT, I always get that wrong, about being like, likening it to the launch of the iPhone, which revolutionized mobile and connectivity. And here we have a female in the technical role. Let's put her on a pedestal because that is hugely inspiring. >> Exactly, like let's bring everybody to the front. >> Yes. >> Right. >> And let's have them talk to us because like, you didn't know. I didn't know probably about this, right. You didn't know. Like, we don't know about this. It's kind of like we are hidden. We need to give them the spotlight. Every woman to give the spotlight, so they can keep aspiring the new generation. >> Or Susan Wojcicki who ran, how long does she run YouTube? All the YouTube influencers that probably have no idea who are influential for whatever they're doing on YouTube in different social platforms that don't realize, do you realize there was a female behind the helm that for a long time that turned it into what it is today? That's outstanding. Why aren't we talking about this more? >> How about Megan Smith, was the first CTO on the Obama administration. >> That's right. I knew it had to do with Obama. Couldn't remember. Yes. Let's let's find more pedestals. But organizations like WIDS, your involvement as a speaker, showing more people you can be this because you can see it, >> Yeah, exactly. is the right direction that will help hopefully bring us back to some of the pre-pandemic levels, and keep moving forward because there's so much potential with data science that can impact everyone's lives. I always think, you know, we have this expectation that we have our mobile phone and we can get whatever we want wherever we are in the world and whatever time of day it is. And that's all data driven. The regular average person that's not in tech thinks about data as a, well I'm paying for it. What's all these data charges? But it's powering the world. It's powering those experiences that we all want as consumers or in our business lives or we expect to be able to do a transaction, whether it's something in a CRM system or an Uber transaction like that, and have the app respond, maybe even know me a little bit better than I know myself. And that's all data. So I think we're just at the precipice of the massive impact that data science will make in our lives. And luckily we have leaders like you who can help navigate us along this path. >> Thank you. >> What advice for, last question for you is advice for those in the audience who might be nervous or maybe lack a little bit of confidence to go I really like data science, or I really like engineering, but I don't see a lot of me out there. What would you say to them? >> Especially for people who are from like a non-linear track where like going onto that track. >> Yeah, I would say keep going. Keep going. I don't think it's easy. It's not easy. But keep going because the more you go the more, again, you advance and there are opportunities out there. Sometimes it takes a little bit, but just keep going. Keep going and following your dreams, that you get there, right. So again, data science, such a broad field that doesn't require you to come from a specific background. And I think the beauty of data science exactly is this is like the combination, the most successful data science teams are the teams that have all these different backgrounds. So if you think that we as data scientists, we started programming when we were nine, that's not true, right. You can be 30, 40, shifting careers, starting to program right now. It doesn't matter. Like you get there no matter how old you are. And no matter what's your background. >> There's no limit. >> There was no limits. >> I love that, Gabriela, >> Thank so much. for inspiring. I know you inspired me. I'm pretty sure you probably inspired Tracy with your story. And sometimes like what you just said, you have to be your own mentor and that's okay. Because eventually you're going to turn into a mentor for many, many others and sounds like you're already paving that path and we so appreciate it. You are now officially a CUBE alumni. >> Yes. Thank you. >> Yay. We've loved having you. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> For our guest and for Tracy's Yuan, this is Lisa Martin. We are live at WIDS 23, the eighth annual Women in Data Science Conference at Stanford. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a few minutes. (upbeat music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to "The Cube"'s live coverage of "Women in Data Science 2023". As every year we are here live at Stanford University, profiling some amazing women and men in the fields of data science. I have my co-host for this segment is Hannah Freitag. Hannah is from Stanford's Data Journalism program, really interesting, check it out. We're very pleased to welcome our first guest of the day fresh from the keynote stage, Gayatree Ganu, the VP of Data Science at Meta. Gayatree, It's great to have you on the program. >> Likewise, Thank you for having me. >> So you have a PhD in Computer Science. You shared some really cool stuff. Everyone knows Facebook, everyone uses it. I think my mom might be one of the biggest users (Gayatree laughs) and she's probably watching right now. People don't realize there's so much data behind that and data that drives decisions that we engage with. But talk to me a little bit about you first, PhD in Computer Science, were you always, were you like a STEM kid? Little Gayatree, little STEM, >> Yeah, I was a STEM kid. I grew up in Mumbai, India. My parents are actually pharmacists, so they were not like math or stats or anything like that, but I was always a STEM kid. I don't know, I think it, I think I was in sixth grade when we got our first personal computer and I obviously used it as a Pacman playing machine. >> Oh, that's okay. (all laugh) >> But I was so good at, and I, I honestly believe I think being good at games kind of got me more familiar and comfortable with computers. Yeah. I think I always liked computers, I, yeah. >> And so now you lead, I'm looking at my notes here, the Engagement Ecosystem and Monetization Data Science teams at Facebook, Meta. Talk about those, what are the missions of those teams and how does it impact the everyday user? >> Yeah, so the engagement is basically users coming back to our platform more, there's, no better way for users to tell us that they are finding value on the things that we are doing on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, all the other products than coming back to our platform more. So the Engagement Ecosystem team is looking at trends, looking at where there are needs, looking at how users are changing their behaviors, and you know, helping build strategy for the long term, using that data knowledge. Monetization is very different. You know, obviously the top, top apex goal is have a sustainable business so that we can continue building products for our users. And so, but you know, I said this in my keynote today, it's not about making money, our mission statement is not, you know, maximize as much money as you can make. It's about building a meaningful connection between businesses, customers, users, and, you know especially in these last two or three funky, post-pandemic years, it's been such a big, an important thing to do for small businesses all over all, all around the world for users to find like goods and services and products that they care about and that they can connect to. So, you know, there is truly an connection between my engagement world and the monetization world. And you know, it's not very clear always till you go in to, like, you peel the layers. Everything we do in the ads world is also always first with users as our, you know, guiding principle. >> Yeah, you mentioned how you supported especially small businesses also during the pandemic. You touched a bit upon it in the keynote speech. Can you tell our audience what were like special or certain specific programs you implemented to support especially small businesses during these times? >> Yeah, so there are 200 million businesses on our platform. A lot of them small businesses, 10 million of them run ads. So there is a large number of like businesses on our platform who, you know use the power of social media to connect to the customers that matter to them, to like you, you know use the free products that we built. In the post-pandemic years, we built a lot of stuff very quickly when Covid first hit for business to get the word out, right? Like, they had to announce when special shopping hours existed for at-risk populations, or when certain goods and services were available versus not. We had grants, there's $100 million grant that we gave out to small businesses. Users could show sort of, you know show their support with a bunch of campaigns that we ran, and of course we continue running ads. Our ads are very effective, I guess, and, you know getting a very reliable connection with from the customer to the business. And so, you know, we've run all these studies. We support, I talked about two examples today. One of them is the largest black-owned, woman black-owned wine company, and how they needed to move to an online program and, you know, we gave them a grant, and supported them through their ads campaign and, you know, they saw 60% lift in purchases, or something like that. So, a lot of good stories, small stories, you know, on a scale of 200 million, that really sort of made me feel proud about the work we do. And you know, now more than ever before, I think people can connect so directly with businesses. You can WhatsApp them, I come from India, every business is on WhatsApp. And you can, you know, WhatsApp them, you can send them Facebook messages, and you can build this like direct connection with things that matter to you. >> We have this expectation that we can be connected anywhere. I was just at Mobile World Congress for MWC last week, where, obviously talking about connectivity. We want to be able to do any transaction, whether it's post on Facebook or call an Uber, or watch on Netflix if you're on the road, we expect that we're going to be connected. >> Yeah. >> And what we, I think a lot of us don't realize I mean, those of us in tech do, but how much data science is a facilitator of all of those interactions. >> Yeah! >> As we, Gayatree, as we talk about, like, any business, whether it is the black women-owned wine business, >> Yeah. >> great business, or a a grocer or a car dealer, everybody has to become data-driven. >> Yes. >> Because the consumer has the expectation. >> Yes. >> Talk about data science as a facilitator of just pretty much everything we are doing and conducting in our daily lives. >> Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think data science as a field wasn't really defined like maybe 15 years ago, right? So this is all in our lifetimes that we are seeing this. Even in data science today, People come from so many different backgrounds and bring their own expertise here. And I think we, you know, this conference, all of us get to define what that means and how we can bring data to do good in the world. Everything you do, as you said, there is a lot of data. Facebook has a lot of data, Meta has a lot of data, and how do we responsibly use this data? How do we use this data to make sure that we're, you know representing all diversity? You know, minorities? Like machine learning algorithms don't do well with small data, they do well with big data, but the small data matters. And how do you like, you know, bring that into algorithms? Yeah, so everything we do at Meta is very, very data-driven. I feel proud about that, to be honest, because while data gets a bad rap sometimes, having no data and making decisions in the blind is just the absolute worst thing you can do. And so, you know, we, the job as a data scientist at Facebook is to make sure that we use this data, use this responsibly, make sure that we are representing every aspect of the, you know, 3 billion users who come to our platform. Yeah, data serves all the products that we build here. >> The responsibility factor is, is huge. You know, we can't talk about AI without talking about ethics. One of the things that I was talking with Hannah and our other co-host, Tracy, about during our opening is something I just learned over the weekend. And that is that the CTO of ChatGPT is a woman. (Gayatree laughs) I didn't know that. And I thought, why isn't she getting more awareness? There's a lot of conversations with their CEO. >> Yeah. >> Everyone's using it, playing around with it. I actually asked it yesterday, "What's hot in Data Science?" (all laugh) I was like, should I have asked that to let itself in, what's hot? (Gayatree laughs) But it, I thought that was phenomenal, and we need to be talking about this more. >> Yeah. >> This is something that they're likening to the launch of the iPhone, which has transformed our lives. >> I know, it is. >> ChatGPT, and its chief technologist is a female, how great is that? >> And I don't know whether you, I don't know the stats around this, but I think CTO is even less, it's even more rare to have a woman there, like you have women CEOs because I mean, we are building upon years and years of women not choosing technical fields and not choosing STEM, and it's going to take some time, but yeah, yeah, she's a woman. Isn't it amazing? It's wonderful. >> Yes, there was a great, there's a great "Fast Company" article on her that I was looking at yesterday and I just thought, we need to do what we can to help spread, Mira Murati is her name, because what she's doing is, one of the biggest technological breakthroughs we may ever see in our lifetime. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. (Gayatree laughs) I also wanted to share some stats, oh, sorry, go ahead, Hannah. >> Yeah, I was going to follow up on the thing that you mentioned that we had many years with like not enough women choosing a career path in STEM and that we have to overcome this trend. What are some, like what is some advice you have like as the Vice-President Data Science? Like what can we do to make this feel more, you know, approachable and >> Yeah. >> accessible for women? >> Yeah, I, there's so much that we have done already and you know, want to continue, keep doing. Of course conferences like these were, you know and I think there are high school students here there are students from my Alma Mater's undergrad year. It's amazing to like get all these women together to get them to see what success could look like. >> Yeah. >> What being a woman leader in this space could look like. So that's, you know, that's one, at Meta I lead recruiting at Meta and we've done a bunch to sort of open up the thinking around data science and technical jobs for women. Simple things like what you write in your job description. I don't know whether you know this, or this is a story you've heard before, when you see, when you have a job description and there are like 10 things that you need to, you know be good at to apply to this job, a woman sees those 10 and says, okay, I don't meet the qualifications of one of them and she doesn't apply. And a man sees one that he meets the qualifications to and he applies. And so, you know, there's small things you can do, and just how you write your job description, what goals you set for diversity and inclusion for your own organization. We have goals, Facebook's always been pretty up there in like, you know, speaking out for diversity and Sheryl Sandberg has been our Chief Business Officer for a very long time and she's been, like, amazing at like pushing from more women. So yeah, every step of the way, I think, we made a lot of progress, to be honest. I do think women choose STEM fields a lot more than they did. When I did my Computer Science I was often one of one or two women in the Computer Science class. It takes some time to, for it to percolate all the way to like having more CTOs and CEOs, >> Yeah. >> but it's going to happen in our lifetime, and you know, three of us know this, women are going to rule the world, and it (laughs) >> Drop the mic, girl! >> And it's going to happen in our lifetime, so I'm excited about it. >> And we have responsibility in helping make that happen. You know, I'm curious, you were in STEM, you talked about Computer Science, being one of the only females. One of the things that the nadb.org data from 2022 showed, some good numbers, the number of women in technical roles is now 27.6%, I believe, so up from 25, it's up in '22, which is good, more hiring of women. >> Yeah. >> One of the biggest challenges is attrition. What keeps you motivated? >> Yeah. >> To stay what, where you are doing what you're doing, managing a family and helping to drive these experiences at Facebook that we all expect are just going to happen? >> Yeah, two things come to mind. It does take a village. You do need people around you. You know, I'm grateful for my husband. You talked about managing a family, I did the very Indian thing and my parents live with us, and they help take care of the kids. >> Right! (laughs) >> (laughs) My kids are young, six and four, and I definitely needed help over the last few years. It takes mentors, it takes other people that you look up to, who've gone through all of those same challenges and can, you know, advise you to sort of continue working in the field. I remember when my kid was born when he was six months old, I was considering quitting. And my husband's like, to be a good role model for your children, you need to continue working. Like, just being a mother is not enough. And so, you know, so that's one. You know, the village that you build around you your supporters, your mentors who keep encouraging you. Sheryl Sandberg said this to me in my second month at Facebook. She said that women drop out of technical fields, they become managers, they become sort of administrative more, in their nature of their work, and her advice was, "Don't do that, Don't stop the technical". And I think that's the other thing I'd say to a lot of women. Technical stuff is hard, but you know, keeping up with that and keeping sort of on top of it actually does help you in the long run. And it's definitely helped me in my career at Facebook. >> I think one of the things, and Hannah and I and Tracy talked about this in the open, and I think you'll agree with us, is the whole saying of you can't be what you can't see, and I like to way, "Well, you can be what you can see". That visibility, the great thing that WiDS did, of having you on the stage as a speaker this morning so people can understand, everyone, like I said, everyone knows Meta, >> Yeah. >> everyone uses Facebook. And so it's important to bring that connection, >> Yeah. >> of how data is driving the experiences, the fact that it's User First, but we need to be able to see women in positions, >> Yes. >> like you, especially with Sheryl stepping down moving on to something else, or people that are like YouTube influencers, that have no idea that the head of YouTube for a very long time, Susan Wojcicki is a woman. >> (laughs) Yes. Who pioneered streaming, and I mean how often do you are you on YouTube every day? >> Yep, every day. >> But we have to be able to see and and raise the profile of these women and learn from them and be inspired, >> Absolutely. >> to keep going and going. I like what I do, I'm making a difference here. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> And I can be the, the sponsor or the mentor for somebody down the road. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, and then referring back to what we talked in the beginning, show that data science is so diverse and it doesn't mean if you're like in IT, you're like sitting in your dark room, >> Right. (laughs) >> coding all day, but you know, >> (laughs) Right! >> to show the different facets of this job and >> Right! >> make this appealing to women, >> Yeah. for sure. >> And I said this in my keynote too, you know, one of the things that helped me most is complimenting the data and the techniques and the algorithms with how you work with people, and you know, empathy and alignment building and leadership, strategic thinking. And I think honestly, I think women do a lot of this stuff really well. We know how to work with people and so, you know, I've seen this at Meta for sure, like, you know, all of these skills soft skills, as we call them, go a long way, and like, you know, doing the right things and having a lasting impact. And like I said, women are going to rule the world, you know, in our lifetimes. (laughs) >> Oh, I can't, I can't wait to see that happen. There's some interesting female candidates that are already throwing their hats in the ring for the next presidential election. >> Yes. >> So we'll have to see where that goes. But some of the things that are so interesting to me, here we are in California and Palo Alto, technically Stanford is its own zip code, I believe. And we're in California, we're freaking out because we've gotten so much rain, it's absolutely unprecedented. We need it, we had a massive drought, an extreme drought, technically, for many years. I've got friends that live up in Tahoe, I've been getting pictures this morning of windows that are >> (laughs) that are covered? >> Yes, actually, yes. (Gayatree laughs) That, where windows like second-story windows are covered in snow. >> Yeah. >> Climate change. >> Climate change. >> There's so much that data science is doing to power and power our understanding of climate change whether it's that, or police violence. >> Yeah. (all talk together) >> We had talk today on that it was amazing. >> Yes. So I want more people to know what data science is really facilitating, that impacts all of us, whether you're in a technical role or not. >> And data wins arguments. >> Yes, I love that! >> I said this is my slide today, like, you know, there's always going to be doubters and naysayers and I mean, but there's hard evidence, there's hard data like, yeah. In all of these fields, I mean the data that climate change, the data science that we have done in the environmental and climate change areas and medical, and you know, medicine professions just so much, so much more opportunity, and like, how much we can learn more about the world. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it's a pretty exciting time to be a data scientist. >> I feel like, we're just scratching the surface. >> Yeah. >> With the potential and the global impact that we can make with data science. Gayatree, it's been so great having you on theCUBE, thank you. >> Right, >> Thank you so much, Gayatree. >> So much, I love, >> Thank you. >> I'm going to take Data WiD's arguments into my personal life. (Gayatree laughs) I was actually just, just a quick anecdote, funny story. I was listening to the radio this morning and there was a commercial from an insurance company and I guess the joke is, it's an argument between two spouses, and the the voiceover comes in and says, "Let's watch a replay". I'm like, if only they, then they got the data that helped the woman win the argument. (laughs) >> (laughs) I will warn you it doesn't always help with arguments I have with my husband. (laughs) >> Okay, I'm going to keep it in the middle of my mind. >> Yes! >> Gayatree, thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, >> for sharing, >> Thank you both for the opportunity. >> And being a great female that we can look up to, we really appreciate your insights >> Oh, likewise. >> and your time. >> Thank you. >> All right, for our guest, for Hannah Freitag, I'm Lisa Martin, live at Stanford University covering "Women in Data Science '23". Stick around, our next guest joins us in just a minute. (upbeat music) I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now, so I've had the opportunity as a marketer to really understand and interact with customers across the entire buyer's journey. Hi, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm a host of theCUBE. (upbeat music) Being a host on theCUBE has been a dream of mine for the last few years. I had the opportunity to meet Jeff and Dave and John at EMC World a few years ago and got the courage up to say, "Hey, I'm really interested in this. I love talking with customers, gimme a shot, let me come into the studio and do an interview and see if we can work together". I think where I really impact theCUBE is being a female in technology. We interview a lot of females in tech, we do a lot of women in technology events and one of the things I.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello and welcome back to the live coverage of the Cube here. Live in Detroit, Michigan for Cub Con, our seventh year covering all seven years. The cube has been here. M John Fur, host of the Cube, co-founder of the Cube. I'm here with Lisa Mart, my co-host, and our new host, Savannah Peterson. Great to see you guys. We're wrapping up day one of three days of coverage, and our guest analyst is Sario Wall, who's the cube analyst who's gonna give us his report. He's been out all day, ear to the ground in the sessions, peeking in, sneaking in, crashing him, getting all the data. Great to see you, Sarvi. Lisa Savannah, let's wrap this puppy up. >>I am so excited to be here. My first coupon with the cube and being here with you and Lisa has just been a treat. I can't wait to hear what you have to say in on the report side. And I mean, I have just been reflecting, it was last year's coupon that brought me to you, so I feel so lucky. So much can change in a year, folks. You never know where you're be. Wherever you're sitting today, you could be living your dreams in just a few >>Months. Lisa, so much has changed. I mean, just look at the past this year. Events we're back in person. Yeah. Yep. This is a big team here. They're still wearing masks, although we can take 'em off with a cube. But mask requirement. Tech has changed. Conversations are upleveling, skill gaps still there. So much has changed. >>So much has changed. There's so much evolution and so much innovation that we've also seen. You know, we started out the keynote this morning, standing room. Only thousands of people are here. Even though there's a mass requirement, the community that is CNCF Co Con is stronger than I, stronger than I saw it last year. This is only my second co con. But the collaboration, what they've done, their devotion to the maintainers, their devotion to really finding mentors for mentees was really a strong message this morning. And we heard a >>Lot of that today. And it's going beyond Kubernetes, even though it's called co con. I also call it cloud native con, which I think we'll probably end up being the name because at the end of day, the cloud native scaling, you're starting to see the pressure points. You're start to see where things are breaking, where automation's coming in, breaking in a good way. And we're gonna break it all down Again. So much going on again, I've overs gonna be in charge. Digital is transformation. If you take it to its conclusion, then you will see that the developers are running the business. It isn't a department, it's not serving the business, it is the business. If that's the case, everything has to change. And we're, we're happy to have Sarib here with us Cube analysts on the badge. I saw that with the press pass. Well, >>Thank you. Thanks for getting me that badge. So I'm here with you guys and >>Well, you got a rapport. Let's get into it. You, I >>Know. Let's hear what you gotta say. I'm excited. >>Yeah. Went around, actually attend some sessions and, and with the analysts were sitting in, in the media slash press, and I spoke to some people at their booth and the, there are a few, few patterns, you know, which are, some are the exaggeration of existing patterns or some are kind of new patterns emerging. So things are getting complex in open source. The lawn more projects, right. They have, the CNCF has graduated some projects even after graduation, they're, they're exploring, right? Kubernetes is one of those projects which has graduated. And on that front, just a side note, the new projects where, which are entering the cncf, they're the, we, we gotta see that process and the three stages and all that stuff. I tweeted all day long, if you wanna know what it is, you can look at my tweets. But when I will look, actually write right on that actually after, after the show ends, what, what I saw there, these new projects need to be curated properly. >>I think they need to be weed. There's a lot of noise in these projects. There's a lot of overlap. So the, the work is cut out for CNCF folks, by the way. They're sort of managerial committee or whatever you call that. The, the people who are leading it, they're try, I think they're doing their best and they're doing a good job of that. And another thing actually, I really liked in the morning's keynote was that lot of women on the stage and minorities represented. I loved it, to be honest with you. So believe me, I'm a minority even though I'm Indian, but from India, I'm a minority. So people who have Punjab either know that I'm a minority, so I, I understand their pain and how hard it is to, to break through the ceiling and all that. So I love that part as well. Yeah, the >>Activity is clear. Yeah. From day one. It's in the, it's in the dna. I mean, they'll reject anything that the opposite >>Representation too. I mean, it's not just that everyone's invited, it's they're celebrated and that's a very big difference. Yeah. It's, you see conferences offer discounts for women for tickets or minorities, but you don't necessarily see them put them running where their mouth is actually recruit the right women to be on stage. Right. Something you know a little bit about John >>Diversity brings better outcomes, better product perspectives. The product is better with all the perspectives involved. Percent, it might go a little slower, maybe a little debates, but it's all good. I mean, it's, to me, the better product comes when everyone's in. >>I hope you didn't just imply that women would make society. So >>I think John men, like slower means a slower, >>More diversity, more debate, >>The worst. Bringing the diversity into picture >>Wine. That's, that's how good groups, which is, which is >>Great. I mean, yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. I, I take that mulligan back and say, hey, you knows >>That's >>Just, it's gonna go so much faster and better and cheaper, but that not diversity. Absolutely. >>Yes. Well, you make better products faster because you have a variety >>Of perspectives. The bigger the group, there's more debate. More debate is key. But the key to success is aligning and committing. Absolutely. Once you have that, and that's what open sources has been about for. Oh God, yeah. Generations >>Has been a huge theme in the >>Show generations. All right, so, so, >>So you have to add another, like another important, so observation if you will, is that the security is, is paramount right. Requirement, especially for open source. There was a stat which was presented in the morning that 60% of the projects in under CNCF have more vulnerabilities today than they had last year. So that was, That's shocking actually. It's a big jump. It's a big jump. Like big jump means jump, jump means like it can be from from 40 to 60 or or 50 or 60. But still that percentage is high. What, what that means is that lot more people are contributing. It's very sort of di carmic or ironic that we say like, Oh this project has 10,000 contributors. Is that a good thing? Right. We do. Do we know the quality of that, where they're coming from? Are there any back doors being, you know, open there? How stringent is the process of rolling those things, which are being checked in, into production? You know, who is doing that? I've >>Wondered about that. Yeah. The quantity, quality, efficacy game. Yes. And what a balance that must be for someone like CNCF putting in the structure to try and >>That's >>Hard. Curate and regulate and, and you know, provide some bumpers on the bowling lane, so to speak, of, of all of these projects. Yeah. >>Yeah. We thought if anybody thought that the innovation coming from, or the number of services coming from AWS or Google Cloud or likes of them is overwhelming, look at open source, it's even more >>Overwhelming. What's your take on the supply chain discussion? More code more happening. What are you hearing there? >>The supply chain from the software? Yeah. >>Supply chain software, supply chain security pays. Are people talking about that? What are you >>Seeing? Yeah, actually people are talking about that. The creation, the curation, not creation. Curation of suppliers of software I think is best done in the cloud. Marketplaces Ive call biased or what, you know, but curation of open source is hard. It's hard to know which project to pick. It's hard to know which project will pan out. Many of the good projects don't see the day light of the day, but some decent ones like it becomes >>A marketing problem. Exactly. The more you have out there. Exactly. The more you gotta get above the noise. Exactly. And the noise echo that. And you got, you got GitHub stars, you got contributors, you have vanity metrics now coming in to this that are influencing what's real. But sometimes the best project could have smaller groups. >>Yeah, exactly. And another controversial thing a little bit I will say that is that there's a economics of the practitioner, right? I usually talk about that and economics of the, the enterprise, right? So practitioners in our world, in software world especially right in systems world, practitioners are changing jobs every