>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual Experience Brought to you by HP >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover Virtual experience. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here in the Palo Alto studio with remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HBO. ET Al is tailor vice president of content innovation with studio lab Disney. And so men do suck. Sarkar, distinguished technologist, director of AI at HP. Thanks for coming on, Alice. Someone do. Thank you for taking the time. >>It's great to be here. Hi, >>I love this story. I think it's the innovation story, and I think it's going to be one that will experience in our life going forward. That is media, video and experiences and this innovation in AI. It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney Studio Labs Alice that you're running and it's super super important and fun as well. Very relevant. Cool. So first, before we get started, Alice, >>take a minute >>to explain a little about yourself and how Studio Lab came about. Yeah, >>McGuinness Studio lab is just over in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say, three years ago and at the time, just previously before that I had a start up company that came through the Disney accelerators. So I was already inside the building and, um, the team there said Felicity on the said, You know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology, and that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said Yes on then. Since then, we'll be going a team. We opened the lab in May of 2018 and here we are in the middle of Pandemic. But it has grown like crazy. Its just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >>and it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get some of that talk about your experiences, and I wonder how you got into this position because you came in as an entrepreneur. You're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >>Yeah, Okay, well, so as you could sell on British. My actual background started. My whole career started in technology in the mid nineties. A Xai started as a training video editor but then switched very quickly and 95 building websites. And from there on, it was Internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling. And, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So those five years of the BBC in there already department and, um actually out here is VP of digital media for them and then Channel four as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yep, flights side story and doing a startup which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for Children. And then I came round. Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to you make films and episodic content. Even Mawr. You name it faster, better, more exciting. Using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it, >>and the lab that you're doing is it's an accelerant, almost four new technologies. Your job is to what? Look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out what's next. It's >>not a structure. I think you have >>some rain to be creative and experiment >>Well, yeah, I mean, in fact. So it's a studio live at the studios. We'll Disney has eight studios at the moment, and what we do is we look at actually the whole breath of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world and we segregate those that that whole breadth from into three categories i d. Eight. When you know the process of generating the idea and building it, make how we make it where we make it, what we make it with on that experience, how we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole SNU of projects. The studio level so works with some of the best technology companies in the world, and we call those are innovation partners on. We sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call superpowers to the system we like to think. But the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney. You know, in this case, for instance, working with HP like produces something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HP. He couldn't necessarily do it on his own, either. So, yeah, it's a huge remit, and we tend to look, we don't look quite so far out. Generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigated then and get a bit of a head start. >>Well, it's great. Have HBs partner and And having that bench of technology software people is just a nice power source for you as well. Someone to talk about the relation HP relationship with Disney because, um, you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role? You guys sitting around you riff and put a white board together and say, Hey, we're gonna solve these big problems. Here is the future of consumption. That is the future of video. What goes on? Tell us your the relationship between you guys. >>Yeah, it's a good question at HP. We don't really make the service, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the artificial intelligence solutions and algorithms on the DP use and scale it across servers. So So you don't have this opportunity came up from Disney, where this thing came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As as, you know, there are a lot of blemishes and in the video that can come up and didn't want to fix all of them. And they have great algorithm. But what happens is, but with better guards comes a huge amount of computational complexity, which needs a little bit of heterogeneous compute input in parallel processing and in sequential processing. So we thought that it's a perfect on, and it's a combination off the skill sets to make this video quality software execute at speed switch needed for production. Disney. >>So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to. You guys have a great technology. We hear a lot more from the execs at HB on our reporting else. Want to get your thoughts? We're covering some of this new edge technologies. We're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago, called The New Creative Class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cell phone and and really set of Asti studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how Studio Lab collaborates with filmmakers and execs to push the push, the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh? Because the sign of the times, our instagram, tic tac, this is just very elementary. The quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine in, but you can almost imagine the range of quality that's going to come so access to more people, certainly more equipment, cameras, etcetera. What's next? How do you guys see? What's some examples can you share? >>It's an amazing question. I mean, we're working on films and episodic. It's rather than very short form content, obviously, but you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads first using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability Teoh generate vertical metric models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then use it getting that data into a three D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme. What we want to do is like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions aren't having to slog through something that's slow and tedious. They want to get to the story, telling the art in the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for their QC process toe finished is what we want to kind of get rid of so