>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to the Cube's Coverage of Forward five UI Path Customer event. This is the fourth forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, had some great events. It's all about the customer stories. Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Flow Yees here. She's the director of engineering and development at dsu and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of Automation Solutions at dsu. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much. Thanks >>You to >>Be here. Tell us about dsu. You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. >>Yeah, absolutely. Dentsu, it's one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees and we're operating in a hundred plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Household names like Microsoft Factor and Gamble. If you seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry, Larry Davids ads for the crypto brand. That's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here and we really respect the creatives of our company. >>That was the best commercial, the Super Bowl by far. For sure. I, I said at the top of saying that Dave and I were talking UI pass, a cool company. You guys kinda look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell, tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah, >>Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, so what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And when we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world >>And, And Kate, what's your role? Yeah, >>And the Automation Solutions vertical that I head up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for flows, developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business businesses objectives and making sure that we route them to the right place. So is it, does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers or do we need to bring in the professional resources on flow's >>Team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak geek and wall, right? Is that fair? Okay. So take me back to the, let's, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top down? Is, is is top down required to be successful? Cuz it does feel like you can have bottom up bottoms up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? >>Yeah, we started back in 2017, very traditional top down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath. You know, going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could, that could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. You know, DSU is a young company with a lot of young, young creatives. They wanna make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey I, I need a bot to do this. I need a bot to do that i's gonna save me, you know, 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team a hundred hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in entire department, but didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020 we really introduced the citizen development program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up as well as the top down. >>So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. So >>They've grown up with the technology, they know that they can order an Uber from their phone, right? Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees. >>Yeah. Now, now the way you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, Oh you want things automated, here are the tools. Go ahead. Automated. We'll we, for those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Did I hear that right? You're, you're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. >>Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? Yeah, absolutely. >>Yeah, so I think we started out with assistant development program, obviously the huge success, right? Last year we're also here at the Cubes. We're very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot had changed and we've grown a lot since last year. One, I have the joy being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we are really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. Okay. What I mean by that is that these developer originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. >>And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region and sometimes these use cases could be very, very much, you know, small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we are now able to do is tap into a global automation pipeline. So we connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's used automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation cuz we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines. So the business is happy cuz we are delivering these high scalable solutions. We also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized and then at the same time growing our automation program. So then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities projects are being delivered at a local level and we are able to innovate at a local level. >>I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's blowing my mind >>Here. It's a whole cycle. >>So let me start with how do you, you know, one of the, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA, cuz just you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that to realize the potential of each individual, right? But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it, right? And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought, >>Right? Exactly. A lot of time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we are doing now, able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups, we really bring the diversity together. That's diversity D diverse diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem is to, and that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short-termism. So there's something, what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right? Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. >>But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back, think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar auto tools that they use. So we are really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling a project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good and then that's what we talked about at dsu, Teaming without limits. And that's a, so >>By taking, we wanna make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. Exactly. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into automation cloud, having everything that single pipeline in the cloud. Anybody at DSU can often join the automation community and get access to automation hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launchpad to go and take training. Yeah. And get started on their own automation journey as a citizen developer and you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. >>So by taking us a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now you start in 2017 really before you UI path made it's big enterprise play, it acquired process gold, you know, cloud elements now most recently referenced some others. How much of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah, >>I mean platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team. Whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at dsu, we wanna make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. You know, they're super smart technical people, they wanna do the cool shit with the new stuff. They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upscale them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work. And they don't, they, they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. >>How, how much sort of use case runway when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean where are you, if you had on a spectrum of, you know, maturity, how much more opportunity is there for DSU to automate? >>There's so much I think the, you feel >>Like it's limitless? >>No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there one thing, it's, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people so we make sure our professional developers part of our team spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing, it's also investment in our company's growth. And that's a long term goal. And overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do. And not only the use cases we are doing what we are doing as an operating model for automation. That is also something that we really value because then this is a kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing >>On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and I'm sitting here thinking they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job once they get everything automated, what are they gonna do? Right? But, but so, so it sounds like it's a never ending process, but because you guys are, are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that, is that part of your process? Yeah, >>Absolutely. Because we are such a global brand and with the automation, automation operating model, what we are able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people, but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, right, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automation before. And when they go to their security team and asking for an Okta bypass service account and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath is, why would I give you a service account for good reason, right? They're doing their job right. But what we able to do with automation model, it's to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set up standing infrastructure that we are ready to go whenever an automation's ready to deploy and we're able to get the set up standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality would delivered and making sure anything that we deployed, automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very control and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are >>The governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? >>Yeah, >>If >>You wanna talk more about, >>So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, here are the requirements like get started and go, we've prove the value of automation at Densu. We wanna make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline. And it's, it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities. It's a, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in EM for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same, you know, e r P system for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases, but that's where we wanna work with them to identify, you know, maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there, let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start, you know, working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. >>Does, does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean there are obviously budget constraints are very concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets. But where are the budgets coming from inside of dsu? Is it the business, is it the tech >>Group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group is the cause of doing business because we are here connecting people with bridging people together and really elevating. And the reason why we structure it that way, it's people, we do automation at dsu not to reduce head count, not to, you know, not, not just those matrix number that we measure, but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business. So then that way they can focus on their wellbeing and that way they can focus on the work-life balance, right? So that's what we say. We are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because DSU do prioritize people, you know, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business. So then we can get these time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. >>Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so >>Much for having us today. >>You're very welcome. All keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're live from UI path forward at five from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center. Will be right back, right for the short break.

(digital music) >> And we're back live in New York. It's theCUBE. It's not SNL, it's better than SNL. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here with about 10,000 to 12,000 folks. (John chuckles) There is a ton of energy here. There's a ton of interest in what's going on. But one of the things that we know that AWS is really well-known for is its massive ecosystem. And one of its ecosystem partners is joining us. Please welcome Domenic Ravita, the VP of Product Marketing from SingleStore. Dominic, great to have you on the program. >> Well, thank you. Glad to be here. >> It's a nice opening, wasn't it? (Lisa and John laughing) >> I love SNL. Who doesn't? >> Right? I know. So some big news came out today. >> Yes. >> Funding. Good number. Talk to us a little bit about that before we dig in to SingleStore and what you guys are doing with AWS. >> Right, yeah. Thank you. We announced this morning our latest round, 116 million. We're really grateful to our customers and our investors and the partners and employees and making SingleStore a success to go on this journey of, really, to fulfill our mission to unify and simplify modern, real time data. >> So talk to us about SingleStore. Give us the value prop, the key differentiators, 'cause obviously customers have choice. Help us understand where you're nailing it. >> SingleStore is all about, what we like to say, the moments that matter. When you have an analytical question about what's happening in the moment, SingleStore is your best way to solve that cost-effectively. So that is for, in the case of Thorn, where they're helping to protect and save children from online trafficking or in the case of True Digital, which early in the pandemic, was a company in Southeast Asia that used anonymized phone pings to identify real time population density changes and movements across Thailand to have a proactive response. So really real time data in the moment can help to save lives quite literally. But also it does things that are just good commercially that gives you an advantage like what we do with Uber to help real time pricing and things like this. >> It's interesting this data intensity happening right now. We were talking earlier on theCUBE with another guest and we said, "Why is it happening now?" The big data has been around since the dupe days. That was hard to work with, then data lakes kicked in. But we seem to be, in the past year, everyone's now aware like, "Wow, I got a lot of data." Is it the pandemic? Now we're seeing customers understand the consequences. So how do you look at that? Because is it just timing, evolution? Are they now getting it or is the technology better? Is machine learning better? What's the forces driving the massive data growth acceleration in terms of implementing and getting stuff out, done? (chuckles) >> We think it's the confluence of a lot of those things you mentioned there. First of all, we just celebrate the 15-year anniversary of the iPhone, so that is like wallpaper now. It's just faded into our daily lives. We don't even think of that as a separate thing. So there's an expectation that we all have instant information and not just for the consumer interactions, for the business interactions. That permeates everything. I think COVID with the pandemic forced everyone, every business to try to move to digital first and so that put pressure on the digital service economy to mature even faster and to be digital first. That is what drives what we call data intensity. And more generally, the economic phenomenon is the data intensive era. It's a continuous competition and game for customers. In every moment in every location, in every dimension, the more data hat you have, the better value prop you can give. And so SingleStore is uniquely positioned to and focused on solving this problem of data intensity by bringing and unifying data together. >> What's the big customer success story? Can you share any examples that highlight that? What are some cool things that are happening that can illustrate this new, I won't say bit that's been flipped, that's been happening for a while, but can you share some cutting edge customer successes? >> It's happening across a lot of industries. So I would say first in financial services, FinTech. FinTech is always at the leading edge of these kind of technology adaptions for speeds and things like that. So we have a customer named IEX Cloud and they're focused on providing real time financial data as an API. So it's a data product, API-first. They're providing a lot of historical information on instruments and that sort of thing, as well as real time trending information. So they have customers like Seeking Alpha, for instance, who are providing real time updates on massive, massive data sets. They looked at lots of different ways to do this and there's the traditional, transactionals, LTP database and then maybe if you want to scale an API like theirs, you might have a separate end-memory cache and then yet another database for analytics. And so we bring all that together and simplify that and the benefit of simplification, but it's also this unification and lower latency. Another example is GE who basically uses us to bring together lots of financial information to provide quicker close to the end-of-month process across many different systems. >> So we think about special purpose databases, you mentioned one of the customers having those. We were in the keynote this morning where AWS is like, "We have the broadest set of special purpose databases," but you're saying the industry can't afford them anymore. Why and would it make SingleStore unique in terms of what you deliver? >> It goes back to this data intensity, in that the new business models that are coming out now are all about giving you this instant context and that's all data-driven and it's digital and it's also analytical. And so the reason that's you can't afford to do this, otherwise, is data's getting so big. Moving that data gets expensive, 'cause in the cloud you pay for every byte you store, every byte you process, every byte you move. So data movement is a cost in dollars and cents. It's a cost in time. It's also a cost in skill sets. So when you have many different specialized data sets or data-based technologies, you need skilled people to manage those. So that's why we think the industry needs to be simplified and then that's why you're seeing this unification trend across the database industry and other parts of the stack happening. With AWS, I mean, they've been a great partner of ours for years since we launched our first cloud database product and their perspective is a little bit different. They're offering choice of the specialty, 'cause many people build this way. But if you're going after real time data, you need to bring it. They also offer a SingleStore as a service on AWS. We offer it that way. It's in the AWS Marketplace. So it's easily consumable that way. >> Access to real time data is no longer a nice-to-have for any company, it's table stakes. We saw that especially in the last 20 months or so with companies that needed to pivot so quickly. What is it about SingleStore that delivers, that you talked about moments that matter? Talk about the access to real time data. How that's a differentiator as well? >> I think businesses need to be where their customers are and in the moments their customers are interacting. So that is the real time business-driver. As far as technology wise, it's not easy to do this. And you think about what makes a database fast? A major way of what makes it fast is how you store the data. And so since 2014, when we first released this, what Gartner called at the time, hybrid transaction/analytical processing or HTAP, where we brought transactional data and analytical data together. Fast forward five years to 2019, we released this innovation called Universal Storage, which does that in a single unified table type. Why that matters is because, I would say, basically cost efficiency and better speed. Again, because you pay for the storage and you pay for the movement. If you're not duplicating that data, moving it across different stores, you're going to have a better experience. >> One of the things you guys pioneered is unifying workloads. You mentioned some of the things you've done. Others are now doing it. Snowflake, Google and others. What does that mean for you guys? I mean, 'cause are they copying you? Are they trying to meet the functionality? >> I think. >> I mean, unification. I mean, people want to just store things and make it, get all the table stakes, check boxes, compliance, security and just keep coding and keep building. >> We think it's actually great 'cause they're validating what we've been seeing in the market for years. And obviously, they see that it's needed by customers. And so we welcome them to the party in terms of bringing these unified workloads together. >> Is it easy or hard? >> It's a difficult thing. We started this in 2014. And we've now have lots of production workloads on this. So we know where all the production edge cases are and that capability is also a building block towards a broader, expansive set of capabilities that we've moved onto that next phase and tomorrow actually we have an event called, The Real Time Data Revolution, excuse me, where we're announcing what's in that new product of ours. >> Is that a physical event or virtual? >> It's a virtual event. >> So we'll get the URL on the show notes, or if you know, just go to the new site. >> Absolutely. SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution, you'll find it. >> Can you tease us with the top three takeaways from Revolution tomorrow? >> So like I said, what makes a database fast? It's the storage and we completed that functionality three years ago with Universal Storage. What we're now doing for this next phase of the evolution is making enterprise features available and Workspaces is one of the foundational capabilities there. What SingleStore Workspaces does is it allows you to have this isolation of compute between your different workloads. So that's often a concern to new users to SingleStore. How can I combine transactions and analytics together? That seems like something that might be not a good thing. Well, there are multiple ways we've been doing that with resource governance, workload management. Workspaces offers another management capability and it's also flexible in that you can scale those workloads independently, or if you have a multi-tenant application, you can segment your application, your customer tenant workloads by each workspace. Another capability we're releasing is called Wasm, which is W-A-S-M, Web Assembly. This is something that's really growing in the open source community and SingleStore's contributing to that open source scene, CF project with WASI and Wasm. Where it's been mentioned mostly in the last few years has been in the browser as a more efficient way to run code in the browser. We're adapting that technology to allow you to run any language of your choice in the database and why that's important, again, it's for data movement. As data gets large in petabyte sizes, you can't move it in and out of Pandas in Python. >> Great innovation. That's real valuable. >> So we call this Code Engine with Wasm and- >> What do you call it? >> Code Engine Powered by Wasm. >> Wow. Wow. And that's open source? >> We contribute to the Wasm open source community. >> But you guys have a service that you- >> Yes. It's our implementation and our database. But Wasm allows you to have code that's portable, so any sort of runtime, which is... At release- >> You move the code, not the data. >> Exactly. >> With the compute. (chuckles) >> That's right, bring the compute to the data is what we say. >> You mentioned a whole bunch of great customer examples, GE, Uber, Thorn, you talked about IEX Cloud. When