(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier host here in Palo Alto, California. theCUBE's second year covering International Women's Day. It's been a great celebration of all the smart leaders in the world who are making a difference from all kinds of backgrounds, from technology to business and everything in between. Today we've got a great guest, Dominique Bastos, who's the senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Systems, formerly with AWS. That's where we first met at re:Invent. Dominique, great to have you on the program here for International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John, for having me back on theCUBE. This is an honor, especially given the theme. >> Well, I'm excited to have you on, I consider you one of those typecast personas where you've kind of done a lot of things. You're powerful, you've got great business acumen you're technical, and we're in a world where, you know the world's coming completely digital and 50% of the world is women, 51%, some say. So you got mostly male dominated industry and you have a dual engineering background and that's super impressive as well. Again, technical world, male dominated you're in there in the mix. What inspires you to get these engineering degrees? >> I think even it was more so shifted towards males. When I had the inspiration to go to engineering school I was accused as a young girl of being a tomboy and fiddling around with all my brother's toys versus focusing on my dolls and other kind of stereotypical toys that you would give a girl. I really had a curiosity for building, a curiosity for just breaking things apart and putting them back together. I was very lucky in that my I guess you call it primary school, maybe middle school, had a program for, it was like electronics, that was the class electronics. So building circuit boards and things like that. And I really enjoyed that aspect of building. I think it was more actually going into engineering school. Picking that as a discipline was a little bit, my mom's reaction to when I announced that I wanted to do engineering which was, "No, that's for boys." >> Really. >> And that really, you know, I think she, it came from a good place in trying to protect me from what she has experienced herself in terms of how women are received in those spaces. So I kind of shrugged it off and thought "Okay, well I'm definitely now going to do this." >> (laughs) If I was told not to, you're going to do it. >> I was told not to, that's all I needed to hear. And also, I think my passion was to design cars and I figured if I enroll in an industrial engineering program I could focus on ergonomic design and ultimately, you know have a career doing something that I'm passionate about. So yeah, so my inspiration was kind of a little bit of don't do this, a lot of curiosity. I'm also a very analytical person. I've been, and I don't know what the science is around left right brain to be honest, but been told that I'm a very much a logical person versus a feeler. So I don't know if that's good or bad. >> Straight shooter. What were your engineering degrees if you don't mind sharing? >> So I did industrial engineering and so I did a dual degree, industrial engineering and robotics. At the time it was like a manufacturing robotics program. It was very, very cool because we got to, I mean now looking back, the evolution of robotics is just insane. But you, you know, programmed a robotic arm to pick things up. I actually crashed the Civil Engineering School's Concrete Canoe Building Competition where you literally have to design a concrete canoe and do all the load testing and the strength testing of the materials and basically then, you know you go against other universities to race the canoe in a body of water. We did that at, in Alabama and in Georgia. So I was lucky to experience that two times. It was a lot of fun. >> But you knew, so you knew, deep down, you were technical you had a nerd vibe you were geeking out on math, tech, robotics. What happened next? I mean, what were some of the challenges you faced? How did you progress forward? Did you have any blockers and roadblocks in front of you and how did you handle those? >> Yeah, I mean I had, I had a very eye-opening experience with, in my freshman year of engineering school. I kind of went in gung-ho with zero hesitation, all the confidence in the world, 'cause I was always a very big nerd academically, I hate admitting this but myself and somebody else got most intellectual, voted by the students in high school. It's like, you don't want to be voted most intellectual when you're in high school. >> Now it's a big deal. (laughs) >> Yeah, you want to be voted like popular or anything like that? No, I was a nerd, but in engineering school, it's a, it was very humbling. That whole confidence that I had. I experienced prof, ooh, I don't want to name the school. Everybody can google it though, but, so anyway so I had experience with some professors that actually looked at me and said, "You're in the wrong program. This is difficult." I, and I think I've shared this before in other forums where, you know, my thermodynamic teacher basically told me "Cheerleading's down the hall," and it it was a very shocking thing to hear because it really made me wonder like, what am I up against here? Is this what it's going to be like going forward? And I decided not to pay attention to that. I think at the moment when you hear something like that you just, you absorb it and you also don't know how to react. And I decided immediately to just walk right past him and sit down front center in the class. In my head I was cursing him, of course, 'cause I mean, let's be real. And I was like, I'm going to show this bleep bleep. And proceeded to basically set the curve class crushed it and was back to be the teacher's assistant. So I think that was one. >> But you became his teacher assistant after, or another one? >> Yeah, I gave him a mini speech. I said, do not do this. You, you could, you could have broken me and if you would've done this to somebody who wasn't as steadfast in her goals or whatever, I was really focused like I'm doing this, I would've backed out potentially and said, you know this isn't something I want to experience on the daily. So I think that was actually a good experience because it gave me an opportunity to understand what I was up against but also double down in how I was going to deal with it. >> Nice to slay the misogynistic teachers who typecast people. Now you had a very technical career but also you had a great career at AWS on the business side you've handled 'em all of the big accounts, I won't say the names, but like we're talking about monster accounts, sales and now basically it's not really selling, you're managing a big account, it's like a big business. It's a business development thing. Technical to business transition, how do you handle that? Was that something you were natural for? Obviously you, you stared down the naysayers out of the gate in college and then in business, did that continue and how did you drive through that? >> So I think even when I was coming out of university I knew that I wanted to have a balance between the engineering program and business. A lot of my colleagues went on to do their PEs so continue to get their masters basically in engineering or their PhDs in engineering. I didn't really have an interest for that. I did international business and finance as my MBA because I wanted to explore the ability of taking what I had learned in engineering school and applying it to building businesses. I mean, at the time I didn't have it in my head that I would want to do startups but I definitely knew that I wanted to get a feel for what are they learning in business school that I missed out in engineering school. So I think that helped me when I transitioned, well when I applied, I was asked to come apply at AWS and I kind of went, no I'm going to, the DNA is going to be rejected. >> You thought, you thought you'd be rejected from AWS. >> I thought I'd be, yeah, because I have very much a startup founder kind of disruptive personality. And to me, when I first saw AWS at the stage early 2016 I saw it as a corporation. Even though from a techie standpoint, I was like, these people are insane. This is amazing what they're building. But I didn't know what the cultural vibe would feel like. I had been with GE at the beginning of my career for almost three years. So I kind of equated AWS Amazon to GE given the size because in between, I had done startups. So when I went to AWS I think initially, and I do have to kind of shout out, you know Todd Weatherby basically was the worldwide leader for ProServe and it was being built, he built it and I went into ProServe to help from that standpoint. >> John: ProServe, Professional services >> Professional services, right. To help these big enterprise customers. And specifically my first customer was an amazing experience in taking, basically the company revolves around strategic selling, right? It's not like you take a salesperson with a conventional schooling that salespeople would have and plug them into AWS in 2016. It was very much a consultative strategic approach. And for me, having a technical background and loving to solve problems for customers, working with the team, I would say, it was a dream team that I joined. And also the ability to come to the table with a technical background, knowing how to interact with senior executives to help them envision where they want to go, and then to bring a team along with you to make that happen. I mean, that was like magical for me. I loved that experience. >> So you like the culture, I mean, Andy Jassy, I've interviewed many times, always talked about builders and been a builder mentality. You mentioned that earlier at the top of this interview you've always building things, curious and you mentioned potentially your confidence might have been shaken. So you, you had the confidence. So being a builder, you know, being curious and having confidence seems to be what your superpower is. A lot of people talk about the confidence angle. How important is that and how important is that for encouraging more women to get into tech? Because I still hear that all the time. Not that they don't have confidence, but there's so many signals that potentially could shake confidence in industry >> Yeah, that's actually a really good point that you're making. A lot of signals that women get could shake their confidence and that needs to be, I mean, it's easy to say that it should be innate. I mean that's kind of like textbook, "Oh it has to come from within." Of course it does. But also, you know, we need to understand that in a population where 50% of the population is women but only 7% of the positions in tech, and I don't know the most current number in tech leadership, is women, and probably a smaller percentage in the C-suite. When you're looking at a woman who's wanting to go up the trajectory in a tech company and then there's a subconscious understanding that there's a limit to how far you'll go, your confidence, you know, in even subconsciously gets shaken a little bit because despite your best efforts, you're already seeing the cap. I would say that we need to coach girls to speak confidently to navigate conflict versus running away from it, to own your own success and be secure in what you bring to the table. And then I think a very important thing is to celebrate each other and the wins that we see for women in tech, in the industry. >> That's awesome. What's, the, in your opinion, the, you look at that, the challenges for this next generation women, and women in general, what are some of the challenges for them and that they need to overcome today? I mean, obviously the world's changed for the better. Still not there. I mean the numbers one in four women, Rachel Thornton came on, former CMO of AWS, she's at MessageBird now. They had a study where only one in four women go to the executive board level. And so there's still, still numbers are bad and then the numbers still got to get up, up big time. That's, and the industry's working on that, but it's changed. But today, what are some of the challenges for this current generation and the next generation of women and how can we and the industry meet, we being us, women in the industry, be strong role models for them? >> Well, I think the challenge is one of how many women are there in the pipeline and what are we doing to retain them and how are we offering up the opportunities to fill. As you know, as Rachel said and I haven't had an opportunity to see her, in how are we giving them this opportunity to take up those seats in the C-suite right, in these leadership roles. And I think this is a little bit exacerbated with the pandemic in that, you know when everything shut down when people were going back to deal with family and work at the same time, for better or for worse the brunt of it fell on probably, you know the maternal type caregiver within the family unit. You know, I've been, I raised my daughter alone and for me, even without the pandemic it was a struggle constantly to balance the risk that I was willing to take to show up for those positions versus investing even more of that time raising a child, right? Nevermind the unconscious bias or cultural kind of expectations that you get from the male counterparts where there's zero understanding of what a mom might go through at home to then show up to a meeting, you know fully fresh and ready to kind of spit out some wisdom. It's like, you know, your kid just freaking lost their whatever and you know, they, so you have to sort a bunch of things out. I think the challenge that women are still facing and will we have to keep working at it is making sure that there's a good pipeline. A good amount of young ladies of people taking interest in tech. And then as they're, you know, going through the funnel at stages in their career, we're providing the mentoring we're, there's representation, right? To what they're aspiring to. We're celebrating their interest in the field, right? And, and I think also we're doing things to retain them, because again, the pandemic affected everybody. I think women specifically and I don't know the statistics but I was reading something about this were the ones to tend to kind of pull it back and say well now I need to be home with, you know you name how many kids and pets and the aging parents, people that got sick to take on that position. In addition to the career aspirations that they might have. We need to make it easier basically. >> I think that's a great call out and I appreciate you bringing that up about family and being a single mom. And by the way, you're savage warrior to doing that. It's amazing. You got to, I know you have a daughter in computer science at Stanford, I want to get to that in a second. But that empathy and I mentioned Rachel Thornton, who's the CMO MessageBird and former CMO of AWS. Her thing right now to your point is mentoring and sponsorship is very key. And her company and the video that's on the site here people should look at that and reference that. They talk a lot about that empathy of people's situation whether it's a single mom, family life, men and women but mainly women because they're the ones who people aren't having a lot of empathy for in that situation, as you called it out. This is huge. And I think remote work has opened up this whole aperture of everyone has to have a view into how people are coming to the table at work. So, you know, props are bringing that up, and I recommend everyone look at check out Rachel Thornton. So how do you balance that, that home life and talk about your daughter's journey because sounds like she's nerding out at Stanford 'cause you know Stanford's called Nerd Nation, that's their motto, so you must be proud. >> I am so proud, I'm so proud. And I will say, I have to admit, because I did encounter so many obstacles and so many hurdles in my journey, it's almost like I forgot that I should set that aside and not worry about my daughter. My hope for her was for her to kind of be artistic and a painter or go into something more lighthearted and fun because I just wanted to think, I guess my mom had the same idea, right? She, always been very driven. She, I want to say that I got very lucky that she picked me to be her mom. Biologically I'm her mom, but I told her she was like a little star that fell from the sky and I, and ended up with me. I think for me, balancing being a single mom and a career where I'm leading and mentoring and making big decisions that affect people's lives as well. You have to take the best of everything you get from each of those roles. And I think that the best way is play to your strengths, right? So having been kind of a nerd and very organized person and all about, you know, systems for effectiveness, I mean, industrial engineering, parenting for me was, I'm going to make it sound super annoying and horrible, but (laughs) >> It's funny, you know, Dave Vellante and I when we started SiliconANGLE and theCUBE years ago, one of the things we were all like sports lovers. So we liked sports and we are like we looked at the people in tech as tech athletes and except there's no men and women teams, it's one team. It's all one thing. So, you know, I consider you a tech athlete you're hard charging strong and professional and smart and beautiful and brilliant, all those good things. >> Thank you. >> Now this game is changing and okay, and you've done startups, and you've done corporate jobs, now you're in a new role. What's the current tech landscape from a, you know I won't say athletic per standpoint but as people who are smart. You have all kinds of different skill sets. You have the startup warriors, you have the folks who like to be in the middle of the corporate world grow up through corporate, climb the corporate ladder. You have investors, you have, you know, creatives. What have you enjoyed most and where do you see all the action? >> I mean, I think what I've enjoyed the most has been being able to bring all of the things that I feel I'm strong at and bring it together to apply that to whatever the problem is at hand, right? So kind of like, you know if you look at a renaissance man who can kind of pop in anywhere and, oh, he's good at, you know sports and he's good at reading and, or she's good at this or, take all of those strengths and somehow bring them together to deal with the issue at hand, versus breaking up your mindset into this is textbook what I learned and this is how business should be done and I'm going to draw these hard lines between personal life and work life, or between how you do selling and how you do engineering. So I think my, the thing that I loved, really loved about AWS was a lot of leaders saw something in me that I potentially didn't see, which was, yeah you might be great at running that big account but we need help over here doing go to market for a new product launch and boom, there you go. Now I'm in a different org helping solve that problem and getting something launched. And I think if you don't box yourself in to I'm only good at this, or, you know put a label on yourself as being the rockstar in that. It leaves room for opportunities to present themselves but also it leaves room within your own mind to see yourself as somebody capable of doing anything. Right, I don't know if I answered the question accurately. >> No, that's good, no, that's awesome. I love the sharing, Yeah, great, great share there. Question is, what do you see, what do you currently during now you're building a business of Persistent for the cloud, obviously AWS and Persistent's a leader global system integrator around the world, thousands and thousands of customers from what we know and been reporting on theCUBE, what's next for you? Where do you see yourself going? Obviously you're going to knock this out of the park. Where do you see yourself as you kind of look at the continuing journey of your mission, personal, professional what's on your mind? Where do you see yourself going next? >> Well, I think, you know, again, going back to not boxing yourself in. This role is an amazing one where I have an opportunity to take all the pieces of my career in tech and apply them to building a business within a business. And that involves all the goodness of coaching and mentoring and strategizing. And I'm loving it. I'm loving the opportunity to work with such great leaders. Persistent itself is very, very good at providing opportunities, very diverse opportunities. We just had a huge Semicolon; Hackathon. Some of the winners were females. The turnout was amazing in the CTO's office. We have very strong women leading the charge for innovation. I think to answer your question about the future and where I may see myself going next, I think now that my job, well they say the job is never done. But now that Chloe's kind of settled into Stanford and kind of doing her own thing, I have always had a passion to continue leading in a way that brings me to, into the fold a lot more. So maybe, you know, maybe in a VC firm partner mode or another, you know CEO role in a startup, or my own startup. I mean, I never, I don't know right now I'm super happy but you never know, you know where your drive might go. And I also want to be able to very deliberately be in a role where I can continue to mentor and support up and coming women in tech. >> Well, you got the smarts but you got really the building mentality, the curiosity and the confidence really sets you up nicely. Dominique great story, great inspiration. You're a role model for many women, young girls out there and women in tech and in celebration. It's a great day and thank you for sharing that story and all the good nuggets there. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and it's been my pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto getting all the content, check out the other interviews some amazing stories, lessons learned, and some, you know some funny stories and some serious stories. So have some fun and enjoy the rest of the videos here for International Women's Days, thanks for watching. (gentle inspirational music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, Lisa Martin here with you on theCUBE Live from Mobile World Congress '23 in Barcelona. We're having a great day at the show. We hope you are too. I've got two guests here with me next. We're going to be talking about telco's 5G, all that exciting stuff. Please welcome Jason Inskeep, the AVP 5G, and Private 5G Center of Excellence at AT&T Business. And Doug Lieberman is here as well. Senior Director, Global Solutions Co-Creation Services at Dell Technologies. Guys, it's great to have you on the show, live from the show floor, talk to me about what's going on, how are you? >> Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great show, I'm happy to be back here this year and really looking forward to the conversations that are going on and really continuing these partnerships that Dell has with companies like AT&T to truly drive the realities and the benefits of 5G. >> Absolutely, Doug, talk to me a little bit. You have an interesting title, Director of Global Solutions Co-Creation Services at Dell. Tell me a little bit about your role, what you're responsible for, and then Jason we'll have you do the same. >> Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So, I have a very interesting role and a very exciting role at Dell because we have a unique organization that I run globally whose job it is, is to work with telcos to co-create services for enterprise and jointly go to market with those. So that basically take the combined power of AT&T and Dell and bring that to enterprise customers and other telcos so that enterprises can realize the value of, and truly leverage and harness the capabilities of 5G for private mobility and Mac and IOT and connected devices. >> Jason, let's bring you into the conversation now. You have an interesting title as well. You're with the 5G Center of Excellence at AT&T. Talk a little bit about your role and that COE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again as well. The role with my team at AT&T is we're on the cutting edge. We're sitting in between our customers and our product houses that are working with folks at Dell, really helping putting our products together in the space of 5G. A lot of open opportunities here, a lot of things changing really fast. So my teams are off as well as putting this stuff in customers production sites it's also taking and capturing that information, working with my internal partners, both on the technology side, on the product side, and partners like Dell who are coming in helping us enabling those products and services that we can take and scale out through the different opportunities that we're seeing in this space. >> Let's double click on that partner angle, Jason, will stay with you. The 5G revolution, it's here, we are all excited about it. There's so much potential that will come from that. Let's talk about the AT&T/Dell partnership. How are you guys working together to deliver 5G globally? Jason, we'll start with you and then Doug will go to you. >> Yeah, at the core of it, when we started looking at 5G and seeing the changes that were happening, one of the biggest changes is it became software defined. So, the way we could deploy the hardware with the software becomes a whole new conversation. And what we saw coming out of that is it's not going to be a single winner and loser to really execute the way it's necessary for the experiences of tomorrow. It has to be an ecosystem that comes together. Dell creates a great opportunity for us from the hardware perspective to move those services around, to scale those services ultimately to all kinds of site types up to cities right down to small offices. And those different form factors that they bring with the software and the network pieces that we're adding on top of it help to streamline the flows and processes and really gets to that next generation that we see happening, which is this converged architecture. This meeting of network and application, creating a whole new skillset along with products. So we're at the very top we've got Dell/AT&T, at a partner level, it gets at a granular level too. The users and the developers underneath are starting to change as well, so very interesting dichotomy happening right now. >> Right, Doug, what's through Dell's lens? Tell us a little bit about the partnership and how you're working together to deliver 5G and really unlock its potential globally. >> Yeah, thank you, I'd love to bonus off of what Jason was saying, for Dell, what we look at is through the lens of an enterprise. An enterprise needs to execute their business function, their outcome, their mission that they need to operate. And so therefore they have workloads that they need to run. And 5G is an enabler for that technology, and there's lots of other enablers but the key piece is how can they get their business work done better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently, more securely? And the combination of AT&T and Dell truly is a combination that brings in a partnership that brings together a full breadth of those capabilities, with understanding what those enterprise workloads are and how they work and how an enterprise would leverage these capabilities. And then bonus on top of that and merge together with that the capabilities of AT&T. And when you look at 5G, there's a lot of people that talk about 5G being the enterprise G. And a lot of that is because of things that Jason mentioned. As we move to a disaggregated stack where you have software-defined aspects of it, and the ability in the underlying definition of what 5G in the specifications to allow much more customization. It means that enterprises now cannot just take connectivity as it is and use it however it comes but actually work with a telco and work with Dell to customize that connectivity in a way that better meets their requirements. Whether that be with slicing or private mobility or roaming between private and the public network and things like profiles and being able to have different views of how different users and devices connect to that network are all key in truly harnessing the power of that connectivity to have always on, always connected, always integrated systems from the edge, the core, to the cloud. >> Always on, always connected. That's what we all expect these days. Wherever we are in the world, whatever we're trying to do. But to be able to take advantage of all that 5G offers for all of us, telcos have to create infrastructures that can support it, let's double click guys on the infrastructure that Dell and AT&T have put in place to enable this. Jason, I want to get your perspective first and then Doug will go to you. >> Yeah, I mean, it's foundational, the things that we're trying to do and build out here and there's a lot of complexity in it now that we didn't have before because of the flexibility in it. It's one of those things like the good news in software is you can do whatever you want. The bad news in software is you can do whatever you want. Once you have that foundation there though in terms of infrastructure, which for us is really air to glass. Fiber through the spectrum on top. But underneath of that, we have the servers, we have that infrastructure where those fibers come together where that air meets the radios and so forth. And we've got to have that great foundation. So working with Dell and getting those spaces built together preps the area as needed so that there's additional place now for compute and scale at that new converged meet-me point. And that's going to be the opportunity that we're trying to think about really to get that foundation in a way that maximizes capacity and maximizes control for the customers and enterprises in particular. And more importantly, maximizes the time horizon. Because if you're putting in a foundation like this, you're not looking at two to three years. You're trying to skate beyond, skate where the puck is going, look at five, 10 years out, set that foundation. And that's what we're trying to look at with Dell. What can our network do already? Where can we push it? In return, they're going to build their solutions to help maximize that potential. >> From an infrastructure perspective, Doug, I want to understand really where Dell is really shining there but also what are some of the differentiators that Dell brings to this foundational infrastructure that to your point, is built for scale? >> Yeah, so it really all comes down to as we start to see this transition that's been happening for