they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster and just going back to what Mandy was saying about the AI project here I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on screen when we do our finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans at their best historically have been the best of finding dead pixels. But what a job I have to do at the end of the process to go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print. Right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks follows automatically. And then HP came in and spread that whole process up by nine X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prince. >>You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology. Even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe them because mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster taking with ah, heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand when it's creative writing software. This is kind of a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still like software is kind of same thing, almost so you know, when you see these new technologies that love to get both your reactions of this. One of the big misses that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. And we're kind of seeing that now. A covert our ones. From a way, I could have seen this. No, no one predicted. So what's >>an >>example of something that people might be misunderstanding that super relevant, that that might become super important very quickly? Any thoughts? >>That's great. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then coming, potentially gone. Except it hasn't it's VR. So it came, you know, whenever it was 20 years ago, and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world And then it reappeared again six years ago again, everybody said it's going to change the world, and in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed, I think, because out in the market everyone is expecting VR to have being a huge consumer success, and I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, we're using VR on a daily basis in film production. Virtual production is one of the biggest, um, emerging processes that is happening If you've seen anything to do with, um Jungle Book Line King Man DeLorean. Anything the industrial like magic work on. You're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on screen, and it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm gonna have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. Ai and Ml is a huge area, obviously were scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to say that it's going to come and go in this one. This is huge, but we're only just beginning to see where and how we can apply Ai and Ml and you did you wanna jump in on that one? So >>let me take it from the technology standpoint, I think it was also very cool trends. Now what happens is that your ML spaces people have come up with creative ideas. But one of the biggest challenge is how do you take those ideas for commercial, use it on and make and make it work at the speed, as Alice was mentioning, It makes it feasible in production. So accelerating your ML on making it in a form which is visible is super important. And the other aspect of it is just the first video quality that it was mentioning. That picture is one types, and I know the business is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes. But there's a whole variety of these vanishes on with human operators. It's kind of impossible to scale up the production on to find all these different artifacts like, you know, especially now. As you can see, the video is disseminated in your forms in your ipads from like, you know, in that streaming. So this is a problem of scale on do stuff. This is also like, you know, a lot of compute on a very like I said, a lot of collaboration with complimentary skill sets that make it real. >>I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employees, now retired good friend, and we're talking about all the Dev ops agile go fast scale up, and he made a comment I want to get your reaction to, he said. You know what we're missing is craft and software. You speak crafts game. So when you have speed, you lose craft, and we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterating. Then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies where you can kind of build crafting into it. Alice, what's your reaction to that? >>One of our favorite anecdotes from The Lion King is so Jon Favreau, the director, built out the virtual production system himself, Teoh with his team to make the film, and it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shortened the time to make the film. What the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time, so effectively John had more takes and more material to make his final film with, and that that's what we want people to have. We want them to have to know ever to have to say I missed my perfect shot because of I don't know what you know. We run out of time so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it. That's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material is possible in the most efficient way. Basically, at the end of the day, for our for our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >>So someone do. This is an example of the pixel innovation. The Video QC. It's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it. You can automate that respect from the tech trends. Will automation action in there? >>Yeah, absolutely. And as Chris was mentioning, If you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization, then you have solved the problem that the people who are creative can think on implement something in a very short time, gone back for like, you know, some of these I'm just coming. >>Well, it's a very impressed that I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work. You guys are in the heart of Burbank and all the action and the Euro little incubates really kind of R and D meets commercial commercially. Really cool. But I have to ask you, with covert 19 going on, how are you guys handling? The situation certainly impacted people coming to work. How is your team? Have been impacted. And how are you guys continuing the mission? >>Well, yeah, The lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building, but it's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all. The team carried on the next day from home, and in fact, we have expanded even because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work work remotely. You know, you name it folks with that home connections, wondering if we had some five G phones hanging around that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on in not least, cause it was just around. This kind of what this has done has accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly in the beginning of remote teller work and remote telepresence and then also ideas coming out of that. So ah, you know, again, the other day I heard holograms coming up. Like, Can we have holograms yet? So we don't do it That's going to cover out again. Yeah, but you know what? The team have all been amazing, would. But we'll miss each other. You know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology >>has been a great leader in in accumulating. All HP employees work from removed and in the process. But we're also discovered is we have also, you know, maybe so. We discovered