you're in customer conversations, are you dealing mostly with customers that are looking to you to help replace an existing database that was struggling from a performance perspective? Or are you working with startups who are looking to build a product on SingleStore? Is it both? >> It is a mix of both. I would say among SaaS scale up companies, their API, for instance, is their product or their SaaS application is their product. So quite literally, we're the data engine and the database powering their scale to be able to sign that next big customer or to at least sleep at night to know that it's not going to crash if they sign that next big costumer. So in those cases, we're mainly replacing a lot of databases like MySQL, Postgre, where they're typically starting, but more and more we're finding, it's free to start with SingleStore. You can run it in production for free. And in our developer community, we see a lot of customers running in that way. We have a really interesting community member who has a Minecraft server analytics that he's building based on that SingleStore free tier. In the enterprise, it's different, because there are many incumbent databases there. So it typically is a case where there is a, maybe a new product offering, they're maybe delivering a FinTech API or a new SaaS digital offering, again, to better participate in this digital service economy and they're looking for a better price performance for that real time experience in the app. That's typically the starting point, but there are replacements of traditional incumbent databases as well. >> How has the customer conversation evolved the last couple of years? As we talked about, one of the things we learned in the pandemic was access to real time data and those moments that matter isn't a nice-to-have anymore for businesses. There was that force march to digital. We saw the survivors, we're seeing the thrivers, but want to get your perspective on that. From the customers, how has the conversation evolved or elevated, escalated within an organization as every company has to be a data company? >> It really depends on their business strategy, how they are adapting or how they have adapted to this new digital first orientation and what does that mean for them in the direct interaction with their customers and partners. Often, what it means is they realize that they need to take advantage of using more data in the customer and partner interaction and when they come to those new ideas for new product introductions, they find that it's complicated and expensive to build in the old way. And if you're going to have these real time interactions, interactive applications, APIs, with all this context, you're going to have to find a better, more cost-effective approach to get that to market faster, but also not to have a big sprawling data-based technology infrastructure. We find that in those situations, we're replacing four or five different database technologies. A specialized database for key value, a specialized database for search- >> Because there's no unification before? Is that one of the reasons? >> I think it's an awareness thing. I think technology awareness takes a little bit of time, that there's a new way to do things. I think the old saying about, "Don't pave cow paths when the car..." You could build a straight road and pave it. You don't have to pave along the cow path. I think that's the natural course of technology adaption and so as more- >> And the- pandemic, too, highlighted a lot of the things, like, "Do we really need that?" (chuckles) "Who's going to service that?" >> That's right. >> So it's an awakening moment there where it's like, "Hey, let's look at what's working." >> That's right. >> Double down on it. >> Absolutely. >> What are you excited about new round of funding? We talked about, obviously, probably investments in key growth areas, but what excites you about being part of SingleStore and being a partner of AWS? >> SingleStore is super exciting. I've been in this industry a long time as an engineer and an engineering leader. At the time, we were MemSQL, came into SingleStore. And just that unification and simplification, the systems that I had built as a system engineer and helped architect did the job. They could get the speed and scale you needed to do track and trace kinds of use cases in real time, but it was a big trade off you had to make in terms of the complexity, the skill sets you needed and the cost and just hard to maintain. What excites me most about SingleStore is that it really feels like the iPhone moment for databases because it's not something you asked for, but once your friend has it and shows it to you, why would you have three different devices in your pocket with a flip phone, a calculator? (Lisa and Domenic chuckles) Remember these days? >> Yes. >> And a Blackberry pager. (all chuckling) You just suddenly- >> Or a computer. That's in there. >> That's right. So you just suddenly started using iPhone and that is sort of the moment. It feels like we're at it in the database market where there's a growing awareness and those announcements you mentioned show that others are seeing the same. >> And your point earlier about the iPhone throwing off a lot of data. So now you have data explosions at levels that unprecedented, we've never seen before and the fact that you want to have that iPhone moment, too, as a database. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. >> The other part of your question, what excites us about AWS. AWS has been a great partner since the beginning. I mean, when we first released our database, it was the cloud database. It was on AWS by customer demand. That's where our customers were. That's where they were building other applications. And now we have integrations with other native services like AWS Glue and we're in the Marketplace. We've expanded, that said we are a multi-cloud system. We are available in any cloud of your choice and on premise and in hybrid. So we're multi-cloud, hybrid and SaaS distribution. >> Got it. All right. >> Got it. So the event is tomorrow, Revolution. Where can folks go to register? What time does it start? >> 1:00 PM Eastern and- >> 1:00 PM. Eastern. >> Just Google SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution and you'll find it. Love for everyone to join us. >> All right. We look forward to it. Domenic, thank you so much for joining us, talking about SingleStore, the value prop, the differentiators, the validation that's happening in the market and what you guys are doing with AWS. We appreciate it. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Domenic Ravita and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from New York at AWS Summit 22. John and I are going to be back after a short break, so come back. (digital pulsing music)

>>Yeah. Hello. Welcome to the Cubes International Women's Showcase, featuring International Women's Day. I'm John for your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. And we have three great guests videoing in from Kuala Lumpur as well as Bangkok. Johann Kwa, group CEO of K s K Group. It's just a Christina Equal, co founder and head of K s, K C Labs and Cindy, co founder of Sunday Insurance in Bangkok. Ladies. Thanks for coming on the cue. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks for Thanks for joining me on this special day. >>Thank you. Thank you so much. You >>guys are three sisters, trailblazing and the insurance and real estate through digital transformation in the cloud taking a three decade old family business to the next level raising the bar, as they say in the cloud business. Congratulations. Tell us how it all started. What's going on now? What does it look like? Where did it come from? Tell the Storey. >>Okay, so maybe I'll start, Uh, you know, since I'm at the group CEO level. So, um, as a quick introduction, you know? Okay. SK group, uh, were about 30 years old now, as a group three decades. Um, we started off as an insurance, uh, nonlife insurance company. Um, and then over the years, um, you know, we we operate in in South East Asia, So we are based in the US and markets. That message is also sitting in, um, and very quickly over the years, you know, we decided to actually venture into property development as well. Um, and really across the journey. Um, you know, we we've always been very, um, obsessed over the customers. You know, uh, and, you know, during this time and age, you know, all the customers are really digital natives now, and and, you know, the tech is very, very interesting. And so So starting in the year of 2017, we decided, um, to actually venture. Cindy and I at least we decided to start up our own, uh, tech, uh, called Sunday. Uh, Cindy is now the full time CEO and co founders. Um, and, you know, uh, it's an exciting journey from then on, uh, where now The first full stack ensure attack in in the whole of of the Asian market, uh, starting off in Thailand. Um, And then when Christine came back, to join the business. You know, since we were already in real estate, we decided, taking on from the inspiration of what we did with Sunday, how about we do the same in in in property? Because we obviously saw, you know, there was super loads of opportunities that we could we could we could do. And and a year ago, we gave birth to cast a city lapse. Um, now a prop tech company based in Malaysia. >>Christine and Cindy tell the storey here because this is actually fascinating. Storey, your sisters, your entrepreneurial. So you know each other? You're related and you've got ups and downs with the startups and growing companies changing landscape. A lot of challenges. You all gotta get along all the time. How's it going? What's it like? Mm. >>Maybe I'll start. I think I think for me I'm probably the newest addition to the trio in the, you know, working together kind of space. So for me, I think it's all about really learning how to, you know, separate your professional and personal life. And like you mentioned, you know, we live together. But we also work together. So for me, I think I took a >>lot of advice >>and direction. Um, both from Johann and, >>uh, help >>me a lot. Um, so So I think that's been my experience. Been great So far, Um, they've been really, really supportive. And I think going through this journey of, you know, like, founding a company together, it's obviously very challenging. And so I feel very fortunate to have two sisters who have already gone through it once, you know? >>So for the other guests is trying to get on the cube here. Over there. Um, sounds like fun. Uh, Christine. So on the city labs, you gotta cheque side of it there in the in the property tech. That's exciting. How's it going over there? >>Uh, super, Super cool. Super fun. Uh, has been one heck of a journey building a company from scratch, let alone in tech. I think you know, we created K s K C d lives because we really wanted to modernise the real estate industry, uh, and create, like, super transformative solutions, uh, many for two reasons. You know, one is to improve the quality of life, um, of the community around us. Uh, and secondly, really to harness all the technology and this unused data right in the real estate industry. And try and say, how can we use that to make more intelligent business decisions? Yeah, so So really, Um, I guess for us, it's been really exciting because we've launched two products. Uh, you know, one of which is Ai driven, dynamic pricing engine. And we realised that actually, the way that homes are priced today, uh, in real estate is super RK right? You only use a few basic variables. Like, how big is your house? What views do you have? But then we realised that, actually hey, with a I where you suddenly can use, like, hundreds of variables, um, and even, you know, consisting of wellness variables, for example. Um, and you can really customise pricing all the way down to a single unit level. Uh, and we realise that by doing this, we could actually unlock, um, ferret prices for our customers while also constantly kind of tracking the financial health of the company. >>Awesome. Cindy, I wanna get you in here. A co founder, Sunday Insurance. That was the origination. But a lot of change data drives everything machine learning. You gotta have the state of the art. What's going on with you? >>Yeah, I think for us, essentially, uh, we're operating in a very old industry. Um, it's one of the oldest industries globally. And if you look at the entire insurance value chain, um, every part of the process can actually, it's all about data. You can. It can be disrupted. Um, but yet every inch of the value chain is also regulated. So I think essentially what we're trying to do is, um, we're trying to really innovate the customer journey. So imagine if, um, even in the States now and even coming back to Asia, a lot of how people buy insurance is still very face to face agency. But I think in the future is going to be remote online on your app, through any partners as well. So I think, uh, we're trying to adopt any machine learning to really scale and automate, uh, the journey of anyone who's trying to buy insurance. But at the same time for insurance companies were also trying to help them automate that function itself. So imagine if banks are trying to dish out loans and you're trying to predict. What's the credit risk of every, um, single customer? That's exactly what insurance company needs to do as well. Um, And I guess insurance is all about buying a service as well. >>It's unlike you >>know, I'm gonna buy an apple. It comes to the hardware, >>right? So we're >>selling a service. So essentially you're service has to also dramatically changed. And I think these days, especially when we're operating in, uh, Thailand, Indonesia is one of the highest adoption rates for mobile these days. Everyone does. Everything lives on on the apps. So, um, insurance companies also needs to really on board their journey on that as well as increased engagement. So I don't just want to be an insurance company where, um, I speak to you and I have an issue with my claim. I want to really build a relationship with you and engage you differently. So I think it's actually that's the mission for a Sunday. So I think Imagine if imagine an insurance company 50 years in the future. How would it be? Uh, that's our mission. >>This is a great example. You guys, First of all, you're very dynamic. Thanks for sharing your storey. But when you get into the tech here, if industries that are transforming because of the digital transformation, the consumers expect the apps. You guys, as co founders and entrepreneurs now running this big business have to meet the demands and leverage the technology. How have you done that? How are you guys manage that? What kinds of decisions have you made? And you share some either experiences or observations of how to navigate and how you're riding that wave. >>Yeah. So I think if you hear from what Cindy and Christine has just mentioned, I mean, uh, we were playing in, you know, two of the oldest and largest industries in the world. Real estate and insurance. And, uh, you know, in both industries, as I said earlier, you know, it's really all about the customers, right? Um you know, in in the past, we used to think of of businesses as you know, what's your vertical and the horizontal today? Um, at least four k s k and and and all the all these, um, you know, tech ventures that we are now venture building. We're really thinking about it from the customer land. So really thinking about it from a customer ecosystem perspective. So instead of, you know, creating products and and having that push out to the customers, you know, we use tech and data and and especially data today and the right amount of data and what type of data that we want understanding that and really, um, building that product and really the services, uh, for the customers. So once you know the customer enters our ecosystem, whether you know, in your real estate, um, ecosystem or whether it's in your insurance ecosystem, we want you to to continue to stay with us, um, and to trust us. Um, and so it's not just about selling you a product, but really, you know, like, what Cindy says building a relationship with you because we think that, you know, obviously you know when insurance is something you really need when when when things go wrong in your life, we don't only want to be there. When things go wrong in your life and for real estate, you know everybody needs a shelter. So so so that's why we think that building relationships are very important and from really true, that lands is when you really think about the ecosystem and you think about data. I think Cindy Increasing gave some examples of how we're approaching it. Um, a lot of people start from from from a, you know, from a traditional business and from within. But for us, um, we decided to actually take it outside. Um, and, you know, take the approach of venture building from a startup, um, but really have, on the back end, really have that Connexion to the core businesses. Because what the core businesses understand is, you know, lifetime and experience of how customers feel and and, you know, um, in insurance, it's really about how to run a financial institution in real estate is really how to build buildings, and that is something that we can't take away. But, you know, you use technology to enable and to power. But what venture and start ups do extremely well is really the way we are extremely nimble and the way you use tech and data to navigate the quick changes of customer demands. And and you know, one thing an app and it's all about quick iterations. Right? When you build a super app, how do you incorporate all the features that are coming in, you have to keep on, you know, iterating changing, innovating, um, and innovating small with quick wins and then taking on a larger scale. And so the way we position ourselves is when you have to start up and you combine that with the core. Um, and putting the two together is how, how, how we look at things and that four minutes, the whole ecosystem >>that's awesome and being agile as fast and speed is key if you want to be there. Startup. But at the core business, that's going kind of slow. You got to kind of make everything go faster. That's a great, great insight. Let's talk about the disruption of the property industry again. That's real estate now with the Internet of things, technologies and also people expect technology. They wanna have access. I don't wanna have all these passwords and, you know they want to have easy in and out. They want good efficiency, save money. What's the disruption angle on? Um, the property neck. Christine, what's your How do you see that? The big disruption going? >>Yeah. So I think as Johann already mentioned before, you know um I think our customers we know are becoming, um, digital natives. Right? And they expect very convenient lifestyles. And we're all about our customers. So, actually, that's why we launched also another product, right where we're taking all of these things that you just mentioned, you know, about Iot into account. So what we found is, um, that actually, today, um, you know, the village about real estate is that we all live through that life as well, so we can experience that. Uh, we found that residents today, um, they find it quite challenging to request, you know, basic services like housekeeping managing, um, their defects, their tenants. Um, you know, even the financial planning and even getting into the building, right, they want more convenience. Um, but we realised that actually, all these services in the real estate industry right now and even in the prop tech space, they are very, very segmented. They're all discussed across multiple different apps. So what we really try to do is hey, let's try and consolidate all of this into one single app, which we have done, which is really cool, And it helps our residents really stay engaged and connected with our property. Um, what we did also was on the Iot front. We we were actually the first developer in Malaysia to also integrate, You know, future proof solutions like remote lift calling as well, um, into the mobile app. And that's to really go like, push on the Iot front. For us as well. >>Must be great for retention. It's all the gadgets are built into the of course. You have good WiFi fibre in their everyone's got good band with >>for sure >>It's like water and plumbing. Uh, I'd like to get everyone everyone loves that. I gotta ask Now, on the on the on the on The disruption is great. Now you've got the clouds, the clouds here for actually Amazon. You guys are big customer because you guys can move fast and they do all the heavy lifting. How are you guys seeing that helped modernise in the industry of insurance? Because that's a big vertical for a W s and you guys are doing is Cindy. What is the What is the modernisation? Um, half that you guys have taken with a W s. >>Yeah, sure. So I think essentially, for insurance, it's a product development. And when we talk about product development means, um how do you price, um, every certain individual or company very differently, right, Because everyone has very different risks surrounding them. Uh, currently, what we face is that it's a flat pricing fixed pricing. Um, and it's not really personalised to you. If you are a very good behaviour and safe kind of customer, it doesn't translate to any premium savings for you. Um, so I think, uh, part of insurance is to give, for example, affordable access to health care. But if your premiums isn't sustainable for health insurance, then it doesn't really need the point. So, uh, for Sunday, like, how we're trying to trying to do it differently is, for example, we use some AWS cloud solutions and AWS Lambda too, really power our machine learning Savalas and Cloud infrastructure. So, for example, uh, Sunday we are a serious bee companies sober and the growth stage. So at any point in time, we need to ensure that our infrastructure is able to support a huge spike in transaction volume, and we're working with large scale partners like telcos, e commerce companies, or even within our organic channels. So our AI machine learning risk prediction model, which is basically, um, powering our premium pricing engines whenever there's any requests coming in front of the Web for foreign quotation. For example, if someone wants to buy health insurance, um, it can go up and spike. But also, the data model is actually pricing, uh, processing billions of calculations, ingesting a lot of data points. Uh, it needs to do that within seconds, so yeah, I think a w s. We've been using it from day one since we launched. It's been, uh, helping us on >>that and make it go faster. That's the big thing. I gotta ask you when you guys have this family business now, three decades, you got a lot going on extending that legacy and sustaining the family legacy. I love the Storey. So who decides whether to do the startup and you guys draw straws? Is that you guys flip a coin? You gotta who runs the big business? How do you guys decide that? Mm. >>Um, maybe I'll >>I >>would say maybe it came very naturally to us. Really? I guess Here we don't have to disclose. Our age is a little bit, so I mean, I mean, we all actually the background and really all three of us. Before we came into the family business, we were all working professionals in very different fields. I was a I was in banking. Cindy was a lawyer, and Christine was a a doctor, actually, Um um, but, you know, I came back first. I'm the eldest, so after, you know, walking outside and looking into the family business. So I came back first, and and And from there, I took over the insurance business and looking at it, it was a very lonely place to be. So, um, you know, after a couple of years of Cindy being a professional life, you know, we said, Hey, would you like to come back? And let's, uh, take a different journey with insurance and see how we can build something different? Uh, since we know a lot about insurance, but let's make make make a difference and and and, you know, be sustainable, but also evolve over time and show the world that insurance is actually pretty sexy, actually. Um, and