two to three years. And number of developers doubles every three years. That's the stat I've seen from Uncle Bob. He's authority on that software side of things. Wow. So that means there's a lot more new entrance that means a lot of churn. So who is watching out for the enterprise enterprises economics, You know, like are we creating stable enterprises? How stable are our operations? On a side note to that, most of us see the software as like one band, which is not true. When we talk about all these roles and personas, somebody's writing software for, for core layer, which is the infrastructure part. Somebody's writing business applications, somebody's writing, you know, systems of bracket, some somebody's writing systems of differentiation. We talk about those things. We need to distinguish between those and have principle based technology consumption, which I usually write about in our Oh, >>So bottom line in Europe about it, in your opinion. Yeah. What's the top story here at coupon? >>Top story is >>Headline. Yeah, >>The, the headline. Okay. The open source cannot be ignored. That's a headline. >>And what should people be paying attention to if there's a trend coming out? See any kind of trends coming out or any kind of signal, What, what do you see that people should pay attention to here? The put top >>Two, three things. The signal is that, that if you are a big shop, like you'd need to assess your like capacity to absorb open source. You need to be certain size to absorb the open source. If you are below that threshold, I mean we can talk about that at some other time. Like what is that threshold? I will suggest you to go with the managed services from somebody, whoever is providing those managed services around open source. So manage es, right? So from, take it from aws, Google Cloud or Azure or IBM or anybody, right? So use open source as managed offering rather than doing it yourself. Because doing it yourself is a lot more heavy lifting. >>I I, >>There's so many thoughts coming, right? >>Mind it's, >>So I gotta ask you, what's your rapport? You have some swag, What's the swag look >>Like to you? I do. Just as serious of a report as you do on the to floor, but I do, so you know, I come from a marketing background and as I, I know that Lisa does as well. And one of the things that I think about that we touched on in this is, is you know, canceling the noise or standing out from the noise and, and on a show floor, that's actually a huge challenge for these startups, especially when you're up against a rancher or companies or a Cisco with a very large budget. And let's say you've only got a couple grand for an activation here. Like most of my clients, that's how I ended up in the CU County ecosystem, was here with the A client before. So there actually was a booth over there and I, they didn't quite catch me enough, but they had noise canceling headphones. >>So if you just wanted to take a minute on the show floor and just not hear anything, which I thought was a little bit clever, but gonna take you through some of my favorite swag from today and to all the vendors, you know, this is why you should really put some thought into your swag. You never know when you're gonna end up on the cube. So since most swag is injection molded plastic that's gonna end up in the landfill, I really appreciate that garden has given all of us a potable plant. And even the packaging is plantable, which is very exciting. So most sustainable swag goes to garden. Well done >>Rep replicated, I believe is their name. They do a really good job every year. They had some very funny pins that say a word that, I'm not gonna say live on television, but they have created, they brought two things for us, yet it's replicated little etch sketch for your inner child, which is very nice. And given that we are in Detroit, we are in Motor City, we are in the home of Ford. We had Ford on the show. I love that they have done the custom K eight s key chains in the blue oval logo. Like >>Fords right behind us by the way, and are on you >>Interviewed, we had 'em on earlier GitLab taking it one level more personal and actually giving out digital portraits today. Nice. Cool. Which is quite fun. Get lap house multiple booths here. They actually IPOed while they were on the show floor at CubeCon 2021, which is fun to see that whole gang again. And then last but not least, really embracing the ship wheel logo of a Kubernetes is the robusta accrue that is giving out bucket hats. And if you check out my Twitter at sabba Savvy, you can see me holding the ship wheel that they're letting everyone pose with. So we are all in on Kubernetes. That cove gone 2022, that's for sure. Yeah. >>And this is something, day one guys, we've got three. >>I wanna get one of those >>Hats. We we need to, we need a group photo >>By the end of Friday we will have a beverage and hats on to sign off. That's, that's my word. If I can convince John, >>Don, what's your takeaway? You guys did a great kind of kickoff about last week or so about what you were excited about, what your thoughts were going to be. We're only on day one, There's been thousands of people here, we've had great conversations with contributors, the community. What's your take on day one? What's your, what's your tagline? >>Well, Savannah and I had at we up, we, we were talking about what we might see and I think we, we were right. I think we had it right. There's gonna be a lot more people than there were last year. Okay, check. That's definitely true. We're in >>Person, which >>Is refreshing. I was very surprised about the mask mandate that kind of caught me up guard. I was major. Yeah. Cause I've been comfortable without the mask. I'm not a mask person, but I had to wear it and I was like, ah, mask. But I understand I support that. But whatever. It's >>Corporate travel policy. So you know, that's what it is. >>And then, you know, they, I thought that they did an okay job with the gates, but they wasn't slow like last time. But on the content side, definitely Kubernetes security, top line headline, Kubernetes at scale security, that's, that's to me the bumper sticker top things to pay attention to the supply chain and the role of docker and the web assembly was a surprise. You're starting to see containers ecosystem coming back to, I won't say tension growth in the functionality of containers cuz they have to solve the security problem in the container images. Okay, you got scanning technology so it's a little bit in the weeds, but there's a huge movement going on to fix that problem to scale it so it's not a problem area contain. And then Dr sent a great job with productivity interviews. Scott Johnston over a hundred million in revenue so far. That's my number. They have not publicly said that. That's what I'm reporting from sources extremely well financially. And they, and they love their business model. They make productivity for developers. That's a scoop. That's new >>Information. That's a nice scoop we just dropped there on the co casually. >>You're watching that. Pay attention to that. But that, that's proof. But guess what, Red Hat's got developers too. Yes. Other people have to, So developers gonna go where it's the best. Yeah. Developers are voting with their code, they're voting with their feet. You will see the winners with the developers and that's what we've talked about. >>Well and the companies are catering to the developers. Savannah and I had a great conversation with Ford. Yeah. You saw, you showed their fantastic swag was an E for Ev right behind us. They were talking about the, all the cultural changes that they've really focused on to cater towards the developers. The developers becoming the influencers as you say. But to see a company that is as, as historied as Ford Motor Company and what they're doing to attract and retain developer talent was impressive. And honestly that surprised me. Yeah. >>And their head of deb relations has been working for, for, for 29 years. Which I mean first of all, most companies on the show floor haven't been around for 29 years. Right. But what I love is when you put community first, you get employees to stick around. And I think community is one of the biggest themes here at Cuco. >>Great. My, my favorite story that surprised me and was cool was the Red Hat Lockheed Martin interview where they had edge deployments with micro edge, >>Micro shift, >>Micro >>Shift, new projects under, there's, there are three new projects under, >>Under that was so, so cool because it was an edge story in deployment for the military where lives are on the line, they actually had it working. That is a real world example of Kubernetes and tech orchestrating to deploy the industrial edge. And I think that's proof in my mind that Kubernetes and this ecosystem is gonna move faster through this next wave of growth. Because once things start clicking, you get hybrid on premise to super cloud and edge. That was, that was my favorite cause it was real. That was real >>Story that it can make is literally life and death on the battlefield. Yeah, that was amazing. With what they're doing and what >>They're talking check out the Lockheed Martin Red Hat edge story on Silicon Angle and then a press release all pillar. >>Yeah. Another actually it's impressive, which we knew this which is happening, but I didn't know that it was happening at this scale is the finops. The finops is, I saw your is a discipline which most companies are adopting bigger companies, which are spending like hundreds of millions dollars in cloud average. Si a team size of finops for finops is seven people. And average number of tools is I think 3.5 or around 3.7 or something like that. Average number of tools they use to control the cost. So finops is a very generic term for years. It's not financial operations, it's the financial operations for the cloud cost, you know, containing the cloud costs. So that's a finops that is a very emerging sort of discipline >>To keep an eye on. And well, not only is that important, I talked to, well one of the principles over there, it's growing and they have real big players in that foundation. Their, their events are highly attended. It's super important. It's just, it's the cost side of cloud. And, and of course, you know, everyone wants to know what's going on. No one wants to leave there. Their Amazon on Yeah, you wanna leave the lights on the cloud, as we always say, you never know what the bill's gonna look like. >>The cloud is gonna reach $3 billion in next few years. So we might as well control the cost there. Yeah, >>It was, it was funny to get the reaction I found, I don't know if I was, how I react, I dunno how I felt. But we, we did introduce Super Cloud to a couple of guests and a, there were a couple reactions, a couple drawn. There was a couple, right. There was a couple, couple reactions. And what I love about the super cloud is that some people are like, oh, cringing. And some people are like, yeah, go. So it's a, it's a solid debate. It is solid. I saw more in the segments that I did with you together. People leaning in. Yeah. Super fun. We had a couple sum up, we had a couple, we had a couple cringes, I'll say their names, but I'll go back and make sure I, >>I think people >>Get 'em later. I think people, >>I think people cringe on the, on the term not on the idea. Yeah. You know, so the whole idea is that we are building top of the cloud >>And then so I mean you're gonna like this, I did successfully introduce here on the cube, a new term called architectural list. He did? That's right. Okay. And I wanna thank Charles Fitzgerald for that cuz he called super cloud architectural list. And that's exactly the point of super cloud. If you have a great coding environment, you shouldn't have to do an architecture to do. You should code and let the architecture of the Super cloud make it happen. And of course Brian Gracely, who will be on tomorrow at his cloud cast said Super Cloud enables super services. Super Cloud enables what Super services, super service. The microservices underneath the covers have to be different. High performing, automated. So again, the debate and Susan, the goal is to keep it open. And that's our, that's our goal. But we had a lot of fun with that. It was fun to poke the bear a little bit. So >>What is interesting to see just how people respond to it too, with you throwing it out there so consistently, >>You wanna poke the bear, get a conversation going, you know, let let it go. We'll see, it's been positive so far. >>There, there I had a discussion outside somebody who is from Ford but not attending this conference and they have been there for a while. I, I just some moment hit like me, like I said, people, okay, technologists are horizontal, the codes are horizontal. They will go from four to GM to Chrysler to Bank of America to, you know, GE whatever, you know, like cross vertical within vertical different vendors. So, but the culture of a company is local, right? Right. Ford has been building cars for forever. They sort of democratize it. They commercialize it, right? But they have some intense culture. It's hard to change those cultures. And how do we bring in the new thinking? What is, what approach that should be? Is it a sandbox approach for like putting new sensors on the car? They have to compete with te likes our Tesla, right? Yeah. But they cannot, if they are afraid of deluding their existing market or they're afraid of failure there, right? So it's very >>Tricky. Great stuff. Sorry. Great to have you on as our cube analyst breaking down the stories. We'll document that, that we'll roll out a post on it. Lisa Savannah, let's wrap up the show for day one. We got day two and three. We'll start with you. What's your summary? Quick bumper sticker. What's today's show all about? >>I'm a community first gal and this entire experience is about community and it's really nice to see the community come together, celebrate that, share ideas, and to have our community together on stage. >>Yeah. To me, to me it was all real. It's happening. Kubernetes cloud native at scale, it's happening, it's real. And we see proof points and we're gonna have faster time to value. It's gonna accelerate faster from here. >>The proof points, the impact is real. And we saw that in some amazing stories. And this is just a one of the cubes >>Coverage. Ib final word on this segment was well >>Said Lisa. Yeah, I, I think I, I would repeat what I said. I got eight, nine years back at a rack space conference. Open source is amazing for one biggest reason. It gives the ability to the developing nations to be at somewhat at par where the dev develop nations and, and those people to lift up their masses through the automation. Cuz when automation happens, the corruption goes down and the economy blossoms. And I think it's great and, and we need to do more in it, but we have to be careful about the supply chains around the software so that, so our systems are secure and they are robust. Yeah, >>That's it. Okay. To me for SAR B and my two great co-host, Lisa Martin, Savannah Peterson. I'm John Furry. You're watching the Cube Day one in, in the Books. We'll see you tomorrow, day two Cuban Cloud Native live in Detroit. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Persichetti, the EVP of Global AWS Strategic Alliances at Jefferson Frank. A Tenth Revolution Group company. And Danielle Greshock, one of our own CUBE alumni, joins us, ISV PSA director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, women in tech. >> Thank you, Lisa! >> Great to be here! >> So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do, and about the partnership with AWS. >> Sure, so let's just start, Jefferson Frank is a Tenth Revolution Group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rebura, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the Tenth Revolution Group organization. >> Got it, Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS' perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >> Yes, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. We want to have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course, I've benefited from it. But also, I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. >> Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >> I just think that I've been able to get, a seat at the table. I think that. I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and want to see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. They give me a platform in order to do that, like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that... you always want to feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative. To bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there. >> Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gendered diversity perspective in tech? We know the numbers of women in technical positions. >> Right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping out, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing? >> So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at The Summit. And we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have, and how hard to believe but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years. Which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave. Seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be... you can't be what you can't see. So because they... we feel, collectively women, people who identify as women, just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly we put out a hiring, a salary, and hiring guide. Career and hiring guide every year. And the data points, and that's about 65 pages long, no one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. What I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, being that we have such a very big global platform, is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So... >> Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS' focus on women in tech. I was watching, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls Who Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%... that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS' specific focus here to get these numbers up. >> Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about how I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things. But then also, a more flexible working arrangements. But then also early... how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school. And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, and make it a less intimidating place. And have them look at employees from AWS and say like, "Oh, I can see myself in those people". And kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid-to-late career. But how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child, and how can we help with military women who want to... or underrepresented minorities who want to move into AWS? We have a great military program but then also just that early high school career getting them in that trajectory. >> Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel... >> Right. "There's something wrong with me, I don't get this." >> Right. >> Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >> Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that Summit that we did we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. Cause that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age, some people said high school. But then we said, even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African American woman said to me, "Sue". And I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, "Sue, it's really different for me as an African American woman" Or she identified as non-binary but she was relating to African American women. She said, "You're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey". And I thought, "This is how we're going to learn". I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that but those are the things that we need to educate people on. Those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring. We have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group. So much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >> Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >> Well, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... it used to be a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, "Oh, this is... Danielle is going to solve this." And I think a lot of folks now realize, "Oh, this is something that we all need to solve for." And a lot of my colleagues, who maybe a couple years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their or in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data, and actually make good decisions, and feel as though they often... these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data, and providing awareness, and providing tooling, and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. >> And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective. What is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives? >> Right, so when I go back to that careers and hiring guide, that is my focus today really, because the more data that we have and the data takes... we need people to participate in order to accurately get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking. We're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action then we can't get the right... the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be, therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website jeffersonfrank.com In the survey so we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a... Danielle and I we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute. Some of the other things that we're doing, we're partnering, as I mentioned, more of these events. We're doing around the Summits, we're going to be having more EDNI events, and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there, that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, "Listen, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We want to attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information?" So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well, because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers it inspires me. And I feel like I just want to give back. Make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >> Absolutely, we need- >> Love that metaphor. >> I do too! But to your point to get those numbers up not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need It's a help me help you situation. >> Exactly. >> So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey. Help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. >> Exactly. >> Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa! >> Thank you! Thank you! >> My pleasure! For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. (gentle xylophone music)

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner, showcase women in tech. I'm Lisa Martin from the cube. And today we're gonna be looking into the exciting evolution of women in the tech industry. I'm going to be joined by Danielle GShock, the ISP PSA director at AWS. And we have the privilege of speaking with some wicked smart women from Teradata NetApp. JFI a 10th revolution group, company and honeycomb.io. We're gonna look at some of the challenges and biases that women face in the tech industry, especially in leadership roles. We're also gonna be exploring how are these tech companies addressing diversity, equity and inclusion across their organizations? How can we get more young girls into stem earlier in their careers? So many questions. So let's go ahead and get started. This is the AWS partner showcase women in tech. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three. And I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two great guests here with me to talk about women in tech. Hillary Ashton joins us the chief product officer at Terry data. And Danielle Greshaw is back with us, the ISV PSA director at AWS ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking through such an important topic, Hillary, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us a little bit of an intro into you, your background, and a little bit about Teradata. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Hillary Ashton. I head up the products organization. So that's our engineering product management office of the CTO team. Um, at Teradata I've been with Terra data for just about three years and really have spent the last several decades. If I can say that in the data and analytics space, um, I spent time, uh, really focused on the value of, of analytics at scale, and I'm super excited to be here at Teradata. I'm also a mom of two teenage boys. And so as we talk about women in tech, I think there's, um, uh, lots of different dimensions and angles of that. Um, at Teradata, we are partnered very deeply with AWS and happy to talk a little bit more about that, um, throughout this discussion as well. >>Excellent. A busy mom of two teen boys. My goodness. I don't know how you do it. Let's now look, Atter data's views of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a, the, it's a topic that's important to everyone, but give us a snapshot into some of the initiatives that Terra data has there. >>Yeah, I have to say, I am super proud to be working at Teradata. We have gone through, uh, a series of transformations, but I think it starts with culture and we are deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. It's really more than just a statement here. It's just how we live our lives. Um, and we use, uh, data to back that up. Um, in fact, we were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the 13th year in a row. Um, and all of our executive leadership team has taken an oath around D E and I that's available on LinkedIn as well. So, um, in fact, our leadership team reporting into the CEO is just about 50 50, um, men and women, which is the first time I've worked in a company where that has been the case. And I think as individuals, we can probably appreciate what a huge difference that makes in terms of not just being a representative, but truly being on a, on a diverse and equitable, uh, team. And I think it really, uh, improves the behaviors that we can bring, um, to our office. >>There's so much value in that. It's I impressive to see about a 50 50 at the leadership level. That's not something that we see very often. Tell me how you, Hillary, how did you get into tech? Were you an engineering person by computer science, or did you have more of a zigzaggy path to where you are now? >>I'm gonna pick door number two and say more zigzaggy. Um, I started off thinking, um, that I started off as a political science major or a government major. Um, and I was probably destined to go into, um, the law field, but actually took a summer course at Harvard. I did not go to Harvard, but I took a summer course there and learned a lot about multimedia and some programming. And that really set me on a trajectory of how, um, data and analytics can truly provide value and, and outcomes to our customers. Um, and I have been living that life ever since. Um, I graduated from college, so, um, I was very excited and privileged in my early career to, uh, work in a company where I found after my first year that I was managing, um, uh, kids, people who had graduated from Harvard business school and from MIT Sloan school. Um, and that was super crazy, cuz I did not go to either of those schools, but I sort of have always had a natural knack for how do you take technology and, and the really cool things that technology can do, but because I'm not a programmer by training, I'm really focused on the value that I'm able to help, um, organizations really extract value, um, from the technology that we can create, which I think is fantastic. >>I think there's so much value in having a zigzag path into tech. You bring Danielle, you and I have talked about this many times you bring such breadth and such a wide perspective. That really is such a value. Add to teams. Danielle, talk to us from AWS's perspective about what can be done to encourage more young women to get and under and underrepresented groups as well, to get into stem and stay. >>Yeah, and this is definitely a challenge as we're trying to grow our organization and kind of shift the numbers. And the reality is, especially with the more senior folks in our organization, unless you bring folks with a zigzag path, the likelihood is you won't be able to change the numbers that you have. Um, but for me, it's really been about, uh, looking at that, uh, the folks who are just graduating college, maybe in other roles where they are adjacent to technology and to try to spark their interest and show that yes, they can do it because oftentimes it's really about believing in themselves and, and realizing that we need folks with all sorts of different perspectives to kind of come in, to be able to help really, um, provide both products and services and solutions for all types of people inside of technology, which requires all sorts of perspectives. >>Yeah, the diverse perspectives. There's so much value and there's a lot of data that demonstrates how much value revenue impact organizations can make by having diversity, especially at the leadership level. Hillary, let's go back to you. We talked about your career path. You talked about some of the importance of the focus on de and I at Tarana, but what are, what do you think can be done to encourage, to sorry, to recruit more young women and under groups into tech, any, any carrot there that you think are really important that we need to be dangling more of? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll build on what Danielle just said. I think the, um, bringing in diverse understandings, um, of, of customer outcomes, I mean, I, the we've really moved from technology for technology's sake and I know AWS and entirety to have had a lot of conversations on how do we drive customer outcomes that are differentiated in the market and really being customer centric and technology is wonderful. You can do wonderful things with it. You can do not so wonderful things with it as well, but unless you're really focused on the outcomes and what customers are seeking, um, technology is not hugely valuable. And so I think bringing in people who understand, um, voice of customer who understand those outcomes, and those are not necessarily the, the, the folks who are PhD in mathematics or statistics, um, those can be people who understand a day in the life of a data scientist or a day in the life of a citizen data scientist. And so really working to bridge the high impact technology with the practical kind of usability, usefulness of data and analytics in our cases, I think is something that we need more of in tech and sort of demystifying tech and freeing technology so that everybody can use it and having a really wide range of people who understand not just the bits and bites and, and how to program, but also the value in outcomes that technology through data and analytics can drive. >>Yeah. You know, we often talk about the hard skills, but this, their soft skills are equally, if not more important that even just being curious, being willing to ask questions, being not afraid to be vulnerable, being able to show those sides of your personality. I think those are important for, for young women and underrepresented groups to understand that those are just as important as some of the harder technical skills that can be taught. >>That's right. >>What do you think about from a bias perspective, Hillary, what have you seen in the tech industry and how do you think we can leverage culture as you talked about to help dial down some of the biases that are going on? >>Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, and, and there's some interesting data out there that says that 90% of the population, which includes a lot of women have some inherent bias in their day, day behaviors when it comes to to women in particular. But I'm sure that that is true across all kinds of, of, um, diverse and underrepresented folks in, in the world. And so I think acknowledging that we have bias and actually really learning how, what that can look like, how that can show up. We might be sitting here and thinking, oh, of course I don't have any bias. And then you realize that, um, as you, as you learn more about, um, different types of bias, that actually you do need to kind of, um, account for that and change behaviors. And so I think learning is sort of a fundamental, um, uh, grounding for all of us to really know what bias looks like, know how it shows up in each of us. >>Um, if we're leaders know how it shows up in our teams and make sure that we are constantly getting better, we're, we're not gonna be perfect anytime soon. But I think being on a path to improvement to overcoming bias, um, is really, is really critical. And part of that is really starting the dialogue, having the conversations, holding ourselves and each other accountable, um, when things aren't going in, in a, in a Coptic way and being able to talk openly about that, that felt, um, like maybe there was some bias in that interaction and how do we, um, how do we make good on that? How do we change our, our behavior? Fundamentally of course, data and analytics can have some bias in it as well. And so I think as we look at the, the technology aspect of bias, um, looking at at ethical AI, I think is a, a really important, uh, additional area. And I'm sure we could spend another 20 minutes talking about that, but I, I would be remiss if I didn't talk more about sort of the bias, um, and the over the opportunity to overcome bias in data and analytics as well. >>Yeah. The opportunity to overcome it is definitely there you bring up a couple of really good points, Hillary. It, it starts with awareness. We need to be aware that there are inherent biases in data in thought. And also to your other point, hold people accountable ourselves, our teammates, that's critical to being able to, to dial that back down, Daniel, I wanna get your perspective on, on your view of women in leadership roles. Do you think that we have good representation or we still have work to do in there? >>I definitely think in both technical and product roles, we definitely have some work to do. And, you know, when I think about, um, our partnership with Teradata, part of the reason why it's so important is, you know, Teradata solution is really the brains of a lot of companies. Um, you know, the what, how, what they differentiate on how they figure out insights into their business. And it's, it's all about the product itself and the data and the same is true at AWS. And, you know, we really could do some work to have some more women in these technical roles, as well as in the product, shaping the products. Uh, just for all the reasons that we just kind of talked about over the last 10 minutes, um, in order to, you know, move bias out of our, um, out of our solutions and also to just build better products and have, uh, better, you know, outcomes for customers. So I think there's a bit of work to do still. >>I agree. There's definitely a bit of work to do, and it's all about delivering those better outcomes for customers at the end of the day, we need to figure out what the right ways are of doing that and working together in a community. Um, we've had obviously a lot had changed in the last couple of years, Hillary, what's your, what have you seen in terms of the impact that the pandemic has had on this status of women in tech? Has it been a pro is silver lining the opposite? What are you seeing? >>Yeah, I mean, certainly there's data out there that tells us factually that it has been, um, very difficult for women during COVID 19. Um, women have, uh, dropped out of the workforce for a wide range of, of reasons. Um, and, and that I think is going to set us back all of us, the, the Royal us or the Royal we back, um, years and years. Um, and, and it's very unfortunate because I think we we're at a time when we're making great progress and now to see COVID, um, setting us back in, in such a powerful way. I think there's work to be done to understand how do we bring people back into the workforce. Um, how do we do that? Understanding work life balance, better understanding virtual and remote, working better. I think in the technology sector, um, we've really embraced, um, hybrid virtual work and are, are empowering people to bring their whole selves to work. >>And I think if anything, these, these zoom calls have, um, both for the men and the women on my team. In fact, I would say much more. So for the men on my team, I'm seeing, I was seeing more kids in the background, more kind of split childcare duties, more ability to start talking about, um, other responsibilities that maybe they had, uh, especially in the early days of COVID where maybe daycares were shut down. And, um, you had, you know, maybe a parent was sick. And so we saw quite a lot of, um, people bringing their whole selves to the office, which I think was, was really wonderful. Um, uh, even our CEO saw some of that. And I think, um, that that really changes the dialogue, right? It changes it to maybe scheduling meetings at a time when, um, people can do it after daycare drop off. >>Um, and really allowing that both for men and for women makes it better for, for women overall. So I would like to think that this hybrid working, um, environment and that this, um, uh, whole view into somebody's life that COVID has really provided for probably for white collar workers, if I'm being honest for, um, people who are in a, at a better point of privilege, they don't necessarily have to go into the office every day. I would like to think that tech can lead the way in, um, you know, coming out of the, the old COVID. I don't know if we have a new COVID coming, but the old COVID and really leading the way for women and for people, um, to transform how we do work, um, leveraging data and analytics, but also, um, overcoming some of the, the disparities that exist for women in particular in the workforce. >>Yeah, I think there's, there's like we say, there's a lot of opportunity there and I like your point of hopefully tech can be that guiding light that shows us this can be done. We're all humans at the end of the day. And ultimately if we're able to have some sort of work life balance, everything benefits, our work or more productive, higher performing teams impacts customers, right? There's so much value that can be gleaned from, from that hybrid model and embracing for humans. We need to be able to, to work when we can, we've learned that you don't have to be, you know, in an office 24, 7 commuting, crazy hours flying all around the world. We can get a lot of things done in a ways that fit people's lives rather than taking command over it. Wanna get your advice, Hillary, if you were to talk to your younger self, what would be some of the key pieces of advice you would say? And Danielle and I have talked about this before, and sometimes we, we would both agree on like, ask more questions. Don't be afraid to raise your hand, but what advice would you give your younger self and that younger generation in terms of being inspired to get into tech >>Oh, inspired and being in tech? You know, I think looking at technology as, in some ways, I feel like we do a disservice to, um, inclusion when we talk about stem, cuz I think stem can be kind of daunting. It can be a little scary for people for younger people. When I, when I go and talk to folks at schools, I think stem is like, oh, all the super smart kids are over there. They're all like maybe they're all men. And so, um, it's, it's a little, uh, intimidating. Um, and stem is actually, you know, especially for, um, people joining the workforce today. It's actually how you've been living your life since you were born. I mean, you know, stem inside and out because you walk around with a phone and you know how to get your internet working and like that is technology right. >>Fundamentally. And so demystifying stem as something that is around how we, um, actually make our, our lives useful and, and, and how we can change outcomes. Um, through technology I think is maybe a different lens to put on it. So, and there's absolutely for, for hard sciences, there's absolutely a, a great place in the world for folks who wanna pursue that and men and women can do that. So I, I don't want to be, um, uh, setting the wrong expectations, but I, I think stem is, is very holistic in, um, in the change that's happening globally for us today across economies, across global warming, across all kinds of impactful issues. And so I think everybody who's interested in, in some of that world change can participate in stem. It just may be through a different, through a different lens than how we classically talk about stem. >>So I think there's great opportunity to demystify stem. I think also, um, what I would tell my younger self is choose your bosses wisely. And that sounds really funny. That sounds like inside out almost, but I think choose the person that you're gonna work for in your first five to seven years. And it might be more than one person, but be, be selective, maybe be a little less selective about the exact company or the exact title. I think picking somebody that, you know, we talk about mentors and we talk about sponsors and those are important. Um, but the person you're gonna spend in your early career, a lot of your day with a lot, who's gonna influence a lot of the outcomes for you. That is the person that you, I think want to be more selective about, um, because that person can set you up for success and give you opportunities and set you on course to be, um, a standout or that person can hold you back. >>And that person can put you in the corner and not invite you to the meetings and not give you those opportunities. And so we're in an economy today where you actually can, um, be a little bit picky about who you go and work for. And I would encourage my younger self. I actually, I just lucked out actually, but I think that, um, my first boss really set me, um, up for success, gave me a lot of feedback and coaching. Um, and some of it was really hard to hear, but it really set me up for, for, um, the, the path that I've been on ever since. So it, that would be my advice. >>I love that advice. I it's brilliant. I didn't think it choose your bosses wisely. Isn't something that we primarily think about. I think a lot of people think about the big name companies that they wanna go after and put on a resume, but you bring up a great point. And Danielle and I have talked about this with other guests about mentors and sponsors. I think that is brilliant advice and also more work to do to demystify stem. But luckily we have great family leaders like the two of you helping us to do that. Ladies, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking through what you're seeing in de and I, what your companies are doing and the opportunities that we have to move the needle. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Great to see you, Danielle. Thank you Lisa, to see you. >>My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle brushoff. One of our cube alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called rubra, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, um, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to growth, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, if you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job, and that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there, >>A lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions, uh, right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave seems like those things are happening. >>So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also, um, more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, your white woman, your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how <laugh>, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, uh, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks, so they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get a hold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's not that metaphor I do too, but we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the woman here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females and leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Leah, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Um, thank you for that. Uh, my name's Stephanie cur, as Lisa mentioned, I'm the worldwide head of sales for, uh, AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS, um, going back 25 years now, uh, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. Um, I come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, um, but had been in a different career and I had an opportunity to try something new. Um, I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. Um, and, uh, it, it turned out to be a 25 year career, um, that I'm really, really excited about and, and, um, really thankful for that person, for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance, um, for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply, um, on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities and put that forth to our customers, um, in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performant teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my, um, career know, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. Um, we find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really reflective, not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really, uh, meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that, um, a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that, that, so I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way, um, to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we're showing them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team, >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can't see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of them was an interview on the Cub I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago, um, about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective and AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent. And, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Um, two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, uh, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. Um, and then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women on solution architecture organizations. We have, uh, you know, I just personally connect people as well and to like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home, um, during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a, a long tenured Amazonian. Um, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who, uh, ha has been a sponsor of my career has, uh, Matt YK, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph, who's a cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. Um, and you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, um, you know, and, and get things done, um, inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And S I've, I've agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your, uh, original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really, really key difference. I think also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Um, some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. Uh, he actually is in the distribution, was in distribution, uh, with advent tech data no longer there. Um, Corey Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. Um, so a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend, um, um, different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies and when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference. I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take, uh, an extra, uh, approach an extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One. I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. Um, and they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups, so early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know, uh, the massive influence they've had Daniel back over. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ, that AWS employees to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, um, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. Um, but I think just making sure that, um, you know, both everything from, uh, recruit to onboard to ever boarding that, uh, they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as that they have someone, uh, working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. Um, for me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can come to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner or with a colleague. Um, and then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor, uh, to, to people on my team. Um, that is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment a great place for those women are marginalized, um, communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it and much like Danielle, uh, and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship. Um, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp, um, on my team personally, I think, um, leading by example's really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the, um, life stuffs still lands on the women, whether we like it or not. Uh, I have a very, uh, active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. Um, and I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. Um, I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week now, obviously to make sure your job's covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, um, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. Um, so it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. Um, I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. Um, you both talked about, um, kind of being what you, uh, can see, and, and I know both companies are upset customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Um, some of that maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned, uh, in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp. Um, with that, uh, key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the, um, partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. Uh, so, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to, uh, about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has, uh, started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just, um, uh, the trajectory, um, between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. Um, we feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people in my team often say we feel like Amazonians. Um, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the, uh, first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. Um, I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, um, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the, in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is, um, a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, um, female, male, um, race and so forth, and just to really, uh, have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. Um, so we definitely feel like a part of the family. Uh, we are absolutely loving, uh, working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back five years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the thet route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your youngest Stephanie self. >>Uh, I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you. But, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >><laugh> absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be an, a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Um, it's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs, this thing. Um, you know, I genuinely now, uh, took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, um, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Um, don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger selves was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vero Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our cube alumni, Danielle Ock ISV PSA director at AWS. Join us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. >>Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years. Um, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. Um, I was an engineer for most of that time. Uh, and just recently as a March, switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, um, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different, um, companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile to platforms. Um, it would be apt to call me a generalist. Um, and in the more recent years I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me that, uh, came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI and now honeycomb. Um, I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. >>Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right, uh, for your career. And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her, uh, found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, uh, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from, uh, an amazing woman <laugh>, which I haven't seen before. Uh, so I came across charity majors again, Christine Y our other founder, and then Liz Jones, who's our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically, um, we have tried not to over index on that because there was this, uh, maybe fear awareness of, um, it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. Um, but I'm seeing that, uh, rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility, uh, with great power comes great responsibility, and we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. Um, so I would say that for me, it was, um, a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Um, even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both, um, ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so, um, I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you there talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, so honeycomb is an observability tool, uh, that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And, um, we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh, just to name a couple, if you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because, uh, APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. >>What I mean by rich data is, um, something that has a lot of attributes. So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which, um, I don't know, region, they were in, um, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ality and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query the data. We can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. >>And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. They can go into comb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out, um, under your data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. Uh, and we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important, uh, segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, um, because a lot of all of our customers, uh, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. Um, they've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, uh, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Um, definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers and they have many integrations, uh, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Um, being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS, uh, things in that area as well. And so, uh, very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>Back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, I know this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And, um, I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a longstanding conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use this technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. Um, that also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out, um, in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool, um, based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb. And it man was win, win. >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in, let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. Um, but again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently, um, that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Um, some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among, um, a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal, um, practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it, um, with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect, uh, the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with, uh, a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space, um, by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. Um, and you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles, uh, is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives. Uh, and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, um, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them, um, to do what they need to do in their unique, um, environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand, um, and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities, and that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network, um, and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tag, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate, uh, being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer, uh, back actually in the late nineties, uh, during the, the first.com bubble and, uh, have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, um, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS, uh, as a customer facing solutions architect. Um, I do think spending a lot of time, hands on definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome, um, issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teams at AWS since 2015. Um, so it's really been a great ride. Um, and like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change, uh, as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career, uh, direction, um, and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder, uh, to join, have community, uh, in that. But then as a leader, um, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love that there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask, uh, questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or, uh, in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed, there's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is, um, one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Shaw, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >>Yes. And I will tell you, all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do. And I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the, um, stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So >>I agree. And we're gonna get to set, cuz advice is one of the, the main things that our audience is gonna hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from TETA there, Reynolds joins us from honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Paris from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things Danielle that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like D Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with de and I initiatives. And that intention was a, a, a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where de I is concerned. What are your, what were some of the things that stuck out to you? >>Absolutely. I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where in the last, you know, five to 10 years, there's been a, you know, a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, um, first and foremost, by being intentional, that you can change the, uh, the way your organization looks. Um, but also just that, you know, without being intentional, um, there was just a lot of, you know, outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for, um, you know, a healthy, um, and productive environment, uh, working environment. And so, you know, a lot of these companies have made a big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how, you know, these align with our values. So >>Yeah, that, that value alignment mm-hmm <affirmative> that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners, there's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a D E and I alignment that they have. And I, I think everybody also kind of agreed Stephanie Curry talked about, you know, it's really important, um, for diversity on it, on, on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in >>This. Absolutely. And I absolutely, and I definitely even feel that, uh, with their studies out there that tell you that you make better products, if you have all of the right input and you're getting all many different perspectives, but not just that, but I can, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also, you know, the teams that I work alongside. Um, arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well to in technical roles. Um, but you can just see the difference in the outcomes. Uh, at least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >>That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented, um, groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that, um, you know, some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >>Yeah. I think especially, uh, speaking with Hillary and hearing how, uh, Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first, uh, concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to, you know, go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus, or am I going to be able to, you know, be at my kids' conf you know, conference or even just, you know, have enough work life balance that I can, um, you know, do the things that I wanna do outside of work, uh, beyond children and family. So these are all very important, um, and questions that especially women come and ask, but also, um, you know, it kind of is a, is a bellwether for, is this gonna be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also gonna be able to have that balance that I need need. So I think that was something that is, uh, changing a lot. And many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >>Absolutely. The pandemic not only changed how we think about work, you know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model. We're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about there's, it's a win-win. >>Absolutely. And, you know, definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. Um, but I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it. And I hope that, you know, everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious, you know, work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also, um, you know, have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >>Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail with, and that's mentors and sponsors the differences between them recommendations from, uh, the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that, that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic, advice were mentors and sponsors are concerned is, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks. I shouldn't say that that are attracted to a company it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided something that I'm gonna take into consideration myself. >>Yeah. And I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me, um, with my career. But, you know, if you don't have the ability to do that, or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to, you know, find a mentor for a period of time or, um, you know, just, just enable for you to be able to get from say a point a to point B just for a temporary period. Um, just so you can grow into your next role, have a, have a particular outcome that you wanna drive, have a particular goal in mind find that person who's been there and done that and can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager mentor, who can help you get to the next step. >>Exactly. That, that I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know, that's something that everybody, I think, regardless of gender of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is, this is how it happened to me. This is I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >>Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it. Um, but also just hearing all the different techniques on, on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does, um, you know, even some of the smartest, most confident men I've, I've met in, uh, industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but, um, it is very common and hopefully we, we talk about some good techniques to, to deal with that. >>I think we do, you know, one of the things that when we were asking the, our audience, our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves? What would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in stem and in tech and everybody sort of agreed on me, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Um, show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know, oh, how can people have the same question sitting in the room? >>Well, and also, you know, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that, you know, it's a, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint and you're always going to, um, have new things to learn and you can spend, you know, back to, we talked about the zing and zagging through careers, um, where, you know, we'll have different experiences. Um, all of that kind of comes through just, you know, being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers, but I wanna learn is a key thing, uh, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well, >>Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too, that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean not right now or may, maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is gonna learn is that, you know, failure is not necessarily a bad F word. If you turn it into opportunity, no isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I, I thought that was a really positive message that our guests, um, had to share with the, the audience. >>Yeah, totally. I can, I can say I had a, a mentor of mine, um, a very, uh, strong woman who told me, you know, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural. And you know that when you say that, not right now, um, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. <laugh> >>Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary Vera, Stephanie Sue, and you so much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one, episode three, Danielle, thanks so much for helping >>Us with it's been a blast. I really appreciate it >>All audience. We wanna enjoy this. Enjoy the episode.