innovative ways where we can still work together. Like so we increase the volume of our virtual collaborations on. I worked with Erica from Disney is a tremendous facilitator and the technologists of mining one. You have this close collaboration going. Andi almost missed nothing, but yes, if you would like to, you know, on the field each other on to be in close proximity. Look at each app in each other's eyes are probably that's only missing thing, but rest off it, You know, we created an environment perfect, clever and work pretty well. And actually, at this point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote, considering the community of Silicon Valley. >>You know, the final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technology that you're excited about. But someone doing you know, we're talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around you know what virtualization server virtualization has done? An HP knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business that created cloud because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers. But I think this covert 19 and future beyond it virtualization of life, Immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlight a few of them. Um, this virtualization of life society experiences playing work. It's not just work. It's experiences so Internet of things devices how I'm consuming how I'm producing. It's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your both of your thoughts on this kind of virtualization of life because certainly impact studio lab, because you think about these things. Alice and HP has to invent that the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >>Well, goodness, may, I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do video conferencing that you don't have the same subtle cues as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like we are on day similar and not going to solve that immediately. So what we'll have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think, though fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips. And then what's missing? We're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out as people understand this new paradigm and what they could do to solve for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back to back nine hours of BTC a day. And by the end of the day, I could barely walk Way gonna do about that. I think we're gonna see holograms like that. We're gonna see home exercise equipment combined. You know, really good ones. Like you've seen politicians shares going crazy. There's tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually being held back by, um other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like we have to fix this problem. >>Well, you've got a great job. I want to come to quit. My job income joined studio left. Sounds like it's a playground of fun. There great stuff. Someone do close us out here. What? Are you excited about as we virtualized you're in the in the labs, creating new technology. You're distinct, technologist and director of AI. When you're on the cutting edge, you're riding the wave two. What's your take on this? >>Virtually? Yeah, you know the experience. What it has done is it has pushed the age to the home. So now if you really see home is one of the principal connectivity to the outside world restaurants. Professional goes on and on with that, What I also offers is like a better experience. Right now. We're all gather about Zoom being able to do a video conferencing. But as this was pointing out there is that here in that we are now consider combining the augmented reality and and the way that we do your conference and all the other innovations that we could begin in the East so that the interactions becomes much more really. And that is like, you know, I'd say that the world is moving to >>l Cool. Thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoyed. Congratulations on studio lab. You've got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. And someone do. Thank you very much for sharing the insights on HP's role in that. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the Cube. Virtual covering HP Discover virtual experience. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. Stay tuned for more coverage from HP Discover experience after this break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering HPE's Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of HPE discover Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, we're here in the Palo Alto Studio for the remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HPE, Alice Taylor, Vice President of Content Innovation with studioLAB at Disney. And Soumyendu Sarkar, distinguished technologist director of AI at HPE. Thanks for coming on Alice. Samandiyu thank you for taking the time. >> No worries. Great to be here. Hi. >> Hi >> I love this story. I think it's an innovation story and I think it's going to be one that we'll experience in our life going forward, and that is media, video, and its experiences and these innovation about AI, It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney studioLAB, Alice, that you're running, and it's super, super important and fun as well and very relevant and Cool. So first before we get started, Alice, take a minute to explain a little about yourself and how StudioLAB came about. >> Oh my goodness. StudioLAB is just in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say three years ago, And at the time, just previously before that, I had a startup company that came through the Disney accelerator. So I was already inside the building and the team there said well, the CTO there, and the boss said, you know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology. And that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said, yes. And then since then we've been growing a team. We opened the lab in may of 2018 and here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, but it has grown like crazy. It's just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >> And it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get at some of that. Talk about your experience as an entrepreneur, how you got into this position, because you came in as an entrepreneur, you're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, so as you can tell, I'm British. My actual background started, my whole career started in technology in the mid 90s. As I started as a trainee video editor, but then switched very quickly in 95 to building websites and from there on, and it was internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling and I, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So I was five years at the BBC in their R and D department. And I'm actually out here as VP of digital media for them, and then Channel 4 as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yeah, slight side story and doing a startup, which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for children. And then I came round Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to make films and episodic content, even more, you name it faster, better, more exciting, using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it. >> The lab that you're doing, it's an accelerant almost for new technologies. Your job is to what? look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out? >> Yeah >> what's next. It's not a structured thing. You have some