then, you know, Christine saw the fund that the two of us were having, uh, already started building a real estate on on my end. Uh, and then, uh, she came back. And, you know, we have a conversation, and we said, Look, looking at you know what we're doing in Sunday? You know, building pricing engines and being able to price to a single customer level. Um, we saw that opportunity in real estate, and, uh so I asked her. I said, Look, would you like to do this? You know, because I think there is something cool. Um, the three of us can band together and still inspire each other share ideas across each other. That's an opportunity that a lot of people don't get right. I mean, to all these industries in the world being able to cross share ideas. Uh, and sometimes inspirations and ideas don't come from the same industry. Uh, and so I think. And that's how we started. Really, John, it's not. Maybe we're lucky, and we should be grateful for >>that. You're all power women. I love the storey, and it is good that you come together, and I think the entrepreneurial kind of twist makes it more fun. But not everyone is cut out with the entrepreneurship, but it also gives you more risk management. You can. You can go after opportunities I love. I love the strategy there. You guys are great leaders. Any advice for other aspiring women leaders and entrepreneurs out there who want to make a difference? Make an impact? The world is. Change is getting better for everyone. And and again, entrepreneurial could be in big companies and also big companies doing startups. There's a whole new world. What advice would you guys give other aspiring women leaders? Okay, >>I'll keep it short from my end. I think for me it's about really following your passion following your ambition. And lastly, I think not to try and not feel like you need to conform to any gender stereotypes because I think in male dominated industries such as real estate, our are attack. I think people might have some ideas about you know what a what a tech leader or what a real estate leader might have to look like. But you don't have to conform to that. So that's probably my advice. Uh, >>yeah, I I fully agree with Chris right there. I think, um, gender isn't an issue here. If you have a passion and you identify, there is a market opportunity that you can, you know, you can really do something about it. Just just pursue it. I think most importantly, if you ever want to be an entrepreneur and start your own business or your own, start up. Uh, so long as you have the confidence, I think you're you're good to go. Um, there's a lot of talk out that that or, you know, um, women led start ups are not >>attracting >>funds, but we haven't faced that anyway. In this part of Asia, I think there's a lot of, um, I think it attracts even more attention. If you're a woman in a male dominated that industry like, hey, then you know it's it's quite unique. So I think you have a strength there, and I think there's a lot of diverse talent out there. Um, post pandemic. A lot of people are looking for changes as well, so I think it is a lot of a lot of opportunity out there. >>Yeah, Joanne, you know, you know, the thing is with cloud computing, it's a level centre. It really because if you can come together, whether it's sisters like you guys, powerful sisters and professional experience coming together leverage technology to re factor old industries. It's all about the numbers and the performance. At the end of the day, you know, you move faster and you take territory and beat the competition. >>Ultimate >>the ultimate uh, leveller. Well, congratulations. You guys are great. Thanks for coming on The Cube Sisters. You guys are amazing. Great Storey Love it. Thanks for coming out and celebrating International Women's Day feature today as part of our international women's showcase here in the Cube. Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>Okay. The Cubes International Women's showcase Going on all year, this time featuring International Women's Day The big celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching. Mm mm

>>mhm >>Hello welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo alto California and john for with the cube we had a great conversation around the rise of the cloud and the massive opportunities and challenges around analytics data ai suggestion. Air ceo of thought spot is here with me for conversation. Great to see you. Welcome back to the cube. How are you? >>Well john it is so good to be back. I wish that we could do one of those massive set up that you have and do this face to face but zoom is not bad. >>You guys are doing very well. We have been covering you guys been covering the progress um great technology enabled business. You're on the wave of this cloud analytics you're seeing, we've seen massive changes and structural changes for the better. It's a tailwind for anyone in the cloud data business. And you also on the backdrop of all that the Covid and now the covid is looking at coming out of covid with growth strategies. People are building modern or modernizing their infrastructure and data is not just a department, it's everywhere. You guys are in the middle of this. Take us through what's the update on thought spot. What are you guys doing? What do you see the market right now? Honestly, delta variants coming coming strong but we think will be out of this soon. Where where are >>we look I think it all starts with the users like you said the consumers are demanding more and more from the business they are interacting with. You're no longer happy with being served like uh I'm gonna put you all in a bucket and then Delaware services to you. Everyone's like look look at me, I have likes and dislikes that is probably going to be different from someone that you think are similar to me. So unless you get to know me and deliver bespoke services to me, I'm gonna go somewhere else who does that And the call that the way you do that is through the data that I'm giving to you. So the worst thing you can do is to take my data and still treat me like an average and numbers and what's happening with the cloud is that it is now possible and it wasn't okay. So I grew up in India where newspapers will always have stock market summary on like one full page full of takers and prices and the way it used to work is that you wake up in the morning you look at the newspaper, I don't know if you have had the same thing and then you call your broker is based on in place of that. Can you imagine doing that now? I mean the information is at your fingertips. Hurricane IDa either is actually going to enter in Louisiana somewhere. What good is it? Yesterday morning state on this morning state if I'm trying to make a decision on whether I should pack my stuff and move away or you know finding to from home depot supply chain manager. I shouldn't figure out what should I be doing for Louisiana in the next two days, this is all about the information that's available to you. If you plan to use it and deliver better services for your consumer cloud makes it possible. >>You know, it's interesting you mentioned that the old way things were it seems so slow, then you got the 15 minute quotes, then there's now a real time. Everything has to be real time. And clearly there's two major things happening at the same time which makes exciting the business model and the competitive advantages for leaders and business to use data is critical but also on the developer side where apps are being developed if you don't have the data access, the machine learning won't work well. So as machine learning becomes really courted driving ai this modern analytics cloud product that you guys announced brings to bear kind of two major lifts the developer app modernization as well as competitive advantage for the companies that need to deploy this. So you guys have announced this modern approach analytics cloud, so to speak. What are some of the challenges that companies are having? Because you gotta, if you hit both of those you're gonna right a lot of value. What are some of the challenges for people who want to do this modern cloud? >>I think the challenge is basically all inside in the company. If you ask companies why are they failing to modernize? They will point to what's inside, it's not outside the technology is there the stack is the vendors are there, It is sometimes lack of courage at the leadership level which is a huge problem. I'll give an example. Uh, we have recently announced what we call thoughts part everywhere, which is our way of looking at how to modernize and bring the data inside that you're looking forward to where you are because Lord knows we all have enough apps on our Octa or a single sign on. The last thing you need is one more how no matter how good it is, they don't want to log into yet under their tool, whether it's thought spot or not. But the insights that you are talking about needs to be there when you need. And the difference is uh, the fundamental approach of data analytics was built on embedded model. You know what we are proposing is what we call data apps. So the difference between data apps and the typical dashboard being embedded into your analytics model is sort of like think of it. Uh newspapers telephones and the gap in between. So there is newspapers radio that is walkie talkie and telephone. They're all different and newspapers get printed and it comes to you and you read in the morning, you can talk back to it, you can drag and drop, you can change it right walkie talkies on the other hand, you know, you could have one conversation then come back to that. Whereas phone, you can have true direction conversation? They're all different if you think of embedding it is sort of like the newspaper, the information that you can't talk back. So somebody resembling something that came out monday, you're going to a board meeting on Wednesday and you look at that and make decisions. That is not enough in the new world, you just can't do that. It's not about what a lot of tools can actually answer what the real magic the real value for customers are unlocked when you ask three subsequent questions and answer them and they will come down to when you hear what you have to know. So what? Right and then what if and then the last is what next Imagine you can answer those three questions every business person every time no matter how powerful the dashboard is, they will always have the next question. What? So what? Okay the business customers are turning so what is it good, is it bad? Is it normal or the next question is like now what what do I do with it two, the ability to take all these three questions so what and what a fun. Now what? That requires true interactivity, you know, start with an intent and with an action and that is what we are actually proposing with the data apps which is only possible if you're sitting on top of a snowflake or red shift kind of really powerful and massive cloud data warehouse where the data comes and moves with agility. >>So how has this cloud data model rewritten the rules of business? Because what you're bringing up is essentially now full interactivity really getting in, getting questions that are iterating and building on context to each other. But with all this massive cloud data, people are really excited by this. How is it changing business than the rules of business? >>Yeah. So think about, I mean topical things like there is a hurricane able to enter, hit the cost of the United States. It's a moving target. No one knows exactly where it is going to be. There is only 15 models from here. 10, 10 models from Europe that's going to predict which way it's going to take every millimeter change in that map is going to have significant consequences for lives and resources and money. Right. This is true for every business. What cloud does this? Uh you have your proprietary data for example, let's say you're a bank and you have proprietary data, you're launching a new product And the propriety data was 2025 extremely valuable. But what what's not proprietary but what is available to you? Which could make that data so much more relevant if you layer them on top census data, this was a census here. The census data is updated. Do you not want that vaccination leader? We clearly know that purchasing power parity will vary based on vaccinations and county by county. But is that enough? You need to have street by street is county data enough. If you're going to open startup, Mr Starbucks? No, you probably want to know much more granular data. You wanna know traffic. Is the traffic picking up business usually an office space where people are not coming to office or is it more of a shopping mall where people are still showing all of these data is out there for you? What cloud is making it possible? Unlike the old era where you know, your data is an SFP oracle or carry later in your data center, it's available for you with a matter of clicks. What thought sport modern analytics. Cloud is a simple thing. We are the front end to bring all of this data and make sense of it. You can sit on top of any cloud data and then interact with a complete sort of freedom without compromising on security, compliance or relevance. And what happens is the analysts, the people who are responsible for bringing the data and then making sure that it is secure and delivered. They are no longer doing incremental in chart updates and dashboard updates. What they're doing is solving business problems, business people there freely interacting and making bigger decisions. That actually adds value to their consumers. This is what your customers are looking for, your users are looking for and if you're not doing it, your competitor will do that. So this is why cloud is not a choice for you. It's not an option for you. It is the only way and if you fail to take that back the other way is taking the world out of a cliff. >>Yeah, that's I love it. But I want to get this uh topic of thoughts about anywhere, but I want to just close out on this whole idea of modern cloud scale analytics. What technology under the hood do you guys see that customers should pay attention to with thought spot and in general because the scale there. So is it just machine learning? We hear data lakes, you know, you know different configurations of that. Machine learning is always thrown around like a buzzword. What new technology capability should every executive by your customer look for when it comes to really doing analytics, modern in the cloud >>analytics has to be near real time, Which means what two things speed at scale, make sure it's complex, it can deal with complexity in data structure. Data complexity is a huge problem. Now imagine doing that at scale and then delivering with performance. That means you have to rethink Look Tableau grew out of excellent worksheets that is the market leader, it is a $40 billion dollar market with the largest company having only a billion dollars in revenue. This is a massive place where the problems need to be solved differently. So the underlying technology to me are like I said, these three things, number one cannot handle the cloud scale, you will have hundreds of billions of rows of data that you brought. But when you talk about social media sentiment of customers, analysis of traffic and weather patterns, all of these publicly available valuable data. We're talking trillions of rows of data. So that is scale. Now imagine complexity. So financial sector for example, there is health care where you know some data is visible, some data is not visible, some some is public assumption not or you have to take credit data and let it on top of your marketing data. So it becomes more complex. And the last is when you answer ask a question, can you deliver with absolute confidence that you're giving the right answer With extremely high performance and to do that you have to rebuild the entire staff. You cannot take your, you know, stack that was built in 1990s and so now we can do search So search that is built for these three things with the machine learning and ai essentially helping at every step of the way so that you're not throwing all this inside directly to a human, throw it to a i engine and the ai engine curates what is relevant to you, showing it to you. And then based on your interaction with that inside, I improve my own logic so that the next interaction, the next situation is going to be significantly better. My point is you cannot take a triple a map and then try to act like this google maps. One is built presuming and zoom out and learn from you. The other one is built to give you rich information but doesn't talk back. So the staff has to be fundamentally rebuilt for the club. That's what he's doing. >>I love I love to buy direction. I love the interactivity. This topic of thought spot everywhere, which you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned data apps which by the way I love that concept. I want to do a drill down on that. Uh I saw data marketplace is coming somewhat working but I think it's going to get it better. I love that idea of an app um, and using as developers but you also mentioned embedded analytics. You made a comment about that. So I gotta ask you what's the difference between data apps and embedded analytics? >>Embedded analytics means that uh you know the dashboards that you love but the one that doesn't talk back to you is going to be available inside the app that you built for your other So if a supply chain app that was built by let's say accenture inside that you haven't had your dashboard without logging into tablet. Great. But what you do, what's the big deal? It is the same thing. My point is like I said every time a business user sees a chart. The questions are going to come up. The next 10 question is where the values on earth for example on Yelp imagine if you will piece about I'm hungry. I want to find a restaurant and it says go to this burrito place. It doesn't work like that. It's not good enough. The reason why yell towards is because I start with an intent. I'm hungry. Okay show me all restaurants. Okay I haven't had about it for a while. Let me see the photos. Let me read the reviews. Let me see if my friends have eaten, let me see some menu. Can I walk there? I do all of this but just what underneath it. There is a rich set of data that probably helped have their own secret source and reviews and then you have google map powering some of them. But I don't care all of that is coming together to deliver a seamless experience that satisfies my hunger. Which will be very different from if you use the same map at the same place you might go to an italian place. I go to bed right. That is the power of a data app in business people are still sitting with this. I am hungry. I gotta eat burrito. That's not how it should be in the new world. A business user should have the freedom to add exactly what the customers require looking for and solve that problem without delay. That means every application should be power and enriched with the data where you can interact and customized. That is not something that enterprise customers are actually used to and to do that you need like I said a I and search powering like the google map underneath it, but you need an app like a yelp like app, that's what we deliver. So for example, uh just last week we delivered a service now app on snowflake. You know, it just changes the game. You are thinking about customer cases. You're a large company, you have support coming from Philippines and India some places the quality is good. Some places bad dashboards are not good enough saying that okay, 17% of our customers are unhappy but we are good. That's not the world we live in. That is the tyranny of >>average, >>17% were unhappy. You got to solve for them. >>You mentioned snowflake and they had their earnings. David and I were commenting about how some of the analysts got it all wrong. And you bring up a really good point that kind of highlights the real trend. Not so much how many new customers they got. But there do what customers are doing more. Right? So, so what's happening is that you're starting to see with data apps, it does imply Softwares in there because it's it's application. So the software wrapping around data. This is interesting because people that are using the snowflakes of the world and thought spot your software and your platform, they're doing more with data. So it's not so much. I use snowflake, I use snowflake now I'm going to do more with it. That's the scale kicking. So this is an opportunity to look at that more equation. How do you talk >>with >>when you see that? Because that's the real thing is like, okay, that's I bought software as a service. But what's the more that's happening? What do you see >>that is such an important point? Even I haven't thought about it that john but you're absolutely right. That is sometimes people think of snowflake is taking care of it and no. Yeah, yes, Sarah later used to store once and zeros and they're moving it into club. That is not the point. Like I said, marketplace as an example when you are opening it up for for example, bringing the entire world's data with one click accessible to you securely. That is something you couldn't do on number two. You can have like 100 suppliers and all of a sudden you can now take a single copy of data and then make it available to all of them without actually creating multiple copies and control it differently. That's not something without cloudy, potentially could do. So things like that are fundamentally different. It is much more than like one plus one equals two. It is one plus one is 33. Like our view is that when you are re platform ng like that, you have to think from customer first. What does the customer do? The customer care that you meant from Entre into cloud or event from Teradata snowflake. No, they will care if their lives are better. Are they able to get better services are able to get it faster. That's what it is. So to me it is very simple. The destiny of an insight or data information is action, right? Imagine you're driving a car and if your car updates the gas tank every monday morning, imagine how you know, stressful your life will be for the whole week. I have to wait until next monday wanting to figure out what, whether I have enough gas or not, that's not the new world, that information is there, you need to have it real time and act on it. If you go through the Tesla you realize now that you know, I'm never worried about mileage because it is going to take me to the supercharger because it knows what I need to get to, it knows how long it is going to be, how bad the traffic is. It is synthesizing all of that to give me peace of mind. >>So this is a great >>conversation. That's a >>great question. It's a great conversation because it's really kind of brings in kind of what's happening, you see successful companies that are working with cloud scale and data like you're talking about, it's you get in there, you get the data, the data apps and all of a sudden you hit it, you hit the value equation and it's like almost like discovering oil all of a sudden you have a gusher and then people just see massive increase in value. It's not like the outcome, it's kind of there, you've got to kind of get in there and this is the scale piece and you see people having strategies to do that, they say okay we're gonna get in there, we're going to use the data to iterate but also watch the data learn where's that value, This is that more trend and and there's a successful of the developing. So I have to ask you when you, when you talk about people and culture, um that's not the way it used to be, used to be like okay I'm buying an outcome. I deployed some software mechanisms and at the end of the day there's some value there. Maybe I write it off maybe I, you know, overtime charges and some accounting thing. All changed the culture and the people in charge now are transforming the management techniques. What do you see as a successful mindset for a customer as they managed through these new paradigms and new new success formulas. >>I see a fork in leadership when it comes to courage. There are people with the spine and