>>Mm. >>Amdocs is a leader in providing software and services to some key industries, like telecommunications, media and financial services. In our next session, >>we >>welcome Cedric Jay Gould, who is the head of technical product at Amdocs. And we'll learn about Amdocs modernisation journey and how it added value for their end customers. Cedric. Welcome. >>Welcome. Good. >>Thank you. So describe your modern application, your portfolio, and you know what you're delivering for customers. >>So home dogs is B s s S s players who we are providing a food digital suite for customers. Uh, our customers are communication service providers, which are have to deploy a full digital sweets customer experience. Um, we're for the full os BSS, BSS tax. So, actually, Amdocs is one of the leader in this kind of digital transformation. >>So of course you talk about this as and BS. I mean, you're talking about some really hardened, uh, stacks, right? Uh, telco industry. Uh, say what you want about it, but, boy, the phone works when you dial it. So So you've got this sort of a decades old, you know, platform that you guys have been evolving over the over the years. described this modernisation journey and and the role that couch base played. What value does this offer This modernisation offer to your organisation. And where does Couch based fit? >>Yeah, exactly the same. So that so. Basically what, uh, all solution is You know, it's a broad for you of a large number of components which have to deal with funds, uh, experience of the user and from and then dealing all the, uh, activation of the services in the network in order to deliver a solution, Uh, your services, like mobile services or communication services to, uh, Susan users. So we have a full suites, which, uh, was previously based on, you know, on technology is based on the oracle with web logic and things like that. And what we did is that we do a modernisation of, uh, this something, like, six years ago. A bit more than six years ago. We start to modernisation and transformation of our product into a creative solution. Collaborative solutions. So, uh, and when we did that, we start with Coach base as a partner, uh, to provide the nominative database. So we are actually delivery. We have a guarantee of more than 8000 people developing this product. It's a product which is used by more than 300 customers. Uh, so So it's it's real product that needs to be very flexible. That needs to address many kind of use cases from, uh, Telco or customers, which RCs PS usually till 0 to 1 telco. So we what we wanted to build is a food creative solution that can work on any cloud, then can can skill very, very easily and can address multiple use cases. Okay, And that's why, Coach Base, when we selected Coach Basit, it matched a lot of requirements and criteria as we had. And when we decided to modernise our product, we decided to work with >>you. So you had a lot of experience and and legacy with Oracle and Web logic. I'm curious just to follow up. Why didn't you stay with Oracle? You mentioned? Gotta run any cloud. You gotta be flexible. But could you could you double click on what Couch based delivered from a requirement standpoint, that was such a good fit? >>Well, there's there's a good fit with technology that such as, uh, coach basis. First it's a noise school detonates, right? So it's in terms of performance for some of the youth case that we have. It's very important to have, you know, technology which are are done and optimised for the noise secure use cases. That's the first thing. The second thing as I mentioned the scalability, the fact that you can, almost indefinitely infinitely you can increase the size of your cluster. You can have more, uh, servers and and and And this will skill, you know, very rapidly. And also what we're very interesting to have from coach bases the ability to have something which can be replicated across multiple sites. So with visual technology from coach base, which enable to build, you know, very modern architecture with deployment on multiple agents to have disaster recovery, active, active sites, you know, things like that which are very becoming like the main requirement for more customers now. >>Okay, so I'm presuming there were parts of your application portfolio that you weren't gonna touch and throw away that you had to collect or connect the new with the old. That's always, you know, you know, a challenge. I'm wondering what advice you give to an organisation. That's kind of investing in a similar path, trying to deliver the best digital experiences to customers. You know what? What would you say are the modernisation you gotta have must have, whether it's architecture, internal culture, what are some of those items? >>So so that yes, you're right. I think the integration with the legacy systems is actually, you know, very, very important topic in all domain in the domain. But we we made a very, uh, will see drastic choice or brave choice choice. When, uh, 60 years from now, when we decided to reformat to re platforms are completely or portfolio. Okay, So we we changed more than 95% of our portfolio and 95% of the portfolio today, Arklow native. Which means that they can be deployed on any cloud that actually, they are fully scalable and and and still, we did this transformation. Now, when we do the digital transformation of the, uh, customer system, then we need to integrate with legacy systems, and we need to help our customers to migrate from the legacy systems to creative solutions and doing so, it's important to have in the database domain. It's very important to have a solution which is very flexible in terms of, uh, what kind of data I can manage. And I can, as I said, skill easily, for sure. But also, it's sexual. Okay, Because when you are moving the data from a legacy system or record based or whatever to, uh, another type of, uh, database, you want to be sure that you are you can do it securely, and you're you're not, uh, compromising in any sense, Uh, in terms of security scalability, uh, etcetera. Right. So So, um, in this case, I mean, I will say And then in this opportunities journey, uh, this was very, very, very, very important component in, uh, you know, in our strategy, for all the reasons I mentioned right, it's very coordinative. It's scalable, It's secure. Uh, it's another product, uh, grade. So? So that's that's why it really is. So there's there's a chest back to you. >>You know, this notion that 90 per you really re platform 90% of your portfolio and made a cloud native. That's that's a It's a brave move because a lot of companies do that that I've talked to. They will build an abstraction layer and microservices and make that piece cloud native and then have that kind of overlay. You decided not to do that. Why is that? Was that for performance reasons? You were worried about just bringing along technical debt. I mean, that really must have been an interesting discussion internally in your company. >>Yeah, it's true. I mean, the main motivation, the main driver was business flexibility. Because now we live in a world where our customers, what they need is to be able to test the new feature quickly. And they need to be able to scale the system in a matter of hours. Okay, so we are not in a domain anymore. Where you you when you have to upgrade something, you need to take a few days. It needs to be done in a very, very quickly. And the only way to achieve those, uh, requirements business requirements is to be creative. It's to build microservices and to really realise one of those per cent of, uh, micro services architecture because this is the only way you will have the business flexibility. You will be able to have a resilient architecture. Uh, you know, you can, uh you can deploy this with full high availability across multiple zones, multiple regions and feeling that so, uh, any modern architecture today that that is competing with us, Actually, a micro services based architecture. There is no other way to achieve, uh to to to meet the requirement of the market today, and especially when five g is coming, things will become much more complex. Will become much more, uh, distributed. Uh, you cannot work anymore with the model it architecture. And again, I think the database is nowhere different. Needs to follow the same kind of architecture needs to follow the same principles. So that's that's why am I mean another another point about Yeah, >>So if I If I summarised, it sounds like your top three requirements would be flexibility, which you're getting from the cloud native and microservices piece the scale and the security. Is that right? That I get that right? The three top >>That's right. And the resilience as well. I mean the fact that now you know, with micro services architecture, if one of the system is done, he knows how to self to restart it himself. Right itself. Sorry. So So that's this kind of architecture that we built. It's an architecture which can be resilient in a sense that it can sense itself, and it can ensure full availability. And if something is going down, is not working properly, then on some kind of mechanisms will happen in order to go back to a stable state. >>Yeah. So you've got that automation in there. So you don't doesn't require the labour that it might have 10 years ago. So you're obviously embracing cloud native microservices. So you're on that jury. I'm curious. What are you doing with that? You're you're freeing up. You guys used to bring in lab coats and dig in and figure out what's wrong or restart the system. Where are you in your journey, and how are you? Sort of reallocating those resources. And where do you see that going? >>Yeah, Okay, so that's that's a very good point. Because actually, we when we build this new system, which is unable to do, you know, to self heal himself, right? Uh, actually, the question was more about how we can improve the system, even know how we can be sure that, uh, you know, issues that we we any issues which we are we are facing will not happen again. Well, not actual again. Okay. And this is a, uh, principle. Okay, Practise that we have now people are walking on automation. They're building automation around all these recovery procedures about, uh, fixing. So they're not actually digging into the application now anymore into the system, they learn how the system is walking and buildings all the right automation task to ensure that the system is constantly, constantly resilient. Alright, so that's the necessary practises organisation is now built around. You know, this kind of this approach developed computer develops being fully a geologically having sa reorganisation SRE oriented organisation. And, uh and that's the only way you know you can reach very high, uh, in terms of availability. >>So the big problem that your traditional telco customers have is the amount of data that they're servicing going through the roof and the cost per bit is sinking like that. And you have all the over the top providers coming in creating these customer experiences with modern applications and they've owned the customer data. You mentioned five g. So I'm interested in what the future of modern apps looks like for Amdocs and your customers because five G gives your traditional telco customers the ability if they can have these flexible systems that you're providing to now have better relationships with customers and actually kind of reclaim, you know, some of that that value that they've lost to a lot of competitors, your thoughts on the future. >>So first, you know, technically speaking, we we we will have two challenges. One is about data, and other one is about distribution of the work. Okay, because when we are speaking about five g, we're speaking about the age. We're speaking about the fact that an application may be located very closely to the network because it needs to be to to achieve, you know, to to deliver a very short latency, and, uh and this application can move. Okay, so you you you you will have to be able to distribute completely your your solutions. Okay. And that's why we are working closely with, uh, club providers at the US as you Google and because we we need to be sure that the applications of the systems that we are building will be able to distribute the application as close as possible to the end users. Okay, so that's that's one of the key challenges. Which means that the application is to be very possible and he'd be very scalable, and then it needs to be able to move very quickly from one place to another. That's really what is what What, what? What is happening now and what will become, uh, with five G? The other challenge is behind the communication of all these components is really the data, because now we will capture more and more that are coming from the different systems. And I'm not speaking only about the consequence the customer that are who they are, what they what they like and what they want to do, etcetera. And speaking also about, uh, monitoring that of the systems. Okay, so we will generate a lot of information and this this information needs to be traded very quickly, needs to be stored in very large data lake, and we need to have extraction and manipulation of the data very, very quickly to to give the right information to the applications. Um, in this case, okay, it's very important to have application to have databases that can as I said, skill very quickly. But also we'll be able to have very ideal city note, you know, sense that they with a certain amount of memory or sentiment of storage, you can store a lot of data. And this is where we are always, you know, checking what is the best technologies. And so far, not coach bases, technologies that we're using for for stalking, storing all the data. Because because it's it's a ratio in terms of, uh, performance on the number of data you can store, Uh is very high. Okay, so that's that's another challenge that we're addressing. Of course, God is not the only solution, but it's another another one. >>Excellent. Okay, we're gonna leave it there. Cedric, Thanks so much. A great storey and really appreciate your insights. >>You're welcome. Thank you very much. >>Okay, that's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed the application. Modernisation summit made possible by Couch Base. We shared some fresh survey data and got the perspectives of three expert analysts. We got an outstanding roadmap from Ravi Meyer. Um, who's the CEO of Couch base? And of course, we got the customer angle from Cedric. So look, Maybe you're an organisation going through a modernisation initiative. And if you're thinking about what the future of applications looks like cheque out couch. Based on the road this summer, the application modernisation summit is hitting the road traversing North America and Europe. Find out where they will be where they will be near you by visiting couch based dot com slash roadshow. Ravi is gonna be there along with other thought leaders and peers who will be sharing learnings and best practises on how to modernise now and for the future. And you'll get a chance to interact with some of those piers, something that everyone I know is looking forward to. This is Day Volonte. Thanks for joining us today. And thanks for watching the Cube. Mhm. Yeah. Mm, yeah.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle GShock. One of our alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called Ruba, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, uh, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to grow, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I've benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you be benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers and technology, which there's a lot of value there. >>Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions. Uh, there's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave. >>It seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS and attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also a more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that when those younger girls, >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, you're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and glean the insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing E ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's that metaphor I do too. But we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time.