reign to be creative and experiment? >> Well, yeah, I mean, the studioLAB, at the studios, well, Disney has eight studios at the moment, And what we do is we look at actually the whole breadth of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world, and we segregate that whole breadth into three categories; Ideate, when, you know, the process of generating the idea and building it, Make, how we make it, where we make it, what we make it with and then Experience. How we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole slew of projects, the studio level works with some of the best technology companies in the world. And we call those our innovation partners and we sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call Superpowers to the system. We like to think that the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney, you know, in this case, for instance, working with HPE, like producing something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HBE couldn't necessarily do on his own either. So yeah, it's a huge remit and we don't look quite so far out, generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigate it then and get a bit of a headstart. >> Well, it's great to have HPE as partner and having that bench of technology, software, and people, and it's just a nice power source for you as well. >> Exactly So Soumyendu talk about HPE relationship with Disney, because you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role, you guys sitting around you riffing and put a whiteboard together and say, Hey, we're going to solve these big problems? ... Here's the future of consumption, here's the future of video... What goes on? Tell us the relationship between you guys. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At HPE We can not only make the servers, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the Artificial Intelligence solutions and algorithms on the GPUs and scale it across Servers. So this opportunity came up from Disney where Disney came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As you know, there are a lot of blemishes in the Video that can come up and Disney wanted to fix all of them. And they came up with great algorithm, but what happens is, like with great algorithm comes a huge amount of computational complexity which needs quite a bit of heterogeneous input in both in Parallel Processing and in Sequential Processing. So we thought that it's a perfect, I'd say combination of two skillsets to make this video quality software execute at speeds which are needed for production in Disney. >> So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to, you guys have some great technology. We'll hear a lot more from the Execs at HPE. On our reporting Alice, we want to to get your thoughts. We're covering some of those new edge technologies, we're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago called the new creative class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cellphone, you know, really easy to set up a studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how the studioLAB collaborates with filmmakers and the Execs to push the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh, Because the sign of the times, are Instagram and Tik Tok, this is just very elementary, the quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine driven, but you can almost imagine that the range of quality that's going to come, so access to more people, certainly more equipment and cameras, et cetera. What's next? How do you guys see And what some examples can you share? >> Oh, that's an amazing question. I mean, where working on Films and Episodics rather than very short form content , Obviously. But you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads, using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability to generate photometrical models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then getting that data into a 3-D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme of what we want to do. It's like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions, aren't having to slog through something that's and tedious. They want to get to the storytelling and the art and the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for the QC process to finish is what we want to kind of get rid of. So they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster. And just going back to what Soumyendu was saying about the AI project here, I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on the screen when we do all finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans are the best, or historically have been the best at finding dead pixels, but what a job to have to do at the end of the process. To go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print, right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks for those automatically. And then HPE came in and sped that whole process up by 9X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prints. >> You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10, 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe and then become mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster, take away that heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand, whether its creative or writing software. This is kind of a a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still, like software, it's kind of the same thing almost. >> Yeah >> So you know, when you see these new technologies, I'd love to get both of your reactions to this. One of the big misses, that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. >> Yes >> And we're kind of seeing that now with Covid and everyone's like no way I could've seen this. No, no one predicted it. So what's an example of something that people might be misunderstanding. That's super relevant, that might become super important very quickly. Any thoughts? >> Gosh, that's a great one. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then come and potentially gone, except it hasn't. You'll see. It's VR. So it came whenever it was, 20 years ago and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world. And then it reappeared again, six years ago. And again, everybody said it was going to change the world. And in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed. I think, because out in the market, everyone is expecting VR to have been a huge consumer success. And I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, We are using VR on a daily basis in film production, Virtual production is one of the biggest emerging processes that is happening. If you've seen anything to do with Jungle Book, Lion King , the Mandalorian, anything that industrial light and magic work on, you're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on the screen. And it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm going to have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. AI and ML is a huge area. Obviously, we're scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to to say that it's going to come and go this one. This is huge, but we're already just beginning to see where and how we can apply AI and ML. >> Yeah. >> So Soumyendu, did you want to jump in on that one? >> Yeah, Let me take it from the technology standpoint. I think Alice sort of puts out some very cool trends. Now what happens in tHE AI and ML spaces, people can come up with creative ideas, but one of the biggest