there are people without the spine and the ones with the spine are absolutely killing it. They are unafraid. They are not saying, look, I'm just going to stick with the incumbents that I've known for the last 20 years. Look, I used to drive a Toyota forever because I love the Toyota. And then you know after Nutanix IPO went to Lexus still Toyota because it's reliable. I don't, I'm not a huge card person. It works. But guess what? I knew they were missing Patrick and I care about the environment. I don't want to keep pushing hydrocarbons out there. It's not politics. I just don't like burning stuff into the earth atmosphere. So when Tesla came out, it's not like I love the quality I don't personally like alone mask, you know after that Thailand fiasco of cave rescue and all of that. But I can clearly see that Toyota is not going to catch up to Tesla in the next 10 years. And guess what? My loyalty is much more to doing the right thing for my family and to the world. And I switched this is what business leaders need to know. They can't simply say, well, tabloid as search to. They're not as good as thought sports. We'll just stick with them because they have done with us. That's what weak leaders do and customers suffer for that. What I see like the last two weeks ago when I was in new york. I met with them. A business leader for one of the largest banks in the world with 25,000 people reporting to him. The person walks into the room wearing shorts and t shirts uh, and was so full of energy and so full of excitement. I thought I'm going to learn from him and he was asking questions about how we do our business in bed and learning from me. I was humbled, I was flawed and I realized that's what a modern business leader looks like. Even if it is one of the largest and oldest banks in the world, that's the kind of people are making big difference and it doesn't matter how all the companies, how old their data is they have mainframes or not. I hear this excuses all the type of er, mainframes, we can't move, we have COBOL going on. And guess what? You keep talking about that and hear leaders like him are going to transform those companies And next thing you know, there are some of the most modern companies in the world. >>Well certainly they, we know that they don't have any innovation strategy or any kind of R and D or anything going on that could be caught flat footed in the companies that didn't have that going on, didn't have the spine or the, the, the vision to, to at least try the cloud before Covid when Covid hit, those companies are really either going out of business or they're hurting the people who were in the cloud really move their teams into the cloud quicker to take advantage of uh, the environment that they had to. So this became a skill issue. So, so this is a big deal. This is a big deal. And having the right skills are people skilled, it will be a, I both be running everything for them. What is your take on that? >>This is an important question. You can't just say you got to do more things or new things and not take care of all things. You know, there's only 89, 10 hours so you can work in their uh, analysts in the Atlantic species constantly if your analysts are sitting there and making incremental dashboards and reports change every day and then backlog is growing for 56 days and the users are unhappy because you're not getting answers and then you ask them to go to new things. It's just not going to be enough and you can hire your way out of it. You have to make sure that if you say that I have 20 100 x product already, I don't want 21st guess what? Sometimes to be five products, you need to probably go to 21 you got to do new things to actually take away the gunk off the old and in that context, the re skilling starts with unburdening, unburdening of menial task, unburned routine task. There is nothing more frustrating than making reports and dashboards that people don't even use And 90% of the time analysts, they're amazing experiences completely wasted when they're making incremental change to tabloid reports. I kind of believe thought spot and self service on top of cloud data takes away all of that without compromising security and then you invest the experienced people. Business experience is so critical. So don't just go and hire university students and say, okay, they'll go come and quote everything the experience that they have in knowing what the business is about and what it matters to their users, that domain experience and then uplevel them res kill them and then bring fresh energy to challenge that and then make sure there is a culture that allows that to happen. These three things. That's why I said leadership is not just about hiring event of firing another, it's about cultivating a culture and living that value by saying, look if I am wrong, call me, call me out in public because I want to show you how I deal with conflict. So this is I love this thing because when I see these large companies where they're making these massive changes so fast, it inspires you to say you know what if they can do it, anyone can do it. But then I also see if the top leadership is not aligned to that. They are just trying to retire without the stock tanking too much and let me just get through two more years. The entire company suffers. >>So that's great to chat with you got great energy, love your business, love the energy, love the focus. Um it's a new wave you're on. It's a big wave um and it's it's relevant, it's cool and relevant and it's the modern way and people have to have a spine to be successful if not for the faint of heart, but the rewards are there if you get this right. This is what I I love about this new environment. Um so I gotta ask you just to kind of close it out. How would you plug the company for the folks watching that might want to engage with you guys. What's the elevator pitch? What's the positioning? How would you describe thought spot in a bumper sticker or in a positioning statement. Take a minute to talk about that. >>Remember martin Anderson said that software is eating the world, I think it is now time to update that data is eating everything including software. If you don't have a way to turn data into bespoke action for your customers. Guess what? Your customers are gonna go somewhere where they that's happening right? You may not be in the data business but the data company is going to take your business. Thought spot is very simple. We want to be the friend tent for all cloud data when it comes to structured because that's where business value numbers is world satisfaction and dissatisfaction for reduces allying it is important to move data to action and thought Spot is the pioneer in doing that through search and I >>I really think you guys want something very powerful. Looking forward to chatting with you at the upcoming eight of a startup showcase. I think data is a developer mindset. It's an app, it's part of everything. It will. Everyone's a data company, everyone is a media company. Data is everything you guys are on something really big and people got a program it with it, make experiences whether it's simple scripts, point and click. That is a new kind of developer out there. You guys are tapping into it. Great stuff. Thank >>you for coming on. Thank you john it's good to talk to you. >>Okay. It's a cube conversation here in Palo alto California were remote. We're virtual. That's the cube virtual. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. (gentle music) (bright music)

(bright music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. 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>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >>Hi. Welcome to the Cube. Virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of a PM partner experience. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube. Virtual. We can't be there in person with a remote. And our two next guests are We have pure storage. Michael Slotnick, VP of Worldwide Alliances, Pure storage. And Robert Czarnecki, principal product manager for a U. S. Outposts. Welcome to the Cube. >>Wonderful to be here. Great to see you. And thanks for having us, >>Michael. Great to see you pure. You guys had some great Momenta, um, earnings and some announcements. You guys have some new news? We're here. Reinvent all part of a W s and outpost. I want to get into it right away. Uh, talk about the relationship with AWS. I know you guys have some hot news. Just came out in late November. We're here in the event. All the talk is about new higher level services. Hybrid edge. What do you guys doing? What's the story? >>Yeah, Look, I gotta tell you the partnership with AWS is a very high profile and strategic partnership for pure storage. We've worked hard with our cloud block store for AWS, which is an extensive bility solution for pure flash array and into a W s. I think the big news and one of things that we're most proud of is the recent establishment of pure being service ready and outpost ready. And the first and Onley on Prem storage solution and were shoulder to shoulder with AWS is a W s takes outpost into the data center. Now they're going after key workloads that were well known for. And we're very excited Thio, partner with AWS in that regard, >>you know, congratulations to pure. We've been following you guys from the beginning since inception since it was founded startup. And now I'll see growing public company on the next level kind of growth plan. You guys were early on all this stuff with with with flash with software and cloud. So it's paying off. Rob, I wanna get toe Outpost because this was probably most controversial announcements I've ever covered at reinvent for the past eight years. It really was the first sign that Andy was saying, You know what? We're working backwards from the customers and they all are talking Hybrid. We're gonna have Outpost. Give us the update. What kind of workloads and verticals are seeing Success without post? Now that that's part of the portfolio, How does it all working out? Give us the update on the workloads in the verticals. >>Absolutely. Although I have to say I'd call it more exciting than controversial. We're so excited about the opportunities that outpost opened for our customers. And, you know, customers have been asking us for years. How can we bring AWS services to our data centers? And we thought about it for a long time. And until until we define the outpost service, we really I thought we could do better. And what outpost does it lets us take those services that customers are familiar with? It lets us bring it to their data center and and one of the really bright spots over the past year has just been how many different industries and market segments have shown interest. Outpost right. You could have customers, for example, with data residency needs, those that have to do local data processing. Uh, maybe have Leighton see needs on a specific workload that needs to run near their end users. We're just folks trying to modernize their data center, and that's a journey. That transformation takes time, right? So So Outpost works for all of those customers. And one of the things that's really become clear to us is that to enable the success that we think L Post can have, we need to meet customers where they are. And and one of the fantastic things about the outpost ready program is many of those customers air using pure and they have pure hardware and way. Send an outpost over to the pure lab recently, and I have to tell you a picture of those two racks next to each other looks really good. >>You know, 20 used to kind of welcome back my controversial comments. You know, I meant in the sense of that's when Cloud really got big into the enterprise and you have to deal with hybrid. So I do think it's exciting because the edges a big theme here. Can you just share real quick before I get in some of the pure questions on this edge piece with the hybrid because what what's the customer need? And when you talk to customers, I know you guys, you know, really kind of work backwards from the customer. What are their needs? What causes them to look at Outpost as part of their hybrid? What's the Keith consideration? >>Yeah, so? So there are a couple of different needs. John, right? One, for example, is way have regions and local zones across the globe. But we're not everywhere and and their their data residency regulations that they're becoming increasingly common and popular. So customers I come to us and say, Look, I really need to run, for example, of financial services workload. It needs to be in Thailand, and we don't have a reason or local zone in Thailand. But we could get him an outpost to to places where they need to be right. So the that that requirement to keep data, whether it's by regulation or by a contractual agreement, that's a that's a big driver. The other pieces there's There's a tremendous amount of interest in the that top down executive sponsorship across enterprise customers to transform their operations right to modernize their their digital approach but there, when they actually look a look at their estate, they do see an awful lot of hardware, and that's a hard challenge. Thio Plan the migration when you could bring an outpost right into that data center. It really makes it much easier because AWS is right there. There could be a monolithic architecture that it doesn't lend well toe having part of the workload running in the region, part of the workload running in their data center. But with an outpost, they can extend AWS to their data center, and that just makes it so much easier for them to get started on their digital transformation. >>Michael, this is This is the key trend. You guys saw early Cloud operations on premise. It becomes cloud ified at that point when you have Dev ops on on Premises and then cloud pure cloud for bursting all that stuff. And now you've got the edge exploding as well of growth and opportunity. What causes the customer to get the pure option on outputs? What's the What's the angle for you guys? Obviously storage, you get data and I can see this whole Yeah, there's no region and certainly outpost stores data, and that's a requirement for a lot of, you know, certainly global customers and needs. What's the pure angle on this? >>Yeah, I appreciate that. And appreciate Rob's comments around what AWS sees in the wild in terms of yours footprint in the market share that we've established his company over 11 years in business and, you know, over eight years of shipping product. You know, what I would tell you is one of the things that that a lot of people misses the simplicity and the consistency that air characteristically, you know very much in the AWS experience and equally within the pure experience and that that's really powerful. So as we were successful in putting pure into workloads that, you know, for for all the reasons that Rob talked about right data gravity, you know, the the regulatory issues, you know, just application architecture and its inability to move to the public cloud. Um, you know, our predictability are simplicity. Are consistency really match with the costumers getting with other work clothes that they had in AWS? And so with a W S outposts that's really bringing to the customer that single pane of glass to manage their entire environment. And so we saw that we made the three year investment in Outpost. Is Rob said Just having our solution? Inp Yours Data center. It's set up and running today with a solution built on flash Blade, which is our unstructured data solution and, you know, delivering fantastic performance results in a I and ML workloads. We see the same opportunity within backup and disaster recovery workloads and into analytics and then equally the opportunity toe build. You know, Flash Ray and our other storage solutions, and to build architectures with outposts in our data center and bring them to market >>real quick just to follow up on that. What use cases are you seeing that are most successful without post and in general in general, how do you guys get your customers to integrate with the rest of, uh, their environment? Because you you no one's got. Now this operating environments not just cloud public, is cloud on premise and everything else. >>Yeah, you know what's cool is, and then Rob hit right on. It is the the wide range of industries and the wide range of use cases and workloads that air finding themselves attracted to the outpost offering on DSO. You know, without a doubt there's gonna be, You know, I think what people would immediately believe ai and ml workloads and the importance of having high performance storage and to have a high performance outpost environment, you know, as close to the center as possible of those solutions. But it doesn't stop there. Traditional virtualized database workloads that for reasons of application architecture, aren't candidates to move. AWS is public cloud offering our great fit for outpost and those air workloads that we've always traditionally been successful within the market and see a great opportunity. Thio, you know, build on that success as an outpost partner. >>Rob, I gotta ask, you last reinvent when we're in person. When we had real life back then e was at the replay party and hanging out, and this guy comes out to me. I don't even know who he was. Obviously big time engineer over there opens his hand up and shows me this little processor and I'm like, closes and he's like and I go take a picture and it was like freaking out. Don't take a picture. It was it was the big processor was the big, uh, kind of person. Uh, I think it was the big monster. And it was just so small. See the innovation and hard where you guys have done a lot, there s that's cool. I like get your thoughts on where the future is going there because you've got great hardware innovation, but you got the higher level services with containers. I know you guys took your time. Containers are super important because that's going to deal with that. So how do you look at that? You got the innovation in the hardware check containers. How does that all fit in? Because you guys have been making a lot of investments in some of these cloud native projects. What's your position on that? >>You know, it's all part of one common story, John right customers that they want an easy path to delivering impact for their business. Right. And, you know, you've heard us speak a lot over the past few years about how we're really seeing these two different types of customers. We have those customers that really loved to get those foundational core building blocks and stitch them together in a creative way. But then you have more and more customers that they wanna. They wanna operate at a different level, and and that's okay. We want to support both of them. We want to give both of them all the tools that they need. Thio spend their time and put their resource is towards what differentiates their business and just be able to give them support at whatever level they need on the infrastructure side. And it's fantastic that are combination of investments in hardware and services. And now, with Outpost, we can bring those investments even closer to the customer. If you really think about it that way, the possibilities become limitless. >>Yeah, it's not like the simplicity asked, but it was pretty beautiful to the way it looks. It looks nice. Michael. Gotta ask you on your side. A couple of big announcements over that we've been following from pure looking back. You already had the periods of service announcement you bought the port Works was acquisition. Yeah, that's container management. Across the data center, including outposts you got pure is a service is pure. Is the service working with outpost and how and if so, how and what's the consumption model for customers there. >>Yeah, thanks so much, John. And appreciate you following us the way that you do it. Zits meaningful and appreciate it. Listen, you know, I think the customers have made it clear and in AWS is, you know, kind of led the way in terms of the consumption and experience expectations that customers have. It's got to be consumable. They've got to pay for what they use. It's got to be outcome oriented and and we're doing that with pure is a service. And so I think we saw that early and have invested in pure is a service for our customers. And, you know, we look at the way we acquired outposts as ah customer and a partner of AWS aan dat is exactly the same way customers can consume pure. You know, all of our solutions in a, you know, use what you need, pay for what you use, um, environment. And, you know, one of the exciting things about AWS partnership is its wide ranging and one of the things that AWS has done, I think world class is marketplace. And so we're excited to share with this audience, you know, really? On the back of just recent announcement that, pure is the service is available within the AWS marketplace. And so you think about the, you know, simplicity and the consistency that pure and AWS delivered to the market. AWS customers demand that they get that in the marketplace, and and we're proud to have our offerings there. And Port Works has been in the marketplace and and will continue to be showcased from a container management standpoint. So as those workloads increasingly become, you know, the cloud native you know, Dev Ops, Containerized workloads. We've got a solution and to end to support >>that great job. Great insight. Congratulations to pure good moves as making some good moves. Rob, I want to just get to the final word here on Outpost again. Great. Everyone loves this product again. It's a lot of attention. It's really that that puts the operating models cloud firmly on the in the on premise world for Amazon opens up a lot of good conversation and business opportunities and technical integrations or are all around you. So what's your message to the ecosystem out there for outposts? How do I What's the what's the word? I wanna do I work with you guys? How do I get involved? What are some of the opportunities? What's your position? How do you talk to the ecosystem? >>Yeah, You know, John, I think the best way to frame it is we're just getting started. We've got our first year in the books. We've seen so many promising signals from customers, had so many interesting conversations that just weren't possible without outposts. And, uh, you know, working with partners like pure and expanding our outpost. Ready program is just the beginning. Right? We launched back in September. We've We've seen another meaningful set of partners come out. Uh, here it reinvent, and we're gonna continue toe double down on both the outpost business, but specifically on on working with our partners. I think that the key to unlocking the magic of outpost is meeting customers where they are. And those customers are using our partners. And there's no reason that it shouldn't just work when they move there. Their partner based workload from their existing infrastructure right over to the outpost. >>All right, I'll leave it there. Michael saw the VP of worldwide alliances that pier storage congratulations. Great innovation strategy It's easy to do alliances when you've got a great product and technology congratulated. Rob Kearney Key principle product manager. Outpost will be speaking more to you throughout the next couple of weeks. Here at Reinvent Virtual. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay. So cute. Virtual. We are the Cube. Virtual. We wish we could be there in person this year, but it's a virtual event. Over three weeks will be lots of coverage. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The steepest drop in the stock market since June 11th flipped the narrative and sent investors scrambling. Tech got hammered after a two-month run, and people are asking questions. Is this a bubble popping, or is it a healthy correction? Are we now going to see a rotation into traditional stocks, like banks and maybe certain cyclicals that have lagged behind the technology winners? Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Wikibon's CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to give you our perspective on what's happening in the technology space and unpack what this sentiment flip means for the balance of 2020 and beyond. Let's look at what happened on September 3rd, 2020. The tech markets recoiled this week as the NASDAQ Composite dropped almost 5% in a single day. Apple's market cap alone lost $178 billion. The Big Four: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google lost a combined value that approached half a trillion dollars. For context, this number is larger than the gross domestic product for countries as large as Thailand, Iran, Austria, Norway, and even the UAE, and many more. The tech stocks that have been running due to COVID, well, they got crushed. These are the ones that we've highlighted as best positioned to thrive during the pandemic, you know, the work-from-home, SaaS, cloud, security stocks. We really have been talking about names like Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce, DocuSign, Splunk, and the security names like CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. By the way, DocuSign and CrowdStrike and Okta all had nice earnings beats, but they still got killed underscoring the sentiment shift. Now the broader tech market was off as well on sympathy, and this trend appears to be continuing into the Labor Day holiday. Now why is this happening, and why now? Well, there are a lot of opinions on this. And first, many, like myself, are relatively happy because this market needed to take a little breather. As we've said before, the stock market, it's really not reflecting the realities of the broader economy. Now as we head into September in an election year, uncertainty kicks in, but it really looks like this pullback was fueled by a combination of an overheated market and technical factors. Specifically, take a look at volatility indices. They were high and rising, yet markets kept rising along with them. Robinhood millennial investors who couldn't bet on sports realized that investing in stocks was as much of a rush and potentially more lucrative. The other big wave, which was first reported by the Financial Times, is that SoftBank made a huge bet on tech and bought options tied to around $50 billion worth of high-flying tech stocks. So the option call volumes skyrocketed. The call versus put ratio was getting way too hot, and we saw an imbalance in the market. Now market makers will often buy an underlying stock to hedge call options to ensure liquidity in these cases. So to be more specific, delta in options is a measure of the change in the price of an option relative to the underlying stock, and gamma is a measure of the volatility of the delta. Now usually, volatility is relatively consistent on both sides of the trade, the calls and the puts, because investors often hedge their bets. But in the case of many of these hot stocks, like Tesla, for example, you've seen the call skew be much greater than the skew in the downside. So let's take an example. If people are buying cheap out of the money calls, a market maker might buy the underlying stock to hedge for liquidity. And then if Elon puts out some good news, which he always does, the stock goes up. Market makers have to then buy more of the underlying stock. And then algos kick in to buy even more. And then the price of the call goes up. And as it approaches it at the money price, this forces market makers to keep buying more of that underlying stock. And then the melt up until it stops. And then the market flips like it did this week. When stock prices begin to drop, then market makers were going to rebalance their portfolios and their risk and sell their underlying stocks, and then the rug gets pulled out from the markets. And that's really why some of the stocks that have run dropped so precipitously. Okay, why did I spend so much time on this, and why am I not freaking out? Because I think these market moves are largely technical versus fundamental. It's not like 1999. We had a double whammy of technical rug pulls combined with poor underlying fundamentals for high-flying companies like CMGI and Internet Capital Group, whose businesses, they were all about placing bets on dot-coms that had no business models other than non-monetizable eyeballs. All right, let's take a look at the NASDAQ and dig into the data a little bit. And I think you'll see what I mean and why I'm not too concerned. This is a year-to-date chart of the NASDAQ, and you can see it bottomed on March 23rd at 6,860. And then ran up until June 11th and had that big drop, but was still elevated at 9,492. And then it ran up to over 12,000 and hit an all-time high. And then you see the big drop. And that trend continued on Friday morning. The NASDAQ Composite traded below 11,000. It actually corrected to 10% of its high, 9.8% to be precise, and then it snapped back. But even at its low, that's still up over 20% for the year. In the year of COVID, would that have surprised you in March? It certainly would have surprised me. So to me, this pullback is sort of a relief. It's good and actually very normal and quite predictable. Now the exact timing of these pullbacks, of course, on the other hand is not entirely predictable. Not at all, frankly, at least for this observer. So the big question is where do we go from here? So let's talk about that a little bit. Now the economy continues to get better. Take a look at the August job report; it was good. 1.4 million new jobs, 340,000 came from the government. That was positive numbers. And the other good news is it translates into a drop in unemployment under 10%. It's now at 8.4%. And this is really good relative to expectations. Now the sell-off continued, which suggested that the market wanted to keep correcting, so that's good. Maybe some buying opportunities would emerge in over the next several months, the market snapped back, but for those who have been waiting, I think that's going to happen. And so that snapback, maybe that's an indicator that the market wants to keep going up, we'll see. But I think there are more opportunities ahead because there's really so much uncertainty. What's going to happen with the next round of the stimulus? The jobs report, maybe that's a catalyst for compromise between the Democrats and the Republicans, maybe. The US debt is projected to exceed 100% of GDP this calendar year. That's the highest it's been since World War II. Does that give you a good feeling? That doesn't give me a good feeling. And when we talk about the election, that brings additional uncertainty. So there's a lot to think about for the markets. Now let's talk about what this means for tech. Well, as we've been projecting for months with our colleagues at ETR, despite what's going on in the stock market and its rise, there's those real tech winners, we still see a contraction in 2020 for IT spend of minus 5 to 8%. And we talk a lot about the bifurcation in the market due to COVID accelerating some of these trends that were already in place, like digital transformation and SaaS and cloud. And then the work-from-home kicks in with other trends like video conferencing and the shift to security spend. And we think this is going to continue for years. However, because these stocks have run up so much, they're going to have very tough compares in 2021. So maybe time for a pause. Now let's take a look at the IT spending macroeconomics. This data is from a series of surveys that ETR conducted to try to better understand spending patterns due to COVID. Those yellow slices of the pies show the percent of customers that indicate that their budgets will be impacted by coronavirus. And you can see there's a steady increase from mid-March, which blend into April, and then you can see the June data. It goes from 63% saying yes, which is very high, to 78%, which is very, very high. And the bottom part of the chart shows the degree of that change. So 22% say no change in the latest survey, but you can see much more of a skew to the red declines on the left versus the green upticks on the right-hand side of the chart. Now take a look at how IT buyers are seeing the response to the pandemic. This chart shows what companies are doing as a result of COVID in another recent ETR survey. Now of course, it's no surprise, everybody's working from home. Nobody's traveling for business, not nobody, but most people aren't, we know that. But look at the increase in hiring freezes and freezing new IT deployments, and the sharp rise in layoffs. So IT is yet again being asked to do more with less. They're used to it. Well, we see this driving an acceleration to automation, and that's going to benefit, for instance, the RPA players, cloud providers, and modern software vendors. And it will also precipitate a tailwind for more aggressive AI implementations. And many other selected names are going to continue to do well, which we'll talk about in a second, but they're in the work-from-home, the cloud, the SaaS, and the modern data sectors. But the problem is those sectors are not large enough to offset the declines in the core businesses of the legacy players who have a much higher market share, so the overall IT spend declines. Now where it gets kind of interesting is the legacy companies, look, they all have growth businesses. They're making acquisitions, they're making other bets. IBM, for example, has its hybrid cloud business in Red Hat, Dell has VMware and it's got work-from-home solutions, Oracle has SaaS and cloud, Cisco has its security business, HPE, it's as a service initiative, and so forth. And again, these businesses are growing faster, but they are not large enough to offset the decline in core on-prem legacy and drive anything more than flat growth, overall, for these companies at best. And by the time they're large enough, we'll be into the next big thing, so the cycle continues. But these legacy companies are going to compete with the upstarts, and that's where it gets interesting. So let's get into some of the specific names that we've been talking about for over a year now and make some comments around their prospects. So what we want to do is let's start with one of our favorites: Snowflake. Now Snowflake, along with Asana, JFrog, Sumo Logic, and Unity, has a highly anticipated upcoming IPO. And this chart shows new adoptions in the database sector. And you can see that Snowflake, while down from the October 19th survey, is far outpacing its competitors, with the exception of Google, where BigQuery is doing very well. But you see Mongo and AWS remain strong, and I'm actually quite encouraged that it looks like Cloudera has righted the ship and you kind of saw that in their earnings recently. But my point is that Snowflake is a share gainer, and we think will likely continue to be one for a number of quarters and years if they can execute and compete with the big cloud players, and that's a topic that we've covered extensively in previous Breaking Analysis segments, and, as you know, we think Snowflake can compete. Now let's look at automation. This is another space that we've been talking about quite a bit, and we've largely focused on two leaders: UiPath and Automation Anywhere. But I have to say, I still like Blue Prism. I think they're well-positioned. And I especially like Pegasystems, which has, for years, been embarking on a broader automation agenda. What this chart shows is net score or spending velocity data for those customers who said they were decreasing spend in 2020. Those red bars that we showed earlier are the ones who are decreasing. And you can see both Automation Anywhere and UiPath show elevated levels within that base where spending is declining, so that's a real positive. Now Microsoft, as we've reported, is elbowing its way into the market with what is currently an inferior point product, but, you know, it's Microsoft, so we can't ignore that. And finally, let's have a look at the all-important security sector, which we've covered extensively and put out a report recently. So what this next chart does is cherry-picks of a few of our favorite names, and it shows the net score or spending momentum and the granularity for some of the leaders and emerging players. All of these players are in the green, as you can see in the upper right, and they all have decent presence in the dataset as indicated by the shared NS. Okta is at the top of the list with 58% net score. Palo Alto, they're a more mature player, but still, they have an elevated net score. CrowdStrike's net score dropped this quarter, which was a bit of a concern, but it's still high. And it followed by SailPoint and Zscaler, who are right there. The big three trends in this space right now are cloud security, identity access management, and endpoint security. Those are the tailwinds, and we think these trends have legs. Remember, net score in this survey is a forward-looking metric, so we'll come back and look at the next survey, which is running this month in the field from ETR. Now everyone on this chart has reported earnings, except Zscaler, which reports on September 9th, and all of these companies are doing well and exceeding expectations, but as I said earlier, next year's compares won't be so easy. Oh, and by the way, their stock prices, they all got killed this week as a result of the rug pull that we explained earlier. So we really feel this isn't a fundamental problem for these firms that we're talking about. It's more of a technical in the market. Now Automation Anywhere and UiPath, you really don't know because they're not public and I think they need to get their house in order so they can IPO, so we'll see when they make it to public markets. I don't think that's an if, that I think they will IPO, but the fact that they haven't filed yet says they're not ready. Now why wouldn't you IPO if you are ready in this market despite the recent pullbacks? Okay, let's summarize. So listen, all you new investors out there that think stock picking is easy, look, any fool can make money in a market that goes up every day, but trees don't grow to the moon and there are bulls and bears and pigs, and pigs get slaughtered. And I can throw a dozen other cliches at you, but I am excited that you're learning. You maybe have made a few bucks playing the options game. It's not as easy as you might think. And I'm hoping that you're not trading on margin. But look, I think there are going to be some buying opportunities ahead, there always are, be patient. It's very hard, actually impossible, to time markets, and I'm a big fan of dollar-cost averaging. And young people, if you make less than $137,000 a year, load up on your Roth, it's a government gift that I wish I could have tapped when I was a newbie. And as always, please do your homework. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, so check that out, and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts. Don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey action. Get in touch on Twitter, I'm @dvellante, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is the CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everybody, welcome to this special CXO Series that I've been running over the past couple weeks, my name is Dave Vellante and what I've been doing is bringing in executives from around the industry to try to better understand how they're dealing with this COVID crisis, what some of their fundamental communications principles are, and I'm really pleased to invite in Sri Srinivasan, who's the Senior Vice President and GM of Cisco Collaborations. Sri, great to see you again. It seems like just a long time ago actually, but it was just January that we were in Barcelona together, wow, a lot has changed. >> A lot has changed, Dave. Dave, thanks for having me on the show, it's always a pleasure to see you and I'm so happy to see you safe and sound today. >> Yeah, ditto, we're all in this together, as they say so I want to go back to, I mean we were in January we were getting clenches of this thing. We were definitely a little bit worried but not really fully grasping the impact. At what point did you kind of realize that you were going to have to adjust, and how did you shift your priorities as a leader? >> Yeah, so, Dave we started seeing this right out of the Chinese New Year, coming out of the Chinese New Year, on February 11th, if my memory serves me right. Users out of China started increasing, connecting to their global sites by multiples. Like, they went up as much as 22 times, on the night of February 11th and right off the bat we started seeing it expanding to South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and towards the end of February, we started seeing it going to Europe in terms of expanded volumes where people working from home. Europe has expanded nearly four times for us, Asia pack has expanded nearly three to four times in terms of total usage and from the second week of March, it's US, our biggest market, which has more than doubled and as you may have heard, this past month in March, we served 324 million attendees on our meeting platform. We provide a whole slew of collaboration capability set. The fundamental principle for us that we apply is, provide customers with business continuity, while keeping their employees and their families safe. That is the fundamental principle we apply and one of my engineers said it really well. He said, "for every WebEx engineer-hour spent, "we now keep people safe for 14 thousand hours, "or 583 days". That is the amount of time through virtual capability set we're able to bring people together safely and continue their businesses forward as is nearly normal. >> I mean, the numbers are unbelievable. Chuck Robbins, over a month ago, said you guys held, and this is early March, 3.2 million meetings and 5.5 billion minutes, and the numbers have just gone up from then. Guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart, I want to set up this conversation and so, we along with our partner ETR, we're one of the first to report sort of the impact of COVID on IT Budgets and what this chart is showing is that, that gray bar says 35% of those CIO's that we talked to said they don't expect any change in spending for 2020. >> Sri: Mhm. >> Dave: The green side over 20% said they expect to spend more and then you can see the big red. So overall, we've taken the overall forecast at the beginning of the year was plus 4% was kind of the consensus for IT spend. We're now down to minus 4%. The point though is that it would be a lot worse Sri, were it not for that green, which is being driven by the work from home offset, and it's not just collaborations tools, its networking, its security, its VPN, it's all the infrastructure around that so I wonder if you could comment and add a little bit of color to what you're seeing in the space. >> I think we're seeing immense expansion of work from home capabilities. Work from home is new for so many people, like for people like me it's the norm but there's so many people who are coming into it cold for the very first time, it can be daunting and that requires investments from organizations, I think CIOs IT infrastructure heads are working to make sure they provide the best secure collaboration canvas for people to work in from home, understanding the challenges of last mile excellence, security challenges and things of that sort so there is a ton of investment going on, in speeding up that investment and I see something coming out of this, which is recognition that organizations are going to have to fix and modernize their digital infrastructure. Why is that important? I think environmental sustainability has something called LEED Certification. Very similar to that work from home is going to have some type of certification that says, an organization is ready for this type of a mass upheaval moment where their infrastructures keep their businesses alive, kicking and thriving through any situation and I think what we have seen is many organizations struggle getting to that first step. Now, technology allows them to move very fast these days but no organization wants to struggle through it in the future, whether it's public sector or commercial enterprise, it's one and the same. >> I think that's a great point, one of the things I wanted to ask you was about some of the things that you've learned and maybe some of the things that are going to be permanent and I think that, people didn't expect this obviously and so do you feel as though that organizations will kind of rethink and that portions of this will become permanent, maybe they'll sub-optimize, in the near-term profitability and try to optimize for business resilience and the flexibility to do things like work from home, your thoughts. >> So Dave, I do see some things becoming permanent, right? Do I expect the volumes of collaboration to go down? No, it's never going to go back to the same level. The world as we know it is going to change forever. We are going to have a Post-COVID era and that's going to be changed for the better. There's a number of employees who are being skeptical, reticent to working from home, who are suddenly going to say, work from home thing is not so bad after all so you're going to have that moment for sure and then you're going to also have a set of employers who are going to look at a much wider pool of applicants that are cross timezone, geography, language barriers, it's going to help an organization increase their diversity and inclusiveness ocean, making their products and services much better so I think we are opening up the surface area for innovation as a result and you will see a lot of the work from home technologies get better and better, we're being forced to be better because we now have to be relatable, discernible easy to a new class of worker that has never seen these technologies and it is across all kinds of barriers that technology has to adhere itself to so I do see a lot of goodness coming in and you know what, at the end of the day, it's really good for the environment too >> I want to ask you how you're supporting customers. The data partner that I mentioned ETR, the other day I sat in one of their CIO Roundtables and it's a private conversation with (mumbles) and CIOs and they were asking them like, who's helping you through this and who's not and they mentioned, for instance, back in the 2009 timeframe, there was one company they won't mention. It was doing audits right after the crisis. That was not a cool thing but I got to give Cisco some props it came up that they really were helping in three areas and one of the CIOs just really mentioned this and called it out. He said, collaboration tools, network, we're a Cisco customer so we're relying more on the network and then the security piece so specifically how are you supporting your customers in this crisis? >> So, towards the end of February, what we did is we opened up our collaboration technology and Chuck said something very profound to me. He basically said, "let's make sure we do right by our customers "and keep them safe through this exercise." What we came out with was a set of free offers. We expanded (mumbles) free offer by providing unlimited meeting time, up to a hundred participants toll dial-in into our meetings infrastructure in 52 countries. We didn't basically just say, hey, only in countries afflicted by the virus, we basically made it as global as we could make it possible and then we provided enterprise trials through our partner routes to market that is an enterprise could sign up for a 90-day thing, no strings attached. Just take on the collaboration platform and whether it's calling, meetings, our device infrastructure and just take advantage of it and in a secure fashion using our security portfolio using extensions of our network portfolio and just continue to operate so we've added close to north of 15 million users through our free offers to date that (mumbles) >> Wow. >> and no strings attached. We're not asking for a credit card or a contract at the end of it, if you like it, and we come out at the other end of it, we are happy that they're safe and if they stay a long-term customer of ours, we are happy about that too. >> I mean, that's awesome. We saw recently a lot of talk about big tech and a lot of attacks on big tech and you're seeing big