>>Earlier this week, Oracle announced the new X nine M generation of exit data platforms for its cloud at customer and legacy on prem deployments. And the company made some enhancements to its zero data loss, recovery appliance. CLRA something we've covered quite often since its announcement. We had a video exclusive with one Louisa who was the executive vice president of mission critical database technologies. At Oracle. We did that on the day of the announcement who got his take on it. And I asked Oracle, Hey, can we get some subject matter experts, some technical gurus to dig deeper and get more details on the architecture because we want to better understand some of the performance claims that Oracle is making. And with me today is Susan. Who's the vice president of product management for exit data database machine. Bob tome is the vice president of product management for exit data cloud at customer. And Tim chin is the senior director of product management for DRA folks. Welcome to this power panel and welcome to the cube. >>Thank you, Dave. >>Can we start with you? Um, Juan and I, we talked about the X nine M a that Oracle just launched a couple of days ago. Maybe you could give us a recap, some of the, what do we need to know? The, especially I'm interested in the big numbers once more so we can just understand the claims you're making around this announcement. We can dig into that. >>Absolutely. They've very excited to do that. In a nutshell, we have the world's fastest database machine for both LTP and analytics, and we made that even faster, not just simply faster, but for all LPP we made it 70% faster and we took the oil PPV ops all the way up to 27.6 million read IOPS and mind you, this is being measured at the sequel layer for analytics. We did pretty much the same thing, an 87% increase in analytics. And we broke through that one terabyte per second barrier, absolutely phenomenal stuff. Now, while all those numbers by themselves are fascinating, here's something that's even more fascinating in my mind, 80% of the product development work for extra data, X nine M was done during COVID, which means all of us were remote. And what that meant was extreme levels of teamwork between the development teams, manufacturing teams, procurement teams, software teams, the works. I mean, everybody coming together as one to deliver this product, I think it's kudos to everybody who touched this product in one way or the other extremely proud of it. >>Thank you for making that point. And I'm laughing because it's like you the same bolt of a mission-critical OLT T O LTP performance. You had the world record, and now you're saying, adding on top of that. Um, but, okay. But, so there are customers that still, you know, build the builder and they're trying to build their own exit data. What they do is they buy their own servers and storage and networking components. And I do that when I talk to them, they'll say, look, they want to maintain their independence. They don't want to get locked in Oracle, or maybe they believe it's cheaper. You know, maybe they're sort of focused on the, the, the CapEx the CFO has him in the headlock, or they might, sometimes they talk about, they want a platform that can support, you know, horizontal, uh, apps, maybe not Oracle stuff, or, or maybe they're just trying to preserve their job. I don't know, but why shouldn't these customers roll their own and why can't they get similar results just using standard off the shelf technologies? >>Great question. It's going to require a little involved answer, but let's just look at the statistics to begin with. Oracle's exit data was first productized in Delaware to the market in 2008. And at that point in time itself, we had industry leadership across a number of metrics. Today, we are at the 11th generation of exit data, and we are way far ahead than the competition, like 50 X, faster hundred X faster, right? I mean, we are talking orders of magnitude faster. How did we achieve this? And I think the answer to your question is going to lie in what are we doing at the engineering level to make these magical numbers come to, uh, for right first, it starts with the hardware. Oracle has its own hardware server design team, where we are embedding in capabilities towards increasing performance, reliability, security, and scalability down at the hardware level, the database, which is a user level process talks to the hardware directly. >>The only reason we can do this is because we own the source code for pretty much everything in between, starting with the database, going into the operating system, the hypervisor. And as I, as I just mentioned the hardware, and then we also worked with the former elements on this entire thing, the key to making extra data, the best Oracle database machine lies in that engineering, where we take the operating system, make it fit like tongue and groove into, uh, a bit with the opera, with the hardware, and then do the same with the database. And because we have got this deep insight into what are the workloads that are, that are running at any given point in time on the compute side of extra data, we can then do micromanagement at the software layers of how traffic flows are flowing through the entire system and do things like, you know, prioritize all PP transactions on a very specific, uh, you know, queue on the RDMA. >>We'll converse Ethan at be able to do smart scan, use the compute elements in the storage tier to be able to offload SQL processing. They call them the longer I used formats of data, extend them into flash, just a whole bunch of things that we've been doing over the last 12 years, because we have this deep engineering, you can try to cobble a system together, which sort of looks like an extra data. It's got a network and it's got storage, tiering compute here, but you're not going to be able to achieve anything close to what we are doing. The biggest deal in my mind, apart from the performance and the high availability is the security, because we are testing the stack top to bottom. When you're trying to build your own best of breed kind of stuff. You're not going to be able to do that because it depended on the server that had to do something and HP to do something else or Dell to do something else and a Brocade switch to do something it's not possible. We can do this, we've done it. We've proven it. We've delivered it for over a decade. End of story. For as far as I'm concerned, >>I mean, you know, at this fine, remember when Oracle purchased Sohn and I know a big part of that purchase was to get Java, but I remember saying at the time it was a brilliant acquisition. I was looking at it from a financial standpoint. I think you paid seven and a half billion for it. And it automatically, when you're, when Safra was able to get back to sort of pre acquisition margins, you got the Oracle uplift in terms of revenue multiples. So then that standpoint, it was a no brainer, but the other thing is back in the Unix days, it was like HP. Oracle was the standard. And, and in terms of all the benchmarks and performance, but even then, I'm sure you work closely with HP, but it was like to get the stuff to work together, you know, make sure that it was going to be able to recover according to your standards, but you couldn't actually do that deep engineering that you just described now earlier, Subin you, you, you, you stated that the X sign now in M you get, oh, LTP IO, IOP reads at 27 million IOPS. Uh, you got 19 microseconds latency, so pretty impressive stuff, impressive numbers. And you kind of just went there. Um, but how are you measuring these numbers versus other performance claims from your competitors? What what's, you know, are you, are you stacking the deck? Can you give you share with us there? >>Sure. So Shada incidents, we are mentioning it at the sequel layer. This is not some kind of an ion meter or a micro benchmark. That's looking at just a flash subsystem or just a persistent memory subsystem. This is measured at the compute, not doing an entire set of transactions. And how many times can you finish that? Right? So that's how it's being measured. Now. Most people cannot measure it like that because of the disparity and the number of vendors that are involved in that particular solution, right? You've got servers from vendor a and storage from vendor B, the storage network from vendor C, the operating system from vendor D. How do you tune all of these things on your own? You cannot write. I mean, there's only certain bells and whistles and knobs that are available for you to tune, but so that's how we are measuring the 19 microseconds is at the sequel layer. >>What that means is this a real world customer running a real world. Workload is guaranteed to get that kind of a latency. None of the other suppliers can make that claim. This is the real world capability. Now let's take a look at that 19 microseconds we boast and we say, Hey, we had an order of magnitude two orders of magnitude faster than everybody else. When it comes down to latency. And one things that this is we'll do our magic while it is magical. The magic is really grounded in deep engineering and deep physics and science. The way we implement this is we, first of all, put the persistent memory tier in the storage. And that way it's shared across all of the database instances that are running on the compute tier. Then we have this ultra fast hundred gigabit ethernet RDMA over converged ethernet fabric. >>With this, what we have been able to do is at the hardware level between two network interface guides that are resident on that fabric, we create paths that enable high priority low-latency communication between any two end points on that fabric. And then given the fact that we implemented persistent memory in the storage tier, what that means is with that persistent memory, sitting on the memory bus of the processor in the storage tier, we can perform it remote direct memory access operation from the compute tier to memory address spaces in the persistent memory of the storage tier, without the involvement of the operating system on either end, no context, switches, knowing processing latencies and all of that. So it's hardware to hardware, communication with security built in, which is immutable, right? So all of this is built into the hardware itself. So there's no software involved. You perform a read, the data comes back 19 microseconds, boom. End of story. >>Yeah. So that's key to my next topic, which is security because if you're not getting the OSTP involved and that's, you know, very oftentimes if I can get access to the OSTP, I get privileged. Like I can really take advantage of that as a hacker. But so, but, but before I go there, like Oracle talks about, it's got a huge percentage of the Gayety 7% of the fortune 100 companies run their mission, critical workloads on exit data. But so that's not only important to the companies, but they're serving consumer me, right. I'm going to my ATM or I'm swiping my credit card. And Juan mentioned that you use a layered security model. I just sort of inferred anyway, that, that having this stuff in hardware and not have to involve access to the OS actually contributes to better security. But can you describe this in a bit more detail? >>So yeah, what Brian was talking about was this layered security set differently. It is defense in depth, and that's been our mantra and philosophy for several years now. So what does that entail? As I mentioned earlier, we designed our own servers. We do this for performance. We also do it for security. We've got a number of features that are built into the hardware that make sure that we've got immutable areas of form where we, for instance, let me give you this example. If you take an article x86 server, just a standard x86 server, not even express in the form of an extra data system, even if you had super user privileges sitting on top of an operating system, you cannot modify the bias as a user, as a super user that has to be done through the system management network. So we put gates and protection modes, et cetera, right in the hardware itself. >>Now, of course the security of that hardware goes all the way back to the fact that we own the design. We've got a global supply chain, but we are making sure that our supply chain is protected monitored. And, uh, we also protect the last mile of the supply chain, which is we can detect if there's been any tampering of form where that's been, uh, that's occurred in the hardware while the hardware shipped from our factory to the customers, uh, docks. Right? So we, we know that something's been tampered with the moment it comes back up on the customer. So that's on the hardware. Let's take a look at the operating system, Oracle Linux, we own article the next, the entire source code. And what shipping on exit data is the unbreakable enterprise Connell, the carnal and the operating system itself have been reduced in terms of eliminating all unnecessary packages from that operating system bundle. >>When we deliver it in the form of the data, let's put some real numbers on that. A standard Oracle Linux or a standard Linux distribution has got about 5,000 plus packages. These things include like print servers, web servers, a whole bunch of stuff that you're not absolutely going to use at all on exit data. Why ship those? Because the moment you ship more stuff than you need, you are increasing the, uh, the target, uh, that attackers can get to. So on AXA data, there are only 701 packages. So compare this 5,413 packages on a standard Linux, 701 and exit data. So we reduced the attack surface another aspect on this, when we, we do our own STIG, uh, ASCAP benchmarking. If you take a standard Linux and you run that ASCAP benchmark, you'll get about a 30% pass score on exit data. It's 90 plus percent. >>So which means we are doing the heavy lifting of doing the security checks on the operating system before it even goes out to the factory. And then you layer on Oracle database, transparent data encryption. We've got all kinds of protection capabilities, data reduction, being able to do an authentication on a user ID basis, being able to log it, being able to track it, being able to determine who access the system when and log back. So it's basically defend at every single layer. And then of course the customer's responsibility. It doesn't just stop by getting this high secure, uh, environment. They have to do their own job of them securing their network perimeters, securing who has physical access to the system and everything else. So it's a giant responsibility. And as you mentioned, you know, you as a consumer going to an ATM machine and withdrawing money, you would do 200. You don't want to see 5,000 deducted from your account. And so all of this is made possible with exited and the amount of security focus that we have on the system >>And the bank doesn't want to see it the other way. So I'm geeking out here in the cube, but I got one more question for you. Juan talked about X nine M best system for database consolidation. So I, I kinda, you know, it was built to handle all LTP analytics, et cetera. So I want to push you a little bit on this because I can make an argument that, that this is kind of a Swiss army knife versus the best screwdriver or the best knife. How do you respond to that concern and how, how do you respond to the concern that you're putting too many eggs in one basket? Like, what do you tell people to fear you're consolidating workloads to save money, but you're also narrowing the blast radius. Isn't that a problem? >>Very good question there. So, yes. So this is an interesting problem, and it is a balancing act. As you correctly pointed out, you want to have the economies of scale that you get when you consolidate more and more databases, but at the same time, when something happens when hardware fails or there's an attack, you want to make sure that you have business continuity. So what we are doing on exit data, first of all, as I mentioned, we are designing our own hardware and a building in reliability into the system and at the hardware layer, that means having redundancy, redundancy for fans, power supplies. We even have the ability to isolate faulty cores on the processor. And we've got this a tremendous amount of sweeping that's going on by the system management stack, looking for problem areas and trying to contain them as much as possible within the hardware itself. >>Then you take it up to the software layer. We used our reliability to then build high availability. What that implies is, and that's fundamental to the exited architecture is this entire scale out model, our based system, you cannot go smaller than having two database nodes and three storage cells. Why is that? That's because you want to have high availability of your database instances. So if something happens to one server hardware, software, whatever you got another server that's ready to take on that load. And then with real application clusters, you can then switch over between these two, why three storage cells. We want to make sure that when you have got duplicate copies of data, because you at least want to have one additional copy of your data in case something happens to the disc that has got that only that one copy, right? So the reason we have got three is because then you can Stripe data across these three different servers and deliver high availability. >>Now you take that up to the rack level. A lot of things happen. Now, when you're really talking about the blast radius, you want to make sure that if something physically happens to this data center, that you have infrastructure that's available for it to function for business continuity, we maintain, which is why we have the maximum availability architecture. So with components like golden gate and active data guard, and other ways by which we can keep to this distant systems in sync is extremely critical for us to deliver these high availability paths that make, uh, the whole equation about how many eggs in one basket versus containing the containment of the blast radius. A lot easier to grapple with because business continuity is something which is paramount to us. I mean, Oracle, the enterprise is running on Xcel data. Our high value cloud customers are running on extra data. And I'm sure Bob's going to talk a lot more about the cloud piece of it. So I think we have all the tools in place to, to go after that optimization on how many eggs in one basket was his blast radius. It's a question of working through the solution and the criticalities of that particular instance. >>Okay, great. Thank you for that detailed soup. We're going to give you a break. You go take a breath, get a, get a drink of water. Maybe we'll come back to you. If we have time, let's go to Bob, Bob, Bob tome, X data cloud at customer X nine M earlier this week, Juan said kinda, kinda cocky. What we're bothering, comparing exit data against your cloud, a customer against outpost or Azure stack. Can you elaborate on, on why that is? >>Sure. Or you, you know, first of all, I want to say, I love, I love baby. We go south posts. You know why it affirms everything that we've been doing for the past four and a half years with clouded customer. It affirms that cloud is running that running cloud services in customers' data center is a large and important market, large and important enough that AWS felt that the need provide these, um, you know, these customers with an AWS option, even if it only supports a sliver of the functionality that they provide in the public cloud. And that's what they're doing. They're giving it a sliver and they're not exactly leading with the best they could offer. So for that reason, you know, that reason alone, there's really nothing to compare. And so we, we give them the benefit of the doubt and we actually are using their public cloud solutions. >>Another point most customers are looking to deploy to Oracle cloud, a customer they're looking for a per performance, scalable, secure, and highly available platform to deploy. What's offered their most critical databases. Most often they are Oracle databases does outposts for an Oracle database. No. Does outpost run a comparable database? Not really does outposts run Amazon's top OTP and analytics database services, the ones that are top in their cloud public cloud. No, that we couldn't find anything that runs outposts that's worth comparing against X data clouded customer, which is why the comparisons are against their public cloud products. And even with that still we're looking at numbers like 50 times a hundred times slower, right? So then there's the Azure stack. One of the key benefits to, um, you know, that customers love about the cloud that I think is really under, appreciated it under appreciated is really that it's a single vendor solution, right? You have a problem with cloud service could be I as pass SAS doesn't matter. And there's a single vendor responsible for fixing your issue as your stack is missing big here, because they're a multi-vendor cloud solution like AWS outposts. Also, they don't exactly offer the same services in the cloud that they offer on prem. And from what I hear, it can be a management nightmare requiring specialized administrators to keep that beast running. >>Okay. So, well, thanks for that. I'll I'll grant you that, first of all, granted that Oracle was the first with that same, same vision. I always tell people that, you know, if they say, well, we were first I'm like, well, actually, no, Oracle's first having said that, Bob and I hear you that, that right now, outpost is a one Datto version. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but neither did your cloud when you first launched your cloud. So let's, let's let it bake for a while and we'll come back in a couple of years and see how things compare. So if you're up for it. Yeah. >>Just remember that we're still in the oven too. Right. >>Okay. All right. Good. I love it. I love the, the chutzpah. One also talked about Deutsche bank. Um, and that, I, I mean, I saw that Deutsche bank announcement, how they're working with Oracle, they're modernizing their infrastructure around database. They're building other services around that and kind of building their own sort of version of a cloud for their customers. How does exit data cloud a customer fit in to that whole Deutsche bank deal? Is, is this solution unique to Deutsche bank? Do you see other organizations adopting clouded customer for similar reasons and use cases? >>Yeah, I'll start with that. First. I want to say that I don't think Georgia bank is unique. They want what all customers want. They want to be able to run their most important workloads. The ones today running their data center on exit eight as a non other high-end systems in a cloud environment where they can benefit from things like cloud economics, cloud operations, cloud automations, but they can't move to public cloud. They need to maintain the service levels, the performance, the scalability of the security and the availability that their business has. It has come to depend on most clouds can't provide that. Although actually Oracle's cloud can our public cloud Ken, because our public cloud does run exit data, but still even with that, they can't do it because as a bank, they're subject to lots of rules and regulations, they cannot move their 40 petabytes of data to a point outside the control of their data center. >>They have thousands of interconnected databases, right? And applications. It's like a rat's nest, right? And this is similar many large customers have this problem. How do you move that to the cloud? You can move it piecemeal. Uh, I'm going to move these apps and, you know, not move those apps. Um, but suddenly ended up with these things where some pieces are up here. Some pieces are down here. The thing just dies because of the long latency over a land connection, it just doesn't work. Right. So you can also shut it down. Let's shut it down on, on Friday and move everything all at once. Unfortunately, when you're looking at it, a state decides that most customers have, you're not going to be able to, you're going to be down for a month, right? Who can, who can tolerate that? So it's a big challenge and exited cloud a customer let's then move to the cloud without losing control of their data. >>And without unhappy having to untangle that thousands of interconnected databases. So, you know, that's why these customers are choosing X data, clouded customer. More importantly, it sets them up for the future with exited cloud at customer, they can run not just in their data center, but they could also run in public cloud, adjacent sites, giving them a path to moving some work out of the data center and ultimately into the public cloud. You know, as I said, they're not unique. Other banks are watching and some are acting and it's not just banks. Just last week. Telefonica telco in Spain announced their intent to migrate the bulk of their Oracle databases to excavate a cloud at customer. This will be the key cloud platform running. They're running in their data center to support both new services, as well as mission critical and operational systems. And one last important point exited cloud a customer can also run autonomous database. Even if customers aren't today ready to adopt this. A lot of them are interested in it. They see it as a key piece of the puzzle moving forward in the future and customers know that they can easily start to migrate to autonomous in the future as they're ready. And this of course is going to drive additional efficiencies and additional cost savings. >>So, Bob, I got a question for you because you know, Oracle's playing both sides, right? You've got a cloud, you know, you've got a true public cloud now. And, and obviously you have a huge on-premise state. When I talk to companies that don't own a cloud, uh, whether it's Dell or HPE, Cisco, et cetera, they have made, they make the point. And I agree with them by the way that the world is hybrid, not everything's going into the, to the cloud. However, I had a lot of respect for folks at Amazon as well. And they believed long-term, they'll say this, they've got them on record of saying this, that they believe long-term ultimately all workloads are going to be running in the cloud. Now, I guess it depends on how you define the cloud. The cloud is expanding and all that other stuff. But my question to you, because again, you kind of on both sides, here are our hybrid solutions like cloud at customer. Do you see them as a stepping stone to the cloud, or is cloud in your data center, sort of a continuous sort of permanent, you know, essential play >>That. That's a great question. As I recall, people debated this a few years back when we first introduced clouded customer. And at that point, some people I'm talking about even internal Oracle, right? Some people saw this as a stop gap measure to let people leverage cloud benefits until they're really ready for the public cloud. But I think over the past four and a half years, the changing the thinking has changed a little bit on this. And everyone kind of agrees that clouded customer may be a stepping stone for some customers, but others see that as the end game, right? Not every workload can run in the public cloud, not at least not given the, um, you know, today's regulations and the issues that are faced by many of these regulated industries. These industries move very, very slowly and customers are content to, and in many cases required to retain complete control of their data and they will be running