challenges is how do you take those ideas for commercial usage and make it work at a speed, as Alice was mentioning, makes it feasible in production. So accelerating AI/ML and making it in a form, which is usable is super important. And the other aspect of it is, just see, for instance, video quality, that Alice was mentioning. Dead pixel is one type, And I know that Disney is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes, but there is a whole variety of these blemishes and with human operators, Its kind of impossible to scale up the production and to find all these different artifacts, and especially now, as you can see, the video is disseminated in your phones, in your iPads. Like, you know, in just streaming. So this is a problem of scale and to solve this is also like, you know, a lot of computers, and I'd say a lot of collaboration with complementary skillsets that make AI real. >> I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employee. He's now retired, good friend. And we were talking about, you know, all the dev apps, agile, go fast, scale up. And he made a comment. I want to get your reaction to it. He said, "you know, what we're missing is craft." And software used to be a craft game. So when you have speed, you lose craft. And we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterate, and then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies, where, you can kind of build crafting into it. >> Yap Alice, what's your reaction to that? >> One of our favorite anecdotes from the lion King is, so Jon Favreau the director, built out the virtual production system with his team to make the film. And it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shorten the time to make the film, what the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time. So effectively Jon had more tapes and more material to make his final film with. And that's what we want people to have. We want them to not ever to have to say, Oh, I missed my perfect shot because of, I don't know what, you know, we ran out of time, so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it, that's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material as possible in the most efficient way, basically at the end of the day for our our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >> So Soumyendu, this is an example of the pixel innovation, the video QC, it's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it, you can automate that. That's back to some of the tech trends. A lot of automation action in there. >> Yeah, absolutely. And as Alice was mentioning, if you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization then you have solved the problem. That way, the people who are creative can think and implement something in a very short time. And that's fair, like, you know, some of these scientists come in >> Well, I also very impressed and I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work, >> Alright. >> You guys are in the part of Burbank and all the action. I know you're a little sort of incubate. It's really kind of R and D meet commercially. Commercial is really cool. But I have to ask you what the COVID-19 going on, how are you guys handling the situation? Certainly impacted people coming to work. >> Yeah >> How has your team in been impacted and how are you guys continuing the mission? >> Well, the lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building. But there's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all the team carried on the next day from home. And in fact, we have expanded even, because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work remotely, you name it, folks with bad home connections, wondering if we had some 5G phones hanging around, that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co-location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on then. Not least, coz it was just a round, this kind of, what this has done is accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly, in the beginning of remote teleworking and remote telepresence, and then also ideas coming out of that. So you know, again, the other day I heard Holograms coming up, like, can we have holograms yet? >> Yeah, we can do that, we've done that, Lets do it. Bring that back. >> And so it's that kind of thing. Exactly, that's going to come around again. Yeah. But you know what? The team have all been amazing. But we'll miss each other, you know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology. >> Well, You know, we were talking earlier on theCUBE last week about, the future got pulled to the present, not the present accelerated the future. Which exposes some of these things that are really important and you mentioned it. So I have to ask you Alice, as you guys got more work, obviously it makes sense. What have you learnt as adapting and leading your team through this change? Any learnings you can share with folks? >> Well, yes, that's a good one. But mainly resilience. It's been a nonstop and quite relentless and the news out there is extraordinary. So we're also trying to balance a very full pipeline of work with understanding that people are struggling to balance their lives as well at home, You know, kids, pets, BLM, like you name it, everything is affecting everybody. So resilience and empathy is really top of my mind at the moment as we try to continue to succeed, but making sure that everybody stays healthy and sane. >> Yeah. And in great news, you got a partner here with HPE, the innovation doesn't stop there. You still have to partner. How do you keep up with these technologies and the importance of partners, comments, and Soumyendu your comment as well. >> Yeah. So HPE has been a great leader in accommodating all HPE employees to work from remote and in the process, what we also discovered is, we humans are innovative. So we discover the innovative ways where we can still work together. So we increased the volume of our virtual collaborations, and I have worked with Erica from Disney, who is a tremendous facilitator and a technologist of mine, to have this close collaboration going, and we almost missed nothing. But yes, we would like to, you know the feel each other to be in close proximity, look at each other's eyes. Probably that's the only missing thing, a crest of it, You know, we created an environment where we can collaborate and work pretty well. And to Alice's point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote considering the community of Silicon Valley. >> You know, I'd love. The final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technologies that you're excited about. But some Soumyendu, you know, we were talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around, you know, what Virtualization... Server Virtualization has done. And HPE knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business, that created cloud, because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers, but I think this COVID-19 and the future beyond it, virtualization of life, an immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlighted a few of them. This virtualization of life, society, experiences, play, work. It's not just work it's experiences. So Internet of Things, devices, how I'm consuming, how I'm producing, it's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your, both of your thoughts on this kind of "virtualization of life" because it certainly impacts studioLAB, because you think about