tech really step up, so thank you for that. You know us. We're not gotcha media, but it's I feel it's really important to ask you this. Zoom has had some clear issues with security. Eric Yuan, was instrumental in developing WebEx so what assurances can you give (Sri coughs) your customers and our audience that you're not subjected to similar security gaps and flaws? >> So let's talk about our security principles, right? Our security principles are very clear, we are open and transparent about the issues we face, the investments we make and we will be very open in terms of our posture. Secondly, we will never rent or sell customers data. Thirdly, we have a growth mindset around security. It's a differentiator. You never get complacent about security, you keep on investing in it and to be honest with you, WebEx has come a very long way since some of the comments that were made in the press by some of our competitors. circa 2012 WebEx versus now there's so much innovation that has happened Dave. We've had over 100 major software updates so I would rather have our competitors focus on their issues rather than, give us kudos in public. Our promise to our customers is to be open, transparent and continuously invest in the space because the moment you take your eyes off it, you've opened yourself up for a set of attacks so we're not going to ever say we are fully secure. You just have to continually invest in the growing threat posture world we live in today. >> So I want to follow up on that because I mean, I'm not a security expert, but I've interviewed enough people to know that they will tell you, you can't just bolt on security, you got to build it in and it's a hard thing to do. Some of your security pros Gee Rittenhouse, TK Keanini would definitely second this so, >> Yeah. >> How, you're saying you've spent a lot of time obviously designing in and I'm inferring not bolting on so I wonder if you could add some color to the sort of types of things that you've done to really, assure your customers that you're secure. >> Yeah, so I think security is in the DNA of Cisco, pun intended in many ways. We pride ourselves in our craft and to be honest with you, security starts at the time of design for us and it's not a checkbox exercise at the end of the ship cycle. You build for security. You build for privacy and compliance and you build with one simple rule. It's your customers data, we are custodians and we need to be protectors of it all the way through. We do not sacrifice experience for security. We never will. We build high-grade experiences but we never give up on security capability set and whether it's free, whether it's premium, whether it's paid. We have the same levels of security, yes, we do have additional security add ons and finally, we have a culture where there are groups within Cisco that continually test us. They don't report to me, they report to chuck and the board and they pretty much are continuously measuring our threat posture. These are world class organizations that keep you on your toes and I'm so thankful for that. It helps our customers safe, it helps us be better. It helps us stay current with the threat postures and this is years of investment. This is not something you can do in 90 days or 30 days. You'd be doing lip service to it. This is something you've got to do, critical, intentional, deliberate investments that pay off in the long-term. >> Yeah, and things like penetration testing, it's not a one shot deal, you got to do it on an ongoing basis. I want to come back to productivity. There are some organizations that are concerned they're struggling a little bit with productivity, particularly with the work from home. What advice would you give to organizations in terms of being able to maintain that productivity? They might take a little bit of hit but what would you tell them? >> I think change is difficult. Change is not easy. I'll take my own story here. Dave, two years back when I joined Cisco work from home was a alien culture to me based on where I came from, for the first month I did struggle. I had my questions, I had my trepidations of is this really going to work? Am I going to be able to run thousands of engineers, multibillion dollar business from home or while traveling on a plane because we have so many development centers across the globe and I'm a remote worker. I really saw this as opening up new horizons for me starting the first month. I took it on with gusto so I think my guidance to organizations is help end users deal with that change. If you force it down their throats, it's not going to work. You've got to understand their pains, you've going to make it more pleasing. You've got to introduce things like a digital water cooler talk, you've got to make it easy on them, you've got to talk about improvements in a remote-work setting like providing them with a set of accessories that make it easier for you to work from home. One of the core principles we have and i espouse within my organization is by working from home, you're intruding into your family's space. I think it's so important to make sure you let your family in on your work and when kids walk into the door, today, when we work at Cisco, we actually share our family and we share our joy with the wider teams and we are so proud of such culture so be very open and make sure that you understand that you're intruding into somebody else's house when you're working from home. >> Yeah, we have dogs barking, we have kids playing games and crawling all over us, that's great. one of the... >> The dogs barking we have solved we have an AI technology that brings it down. >> Mutes the barking. That's good, I need one. >> Absolutely. >> So one of my big takeaways and you really underscored it here is we're not going back to 2019. The digital transformation that we talk about and that frankly many give lip service (mumbles) but it is now going to be accelerated and it's ironic, we're starting a new decade but this digital transformation is going to be accelerated and collaboration is going to be a key underpinning so I'll ask you to give us some final thoughts, will you please? >> Yeah, I think, people to people collaboration is so important in this day and age. As such, industry has been changing from a task-based hierarchy driven world to a group-outcome based synergistic, a bring people along type culture and that brings people along type cultures now, thanks to collaboration technology, becoming independent of timezone, you don't have to worry about language barriers anymore or cultural boundaries. Think of the type of ideation you can do by bringing people across the world together with a low carbon footprint and what this time has shown us is that businesses can still continue to operate and operate really well when you bring people together using these virtual technologies and capability sets. You're saving people some time by having them work from home like you don't have to travel 30 and 40 minutes to get to work. You're just doing doing your thing from wherever you are and that saves so much in cost, in capability sets and the concept of hoteliering and open spaces in different organizations is only going to sprout even further because not everybody is going to have a home office, have an office, a set office, in within the enterprise CEOs are going to see that as a cost saving opportunity that they can funnel back into the growth of the organization. Right? So I think it's a plethora of opportunity in front of us and that these technologies are going to get monumentally better in the months to come. >> We're definitely entering a new chapter. Sri, thanks so much for sharing your insights and some of your leadership principles and thanks to Cisco, for all that you guys are doing some of the pro bono work. I know some of the volunteerism that Chuck has talked about. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks Dave. Always a pleasure, stay safe. >> And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from San Francisco, California. It's the key. You covering the IBM chief Data officer? Someone brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at the IBM CDO conference. Fisherman's Worf Worf in San Francisco. You're watching the Cube, the leader in life tech coverage. My name is David Dante. Glenn Finches. Here's the global leader of Big Data Analytics and IBM, and we're pleased to have Mark Clare. He's the head of data enablement at AstraZeneca. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on my mark. I'm gonna start with this head of data Data Enablement. That's a title that I've never heard before. And I've heard many thousands of titles in the Cube. What is that all about? >> Well, I think it's the credit goes to some of the executives at AstraZeneca when they recruited me. I've been a cheap date officer. Several the major financial institutions, both in the U. S. And in Europe. Um, AstraZeneca wanted to focus on how we actually enable our business is our science areas in our business is so it's not unlike a traditional CDO role, but we focus a lot more on what the enabling functions or processes would be >> So it sounds like driving business value is really the me and then throw. Sorry. >> I've always looked at this role in three functions value, risk and cost. So I think that in any CDO role, you have to look at all three. I think the you'd slide it if you didn't. This one with the title. Obviously, we're looking at quite a bit at the value we will drive across the the firm on how to leverage our date in a different way. >> I love that because you can quantify all three. All right, Glenn. So you're the host of this event. So awesome. I love that little presentation that you gave. So for those you didn't see it, you gave us pay stubs and then you gave us a website and said, Take a picture of the paste up, uploaded, and then you showed how you're working with your clients. Toe. Actually digitize that and compress all kinds of things. Time to mortgage origination. Time to decision. So explain that a little bit. And what's that? What's the tech behind that? And how are people using it? You know, >> for three decades, we've had this OCR technology where you take a piece of paper, you tell the machine what's on the paper. What longitudinal Enter the coordinates are and you feed it into the hope and pray to God that it isn't in there wrong. The form didn't change anything like that. That's what that's way. We've lived for three decades with cognitive and a I, but I read things like the human eye reads things. And so you put the page in and the machine comes back and says, Hey, is this invoice number? Hey, is this so security number? That's how you train it as compared to saying, Here's what it So we use this cognitive digitization capability to grab data that's locked in documents, and then you bring it back to the process so that you can digitally re imagine the process. Now there's been a lot of use of robotics and things like that. I'm kind of taken existing processes, and I'm making them incrementally. Better write This says look, you now have the data of the process. You can re imagine it. However, in fact, the CEO of our client ADP said, Look, I want you to make me a Netflix, not a blood Urbach Blockbuster, right? So So it's a mind shift right to say we'll use this data will read it with a I will digitally re imagine the process. And it usually cuts like 70 or 80% of the cycle time, 50 to 75% of the cost. I mean, it's it's pretty groundbreaking when you see it. >> So markets ahead of data neighborhood. You hear something like that and you're not. You're not myopically focused on one little use case. You're taking a big picture of you doing strategies and trying to develop a broader business cases for the organization. But when you see an example like that and many examples out there, I'm sure the light bulbs go off. So >> I wrote probably 10 years cases down while >> Glenn was talking about you. You do get tactical, Okay, but but But where do you start when you're trying to solve these problems? >> Well, I look att, Glenn's example, And about five and 1/2 years ago, Glenn was one I went to had gone to a global financial service, firms on obviously having scale across dozens of countries, and I had one simple request. Thio Glenn's team as well as a number of other technology companies. I want cognitive intelligence for on data in Just because the process is we've had done for 20 years just wouldn't scale not not its speed across many different languages and cultures. And I now look five and 1/2 years later, and we have beginning of, I would say technology opportunities. When I asked Glenn that question, he was probably the only one that didn't think I had horns coming out of my head, that I was crazy. I mean, some of the leading technology firms thought I was crazy asking for cognitive data management capabilities, and we are five and 1/2 years later and we're seeing a I applied not just on the front end of analytics, but back in the back end of the data management processes themselves started automate. So So I look, you know, there's a concept now coming out day tops on date offices. You think of what Dev Ops is. It's bringing within our data management processes. It's bringing cognitive capabilities to every process step, And what level of automation can we do? Because the, you know, for typical data science experiment 80 to 90% of that work Estate engineering. If I can automate that, then through a date office process, then I could get to incite much faster, but not in scale it and scale a lot more opportunities and have to manually do it. So I I look at presentations and I think, you know, in every aspect of our business, where we clear could we apply >> what you talk about date engineering? You talk about data scientist spending his or her time just cleaning the wrangling data, All the all the not fun stuff exactly plugging in cables back in the infrastructure date. >> You're seeing horror stories right now. I heard from a major academic institution. A client came to them and their data scientists. They had spent several years building. We're spending 99% of their time trying to cleanse and prep data. They were spend 90% cleansing and prepping, and of the remaining 10% 90% of that fixing it where they fix it wrong and the first time so they had 1% of their job doing their job. So this is a huge opportunity. You can start automating more of that and actually refocusing data science on data >> science. So you've been a chief data officer number of financial institutions. You've got this kind of cool title now, which touches on some of the things a CDO might do and your technical. We got a technical background. So when you look a lot of the what Ginny Rometty calls incumbents, call them incumbent Disruptors two years ago at Ivy and think they've got data that has been hardened, you know, in all these projects and use cases and it's locked and people talk about the silos, part of your role is to figure out Okay, how do we get that data out? Leverage. It put it at the core. Is that is that fair? >> Well, and I'm gonna stay away from the word core cause to make core Kenan for kind of legacy processes of building a single repositories single warehouse, which is very time consuming. So I think I can I leave it where it is, but find a wayto to unify it. >> Not physically, exactly what I say. Corny, but actually the court, that's what we need >> to think about is how to do this logically and cream or of Ah unification approach that has speed and agility with it versus the old physical approaches, which took time. And resource is >> so That's a that's a computer science problem that people have been trying to solve for years. Decentralized, distributed, dark detectors, right? And why is it that we're now able Thio Tap your I think it's >> a perfect storm of a I of Cloud, the cloud native of Io ti, because when you think of I o. T, it's a I ot to be successful fabric that can connect millions of devices or millions of sensors. So you'd be paired those three with the investment big data brought in the last seven or eight years and big data to me. Initially, when I started talking to companies in the Valley 10 years ago, the early days of, um, apparatus, what I saw or companies and I could get almost any of the digital companies in the valley they were not. They were using technology to be more agile. They were finding agile data science. Before we call the data signs the map produce and Hadoop, we're just and after almost not an afterthought. But it was just a mechanism to facilitate agility and speed. And so if you look at how we built out all the way up today and all the convergence of all these new technologies, it's a perfect storm to actually innovate differently. >> Well, what was profound about my producing in the dupe? It was like leave the data where it is and shipped five megabytes a code two upended by the data and that you bring up a good point. We've now, we spent 10 years leveraging that at a much lower cost. And you've got the cloud now for scale. And now machine intelligence comes in that you can apply in the data causes. Bob Pityana once told me, Data's plentiful insights aren't Amen to that. So Okay, so this is really interesting discussion. You guys have known each other for a couple of couple of decades. How do you work together toe to solve problems Where what is that conversation like, Do >> you want to start that? >> So, um, first of all, we've never worked together on solving small problems, not commodity problems. We would usually tackle something that someone would say would not be possible. So normally Mark is a change agent wherever he goes. And so he usually goes to a place that wants to fix something or change something in an abnormally short amount of time for an abnormally small amount of money. Right? So what's strange is that we always find that space together. Mark is very judicious about using us as a service is firm toe help accelerate those things. But then also, we build in a plan to transition us away in transition, in him into full ownership. Right. But we usually work together to jump start one of these wicked, hard, wicked, cool things that nobody else >> was. People hate you. At first. They love you. I would end the one >> institution and on I said, OK, we're going to a four step plan. I'm gonna bring the consultants in day one while we find Thailand internally and recruit talent External. That's kind of phases one and two in parallel. And then we're gonna train our talent as we find them, and and Glenn's team will knowledge transfer, and by face for where, Rayna. And you know, that's a model I've done successfully in several organizations. People can. I hated it first because they're not doing it themselves, but they may not have the experience and the skills, and I think as soon as you show your staff you're willing to invest in them and give them the time and exposure. The conversation changes, but it's always a little awkward. At first, I've run heavy attrition, and some organizations at first build the organizations. But the one instance that Glen was referring to, we came in there and they had a 4 1 1 2 1 12 to 15 year plan and the C I O. Looked at me, he says. I'll give you two years. I'm a bad negotiator. I got three years out of it and I got a business case approved by the CEO a week later. It was a significant size business case in five minutes. I didn't have to go back a second or third time, but we said We're gonna do it in three years. Here's how we're gonna scale an organization. We scaled more than 1000 person organization in three years of talent, but we did it in a planned way and in that particular organization, probably a year and 1/2 in, I had a global map of every data and analytics role I need and I could tell you were in the US they set and with what competitors earning what industry and where in India they set and in what industry And when we needed them. We went out and recruited, but it's time to build that. But you know, in any really period, I've worked because I've done this 20 plus years. The talent changes. The location changes someone, but it's always been a challenge to find him. >> I guess it's good to have a deadline. I guess you did not take the chief data officer role in your current position. Explain that. What's what. What's your point of view on on that role and how it's evolved and how it's maybe being used in ways that don't I >> mean, I think that a CDO, um on during the early days, there wasn't a definition of a matter of fact. Every time I get a recruiter, call me all. We have a great CDO row for first time I first thing I asked him, How would you define what you mean by CDO? Because I've never seen it defined the same way into cos it's just that way But I think that the CDO, regardless of institutions, responsibility end in to make sure there's an Indian framework from strategy execution, including all of the governance and compliance components, and that you have ownership of each piece in the organization. CDO most companies doesn't own all of that, but I think they have a responsibility and too many organizations that hasn't occurred. So you always find gaps and each organization somewhere between risk costs and value, in terms of how how they're, how the how the organization's driving data and in my current role. Like I said, I wanted to focus. We want the focus to really be on how we're enabling, and I may be enabling from a risk and compliance standpoint, Justus greatly as I'm enabling a gross perspective on the business or or cost management and cost reductions. We have been successful in several programs for self funding data programs for multi gears. By finding and costs, I've gone in tow several organizations that it had a decade of merger after merger and Data's afterthought in almost any merger. I mean, there's a Data Silas section session tomorrow. It'd be interesting to sit through that because I've found that data data is the afterthought in a lot of mergers. But yet I knew of one large health care company. They've made data core to all of their acquisitions, and they was one the first places they consolidated. And they grew faster by acquisition than any of their competitors. So I think there's a There's a way to do it correctly. But in most companies you go in, you'll find all kinds of legacy silos on duplication, and those are opportunities to, uh, to find really reduce costs and self fund. All the improvements, all the strategic programs you wanted, >> a number inferring from the Indian in the data roll overlaps or maybe better than gaps and data is that thread between cost risk. And it is >> it is. And I've been lucky in my career. I've report toe CEOs. I reported to see Yellows, and I've reported to CEO, so I've I've kind of reported in three different ways, and each of those executives really looked at it a little bit differently. Value obviously is in a CEO's office, you know, compliance. Maurizio owes office and costs was more in the c i o domain, but you know, we had to build a program looking >> at all three. >> You know, I think this topic, though, that we were just talking about how these rules are evolving. I think it's it's natural, because were about 5 2.0. to 7 years into the evolution of the CDO, it might be time for a CDO Um, and you see Maur CEOs moving away from pure policy and compliance Tomb or value enablement. It's a really hard change, and that's why you're starting to Seymour turnover of some of the studios because people who are really good CEOs at policy and risk and things like that might not be the best enablers, right? So I think it's pretty natural evolution. >> Great discussion, guys. We've got to leave it there, They say. Data is the new oil date is more valuable than oil because you could use data to reduce costs to reduce risk. The same data right toe to drive revenue, and you can't put a gallon of oil in your car and a quart of oil in the car quarter in your house of data. We think it's even more valuable. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on the cues. Thanks so much. Lot of fun. Thanks. Keep right, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube from IBM CDO 2019 right back.