under their control. They'll be running with that data under their control and the data center for the foreseeable future. >>Oh, I got another question for kind of just, if I could take a little tangent, cause the other thing I hear from the, on the, the, the on-prem don't own, the cloud folks is it's actually cheaper to run in on-prem, uh, because they're getting better at automation, et cetera. When you get the exact opposite from the cloud guys, they roll their eyes. Are you kidding me? It's way cheaper to run it in the cloud, which is more cost-effective is it one of those? It depends, Bob. >>Um, you know, the great thing about numbers is you can make, you can, you can kind of twist them to show anything that you want, right? That's a have spreadsheet. Can I, can, I can sell you on anything? Um, I think that there's, there's customers who look at it and they say, oh, on-premise sheet is cheaper. And there's customers who look at it and say, the cloud is cheaper. If you, um, you know, there's a lot of ways that you may incur savings in the cloud. A lot of it has to do with the cloud economics, the ability to pay for what you're using and only what you're using. If you were to kind of, you know, if you, if you size something for your peak workload and then, you know, on prem, you probably put a little bit of a buffer in it, right? >>If you size everything for that, you're gonna find that you're paying, you know, this much, right? All the time you're paying for peak workload all the time with the cloud, of course, we support scaling up, scaling down. We supply, we support you're paying for what you use and you can scale up and scale down. That's where the big savings is now. There's also additional savings associated with you. Don't have the cloud vendors like work. Well, we manage that infrastructure for you. You no longer have to worry about it. Um, we have a lot of automation, things that you use to either, you know, probably what used to happen is you used to have to spend hours and hours or years or whatever, scripting these things yourselves. We now have this automation to do it. We have, um, you eyes that make things ad hoc things, as simple as point and click and, uh, you know, that eliminates errors. And, and it's often difficult to put a cost on those things. And I think the more enlightened customers can put a cost on all of those. So the people that were saying it's cheaper to run on prem, uh, they, they either, you know, have a very stable workload that never changes and their environment never changes, um, or more likely. They just really haven't thought through the, all the hidden costs out there. >>All right, you got some new features. Thank you for that. By the way, you got some new features in, in cloud, a customer, a what are those? Do I have to upgrade to X nine M to, to get >>All right. So, you know, we're always introducing new features for clouded customer, but two significant things that we've rolled out recently are operator access control and elastic storage expansion. As we discussed, many organizations are using Axeda cloud a customer they're attracting the cloud economics, the operational benefits, but they're required by regulations to retain control and visibility of their data, as well as any infrastructure that sits inside their data center with operator access control, enabled cloud operations, staff members must request access to a customer system, a customer, it team grants, a designated person, specific access to a specific component for a specific period of time with specific privileges, they can then kind of view audit controls in real time. And if they see something they don't like, you know, Hey, what's this guy doing? It looks like he's, he's stealing my data or doing something I don't like, boom. >>They can kill that operators, access the session, the connections, everything right away. And this gives everyone, especially customers that need to, you know, regulate remote access to their infrastructure. It gives them the confidence that they need to use exit data cloud, uh, conduct, customer service. And, and the other thing that's new is, um, elastic storage expansion. Customers could out add additional service to their system either at initial deployment or after the fact. And this really provides two important benefits. The first is that they can right size their configuration if they need only the minimum compute capacity, but they don't need the maximum number of storage servers to get that capacity. They don't need to subscribe to kind of a fixed shape. We used to have fixed shapes, I guess, with hundreds of unnecessary database cores, just to get the storage capacity, they can select a smaller system. >>And then incrementally add on that storage. The second benefit is the, is kind of key for many customers. You are at a storage, guess what you can add more. And that way, when you're out of storage, that's really important. Now they'll get to your last part of that question. Do you need a deck, a new, uh, exit aquatic customer XIM system to get these features? No they're available for all gen two exited clouded customer systems. That's really one of the best things about cloud. The service you subscribed to today just keeps getting better and better. And unless there's some technical limitation that, you know, we, and it, which is rare, most new features are available even for the oldest cloud customer systems. >>Cool. And you can bring that in on from my, my last question for you, Bob is a, another one on security. Obviously, again, we talked to Susan about this. It's a big deal. How can customer data be secure if it's in the cloud, if somebody, other than the, their own vetted employees are managing the underlying infrastructure, is is that a concern you hear a lot and how do you handle that? >>You know, it's, it's only something because a lot of these customers, they have big, you know, security people and it's their job to be concerned about that kind of stuff. And security. However, is one of the biggest, but least appreciate appreciated benefits of cloud cloud vendors, such as Oracle hire the best and brightest security experts to ensure that their clouds are secure. Something that only the largest customers can afford to do. You're a small, small shop. You're not going to be able to, you know, hire some of this expertise. So you're better off being in the cloud. Customers who are running in the Oracle cloud can also use articles, data, safe tool, which we provide, which basically lets you inspect your databases, insurance. Sure that everything is locked down and secure and your data is secure. But your question is actually a little bit different. >>It was about potential internal threats to company's data. Given the cloud vendor, not the customer's employees have access to the infrastructure that sits beneath the databases and really the first and most important thing we do to protect customers' data is we encrypt that database by default. Actually Subin listed a whole laundry list of things, but that's the one thing I want to point out. We encrypt your database. It's, you know, it's, it's encrypted. Yes. It sits on our infrastructure. Yes. Our operations persons can actually see those data files sitting on the infrastructure, but guess what? They can't see the data. The data is encrypted. All they see as kind of a big encrypted blob. Um, so they can't access the data themselves. And you know, as you'd expect, we have very tight controls over operations access to the infrastructure. They need to securely log in using mechanisms by stuff to present, prevent unauthorized access. >>And then all access is logged and suspicious. Activities are investigated, but that still may not be enough for some customers, especially the ones I mentioned earlier, the regulated industries. And that's why we offer app operator access control. As I mentioned, that gives customers complete control over the access to the infrastructure. The, when the, what ops can do, how long can they do it? Customers can monitor in real time. And if they see something they don't like they stop it immediately. Lastly, I just want to mention Oracle's data ball feature. This prevents administrators from accessing data, protecting data from road operators, robot, world operations, whether they be from Oracle or from the customer's own it staff, this database option. A lot of ball is sorry. Database ball data vault is included when running a license included service on exited clouded customer. So basically to get it with the service. Got it. >>Hi Tom. Thank you so much. It's unbelievable, Bob. I mean, we've got a lot to unpack there, but uh, we're going to give you a break now and go to Tim, Tim chin, zero data loss, recovery appliance. We always love that name. The big guy we think named it, but nobody will tell us, but we've been talking about security. There's been a lot of news around ransomware attacks. Every industry around the globe, any knucklehead with, uh, with a high school diploma could become a ransomware attack or go in the dark web, get, get ransomware as a service stick, a, put a stick in and take a piece of the VIG and hopefully get arrested. Um, with, when you think about database, how do you deal with the ransomware challenge? >>Yeah, Dave, um, that's an extremely important and timely question. Um, we are hearing this from our customers. We just talk about ha and backup strategies and ransomware, um, has been coming up more and more. Um, and the unfortunate thing that these ransoms are actually paid, um, uh, in the hope of the re you know, the, uh, the ability to access the data again. So what that means it tells me is that today's recovery solutions and processes are not sufficient to get these systems back in a reliable and timely manner. Um, and so you have to pay the ransom, right, to get, uh, to get the, even a hope of getting the data back now for databases. This can have a huge impact because we're talking about transactional workloads. And so even a compromise of just a few minutes, a blip, um, can affect hundreds or even thousands of transactions. This can literally represent hundreds of lost orders, right? If you're a big manufacturing company or even like millions of dollars worth of, uh, financial transactions in a bank. Right. Um, and that's why protecting databases at a transaction level is especially critical, um, for ransomware. And that's a huge contrast to traditional backup approaches. Okay. >>So how do you approach that? What do you, what do you do specifically for ransomware protection for the database? >>Yeah, so we have the zero data loss recovery appliance, which we announced the X nine M generation. Um, it is really the only solution in the market, which offers that transaction level of protection, which allows all transactions to be recovered with zero RPO, zero again, and this is only possible because Oracle has very innovative and unique technology called real-time redo, which captures all the transactional changes from the databases by the appliance, and then stored as well by the appliance, moreover, the appliance validates all these backups and reading. So you want to make sure that you can recover them after you've sent them, right? So it's not just a file level integrity check on a file system. That's actual database level of validation that the Oracle blocks and the redo that I mentioned can be restored and recovered as a usable database, any kind of, um, malicious attack or modification of that backup data and transmit that, or if it's even stored on the appliance and it was compromised would be immediately detected and reported by that validation. >>So this allows administrators to take action. This is removing that system from the network. And so it's a huge leap in terms of what customers can get today. The last thing I just want to point out is we call our cyber vault deployment, right? Um, a lot of customers in the industry are creating what we call air gapped environments, where they have a separate location where their backup copies are stored physically network separated from the production systems. And so this prevents ransomware for possibly infiltrating that last good copy of backups. So you can deploy recovery appliance in a cyber vault and have it synchronized at random times when the network's available, uh, to, to keep it in sync. Right. Um, so that combined with our transaction level zero data loss validation, it's a nice package and really a game changer in protecting and recovering your databases from modern day cyber threats. >>Okay, great. Thank you for clarifying that air gap piece. Cause I, there was some confusion about that. Every data protection and backup company that I know as a ransomware solution, it's like the hottest topic going, you got newer players in, in, in recovery and backup like rubric Cohesity. They raised a ton of dough. Dell has got solutions, HPE just acquired Zerto to deal with this problem. And other things IBM has got stuff. Veem seems to be doing pretty well. Veritas got a range of, of recovery solutions. They're sort of all out there. What's your take on these and their strategy and how do you differentiate? >>Yeah, it's a pretty crowded market, like you said. Um, I think the first thing you really have to keep in mind and understand that these vendors, these new and up and coming, um, uh, uh, vendors start in the copy data management, we call CDN space and they're not traditional backup recovery designed are purpose built for the purpose of CDM products is to provide these fast point in time copies for test dev non-production use, and that's a viable problem and it needs a solution. So you create these one time copy and then you create snapshots. Um, after you apply these incremental changes to that copy, and then the snapshot can be quickly restored and presented as like it's a fully populated, uh, file. And this is all done through the underlying storage of block pointers. So all of this kind of sounds really cool and modern, right? It's like new and upcoming and lots of people in the market doing this. Well, it's really not that modern because we've, we know storage, snapshot technologies has been around for years. Right. Um, what these new vendors have been doing is essentially repackaging the old technology for backup and recovery use cases and having sort of an easier to use automation interface wrapped around it. >>Yeah. So you mentioned a copy data management, uh, last year, active FIO. Uh, they started that whole space from what I recall at one point there, they value more than a billion dollars. They were acquired by Google. Uh, and as I say, they kind of created that, that category. So fast forward a little bit, nine months a year, whatever it's been, do you see that Google active FIO offer in, in, in customer engagements? Is that something that you run into? >>We really don't. Um, yeah, it was really popular and known some years ago, but we really don't hear about it anymore. Um, after the acquisition, you look at all the collateral and the marketing, they are really a CDM and backup solution exclusively for Google cloud use cases. And they're not being positioned as for on premises or any other use cases outside of Google cloud. That's what, 90, 90 plus percent of your market there that isn't addressable now by Activia. So really we don't see them in any of our engagements at this time. >>I want to come back and push it a little bit, uh, on some of the tech that you said, it's kind of really not that modern. Uh, I mean it's, if they certainly position it as modern, a lot of the engineers who are building there's new sort of backup and recovery capabilities came from the hyperscalers, whether it's copy data management, you know, the bot mock quote, unquote modern backup recovery, it's kind of a data management, sort of this nice all in one solution seems pretty compelling. How does recovery clients specifically stack up? You know, a lot of people think it's a niche product for, for really high end use cases. Is that fair? How do you see a town? >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I think it's so important to just, you know, understand, again, the fundamental use of this technology is to create data copies for test W's right. Um, and that's really different than operational backup recovery in which you must have this ability to do full and point in time recoverability in any production outage or Dr. Situation. Um, and then more importantly, after you recover and your applications are back in business, that performance must continue to meet servers levels as before. And when you look at a CDM product, um, and you restore a snapshot and you say with that product and the application is brought up on that restored snapshot, what happens or your production application is now running on actual read rideable snapshots on backup storage. Remember they don't restore all the data back to the production, uh, level stores. They're restoring it as a snapshot okay. >>Onto their storage. And so you have a huge difference in performance. Now running these applications where they instantly recovered, if you will database. So to meet these true operational requirements, you have to fully restore the files to production storage period. And so recovery appliance was first and foremost designed to accomplish this. It's an operational recovery solution, right? We accomplish that. Like I mentioned, with this real-time transaction protection, we have incremental forever backup strategies. So that you're just taking just the changes every day. And you, you can create these virtual full backups that are quickly restored, fully restored, if you will, at 24 terabytes an hour. And we validate and document that performance very clearly in our website. And of course we provide that continuous recovery validation for all the backups that are stored on the system. So it's, um, it's a very nice, complete solution. >>It scales to meet your demands, hundreds of thousands of databases, you know, it's, um, you know, these CDM products might seem great and they work well for a few databases, but then you put a real enterprise load and these hundreds of databases, and we've seen a lot of times where it just buckles, you know, it can't handle that kind of load in that, uh, in that scale. Uh, and, and this is important because customers read their marketing and read the collateral like, Hey, instant recovery. Why wouldn't I want that? Well, it's, you know, nicer than it looks, you know, it always sounds better. Right. Um, and so we have to educate them and about exactly what that means for the database, especially backup recovery use cases. And they're not really handled well, um, with their products. >>I know I'm like way over. I had a lot of questions on this announcement and I was gonna, I was gonna let you go, Tim, but you just mentioned something that, that gave me one more question if I may. So you talked about, uh, supporting hundreds of thousands of databases. You petabytes, you have real world use cases that, that actually leverage the, the appliance in these types of environments. Where does it really shine? >>Yeah. Let me just give you just two real quick ones. You know, we have a company energy transfer, the major natural gas and pipeline operator in the U S so they are a big part of our country's critical infrastructure services. We know ransomware, and these kinds of threats are, you know, are very much viable. We saw the colonial pipeline incident that happened, right? And so the attack, right, critical services while energy transfer was running, lots of databases and their legacy backup environments just couldn't keep up with their enterprise needs. They had backups taking like, well, over a day, they had restores taking several hours. Um, and so they had problems and they couldn't meet their SLS. They moved to the recovery appliance and now they're seeing backwards complete with that incremental forever in just 15 minutes. So that's like a 48 times improvement in backup time. >>And they're also seeing restores completing in about 30 minutes, right. Versus several hours. So it's a, it's a huge difference for them. And they also get that nice recovery validation and monitoring by the system. They know the health of their enterprise at their fingertips. The second quick one is just a global financial services customer. Um, and they have like over 10,000 databases globally and they, they really couldn't find a solution other than throw more hardware kind of approach to, uh, to fix their backups. Well, this, uh, not that the failures and not as the issues. So they moved to recovery appliance and they saw their failed backup rates go down for Matta plea. They saw four times better backup and restore performance. Um, and they have also a very nice centralized way to monitor and manage the system. Uh, real-time view if you will, that data protection health for their entire environment. Uh, and they can show this to the executive management and auditing teams. This is great for compliance reporting. Um, and so they finally done that. They have north of 50 plus, um, recovery appliances a day across that on global enterprise. >>Love it. Thank you for that. Um, uh, guys, great power panel. We have a lot of Oracle customers in our community and the best way to, to help them is to, I get to ask you a bunch of questions and get the experts to answer. So I wonder if you could bring us home, maybe you could just sort of give us the, the top takeaways that you want to your customers to remember in our audience to remember from this announcement. >>Sure, sorry. Uh, I want to actually pick up from where Tim left off and talk about a real customer use case. This is hot off the press. One of the largest banks in the United States, they decided to, that they needed to update. So performance software update on 3000 of their database instances, which are spanning 68, exited a clusters, massive undertaking, correct. They finished the entire task in three hours, three hours to update 3000 databases and 68 exited a clusters. Talk about availability, try doing this on any other infrastructure, no way anyone's going to be able to achieve this. So that's on terms of the availability, right? We are engineering in all of the aspects of database management, performance, security availability, being able to provide redundancy at every single level is all part of the design philosophy and how we are engineering this product. And as far as we are concerned, the, the goal is for forever. >>We are just going to continue to go down this path of increasing performance, increasing the security aspect of the, uh, of the infrastructure, as well as our Oracle database and keep going on this. You know, this, while these have been great results that we've delivered with extra data X nine M the, the journey is on and to our customers. The biggest advantage that you're going to get from the kind of performance metrics that we are driving with extra data is consolidation consolidate more, move, more database instances onto the extended platform, gain the benefits from that consolidation, reduce your operational expenses, reduce your capital expenses. They use your management expenses, all of those, bring it down to accelerator. Your total cost of ownership is guaranteed to go down. Those are my key takeaways, Dave >>Guys, you've been really generous with your time. Uh Subin uh, uh, uh, Bob, Tim, I appreciate you taking my questions and we'll willingness to go toe to toe, really? Thanks for your time. >>You're welcome, David. Thank you. Thank you. >>And thank you for watching this video exclusive from the cube. This is Dave Volante, and we'll see you next time. Be well.