these things, Alice, and HP has to invent the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do you think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >> Wow. Goodness, me. I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do, video conferencing, that you don't have the same subtle cue as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like VR and similar, are not going to solve that immediately. So what will have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think though, fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips and then what's missing, we're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out. As people understand this new paradigm and what they can do to solve, for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back-to-back nine hours of etc a day. And by the end of the day, I can barely walk. What are we going to do about that? I think we're going to see, >> Holograms, I like that Idea. >> right, we're going to see home exercise equipment combined with like, you know, really good ones. Like you've seen pellets on the shares going crazy. There's going to be tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually been held back by other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like, we have to fix this problem. >> Well, you got a great job. I want to come, just quit my job and come join studio lab, sounds like that's a playground of fun. They have great stuff. >> Ton of fun. >> Soumyendu, close this out here. What are you excited about as we virtualize. You're in the labs, creating new technology, you're a distinguished technologist and director of AI. I Wean, you're on the cutting edge. You're riding the wave too. What's your take on this virtual center? >> I think, you know the COVID experience, what it has done is it has pushed the edge to the home. So now, if you really see a home is one of the principle connectivity to the outside world, as far as professionalism goes. And with that, what AI also offers is like a better experience. Right now we are all Gaga about zoom being able to do a video conferencing, but as Alice was pointing out, there is that ER, and the VR. Now consider combining the augmented reality. And the way that we do review a conference and all the other AI innovations that we can bring in so that the interactions becomes much more real. And that is like, you know, I'd say, where the world is moving. >> I can't let this go. I have to go one more step in because you guys brought that up. Alice, you mentioned the fatigue and all these things. And if you think about just the younger generations, we have to invest in our communities and our young people. I mean, think about all the kids who have to go back to school in September, in the fall, what their world's like. And you talk about, you know, we can handle video, but learners? So the transformation that's going to come down the path really fast is how do you create an experience for education and for learning and connecting. This is huge. Thoughts and reactions to that. So it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'm sure a lot of other parents have as well. >> My take on that, kids, I've worked a lot with kids and kids media. And over the years, you often find that when a new media does come in, there's a lot of fear around it, but kids are plastic and incredibly good at adapting to new media and new technology and new ways of working. The other thing is, I think this generation of kids have really had to live through something, you know, and it's going to have, with luck, taught them some resilience. I think, if there's one thing that teachers can be focusing on, it is things like resilience and how to cope under very unusual and very unpredictable circumstances, which is never good for things like anxiety. But it's also the reality of the world, you know, be adaptive and learn, keep learning. These are great messages to give to kids. I think if anything, they are the ones who'll figure out how to socialize online successfully and healthily. So we're going to have to learn from them. >> Yeah. They're going to want to make it to be fun too. I mean, you have to make it entertaining. I mean, I find my personal experience, if it's boring, it ain't going to work. Thank you so much, Alice. Well, thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoy. Congratulations on studioLAB, you got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. Soumyendu thank you very much for sharing the insights on HPE's role in that. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thanks. It's nice. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> This is theCUBE virtual covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Stay tuned for more coverage from HPE Discover Virtual Experience after this break.

>> Announcer: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground at Coupa Inspire '19 from the Vegas. I'm very pleased to welcome not Bono, not Sting, it's Chandar, the CMO of Coupa. Chandar, welcome to theCUBE. >> Lisa, thank you, it's great to be here today. >> This is a really cool event. Procurement is sexy. >> It is sexy. >> It can be so incredibly transformative to any organization. I loved how the last two days, what you guys have done is a great job of articulating Coupa's value in procurement, invoicing, payments, expense, through the voices of your customers and I think there's no better brand value that you can get. >> Sure, absolutely. >> Tell us a little bit about your role as the CMO of Coupa and marketing in a fast-growing company with a product that people might go, "I haven't heard of that, what is that again?" >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I look at it, my role is at Coupa, especially, for Coupa, what's interesting about it, as you said, is that every company makes money, every company spends money. So, invariably, Coupa can be used across a set of different companies. One from the Golden State Warriors to Procter & Gamble to the Lukemia & Lymphoma Society. Across the board. And then, from our perspective, holistically, we're looking at business, but managed from different aspects of spend. You said procurement was in expenses. So, my role is to build a marketing engine to get the flywheel effect of first you drive awareness. All marketing starts with awareness and you said people haven't heard of it. And so, to first to drive awareness in a very thoughtful way to the right contextual community we want to go after. And, two, drive acquisition, we'll drive close synergies between sales and marketing to ultimately drive pipeline and win rates and ultimately deals. And then, very importantly in today's world, is to drive the advocacy and get your most passionate customers to evangelize about the brand, so that you create the flywheel effect of awareness, acquisition, and advocacy. And, that's really what my role today is. >> And, I love how I read an article where you call that the stairway to marketing heaven. So, I thought, I wonder if you're a guitar guy, but you're right. It's how to drive awareness, but in a meaningful, thoughtful way. Especially today, with all all the technology, we wake up with it, right? Our phone is our alarm clock. We are bombarded by ads. If we're on Instagram, following our favorite celebrities or whatnot and it's scary when they have the right context, but it has to be thoughtful. We need to know our audience. So, you describe this stairway to marketing heaven, as you