years, but it's accelerating because of always-connected devices and everything connected and the great proliferation of data at the edge. As we move assets from the data center and out to the edge we introduce new challenges that have to be overcome. You have things like security, automation, infrastructure cost, maintenance, day-one operations, day-two operations, all of these things are new complexities which enterprises want to enable their workloads, enable the outcomes that they want to generate. But they need to make sure that they're not taking a step backwards when it comes to things like regulations. In Europe, you've got GDPR, and in the US you've got different security regulations. No one wants to be the next front page headline about their company being attacked and having a ransomware attack. And so as we spread out these assets, what Dell is here to do is to work with AT&T and enable enterprises to effectively build their virtual enterprise around the world where those assets, whether they're at the edge or the core or in the cloud, are all managed with the same profiles and the same security features and the same automation that they have in a core data center. So my ability to deploy an edge cloud so that I can leverage AT&T's network and have end-user devices do things like gaming or connect to video services or get directed retail advertising to you are not basically introducing new vectors for security vulnerabilities into that network. And so Dell has worked really hard and is a leader in the industry in providing automation and lower cost of ownership and security for those solutions. So it's not just about putting a server out there but it's about putting an infrastructure and a cloud that is connected by AT&T's backbone and to a central core of automation management and orchestration capabilities so that I can leverage those assets securely and efficiently. >> That security element that you bring up, Doug, is so incredibly critical. We talk about it at every event, we talk about it every day. We've seen such dramatic changes in the threat landscape in the last couple of years with covid and things like that. So that security element isn't trivial, it's essential for every type of enterprise regardless of where they are. I want to talk a little bit now about best practices. And Doug, go back to you, looking at what AT&T is achieving, the 5G COE, what you're doing with Dell. From your lens and your experiences, what are some of the best practices for telcos deploying secured network and connectivity at the edge? >> Yeah, well, I think the first one is that automation and that orchestration, right? The answer is that you cannot have snowflakes at every single ag point. You need to make sure that those infrastructures are consistent and compliant with the integrations and with the policies that have been set across the network. The second thing is that you want to make sure that the connectivity is monitored and metered and managed so that we know whether, for example that endpoint is there and it's not there, if it goes offline. And ensuring the end-user experience is consistent throughout. And so what we are seeing is that it's really important that we provide an implementation where the enterprise can get a consistent and a predictable outcome for what they're trying to accomplish. What they don't want to do, what enterprises hate and is really bad for them is when they provide an inconsistent or inappropriate results to their users, to their customer base. So if your website goes offline or you're a gaming platform, if people can't get to your game you're going to lose customers, you're going to lose business you're going to have people lose faith in your network. And so our partnership with AT&T and with other telcos is about ensuring that we have all those aspects covered, day zero, day one, and day two, as well as the security aspects. And that back haul is an essential piece of that because as we get more and more devices and more and more edge devices set up, there's more sprawl. And so the complexity goes up substantially, but what really wins is when you can take that complexity and use it to your advantage and be able to manage and deploy those systems as though they were all within your virtual enterprise. >> Using complexity to your advantage. That's an interesting one, Doug, that you're bringing up. Jason, I want to know, what does that mean for you and how is AT&T leveraging complexity to its advantage for its customers all over the globe? >> You know, first thing is if you're thinking about, we're a network company we're not just a 5G company, so we're wireline, we're wireless, we're global in terms of the amount of fiber we have in the ground, the amount of in the US, domestic sailor deployments, our investments in FirstNet, is our first responder network here in the US. So we have a big portfolio inclusive of IOT. That is a global brand as well. That, if you look at it through the outside lens, that's super complex, all over the planet. So when we're talking to our customers now in this new world, which is very much, "Hey, you can do these things on your own." We go back and the bigger, obviously have the products, and the network and the tech but now that customers can take advantage of it and take things that Dell have rolled out, they need that new new age expertise. You also got the Dell expertise of building these platforms from maybe a software level, from an orchestration level, those kind of things. And at the edge that's creating a new type of person and a new type of workflow, a new type of way to respond and work. So that combination of those two is going to be that new skillset. It's in small pockets now, it's growing in how that looks because it's a little combination of both the app developer and the network developer, that's coming together. Our footprint and in terms of what we provide in there is not just 5G, it's 5G, it's fiber, it's all of those pieces together. And that's what's going to super enable that experience that Doug talked about when you're thinking about gaming or transportation, it's not just the network performance, it's the roundtrip, so we're really trying to focus on that and educate our customers in that way with the expertise that we bring over years and years of building these things. >> And if I could just jump in there. I'd like to just emphasize something Jason just said. When we look at workloads at the edge, very rarely are those workloads uniquely just an edge workload, there are components. The example I like to use is video surveillance. If you are a big box store and you have video surveillance inside your store, there is a set of workloads and outcomes you need for immediate response at that edge. You want to know if there's a safety hazard, if there is a theft or those things. Those things need to be processed real time in the store before the thief leaves the store. But then there's a set of connectivity as well where you want to process that data up in the cloud to get long-term analytics and data off of that information. What's my average store density on a Thursday afternoon in November when it's 20 degrees out. Because that would drive how many employees I have, how much inventory I carry, et cetera. And that combination is a factor that drives all the different aspects of AT&T's network. We need the connectivity in the store for the practicability and the spectrum for the cameras that talk to a central server. We need the high-speed backup and throughput in order to provide cyber recovery as well as point-of-sales services so that they can do credit card transactions flawlessly, which is using a lot of wireline services for AT&T. And together with their cloud and their other capabilities, an enterprise needs all those different aspects to work, both the edge, the core and the cloud coming together to form an outcome from one piece of input. So that one piece of input, that video stream is used in multiple different ways and because of that, that network that AT&T brings can support the end-to-end outcome and use cases for that implementation, as an example. >> That end-to-end roundtrip that you guys talked about is essential for every type of enterprise. A lot of great work that Dell and AT&T are doing together to really enable enterprises to really capitalize on all that the new technology that 5G has the potential to deliver. So I got to wrap things up, Jason, with you. From a business-customer perspective, what's next for AT&T? What can those business customers expect? >> Just continued to scaling because you're looking at a space that's evolving rapidly. It's evolving rapidly, there's a lot of opportunity. You look at the private wireless space in particular, it's nascent, but growing rapidly with the customers having their ability to do this on their own. So for us, and really where we're starting to think now is we're seeing the things move from POC, starting to move to production, customers are starting to think about what's next. For us, we're trying to skate ahead of that knowing how we built our own networks, knowing how we engaged in our own partnerships like with Dell and trying to bring that expertise back to the customer, because it isn't cookie cutter anymore. There's a lot of flexibility and each input creates a different output. So it's up to us to at least help them balance that. Define what I like to affectionately call, "Find their Goldilocks." What is that just right for them? >> Great point, Jason, it is no longer a cookie cutter. Cookie cutter isn't going to cut it. Jason, Doug, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We appreciate thank you all of your insights. Sounds like some great work that AT&T and Dell are doing together. Enterprises have a lot to look forward to. Thank you again for your time. >> Thank you very much, >> Thank you. >> Looking forward to seeing you at the show. >> I'm Lisa Martin from theCUBE at Mobile World Congress '23 in Barcelona. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(low-key music) >> The cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting electronic music) (crowd chattering in background) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. My name's Dave Vellante. I'm here with Dave Nicholson. We are live at the Fira in Barcelona, covering MWC23 day four. We've been talking about, you know, 5G all week. We're going to talk about it some more. Jillian Kaplan is here. She's the head of Global Telecom Thought Leadership at Dell Technologies, and we're pleased to have Meg Knauth, who's the Vice President for Digital Platform Engineering at T-Mobile. Ladies, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, Meg, can you explain 5G and edge to folks that may not be familiar with it? Give us the 101 on 5G and edge. >> Sure, I'd be happy to. So, at T-Mobile, we want businesses to be able to focus on their business outcomes and not have to stress about network technology. So we're here to handle the networking behind the scenes for you to achieve your business goals. The main way to think about 5G is speed, reduced latency, and heightened security. And you can apply that to so many different business goals and objectives. You know, some of the use cases that get touted out the most are in the retail manufacturing sectors with sensors and with control of inventory and things of that nature. But it can be applied to pretty much any industry because who doesn't need more (chuckles) more speed and lower latency. >> Yeah. And reliability, right? >> Exactly. >> I mean, that's what you're going to have there. So it's not like it's necessarily going to- you know, you think about 5G and these private networks, right? I mean, it's not going to, oh, maybe it is going to eat into, there's a Venn there, I know, but it's not going to going to replace wireless, right? I mean, it's new use cases. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, they definitely coexist, right? And Meg touched a little bit on like all the use cases that are coming to be, but as we look at 5G, it's really the- we call it like the Enterprise G, right? It's where the enterprise is going to be able to see changes in their business and the way that they do things. And for them, it's going to be about reducing costs and heightening ROI, and safety too, right? Like being able to automate manufacturing facilities where you don't have workers, like, you know, getting hit by various pieces of equipment and you can take them out of harm's way and put robots in their place. And having them really work in an autonomous situation is going to be super, super key. And 5G is just the, it's the backbone of all future technologies if you look at it. We have to have a network like that in order to build things like AI and ML, and we talk about VR and the Metaverse. You have to have a super reliable network that can handle the amount of devices that we're putting out today, right? So, extremely important. >> From T-Mobile's perspective, I mean we hear a lot about, oh, we spent a lot on CapEx, we know that. You know, trillion and a half over the next seven years, going into 5G infrastructure. We heard in the early keynotes at MWC, we heard the call to you know, tax the over the top vendors. We heard the OTT, Netflix shot back, they said, "Why don't you help us pay for the content that we're creating?" But, okay, so I get that, but telcos have a great business. Where's T-Mobile stand on future revenue opportunities? Are you looking to get more data and monetize that data? Are you looking to do things like partner with Dell to do, you know, 5G networks? Where are the opportunities for T-Mobile? >> I think it's more, as Jillian said, it's the opportunities for each business and it's unique to those businesses. So we're not in it just for ourselves. We're in it to help others achieve their business goals and to do more with all of the new capabilities that this network provides. >> Yeah, man, I like that answer because again, listening to some of the CEOs of the large telcos, it's like, hmm, what's in it for me as the customer or the business? I didn't hear enough of that. And at least in the early keynotes, I'm hearing it more, you know, as the show goes on. But I don't know, Dave, what do you think about what you've heard at the event? >> Well, I'm curious from T-Mobile's perspective, you know when a consumer thinks about 5G, we think of voice, text, and data. And if we think about the 5G network that you already have in place, I'm curious, if you can share this kind of information, what percentage of that's being utilized now? How much is available for the, you know, for the Enterprise G that we're talking about, and maybe, you know, in five years in the future, do you have like a projected mix of consumer use versus all of these back office, call them processes that a consumer's not aware of, but you know the factory floor being connected via 5G, that frontiers that emerges, where are we now and what are you looking towards? Does that make sense? Kind of the mixed question? >> Hand over the business plan! (all laugh) >> Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, I- >> I want numbers Meg, numbers! >> Wow. (Dave and Dave laugh) I'm probably actually not the right person to speak to that. But as you know, T-Mobile has the largest 5G network in North America, and we just say, bring it, right? Let's talk- >> So you got room, you got room for Jillian's stuff? >> Yeah, let's solve >> Well, we can build so many >> business problems together. >> private 5G networks, right? Like I would say like the opportunities are... There's not a limit, right? Because as we build out these private networks, right? We're not on a public network when we're talking about like connecting these massive factories or connecting like a retail store to you and your house to be able to basically continue to try on the clothes remotely, something like that. It's limitless and what we can build- >> So they're related, but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive in the sense that what you are doing in the factory example is going to interfere with my ability to get my data through T-mobile. >> No, no, I- >> These are separated. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. >> As we build out these private networks and these private facilities, and there are so many applications in the consumer space that haven't even been realized yet. Like, when we think about 4G, when 4G launched, there were no applications that needed 4G to run on our cell phones, right? But then the engineers got to work, right? And we ended up with Uber and Instagram stories and all these applications that require 4G to launch. And that's what's going to happen with 5G too, it's like, as the network continues to get built, in the consumer space as well as the enterprise space, there's going to be new applications realized on this is all the stuff that we can do with this amazing network and look how many more devices and look how much faster it is, and the lower latency and the higher bandwidth, and you know, what we can really build. And I think what we're seeing at this show compared to last year is this stuff actually in practice. There was a lot of talk last year, like about, oh, this is what we can build, but now we're building it. And I think that's really key to show that companies like T-Mobile can help the enterprise in this space with cooperation, right? Like, we're not just talking about it now, we're actually putting it into practice. >> So how does it work? If I put in a private network, what are you doing? You slice out a piece of the network and charge me for it and then I get that as part of my private network. How does it actually work for the customer? >> You want to take that one? >> So I was going to say, yeah, you can do a network slice. You can actually physically build a private network, right? It depends, there's so many different ways to engineer it. So I think you can do it either way, basically. >> We just, we don't want it to be scary, right? >> Yep. >> So it starts with having a conversation about the business challenges that you're facing and then backing it into the technology and letting the technology power those solutions. But we don't want it to be scary for people because there's so much buzz around 5G, around edge, and it can be overwhelming and you can feel like you need a PhD in engineering to have a conversation. And we just want to kind of simplify things and talk in your language, not in our language. We'll figure out the tech behind the scenes. Just tell us what problems we can solve together. >> And so many non-technical companies are having to transform, right? Like retail, like manufacturing, that haven't had to be tech companies before. But together with T-Mobile and Dell, we can help enable that and make it not scary like Meg said. >> Right, so you come into my factory, I say, okay, look around. I got all these people there, and they're making hoses and they're physically putting 'em together. And we go and we have to take a physical measurement as to, you know, is it right? And because if we don't do that, then we have to rework it. Okay, now that's a problem. Okay, can you help me digitize that business? I need a network to do that. I'm going to put in some robots to do that. This is, I mean, I'm making this up but this has got to be a common use case, right? >> Yeah. >> So how do you simplify that for the business owner? >> So we start with what we can provide, and then in some cases you need additional solution providers. You might need a robotics company, you might need a sensor company. But we have those contacts to bring that together for you so that you don't have to be the expert in all those things. >> And what do I do with all the data that I'm collecting? Because, you know, I'm not really a data expert. Maybe, you know, I'm good at putting hoses together, but what's the data layer look like here? (all laughing) >> It's a hose business! >> I know! >> Great business. >> Back to the hoses again. >> There's a lot of different things you can do with it, right? You can collect it in a database, you can send it up to a cloud, you can, you know, use an edge device. It depends how we build the network. >> Dave V.: Can you guys help me do that? Can you guys- >> Sure, yeah. >> Help me figure that out. Should I put it into cloud? Should I use this database or that data? What kind of skills do I need? >> And it depends on the size of the network, right? And the size of the business. Like, you know, there's very simple. You don't have to be a massive manufacturer in order to install this stuff. >> No, I'm asking small business questions. >> Yeah. >> Right, I might not have this giant IT team. I might not have somebody who knows how to do ETL and PBA. >> Exactly. And we can talk to you too about what data matters, right? And we can, together, talk about what data might be the most valuable to you. We can talk to you about how we use data. But again, simplifying it down and making it personal to your business. >> Your point about scary is interesting, because no one has mentioned that until you did in four days. Three? Four days. Somebody says, let's do a private 5G network. That sounds like you're offering, you know, it's like, "Hey, you know what we should do Dave? We'll build you a cruise ship." It's like, I don't need a cruise ship, I just want to go bass fishing. >> Right, right, right. >> But in fact, these things are scalable in the sense that it can be scaled down from the trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It needs to be focused on your outcome, right? And not on the tech. >> When I was at the Dell booth I saw this little private network, it was about this big. I'm like, how much is that? I want one of those. (all laugh) >> I'm not the right person to talk about that! >> The little black one? >> Yes. >> I wanted one of those, too! >> I saw it, it had a little case to carry it around. I'm like, that could fit in my business. >> Just take it with you. >> theCUBE could use that! (all laugh) >> Anything that could go in a pelican case, I want. >> It's true. Like, it's so incredibly important, like you said, to focus on outcomes, right? Not just tech for the sake of tech. What's the problem? Let's solve the problem together. And then you're getting the outcome you want. You'll know what data you need. If you know what the problem is, you're like, okay this is the data I need to know if this problem is solved or not. >> So it sounds like 2022 was the year of talking about it. 2023, I'm inferring is the year of seeing it. >> Yep. >> And 2024 is going to be the year of doing it? >> I think we're doing it now. >> We're doing it now. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah, yeah. We're definitely doing it now. >> All right. >> I see a lot of this stuff being put into place and a lot more innovation and a lot more working together. And Meg mentioned working with other partners. No one's going to do this alone. You've got to like, you know, Dell especially, we're focused on open and making sure that, you know, we have the right software partners. We're bringing in smaller players, right? Like ISVs too, as well as like the big software guys. Incredibly, incredibly important. The sensor companies, whatever we need you've got to be able to solve your customer's issue, which in this case, we're looking to help the enterprise together to transform their space. And Dell knows a little bit about the enterprise, so. >> So if we are there in 2023, then I assume 2024 will be the year that each of your companies sets up a dedicated vertical to address the hose manufacturing market. (Meg laughing) >> Oh, the hose manufacturing market. >> Further segmentation is usually a hallmark of the maturity of an industry. >> I got a lead for you. >> Yeah, there you go. >> And that's one thing we've done at Dell, too. We've built like this use case directory to help the service providers understand what, not just say like, oh, you can help manufacturers. Yeah, but how, what are the use cases to do that? And we worked with a research firm to figure out, like, you know these are the most mature, these are the best ROIs. Like to really help hone in on exactly what we can deploy for 5G and edge solutions that make the most sense, not only for service providers, right, but also for the enterprises. >> Where do you guys want to see this partnership go? Give us the vision. >> To infinity and beyond. To 5G! (Meg laughing) To 5G and beyond. >> I love it. >> It's continuation. I love that we're partnering together. It's incredibly important to the future of the business. >> Good deal. >> To bring the strengths of both together. And like Jillian said, other partners in the ecosystem, it has to be approached from a partnership perspective, but focused on outcomes. >> Jillian: Yep. >> To 5G and beyond. I love it. >> To 5G and beyond. >> Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE. Go to silliconANGLE.com. John Furrier is banging out all the news. theCUBE.net has all the videos. We're live at the Fira in Barcelona, MWC23. We'll be right back. (uplifting electronic music)

(gentle music) >> Narrator: "TheCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, welcome back to day four of "theCUBE's" coverage of MWC '23. We're here live at the Fira in Barcelona. Wall-to-wall coverage, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio, banging out all the news. Really, the whole week we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco network, the new opportunities in telco. We're really excited to have AT&T and Snowflake here. Dave Whittington is the AVP, at the Chief Data Office at AT&T. Roddy Tranum is the Assistant Vice President, for Channel Performance Data and Tools at AT&T. And Phil Kippen, the Global Head Of Industry-Telecom at Snowflake, Snowflake's new telecom business. Snowflake just announced earnings last night. Typical Scarpelli, they beat earnings, very conservative guidance, stocks down today, but we like Snowflake long term, they're on that path to 10 billion. Guys, welcome to "theCUBE." Thanks so much >> Phil: Thank you. >> for coming on. >> Dave and Roddy: Thanks Dave. >> Dave, let's start with you. The data culture inside of telco, We've had this, we've been talking all week about this monolithic system. Super reliable. You guys did a great job during the pandemic. Everything shifting to landlines. We didn't even notice, you guys didn't miss a beat. Saved us. But the data culture's changing inside telco. Explain that. >> Well, absolutely. So, first of all IoT and edge processing is bringing forth new and exciting opportunities all the time. So, we're bridging the world between a lot of the OSS stuff that we can do with edge processing. But bringing that back, and now we're talking about working, and I would say traditionally, we talk data warehouse. Data warehouse and big data are now becoming a single mesh, all right? And the use cases and the way you can use those, especially I'm taking that edge data and bringing it back over, now I'm running AI and ML models on it, and I'm pushing back to the edge, and I'm combining that with my relational data. So that mesh there is making all the difference. We're getting new use cases that we can do with that. And it's just, and the volume of data is immense. >> Now, I love ChatGPT, but I'm hoping your data models are more accurate than ChatGPT. I never know. Sometimes it's really good, sometimes it's really bad. But enterprise, you got to be clean with your AI, don't you? >> Not only you have to be clean, you have to monitor it for bias and be ethical about it. We're really good about that. First of all with AT&T, our brand is Platinum. We take care of that. So, we may not be as cutting-edge risk takers as others, but when we go to market with an AI or an ML or a product, it's solid. >> Well hey, as telcos go, you guys are leaning into the Cloud. So I mean, that's a good starting point. Roddy, explain your role. You got an interesting title, Channel Performance Data and Tools, what's that all about? >> So literally anything with our consumer, retail, concenters' channels, all of our channels, from a data perspective and metrics perspective, what it takes to run reps, agents, all the way to leadership levels, scorecards, how you rank in the business, how you're driving the business, from sales, service, customer experience, all that data infrastructure with our great partners on the CDO side, as well as Snowflake, that comes from my team. >> And that's traditionally been done in a, I don't mean the pejorative, but we're talking about legacy, monolithic, sort of data warehouse technologies. >> Absolutely. >> We have a love-hate relationship with them. It's what we had. It's what we used, right? And now that's evolving. And you guys are leaning into the Cloud. >> Dramatic evolution. And what Snowflake's enabled for us is impeccable. We've talked about having, people have dreamed of one data warehouse for the longest time and everything in one system. Really, this is the only way that becomes a reality. The more you get in Snowflake, we can have golden source data, and instead of duplicating that 50 times across AT&T, it's in one place, we just share it, everybody leverages it, and now it's not duplicated, and the process efficiency is just incredible. >> But it really hinges on that separation of storage and compute. And we talk about the monolithic warehouse, and one of the nightmares I've lived with, is having a monolithic warehouse. And let's just go with some of my primary, traditional customers, sales, marketing and finance. They are leveraging BSS OSS data all the time. For me to coordinate a deployment, I have to make sure that each one of these units can take an outage, if it's going to be a long deployment. With the separation of storage, compute, they own their own compute cluster. So I can move faster for these people. 