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Q3 "AWS Startup Showcase", I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to be talking about new breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management Tools, with WhiteSource Software, at least for the DevOps track. I'm excited to welcome Susan StClair, Director of Product at WhiteSource software to the program. Susan, it's great to see you! >> Oh, very excited to be here, Lisa, thank you. >> We've got a lot of stuff to talk about today, but ultimately, the theme that Susan's going to talk to us about us is, winning developer's trust is key to scaling-up open source security for the enterprise. We're going to unpack that. You talk about, that winning that trust is key, shifting left won't work without developers buy-in. Susan, help us understand this. >> Yeah, sure, so- on some of the topics we have later but you look at the rate of applications of being the pool of how fast that is, and you look at development teams of hundreds and you have the OpSec teams of five or ten, and they just can't do it all, so, really, you need to leverage everybody who's part of the application to really be able to make sure that you're developing and deploying and releasing a secure application. So, that's the Shifting Left. Unfortunately, I think what's happened is, because application security is overwhelmed and because they're like, "Oh, we have all of these developer teams over here, and it's their code, and they should fix it." And they just kind of dumped application security on them and the poor development teams are like, "but that's not what I do, I don't have any expertise in there." So if you really, truly, want a Shift Left to work, you do need to build that buy-in, you do need to build the trust with your extended team, for lack of a better word. And, really start to look at things that are important to them. So automated tools, making sure that they work with their tools sets and their processes. Looking at automation, not just in terms of scanning but also remediation. You just really need to start to work with them and think about application releases in a different mindset. >> And your recommendation here is also to build that trust gradually, and to let developers control the pace- >> Absolutely >> And the level of automation. Talk to me about why it's important to give the developers that control? >> Yeah, sure. Again, I think nobody likes to be told what to do, I certainly don't, don't tell me how to do my job. So, I think, that because historically application security and development have really been at odds. It has been somewhat of a confrontational relationship, so, I think as you're starting to build that trust, you do need to go slow. Where does it make sense to add in auto-remediation solution like WhiteSource, right? Where does it make sense? We don't want to do it everywhere, we don't want to overwhelm development teams with this. So, really start to look, let them control the pace, build that trust, build that. This is a good thing for everybody. And, again, I think with tools like WhiteSource, the solution software, you can pick and choose, it's not an all or nothing. We're going full automation, full remediation, one-stop-shopping, I mean you can kind of control the pace as you start to build that trust between the various teams. >> Is that differentiator for WhiteSource the ability for this auto-remediation tool to let them control that? >> Yeah, it definitely is, and I know it just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Just rolls off the tongue. >> It really does. (both laughing) >> Say it ten times fast >> I'm afraid to. >> Exactly, exactly. So, no, it actually, absolutely is a differentiator for us. And again when we look at, looking at our customer base and enterprise and we look at, even maybe smaller teams that trust is really made us successful and the key to that trust is really that controlling the pace with auto-remediation. And, some of the other automation pieces to the solution. >> And speaking of customers, you guys have 23% of the Fortune 100 as customers, give me an example of one of your favorite customers that you think really shows the value that WhiteSource is giving to those developers by giving them that control. >> Yeah, sure. So I feel like we're like the big company or bigger company that nobody has heard of outside of this space. But, not naming names, but large financial customers and really shifting application security, open-source application security, to the hands of the development teams. So they've actually, again, small application team, they've really pushed it out to the development teams as part of a repo-integration for scanning, for ticket creation, for auto-remediation, and that's really, let them scale beyond, just one or two teams to thousands of repos, for example. I mean, that is, in my opinion, a huge use case or huge validation of that this works. This isn't just somebody talking about how cool their software is and it's not based in reality. >> A stat that I read about WhiteSource offer that I wanted to get your feedback on, is that, "WhiteSource goes beyond traditional detection, providing dependency and trace analysis and that this helps organizations eliminate upto 85% of security alerts." That's a big number. Talk to me about how you guys do that and the advantages that delivers. >> Yeah, sure, so I think like the one of the challenges with, historically, with open-source solutions, is that they scan and they get this result, and you could have hundreds and thousands of insecure libraries and you're like, "Holy moly, where do I even start?" It's just completely overwhelming. And then you dig into little deeper and again starting to build that trust with development teams, and the development teams comes back to you and says, "Well, hey, guess what? Yeah I know that library is insecure, but I'm not using that part of that library." So, it's really kind of a false-positive. So, what this dependency tracing does and how it helps with prioritization, is it says, "Okay, we see this particular library, this vulnerable open-source library, and it is in your execution path, we can see that you're using it." So then, you're able to say, "Okay, I should definitely fix this, because we're using it, or maybe not." Maybe, again, it's part my backlog yes, we should always keep up-to-date, and be completely secure. But having that ability to prioritize where to start and having the alerts based on that really reduces the noise. And again, it builds the trust between the teams. >> So, we talked from the beginning about shifting left isn't going to work without developers buy-in, the idea of using auto-remediation tools to let developers control that pace, the OpSec folks, the Dev folks, we also have for, I believe, it's the fifth consecutive year now, a huge gap in cybersecurity skills. I think I've seen some reports estimating that there needs to be another three million professionals in the next five years to help fill that gap and at the same time we're seeing the security landscape changing dramatically. Talk to me about how the cybersecurity skills gap is affecting developers, OpSec folks, and what your seeing as a tool that can help remediate some of that. >> Sure, yeah, no, that's, I mean that is the challenge. And I would even say that there seems to those skills gap on the development side too. But, I think that in terms of some of the challenges with that, so you have to look at ways, how can we be smarter about things. So, we don't have people, large teams where they know everything about application security and open-source security that we can really rely on to drive remediation, but, also to use these tools that all of us bought that do different things, that aren't correlated but to kind of provide that glue. So, where WhiteSource, I think is trying to address this is, again, if I don't have the people, and I don't have the skillsets, first of all automation, right? So, the more that we can automate, the better. But, not just again, automating on the scanning side, I think that's certainly a part of it, but again, looking at how we can help development teams that are maybe not security experts, and keeping them up-to-date and giving them, again, automatic remediation so that they can fix things without having a really depth that you would expect in a cybersecurity professional. >> I'm sure they appreciate that, not having to have that depth, because there really isn't, in terms of developers, there isn't the time. Speed is always of the essence there. One of the things too that I know, is there's lot of tools being used, you mentioned that. How can WhiteSource Software help the developers to better utilize some of the tools that they have or not just be buying tools to check boxes? >> Yeah, sure. So, yeah it's sad fact, I think, within our industry, probably more than just our hours, but really a lot of decisions, purchasing decision are based on the, "Well, I need to scan because somebody told me to and I that I had to, and I'm going to check the box. I'm not really interested in fixing anything, I just need to check that box." And, I think, historically, when it comes to tool selection, again, because application security is really focused on that check-the-box because they need to do that for a compliance or governance reason, they really haven't taken into heart the teams that would actually be using them and having to make the magic happen. So, they would prioritize things that, again, maybe OpDev wouldn't, so, again does it work with my tools? As a developer, I live in my IDE, I live in my code-repo, I live in my ticketing system, security doesn't typically care anything about that. So, I think with WhiteSource, again, providing the tools that the OpSec team needs. So again, the compliance reports and the policies and all this stuff we love. Also providing, again, the way to easily fit into developer workflows, that's how we're helping to move beyond, okay, we're checking the box but we do want to actually fix something and we want to move the target along. So we're really, I think, helping address that need as well. >> I know you guys did a DevSec Ops Insights Report recently, unpack that a little bit with some of the key findings that have come out of that. >> Yeah, no, that's great, so it's very interesting. First of all I think we in the industry we talk a lot about DevSecOps and that security is part of the DevOps process and everything is good. But when you actually talk to people, I think, two things, one, it's very much a work in progress, absolutely, and a lot of that is part of the tooling. I think, too, like what we've found as a part of this survey, is that the developers, are often, they feel forced to, okay, I'm shifting left, you're telling me I own security, but you're also telling me that I need to get this application out the door. I need this to compete. So, they're really being forced into hard choices of which one to prioritize, and that really comes down to a culture thing. What is more important to you. Being secure or being competitive? And how do you weigh that? So, I thought that was actually very interesting, I think that we tend to give OpDev teams a bad rap but they're really doing the best they can and they need clear guidance and there needs to be a security culture for them to operate in. >> Right, that's a really big one that you just hit on, that cultural impact. It's hard to change. In the last 18 months, we've all been through so much change, personally and professionally. We've seen this massive acceleration in digital transformation, so probably more pressure on developers who need to be able to be productive from work, from anywhere environments, that that cultural change, is really critical. I'm curious if you have some feedback from customers that have done it successfully or are in the process of doing it successfully that you can share? >> Yeah, change is hard, no matter where it's at. Absolutely. So, I think, like where we've seen the most successful of our customers, around this specifically, it truly is both a top-down and bottom-up approach. From a top-down, you can't just give lip-service that application security is important. You can't just say, "Oh, again from a compliance check-the-box, point-of-view, we scan, and we're looking, and, oh look, we have these statistics. You have to really have to live it. And what I mean by that is, when you're developing new applications it's just as important as the feature list. Security bugs are just as important as any other type of bugs. So again, it goes into the workflow of the application development teams and you don't make them make these hard trade-offs all the time between security and release. And then, from the bottom-up, again, you need to be where your teams are at. You can't ask them to go into another tool, or another thing, or another this and that. They have things to do. You have to be where they are. And you, have to give targeted, actionable, not things they have to go research, a guidance, and automate as much as you can. Again, both on the scanning as well as on the remediation side. >> Meet them where they are and facilitate that automation. Susan, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about- >> My pleasure. >> How WhiteSource Software is helping that, and also for the challenge of saying auto-remediation 10 times in a row, fast. (Susan laughing) I might practice that later. But it's been great talking to you. >> That will be my home work. Likewise. >> Exactly! Thank you so much for joining me. >> My pleasure. >> This has been our coverage of the "AWS Startup Showcase", New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management tools. For Susan StClair, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Yeah, yeah, hello again and welcome to our last session of the day before we head to the meat. The experts roundtables how T Mobile is building a data driven organization with thought spot and whip prone. Today we'll hear how T Mobile is leaving Excel hell by enabling all employees with self service analytics so they can get instant answers on curated data. We're lucky to be closing off the day with these two speakers. Evo Benzema, manager of business intelligence services at T Mobile Netherlands, and Sanjeev Chowed Hurry, lead architect AT T Mobile, Netherlands, from Whip Chrome. Thank you both very much for being with us today, for today's session will cover how mobile telco markets have specific dynamics and what it waas that T Mobile was facing. We'll also go over the Fox spot and whip pro solution and how they address T mobile challenges. Lastly, but not least, of course, we'll cover Team Mobil's experience and learnings and takeaways that you can use in your business without further ado Evo, take us away. >>Thank you very much. Well, let's first talk a little bit about T Mobile, Netherlands. We are part off the larger deutsche Telekom Group that ISS operating in Europe and the US We are the second largest mobile phone company in the Netherlands, and we offer the full suite awful services that you expect mobile landline in A in an interactive TV. And of course, Broadbent. Um so this is what the Mobile is appreciation at at the moment, a little bit about myself. I'm already 11 years at T Mobile, which is we part being part of the furniture. In the meantime, I started out at the front line service desk employee, and that's essentially first time I came into a touch with data, and what I found is that I did not have any possibility of myself to track my performance. Eso I build something myself and here I saw that this need was there because really quickly, roughly 2020 off my employer colleagues were using us as well. This was a little bit where my efficient came from that people need to have access to data across the organization. Um, currently, after 11 years running the BR Services Department on, I'm driving this transformation now to create a data driven organization with a heavy customer focus. Our big goal. Our vision is that within two years, 8% of all our employees use data on a day to day basis to make their decisions and to improve their decision. So over, tuition Chief. Now, thank >>you. Uh, something about the proof. So we prize a global I T and business process consulting and delivery company. Uh, we have a comprehensive portfolio of services with presents, but in 61 countries and maybe 1000 plus customers. As we're speaking with Donald, keep customers Region Point of view. We primary look to help our customers in reinventing the business models with digital first approach. That's how we look at our our customers toe move to digitalization as much as possible as early as possible. Talking about myself. Oh, I have little over two decades of experience in the intelligence and tell cope landscape. Calico Industries. I have worked with most of the telcos totally of in us in India and in Europe is well now I have well known cream feed on brownfield implementation off their house on big it up platforms. At present, I'm actively working with seminal data transform initiative mentioned by evil, and we are actively participating in defining the logical and physical footprint for future architectures for criminal. I understand we are also, in addition, taking care off and two and ownership off off projects, deliveries on operations, back to you >>so a little bit over about the general telco market dynamics. It's very saturated market. Everybody has mobile phones already. It's the growth is mostly gone, and what you see is that we have a lot of trouble around customer brand loyalty. People switch around from provider to provider quite easily, and new customers are quite expensive. So our focus is always to make customer loyal and to keep them in the company. And this is where the opportunities are as well. If we increase the retention of customers or reduce what we say turned. This is where the big potential is for around to use of data, and we should not do this by only offering this to the C suite or the directors or the mark managers data. But this needs to be happening toe all employees so that they can use this to really help these customers and and services customers is situated. This that we can create his loyalty and then This is where data comes in as a big opportunity going forward. Yeah. So what are these challenges, though? What we're facing two uses the data. And this is, uh, these air massive over our big. At least let's put it like that is we have a lot of data. We create around four billion new record today in our current platforms. The problem is not everybody can use or access this data. You need quite some technical expertise to add it, or they are pre calculated into mawr aggregated dashboard. So if you have a specific question, uh, somebody on the it side on the buy side should have already prepared something so that you can get this answer. So we have a huge back lock off questions and data answers that currently we cannot answer on. People are limited because they need technical expertise to use this data. These are the challenges we're trying to solve going forward. >>Uh, so the challenge we see in the current landscape is T mobile as a civil mentioned number two telco in Europe and then actually in Netherlands. And then we have a lot of acquisitions coming in tow of the landscape. So overall complexity off technical stack increases year by year and acquisition by acquisition it put this way. So we at this time we're talking about Claudia Irureta in for Matic Uh, aws and many other a complex silo systems. We actually are integrated where we see multiple. In some cases, the data silos are also duplicated. So the challenge here is how do we look into this data? How do we present this data to business and still ensure that Ah, mhm Kelsey of the data is reliable. So in this project, what we looked at is we curated that around 10% off the data of us and made it ready for business to look at too hot spot. And this also basically help us not looking at the A larger part of the data all together in one shot. What's is going to step by step with manageable set of data, obviously manages the time also and get control on cost has. >>So what did we actually do and how we did? Did we do it? And what are we going to do going forward? Why did we chose to spot and what are we measuring to see if we're successful is is very simply, Some stuff I already alluded to is usual adoption. This needs to be a tool that is useable by everybody. Eso This is adoption. The user experience is a major key to to focus on at the beginning. Uh, but lastly, and this is just also cold hard. Fact is, it needs to save time. It needs to be faster. It needs to be smarter than the way we used to do it. So we focused first on setting up the environment with our most used and known data set within the company. The data set that is used already on the daily basis by a large group. We know what it's how it works. We know how it acts on this is what we decided to make available fire talksport this cut down the time around, uh, data modeling a lot because we had this already done so we could go right away into training users to start using this data, and this is already going on very successfully. We have now 40 heavily engaged users. We go went life less than a month ago, and we see very successful feedback on user experience. We had either yesterday, even a beautiful example off loading a new data set and and giving access to user that did not have a training for talk sport or did not know what thoughts, what Waas. And we didn't in our he was actively using this data set by building its own pin boards and asking questions already. And this shows a little bit the speed off delivery we can have with this without, um, much investments on data modeling, because that's part was already done. So our second stage is a little bit more ambitious, and this is making sure that all this information, all our information, is available for frontline uh, employees. So a customer service but also chills employees that they can have data specifically for them that make them their life easier. So this is performance KP ice. But it could also be the beautiful word that everybody always uses customer Terry, 60 fuse. But this is giving the power off, asking questions and getting answers quickly to everybody in the company. That's the big stage two after that, and this is going forward a little bit further in the future and we are not completely there yet, is we also want Thio. Really? After we set up the government's properly give the power to add your own data to our curated data sets that that's when you've talked about. And then with that, we really hope that Oh, our ambition and our plan is to bring this really to more than 800 users on a daily basis to for uses on a daily basis across our company. So this is not for only marketing or only technology or only one segment. This is really an application that we want to set in our into system that works for everybody. And this is our ambition that we will work through in these three, uh, steps. So what did we learn so far? And and Sanjeev, please out here as well, But one I already said, this is no which, which data set you start. This is something. Start with something. You know, start with something that has a wide appeal to more than one use case and make sure that you make this decision. Don't ask somebody else. You know what your company needs? The best you should be in the driver seat off this decision. And this is I would be saying really the big one because this will enable you to kickstart this really quickly going forward. Um, second, wellness and this is why we introduce are also here together is don't do this alone. Do this together with, uh I t do this together with security. Do this together with business to tackle all these little things that you don't think about yourself. Maybe security, governance, network connections and stuff like that. Make sure that you do this as a company and don't try to do this on your own, because there's also again it's removes. Is so much obstacles going forward? Um, lastly, I want to mention is make sure that you measure your success and this is people in the data domain sometimes forget to measure themselves. Way can make sure everybody else, but we forget ourselves. But really try to figure out what makes its successful for you. And we use adoption percentages, usual experience, surveys and and really calculations about time saved. We have some rough calculations that we can calculate changes thio monetary value, and this will save us millions in years. by just automating time that is now used on, uh, now to taken by people on manual work. So, do you have any to adhere? A swell You, Susan, You? >>Yeah. So I'll just pick on what you want to mention about. Partner goes live with I t and other functions. But that is a very keating, because from my point of view, you see if you can see that the data very nice and data quality is also very clear. If we have data preparing at the right level, ready to be consumed, and data quality is taken, care off this feel 30 less challenges. Uh, when the user comes and questioned the gator, those are the things which has traded Quiz it we should be sure about before we expose the data to the Children. When you're confident about your data, you are confident that the user will also get the right numbers they're looking for and the number they have. Their mind matches with what they see on the screen. And that's where you see there. >>Yeah, and that that that again helps that adoption, and that makes it so powerful. So I fully agree. >>Thank you. Eva and Sanjeev. This is the picture perfect example of how a thought spot can get up and running, even in a large, complex organization like T Mobile and Sanjay. Thank you for sharing your experience on how whip rose system integration expertise paved the way for Evo and team to realize value quickly. Alright, everyone's favorite part. Let's get to some questions. Evil will start with you. How have your skill? Data experts reacted to thought spot Is it Onley non technical people that seem to be using the tool or is it broader than that? You may be on. >>Yes, of course, that happens in the digital environment. Now this. This is an interesting question because I was a little bit afraid off the direction off our data experts and are technically skilled people that know how to work in our fight and sequel on all these things. But here I saw a lot of enthusiasm for the tool itself and and from two sides, either to use it themselves because they see it's a very easy way Thio get to data themselves, but also especially that they see this as a benefit, that it frees them up from? Well, let's say mundane questions they get every day. And and this is especially I got pleasantly surprised with their reaction on that. And I think maybe you can also say something. How? That on the i t site that was experienced. >>Well, uh, yeah, from park department of you, As you mentioned, it is changing the way business is looking at. The data, if you ask me, have taken out talkto data rather than looking at it. Uh, it is making the interactivity that that's a keyword. But I see that the gap between the technical and function folks is also diminishing, if I may say so over a period of time, because the technical folks now would be able to work with functional teams on the depth and coverage of the data, rather than making it available and looking at the technical side off it. So now they can have a a fair discussion with the functional teams on. Okay, these are refute. Other things you can look at because I know this data is available can make it usable for you, especially the time it takes for the I t. G. When graduate dashboard, Uh, that time can we utilize toe improve the quality and reliability of the data? That's yeah. See the value coming. So if you ask me to me, I see the technical people moving towards more of a technical functional role. Tools such as >>That's great. I love that saying now we can talk to data instead of just looking at it. Um Alright, Evo, I think that will finish up with one last question for you that I think you probably could speak. Thio. Given your experience, we've seen that some organizations worry about providing access to data for everyone. How do you make sure that everyone gets the same answer? >>Yes. The big data Girlfriends question thesis What I like so much about that the platform is completely online. Everything it happens online and everything is terrible. Which means, uh, in the good old days, people will do something on their laptop. Beirut at a logic to it, they were aggregated and then they put it in a power point and they will share it. But nobody knew how this happened because it all happened offline. With this approach, everything is transparent. I'm a big I love the word transparency in this. Everything is available for everybody. So you will not have a discussion anymore. About how did you get to this number or how did you get to this? So the question off getting two different answers to the same question is removed because everything happens. Transparency, online, transparent, online. And this is what I think, actually, make that question moot. Asl Long as you don't start exporting this to an offline environment to do your own thing, you are completely controlling, complete transparent. And this is why I love to share options, for example and on this is something I would really keep focusing on. Keep it online, keep it visible, keep it traceable. And there, actually, this problem then stops existing. >>Thank you, Evelyn. Cindy, That was awesome. And thank you to >>all of our presenters. I appreciate your time so much. I hope all of you at home enjoyed that as much as I did. I know a lot of you did. I was watching the chat. You know who you are. I don't think that I'm just a little bit in awe and completely inspired by where we are from a technological perspective, even outside of thoughts about it feels like we're finally at a time where we can capitalize on the promise that cloud and big data made to us so long ago. I loved getting to see Anna and James describe how you can maximize the investment both in time and money that you've already made by moving your data into a performance cloud data warehouse. It was cool to see that doubled down on with the session, with AWS seeing a direct query on Red Shift. And even with something that's has so much scale like TV shows and genres combining all of that being able to search right there Evo in Sanjiv Wow. I mean being able to combine all of those different analytics tools being able to free up these analysts who could do much more important and impactful work than just making dashboards and giving self service analytics to so many different employees. That's incredible. And then, of course, from our experts on the panel, I just think it's so fascinating to see how experts that came from industries like finance or consulting, where they saw the imperative that you needed to move to thes third party data sets enriching and organizations data. So thank you to everyone. It was fascinating. I appreciate everybody at home joining us to We're not quite done yet. Though. I'm happy to say that we after this have the product roadmap session and that we are also then going to move into hearing and being able to ask directly our speakers today and meet the expert session. So please join us for that. We'll see you there. Thank you so much again. It was really a pleasure having you.