just mentioned, it's awareness, it's acquisition, which is key. But, I feel like a lot of companies don't forget the advocacy part, but they don't invest enough in it because that's the best salesperson for your technology, is the people that are using it successfully, right? >> Totally. Yeah, so, in fact, there was a study about a couple of years which looked at how balanced the boat is in terms of spending in presale versus post-sale. And, it's interesting that 87% of B2B marketing spend was presale. In other words, only 13% of people were investing in retention marketing, adoption mastery, customer marketing, and this is what advocacy marketing. And, in today's world, that doesn't work because you got to balance the boat because, to your point, you're getting in a peer-bond world where your existing customers are your best sellers. And, prospects who have all the buying power today are looking to your existing customers to guide them in their purchasing decisions. So, as an organization, if you balance the boat, then you're going to get the flywheel effect going for you in terms of driving the right advocacy across all channels. Just not your own channel if you earn channels to ultimately drive that acquisition going. >> Do you think that's actually more valuable? 'Cause it's one thing to have on your .com site, your social media sites, all these great things about your technologies, etc., coming from customers or from product experts, from influencers. Talk about the value. As technology advances so much and we are influenced by so many other channels, the value of the earned channel and that peer-to-peer relationship. >> Yeah, I think, as I say, that every mom says her baby is good-looking. But, in software, not every baby is really good-looking. Which means, if you take that analogy and extend it, if you're coming to your own channel, invariably, you're going to see some great customer videos about your product, you're going to see some great endorsements and testimonials, you're going to see some great quotes about your product. The reality, there's no bad news about your product on your own website, on your own channel. But, the reality is there are some, some people who might have different opinions. If you go to Glassdoor, no company gets a five on Glassdoor. And, if you take the same thing and extend it to earned channels for advocacy, folks like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, and B2B, for example, are becoming more relevant today than before because two things. One is 85% of our customers' journey is self-directed. >> Lisa: That much? >> That much and Forrester has anywhere from 60 to 80, but reality is whether you're buying a car or you're buying Coupa. Today, a customer is discovering more journeys. And, in that process, they are looking to more of these earned channels as validation of which ones to go after than just your own channels. So, that's why we got to balance the boat and distribute our advocacy spend dollars across both your own channels and your earned channels. And, that's really important for you and the flywheel will pay off for you over time from that perspective. >> It will and that seems like a lot of the things that Suzy Irwin was talking about to the audience earlier. That's common sense. Why is it that you see these marketing budgets that are so heavily weighted towards just getting awareness, getting customers acquired, and then not thinking about retention marketing account based marketing. >> I'll tell you why. I think any smart CMO will conceptually agree with you. Nobody's going to say, of course, this is not important for me to get advocacy. The challenge comes in in terms of how that marketing department is measured. What gets measured gets funding at the end of the day. >> Lisa: That's a good point. >> And, reality is a lot of these B2B companies are still measuring marketing based on, what's the pipeline you're driving and what's at the top of the funnel metrics that you're driving? In reality, that's a little bit of a skewed thing because then if that's what you're being measured at the board level, at the executive level, then guess what? All your funding is going to go towards that. But, really, the true measurement of marketing, one, is about, yes, you have to get pipeline. You have to influence win rates at the bottom of the funnel and that's where product marketing comes in. But, as importantly, you have to look at the number of brand advocates you create and lifetime value of a customer. >> Yes, CLV, yes. >> And, that's really, really, customer lifetime value is so important because in a SaaS business, ultimately, the Mufasa metric, I'm a Lion King fan. The Mufasa metric is really lifetime value because if a customer stays longer with you, pays you more, and is shouting from the rooftop, then, invariably, that SaaS business is doing well. And, that's why you have to balance the boat in terms of post-advocacies, post-acquisition spend into advocacy, as much as you've done in pre-acquisition. >> When you came into Coupa a couple of years ago, have you been able to shift those budgets because you're able to demonstrate the value that that advocacy piece generates with the flywheel? >> Absolutely and I have a very progressive-thinking CEO who's partners with me on this too. So, we've been absolutely able to do that. In fact, what we're trying to do at the end of the day and most software companies, the real goal should be creating a tribe. In technology, you have to create a tribe to be a titan. And, it's just not about the capability, it's about the community. And, that's really what we're trying to do at Coupa is to create the tribal community feeling. So, if the community is bigger than the brand, it is about the community itself and learning, sharing, and growing with each other and being successful. And, we're just fostering that. So, from that perspective, if you look at this conference and the investment we're making here, some of the programs we're doing in terms of advocacy, what we call spend sellers, etc., is all about that community tribal feeling and go establish that. To use some inspiration from our consumer brands, if you really think about it, people don't buy what they want. People buy what they want to be. So, let me give you what I mean by that. What I want could be a bike. It could be any motorbike, but what I want to be could be part of a very special community and that's why Harley Davidson is successful. What I want could be any stationary bike today, but what I want to be is part of some cool community like Peloton. That's why Peloton is successful. So, similarly for us, what I want could be some spend management software, but what I want to be is part of this community, this cool club, and that's the feeling we're trying to create in the post-acquisition cycle. >> I love that you said that because you talked about that this morning and I loved how you had the word community on the slide and then broke that out into communication unity. And, one of the senses that I got yesterday when-- >> Chandar: Rob was talking about it. >> Yeah, when Rob kicked off everything is this is a very collaborative community. We think about that in terms in terms even like a developer community or something like that. But, Coupa is now managing $1.2 trillion of spend through the platform that every other business that's using Coupa gets to benefit from. It's customer-centric, it's supplier-centric, but it's about applying