'Cause if finance, I can implement his code without impacting finance or marketing. This brings in CI/CD to more reality. It brings us faster to market with more features. So if he wants to implement a new comp plan for the field reps, or we're reacting to the marketplace, where one of our competitors has done something, we can do that in days, versus waiting weeks or months. >> And we've reported on this a lot. This is the brilliance of Snowflake's founders, that whole separation >> Yep. >> from compute and data. I like Dave, that you're starting with sort of the business flexibility, 'cause there's a cost element of this too. You can dial down, you can turn off compute, and then of course the whole world said, "Hey, that's a good idea." And a VC started throwing money at Amazon, but Redshift said, "Oh, we can do that too, sort of, can't turn off the compute." But I want to ask you Phil, so, >> Sure. >> it looks from my vantage point, like you're taking your Data Cloud message which was originally separate compute from storage simplification, now data sharing, automated governance, security, ultimately the marketplace. >> Phil: Right. >> Taking that same model, break down the silos into telecom, right? It's that same, >> Mm-hmm. >> sorry to use the term playbook, Frank Slootman tells me he doesn't use playbooks, but he's not a pattern matcher, but he's a situational CEO, he says. But the situation in telco calls for that type of strategy. So explain what you guys are doing in telco. >> I think there's, so, what we're launching, we launched last week, and it really was three components, right? So we had our platform as you mentioned, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> and that platform is being utilized by a number of different companies today. We also are adding, for telecom very specifically, we're adding capabilities in marketplace, so that service providers can not only use some of the data and apps that are in marketplace, but as well service providers can go and sell applications or sell data that they had built. And then as well, we're adding our ecosystem, it's telecom-specific. So, we're bringing partners in, technology partners, and consulting and services partners, that are very much focused on telecoms and what they do internally, but also helping them monetize new services. >> Okay, so it's not just sort of generic Snowflake into telco? You have specific value there. >> We're purposing the platform specifically for- >> Are you a telco guy? >> I am. You are, okay. >> Total telco guy absolutely. >> So there you go. You see that Snowflake is actually an interesting organizational structure, 'cause you're going after verticals, which is kind of rare for a company of your sort of inventory, I'll say, >> Absolutely. >> I don't mean that as a negative. (Dave laughs) So Dave, take us through the data journey at AT&T. It's a long history. You don't have to go back to the 1800s, but- (Dave laughs) >> Thank you for pointing out, we're a 149-year-old company. So, Jesse James was one of the original customers, (Dave laughs) and we have no longer got his data. So, I'll go back. I've been 17 years singular AT&T, and I've watched it through the whole journey of, where the monolithics were growing, when the consolidation of small, wireless carriers, and we went through that boom. And then we've gone through mergers and acquisitions. But, Hadoop came out, and it was going to solve all world hunger. And we had all the aspects of, we're going to monetize and do AI and ML, and some of the things we learned with Hadoop was, we had this monolithic warehouse, we had this file-based-structured Hadoop, but we really didn't know how to bring this all together. And we were bringing items over to the relational, and we were taking the relational and bringing it over to the warehouse, and trying to, and it was a struggle. Let's just go there. And I don't think we were the only company to struggle with that, but we learned a lot. And so now as tech is finally emerging, with the cloud, companies like Snowflake, and others that can handle that, where we can create, we were discussing earlier, but it becomes more of a conducive mesh that's interoperable. So now we're able to simplify that environment. And the cloud is a big thing on that. 'Cause you could not do this on-prem with on-prem technologies. It would be just too cost prohibitive, and too heavy of lifting, going back and forth, and managing the data. The simplicity the cloud brings with a smaller set of tools, and I'll say in the data space specifically, really allows us, maybe not a single instance of data for all use cases, but a greatly reduced ecosystem. And when you simplify your ecosystem, you simplify speed to market and data management. >> So I'm going to ask you, I know it's kind of internal organizational plumbing, but it'll inform my next question. So, Dave, you're with the Chief Data Office, and Roddy, you're kind of, you all serve in the business, but you're really serving the, you're closer to those guys, they're banging on your door for- >> Absolutely. I try to keep the 130,000 users who may or may not have issues sometimes with our data and metrics, away from Dave. And he just gets a call from me. >> And he only calls when he has a problem. He's never wished me happy birthday. (Dave and Phil laugh) >> So the reason I asked that is because, you describe Dave, some of the Hadoop days, and again love-hate with that, but we had hyper-specialized roles. We still do. You've got data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and you've got this sort of this pipeline, and it had to be this sequential pipeline. I know Snowflake and others have come to simplify that. My question to you is, how is that those roles, how are those roles changing? How is data getting closer to the business? Everybody talks about democratizing business. Are you doing that? What's a real use example? >> From our perspective, those roles, a lot of those roles on my team for years, because we're all about efficiency, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> we cut across those areas, and always have cut across those areas. So now we're into a space where things have been simplified, data processes and copying, we've gone from 40 data processes down to five steps now. We've gone from five steps to one step. We've gone from days, now take hours, hours to minutes, minutes to seconds. Literally we're seeing that time in and time out with Snowflake. So these resources that have spent all their time on data engineering and moving data around, are now freed up more on what they have skills for and always have, the data analytics area of the business, and driving the business forward, and new metrics and new analysis. That's some of the great operational value that we've seen here. As this simplification happens, it frees up brain power. >> So, you're pumping data from the OSS, the BSS, the OKRs everywhere >> Everywhere. >> into Snowflake? >> Scheduling systems, you name it. If you can think of what drives our retail and centers and online, all that data, scheduling system, chat data, call center data, call detail data, all of that enters into this common infrastructure to manage the business on a day in and day out basis. >> How are the roles and the skill sets changing? 'Cause you're doing a lot less ETL, you're doing a lot less moving of data around. There were guys that were probably really good at that. I used to joke in the, when I was in the storage world, like if your job is bandaging lungs, you need to look for a new job, right? So, and they did and people move on. So, are you able to sort of redeploy those assets, and those people, those human resources? >> These folks are highly skilled. And we were talking about earlier, SQL hasn't gone away. Relational databases are not going away. And that's one thing that's made this migration excellent, they're just transitioning their skills. Experts in legacy systems are now rapidly becoming experts on the Snowflake side. And it has not been that hard a transition. There are certainly nuances, things that don't operate as well in the cloud environment that we have to learn and optimize. But we're making that transition. >> Dave: So just, >> Please. >> within the Chief Data Office we have a couple of missions, and Roddy is a great partner and an example of how it works. We try to bring the data for democratization, so that we have one interface, now hopefully know we just have a logical connection back to these Snowflake instances that we connect. But we're providing that governance and cleansing, and if there's a business rule at the enterprise level, we provide it. But the goal at CDO is to make sure that business units like Roddy or marketing or finance, that they can come to a platform that's reliable, robust, and self-service. I don't want to be in his way. So I feel like I'm providing a sub-level of platform, that he can come to and anybody can come to, and utilize, that they're not having to go back and undo what's in Salesforce, or ServiceNow, or in our billers. So, I'm sort of that layer. And then making sure that that ecosystem is robust enough for him to use. >> And that self-service infrastructure is predominantly through the Azure Cloud, correct? >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And you work on other clouds, but it's predominantly through Azure? >> We're predominantly in Azure, yeah. >> Dave: That's the first-party citizen? >> Yeah. >> Okay, I like to think in terms sometimes of data products, and I know you've mentioned upfront, you're Gold standard or Platinum standard, you're very careful about personal information. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So you're not trying to sell, I'm an AT&T customer, you're not trying to sell my data, and make money off of my data. So the value prop and the business case for Snowflake is it's simpler. You do things faster, you're in the cloud, lower cost, et cetera. But I presume you're also in the business, AT&T, of making offers and creating packages for customers. I look at those as data products, 'cause it's not a, I mean, yeah, there's a physical phone, but there's data products behind it. So- >> It ultimately is, but not everybody always sees it that way. Data reporting often can be an afterthought. And we're making it more on the forefront now. >> Yeah, so I like to think in terms of data products, I mean even if the financial services business, it's a data business. So, if we can think about that sort of metaphor, do you see yourselves as data product builders? Do you have that, do you think about building products in that regard? >> Within the Chief Data Office, we have a data product team, >> Mm-hmm. >> and by the way, I wouldn't be disingenuous if I said, oh, we're very mature in this, but no, it's where we're going, and it's somewhat of a journey, but I've got a peer, and their whole job is to go from, especially as we migrate from cloud, if Roddy or some other group was using tables three, four and five and joining them together, it's like, "Well look, this is an offer for data product, so let's combine these and put it up in the cloud, and here's the offer data set product, or here's the opportunity data product," and it's a journey. We're on the way, but we have dedicated staff and time to do this. >> I think one of the hardest parts about that is the organizational aspects of it. Like who owns the data now, right? It used to be owned by the techies, and increasingly the business lines want to have access, you're providing self-service. So there's a discussion about, "Okay, what is a data product? Who's responsible for that data product? Is it in my P&L or your P&L? Somebody's got to sign up for that number." So, it sounds like those discussions are taking place. >> They are. And, we feel like we're more the, and CDO at least, we feel more, we're like the guardians, and the shepherds, but not the owners. I mean, we have a role in it all, but he owns his metrics. >> Yeah, and even from our perspective, we see ourselves as an enabler of making whatever AT&T wants to make happen in terms of the key products and officers' trade-in offers, trade-in programs, all that requires this data infrastructure, and managing reps and agents, and what they do from a channel performance perspective. We still ourselves see ourselves as key enablers of that. And we've got to be flexible, and respond quickly to the business. >> I always had empathy for the data engineer, and he or she had to service all these different lines of business with no business context. >> Yeah. >> Like the business knows good data from bad data, and then they just pound that poor individual, and they're like, "Okay, I'm doing my best. It's just ones and zeros to me." So, it sounds like that's, you're on that path. >> Yeah absolutely, and I think, we do have refined, getting more and more refined owners of, since Snowflake enables these golden source data, everybody sees me and my organization, channel performance data, go to Roddy's team, we have a great team, and we go to Dave in terms of making it all happen from a data infrastructure perspective. So we, do have a lot more refined, "This is where you go for the golden source, this is where it is, this is who owns it. If you want to launch this product and services, and you want to manage reps with it, that's the place you-" >> It's a strong story. So Chief Data Office doesn't own the data per se, but it's your responsibility to provide the self-service infrastructure, and make sure it's governed properly, and in as automated way as possible. >> Well, yeah, absolutely. And let me tell you more, everybody talks about single version of the truth, one instance of the data, but there's context to that, that we are taking, trying to take advantage of that as we do data products is, what's the use case here? So we may have an entity of Roddy as a prospective customer, and we may have a entity of Roddy as a customer, high-value customer over here, which may have a different set of mix of data and all, but as a data product, we can then create those for those specific use cases. Still point to the same data, but build it in different constructs. One for marketing, one for sales, one for finance. By the way, that's where your data engineers are struggling. >> Yeah, yeah, of course. So how do I serve all these folks, and really have the context-common story in telco, >> Absolutely. >> or are these guys ahead of the curve a little bit? Or where would you put them? >> I think they're definitely moving a lot faster than the industry is generally. I think the enabling technologies, like for instance, having that single copy of data that everybody sees, a single pane of glass, right, that's definitely something that everybody wants to get to. Not many people are there. I think, what AT&T's doing, is most definitely a little bit further ahead than the industry generally. And I think the successes that are coming out of that, and the learning experiences are starting to generate momentum within AT&T. So I think, it's not just about the product, and having a product now that gives you a single copy of data. It's about the experiences, right? And now, how the teams are getting trained, domains like network engineering for instance. They typically haven't been a part of data discussions, because they've got a lot of data, but they're focused on the infrastructure. >> Mm. >> So, by going ahead and deploying this platform, for platform's purpose, right, and the business value, that's one thing, but also to start bringing, getting that experience, and bringing new experience in to help other groups that traditionally hadn't been data-centric, that's also a huge step ahead, right? So you need to enable those groups. >> A big complaint of course we hear at MWC from carriers is, "The over-the-top guys are killing us. They're riding on our networks, et cetera, et cetera. They have all the data, they have all the client relationships." Do you see your client relationships changing as a result of sort of your data culture evolving? >> Yes, I'm not sure I can- >> It's a loaded question, I know. >> Yeah, and then I, so, we want to start embedding as much into our network on the proprietary value that we have, so we can start getting into that OTT play, us as any other carrier, we have distinct advantages of what we can do at the edge, and we just need to start exploiting those. But you know, 'cause whether it's location or whatnot, so we got to eat into that. Historically, the network is where we make our money in, and we stack the services on top of it. It used to be *69. >> Dave: Yeah. >> If anybody remembers that. >> Dave: Yeah, of course. (Dave laughs) >> But you know, it was stacked on top of our network. Then we stack another product on top of it. It'll be in the edge where we start providing distinct values to other partners as we- >> I mean, it's a great business that you're in. I mean, if they're really good at connectivity. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And so, it sounds like it's still to be determined >> Dave: Yeah. >> where you can go with this. You have to be super careful with private and for personal information. >> Dave: Yep. >> Yeah, but the opportunities are enormous. >> There's a lot. >> Yeah, particularly at the edge, looking at, private networks are just an amazing opportunity. Factories and name it, hospital, remote hospitals, remote locations. I mean- >> Dave: Connected cars. >> Connected cars are really interesting, right? I mean, if you start communicating car to car, and actually drive that, (Dave laughs) I mean that's, now we're getting to visit Xen Fault Tolerance people. This is it. >> Dave: That's not, let's hold the traffic. >> Doesn't scare me as much as we actually learn. (all laugh) >> So how's the show been for you guys? >> Dave: Awesome. >> What're your big takeaways from- >> Tremendous experience. I mean, someone who doesn't go outside the United States much, I'm a homebody. The whole experience, the whole trip, city, Mobile World Congress, the technologies that are out here, it's been a blast. >> Anything, top two things you learned, advice you'd give to others, your colleagues out in general? >> In general, we talked a lot about technologies today, and we talked a lot about data, but I'm going to tell you what, the accelerator that you cannot change, is the relationship that we have. So when the tech and the business can work together toward a common goal, and it's a partnership, you get things done. So, I don't know how many CDOs or CIOs or CEOs are out there, but this connection is what accelerates and makes it work. >> And that is our audience Dave. I mean, it's all about that alignment. So guys, I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your story in "theCUBE." Great stuff. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, thanks everybody. Thank you for watching. I'll be right back with Dave Nicholson. Day four SiliconANGLE's coverage of MWC '23. You're watching "theCUBE." (gentle music)

(bright music) >> Well, hey, everybody. John Walls here with theCUBE continuing coverage at AWS re:Invent '22. It has been three really fantastic days here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. And we still have more to come with us to talk about Persistent Systems, the Senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Dominique Bastos. Dominique, good to see you. >> Pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for joining us here on the queue. >> Thank you for having me. >> Oh, you bet. You bet. >> Thank you. All right. Tell us about Persistent Systems. So, first off, core focus, what you're up to and then we'll jump in from there. >> Sure, sure. So Persistent Systems is a digital engineering solutions and services provider. They've been around for 32 years doing software engineering, innovating in several areas within different verticals. There's over 22,500 people at Persistent now as of my last count. We're in 18 countries. >> Mm. >> And in October we hit the $1 billion annualized recurring revenue mark. >> Oh, that's a good number right there. >> It's a good number. It's a great company. It's been such an interesting journey. I was with AWS for almost seven years before recently joining Persistent, and it almost felt like a such a logical transition in terms of bringing what I've seen in my entire career of interacting with customers and businesses to what Persistent can provide as people are looking to make their journey to the cloud whatever stage they might be at so. >> Right. And we should point out is that SVP of Cloud, but your focus is AWS. >> My focus AWS. >> Other options, other opportunities. >> Right. >> But you're AWS all the way. >> Right. It's a multicloud company because, you know, we really don't believe in dictating to a customer what they need. I think the benefit, one of the differentiators for Persistent is the amount of legacy history that they have across these industries and customers. I mean, 32 years is a lot, and in terms of like software engineering. So it's like really doing the hard work, the heavy lifting. And then seeing what can actually be commoditized, repeatable building solutions within these verticals to help customers accelerate their transformations. >> Mm hmm. >> So... >> You know, when we talk about cloud, I mean, this has been something that's been on the forefront feel like a long time. Right? But yet there are still many and maybe you can help me out with that percentage, whatever of companies who are either haven't begun yet, are just beginning, they're really in a nascent stage of this transformation. And yeah, I found it curious this week as we've talked with different people about where are you in your journey and so and so forth. A lot of people are way back just starting pass go, and aren't as mature as I would've thought. I mean, do you find that to be the case? >> Absolutely. And there's many reasons for that. I mean, I think what I've started, I mean I've been seeing it over the years, but we all know IT and business back then was very much kept separate. >> Two separate animals. >> Two separate animals. >> Yeah. >> IT made the decisions, not in a vacuum, but almost in a vacuum, right? Now, obviously companies who know it's necessary and have embraced it, bring together the function of looking at the technological solutions that they're adopting to solve a business problem. Right? But that business problem really is dictated by the customer need. >> Mm hmm. >> So I think I have seen, you know, in terms of like the life cycle of a business adopting technology, post cloud, there's a lot of enterprises that are still, they've made such big investments in their legacy infrastructure. >> Mm hmm. >> And in actually, you know, the developers and the people that are maintaining those systems, and the different connections to put it in layman's terms between their systems and their customers systems, right? So, that entire scenario makes it very difficult for them to move. >> Mm hmm. >> It's like moving a mountain. So, I would say there's like three ways of looking at it. You have those that kind of want to revitalize their technology, right? Their backend systems, they want to optimize costs, they want to, and my background in technology is specifically in data, kind of I came up as a DBA and built data models, and I've always loved data before it was a thing to love data. (John chuckles) So... >> You were so far ahead of the curve. >> I was ahead of the curve. I was a trendsetter. >> What a trendsetter? >> I'm a trendsetter. (Dominique chuckles) So I think from that perspective they're looking at, you know, these enormous of amounts of data that they've been capturing in these legacy systems that they're so heavily invested in, but they're not able to derive the insights to better serve their customers or to even innovate new revenue streams from that data. But, they're taking the first step to say, look, you know, we can actually operate more smoothly at a lower cost by moving to the cloud. >> Mm hmm. >> So there's that. Then there are those that are looking to actually innovate and create new revenue streams, monetize their data, look at opportunities to integrate feedback that they've been getting from their customers to provide new services. So they're using the cloud journey, they've probably already moved into the cloud. They're starting to look at analytics, and potentially using AIML to facilitate creating these solutions and services. And then there's those that, you know, want to pioneer, and break into new inventions and ways of solving the big world problems. >> Mm hmm. >> Right? I mean, I think that's one thing I noticed in this re:Invent that I thought was so special is there's like a really big focus on humanity, on humans, on you know, as we were talking earlier everything and I myself have like holding books and I don't like people being on their phone when we're having a conversation. (John chuckles) >> Right. But I think, you know, we are where we are. The reality is the world has evolved in such a way that community is no longer, it takes a small village, all, you know everybody knows each other. You have face to face interactions. You're not doing that with your customers either. There's digitally native businesses that have for a long time cropped up in the FinTech space in you know, you name the space, there's a startup that was born in the cloud that can reach customers immediately, and can provide a service that an enterprise that's kind of like weighed down with their legacy systems. They can't pivot fast enough. So, I think, you know, the pioneers think beyond that. How do we use quantum computing? You know, how do we use 3D simulation to anticipate solving big world problems? Whether it's, you know, people no longer, I don't know what the statistics are, but it's very sad. That elderly people, you know, the amount of human contact that they have is very little. You know, and if you could provide, I don't know, an experience, an immersive experience where their memories are triggered, you know, to help them with dementia, or Alzheimer's. >> Sure. >> I mean, those types of things, those are the things that I think that's what excites me about the launches that I see at re:Invent. And I think the innovation, you know, you have to take that journey. Unless you're born in the cloud, you do have to kind of take that journey. >> You got to get there. >> You have to get there. >> Right. Sure. >> But it's so worth it. >> So how about, let's just say, if I'm a health sciences company, or I'm a pharmaceutical or whatever, and so I've got this desire to create this new opportunity you know, with a human, I say, but yeah, but if you're also Persistent Systems and you're working with you know, somebody in FinTech, or somebody in EEG or whatever, you can't really understand my challenges or my problems. I mean, how do you wear those different hats so you can identify not only what the focus of that client is, but also their technology and how you're going to get them to marry up so they can achieve their goals? >> Well, the beauty of being, you know, in a company with teams of people that you work with, I cut across industries. Right? So we have vertical leaders that have very deep subject matter expertise in any number of those areas. You know, we're working with genomics for example. So, for example, you know, we engage with a customer that we've been helping over the past 32 years use technology to bring services to their customers. And now we are seeing an opportunity to help them innovate to keep up for their business for obvious reasons, but also to supply their customers with the new innovative solutions within that industry, right? 'Cause you need that vehicle to kind of deploy and deliver what customers need. The way we do it is from end to end, right? So, we have in the partnership with AWS, we're a partner of AWS, and as such we are able to collaborate with AWS and their customers or bring our customers to the cloud for all the way from assessment to planning to execution. And even within Persistent, we have ways to main operationalize the maintenance of these solutions. So it's really very easy managed services type framework that we work under. In terms of like migration planning, we have competencies within AWS. For looking at migrations we have AIML, we have DevOps. So we have the various competencies aligned with AWS to be able to execute at whatever stage the customer is. But also in terms of like the accelerators that we provide or the frameworks to look at total cost, that cuts across, right? And then we don't kind of like, here's what you needed and buy, never speak to us again. (John chuckles) I mean, I think the beauty of this company and what I really loved when I was first speaking to them is the depth of the relationships with their customers and the longevity of them. So they've really seen their customers grow. And you can only do that if you're there for the long run. >> You've got to be present. >> You have to be present. >> Sure. So how do you handle if people are making this transformation and they're moving into the cloud, but the people they have on staff might not be familiar with it, right? They have great expertise in what they've been doing on these legacy systems, but now you're moving, you're migrating to a new world, new culture, new environment, and you got to get 'em up to speed. And that's not easy. >> No. >> Right? So what do you do, or what does Persistent suggest or what are you doing and with regard to closing that gap into making that bridge so that they can maintain a little bit on their own. >> Yeah. >> They can execute and implement on their own. >> Yep. >> A little bit. They don't need somebody there to stand over their shoulder the whole time. >> I won't geek out on having joined AWS in professional services way back when to migrate a major company to the cloud, and having lived through painstakingly all those problems and blockers and adoption roadblocks that you speak of. >> Mm hmm. >> You know, I think the way Persistent handles it is what I would've done myself, right? If I were to start a company and say how do we help customers simplify their cloud journey, and remove the complexity? I think that's what Persistent Systems does. We, there's training programs that we are aligned to with AWS. So there's up-skilling of development teams, application developers. We collaborate from the top down with executives to look at the resources that they have available. Obviously mission critical systems that cannot sacrifice having engineers pulled away for a new project. You know, you take that into account. I think, you know, when I spoke earlier about assessments, you're not just assessing what needs to be lifted and shifted or refactored or rearchitected, you're looking at, you know, all these applications that are going to move to the cloud. Who owns them? >> Mm hmm. >> You know, do you have a CI/CD pipeline, or a data pipeline built? Well, we're going to need that, right? So, the continuous integration, continuous development of applications, that type of DevOps, obviously security also DevSecOps, we look at it from end to end as well. We have a very strong security practice. So, all those advisory pieces we have, but we also have the capability to execute on it. Where we're not just coming in and saying well this is what you should do. We're kind of in there saying, this is what you should do, here's how we can get you started. And then, you know, it's a collaborative effort with our customers to see how much they still want us to stay versus how much they want to take over. >> Right. It's nice to have a friend. >> Yeah. (John laughs) Who doesn't need a friend. (Dominique laughs) And Persistent Systems is your friend. Dominique, thanks for the time. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> I appreciate it. >> Thanks again for having me. >> Thanks for being here on theCUBE. You bet. >> Absolutely. >> You are watching theCUBE as you well know the leader in high tech coverage. (soft music)