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re;Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of the APN partner experience. I'm Lisa Martin I've got a couple of gentlemen from BMC software joining me. Please welcome Greg Bukowski, the technology solutions director and Simon Blanks, area vice president Gentlemen it's great to have you on theCUBE virtual. >> Great to be here Lisa. >> Representing social distancing from across the country here. So guys, I'd like to just start Greg with you give our audience an understanding of your role technology solutions director your role and responsibilities at BMC. >> Sure I play the role of a field CTO. So I actually am aligned with our strategic CTO office and I bring their message to our customers all of our strategic customers within North America. >> And Simon, tell us a little bit about your role as area vice president. >> Well first of all, thanks for having us I have responsibility for our channels and our partners in the Americas. So I get to work both within our organization with our customers and with our partners to help them grow, to help us grow and deliver value to our customers. >> Speaking of your customers Simon the last year has been incredibly challenging and brought on a lot of challenges but opportunities. Talk to me about how that has impacted BMCs customers. >> That's a great question. You know, I think our customers are wanting to simplify that they're wanting to focus on what makes them win, right and get away from the things that, you know are not the competitive advantage. We see a lot of customers wanting to get out of the day-to-day operation of the data centers and migrate to the world of AWS but it's not as easy as we would all like it there's lots of challenges. AWS consulting partners are there to help them. One of the largest areas of challenges we see that they are having to address is manage these millions of IT assets that are constantly changing and some of them they don't even know exist and moving those to AWS, but moving them quickly, securely and of course, in a cost-effective manner. >> Talk to me a little bit about some of the speed like in the last nine months, have you seen an acceleration of those customers wanting to move workloads to AWS as we think of way back when the pandemic started and every business had to suddenly send workforces home no access to a data center or very limited. Is that something that you've seen speed up the last few months? >> Yeah we believe it's not only gained in velocity but will continue. We don't think that some of these changes to how a business is conducted are going to stop once the vaccine comes out. So yeah and you know the complexity of making this happen, you know it's difficult, especially in some of the very large organizations be it banks or telecoms or manufacturers or retailers you know it's not an easy chore and you know we've experienced some great wins in that area and helping some of our most strategic customers make that happen. >> So talk to me a little bit about Simon, what's your elevator pitch when you're going and i know you talk with customers, you talk with partners how do you describe BMC and what you guys deliver? >> Well BMC is a 40 year old company with 6,000 employees. we help 93% of the global 1000 manage their IT infrastructure right. In addition to that we help thousands of other customers with the same problems. So, you know what I tell organizations is we're there to help them be successful and to make things tick. >> Awesome thank you. So Greg, talk to me about more about the BMC solutions. You said in your role, you're also field CTO. What are some of the BMC solutions that you recommended AWS consulting partners consider to help customers, especially in this time as you're seeing more and more migrations AWS? >> Yeah I think that's a great point, Lisa. I mean, with the pandemic coming in, you know there was an initial pullback right that we saw from our customers and now as that trend, you know as the summer came on, not that it's gotten less, right. I mean obviously it's a big concern for customers but the realization of how they're going to operationalize themselves and still be a tech driven company and tech driven organization has really accelerated their digital transformation and it's driven more than anything the adoption of cloud technologies and to move into that cloud space it's brought about understanding customers how did they become more digital and to do that they have to connect their services. So underlying that challenge is really what we wanted to bring today to talk about is that BMC has an industry leading solution it's called a BMC discovery solution and it automatically goes within an organization's footprint and understands the dependencies between their infrastructure and their applications. That's really difficult, right? Typically we can just find assets, right? A lot of solutions out there can do that. What BMC does or what our solution does. That's unique in this space is that it understands relationships so that you understand from an application viewpoint which ultimately ties back to a business service into the software that runs on those assets into the applications that are supporting that as well as the platforms and infrastructure and that becomes more and more complex to date. What we see with our customers as they have cloud services they've got containers, they've got on-premise stuff. So we're working with customers today, right? We are the largest retailers in the US working with them to actually transform how they're doing business continuity. So it becomes not only an acceleration but a risk aversion program for them as well as a cost savings effort of trying to adopt that understanding those services from both within their data center, through the mainframe back into their cloud, right and understanding all those interdependencies so that they can run their business more efficiently. >> So Greg have you automated what used to be a traditionally manual lengthy process of that discovery. >> I think that is the key point Lisa. I mean when partners look to us for what value we can bring to them it's about accelerating that time all about reducing the time through automation what used to be a manual effort of understanding how these things connect and being able to having go talk to the application teams. We worked with a large bank as well. They were using other solutions in the marketplace and were taking six to nine months to map a single business service which is complex right it's got about a dozen applications that support it. We brought in our solution and they did it in three hours with one piece of information from an application team. It was unbelievable, right and these are the stories we hear all the time from our customers and this is a great solution that we have that runs in AWS. That's part of our AWS migration competency that we have and you know this is why we're here today on theCUBE. >> Well that speed improvement is massive as you just talked about Greg you know, when you think of organizations now that there is no time, there is no six to nine months to figure things out anymore right. Especially because we've all learned, I think a lot in the last nine months, professionally and personally but there's competition out there. That's ready to come and be nimble and faster and maybe with less legacy than any type of whether it's a retailer or a financial institution. So being able to get in there and discover and align this business and IT services folks to discover what they have, where they should move it that fast is really something that sounds to me like not just a survival mechanism, keeping the lights on during a strange time, but something that may even set apart the winners and the losers of tomorrow. >> Absolutely right. I mean you have to be able to tie into your existing infrastructure for print that traditional legacy or heritage as we call it for print that you have, that still runs your core business. Right, if you're a retailer it's probably some kind of supply chain rate If you're a bank it's all the financial transaction stuff that you do but then also adopt the technology and innovation that exists within the fintech space for a financial services customer and bringing that together and when you're doing that at the native integration point a lot of it comes into the cloud services, right and that's really where they're going to get the acceleration to attack new markets grow their margin in that space and that's where they need partners to help them. To adopt and learn those technologies and integrate those additionally, right we have other advanced capabilities that we offer from an AWS migration competency standpoint around cloud optimization. So when those services are running in there we also do a cost optimization that doesn't look at it from the infrastructure standpoint but actually it takes the same discovery data and lines it back to the lines of business. So the line of business now has visibility into if they're going to change what their operating model is how that's going to affect the cost in the backend services they can optimize their resources. >> So Simon looking at the capabilities that BMC is delivering. Talk to me about the BMC partner program. Why become a BMC partner? I think there's a couple of answers to that. First of all, what Greg was talking about in terms of this you know massive I'll call it reinvention of the amount of time it takes to perform some of these tasks. Some of these tasks that are done in every migration from you know months to days or hours that in and of itself can help the AWS consulting partners massively you know in their efforts. So that's one but I think more importantly than that is the culture of BMC and the importance of partners and the focus that it's getting whether or not it be from our board or CEO or down the management rank. So the channel has become massively important to our success and we're committed to helping our partners be successful right, we're committing to help them make money, right. We're actually, as a part of AWS re;Invent here were going to offer an incentive to partners to come and join our family. Traditionally there's enablement and costs associated with that and we're going to refund that cost. Plus we're going to invest our monies and refund any costs associated with the first co-marketing effort together that we can go out to the market and help them. So I think you know, it's sort of the three legs of the stool. The technology itself is you know, impressive the commitment of our leadership and we're also willing to make it you know, very economically attractive so that would be the reasons >> Everybody likes that, especially economically attractive. So in terms of what you're offering you said that around re;Invent with respect to interested perspective partners, how do they move forward with BMC to become an AWS consulting partner? What's that process like? >> Well, we have you know an onboarding team that Susan DuRoff she reports in to me and helps me with that process. But the best way to do it would be to contact me directly. My email address is simon_blanks@bmc.com and if you reach out to me directly, I'll make sure we get back to you promptly. We can have further discussions and you know, facilitate it and we really look forward to making that happen. >> That's pretty excellent personal service I like that. So Greg talk to me as we get towards the wrap here as field CTO, looking forward into 2021 which we all hope is going to be trim significantly better than 2020. What are some of the opportunities that you see that this time has uncovered for the IT folks and the business folks to get even stronger alignment? >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity for customers to realize that bringing together the IT organizations in alignment with their business organizations is a great opportunity from the Revolut to accelerate their adoption of technology accelerate their migrations into adoption of cloud services. But then also look for the opportunities to take advantage of, to grow revenue streams. Right I mean, challenges present opportunities and opportunities present growth, right? That's how customers grow when they recognize those opportunities and become agile enough to adopt them and go after them. >> That's a great mindset because it's absolutely true. It's not matter of how we look at it and look at what's being uncovered to then kind of exploit for good new products, new services, competitive differentiators all sorts of things going on. Well gentlemen, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE virtual today. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you so much appreciate the time and thank you. >> All right. For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube. I'm John for a year host. We've got a great conversation virtual event, accelerating automation with definite Cisco. Definite. And of course, we got the Cisco Brain Trust here. Cube alumni Suzy we Vice President, senior Vice President GM and also CTO of Cisco. Definite and ecosystem Success C X, All that great stuff. Many Wadley Who's the director? Senior director of definite certifications. Eric Field, director of developer advocacy. Susie Mandy. Eric, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you down. So >>we're not in >>person. We >>don't Can't be at the definite zone. We can't be on site doing definite created All the great stuff we've been doing in the past three years were virtual the cube Virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the succession had has been awesome. But definite create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the definite community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with definite because you said to me, I think four years ago everything should be a service or X a s is it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision? Because this is really important. And still only 5 to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and program ability. What's your What's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that is, more and more businesses are coming online is I mean, they're all online, But is there growing into the cloud? Is their growing in new areas as we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure. How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be ableto really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just acts writing on top. But now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to a higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You remember a few years ago when definite create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we're talking about Muraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco um Europe in Barcelona before all the cove it hit and you had the massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now, more than ever, the cloud scale the modern APS. The momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing Mawr innovation at scale. Because the pressure to do that because >>the stay alive get >>your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world? Because you were there in person. Now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are, Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers as businesses around the world as we ourselves all dealt with, How do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because >>you >>have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my I t infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there in working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and being kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world. But also in India, where it was actually not, you know, not they wouldn't let They didn't have rules toe let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer. You know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home, so that puts extra stress on automation. It puts extra stress on our customers digital transformation. And it just forced them toe, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You have to figure out how to automate all of that. >>You know, one of them >>were still there, all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observe ability, uh, kubernetes serve micro services. So those things again. All Dev ups. And you know, if you guys got some acquisitions, you thought about 1000 eyes. Um, you got a new one you just bought recently Port shift to raise the game in security, Cuban, All these micro services, So observe, ability, superhot. But then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you think? Observe, What do you observing? The network is under huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on. People zooms and WebEx is and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the upside? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observe ability, challenges? It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Muraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has This goes entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that Bigger Attn. Bigger scale. Francisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observe ability and the dashboards and the automation of the A P. I s and all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in, um, they had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people toe work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be a nightie conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of I t and the CEO and saying, You know, how is our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are, you know, connected and ableto work and watch their productivity? Eso All of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure I t stuff became a board level conversation and you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they're now building in automation, additional transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observe ability. You know, looking for those events. The dashboards, you know? So it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners air doing to really rise to that next level. >>Susan, I know you gotta go, but real quick, um, describe what? Accelerating automation with definite means. >>Well, you've been fault. You know, we've been working together on definite in the vision of the infrastructure program ability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets in the program ability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people. And it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run. Things are definite. Community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in. They've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals. We have partners, you know, They're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, Justus, much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got definite create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, being personal will be virtual Susie. Thank you for your time. We're gonna dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're gonna dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, John. Okay. >>Mandy, you heard Susie is about people, and one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of definite certifications. Um is getting people leveled up? I mean, the demand for skills cybersecurity, network program, ability, automation, network design solution, architect cloud multi cloud design thes are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh, yes, absolutely. The you know what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning those air. What's accelerating? A lot of the technology changes, and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing, uh, customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like Dev SEC ops engineer, network Automation engineer, network automation developer, which sues you mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current, um, scope and broaden out and take on new challenges? >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um uh, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is. Director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving what's the state of it now? Because with Cove and people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>What's your role? Absolutely So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the definite creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into. How do you really start solving these problems? Eso that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously, Sisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect, as we found out with a much larger audience. So you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of you know how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with are definite day that was kind of attached onto Sisco Live, and we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of you know what my team does. So that's one piece of it is is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the definite site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network, where there's there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the definite certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with program ability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They move now into the definite spaces well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I gotta ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are Is there anything in particular? Obviously, network automation been around for a long time. Cisco's been leader in that. But as you move up, the staff has modern applications or building. Do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observe ability was big before Cove it and we actually really saw that amplified during co vid. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observe ability now that we needed? Well, we're virtual eso. That's actually been a huge uptick, and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that air. Now, figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SCS in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up and one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that I T departments might care about about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at. The old days you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100% things like licenses started coming into play where they need to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the essays actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use them open source, tooling to monitor and alert on these things, and then published it so the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it. Try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out Okay, now I could take that. I can adapt into what I need to see for my observe ability. >>That's great, Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this, too, because as automation continues to scale. Um, it's gonna be a focus. People are at home. And you guys had a lot of content online for you. Recorded every session that in the definite zone learning is going on sometimes literally and non linearly. You've got the certifications, which is great. That's key. Great success there. People are interested. But what other learnings are you seeing? What are people, um, doing? What's the top top trends? >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time, they want toe advance, their skill set. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They wanna be able to choose which matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. On we have two new expert lead study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called Automation Boot Camp. And then we're also seeing individual who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, gets, um, skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular, self driven hands on learning through the Definite Fundamentals course, which is available through DEV. Net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like Thio experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're They're spending a lot of time in our definite sandbox, trying out different technologies. Cisco Technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things, and three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people Skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those were three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing more about that at definite create. >>Awesome Eric and man, if you guys can wrap up the accelerated automated with definite package and virtual event here, um, and also t up definite create because definite create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end program ability. And with everything is a service that you guys were doing everything with a piece. Um Onley can imagine the enablement that's gonna enable create Can >>you hear the >>memory real quick on accelerating automation with definite and TF definite create. Mandy will start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first, and then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, Devon, it's bringing a p I s across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with definite. Suzy mentioned the people aspect of that the people Skilling up and how that transformed team transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so would I think about accelerating automation with definite. It's about the definite community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >>Eric, take us home. He accelerate automation. Definite and definite create a lot of developer action going on cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for definite day this year for Cisco Live, and we're seeing we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding a start now track for people that I want to be there. They want to be a developer. Network automation developer, for instance, We've now got a track just for them where they could get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Eso. I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mixed together as well as getting some of our business units together to and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new AP eyes into their platforms? What are the what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together, seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So, like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. God, man, can >>I add one had >>one more thing. >>Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions. And, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping upto have things personalized to their area to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for definite create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>You know, that's what God is going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now, during with this virtual definite virtual definite create virtual the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups on sharing content. We're gonna learn new things. We're gonna try new things, and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And whoa, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on. The Cuban talk about your awesome accelerate automation and definitely looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Happy to be here. >>Okay, I'm John for the Cube. Virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment Virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll see you at definite create. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube. I'm John for a year host. We've got a great conversation virtual event, accelerating automation with definite Cisco. Definite. And of course, we got the Cisco Brain Trust here. Cube alumni Suzy we Vice President, senior Vice President GM and also CTO of Cisco. Definite and ecosystem Success C X, All that great stuff. Many Wadley Who's the director? Senior director of definite certifications. Eric Field, director of developer advocacy. Susie Mandy. Eric, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you >>down. So we're not in person. We >>don't Can't be at the definite zone. We can't be on site doing definite created All the great stuff we've been doing in the past three years were virtual the cube Virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the succession had has been awesome. But definite create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the definite community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with definite because you said to me, I think four years ago everything should be a service or X a s is it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision? Because this is really important. And still only 5 to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and program ability. What's your What's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that is, more and more businesses are coming online is I mean, they're all online, But is there growing into the cloud? Is their growing in new areas as we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure. How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be ableto really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just acts writing on top. But now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to a higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You remember a few years ago when definite create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we're talking about Muraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco um Europe in Barcelona before all the cove it hit and you had the massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now, more than ever, the cloud scale the modern APS. The momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing Mawr innovation at scale. Because the pressure to do that because >>the stay alive get >>your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world? Because you were there in person. Now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are, Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers as businesses around the world as we ourselves all dealt with, How do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because >>you >>have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my I t infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there in working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and being kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world. But also in India, where it was actually not, you know, not they wouldn't let They didn't have rules toe let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer. You know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home, so that puts extra stress on automation. It puts extra stress on our customers digital transformation. And it just forced them toe, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You have to figure out how to automate all of that. >>You know, one of them >>were still there, all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observe ability, uh, kubernetes serve micro services. So those things again. All Dev ups. And you know, if you guys got some acquisitions, you thought about 1000 eyes. Um, you got a new one you just bought recently Port shift to raise the game in security, Cuban, All these micro services, So observe, ability, superhot. But then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you think? Observe, What do you observing? The network is under huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on. People zooms and WebEx is and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the upside? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observe ability, challenges? It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Muraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has This goes entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that Bigger Attn. Bigger scale. Francisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observe ability and the dashboards and the automation of the A P. I s and all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in, um, they had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people toe work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be a nightie conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of I t and the CEO and saying, You know, how is our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are, you know, connected and ableto work and watch their productivity? Eso All of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure I t stuff became a board level conversation and you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they're now building in automation, additional transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observe ability. You know, looking for those events. The dashboards, you know? So it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners air doing to really rise to that next level. >>Susan, I know you gotta go, but real quick, um, describe what? Accelerating automation with definite means. >>Well, you've been fault. You know, we've been working together on definite in the vision of the infrastructure program ability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets in the program ability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people. And it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run. Things are definite. Community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in. They've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals. We have partners, you know, They're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, Justus, much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got definite create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, being personal will be virtual Susie. Thank you for your time. We're gonna dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're gonna dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, John. Okay. >>Mandy, you heard Susie is about people, and one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of definite certifications. Um is getting people leveled up? I mean, the demand for skills cybersecurity, network program, ability, automation, network design solution, architect cloud multi cloud design thes are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh, yes, absolutely. The you know what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning those air. What's accelerating? A lot of the technology changes, and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing, uh, customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like Dev SEC ops engineer, network Automation engineer, network automation developer, which sues you mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current, um, scope and broaden out and take on new challenges? >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um uh, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is. Director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving what's the state of it now? Because with Cove and people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>What's your role? Absolutely So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the definite creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into. How do you really start solving these problems? Eso that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously, Sisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect, as we found out with a much larger audience. So you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of you know how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with are definite day that was kind of attached onto Sisco Live, and we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of you know what my team does. So that's one piece of it is is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the definite site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network, where there's there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the definite certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with program ability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They move now into the definite spaces well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I gotta ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are Is there anything in particular? Obviously, network automation been around for a long time. Cisco's been leader in that. But as you move up, the staff has modern applications or building. Do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observe ability was big before Cove it and we actually really saw that amplified during co vid. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observe ability now that we needed? Well, we're virtual eso. That's actually been a huge uptick, and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that air. Now, figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SCS in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up and one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that I T departments might care about about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at. The old days you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100% things like licenses started coming into play where they need to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the essays actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use them open source, tooling to monitor and alert on these things, and then published it so the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it. Try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and >>trying >>to figure out Okay, now I could take that. I can adapt into what I need to see for my observe ability. >>That's great, Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this, too, because as automation continues to scale. Um, it's gonna be a focus. People are at home. And you guys had a lot of content online for you. Recorded every session that in the definite zone learning is going on sometimes literally and non linearly. You've got the certifications, which is great. That's key. Great success there. People are interested. But what other learnings are you seeing? What are people, um, doing? What's the top top trends? >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time, they want toe advance, their skill set. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They wanna be able to choose which matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. On we have two new expert lead study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called Automation Boot Camp. And then we're also seeing individual who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, gets, um, skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular, self driven hands on learning through the Definite Fundamentals course, which is available through DEV. Net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like Thio experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're They're spending a lot of time in our definite sandbox, trying out different technologies. Cisco Technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things, and three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people Skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those were three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing more about that at definite create. >>Awesome Eric and man, if you guys can wrap up the accelerated automated with definite package and virtual event here, um, and also t up definite create because definite create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end program ability. And with everything is a service that you guys were doing everything with a piece. Um Onley can imagine the enablement that's gonna enable create Can >>you hear the >>memory real quick on accelerating automation with definite and TF definite create. Mandy will start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first, and then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, Devon, it's bringing a p I s across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with definite. Suzy mentioned the people aspect of that the people Skilling up and how that transformed team transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so would I think about accelerating automation with definite. It's about the definite community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >>Eric, take us home. He accelerate automation. Definite and definite create a lot of developer action going on cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for definite day this year for Cisco Live, and we're seeing we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding a start now track for people that I want to be there. They want to be a developer. Network automation developer, for instance, We've now got a track just for them where they could get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Eso. I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mixed together as well as getting some of our business units together to and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new AP eyes into their platforms? What are the what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together, seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So, like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. God, man, can >>I add one had >>one more thing. >>Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions. And, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping upto have things personalized to their area to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for definite create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>You know, that's what God is going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now, during with this virtual definite virtual definite create virtual the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups on sharing content. We're gonna learn new things. We're gonna try new things, and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And whoa, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on. The Cuban talk about your awesome accelerate automation and definitely looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Happy to be here. >>Okay, I'm John for the Cube. Virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment Virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll see you at definite create. Thanks for watching.