the right technologies, AI, machine learning, to all this data, so everybody benefits. >> That's right and one of the interesting aspects of community building is one aspect of community building is that Marc Benioff had a great, evangelistic marketing was a way of community building. He would come in and really evangelize and this is where we're going and you all need to come with us. When I was at Marketo, it was interesting. Community building was through more educational marketing and doing it through this, I'm going to educate you through though leadership. Another good way of community building is through product intelligence, which is community intelligence. So, collectively, the sum of all parts are smarter than the parts themselves. And, Rob has a great line, which says, "None of us is as smart as all of us." And, the fundamental community intelligence offering is based on this first principle. So, example, if I'm the community of Coupa customers, the next customer is smarter than the previous customer because the collective intelligence grew, which means I can then go benchmark it myself. I gave an example this morning of USO, the company that provides services to the United States troops. And, when Rick Quaintance at USO benchmarked himself using community intelligence, versus the rest of the community, he realizes that his invoice cycle times are seven times lower. So, that kind of intelligence is extremely beneficial and invaluable to companies. So, that's the value of the community, is providing the collective intelligence. Waze is a great consumer example. Those of us who use Waze for traffic know that it's all community driven and each one of us is smarter because we're collectively using it. It's the same concept in applying that to B2B software. >> So, as we see, you mentioned the over 80% of the buying decision is self-directed whether we're buying a car or Coupa software. Did Coupa foresee that in the last decade to see we're going to have to go to a more community-driven collaboration because the consumer of any thing, any product or service, is going to be so empowered 'cause that's a part of the Coupa foundation. >> It is. >> Lisa: Which, we don't see a lot in companies that are 10 plus years old. >> Yeah, and credit to Rob for his vision for this. It's because I think early part of the company, he wrote into the contracts that the company can benefit. Collectively, every company can benefit by being part of this community. And, the fact is data's aggregated, abstracted, there's no information that is sensitive, etc. But, the fact is we all can collectively benefit through it. That was a great vision of Rob and early people and that's benefited us because the benefit is really over scale and time. Now, your $1.2 trillion, it is really statistically significant in each different industry to get that intelligence. And, that is one of the other reasons we launched our business spend index. It's called spendindex.com. Where we can use the billions of dollars spent in the community to provide a leading indicator of economic growth based on current business spend sentiment. You think of ADP as this payroll, it's called ADP payroll thing that comes out and the gross domestic product report comes out. Those tend to be rear-view mirror lagging indicators. But, as we're using community-based intelligence to provide a windshield, a leading indicator of where the economy is going. So, there's so many different use cases. Benefiting based on spend you're doing as well as where the economy is going and all this is based on the intelligence. >> It's so powerful because, to your point, you're not looking behind. >> Chandar: It's the windshield. >> Exactly, able to be looking forward. So, with all the announcements and the great things that have come out with the AWS expansion, what you guys are doing with Coupa Pay. I was shocked to learn the percentages of businesses that are still writing paper checks. Or, the fact that a lot of companies have 10 plus banks that they're working with. There's still so much manual processes. You must just be, the future is so bright, you got to wear shades with Coupa. But, what excites you about what you guys have announced the last coupe of days and the feedback that you're hearing from your tribe? >> I think there's two kinds of things. One is continue to set the innovation agenda for the industry. And, really, you have to look at every customer on their unique journey of maturity and maturation, so we have a very thoughtful, what we call, maturity index, The business spend management index. Whereas, you are seeing some of these customers, for example, you mentioned, may be in the first stage of this maturity, where, for them, it's just getting automation and going from paper to paperless could be the first step. But, some other customers might say, "I've gotten there, "but I want to get the next level of sophistication "to orchestrate these business spend processes." So, what's exciting for us in the feedback is we're creating product capability across this maturation journey for our customers to make them successful at each of those places. And, Coupa Pay is one example of that. Whereas, some of the other pieces we talked about, we announced about some of the community offerings that we did also is on that. So, that's one exciting piece. The other exciting piece that customers tell us at this conference is, "Foster platforms for us "to engage with each other, learn from each other, "share from each other, and grow with each other." So, even stuff that Rob talked about, which is sourced together. This concept of customers coming together to drive a sourcing process and, again, the collective intelligence in the community, that, we're getting very, very positive feedback from that perspective. And, ultimately, Rob has a really good saying that, "It is not about customer satisfaction. "It is about customer success." That's a delineation there. A customer could be very satisfied with you, but they may not be necessarily successful. And, we say, it's not about satisfaction. It's about success. And, by creating this innovation cycle and then having a post-implementation process that's getting true value, that's truly how we drive customer success. >> And, something that I've heard over and over as I've talked to a number of your customers yesterday and today is how much they're feeling Coupa is listening. Their feedback is being incorporated. They're actually influencing the development of the technology and that was loud and clear the last two days. >> Yeah, I think there is, Rob talked about the number of features that are being influenced by the community and we have these-- >> 300 plus in the last 12 months. >> Yes, 300 plus in the last 12 months. And, there's this concept of two ears, one mouth. And, listen, learn, and innovate and that's the philosophy here. But, it's a right mix of listening to customers, learning from them, and getting the right input from them for driving innovation, as well as having strategic vision on where this market is going and having the right mix of those to provide the capability to customers. >> Wow, you're on a rocket ship. Chandar, it was great to have you on theCUBE. You'll have to come back. >> Yes, Lisa, absolutely, I'll come back and it was a pleasure being here. Awesome. >> Awesome, thank you so much. For Chandar, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire '19. Thanks for watching. (techno music)