>> Live from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit, here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting with John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment, we have George Gagne, he is the Chief Information Officer at Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, George. And we have Christopher McDermott, who is the CDO of the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, Chris. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So, I want to start with you George, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. >> Sure, so the mission has been around for decades actually. In 2015, Secretary of Defense, Hagel, looked at the accounting community as a whole and for efficiency gains made decision to consolidate some of the accounting community into a single organization. And they took the former JPAC, which was a direct reporting unit to PACOM out of Hawaii, which was the operational arm of the accounting community, responsible for research, investigation, recovery and identification. They took that organization, they looked at the policy portion of the organization, which is here in Crystal City, DPMO and then they took another part of the organization, our Life Sciences Support Equipment laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, and consolidated that to make the defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Under the Office of Secretary Defense for Policy. So that was step one. Our mission is the fullest possible accounting of missing U.S. personnel to their families and to our nation. That's our mission, we have approximately 82,000 Americans missing from our past conflicts, our service members from World War II, Korea War, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. When you look at the demographics of that, we have approximately 1,600 still missing from the Vietnam conflict. We have just over a 100 still missing from the Cold War conflict. We have approximately 7,700 still missing from the Korean War and the remainder of are from World War II. So, you know, one of the challenges when our organization was first formed, was we had three different organizations all had different reporting chains, they had their own cultures, disparate cultures, disparate systems, disparate processes, and step one of that was to get everybody on the same backbone and the same network. Step two to that, was to look at all those on-prem legacy systems that we had across our environment and look at the consolidation of that. And because our organization is so geographically dispersed, I just mentioned three, we also have a laboratory in Offutt, Nebraska. We have detachments in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and we have a detachment in Germany. And we're highly mobile. We conduct about, this year we're planned to do 84 missions around the world, 34 countries. And those missions last 30 to 45 day increments. So highly mobile, very globally diverse organization. So when we looked at that environment obviously we knew the first step after we got everybody on one network was to look to cloud architectures and models in order to be able to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, so we developed a case management system that consist of a business intelligence software along with some enterprise content software coupled with some forensics software for our laboratory staff that make up what we call our case management system that cloud hosted. >> So business challenges, the consolidation, the reset or set-up for the mission, but then the data types, it's a different kind of data problem to work, to achieve the outcomes you're looking for. Christopher, talk about that dynamic because, >> Sure. >> You know, there are historical different types of data. >> That's right. And a lot of our data started as IBM punchcards or it started from, you know, paper files. When I started the work, we were still looking things up on microfiche and microfilm, so we've been working on an aggressive program to get all that kind of data digitized, but then we have to make it accessible. And we had, you know as George was saying, multiple different organizations doing similar work. So you had a lot of duplication of the same information, but kept in different structures, searchable in different pathways. So we have to bring all of that together and make and make it accessible, so that the government can all be on the same page. Because again, as George said, there's a large number of cases that we potentially can work on, but we have to be able to triage that down to the ones that have the best opportunity for us to use our current methods to solve. So rather than look for all 82,000 at once, we want to be able to navigate through that data and find the cases that have the most likelihood of success. >> So where do you even begin? What's the data that you're looking at? What have you seen has had the best indicators for success, of finding those people who are prisoners of war or missing in action? >> Well, you know, for some degrees as George was saying, our missions has been going on for decades. So, you know, a lot of the files that we're working from today were created at the time of the incidents. For the Vietnam cases, we have a lot of continuity. So we're still working on the leads that the strongest out of that set. And we still send multiple teams a year into Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia. And that's where, you know, you try to build upon the previous investigations, but that's also where if those investigations were done in the '70s or the '80s we have to then surface what's actionable out of that information, which pathways have we trod that didn't pay off. So a lot of it is, What can we reanalyze today? What new techniques can we bring? Can we bring in, you know, remote sensing data? Can we bring GIS applications to analyze where's the best scenario for resolving these cases after all this time? >> I mean, it's interesting one of the things we hear from the Amazon, we've done so many interviews with Amazon executives, we've kind of know their messaging. So here's one of them, "Eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting." You hear that a lot right. So there might be a lot of that here and then Teresa had a slide up today talking about COBOL and mainframe, talk about punch cards >> Absolutely. >> So you have a lot of data that's different types older data. So it's a true digitization project that you got to enable as well as other complexity. >> Absolutely, when the agency was formed in 2015 we really begin the process of an information modernization effort across the organization. Because like I said, these were legacy on-prem systems that were their systems' of record that had specific ways and didn't really have the ability to share the data, collaborate, coordinate, and communicate. So, it was a heavy lift across the board getting everyone on one backbone. But then going through an agency information modernization evolution, if you will, that we're still working our way through, because we're so mobilely diversified as well, our field communications capability and reach back and into the cloud and being able to access that data from geographical locations around the world, whether it's in the Himalayas, whether it's in Vietnam, whether it's in Papua New Guinea, wherever we may be. Not just our fixed locations. >> George and Christopher, if you each could comment for our audience, I would love to get this on record as you guys are really doing a great modernization project. Talk about, if you each could talk about key learnings and it could be from scar tissue. It could be from pain and suffering to an epiphany or some breakthrough. What was some of the key learnings as you when through the modernization? Could you share some from a CIO perspective and from a CDO perspective? >> Well, I'll give you a couple takeaways of what I thought I think we did well and some areas I thought that we could have done better. And for us as we looked at building our case management system, I think step one of defining our problem statement, it was years in planning before we actually took steps to actually start building out our infrastructure in the Amazon Cloud, or our applications. But building and defining that problem statement, we took some time to really take a look at that, because of the different in cultures from the disparate organizations and our processes and so on and so forth. Defining that problem statement was critical to our success and moving forward. I'd say one of the areas that I say that we could have done better is probably associated with communication and stakeholder buy-in. Because we are so geographically dispersed and highly mobile, getting the word out to everybody and all those geographically locations and all those time zones with our workforce that's out in the field a lot at 30 to 45 days at a time, three or four missions a year, sometimes more. It certainly made it difficult to get part of that get that messaging out with some of that stakeholder buy-in. And I think probably moving forward and we still deal regarding challenges is data hygiene. And that's for us, something else we did really well was we established this CDO role within our organization, because it's no longer about the systems that are used to process and store the data. It's really about the data. And who better to know the data but our data owners, not custodians and our chief data officer and our data governance council that was established. >> Christopher you're learnings, takeaways? >> What we're trying to build upon is, you define your problem statement, but the pathway there is you have to get results in front of the end users. You have get them to the people who are doing the work, so you can keep guiding it toward the solution actually meets all the needs, as well as build something that can innovate continuously over time. Because the technology space is changing so quickly and dynamically that the more we can surface our problem set, the more help we can to help find ways to navigate through that. >> So one of the things you said is that you're using data to look at the past. Whereas, so many of the guests we're talking today and so many of the people here at this summit are talking about using data to predict the future. Are you able to look your data sets from the past and then also sort of say, And then this is how we can prevent more POW. Are you using, are you thinking at all, are you looking at the future at all with you data? >> I mean, certainly especially from our laboratory science perspective, we have have probably the most advanced human identification capability in the world. >> Right. >> And recovery. And so all of those lessons really go a long ways to what what information needs to be accessible and actionable for us to be able to, recover individuals in those circumstances and make those identifications as quickly as possible. At the same time the cases that we're working on are the hardest ones. >> Right. >> The ones that are still left. But each success that we have teaches us something that can then be applied going forward. >> What is the human side of your job? Because here you are, these two wonky data number crunchers and yet, you are these are people who died fighting for their country. How do you manage those two, really two important parts of your job and how do you think about that? >> Yeah, I will say that it does amp up the emotional quotient of our agency and everybody really feels passionately about all the work that they do. About 10 times a year our agency meets with family members of the missing at different locations around the country. And those are really powerful reminders of why we're doing this. And you do get a lot of gratitude, but at the same time each case that's waiting still that's the one that matters to them. And you see that in the passion our agency brings to the data questions and quickly they want us to progress. It's never fast enough. There's always another case to pursue. So that definitely adds a lot to it, but it is very meaningful when we can help tell that story. And even for a case where we may never have the answers, being able to say, "This is what the government knows about your case and these are efforts that have been undertaken to this point." >> The fact there's an effort going on is really a wonderful thing for everybody involved. Good outcomes coming out from that. But interesting angle as a techy, IT, former IT techy back in the day in the '80s, '90s, I can't help but marvel at your perspective on your project because you're historians in a way too. You've got type punch cards, you know you got, I never used punch cards. >> Put them in a museum. >> I was the first generation post punch cards, but you have a historical view of IT state of the art at the time of the data you're working with. You have to make that data actionable in an outcome scenario workload work-stream for today. >> Yeah, another example we have is we're reclaiming chest X-rays that they did for induction when guys were which would screen for tuberculosis when they came into service. We're able to use those X-rays now for comparison with the remains that are recovered from the field. >> So you guys are really digging into history of IT. >> Yeah. >> So I'd love to get your perspective. To me, I marvel and I've always been critical of Washington's slowness with respect to cloud, but seeing you catch up now with the tailwinds here with cloud and Amazon and now Microsoft coming in with AI. You kind of see the visibility that leads to value. As you look back at the industry of federal, state, and local governments in public over the years, what's your view of the current state of union of modernization, because it seems to be a renaissance? >> Yeah, I would say the analogy I would give you it's same as that of the industrial revolutions went through in the early 20th century, but it's more about the technology revolution that we're going through now. That's how I'd probably characterize it. If I were to look back and tell my children's children about, hey, the advent of technology and that progression of where we're at. Cloud architecture certainly take down geographical barriers that before were problems for us. Now we're able to overcome those. We can't overcome the timezone barriers, but certainly the geographical barriers of separation of an organization with cloud computing has certainly changed. >> Do you see your peers within the government sector, other agencies, kind of catching wind of this going, Wow, I could really change the game. And will it be a step function into your kind of mind as you kind of have to project kind of forward where we are. Is it going to a small improvement, a step function? What do you guys see? What's the sentiment around town? >> I'm from Hawaii, so Chris probably has a better perspective of that with some of our sister organizations here in town. But, I would say there's more and more organizations that are adopting cloud architectures. It's my understanding very few organizations now are co-located in one facility and one location, right. Take a look at telework today, cost of doing business, remote accessibility regardless of where you're at. So, I'd say it's a force multiplier by far for any line of business, whether it's public sector, federal government or whatever. It's certainly enhanced our capabilities and it's a force multiplier for us. >> And I think that's where the expectation increasingly is that the data should be available and I should be able to act on it wherever I am whenever the the opportunity arises. And that's where the more we can democratize our ability to get that data out to our partners to our teams in the field, the faster those answers can come through. And the faster we can make decisions based upon the information we have, not just the process that we follow. >> And it feeds the creativity and the work product of the actors involved. Getting the data out there versus hoarding it, wall guarding it, asylumming it. >> Right, yeah. You know, becoming the lone expert on this sack of paper in the filing cabinet, doesn't have as much power as getting that data accessible to a much broader squad and everyone can contribute. >> We're doing our part. >> That's right, it's open sourcing it right here. >> To your point, death by PowerPoint. I'm sure you've heard that before. Well business intelligence software now by the click of a button reduces the level of effort for man-power and resources to put together slide decks. Where in business intelligence software can reach out to those structured data platforms and pull out the data that you want at the click of a button and build those presentations for you on the fly. Think about, I mean, if that's our force multiplier in advances in technology of. I think the biggest thing is we understand as humans how to exploit and leverage the technologies and the capabilities. Because I still don't think we fully grasp the potential of technology and how it can be leveraged to empower us. >> That's great insight and really respect what you guys do. Love your mission. Thanks for sharing. >> Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Ferrer. We will have much more coming up tomorrow on the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, DC. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome to the theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin at The Wynn, in Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019. This is a three day event. You can hear a lot of exciting folks networking behind me, talking tech, talking e-commerce innovation and we're pleased to welcome fresh off the keynote stage a couple of guests from HP. We've got Gillian Campbell, the Head of Omni-channel Strategy and Operations. Gillian, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you for asking us. >> Our pleasure and Herriot Stobo, Director of Omni-channel Innovation and Solutions, also from HP. Welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So Gillian fresh off the keynote stage, enjoyed your presentation this morning. >> Gillian: Thank you. >> Everybody I think in the world knows HP. Those of us consumers going, you know what actually, that reminds me, I need a new printer. >> We can help you. >> Thank you, excellent. Whether I'm shopping online or in a store. So you gave this really interesting keynote this morning talking about what HP is doing, starting at Apache. You really transform this shopping experience. Talk to us a little bit about HP, as I think you've mentioned it as a $50 billion start up and from a digital experience perspective, what you needed to enable. >> Yeah, so as I said, HP have been around for 80 years and in 2015, we became our own entity, HP Inc., and really started looking at how do we enable digital to be pervasive through everything that we do. Our internal processes are reached to customers and identified a great opportunity to really take leading edge and our digital commerce capabilities and we already had some early proof points and APG so we launched a global initiative and we're now on that journey to enable that best in class experience through the digital platforms. >> So Herriot talk to us about, you're based in Singapore. >> Yes. >> What were some of the market dynamics that really made it obvious that this is where we want to start building out this omni-channel strategy starting in Apache? Is it, you know whether, Gillian you mentioned it before. We started retail spaces, some being expensive. Is it more mobile experience and expectations on consumer's part? >> I think we've got a mix of different starting points across Asia. We've got some mega cities like Hong Kong and Singapore rising, Tokyo. And then we've got you know emerging markets across South-East Asia. We don't necessarily have any single market place that controls the entire market as we might see in other regions and so we've had a lot of runway to go and experiment and try new things. We also have an ecosystem of branded retail in Asia. Not in all markets, predominantly in India but also in some markets in South-East Asia that allow us to really blend the experience across both offline and online and to give customers choice at the end of the day. Let them decide how they want to shop and interact with our brand. So we have been running Magento 1 since we first launched our online store businesses in Indonesia and Thailand about six years ago and then we moved into China, replatformed, lexi-platform onto Magento 1 and then that was really the foundation of what we decided to go and build upon to become a global program. so we already had some proof points under our belt with Magento so. >> And what were some of those early wins that really started to make this really obvious that this omni-channel experience, the ability to give customers choice? Whether they want to start the process online, finish it in store, vice verse, or at least have the opportunity to have a choice? What were some of those early wins and business outcomes that you started to see? >> I think even just from because we're all, customers are people. Whether you're a corporate customer, a small business, or a consumer, we're all people and we all know that we shop that way. So essentially the storyline on that back to HP was we have to enable experiences that we would want to experience as well and it was quite a shift for a tech company who were really all about the products to be thinking about, well, how do we really enable that end to end experience? And as Herriot said, the runway was open. We already had some proof points. I was new in the job so I was like all listening to, you know, what the team were telling me. We have a great opportunity here and took that formered as a new concept for the company. We got funding approval and you know the rest is the history and the journey that we're on. So I think it was just taking a different perspective and a different approach and working with a team who already had the, built some of that credibility and others proof points with the earlier deployments and I think we kind of took a risk at the time when we started the engagement with Magento. They weren't in that leadership quadrant and we took a risk to say, let's partner with an energizing company and do something a little bit different and we're still here working towards it so I think that for me was the breakthrough, was just having the tenacity to say, we're gonna drive this path forward. It may not be how we would have done things in the past, but we're a different company now. and we had much more thinner air cover to be able to do that. >> Little bit more agility and flexibility. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you guys, you talked about, Gillian about all the buyers. We are the consumers and we have this expectation, growing expectation that I want to be able to get any and transact anything that I want to buy, whether I'm a procuring person for a company and I'm traveling but I need to approve expenses or I'm a salesperson maybe sitting next to a medium-small business customer. I need to have the option at least to have this store front. What are the things that you guys launched in Apache, leverage be the power of Magento Commerce was click to collect. So tell me a little bit about from maybe an e-commerce cultural perspective, what is it that makes people want to have the ability to start online and actually complete the transaction in a physical location? >> Essentially I was in the Advisory Board yesterday and one of the other customers of Magento said, "Until we can invent a way to touch and feel online, "there's always gonna be a need to have, "outlets where you can go touch and feel." and I think with the click and collect, some of our products are, you know, high-end PCs and gaming devices and printers that is hard to get a good appreciation of what it looks and feels like online. So if you're gonna be spending you know, a significant money you may want to go in and be able to see the colors, feel the finish. You know some of our newer products with the leather portfolios is not something you can truly appreciate without touching it. So I think we have to enable again those customers who do want to experience, feel the weight, you know feel the finish, see the color scheme 'cause its usually important, again not for all customers. Some customers are quite happy to spend thousands of dollars on an online purchase without seeing it and then making sure they have a good facility to be able to, well if they wanted to, to return if they got the normal the product. >> As we look though at like we talked about, this consumerization of everything where we have this expectation and the numbers, I think you even mentioned it maybe in your keynote, Gillian, the numbers of, or somebody did this morning, like upwards of half of all transactions are starting on mobile so we got to start there. What are some of the things that you guys have seen in region in terms of mobile conversions? >> So there's still a massive gap between desktop and mobile conversions, first of all. I mean we're not anywhere near parity between the two. But obviously we're seeing a huge volume of traffic coming in as well and it's shifting that way, so you would expect it to drop as result. I think with Magento what we've seen over the, you know, past few deployments that we've been running and that were over 8% improven. But the desktop conversions are far higher. I mean in terms of improvement and actual conversion so we've still got a long way to go. There and that's a naturative process, that's a journey that probably never ends in terms of ongoing optimization and experimentation. So yeah a lot happening there. I think just on the click and collect topic as well that you were asking about people wanting to start their journey online and then come into bricks and mortar. We're seeing a huge uptake on it just by experimenting, by piloting. Over 26% of our consumer notebooks in India that we've put onto this program were being collected in store and this is in environments which are inherently chaotic on the streets. You don't want to go out there but actually I'm passing that way anyway so it's just easier for me to pick it up on the way home and probably quicker 'cause I can collect in two hours. So it's just giving people customer choice, no additional incentive and it seems to take. So now we're expanding out regionally. >> So you said there's, this morning, Gillian, in your keynote eight markets covered, mostly Apache, but also in Latin America. >> We just started in Latin America, again, the development process is not just as simple as we're switching on. So we've been doing a lot of work for this past six months with Latin America. The team there, they're super excited to get launched. There's some differences there, we've talked about the regional variation around fulfillment models that we have to adapt towards but the intent is to get Latin America deployed, leveraging some of the layer lengths from what we've done in Asia specific and then starting to move around into more the near region and then ultimately back into the US and Canada. >> So as you look forward and of course you've mentioned we're on this journey right, what are some of the key learnings that you're going to apply? You mentioned this morning, something that was very intriguing and that was, respect the integrity of the Magento platform. Talk about that in context of some of the other learnings that you'd recommend for colleagues and similar or other industries to be able to achieve what you have on a global scale. >> I think from the outset, there was this kind of like baggage of deployments of capabilities not just in commerce but deployment of capabilities across HP that we had not respected the integrity of the platform. We had adjusted the code and developed on the code to make it HP specific and with the new HP Inc. company one of the guided principles was no, when we buy the leverage software applications respect it for what it is and adjust business processes and adjust integration rather than adjust the core so that we can get the advantage of the longer term opportunity without creating such like. So it was really just a foundational, you know, let's not go in here with a mindset that we know better than the core. The core is there for a reason and then build around that and ensure the integration and I think you know with Herriot's leadership, we've been able to you know, just keep that firm is why we can be successful and be successful longer term as well. So that all the, and one of the things we talked about yesterday also is the excellent capabilities that are coming with Adobe and the integration that we talked about the recommendation of Adobe Sensei and integrate that with Magento Core. If you don't keep to the respect the integrity, those upgrades and capabilities become really hard to take benefit of so we're really excited about, you know, again, sticking with the core and enabling and growing with the core with Magento and Adobe. >> I would just build on it, I mean I think its never gonna be easy running a global commerce platform. Single instance, multiple countries, you know, 27 markets to get started with. Who knows where we're gonna end. Its always gonna be a challenge so we have to keep it as simple as possible. These upgrades are fast and furious and that's great and we all gets lots of benefit but if we start going down our own path, we've lost it. We've lost the benefit. >> And that's one of the things too that Jason Wolfsteen said this morning was that the word Magento was gonna be enabling businesses to achieve without getting in their way and it kind of sounds Herriot, like you're saying the same thing. That we've gotta be able to respect the technologies that we're building so we don't get in our own way and we keep it simple as we wanna expand globally. Ultimately at the end of the day, you're creating these personalized experiences with consumers and that personalization is so important because it's more and more not only are we transacting or wanting to on mobile but we want our brands like HP to know us. We want you to know our brand value, you know our average order value so that we can become part of the experience but also ideally get rewarded for being loyal. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, I mean just coming to mobile again but you know, 2.3 delivers the native PWA capabilities which we're super excited to get started with. You know we've got so many used cases for this straight away, right out the box but you know we've got to do it gradually, do it the right way. I think we're also aware that we're not gonna be able to run with PWA in all markets straight away 'cause not all markets are ready for it quite frankly. User behavior- >> Is that a cultural thing? >> It's purely cultural. Maybe technical and just technical ecosystems as well. Places like China in particular, where, you know, customers use app stores but they use app stores from every single phone manufacturer right there. That's where the customer is. We can't just move away from that so we need to keep some of those legacy approaches for a little while and then yeah test in other regions and then take the learnings when we're ready to adopt it. >> Exciting so here we are at, this is the first Magento Imagine since the Adobe acquisition. Gillian, let's wrap things up with you. What are your, you mentioned you were part of the Customer Advisory Board yesterday, just some of your perspectives on this years' event now that Magento is powering the Adobe commerce cloud. >> I actually attended the Adobe Summit a few weeks ago here also in Vegas and started to see the thread of commerce coming into that conference and then seeing the Adobe, the experience, coming into Magento and I just think it's a perfect combination of opportunities especially for a company like HP where we were linked in to connect, you know, marketing and sales and support across the customer journey and the capabilities with Adobe and some of the marketing stack, and then the commerce stack, and there was support bringing that together is a super exciting opportunity for us. You know the partnership that we have with both Adobe and Magento again as one as I really, they were just starting what the next journey was gonna look like. >> We feel that about so many things, we're just starting, but Gillian, Herriot, it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE for Magento Imagine 2019. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from The Wynn Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (light music)

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HoshoCon 2018. Brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for the first annual blockchain security conference. The brightest minds in the industry coming together, it's called HoshoCon, and it's presented by, and sponsored by Hosho. But it's not their event, it's an industry event. And we're here with the co-founder and president, Hartej Sawhney, who is theCUBE alumni. Great to see you. You guys are doing a great event. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, it's always good to see you, and I'm so glad theCUBE is here at HoshoCon. >> So you've talked with us many times, but recently in Toronto about this event. This is not your company's event. You guys are putting it together. You're holding it because there's no other conferences that do this, but it's not just you guys. You guys are bringing the industry brains together. >> Yeah, I mean, we see ourselves as being on the intersection of cybersecurity and blockchain. And (coughs) just getting over a cold, but not a lot of conferences are out there that have a open discussion about cyber security in the blockchain industry. And hundreds of millions of dollars are stolen from exchanges. And 10% of all the money in the ICO space has been lost or stolen. And there's simply not enough platforms for this to be discussed. So, we figured we'd start the first conference that solely focuses on being a blockchain security conference. We chose not to have any ICO pitch competition. And it feels like there's more and more typical blockchain conferences out there, but it's important to be home base for anyone who wants to affiliate themselves with cyber security and the blockchain industry. >> And the depth and breadth of security is changing. We are hearing talks with, unfortunately I won't be able to attend the sessions, we're interviewing people all day, but amazing talks. How to hack an exchange, all these new surface areas. I mean, people kind of generally know they're unsecure, but this growth going on. There's new things happening. This is exposing some of the security vulnerabilities. What is the hot topics in the talk tracks here at HoshoCon? >> We have Anand Prakash, who runs a company called AppSecure. He's one of the worlds best white hat hackers. Who has hacked into the likes of Linkedin, Facebook, Google, all the top names. And to have someone walk us through today, Anand Prakash said, "Here's how you hack into a crypto "currency exchange and here's how they actually did it." And to have a white hat hacker walk us through that, it opens up our eye balls as to how easy it actually was for a Japanese exchange to loose 500 million dollars. That's no small sum of money. And this industry is only going to survive if we together as a community come together and evaluate how was it that 500 million dollars got stolen? And how can we as a community of global lovers of bitcoin make sure that this does not happen moving forward? >> On that exchange hack, 500 million dollars in Japan, was that white hat done or was that black hat? >> It was black hat. Unfortunately the money's not been given back. >> So it's not given back. So that's a half a billion dollars? >> It's half a billion dollars stolen, yeah you know. How many industries are worth just about that much? >> Yes, you could feed a couple countries. This is legit, right? Obviously it's like total, you know, wild west if you want to call it. Stage coach robberies they got the mask on. No one knows who it is. This is real, this is absolutely real. What are you guys doing as an industry? What's happening here to prevent this? What are the key, you know hygiene or social, anti-social engineering? What are the key things that are going on that are solving this problem? >> So, every exchange needs to value security and get a penetration test. Every company needs to make sure that somebody at their company is in charge of their in house security practices. Most companies when you ask them, "Who's in charge of security?" They point their finger at the CTO. The CTO is in charge of architecting the software. You need to have somebody full time, in house taking care of the security. Ideally a CISO and if you can afford it, pay someone five to ten thousand dollars a month as a consultant to come in for a couple of months and take care of your in house security. These are basic things that, you know, surprisingly most bitcoin exchanges often times when they're hacked, they're hacked by a basic phishing attack. That one of your employees opened up the wrong email. They opened up a PDF and the hacker gained access to your computer and is now monitoring your keyboard strokes and stole millions of dollars. Or the exchange didn't get an actual penetration test of their exchange. Or exchanges are listing contracts that have not gone through a professional smart contract audit. These things are now, also we're seeing them service in regulation with central governments. And it seems that all the smaller island nations are spearheading the way in terms of writing clarity on regulation. In Malta, Bermuda, Gibraltar, all of them are trying to spearhead the way. I'm much more excited, to be honest, about some of the larger nations bringing clarity on regulation in the next two to three years. We all can't just move to a small island off the coast of Italy that is infamous for actually laundering money in the gaming space. Yes, now they're trying to bring clean clarity doing KYC and AML in Malta and write a actual regulation about security. And if you're domiciled in Malta and you're a exchange then you can only list a token that's been audited. It's wonderful but at the end of the day Malta is also a part of the EU and if the EU changes their mind, things can change Malta. I just feel like it shows the immaturity of the space. If very legitimate companies are all going to flee to small countries like Malta or to islands like Bermuda. Good on those island nations for being so pragmatic and forward thinking and for bringing legal clarity. I mean if I was in an exchange today, arguably yes you have to go to Malta if you want clarity on regulation and you don't want to be in the United States. Right now, Malta is your choice. I'm just personally a little bit much more excited about the next three years where, I make a joke to my co-founder and I say, "The suits are coming." That we look around these conferences and you don't see that many suits but the fortunate 500, many of them are either writing private blockchains, they're evaluating how they're going to leverage blockchain technology in their major businesses and they're going to leverage decentralized applications and tokenization for already running products that have millions of customers, that are already profitable and then when they get tokenized they're going to be up and running right away. So the next two to three years are going to be very interesting. From Hosho's perspective we've taken a big turn towards catering towards more publicly traded large sophisticated companies. We've partnered up with Telefonica. Telefonica is a Fortune 200 company. Its wonderful to be able to leverage that kind of a brand. To deal with major world wide entities that are publicly traded come to Telefonica and evaluate how they can leverage blockchain technology and get one bundled security package that includes Hosho, Rivets, and Telefonica. >> Yeah the Rivets solution is interesting. It's a hardware based solution. So the subscriber of the phone becomes the entity. It's really interesting and I think this points to new paradigms of security, which I want to get to in a second but I want to just unpack what you said about the small country, big country dynamic. Great for the small countries to be opportunistic. To be creative and capture this opportunity. But people want stability. They want clarity on regulations, yes, but also standards, technical standards. >> We can't all just move to the small country of Malta. >> Yeah I'll be in a plane the whole time. >> It just doesn't work. >> Yeah and by the way the game changes too. Whats the implications of say, Malta decides one day, "You know what?" "We're getting out, we're changing things." A company would have to move their domicile again. So it's a moving train, you don't know what you're going to get. It might be stable now but it's not a scalable opportunity. >> Yeah, people have families and they want to stay where they are. Simple as that. We have large countries that have a strong crypto community that's growing and let's see how they pan out. Singapore seems like a likely next candidate. You have Korea. I would argue to say that the worlds first decentralized application that will be massively adopted will be in Korea. Korea is going to be the place where we have the worlds first decentralized application launched with mass adoption, a paradigm shift. The kind of shift where you forgot what it was like before you used Gmail regularly. >> Yeah, total, total infrastructure change. Alright so I got to ask you the hallway conversation question. Obviously you're very popular here. It's you event, you're sponsoring with the community. I see you talking to a lot of people at the VIP dinner last night. What are some of the hallway conversations that you're having? A lot of interesting people here from diverse backgrounds, in security, technology, some policy, some regulatory, some business, and legal, but really bright minds. What's the hallway conversation like? What are you talking about? >> We're talking about how all of us are going to survive crypto winter that we just entered. We've entered a time where fund raising has become extremely difficult. A lot of funds are simply bleeding. They lost a lot of money and they're not cutting checks right now. So the companies that are going to survive and stick around through this crypto winter, they're making a strong statement and they're going to be the ones that are going to stick around. And a lot of them are here at this conference at HoshoCon. And it amazing to have discussions to see what are the problems that fellow founders are facing? Building companies that will survive this crypto winter. Another thing has been just what are we going to do as a community to self-regulate? Are we going to create self-regulatory organizations? Are we going to let another Moody's get created? What is our viewpoint on regulation in the space overall, right? We love Max Keiser. His viewpoint on regulation is very extreme where he believes bitcoin is a self-regulatory technology. And on the other hand we have people saying, "No, we need to quickly move to regulate the space. "Work with central banks, work with central governments, "and write out the regulations." That's been lot of the hallway conversation. And a lot of other ones that have been really intriguing to me has been people talking about what are things that they have done within their company to protect their employees. Because the reality is in the crypto currency space every single employee of a major company in this industry is a target by naturally being in this industry. And this includes you. We are all naturally targets. And it's not about how much bitcoin you have maybe its about how much bitcoin someone thinks you have. And all of a sudden you become a target. And we need to think about things like our physical security. So some of the more interesting conversations I've been having with people have been around, along the lines of what are you doing to protect you and your family in regards to your physical security? On top of that your online presences. >> So ransoms, people getting kidnapped and or extorted. These kinds of physical pressures? >> Yeah, like ShapeShift has a lot of great stories. Michael Perklin from, the CIS of ShapeShift is here. You should totally talk to him and get him on theCUBE. Michael Perklin has a long list of war stories that ShapeShift has been through. Some of them they went through before he was actually hired as a CISO. And ShapeShift would've also not been hacked of millions of dollars if they had brought on a CISO earlier such as Michael Perklin. I believe they had hired him as a consultant. Did not renew the contract, got hacked, and brought him on as CISO. And he was like, "If you had continued working with me "I would of, this would of been avoided." And that's really-- >> It's foolish. >> One other thing I've seen with ShapeShift actually is online you'll notice that all the employees of ShapeShift, their last names are not online. So on the website it says, their chief marketing officers name is Emily, it says "Emily Shape Shift". And their badges at conferences also says "Emily Shape Shift". These are interesting things to learn from other companies that this is what you're doing to protect your employees from them being hacked. It's very interesting for us to all exchange notes-- >> Shoot I'm out there, (mumbles) everywhere pretty much online. >> Well I'm out there as well. We just got to protect ourselves and we got to think about things like our physical security. People feel uncomfortable thinking about their physical security. They think that, "Oh no we're in America, "we'll just call the cops." What about when we travel? What about when you and I are in a village in Thailand hanging out? We are microorganisms and when microorganisms are hungry they'll do what ever it takes to eat. So if they smell abundance, you and I are in trouble. >> Yeah, we got to be careful. And this is something that you really got to worry about because there's been tons of war stories. Now ultimately when you get back down to the wallet, it's one of the things we've been talking a lot this morning on, with Rivets, was on about the notion of how hard it is for mainstream to use tokens. Where's my private key? This has always been the crypto problem, even with private key encryption. >> Yeah, or should we build a multi-sig wallet to store your tokens in a secure manner? People have been asking us for a long time, Crypto funds, ICO's, "How do we store our tokens!" And our problem was that A, we've either hacked into the other wallets that are available and we saw that they're insecure or the UI and UX completely sucks. So we said lets build our own and so we built our own. >> Are you open sourcing that, is that-- >> No, we're going to be, this is going to be a unique multi-sig wallet that we release, it's not. You're open sourcing the actual code of the wallet or else it's not going to be considered legitimate. >> Yeah, it's good, it's a goldmine. >> It's a profitable venture. >> And that's going to be 100% bullet proof? >> It's going to be very secure. >> Let's talk about Meadow Suite. >> So, we came to a point where our engineers needed better tooling to find security vulnerabilities in smart contracts. And what is available, Truffle, is weak and slow. And so we built Meadow Suite. We built in a long list of tools and a full suite of tooling that we believe are going to be used by a long list of people that are building on the Ethereum blockchain. Including a lot of our competitors. And so we've open sourced it and we're excited for people to check out Meadow Suite. It's on GitHub and our engineers have put a lot of time and effort into it. We even have our own logo for it. >> And the goal is to automate things, make it easier? What's the main, main initial goals? >> I would say, long story short, is to find security vulnerabilities in smart contracts and to build tooling around that. And to effectively build and find vulnerabilities in smart contracts. >> So they build it into their development process natively? >> Correct. >> Alright Hartej great to have you on and hey congratulations for putting on this event. I know we've talked about >> Awesome to be here. it in the past, it actually happened. It's the first inaugural one. >> We had this vision and I'm glad it came through. We had a great global events team. Gabriel Shepherd, and Ryan Shewchuk, and Brad Horspool, and Michelle Yon. And like they've put on conference's the size of Southwest by Southwest. And our vision is, look we're not in the events business. And we're a cyber security business at the end of the day. But we found it necessary that there has to be a conference where there's a platform for people to talk about cyber security intersecting with the blockchain industry. There's got to be a platform for someone to get on stage and say, "Hey here's lessons that "we learned from getting hacked" And if this industry is going to survive, this topic needs to survive. And the brands that want to affiliate themselves with blockchain security and that want to be apart of the discussion. This will be a go to conference every single year. We're going to keep doing it and I look forward to having you at every single one, coming. >> It's been great. And you know what's key is having reputable people working together in a community, building an open community, sharing data, sharing best practices, and having candid conversations. >> Yep, it's the only way to get someone as epic as Andreas Antonopoulos to your conference. I mean my co-founder and I have been looking up to Andreas for so long. Watching videos of Andreas. Watching videos of Max Keiser, Stacy Herbert. To have them here is really just truly remarkable and I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm touched. I'm touched to have you here. I miss David Vellante, I wish he was here. >> He's in San Francisco, he says hi. He was going to fly in tonight but-- >> He texted me. >> He did, okay. >> Hartej it's great to see you. >> Great to see you >> Congratulations. as well. thank you. >> Great event. Okay we're here live with theCUBe coverage for HoshoCon 2018, the first inaugural security conference on blockchain. Industry leaders coming together. The brilliant, bright minds of the industry working out the solutions, trying to pedal faster. Better security, check it out HoshoCon.com. I'm John Furrier stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (techno music)