>>Good morning friends. Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube Day four of our coverage of AWS. Reinvent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. You >>Can tell it's day four. Yeah. >>You can tell, you >>Get punchy. >>Did you? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed down, leaving tonight. >>Really? You rodeo >>Fan this weekend? No, but to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas, >>I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders get tickets. >>Yeah. And the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. The cubes. 10th year covering reinvent 11th. Reinvent >>Our 10th year here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean we covered remotely in during Covid, but >>Yes, yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything jump out at you that we really, we, we love talking to aws, the ecosystem. We got a customer next. Anything jump out at you that's really a kind of a key takeaway? >>Big story. The majority of aws, you know, I mean people ask me what's different under a Adam than under Andy. And I'm like, really? It's the maturity of AWS is what's different, you know, ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions, you know, that's, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way it's kind of boring relative to other reinvents, which are like, oh wow, oh my god, they announced outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good >>Thing. The next level it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're gonna be talking through their customers story, their business transformation with aws. Glenn Curing joins us, the director product and technology. And Nick Chris, senior manager, product and technology guys. Welcome. Great to have you on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. >>Yeah, >>I mean we are always T-Mobile. >>I love it. So, so everyone knows T-Mobile Blend, you guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, >>So the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the Digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process, they decide to purchase the phone day at, at the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and, and buy the phone at, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience, essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year we have processed well over three and a half million orders amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. >>Wow. Big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage, obviously the, the customer experience is absolutely critical because if, if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is is at stake. Yep. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced and how did you work with AWS and part its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? >>Sure. Yeah. So actually before I started working with Glen on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS and commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go a hundred percent cloud native. And so for us it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When >>You talk about headless APIs, you talk, I dunno if you saw Warren a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you're talking about loosely coupled, a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more >>Detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build and operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to >>Each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when, when AWS announced s3, you know, there was just a handful of services maybe at just two or three. I think now there's 200 and you know, it's never gone down, it's never been, you know, replaced essentially. And so, you know, the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. >>Exactly. >>Which was, I thought, you know, really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system. Take us kind of to the, from the before or after, you know, the classic as as was and the, and as is. Did you talk about that? >>Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the uncarrier. It's a brand that we have basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive uncarrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams have to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated, right? So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey over time, essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely, but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost. Cuz we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems. It's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world class, you know, platform. >>Yeah, I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us, cuz going all the way back to the beginning, our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the, of the webspace, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're gonna build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is gonna be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it. So now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. >>When did the journey start? >>2016. >>2016, yeah. It's been, it's been six years. >>What are some of the game changers in, in this business transformation that you would say these are some of the things that really ignited our transformation? >>Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about, which is the fact that we now operate what we call active active stacks. And what that means is you've got a single stack of the eCommerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner, but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can, but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active active mode, which itself is a big deal from a system uptime perspective. It really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases, we are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly, I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Cuz that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. >>So you do this, it's, it's you separate across regions I presume? Yes. Is that right? Yes. This was really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world, you never tested that disaster recovery was too risky because you're afraid you're gonna take your whole business down and you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. >>Absolutely. >>It, it is the thing that you do for every release. So you know, at least every week or so you are doing this and you know, in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario, you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity or risk or problem. When we put this in place. Now if I, I tell people everything we do got easier after that. >>Is it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a, a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance, the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong, but there are services where, you know, you might not be able to do data sharing across region. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different, you know, levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? >>Yeah, I mean it, it is certainly a concern and so the stacks, like Glen said, they are largely decoupled and that what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view. But then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack, we're gonna initially kind of lock you on one stack. And then the key thing that we do is we, we understand the difference between what, what we would call the critical data. So think of like your shopping carts and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion. So it's not interrupting your performance, being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to, if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration. And if you end up getting bumped to a new stack, we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that, that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen, we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly, highly reliable and multi >>Reason. So, and, and presume you're doing some form of server list for the stateless stuff and, and maybe taking control of the run time for the stateful things you, are you leaning into to servers and lambda or Not yet cuz you want control over the, the, the EC two and the memory configs. What, what's, I mean, I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit, but it's kind of fun. >>That's always fun. You >>Went Yeah, and, and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started, we were all on EC twos and across, you know, over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from easy two to, to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless, we've got a few functions running. But you know, in that journey, I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum, we are somewhere towards the, the process of sort of going from, you know, containers to, to serverless. >>Yeah. So today your team is setting up the containers, they're fencing 'em off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of sort of semi heavy lifting. Yeah. How do you deal with the, you know, this is one of the things Lisa, you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's that? What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? >>Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a challenge and it's a, a highly specialized skill set that you need. And you talk about cloud, you know, I, I tell developers when we bring new folks in, in the old days, you could just be like really good at Java and study that for and be good at that for decades. But in the cloud world, you have to be wide in, in your breadth. And so you have to understand those 200 services, right? And so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner. So UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey up the same timeline that we were. And I had worked with them on the cloud team, you know, before I came to commerce. And when I came to, to the commerce team, we were really struggling, especially from that operational perspective. >>The, the team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality. They were used to the on-prem world, but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff, but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were gonna be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example, we have built, T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, C I C D, cloud security. And so not only did these folks have the right skill sets, but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-mobile cloud perspective. And so it's kind of kind of fun to see, you know, when they came on board with this journey with us, we were both, both companies were relatively new and, and learning. Now I look and, you know, I I think that they're like a, a platinum sponsor these days here of aws and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together, >>A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glen, I wanna know from you when we're almost out of time here, but tell me the what the digital commerce domain, you kind of talked about this in the beginning, but I wanna know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing? Yeah, the maturation, the transformation. How does it benefit mean? >>Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store, and without spending too much time completed that transaction and walkout, they don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, you know, like I talked about, we started with easy twos back in the day. It was what we call the wild west in the, on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today. You know, the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly, they go to the website, literally within a couple minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete their transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth. Right. So >>Right. And a big driver of revenue. >>Exactly. >>I have one final question for each of you. We're making a Instagram reel, so think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people, what, what would you say if you had a billboard, what would it say about that? Glen, what do you think? >>So T-Mobile, from a technology company perspective, the, the whole purpose of setting up T-mobile's, you know, shopping experience is about bringing customers in, surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it. And essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. >>Perfect. Nick, what would you say, what's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, Glen really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days, really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when, when we don't reach that high bar. And so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation is really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. >>Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with aws, the maturation, and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin, you watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody you're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson this morning. Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system. (Dave laughing) >> Thought it was something fake. >> But it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile and Naga Chakravarthy is the Chief Digital Officer at iOpex. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> Next, so John, (commentator booming) so okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that S0 let's just give him a second here. >> (Commentator) Three different tracks >> I think it's pretty loud. Probably coming through. Usually we don't get that. >> It's live. >> But, it is live. So John, we, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title's, Director of product and technology. Obviously you're here 'cause you have an affinity to automation. But talk about your role and how automation fits into it. >> Sure. Well, I'm the director of product and technology and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So I'm here to learn about, from these experts and all these leaders within the UiPath and from our vendors as well. >> Okay. Now tell us about iOpex. So kind of an interesting name. Where'd that come from? I think cloud. When I think opex, but, get rid of my cap. Where's the name come from and what do you guys do? >> Actually we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the whole team comes from a service background and then I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, you know the dependency on people was also increasing. And we thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, you know, I would say iOpex is currently at 3.0 and if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me from operation excellence that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. >> So the market just went right, right to you guys you were ahead of the game. And then, wow, now, >> I have to brag that we fortunately named it Opex, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. >> Got it. >> So, so John, where did, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did, was it the, was it the, the merger? Take us through that. >> Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOpex. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. Proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-mobile enterprise. Not having any experience within automation as we had discussed before usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners iOpex being main critical partner in that evolution. And so iOpex came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green is that, you know, we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shoutouts here. Giao Duong, John Lowe and our CIO Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOpex, UiPath to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, I'll wait. >> Wait. No, it's okay. So you went, you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program, where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOpex to get that in place. And once we have that in place I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program. That's incredible. And we're a large company and we'll, I mean we're just starting so it's going to be fun. >> So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroot effort and then the COE comes later? How do you typically recommend approaching it? >> I think the fact that we started very small there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we are solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation, right? And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process, entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So, which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to have, when you have to have evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified let's say if you have to go to different departments it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments' problem statements and how when you, when you navigate it you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit. And when it comes to benefit, right? You need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem. So somebody internally within T-Mobile we were able to use very nice, you know John's team, you know, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation. And slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggyback and scale it bigger. >> So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyper scale cloud providers or automation platforms from UiPath, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else there are organizations like iOpex and you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, >> Yeah. >> How does that business model from an iOpex perspective work do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it a, is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of, okay now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, in the, from a business perspective, iOpex wants to do as much as it can a value for T-mobile because that's what, that's the business they're in. But, so tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, So I'll say real fast that, yeah iOpex is actually part of the T-mobile team. They are embedded. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> We work with them daily. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> Right. They had the expertise they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure there. >> Absolutely. Let me add one more point to it. See if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile I would say it's a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you there was a natural way to get embedded, you know as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So, which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. >> Vellante: I got a lot of questions. >> John: Yeah. >> John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. >> Yes. >> What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding, >> Yep. >> And maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I, if you could, Cause a lot of people ask me well how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative line of business? >> So those executives were from the IT team. >> Vellante: Okay. For sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and you know a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have, you know, Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. >> How do you choose, I got so many questions I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? >> I think it's a combination, right? One fundamentally guiding principle that we always look at is let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that gets executed in the systems of record, in the form of workflow. And there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath, you will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere. But you also have to look at why is this clutter happening, and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together. And that's when you'll start deciding, hey this is repetitive in nature, this is going to scale, this is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard and that scorecard naturally drives the, you know decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? >> So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research digging, peeling the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard like approach and say, okay these are the high, high opportunity areas. Okay. So combination. Got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before, big organizations that I know they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio the applications have dependencies on each other. And then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications. Any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? >> So we actually have a change management team and we make sure that before we go forward with anything it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with iOpex, with our development teams on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? >> Yeah. So when it comes to change management, right? Well, John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is the proactive thing that we end up doing is right when a bot goes live, there is a life support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamentally core principle for that entire support to work good is you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails. Right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record the data format, is it changing or the bot logic is failed? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons. And that kind of compliments the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay fair enough, this systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way the change becomes a smoother process. >> And how quickly can you diagnose that? Is it hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? >> So, >> Vellante: Depends. >> It's a very subjective question. Right. If we know the pattern early then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, you know, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you know, you need to basically look at how the business is going to going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. >> So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. >> Please. >> As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that in general? What differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? >> I think, it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with Orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in process mining, task capture, made it up chain, a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skillset? So a platform will try to look at what is that, you know I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise? I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture. And that's the kind of platform that, you know anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. >> So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? You know, is there an all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? >> John: Yeah, so we are enterprise license. >> You are? Okay. >> So, and iOpex helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, you know, and and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of 'em. It's a large company. So I'm, '23 is going to be huge for us. >> Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. Good luck in the future. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> All right. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson UiPath FORWARD5. The bots are running around Dave. We're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at FORWARD. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage of S reinve rein Mars. I said reinvent all my VES months away. Re Mars machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John feer, host of the cube, an exciting guest here, bringing on special guest more robot robots are welcome on the cube. We're gonna have that segment here. Mike Dooley co-founder and CEO of Labrador systems. Mike, welcome to the cube. Thanks. >>Coming on. Thank, thank you so much. Yeah. Labrador systems. We're a company is developing a new type of assistive robot for people in the home. And you know, our mission is really to help people live independently. And so we're about to show a robot that's it looks like my, what used to be in a warehouse or other places, but it's being designed to be both robust enough to operate in real world settings, help people that may be aging and using a Walker wheelchair. A cane could have early onset health conditions like Parkinson's and things like that. So >>Let me, let me set this up first, before you get into the, the demo, because I think here at re Mars, one of the things that's coming outta the show besides the cool vibe, right? Is that materials handling? Isn't the only thing you've seen with robotics. Yeah. You're seeing a lot more life industrial impact. And this is an example of one of that, isn't >>It? Yeah. We just actually got an award. It's a Joseph EGL Bergo was the first person to actually put robots in factories and automation. And in doing that, um, he set up grant for robots going beyond that, to help people live in it. So we're the first recipient of that. But yeah, I think that robots, they're not the, what you think about with Rosie yet. We're the wrong way from that, but they're, they can do really meaningful things. >>And before we get the demo, your mission hearing, what you're gonna show here is a lot of hard work and we know how hard it is. What's the mission. What's the vision. >>The mission is to help people live more independently on their own terms. Uh, we're, there's, it's an innate part of the human condition that at some point in our lives, it becomes more difficult to move ourselves or move things around it. And that is a huge impact on our independence. So when we're putting this robot in pilots, we're helping people try to regain degrees of independence, be more active deal with whatever situation they want, but under their terms and have, have control over their life. >>Okay, well, let's get into it. May I offer you a glass of water? Well, you >>Know, I have a robot that just happens to be really good at delivering things, including water. Um, we just actually pulled these out of our refrigerator on our last demo. So why don't we bring over the retriever? And so we're gonna command it to come on in. So this is a Labrador retriever. These robots have been in homes. This robot itself has been in homes, helping people do activities like this. It's able to sort of go from place to place it automatically navigates itself. Uh, just like we've been called a self-driving shelf, um, as an example, but it's meant to be very friendly, can come to a position like this could be by my armchair and it would automatically park. And then I could do something like I can pick up, okay, I want some water and maybe I want to drink it out of a cup and I can do this. And if I have a cough or something else, cough drops. My phone, all sorts of things can be in there. Um, so the purpose of the retriever is really to be this extra pair of hands, to keep things close by and move things. And it can automatically adjust to any hide or position. And if I, even if I block it like a safety, it, it >>Stops. And someone who say disabled or can't move is recovering or has some as aging or whatever the case is. This comes to them. It's autonomous in it sense. Is that that what works or yeah. Is it guided? How does >>It, it works on a series of bus stops. So the in robotics, we call those way points. But when we're talking to people, the bus stops are the places you want it to go. You have a bus stop by the front door, your kitchen sink, the refrigerator, your armchair, the laundry machine, you won't closet it. <laugh>. And with that simple metaphor, we, we train the robot in a couple hours. We create all these routes, just like a subway map. And then the robot is autonomous. So I can hit a button. I can hit my cell phone, or I can say Alexa ass lab, one to come to the kitchen. The robot will autonomously navigate through everything, go around the pets park itself. And it raises and lowers to bring things with and reach. So I'm sitting and it might lower itself down. So I can just comfortably get something at the kitchen. I, it could just go right to the level of the countertop. So it's very easy for someone that has an issue to move things with with limited, uh, challenges. >>And this really illustrates to this show again. Yeah. Talk about the impact here. Cause we're at a historic moment in robotics. >>We are. Yeah. >>What's your reaction to that? Tell your, share your vision >>On that. I've been in robotics for 25 years. Um, and I started, I actually started working actually at Lego and launching Lego Mindstorms, the end of the nineties. So I have like CEO just last night again, they gush over like you did that. Yeah. <laugh> and again, I'm pretty old school. And so we've my career. If I've been working through from toys onto like robotic floor cleaners, the algorithms that are on Roomba today came from the startup that we were all part of. We're, we're moving things to be bigger and bigger and have a bigger >>Impact. What's it feel like? I mean, cuz I mean I can see the experience and by the way, it's hardcore robotics communities out there, but now it's still mainstream. It's opening up the aperture of robotics. Yeah. It's the prime time is right now and it's an inflection point. >>Well, and it's also a point where we desperately need it. So we have incredible work for shortages <laugh> and it's not that we're, these robots are not to take people jobs away it's to do the work that people don't want to do and try to make, you know, free them up for things that are more important. Yeah. In senior care, that's the high touch we want caregivers to be helping people get outta their bed, help them safely move from place to place things that robots aren't at yet. Yeah. But for getting the garbage, for getting a drink or giving the person the freedom to say, do I wanna ask my caregiver or my spouse to do that? Or do I wanna do it myself? And so robots can be incredibly liberating experience if they're, if they're done in the right way and they're done well, >>It's a choice. It actually comes down to choice. I remember this argument way back when, oh, ATM's gonna kill the bank teller. In fact more bank tellers emerged. Right. And so there's choices come out there and, but there's still more advances to do. What is you, what do you see as milestones for the industry as you start to seeing better handling better voice activation cameras on board. I noticed some cameras in there. Yeah. So we're starting to see the, some of the smaller, faster, cheaper >>It's it's especially yeah. Faster. Cheaper is what we're after. So can we redo? So like the gyros that are on this type of robot used to be like in the tens of thousands of dollars 20 or 30 years ago. And, and then when you started seeing Roomba and the floor cleaners come out, those started what happened was basically the gyro on here that what's happening in consumer electronics, the ability for the iPhone to play, you know, the game in turn and, and do portrait and landscape. That actually is what enables all these robots that clean your floors to do very tight angles. What we're doing is this migration of consumer electronics then gets robbed and, and adopted over in that. So it's really about it's I, it's not that you're gonna see things radically change. It's just that you're gonna see more and more applications get more sophisticated and become more affordable. Our target is to bring this for a few hundred dollars a month into people's homes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and make that economy work for as many people as >>Possible. Yeah. Mike, what a great, great illustration of great point there now on your history looking forward. Okay. Smaller Fest are cheaper. Yeah. You're gonna see a human aspect. So technology's kind of getting out of the way now you got a lot in the cloud, you got machine learning, big thing here. There's a human creative side now gonna be a big part of this. Yeah. Can you talk about like how you see that unfolding? Because again, younger people gonna come in, you got a lot more things pre-built I just saw a swaping on stage saying, oh, we, we write subroutines automatically the machine learning like, oh my God, that's so cool. Like, so more is coming for, to, for builders, right. To build what's the playbook gonna look like? How do you see the human aspect, creative crafting building? >>I, I it's, you know, it's a hard Fu future to predict. I think the issue is that humans are always gonna have to be more clever than the AI <laugh>, you know, I, I can't say that enough is that AI can solve some things and it can get smarter and smarter. You task that over and then let's work on the things that can't do. And I think that's intellectually challenging. Like, and I, and I think we have a long way to go, uh, to sort of keep on pushing that forward. So the whole mission is people get to do more interesting things with their life, more dynamic. Think about what the machines should be working on. Yeah. And then move on to the next things. >>Well, a lot of good healthcare implications. Yeah. Uh, senior living people who are themselves, >>All those are place. Yeah. >>Now that you have, um, this kind of almost a perfect storm of innovation coming, and I just think it's gonna be the beginning. You're gonna see a lot of young people come in. Yeah. And a lot of people in school now going down to the elementary school level yeah. Are really immersed in robotics. They're born with it. And certainly as they get older, what kind of disciplines do you see coming into robot? I used to be pretty clear. Yeah. Right. Nerdy, builder, builder. Now it's like what? I got Mac and rice. My code. >>Yeah. My, my co-founder and CEO has a good example. Anybody we interview, we say we really like it. If you think of yourself as an astronaut, going on to a space mission. And, and it's really appropriate being here at R Mars is that normally the astronaut has one specialty, but they have to know enough of the other skills to be able to help out. In case of an emergency robotics is so complex. There's so there's mechanical, there's electrical, there's software, they're perceptual, there's user interface, all of those Fs together. So when we're trying to do a demo and something goes wrong, I can't say why. I only do mechanical. Yeah. You got it. You really have to have a system. So I think if any system architects, people that if you're gonna, if, if you're gonna be, if mechanical is your thing, you better learn a little bit electrical and software. Yeah. If software is your thing, you better not just write code because you need to understand where you're >>Your back. Well, the old days you have to know for trend to run any instrumentation in the old days. So same kind of vibe. So what does that impact on the teamwork side? Because now I can imagine, okay, you got some general purpose knowledge, so math, science, all the disciplines, but the specialties there, I love that right now. Teamwork. Yeah. Because you, you know, I could be a generalism at some point. There's another component I'm gonna need to call my teammate for. >>Yeah. Yeah. And you have to have, yeah. So it, yeah, we're a small team, so it's a little bit easier right now, but even the technology. So like there's a, what, this is, this runs on Linux and that runs on Ross, which is a robotics operating system. The modules are, are the, are sorry, the modules, I mean redundant there, but the, the part that makes the robot go, okay, I'm gonna command it to go here. It's gonna go around it, see an obstacle. This module kicks in, even the elements become module. So that's part of how teams work is that, and, and Amazon has a rule around that is that everything has to have an API. Yeah. I have to be able to express my work and the way that somebody else can come in and talk to it in a very easy way. So you're also going away from like, sort of like the hidden code that only I touch you can't have ownership of that. You have to let your team understand how it works and let them control it and edit it. Well, >>Super exciting. Dan, first of all, great to bring robots on the cube set. Thanks to your team here. Doing that. Yeah. Um, talk about the company. Um, put a plug in, what are you guys doing? Sure. Raising money, getting more staff, more sales. We're give, give a commercial. >>Yeah. So we, we closed the seed round. So we've been around it's actually five years next month. Um, did pre-seed and then we closed the seed round that we announced back at CS. So we debuted the retriever for the first time we had it under wraps. We had it in people's homes for a year before we did that. Um, I, Amazon was one of our early investors and they actually co-led on this last round, along with our friends at iRobot. So yeah. Uh, so we've raised that we're right in the next phase of deploying this, especially going more into senior living now that that's opening up with COVID coming down and looking at helping these workforce issues where there's that crisis. So we'll be raising later this year. So we're starting to sort of do the preview for series a. We're starting to take those pre-orders for robots and for Lois. And then our goal is we're and we're actually already at the factory. So we've been converting this, these there's a version of this robot underway right now at the factory that will probably have engineering units at the end of this year. Yeah. Goal is for, uh, full production with all the supply chain issues for second half of, of next >>Year. Yeah. Well, congratulations. It's a great product. And I gotta ask you what's on the roadmap, how you see this product unfolding. What's the wishlist look like if you had all the dough in the world, what would you do next? What would you be putting on there? Sure. If you had the magic wand what's happening, >>It's a couple variables. I think it's scale. So it's driving the, this whole thing is designed to go down in cost, which improves basically accessibility. More people can afford it. The health system, Medicare, those sorts of folks. See it one. So basically get us into reduction and get us into volume is one part, I think the other ones is adding layers. I, what we, when we see our presentation and the speech we're doing tomorrow, we see this as a force multiplier for a lot of other things in healthcare. So if I bring the blood pressure cuff, like we have on the retrieval, I can be a physical reminder to take your medication, to take the, my, my readings, or we are just con having a conversation with some of our friends of Amazon is bringing an echo show to you when you want to have a conversation and take it away. >>When you don't think about that metaphor of how do I wanna live my life and what do I have control over? And then on top of it, the sensors on the robot, they're pretty sophisticated. So in my case, my mom is still around she's 91, but now in a hospital beded wheelchair could, we've seen her walking differently early, early on, and using things like Intel, real sense and, and computer vision and AI to detect things and just say to her, don't even tell anybody else, we're noticing this. Do you wanna share this with your doctor? Yeah. That's the world. I think that what we're trying to do is lay this out as version 1.0, so that when folks like us are around, it'll something like decades from now, life is so much more better for the options and choices we have. It's >>Really interesting. You know, I liked, um, kind of the theme here. There's a lot of day to day problems that people like to solve. And then there's like the new industrial problems that are emerging that are opportunities. And then there's the save the world kind of vibe. <laugh>, there's help people make things positive, right. You know, solve the climate problems, help people. And so we're kind of at this new era and it's beyond just like sustainability and, you know, bias. That's all gotta get done a new tipping point around the human aspect of >>Things. And you do it economically. I think sometimes you think that, okay, well, you're just doing this cuz you're, you're socially motivated and doesn't, you don't care how many you sell it to just so you can accomplish it. It's their link. The, the cheaper that we can make this, the more people you can impact. I think you're talking about the kids today is the work we did at Lego. In the end of the nineties, you made a, a robotics kit for 200 bucks and millions of kids. Yeah. Did that. And >>Grape pie. I mean, you had accessories to it. Make a developer friendly. >>Yeah, no, exactly. And we're getting all those requests. So I think that's the thing is like, get a new platform, learn what it's like to have this sort of capability and then let the market drive. It, let the people sort of the folks who are gonna be using it that are in a wheelchair, are dealing with Parkinson's or Ms, or other issues. What can we add to that ecosystem? So you it's, it's all about being very human centric in that. Yeah. And making the other parts of the economy make it work for them, make it so that the health system, they get an ROI on this so that, Hey, this is a good thing to put into people's homes. >>And well, I think you have the nice, attractive value proposition to investors. Obviously robotics is super cool and really relevant. Cool, cool. And relevant to me always is nice to have that. So check that, then you got the economics on price, pressure, prove the price down lower. Yeah. Open up the Tams of the market. Right. Make it more viable economically. >>Yeah, definitely. And then, and what we're having, what's driving us that wasn't around seven when we started this about four and a half years ago. Uh, my joke and I don't mean to offend them, but after doing pitching the vision of this in six months, don't be, >>Don't be afraid. We're do we, >>My, my joke. And I'm sort to see more bold about is that VCs don't think they're gonna get old. They're just gonna get rich. And so the idea is that they didn't see themselves in this position and we not Gloo and doom, you can work out, you can be active, but we're living older, longer. We are it's. My mom is born in the depression. She's been in a wheelchair for five years. She might be around for a good, another 10 or 15. And that's wonderful for her, but her need for care is really high. >>Yeah. And the pressure on the family too, there's always, there's always collateral damage on all these impacts. >>There's 53 million unpaid family caregivers in the us. Yeah. Just in the time that we've grown, been doing this, it's grown 4% a year and it's a complicated thing. And it's, it's not just the pressure on you to help your mom or dad or whoever. It's the frustration on their face when they have to always ask for that help. So it's, it's twofold. It's give them some freedom back so they can make a choice. Like my classic example is my mom wants tea. My dad's trying to watch the game. He, she asks for it. It's not hot enough. Sends it back. And that's a currency. Yeah, yeah. That she's losing and, and it's frustration as opposed to give her a choice to say, I'm gonna do this on my own. And I that's just, >>You wanna bring the computer out, do a FaceTime with the family, send it back. Or you mentioned the Alexa there's so many use cases. Oh >>No. We talked about, uh, we talked about putting like a, a device with a CA with a screen on it so she could chat and see pictures. And it says, I don't want to have this in my bedroom. That's my private space. Yeah. But if we could have the robot, bring it in when it's appropriate and take it on go the retriever that's that's >>The whole go fetch what I need right now. That's and then go lie down. Yeah. >>That's what I, I called >>Labrador. Doesn't lie down >>Actually. But well, it lowers down, it lowers down about 25 inches. That's about lying. >>Down's super exciting. And congratulations. I know, um, how passionate you are. It's obvious. Yeah. And being in the business so long, so many accomplishment you had. Yeah. But now is a whole new Dawn. A new era here. >>Yeah. Oh yeah. No, I, we just, it was real. It was on impromptu. It wasn't scheduled. There's a, a post circle on LinkedIn where all the robots got together. <laugh> you know, and they were seeing to hang out. No, and you're seeing stuff that wasn't possible. You look at this and you go, well, what's the big thing. It's a box on wheels. It's like, it wasn't possible to navigate something around the complexity of a home 10 years ago for the price we're doing. Yeah. It wasn't possible to wa have things that walk or spot that can go through construction sites. I, I think people don't realize it's it. It really is changing. And then we're, I think every five years you're gonna be seeing this more bold deployment of these things hitting our lives. It's >>It's super cool. And that's why this show's so popular. It's not obvious to mainstream, but you look at the confluence of all those forces coming together. Yeah. It's just a wonderful thing. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate >>It really, really appreciate you for this >>Time. Great success. Great demo. Mike, do cofounder, the CEO of Labrador systems. Check him out. They have the retriever, uh, future of robotics here. It's all impact all life on the planet. And more space. Two is to keep coverage here at re Mars, stay tuned for more live coverage. After this short break.

>>Hey, welcome back to live coverage in San Francisco, California, the cubes coverage of 80 west summit, 2022 here in SF and NYC New York city. Summit's coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. Check it out. Okay. We've got a great guest here. C Bhan co and CEO RAI systems. Welcome to the cube, hot startup and growing company. And Kubernetes is great to see you. >>Yeah, John, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Great to have you on. So Cubans coming up, you got cloud native here at AWS. You guys in the middle of it, take a minute to explain what your company does. Sure. >>So 50,000 enterprises are going to modernize in the next five to 10 years. They're all going to run into the exact same problem, which is they're gonna choose Kubernetes as the orchestra platform. And then they're gonna invest in building a platform essentially on top of Kubernetes so that their internal consumers, that developers can consume it. That requires a lot, a lot of effort. We, lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of effort, what we did was we thought about entire journey for Kubernetes operations that a team would go through and we package that as an offering. It's a SaaS product that you can consume. You can make it work with Amazon's Kubernetes, Azures Kubernetes, Googles, Kubernetes, upstream, Kubernetes, but then you can move significantly faster so that the goal of modernization can be achieved now versus two years more. >>What's the big, uh, opportunity that Kubernetes brings. And what are some of the pain points that are being removed or solved or blockers being removed and pain being reduced? Is it standing up Kubernetes? Is it running it in production? Is it the new revisions? I mean, honestly, it's huge. Yeah. What's the pain point. The customers that you guys solve. >>Yeah. Look, the, the paradox with Kubernetes is when it's working. It's awesome. It's great. And we can move it fast, but to get there, it's hard. Yeah. So simple things as a starting point, how do I provision my infrastructure repeatedly in the same way with the right blueprints? How do I make sure they all look the same? How do I make sure John can access certain things? And he cannot, how do I make sure the right policies are set up? How do I make sure consistent deployment is happening? Can I watch every we think, and I measure everything and we are not beyond basic things, right? Yeah. I need to back this up, you know, on and on. I need to do cost management. I need to network policy management. I need service management. You already built the team now. Right? Each of these is, is, is multiple people's jobs sometimes. Right? So it's really complicated. But again, everybody is investing. This is complexity. It's complexity. Yes. But people are investing in this because everybody understands now that once this is all working, the beauty, the, the P the pace at which you can run is exactly what we were promised five, six years ago when we were all told about modernization. Yeah. So the, when you get there, it's awesome. And we are helping companies get there significantly faster. Then they would've had, were they not working with a company? >>It's it really is a holy grail kind of orchestration layer if it works. And a lot of people, even myself, which a big fan of Kubernetes, caution, cautions over the oo problem, which is the clusters are up. I can't find talent to run them. They're too hard. Um, that's kind of in the back of people's minds and there's a lot of scar tissue around that. Uh, and then a little bit of open stack, you know, is it too hard, too hard? So the question is, is that what needs to happen to be successful with Kubernetes to make that go faster? So that's easy to deploy. Exactly. Yeah. And what what's your product do? Is it software open source? Yeah. What's, what's your product? >>The, the key here is repeatably usable automation. It's automation that it can use again and again, and it's flexible enough that it solves for many companies problem. You know, the funny thing is, and this is something that took me a while to figure out whether we have a financial services customer or an insurance company, or a healthcare company, or a high tech company, you know, what their problems are exactly the same. <laugh> when it comes to Kubernetes, it's all the same, right? So we figured out what it takes to build that automation in a repeatable fashion so that we could essentially sell it as a product. Our product is a SaaS product. Um, and once you have the right automation in place that you can ideally consume as a service, then now the beauty is that the people who are using it on a day to day basis, they don't need to be as expert at Kubernetes as today. Yeah. And that's the issue today? The issue is, you know, people, I've seen ads now where people say, you know, looking for Kubernetes expertise, 10 years, minimum experience, okay, that's ridiculous. Right. But you see these ads out there, right? Because people are rude about it, a tool like this makes it easy for you to take your existing skillset, existing resources and allow them to become Kubernetes. >>That's the key. I think that's the key in my mind is like hiring talent for these, I call DevOps glass eating projects, cuz it's hard. Yep. Some of this stuff's hard when you get down to the early stuff. And even in the hyperscalers, you look at the early hyperscalers, they were rolling their own and they were rock stars. And they were like the 1% of top developers. Right? Yep. And now you have general audiences who just want to code. Yep. They want abstractions. They want Kubernetes as a service. Uh, and they want all the benefits. And even if they could hire the Oddsly hiring the low level core people yeah. Is hard. Yeah. >>It takes time. Yeah. >>Absolutely. That's a core problem you guys solve. >>Absolutely. I think look, the, the one thing that every enterprise you think about is when the, the big companies, the hyperscale is that you mentioned that build this themselves when they us out 5, 6, 7, whatever years ago, when, you know, even some, some of them pre Kubernetes, it was a competitive advantage to roll this out because nobody else was doing it now as, as an enterprise who is trying to use software to move faster. Yeah. It's actually a competitive disadvantage because now you're building your own product. And now you're building this thing called Kubernetes that doesn't make any sense, focus your application, focus on your products, roll them out faster, and then essentially reuse the learnings from the market. Right. That's what we are doing. Really? What, what are we doing? We're taking the best practices of this industry and packaging that up into an easy to consume platform. That's awesome. That's it? >>Well, we'll see you in Cooper, Cuban, not Kubernetes contest in Valencia. Yep. Uh, and thanks for coming on. I know we didn't have a lot of time to drill into it, um, here, but great to meet you and the company. Final question as a co-founder what's your north star, you got, you got a company to run in. Bill got employees, you're managing and hiring inspiring. What's the north star for the company. >>So I'd say, I mean, the phrase that I, that, that I think about when, when you say north star is, is loyalty with urgency. >>So loyalty to whom? Yeah. It's to my team, right? My team comes first beyond before anything else. Right? And then my customers, right? My customers, many, many of our, our customers even now, right? We a four old company, they have my cell phone number and people call me at odd hours and I will show up. I will get people on a call. I will show up. Right. That's critical. But with urgency now my customer needs help. It needs to happen now. Not tomorrow, not next week. My team has heard me say this a thousand times, by the way, not tomorrow, not next week now. And this, if you do this in a startup, you will be successful. >>Yeah. I mean, you gotta make the market as the founder, inspiring people, product market fits huge. Yep. Getting that scale point. Yep. Where you're got the value proposition in position you're in mode to scale, you got visibility on unit economics. It's hard. Yep. It's super hard look. Good news is you get in a good area. Cloud native Kubernetes, automation, cloud, native modernization of apps. Super hot right now. Yeah. Big >>Time. Yeah. Look, I mean, you know, of course you, you want your teams to be topnotch. Right. But I gotta tell you there's a lot of luck and timing to everything. >>Exactly. >>Timing is in hindsight, nobody times anything. Right. So we have, time is perfect, but it's luck. Yeah. Right. We're very lucky. We're we have the right team. We're doing a great job. I think our customers are very happy. What we've rebuilt and uh, you know, look forward >>To Steve. You're humble. And you're a humble person. I can tell. I don't believe in luck. I think you make luck. I think luck is just part of the hustle, making those phone calls, doing those calls, doing the right things, grinding. And then when you get the shot, you're ready. Yeah. Yeah. So congratulations. Thanks for coming the queue. Appreciate it. Appreciate your time, sir. Nice to meet you coverage here in San Francisco, back with more day, two coverage. After this short break, stay with us.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube covering Fortinet security summit brought to you by Fortinet. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here at the Fordham het championship security summit. Napa valley has been beautiful and gracious to us all day. We're very pleased to be here. I'm very pleased to welcome a first-timer to the cube. Rupesh Chuck Chuck Xi, VP a T and T cybersecurity and edge solutions at, at and T cybersecurity. Refresh. Welcome. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Lisa, I'm looking forward to our conversation today. >>Me too. First of all, it's we're in Napa we're outdoors. It's beautiful venue, no complaints, right? We're at a golf PGA tournament. Very exciting. Talk to me about the at and T Fordanet relationship. Give me, give me an, a good insight into the partnership. >>Sure, sure. So, as you said, you know, beautiful weather in California, Napa it's my first time. Uh, so it's kind of a new experience for me going back to your question in terms of the relationship between eight P and T and Ford in that, uh, a long lasting, you know, 10 plus years, you know, hand in hand in terms of the product, the technology, the capabilities that we are brought together in the security space for our customers. So a strategic relationship, and I'm so thrilled to be here today as a, Fordanet invited us to be part of the championship. Tommy, >>Talk to me. So your role VP of, and T cybersecurity and edge solutions, give me an, a deep dive into what's in your purview. >>Sure, sure. So I, uh, sort of, you know, run the PNL or the profit and loss center for product management for all of at and T cybersecurity and ed solutions and the whole concept behind putting the teams together is the convergence in networking and security. Um, so, you know, we are supporting the entire customer continuum, whether it's a fortune 50, the fortune 1000 to mid-market customers, to small businesses, to, you know, government agencies, you know, whether it's a local government agency or a school district or a federal agency, et cetera. And my team and I focus on bringing new product and capabilities to the marketplace, you know, working with our sales team from an enablement perspective, go to market strategy. Um, and the whole idea is about, uh, you know, winning in the marketplace, right? So delivering growth and revenue to the business, >>Competitive differentiation. So we've seen so much change in the last year and a half. I know that's an epic understatement, but we've also seen the proliferation at the edge. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing and hearing from customers where that's concerned >>As you stated, right. There's a lot happening in the edge. And sometimes the definition for edge varies when you talk with different people, uh, the way we look at it is, you know, definitely focused on the customer edge, right? So if you think about many businesses, whether I am a, a quick serve restaurant or I'm a banking Institute or a financial services or an insurance agency, or I'm a retail at et cetera, you know, lots of different branches, lots of different transformation taking place. So one way of approaching it is that when you think about the customer edge, you see a lot of virtualization, software driven, a lot of IOT endpoints, et cetera, taking place. So the cyber landscape becomes more important. Now you're connecting users, devices, capabilities, your point of sale system to a multi-cloud environment, and that, you know, encryption of that data, the speed at which it needs to happen, all of that is very important. And as we think ahead with 5g and edge compute and what that evolution revolution is going to bring, it's going to get even more excited because to me, those are kind of like in a playgrounds of innovation, but we want to do it right and keep sort of, you know, cyber and security at the core of it. So we can innovate and keep the businesses safe. >>How do you help customers to kind of navigate edge cybersecurity challenges and them not being synonymous? >>That's a great, great question. You know, every day I see, you know, different teams, different agendas, different kinds of ways of approaching things. And what I tell customers and even my own teams is that, look, we have to have a, a blueprint and architecture, a vision, you know, what are the business outcomes that we want to achieve? What the customer wants to achieve. And then start to look at that kind of technology kind of convergence that is taking place, and especially in the security and the networking space, significant momentum on the convergence and utilize that convergence to create kind of full value stack solutions that can be scaled, can be delivered. So you are not just one and done, but it's a continuous innovation and improvement. And in the security space, you need that, right. It's never going to be one and done. No >>We've seen so much change in the last year. We've seen obviously this rapid pivot to work from home that was overnight for millions and millions of people. We're still in that too. A fair amount. There's a good amount of people that are still remote, and that probably will be permanently there's. Those that are going to be hybrid threat landscape bloated. I was looking at and talking with, um, 40 guard labs and the, the nearly 11 X increase in the last 12 months in ransomware is insane. And the ransomware as a business has exploded. So security is a board level conversation for businesses I assume in any. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree with you, it's a board level conversation. Security is not acknowledged the problem about picking a tool it's about, you know, the business risk and what do we need to do? Uh, you mentioned a couple of interesting stats, right? So we've seen, uh, you know, two things I'll share. One is we've seen, you know, 440 petabytes of data on the at and T network in one average business day. So 440 petabytes of data. Most people don't know what it is. So you can imagine the amount of information. So you can imagine the amount of security apparatus that you need, uh, to Tofino, protect, and defend and provide the right kind of insights. And then the other thing that VOC and along the same lines of what you were mentioning is significant, you know, ransomware, but also significant DDoSs attacks, right? So almost like, you know, we would say around 300% plus said, DDoSs mitigations that we did from last year, you know, year over year. >>So a lot of focus on texting the customer, securing the end points, the applications, the data, the network, the devices, et cetera. Uh, the other two points that I want to mention in this space, you know, again, going back to all of this is happening, right? So you have to focus on this innovation at the, at the speed of light. So, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the software capabilities that are more, forward-looking have to be applied in the security space ever more than ever before, right. Needs these do, we're seeing alliances, right? We're seeing this sort of, you know, crowdsourcing going on of action on the good guys side, right? You see the national security agencies kind of leaning in saying, Hey, let's together, build this concept of a D because we're all going to be doing business. Whether it's a public to public public, to private, private, to private, all of those different entities have to work together. So having security, being a digital trust, >>Do you think that the Biden administrations fairly recent executive order catalyst of that? >>I give it, you know, the president and the, the administration, a lot of, you know, kudos for kind of, and then taking it head on and saying, look, we need to take care of this. And I think the other acknowledgement that it is not just hunting or one company or one agency, right? It's the whole ecosystem that has to come together, not just national at the global level, because we live in a hyper connected world. Right. And one of the things that you mentioned was like this hybrid work, and I was joking with somebody the other day that, and really the word is location, location, location, thinking, network security, and networking. The word is hybrid hybrid hybrid because you got a hybrid workforce, the hybrid cloud, you have a hybrid, you have a hyper-connected enterprise. So we're going to be in this sort of, you know, hybrid for quite some time are, and it has to >>Be secure and an org. And it's, you know, all the disruption of folks going to remote work and trying to get connected. One beyond video conference saying, kids are in school, spouse working, maybe kids are gaming. That's been, the conductivity alone has been a huge challenge. And Affordanet zooming a lot there with links to us, especially to help that remote environment, because we know a lot of it's going to remain, but in the spirit of transformation, you had a session today here at the security summit, talked about transformation, formation plan. We talk about that word at every event, digital transformation, right? Infrastructure transformation, it security. What context, where you talking about transformation in it today? What does it transformation plan mean for your customers? >>That's a great question because I sometimes feel, you know, overused term, right? Then you just take something and add it. It's it? Transformation, network, transformation, digital transformation. Um, but what we were talking today in, in, in the morning was more around and sort of, you know, again, going back to the network security and the transformation that the customers have to do, we hear a lot about sassy and the convergence we are seeing, you know, SD van takeoff significantly from an adoption perspective application, aware to experiences, et cetera, customers are looking at doing things like internet offload and having connectivity back into the SAS applications. Again, secure connectivity back into the SAS applications, which directly ties to their outcomes. Um, so the, the three tenants of my conversation today was, Hey, make sure you have a clear view on the business outcomes that you want to accomplish. Now, the second was work with a trusted advisor and at and T and in many cases is providing that from a trusted advisor perspective. And third, is that going back to the one and done it is not a one and done, right? This is a, is a continuous process. So sometimes we have to be thinking about, are we doing it in a way that we will always be future ready, will be always be able to deal with the security threats that we don't even know about today. So yeah, >>You bring up the term future ready. And I hear that all the time. When you think of man, we really weren't future ready. When the pandemic struck, there was so much that wasn't there. And when I was talking with 49 earlier, I said, you know, how much, uh, has the pandemic been a, uh, a catalyst for so much innovation? I imagine it has been the same thing that >>Absolutely. And, you know, I remember, you know, early days, February, March, where we're all just trying to better understand, right? What is it going to be? And the first thing was, Hey, we're all going to work remote, is it a one week? Is it a two week thing? Right? And then if you're like the CIO or the CSO or other folks who are worried about how am I going to give the productivity tools, right. Businesses in a one customer we work with, again, tobacco innovation was said, Hey, I have 20,000 call center agents that I need to take remote. How do you deliver connectivity and security? Because that call center agent is the bloodline for that business interacting with their end customers. So I think, you know, it is accelerated what would happen over 10 years and 18 months, and it's still unknown, right? So we're still discovering the future. >>There's a, there will be more silver linings to come. I think we'll learn to pick your brain on, on sassy adoption trends. One of the things I noticed in your abstract of your session here was that according to Gardner, the convergence of networking and security into the sassy framework is the most vigorous technology trend. And coming out of 2020, seeing that that's a big description, most vigorous, >>It's a big, big description, a big statement. And, uh, we are definitely seeing it. You know, we saw some of that, uh, in the second half of last year, as the organizations were getting more organized to deal with, uh, the pandemic and the change then coming into this year, it's even more accelerated. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I look at sort of, you know, three things, right? So one is going back to the hybrid work, remote work, work from anywhere, right. So how do you continue to deliver a differentiated experience, highly secure to that workforce? Because productivity, human capital very important, right? The second is that there's a back and forth on the branch transformation. So yes, you know, restaurants are opening back up. Retailers are opening back up. So businesses are thinking about how do I do that branch transformation? And then the third is explosive business IOT. So the IOT end points, do you put into manufacturing, into airports in many industries, we continue to see that. So when you think about sassy and the framework, it's about delivering a, a framework that allows you to protect and secure all of those endpoints at scale. And I think that trend is real. I've seen customer demand, we've signed a number of deals. We're implementing them as we speak across all verticals, healthcare, retail, finance, manufacturing, transportation, government agencies, small businesses, mid-sized businesses. >>Nope, Nope. Not at all. Talk to me about, I'm curious, you've been at, at and T a long time. You've seen a lot of innovation. Talk, talk to me about your perspectives on seeing that, and then what to you think as a silver lining that has come out of the, the acceleration of the last 18 months. >>She and I, I get the question, you know, I've been with at and T long time. Right. And I still remember the day I joined at T and T labs. So it was one of my kind of dream coming out of engineering school. Every engineer wants to go work for a brand that is recognized, right. And I, I drove from Clemson, South Carolina to New Jersey Homedale and, uh, I'm still, you know, you can see I'm still having the smile on my face. So I've, you know, think innovation is key. And that's what we do at, at and T I think the ability to, um, kind of move fast, you know, I think what the pandemic has taught us is the speed, right? The speed at which we have to move the speed at which we have to collaborate the speed at which we have to deliver, uh, to agility has become, you know, the differentiator for all of us. >>And we're focusing on that. I also feel that, uh, you know, there have been times where, you know, product organizations, technology organizations, you know, we struggle with jumping this sort of S-curve right, which is, Hey, I'm holding onto something. Do I let go or not? Let go. And I think the pandemic has taught us that you have to jump the S-curve, you have to accelerate because that is where you need to be in, in a way, going back to the sassy trend, right. It is something that is real, and it's going to be there for the next three to five years. So let's get ready. >>I call that getting comfortably uncomfortable, no businesses safe if they rest on their laurels these days. I think we've learned that, speaking of speed, I wanna, I wanna get kind of your perspective on 5g, where you guys are at, and when do you think it's going to be really impactful to, you know, businesses, consumers, first responders, >>The 5g investments are happening and they will continue to happen. And if you look at what's happened with the network, what at and T has announced, you know, we've gotten a lot of kudos for whatever 5g network for our mobile network, for our wireless network. And we are starting to see that, that innovation and that innovation as we anticipated is happening for the enterprise customers first, right? So there's a lot of, you know, robotics or warehouse or equipment that needs to sort of, you know, connect at a low latency, high speed, highly secure sort of, you know, data movements, compute edge that sits next to the, to the campus, you know, delivering a very different application experience. So we're seeing that, you know, momentum, uh, I think on the consumer side, it is starting to come in and it's going to take a little bit more time as the devices and the applications catch up to what we are doing in the network. And if you think about, you know, the, the value creation that has happened on, on the mobile networks is like, if you think about companies like Uber or left, right, did not exist. And, uh, many businesses, you know, are dependent on that network. And I think, uh, it will carry on. And I think in the next year or two, we'll see firsthand the outcomes and the value that it is delivering you go to a stadium at and T stadium in Dallas, you know, 5g enabled, you know, that the experience is very different. >>I can't wait to go to a stadium again and see it came or live music. Oh, that sounds great. Rubbish. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what a T and T is doing with 49, the challenges that you're helping your customers combat at the edge and the importance of really being future. Ready? >>Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you having me. Thanks for 49 to invite us to be at this event. Yes. >>Thank you for refresh talk. She I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube at the 40 net championship security summits.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante aws is pointing the way to a revolution in system architecture much in the same way that aws defined the cloud operating model last decade we believe it is once again leading in future systems design the secret sauce underpinning these innovations is specialized designs that break the stranglehold of inefficient and bloated centralized processing and allows aws to accommodate a diversity of workloads that span cloud data center as well as the near and far edge hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll dig into the moves that aws has been making which we believe define the future of computing we'll also project what this means for customers partners and aws many competitors now let's take a look at aws's architectural journey the is revolution it started by giving easy access as we all know to virtual machines that could be deployed and decommissioned on demand amazon at the time used a highly customized version of zen that allowed multiple vms to run on one physical machine the hypervisor functions were controlled by x86 now according to werner vogels as much as 30 of the processing was wasted meaning it was supporting hypervisor functions and managing other parts of the system including the storage and networking these overheads led to aws developing custom asics that help to accelerate workloads now in 2013 aws began shipping custom chips and partnered with amd to announce ec2 c3 instances but as the as the aws cloud started to scale they really weren't satisfied with the performance gains that they were getting and they were hitting architectural barriers that prompted aws to start a partnership with anaperta labs this was back in 2014 and they launched then ec2 c4 instances in 2015. the asic in c4 optimized offload functions for storage and networking but still relied on intel xeon as the control point aws aws shelled out a reported 350 million dollars to acquire annapurna in 2015 which is a meager sum to acquire the secret sauce of its future system design this acquisition led to a modern version of project nitro in 2017 nitro nitro offload cards were first introduced in 2013 at this time aws introduced c5 instances and replaced zen with kvm and more tightly coupled the hypervisor with the asic vogels shared last year that this milestone offloaded the remaining components including the control plane the rest of the i o and enabled nearly a hundred percent of the processing to support customer workloads it also enabled a bare metal version of the compute that spawned the partnership the famous partnership with vmware to launch vmware cloud on aws then in 2018 aws took the next step and introduced graviton its custom designed arm-based chip this broke the dependency on x86 and launched a new era of architecture which now supports a wide variety of configurations to support data intensive workloads now these moves preceded other aws innovations including new chips optimized for machine learning and training and inferencing and all kinds of ai the bottom line is aws has architected an approach that offloaded the work currently done by the central processing unit in most general purpose workloads like in the data center it has set the stage in our view for the future allowing shared memory memory disaggregation and independent resources that can be configured to support workloads from the cloud all the way to the edge and nitro is the key to this architecture and to summarize aws nitro think of it as a set of custom hardware and software that runs on an arm-based platform from annapurna aws has moved the hypervisor the network the storage virtualization to dedicated hardware that frees up the cpu to run more efficiently this in our opinion is where the entire industry is headed so let's take a look at that this chart pulls data from the etr data set and lays out key players competing for the future of cloud data center and the edge now we've superimposed nvidia up top and intel they don't show up directly in the etr survey but they clearly are platform players in the mix we covered nvidia extensively in previous breaking analysis and won't go too deep there today but the data shows net scores on the vertical axis that's a measure of spending velocity and then it shows market share in the horizontal axis which is a measure of pervasiveness within the etr data set we're not going to dwell on the relative positions here rather let's comment on the players and start with aws we've laid out aws how they got here and we believe they are setting the direction for the future of the industry and aws is really pushing migration to its arm-based platforms pat morehead at the 6-5 summit spoke to dave brown who heads ec2 at aws and he talked extensively about migrating from x86 to aws's arm-based graviton 2. and he announced a new developer challenge to accelerate that migration to arm instances graviton instances and the end game for customers is a 40 better price performance so a customer running 100 server instances can do the same work with 60 servers now there's some work involved but for the by the customers to actually get there but the payoff if they can get 40 improvement in price performance is quite large imagine this aws currently offers 400 different ec2 instances last year as we reported sorry last year as we reported earlier this year nearly 50 percent of the new ec2 instances so nearly 50 percent of the new ec2 instances shipped in 2020 were arm based and aws is working hard to accelerate this pace it's very clear now let's talk about intel i'll just say it intel is finally responding in earnest and basically it's taking a page out of arm's playbook we're going to dig into that a bit today in 2015 intel paid 16.7 billion dollars for altera a maker of fpgas now also at the 6.5 summit nevin shenoy of intel presented details of what intel is calling an ipu it's infrastructure processing unit this is a departure from intel norms where everything is controlled by a central processing unit ipu's are essentially smart knicks as our dpus so don't get caught up in all the acronym soup as we've reported it's all about offloading work and disaggregating memory and evolving socs system-on-chip and sops system on package but just let this sink in a bit a bit for a moment intel's moves this past week it seems to us anyway are designed to create a platform that is nitro like and the basis of that platform is a 16.7 billion dollar acquisition just compare that to aws's 350 million dollar tuck-in of annapurna that is incredible now chenoy said in his presentation rough quote we've already deployed ipu's using fpgas in a in very high volume at microsoft azure and we've recently announced partnerships with baidu jd cloud and vmware so let's look at vmware vmware is the other you know really big platform player in this race in 2020 vmware announced project monterrey you might recall that it's based on the aforementioned fpgas from intel so vmware is in the mix and it chose to work with intel most likely for a variety of reasons one of the obvious ones is all the software that's running on on on vmware it's been built for x86 and there's a huge install base there the other is pat was heading vmware at the time and and you know when project monterey was conceived so i'll let you connect the dots if you like regardless vmware has a nitro like offering in our view its optionality however is limited by intel but at least it's in the game and appears to be ahead of the competition in this space aws notwithstanding because aws is clearly in the lead now what about microsoft and google suffice it to say that we strongly believe that despite the comments that intel made about shipping fpgas and volume to microsoft that both microsoft and google as well as alibaba will follow aws's lead and develop an arm-based platform like nitro we think they have to in order to keep pace with aws now what about the rest of the data center pack well dell has vmware so despite the split we don't expect any real changes there dell is going to leverage whatever vmware does and do it better than anyone else cisco is interesting in that it just revamped its ucs but we don't see any evidence that it has a nitro like plans in its roadmap same with hpe now both of these companies have history and capabilities around silicon cisco designs its own chips today for carrier class use cases and and hpe as we've reported probably has some remnants of the machine hanging around but both companies are very likely in our view to follow vmware's lead and go with an intel based design what about ibm well we really don't know we think the best thing ibm could do would be to move the ibm cloud of course to an arm-based nitro-like platform we think even the mainframe should move to arm as well i mean it's just too expensive to build a specialized mainframe cpu these days now oracle they're interesting if we were running oracle we would build an arm-based nitro-like database cloud where oracle the database runs cheaper faster and consumes less energy than any other platform that would would dare to run oracle and we'd go one step further and we would optimize for competitive databases in the oracle cloud so we would make oci run the table on all databases and be essentially the database cloud but you know back to sort of fpgas we're not overly excited about about the market amd is acquiring xi links for 35 billion dollars so i guess that's something to get excited about i guess but at least amd is using its inflated stock price to do the deal but we honestly we think that the arm ecosystem will will obliterate the fpga market by making it simpler and faster to move to soc with far better performance flexibility integration and mobility so again we're not too sanguine about intel's acquisition of altera and the moves that amd is making in in the long term now let's take a deeper look at intel's vision of the data center of the future here's a chart that intel showed depicting its vision of the future of the data center what you see is the ipu's which are intelligent nixed and they're embedded in the four blocks shown and they're communicating across a fabric now you have general purpose compute in the upper left and machine intelligent on the bottom left machine intelligence apps and up in the top right you see storage services and then the bottom right variation of alternative processors and this is intel's view of how to share resources and go from a world where everything is controlled by a central processing unit to a more independent set of resources that can work in parallel now gelsinger has talked about all the cool tech that this will allow intel to incorporate including pci and gen 5 and cxl memory interfaces and or cxl memory which are interfaces that enable memory sharing and disaggregation and 5g and 6g connectivity and so forth so that's intel's view of the future of the data center let's look at arm's vision of the future and compare them now there are definite similarities as you can see especially on the right hand side of this chart you've got the blocks of different process processor types these of course are programmable and you notice the high bandwidth memory the hbm3 plus the ddrs on the two sides kind of bookending the blocks that's shared across the entire system and it's connected by pcie gen 5 cxl or ccix multi-die socket so you know you may be looking to say okay two sets of block diagrams big deal well while there are similarities around disaggregation and i guess implied shared memory in the intel diagram and of course the use of advanced standards there are also some notable differences in particular arm is really already at the soc level whereas intel is talking about fpgas neoverse arms architecture is shipping in test mode and we'll have end market product by year end 2022 intel is talking about maybe 2024 we think that's aspirational or 2025 at best arm's road map is much more clear now intel said it will release more details in october so we'll pay attention then maybe we'll recalibrate at that point but it's clear to us that arm is way further along now the other major difference is volume intel is coming at this from a high data center perspective and you know presumably plans to push down market or out to the edge arm is coming at this from the edge low cost low power superior price performance arm is winning at the edge and based on the data that we shared earlier from aws it's clearly gaining ground in the enterprise history strongly suggests that the volume approach will win not only at the low end but eventually at the high end so we want to wrap by looking at what this means for customers and the partner ecosystem the first point we'd like to make is follow the consumer apps this capability the capabilities that we see in consumer apps like image processing and natural language processing and facial recognition and voice translation these inference capabilities that are going on today in mobile will find their way into the enterprise ecosystem ninety percent of the cost associated with machine learning in the cloud is around inference in the future most ai in the enterprise and most certainly at the edge will be inference it's not today because it's too expensive this is why aws is building custom chips for inferencing to drive costs down so it can increase adoption now the second point is we think that customers should start experimenting and see what you can do with arm-based platforms moore's law is accelerating at least the outcome of moore's law the doubling of performance every of the 18 to 24 months it's it's actually much higher than that now when you add up all the different components in these alternative processors just take a look at apple's a5 a15 chip and arm is in the lead in terms of performance price performance cost and energy consumption by moving some workloads onto graviton for example you'll see what types of cost savings you can drive for which applications and possibly generate new applications that you can deliver to your business put a couple engineers in the task and see what they can do in two or three weeks you might be surprised or you might say hey it's too early for us but you'll find out and you may strike gold we would suggest that you talk to your hybrid cloud provider as well and find out if they have a nitro we shared that vmware they've got a clear path as does dell because they're you know vmware cousins what about your other strategic suppliers what's their roadmap what's the time frame to move from where they are today to something that resembles nitro do they even think about that how do they think about that do they think it's important to get there so if if so or if not how are they thinking about reducing your costs and supporting your new workloads at scale now for isvs these consumer capabilities that we discussed earlier all these mobile and and automated systems and cars and and things like that biometrics another example they're going to find their way into your software and your competitors are porting to arm they're embedding these consumer-like capabilities into their apps are you we would strongly recommend that you take a look at that talk to your cloud suppliers and see what they can do to help you innovate run faster and cut costs okay that's it for now thanks to my collaborator david floyer who's been on this topic since early last decade thanks to the community for your comments and insights and hey thanks to patrick morehead and daniel newman for some timely interviews from your event nice job fellas remember i published each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes are all available as podcasts just search for breaking analysis podcasts you can always connect with me on twitter at d vallante or email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com i appreciate the comments on linkedin and clubhouse so follow us if you see us in a room jump in and let's riff on these topics and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Everybody welcome back to IBM. Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of this event. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, but doing that virtually for the better part of a 14 months. Now we're going to get deeper into application modernization. Marie ASHRAE is here. She's the director of marketing at mainline information systems and David burrows. Burrows is an account executive at mainline folks. Welcome to the cube. Great to have you on today. >>Thank you. Nice to be here >>To start with with mainline. Uh, people might not be familiar with, with mainline, but you've transformed over the past five years. I wonder if you could describe that for our audience? >>Yes, we have. Indeed. We have, um, mainline, um, you know, it's a 30 plus year company and, um, and for 30 odd years we had really been focused a lot in hardware, right? Hardware reselling. That's what the market needed. That's what we did a lot of. But then in the past, I would say five to eight years, maybe even 10 years, we started on this transformation project, um, for the business where we started transforming ourselves into really systems integrators versus just hardware reseller. So now we can go to a client and we can say, Hey, now what are you struggling with? Right? What are your business challenges? And then from there, we can integrate a solution that might be hardware. It might be software, it might be some services, it could be managed services. It could be staffing services, um, could be a number of different things and put all that together and then deliver a complete solution that helps them with their, their business requirements. Okay, >>David, that, that must've been an interesting transition because what Marie just described is it used to be every opportunity was a nail and whatever box you were selling was the hammer. And, and that, that has changed dramatically. Of course. So you, you, I wonder what that discussion was like with, with, with clients. You must have heard that early on and said, Oh, this cloud thing is happening. The world is changing. We've got to change too. I wonder if you could chime in on that transformation. >>Yes. That's our, uh, as our clients have been changing, what we've been doing is, uh, you know, making sure that we fully understand what's available not only in the marketplace, but the competition and what, what each industry segment, for example, baking versus insurance versus a utility maybe facing, uh, during this this time. And so, you know, being able to transform as a, as an accounting dedicated, we've been able to, uh, indicate and so provide solutions as Marie indicated. Um, the large focus over the last five years has been networking and security as we move, uh, more compute to the edge, close to the edge. Security has been predominant. Uh, and so, you know, hardware is really almost commoditized through and through and with the exception of, you know, IBM, Z and, and power. Uh, and so, you know, we've had to really, uh, sellers, you know, focus on what customers are dealing with and how they transition. Uh, and as we, uh, you know, through COVID, it's actually been a bigger challenge, a bigger focus on security. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later in more detail >>Let's, let's, let's do that now. So, so Marie, maybe at a high level, you could talk about those challenges that your clients are facing. And then we can sort of double click on how that was exacerbated by, by COVID. And I'm really interested in your perspectives on sort of the post isolation economy and how those challenges are going to shift, but, but maybe, maybe kick us off at the high level if you could. >>Sure. So, um, so, you know, people, companies were moving toward, um, uh, th the whole digital transformation, right? Probably for the past three to four years, we started seeing more and more that's constantly, everybody sees those buzz words all the time. Um, so clients were shifting in that direction and we were shifting to try to satisfy them with their needs with those solutions, but then came COVID and all of a sudden, right. What people were, were planning on doing for the next, let's say five years. I mean, most of the iOS were saying, yeah, we're going to get there in five years. Well, that had to happen. Right. It had to have brakes went on and it had to happen instantaneously. So that put a big change in focus, a big change in direction for not only our clients. Right. But for our own folks, folks like David, who are trying to service these clients with having to bring them these solutions that we're going to solve their digital business needs, um, today and not five years from now. >>Yeah. So David let's, let's talk about that. I mean, what Marie just described, I call it the forced March to digital, because as Maria, as you were saying, people were on a digital transformation, but there was a little bit of complacency and okay, we'll get there. We're really busy doing some other stuff. And then all of a sudden you've probably seen the meme of the COVID wrecking ball coming, coming into the building, the office building and saying, you know, well, we're doing fine. And all of a sudden, boom, the forest COVID comes in. So, so, so, so how did that affect your clients and how did you respond? I mean, they're asking for VDI and get me some laptops, I need end point security. And so how did that affect the, the application modernization efforts and David, maybe you could comment on that. >>So I, I think for, for me, the biggest challenge was all business, the competition within business to survive COVID, uh, you know, they had to put on first thing was how do we get our, our customer, uh, supported correctly and how do we get our workers supportive, working at home? So the very first thing we did over the initial six months was most companies had to transform immediately within the first 30 to 90 days to allow their workforce to work from home. Uh, that happened throughout my, my customer base, uh, both in Southern California, uh, was customers really focused on, uh, how do we business process, how do we compete in this marketplace and get return on investment speed, you know, time to value or what we invest in these, uh, COVID times so that we can compete with other, uh, businesses that are trying to stay alive, uh, through this transition. And, and now, you know, we're seeing on, uh, on the backend, uh, you know, that time, the value in terms of investment is even more important because some businesses have been significantly impacted from not only cashflow, uh, but you know, certainly in terms of profitability during this time >>Makes sense. And so I'm read, so we were talking earlier about the, sort of the initial path to digital transformation, and I wonder if that's gotta be course corrected. I would think we were forced in to compress, you know, the digital reality, uh, and, and I guess in a way that's good. Uh, but in a way it was, we probably made a lot of mistakes. It was a bit of a Petri dish. So now as we begin to knock on exit COVID, you would think those, those imperatives, uh, adjust and they start to become aligned. What's your take on that, especially as it relates to application and infrastructure modernization. >>Um, so I would agree with that. I think that there's definitely has to be a little bit of a, of a real alignment happening. And I know recently I read that, um, 20, 21 is expected to be a very, um, large year in it spend because all of those, um, initiatives that CEOs and others were going after pre COVID kind of got put on hold, right. So they could then go focus on all of those digital needs that were needed, like, you know, the CDI, you know, work at home, all the security stuff for that. So I think we're going to see, I'm thinking, we're going to see a shift again now, and maybe businesses are going to go back and try to pick up where they were, uh, prior to COVID and now start working on more of really of the application modernization, um, initiatives that were in mind. And I know we wanted to talk about that as well, because David's been working on quite a bit of application modernization with, um, a few of his clients, um, as we're seeing again, businesses change. Um, and, and I don't know that all of that changes because of COVID. I think all of that change was for their competitiveness, um, to get there anyway. So I think that's going to start, as you said before, Dave, I think it's going to start now having to >>Kind of rethink, >>It reminds me of traffic on the David, if you've ever been to driving in, in London when it's slingshots, right. It's that's what's COVID was like Murray you're absolutely right. Last year it spend was down four to 5% this year. I mean, our prediction is going to be in the six to 7% range, which, which kind of aligns with where Gartner and IDC are based on our surveys. But, you know, back in, in April, like I think the 16th of April, it was a headline in the wall street journal that the China grew 18% GDP in the quarter. So it's very hard to predict, but, but it's coming back, you know, we, we can see that David and so, so spending is really gonna accelerate. There's probably some pent-up demand for that application modernization. Maybe it's been a little bit, uh, neglected as we've done, as Maria was saying. And you were saying the work from home. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the modernization aspects and maybe I'm really interested in the things that you guys deliver in your portfolio with IBM. >>Sure. Uh, so what I have customers in multiple phases within this, uh, current digital transformation, their customer, uh, moving everything to next gen, uh, development, which is, uh, only containerized code, uh, being able to, you know, swiftly go through their development tests, uh, and, uh, hybrid cloud environments where they're, um, they haven't made an investment yet, but they're sampling what it might be like to, uh, change into that world. And then there are customers are still in the, uh, typical environment, uh, the traditional environment, and are looking at what the solutions, as far as packages are available for them moving forward. So they can kind of skip over, uh, any kind of development and being able to, uh, leverage, uh, what I call them next, gen development or next gen systems, uh, immediately, as you know, you asked, you know, what are the, what are the systems that are available? IBM's cloud pack, uh, solution set. It provides a portfolio of capabilities, uh, both in the application, suite, database, suite security. Uh, I have customers today leveraging that. Uh, and, and so that is one of the first pieces, uh, that, that customers I see who are on the leading edge, or are also kind of trailing, are looking at, uh, these cloud packs to be able to, uh, uh, go time to market and time to value, uh, quickly. >>Yeah. So when I look at your portfolio, I just sort of scan the web. Uh, David just mentioned Marie cloud pack. I mean, we're talking software here. You guys do have a lot of expertise in ZZ Linux power, you mentioned is not a commodity. And it's one of the few pieces of hardware that, and Z they're not a commodity storage. I would think business resiliency fits in there beyond disaster recovery, your red hat, we're talking, you know, things like open OpenShift and Ansible for automation. So these are, these are not your grandfather's main line. These are toolkits are a piece of, you know, parts of the tool bag that you bring to bear to focus on on client outcomes and solutions is, am I getting that right? >>Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, and again, right, that goes back to the original opening comment about how we've transformed as a business, right. To become, uh, an integrator, um, putting all of these different pieces together. I mean, I know that, um, something that, that David recently had worked on, Oh my goodness. If you would have looked at the list of pieces of elements to that solution, um, it was really quite incredible between, um, open source stuff, you know, and a bunch of IBM stuff. Um, yes, it was some storage and yeah, there was some power, um, yes, there was red hat. Right. But then there was other stuff there was VMware. Um, there was, um, some things that, um, I can't even remember now all the names to all the components, but it was, it was a laundry list. Right. And so that's where though mainline stepped in and put the pieces together, uh, for the customer so that the customer then can get done what they needed to get done, which was, which was really solve their business problem, which was trying to become more competitive in their market space. >>Okay, David, so when Maria was sustained was basically, my takeaways is as a system integrator, you've got all these piece parts with these technologies, you've got virtualization, you've got automation, you've got containers and so forth. Uh, and yes, there's there's hardware, but there's this integration that has to occur. And your job is to abstract that complexity, that underlying complexity away so that the customers can focus on the outcome. Maybe you could talk about that and how you do that. >>Sure. I'll give you a good example of a recent customer that we work with who was, uh, basically, I mean, we consider an enterprise data platform that, that, uh, was going to rework their entire data warehouse into something that had governance surrounding it, uh, where they could validate all the data that was coming into their warehouse. And so we underpinned that, uh, with an infrastructure of power, uh, we're running, uh, obviously IBM, uh, uh, pack for data, uh, with DB two warehouse. Uh, we use a combination of that with, uh, Cloudera data flow through IBM, uh, with the streaming and, uh, the governance, uh, IBM governance catalog piece, which is, uh, lots of knowledge catalog. So, uh, we've been able to take not only what their base requirements were, but all the microservices that are packaged in with cloud pack, uh, all running on OpenShift, uh, which was a great acquisition that IBM did last year. And, uh, then, uh, they also required other microservices outside, uh, to support that environment and paint a picture for >>Us as to what the future looks like. Uh, it's, it's much different than the past 30 years, uh, and bring us home please >>Or so, um, I think the future for us is to continue to, um, to find all of the solutions, um, that will, that will help our customers, um, you know, get to their next steps. Right. And, and there's a lot, as you know, there's lots of solutions out there. There's lots of new companies that are popping up all the time. Um, you know, inherently, you know, mainline is an IBM partner. We've been an IBM partner for 30 plus years since our inception. And that's the base of our business is, is IBM. But, but there are other requirements that are needed by, by businesses, by our customers. And that's where we, we reach out and partner up. We probably have gone my goodness, 200 plus partnerships with various companies, various technology companies that we can then, um, lean on and pull in those ancillary solutions, um, to, to, to complete that, that solution for the customer. >>So I think we're going to continue going down that path. We're going to continue making sure that we're partnered with the, um, the, the leading technology companies. So we can build that IBM solution for our customer and, and bolt on the other pieces that are needed. Uh, we're going to continue to grow and enhance our services business because we've got quite a large services business, whether it's implementation services, uh, we do managed services. We have staffing services. I think you're going to see if we're still going to continue to, to grow that business, because that is a piece where companies, you know, they don't want to worry about running all of that stuff, right. They want to know that their system's going to be running 24 seven. And if there is a bump or a burp or something happens, Hey, they could pick up the phone, they can call mainline. We can help them get things corrected. So I think we're going to still see a lot of that going on as well, um, within our, our, our offerings. >>Excellent. Well, congratulations for making it through that. Not a whole lot, not, not every, uh, hardware seller reseller made it through and you guys transformed. It's a, it's an inspiring story. Maria, David, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're really welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante in our continuous coverage and the cube of IBM think 20, 21. Keep it right there.

>>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 the Cube. With digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our commudity partners. >> Okay, Welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We are, coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with our continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 digital this year, like everything in 2020 but we're excited to welcome back to The Cube. He's been on a number of times, he's Russ Currie. The vice president enterprise strategy for Netscout systems. Russ great to see you. >> Great to see you, Jeff. Thank you. >> Absolutely. So before we jump into there's so(laughs), so many things going on in 2020. What I do want to do is, is reflect back a little bit. You were first on The Cube at AWS reinvent 2017. So it's been about three years. And I remember, one of the lines you had said, I believe that was your guys' first, AWS show as well. So I wonder if you could reflect on kind of how the world has changed in terms of your business, and the importance of AWS and public cloud within the infrastructure systems of your clients. >> Yeah, well, it was interesting, right? We were just getting our feet wet at that point, and had just introduced some of our technology for use in AWS, and it was kind of a interesting little adventure. So we were looking at it and saying, okay where's this going to lead us? And ultimately now we're just really waist deep in it, and really having a great partnership with AWS, and delivering new technologies, new capabilities, and our customer base also is becoming so much more reliant on public cloud in particular AWS and the services that they can provide. So as we've gone and they've gone it's been a journey that we've taken together, and it's been quite, fruitful and exciting. >> Right, right. And it really reinforces this concept of I think you'd mentioned it before, a blended, you know kind of a blended infrastructure approach. So there's a lot of conversations about public cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, et cetera, et cetera. But at the, at the end of the day from a customer perspective, as you've mentioned it's really kind of a blended network, right. And it's really application centric, and you put the applications where those applications need to be to be the most appropriate, and that might even change over time from, from test dev to really roll out to, to scale. So you're seeing that consistency. Consistency, >> Absolutely. Yeah. The, the blended environment that in it it's so incredibly complex of our customers. As they take a look at the way that the world has changed, right? When we take a look at what has happened with people working remotely, working from home and having to come into access services in such a, a completely blended and hybrid environment as you say, not only the move to the cloud, but the move to Colo, and bringing all of this together for interconnect, it's definitely a complex environment that they have to have their fingers on the pulse of. Right? >> Yep, yep. And then of course there was this little thing that happened this year with COVID. And really right in March, April timeframe light switch moment, everybody worked from home, whether you're ready or not. And that was a very different kind of situation. Cause we had to get people secure and safe, and get them up and operating. So I'm sure you(laugh) saw a lot of interesting stuff at your business there, but I'm even more interested in how that's evolved over time. Here we are at the end of 2020, there's going to be you know, some version of this for the foreseeable future. And a lot of companies are saying that, you know there'll be a lot of, kind of work from anywhere pieces that continue forward. So again, with your customers and looking kind of the change between what happened in the spring, and now what's happening as they really of kind of put in the systems that'll enable them to continue to support, you know people working from anywhere, not even really working from home, but working from anywhere. >> Right. Exactly. I mean, as our customers had to bring up more connectivity, new connectivity, and start to add licenses for virtual desktop or for their VPN connectivity ultimately how they got it done, most of our customers said, you know we're running hot, but stable. And I think that that was, that was great for most folks. But now they're leaning into it and saying, okay how do we continue to make this happen? And how do we provide the visibility that we need to ensure that the services that we're delivering are, making it possible for their users to be productive and successful. A user doesn't want to feel that they're not contributing as much as someone else that may be able to make it into the office. And, it's a, it's a challenging time, but with that being said, technology has really stepped up, and in particular, the way that they're able to stand up services in the cloud, and the automation, and potential cost savings that they get from standing up in the cloud has really been a bood for most of our users. And some of the users, you know, the high end enterprise that we're a little bit slow to adopt, now are just turning it on as fast as they possibly can. >> Yeah, it's pretty wild. And then, we had another representative from Netscout on earlier this year. One of the, the kind of recurring themes that we've seen is you know, changes in the threat landscape. So clearly the increased attack surfaces as more and more people are working from home. They're not working from the secure environment at the office. But you guys notice some interesting things about what's happening, and we've, we've seen a little bit too in terms of kind of, ransomware and the increase in ransomware as a particular type of attack that, that seems to be growing in popularity. And these, these people are a little bit more thorough in the badness that they caused before they, they throw in the ransom request, and that they're looking for a little bit more fundamental disruption to enable them to basically extract that ransom is which they hope to do. >> Yeah. I mean the amount of DDoS attacks that we've seen has just grown incredibly over the past several months. And these extortion attacks they come in and they often hit the customer quickly and hard, and then say, turn it back for a bit and say, pay us, or we're going to shut you down. And they're really coming in more towards the back office aspects of things. So, going in and attacking that part of the business is kind of a new environment for a lot of folks. But one of the other interesting(laughs) challenges here with us is that, oftentimes those extortion notes don't make it through to the people that really need to act on them because they get caught in spam filters or they like so they're finding these DDoS attacks, and don't necessarily understand that they're under an extortion attack. So it's a real challenge for folks. And we've seen a good uptake with our on-prem capabilities to provide that kind of protection, right at the top of the security stack with our Arbor edge defense products. So it's been something that we're trying to get out there and help our customers as much as we can. And even that new, folks. >> Yeah. It's a, it's an interesting environment. And we found out from somebody too that sometimes if you actually pay the bad guys you can be breaking other rules for doing business with countries >> Yeah. >> Or people that we're not supposed to be doing business with. Like, that's the last thing you need to think about when you're trying to get all your data, and your company back online. >> Right, yeah, I mean, are you trying to make sure that you're keeping yourself stood up right? And, it's tough and you know kind of the rule one is never pay the extortion right? But you kind of got to take a look at it and say, hey, you know, what do I do? >> Right, right. So, you guys been around for a while. I wonder if we could dive in a little bit, we're at reinvent. Some of the things you guys are doing specifically on the product side to, basically increase your, your AWS capabilities. >> Sure. Thanks, yeah. We've been working really closely with AWS as they start to roll out new technologies. Last year, we were fundamental in the VPC ingress routing announcement that they have. We've been working with them with their traffic mirroring capabilities. So technology-wise, we keep in close touch with them in terms of everything that they are delivering. But also on the business side of it, we have our networking competency and just last week got our migration competency. So what we're really doing is, trying to both work the technical and the business relationship, as much as we can to try and expand our overall capabilities of book print with AWS. And, having that visibility and being able to kind of provide that same level of control and capability that you had, on-prem in your enterprise network as you move into the public cloud is a great benefit to a lot of our customers. They really have the ability now, to deliver services the way they have been delivering it for years and years. >> Now, what do you mean specifically, when you say migration competency or networking competency? >> So, they have these different competency programs for their technology partners. And the networking competency is, that you've demonstrated capabilities in your ability to provide network monitoring, or network management capabilities, or network connectivity. In the applica--, migration side you've really provided the ability to show that you have the tools, and solution set to drive, and help people become successful migrations into AWS. As you can imagine right now, a lot of folks are just lifting and shifting, putting stuff into AWS as quickly as they can to try and take advantage of the automation and the operational efficiencies that you get when you move into public cloud settings. As you make those migrations, you want to ensure that you're not either leaving something behind, that needed to move with it, or building a dependency onto something that's in the background that's going to have an adverse effect on, user experience. And ultimately, it really all comes down to the user experience that are, delivering to your customers and or your user base. Right? >> Right. Right. So what are the things you talked about in a prior interview was kind of the shifting dynamic in terms of network traffic. As there's more and more, you know kind of SAS based applications, and there's more kind of an application centric, and in this kind of API interface between all the applications that, you know the North-south is still significant, but the growth in the East-west traffic, meaning, you know kind of inside, if you will. And that some of the unique challenges that come from that from kind of a network monitoring. I wonder if you can share a little bit more color on that, as to, and are you continuing to see this increase in East West relative to North-south, and what kind of special opportunities and challenges that that presents? >> Yeah, absolu--. There is an absolute growth in terms of the East-west connectivity and, traffic that exists out there. In particular, when we take a look at the way that people are implementing software defined networks, NSX, for example NSXT has now provided the ability to blend your environment whether you're going to any cloud, any vendor as you move between these environments having that ability to deliver network services under the same framework is really beneficial to our customer base. And we've also been partnering very closely with VM-ware, and a lot of our customers are implementing VMware cloud on AWS. So, they have that ability to stand up services in a consistent manner whether it be in their legacy environments, or into the public cloud environments, and have that same ability to provide visibility down into the East-west traffic so that you can see that. So when you're part of the NSX framework, what you're able to do is really leverage the service framework that they have the service and search it, and be part of the clusters and host groups that are exchanging traffic East-west. And our ability to see into that really exposes chall--, not, exposes challenges but exposes potential issues that(laughs) our customers might be having in delivering high quality services. So that visibility is really what we've been keying on. >> Right. I'm just curious to get your take, you know as people kind of, as you said, make this move to public cloud, and, you know, you talked about wholesale migrations, and wholesale lifts and shifts. You know, there, there's kind of a couple trains of thought. One is, you know, using cloud for just pure economics, and trying to save money, and the flexibility. The second one is, is to is to add this automation as things grow in this, these great opportunities to automate, and try to reduce air. But the third one, right, the big one is to drive innovation, and to unlock innovation enable better innovation, and speed of delivery, and, you know, moving at the speed of business, pick your favorite buzzword. I'm curious whether your customers, as you have you seen them all jumping in? How much of it is still, you know, to save money or to, or to, you know, kind of use the basic, you know cost saving economics versus people really embracing the opportunity to use this as a method to drive innovation, and change within their own business? >> So I, I think the realities of 2020 have been forcing people to look at primarily from operational and cost efficiency perspectives, however with an eye towards innovation, and as they start to get themselves into a, zone where they're comfortable, they look to see how they can leverage the cloud to provide new services, and new ways in which they provide their services, and avail themselves of, the underlying technologies that are there to build something that's new and exciting in their overall portfolio. So, I think that 2021 is probably going to be a little bit more of where can I innovate as opposed to, how do I get there? (Jeff laughs) >> It's probably an unfair question here at 2020 cause priorities certainly got turned upside down in the middle of the year. So maybe, maybe innovation got pushed down a little bit from, you know, let's get people up, let's get people safe, and let's make sure they can access all the systems and all this crazy stuff that we've got available to them from wherever they are. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Not just within the, within the home office. >> I was listening to a, panel from federal government a couple of weeks ago, and it was really the way the they've adopted kind of commercial cha-- commercial capabilities to meet some of these challenges things that they wouldn't normally look at. But now it's a set of innovation that they're looking at, to try and make sure that they can avail themselves of the services that are out there and available in the public cloud. >> Yeah. Well, that's great, Russ. It's great to catch up. I'm sure you must be as amazed as anybody as the rapid acceleration of this, you know since the short time you went to your first re-invent and, >> Yeah. >> And clearly AWS and Amazon generally is an execution we're seeing. So, I think they'll keep doing it. So I think you're, you're probably sitting in a good spot. >> I think so. (Jeff laughs) Thank you. (Russ laughs) >> All right. Thank you Russ for, for stopping by and sharing your insight. Look forward to catching up next time. >> Thanks a lot, Jeff. Really appreciate it. >> Alrighty. He's Russ, I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube's, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, the virtual event. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and looking forward, we're going to be digging into one of my favorite topics and also the community always loves when we have it. Talking about networking, of course. Happy to welcome you to the program. I have two first time guests. First of all, we have Mike Saur. He is a solutions architect of NetDevOps with CCI. And joining us a long time friend of the program. First time on the program, Omar Saltun, who is a leader, product management for Network Services Orchestrator with Cisco. Omar and Mike, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> Thank you, sir. >> All right. So Mike, if you could just set up for us, CCI, Cisco partner, give us a little bit about the organization, what you specialize in, what you're known for. And tell us a bit about your role there. >> Sure. CCI systems is a trusted partner for typical mid market size service providers. That's primarily the focus and that's a lot of different areas of the business, cable access, CMTS, security, data center and now this next evolution of adding NetDevOps as that next step for trusted advisor. I've been in my role for about a year now at CCI with a strong passion for automation and finding the right fit tools to solve problems for our customers, whether that's a commercial product or a open source tool. So a lot of different problems out there and no one size fits all. So it's my passion to bring those types of solutions to CCIs customers. >> Wonderful. Mike, I'm hearing a lot of the themes that I'm very familiar with. I'm sure our audience is when we talk about Cisco, when we've gone to Cisco live, we've been in the DevNet zone. So having a lot of discussions about that NetDevOps piece, can you talk to us a little bit more, just the partnership with Cisco. I would love to hear how NetDevOps fits in with what you're doing and how that fits with Cisco too. >> Yeah, I've been working with Cisco on and off for the past 18 months to try to think outside the box. As we know, Network Services Orchestrator was primarily targeted at the large providers that have the investment resources, the programming staff, to be able to do that. So over the years, having various discussions with product management, Cisco and CCI have come together to partner to solve two of the big problems in our space for our customers. As far as the math problem of the investment that's needed to bring up Network Service Orchestrator, and then also the programming piece of that. So not a lot of the providers in the mid market space have that expertise. So CCI and Cisco are really pulling that all together with various trusted partners to bring that to life for them in a shorter timeframe, with more sets of controls, to bring them up to speed faster so that they can it with a martial arts type journey of starting small and integrating over different phases of the life cycle of automation. >> Great. Well, Omar, let's pull you into the discussion here. It tends to be in general from a product standpoint, a little bit easier to grow up market. We want to talk a bit about the mid market, so that Network Services Orchestrator, NSO. Help explain how that really can support the mid tier as Mike was saying. >> Sure, so we were a little crazy, we started at the top and starting to work our way down. So we're well established with tier one service providers, large enterprises, we have good markets penetration there. I think for us, it was a lot of growth opportunity down into the mid market, both on commercial and tier two, tier three service providers. I know that the challenge in NSO is awesome, but it's got a steep learning curve. So, these partnerships like the one here is perfect because it allows mid market customers to access the capability. But at the same time, they have someone to hold their hands. They have partners like CCI, that have both the technical expertise, as well as kind of understanding kind of what customer problems are, what operations and problem scaling look like in mid market, not just a tier one where the different markets, different requirements. >> Mike I would love to get your viewpoint as to what's happening inside your customers. So networking in general, obviously there's always new technologies that they need to integrate, but there's also the skill sets. NetDevOps, of course, helping pull people along to work closer with developers, coding more something we have to talk about. So the mid tier customer specifically, what challenges they face with bring us into some of those conversations, if you would. >> Right, so I preach a lot and talk about the vicious cycle of not automating. They don't have time 'cause they're too busy doing the day to day jobs. And I love to get into that vicious cycle and kind of bust that up and help to kind of think differently why they need to operate their networks differently. And they can take a lot of those tools and techniques from the software world and really help leverage them on their networks. There's just a skills gap right now with the mid market type folks. They're overworked, stressed. And with obviously the growth of IOT, more devices means more work. It's just a volume metric problem that certain automation tools can really make a difference in their world. And that's really what my passion is at, reducing human error, helping those businesses provide more uptime for their end customers and just driving a different way to operate networks in more efficiently in accurate way. >> And part of that... >> Please go ahead on that. >> And part of that is just not. You know those are the technical expertise, but there's also the how do you stitch things together? Any automation strategy is going to have more than one tool. And there's the idea of how do we stitch tools together? How do we build processes? How do we help up-skill customers? Those kinds of things. I mean, this is kind of the all the pieces that come together when you kind of mesh the technology and the apart for capabilities together. That's really what drives successful automation projects, and then get some of those problems solving and added value that we're talking about here. >> Yeah. I mean, Omar, when I think about scale and I think about automation, service fighters, you think would be some of the leading edge for some of that? Maybe just refresh our audience a bit as to how you help them along and how much, they used to kind of build a lot of their own toolings and that's challenging if you have to keep doing it itself. So why do they turn to Cisco for some of these solutions? >> I think two things, one, we build tools that survive scale, right? For NSO, we have customers managing hundreds of thousands of nodes at one time. So there's a scale on performance that comes from building SB class tooling. But the second piece is just understanding, you know, the operational environment service providers, have they have demanding requirements in terms of SLA scale, reg compliance, those kinds of things. And that's really what we've brought to the table is not just tools that have the power and the scale, but kind of understanding what the operational environment is for the typical tier one SP and making sure the tools mentioned to that. >> Michael... Please go ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of that businesses are changing fastly and keeping up with that speed of innovation is very difficult. And not to mention to, I mean, as a trusted partner for our customers, maybe the answer's not Cisco every time to be honest, maybe there's a different tool. So if we have a tool like NSO that could drive other vendors equipment, I think that makes customers feel safer, better, not vendor lock in. So the power that NSO brings is second to none, in my opinion. So I'm just all about flexibility and in solving problems for our customers. And to me, Network Services Orchestrator is that product. But like I said, there's a lot of integrations that need to be done and we need to break it down for these customers and get them to realize the value of it faster instead of the large deployments that you've seen in the tier one type of space. >> Yeah, Mike, you bring up a really good point. When I think traditionally about automation, we take a process or maybe we optimize a process and we automate it, but what companies need today is I need to react fast and I need to be able to make changes in the future if that's needed. So not fossilizing something, but being able to move forward. So it sounds like with NSO, some of your other things that you put together, you're helping customers not only do what they need today, but be ready for the future. Do I have that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it's just another progression of what CCI already is. That trusted advisor, we have the great opportunity that we talk to so many different providers of the same size, same business goals that we bring best in breed. And our talent that we have at CCI is just amazing and that's a passion that we're trying to get out there into the world that, Hey, we have horsepower and we're ready to help. We're about making lives better. So it's exciting. >> Yeah certainly in the mid market, one of the things we see is customers doing less building and more assembly. So in tier one, they have the time and resources to build stuff from scratch, to write services from scratch, those kinds of things. Mid-markets much more of a simply play, taking things off the shelf. No, maybe a little NSO, but it's also paired with a little bit of Ansible, a little bit of Python, and that's how they're going to handle their automation requirements, both, 'cause it's probably faster and probably in the long run, easier to maintain. >> Well, yeah. You bring up a great point, Omar. When I think traditionally that mid market and the channel partner often would be delivering prepackaged solutions. But today's solutions, you still need that a little bit of flexibility, that little bit of programming, they're not going to, throw a team of PhDs on it like some of the largest customers do. But they still need to be able to put things together and make them fit for what they need and ultimately their customers need. >> Yeah, I mean, every automation project it's still a snowflake. You take something or free VPN, right. Everyone does it, but everyone does it differently. There's no better, there's no worse. But if you're going to automate that you kind of start with an 80% solution, but then you need to line it up whether that's customer's infrastructure, their operations, their staff capabilities and those kinds of things. That's kind of getting over the finish line what CCI brings to the table in the mid market, sure. >> Yup. Mike, it's funny. I'm curious. CCI, does it have any relation with CCIE 'cause when we're talking about that skillsets that we need, obviously, you start, you think about Cisco certifications. How do you keep your team up on the latest technologies, making sure that they can be that trusted advisor that your customers need? >> Well, of course it's a combination of different things, classical learning, but I would say one of the big things is our collaboration capabilities. We have experts in many different areas and usually they have a secondary skill set and we collaborate. And a lot of times we make our own internal training that's more specific to our customers. So example, I really try to recommend to customers to move to EVPN technologies, but there's that learning curve that they don't know how to configure them. Next gen ethernet type of technologies for service providers. So by building an EVPN model and NSO, we're empowering them to leverage that sooner, faster with a smart tool like NSO. And that's really, some of the value that we have, we know what most of our customers use. The big guys tend to use layer three VPNs a lot of time. I would say just that a majority of our customers are very L two VPN vase or infrastructure services, and even offering them up to their own customers. So having a somewhat pre-packaged 80% as Omar had mentioned, and nothing's ever really the same all the time, but 80% of it probably is. And then we'll come in and then we can finish off that last 20% to make it come to life for that customer with a little bit of customization. So making it fit for their environment. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the biggest challenges out there for anyone is, okay, when do I have to revisit what I had? Is there a new technology? Is there a new way of doing things? So you just laid out like, you know, one way that customers, okay, this is the way I should be in my size thinking about VPN. Anything else? What, what kind of key things should people be hearing and they're saying up, if I have this problem, providers like CCI can help. >> Right. Just trying to increase the health of their network by having consistency checks. Over the years, networks have config wonder. It's very hard to keep that up even in the mid market networks. So the cleaner that your network is, the more uptime you're going to have, the easier it is for your network engineers and allows you to scale. Like I said, the time to businesses is just going rapidly. And being able to empower other teams like say knock or even sales engineering to build those L2VPNs for the customer. If you can build them faster by not escalating tickets to the core engineering team, you serve the customer faster and you freed up those network engineers to maybe be more proactive about building out the future network. Cause right now they're just stuck in that day to day grind. So config consistency, and like primary, like service builds L2, L3 VPN. Those are very popular. And one thing that I always like to challenge customers with is that a lot of times they're like, well, we can do it ourselves. And maybe some of these guys have a developer teams and typically they're more focused on the public facing website, internal apps. And I challenged like maybe you could... but what's your time worth to you? And the amount of man hours that were put into NSO, jumpstart you faster. And a lot of times I think you're going to gain more value in just getting that product that you can customize. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's a developer platform. So you bring it to life in your environment. >> Absolutely, there's so many things now that companies need to make that decision. Can they shift left? Can they push it to the platform? Are there solutions that just make things easier so that you can focus on really the things that are important to run your business and get the best utilization out of your people and the skillsets. Wonderful. Mike, Omar want to give you both, give us the final word takeaways you want people to have regarding kind of the opportunity that they can take advantage of, especially in the mid tier. Mike maybe we'll start with you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I am just passionate about getting CCIS name out there. Not only for NetDevOps, but all the other practices that we have at CCI to be that trusted advisor and come talk to us. We have account teams that already, we have systems engineers that are ready. And I feel like one thing leads to another and it snowballs so reach out and I'd love to have a conversation with every single one of them, whether it's a small organization or a large organization, we're here to help. And that's super important to us. >> I think for us, we see automation start, tactically to science project. So ones trying to deal with the pain pointer or dealing with something here frustrated with which is, I think where most folks start. I think that the trick is to work with your peers, talk to your leadership and figure out how you go from science project to strategy and kind of map out the longer journey and be a little thoughtful as you pick tools and figuring out what you want to automate and make sure it has some value to. >> Mike Saur, Omar Sultan, thank you both for joining. Appreciate the update and especially on the CCI and Cisco partnership. >> Thanks too. >> Thank you. Have a great day. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the AWS Public Sector. Their Partner Awards, really enjoying this. We get to talk to some of the diverse ecosystem as well as they've all brought on their customers, some really phenomenal case studies. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. First of all, we have Jared Bell, he's the Chief Engineer of self response, operational readiness at T-Rex Solutions and T-Rex is the award winner for the most customer obsessed mission-based in Fed Civ. So Jared, congratulations to you and the T-Rex team and also joining him, his customer Michael Thieme, he's the Assistant Director for the Decennial Census Program systems and contracts for the US Census Bureau, thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to be here. >> All right, Jared, if we could start with you, as I said, you're an award winner, you sit in the Fed Civ space, you've brought us to the Census Bureau, which most people understand the importance of that government program coming up on that, you know, every 10 year we've been hearing, you know, TV and radio ads talking about it, but Jared, if you could just give us a thumbnail of T-Rex and what you do in the AWS ecosystem. >> So yeah again, my name's Jared Bell and I work for T-Rex Solutions. T-Rex is a mid tier IT federal contracting company in Southern Maryland, recently graduated from hubs on status, and so T-Rex really focuses on four key areas, infrastructure in Cloud modernization, cybersecurity, and active cyber defense, big data management and analytics, and then overall enterprise system integration. And so we've been, you know, AWS partner for quite some time now and with decennial, you know, we got to really exercise a lot of the bells and whistles that are out there and really put it all to the test. >> All right, well, Michael, you know, so many people in IT, we talk about the peaks and valleys that we have, not too many companies in our organization say, well, we know exactly, you know, that 10 year spike of activity that we're going to have, I know there's lots of work that goes on beyond that, but it tells a little bit , your role inside the Census Bureau and what's under your purview. >> Yes, the Census Bureau, is actually does hundreds of surveys every year, but the decennial census is our sort of our main flagship activity. And I am the Assistant Director under our Associate Director for the IT and for the contracts for the decennial census. >> Wonderful and if you could tell us a little bit the project that you're working on, that eventually pulled T-Rex in. >> Sure. This is the 2020 census and the challenge of the 2020 census is we've done the census since 1790 in the United States. It's a pillar, a foundation of our democracy, and this was the most technologically advanced census we've ever done. Actually up until 2020, we have done our censuses mostly by pen, paper, and pencil. And this is a census where we opened up the internet for people to respond from home. We can have people respond on the phone, people can respond with an iPhone or an Android device. We tried to make it as easy as possible and as secure as possible for people to respond to the census where they were and we wanted to meet the respondent where they were. >> All right. So Jared, I'd love you to chime in here 'cause I'm here and talking about, you know, the technology adoption, you know, how much was already in plans there, where did T-Rex intersect with this census activity? >> Yeah. So, you know, census deserves a lot of credit for their kind of innovative approach with this technical integrator contract, which T-Rex was fortunate enough to win. When we came in, you know, we were just wrapping up the 2018 test. we really only had 18 months to go from start to, you know, a live operational tests to prepare for 2020. And it was really exciting to be brought in on such a large mission critical project and this is one of the largest federal IT products in the Cloud to date. And so, you know, when we came in, we had to really, you know, bring together a whole lot of solutions. I mean, the internet self response, which is what we're going to to talk about today was one of the major components. But we really had a lot of other activities that we had to engage in. You know, we had to design and prepare an IT solution to support 260 field offices, 16,000 field staff, 400,000 mobile devices and users that were going to go out and knock on doors for a numeration. So it was real6ly a big effort that we were honored to be a part of, you know, and on top of that, T-Rex actually brought to the table, a lot of its past experience with cybersecurity and active cyber defense, also, you know, because of the importance of all this data, you know, we had the role in security all throughout, and I think T-Rex was prepared for that and did a great job. And then, you know, overall I think that, not necessarily directly to your question, but I think, y6ou know, one of the things that we were able to do to make ourselves successful and to really engage with the census Bureau and be effective with our stakeholders was that we really build a culture of decennial within the technical integrator, you know, we had brown bags and working sessions to really teach the team the importance of the decennial, you know, not just as a career move, but also as a important activity for our country. And so I think that that really helped the team, you know, internalize that mission and really drove kind of our dedication to the census mission and really made us effective and again, a lot of the T-Rex leadership had a lot of experience there from past decennials and so they really brought that mindset to the team and I think it really paid off. >> Michael, if you could bring us inside a little a bit the project, you know, 18 months, obviously you have a specific deadline you need to hit, for that help us understand kind of the architectural considerations that you had there, any concerns that you had and I have to imagine that just the global activities, the impacts of COVID-19 has impacted some of the end stage, if you will, activities here in 2020. >> Absolutely. Yeah. The decennial census is, I believe a very unique IT problem. We have essentially 10 months out of the decade that we have to scale up to gigantic and then scale back down to run the rest of the Census Bureau's activities. But our project, you know, every year ending in zero, April 1st is census day. Now April 1st continued to be census day in 2020, but we also had COVID essentially taking over virtually everything in this country and in fact in the world. So, the way that we set up to do the census with the Cloud and with the IT approach and modernization that we took, actually, frankly, very luckily enabled us to kind of get through this whole thing. Now, we haven't had, Jared discussed a little bit the fact that we're here to talk about our internet self response, we haven't had one second of downtime for our response. We've taken 77 million. I think even more than 78 million responses from households, out of the 140 million households in the United States, we've gotten 77 million people to respond on our internet site without one second of downtime, a good user experience, a good supportability, but the project has always been the same. It's just this time, we're actually doing it with much more technology and hopefully the way that the Cloud has supported us will prove to be really effective for the COVID-19 situation. Because we've had changes in our plans, difference in timeframes, we are actually not even going into the field, or we're just starting to go into the field these next few weeks where we would have almost been coming out of the field at this time. So that flexibility, that expandability, that elasticity, that being in the Cloud gives all of our IT capabilities was really valuable this time. >> Well, Jared, I'm wondering if you can comment on that. All of the things that Michael just said, you know, seem like, you know, they are just the spotlight pieces that I looked at Cloud for. You know, being able to scale on demand, being able to use what I need when I need it, and then dial things down when I don't, and especially, you know, I don't want to have to, you know, I want to limit how much people actually need to get involved. So help understand a little bit, you know, what AWS services underneath, we're supporting this and anything else around the Cloud deployment. >> Sure, yeah. Michael is spot on. I mean, the cloud is tailor made for our operation and activity here. You know, I think all told, we use over 30 of the AWS FedRAMP solutions in standing up our environment across all those 52 system of systems that we were working with. You know, just to name a few, I mean, internet self response alone, you're relying heavily on auto scaling groups, elastic load balancers, you know, we relied a lot on Lambda Functions, DynamoDB. We're one of the first adopters through DynamoDB global tables, which we use for a session persistence across regions. And then on top of that, you know, the data was all flowing down into RDS databases and then from there to, you know, the census data Lake, which was built on EMR and Elasticsearch capabilities, and that's just to name a couple. I mean, you know, we had, we ran the gamut of AWS services to make all this work and they really helped us accelerate. And as Michael said, you know, we stood this up expecting to be working together in a war room, watching everything hand in hand, and because of the way we, were able to architect it in partnership with AWS, we all had to go out and stay at home, you know, the infrastructure remain rock solid. We can have to worry about, you know, being hands on with the equipment and, you know, again, the ability to automate and integrate with those solutions Cloud formation and things like that really let us keep a small agile team of, you know, DevSecOps there to handle the deployments. And we were doing full scale deployments with, you know, one or two people in the middle of the night without any problems. So it really streamlined things for us and helped us keep a tight natural, sure. >> Michael, I'm curious about what kind of training your team need to go through to take advantage of this solution. So from bringing it up to the ripple effect, as you said, you're only now starting to look at who would go into the field who uses devices and the like, so help us understand really the human aspect of undergoing this technology. >> Sure. Now, the census always has to ramp up this sort of immediate workforce. We hire, we actually process over 3 million people through, I think, 3.9 million people applied to work for the Census Bureau. And each decade we have to come up with a training program and actually training sites all over the country and the IT to support those. Now, again, modernization for the 2020 census, didn't only involve the things like our internet self response, it also involves our training. We have all online training now, we used to have what we called verbatim training, where we had individual teachers all over the country in places like libraries, essentially reading text exactly the same way to exactly over and over again to our, to the people that we trained. But now it's all electronic, it allows us to, and this goes to the COVID situation as well, it allows us to bring only three people in at a time to do training. Essentially get them started with our device that we have them use when they're knocking on doors and then go home and do the training, and then come back to work with us all with a minimal contact, human contact, sort of a model. And that, even though we designed it differently, the way that we set the technology of this time allowed us to change that design very quickly, get people trained, not essentially stop the census. We essentially had to slow it down because we weren't sure exactly when it was going to be safe to go knocking on door to door, but we were able to do the training and all of that worked and continues to work phenomenally. >> Wonderful. Jared, I wonder if you've got any lessons learned from working with the census group that might be applicable to kind of, the broader customers out there? >> Oh, sure. Well, working with the census, you know, it was really a great group to work with. I mean, one of the few groups I worked with who have such a clear vision and understanding of what they want their final outcome to be, I think again, you know, for us the internalization of the decennial mission, right? It's so big, it's so important. I think that because we adopted it early on we felt that we were true partners with census, we had a lot of credibility with our counterparts and I think that they understood that we were in it with them together and that was really important. I would also say that, you know, because we're talking about the go Cloud solutions that we worked, you know, we also engage heavily with the AWS engineering group and in partnership with them, you know, we relied on the infrastructure event management services they offer and was able to give us a lot of great insight into our architecture and our systems and monitoring to really make us feel like we were ready for the big show when the time came. So, you know, I think for me, another lesson learned there was that, you know, the Cloud providers like AWS, they're not just a vendor, they're a partner and I think that now going forward, we'll continue to engage with those partners early and often. >> Michael the question I have for you is, you know, what would you say to your peers? What lessons did you have learned and how much of what you've done for the census, do you think it will be applicable to all those other surveys that you do in between the big 10 year surveys? >> All right. I think we have actually set a good milestone for the rest of the Census Bureau, that the modernization that the 2020 census has allowed since it is our flagship really is something that we hope we can continue through the decade and into the next census, as a matter of fact. But I think one of the big lessons learned I wanted to talk about was we have always struggled with disaster recovery. And one of the things that having the Cloud and our partners in the Cloud has helped us do is essentially take advantage of the resilience of the Cloud. So there are data centers all over the country. If ever had a downtime somewhere, we knew that we were going to be able to stay up. For the decennial census, we've never had the budget to pay for a persistent disaster recovery. And the Cloud essentially gives us that kind of capability. Jared talked a lot about security. I think we have taken our security posture to a whole different level, something that allowed us to essentially, as I said before, keep our internet self response free of hacks and breaches through this whole process and through a much longer process than we even intended to keep it open. So, there's a lot here that I think we want to bring into the next decade, a lot that we want to continue, and we want the census to essentially stay as modern as it has become for 2020. >> Well, I will tell you personally Michael, I did take the census online, it was really easy to do, and I'll definitely recommend if they haven't already, everybody listening out there so important that you participate in the census so that they have complete data. So, Michael, Jared, thank you so much. Jared, congratulations to your team for winning the award and you know, such a great customer. Michael, thank you so much for what you and your team are doing. We Appreciate all that's being done, especially in these challenging times. >> Thank you and thanks for doing the census. >> All right and stay tuned for more coverage of the AWS public sector partner award I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)