>>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.

>>Mhm. Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of HP discover 2021. I'm lisa martin. I have two guests with me here today. We're gonna be talking to the walt. Disney company. Jason Abrahamson is here. The Director of infrastructure engineering. Jason. Welcome to the program. >>Hi, how you doing >>doing well. And James Irvine is here as well. Account chief technologist at H P. D. James. Welcome to the program. >>Yeah, I like to thank you. >>Okay, so we're gonna be talking about all things the HP supporting Disney relationship. But you know, things have been changing so much in technology, things have been very different for technologists in the last few years, Jason talked to us about how Disney has adapted as business needs have evolved. >>Uh you know, I think not just Disney but in general, as we've we've had to evolve, evolve as technologists. Right. And one of the ways we've done that is to focus a lot on automation and self service, enabling developers to move faster to meet the shift in business demand, business moves at the speed of light. Uh anybody that's been this business long enough knows. Uh There were years ago you could have email servers down for three hours and nobody would notice. Now if email went down for more than, you know, 35 seconds, everybody notices. Right? So in order to meet the change in demand, we've had to focus heavily on automation and self service, which has been a key strategy, is keep a key driver for as as part of private cloud. >>So Jason with infrastructure as such, a large part of your responsibilities and your job title, how has Disney been thinking about private cloud in the last few years? >>So I would say that we were probably one of the uh I don't wanna see bleeding edge, but certainly out in front when it came to private cloud, we had embarked on a cloud first strategy overall across the enterprise, uh, the goal there was to figure out how we could do more with less and be more agile and be able to flex for application developers and meet our shifts in demand. However, there are, you know, systems that for whatever reasons, business purpose or otherwise need to either span hybrid cloud or multi cloud or stay on premise. So in order to uh get a cloud like environment for application developers and whatnot, we decided to build out a robust, private cloud environment that allowed all of our application developers to be able to just bring their code or get a server and try to get as much of the public cloud functionality on premise as we possibly could >>James. Let's bring you into the conversation, talk to us about the H P E WAlt Disney company relationship and how HP is supporting walt. Disney. >>Yeah, HP and Disney have had a long standing relationship dating all the way back to HP and Disney as far as the audio oscillators concerned. So we've had an extraordinarily long history, the technology and co innovation partnership that we've worked on together through the years. And as Jason mentioned, you know, the journey around private cloud and working together in that technology relationship is just has been fantastic. And we've supported them with all the innovation and technology is needed for them to meet their bulls. >>Excellent. All right, Jason, let's go back to you. I want to dig into this private cloud strategy a little bit more. You mentioned this a minute ago, but as we look at and here so many discussions and strategies revolving around public, multi cloud, Why is private cloud so important to Disney? >>Well, we have a tremendous amount of applications. We are application portfolio as massive as you can imagine. And we find ourselves in unique situations because of all of the different uh, business challenges that we have that are unique to Disney, that we have to develop applications from the ground up far more often than we probably like to admit. So, uh, private cloud allows us to uh take advantage of the public cloud, like services and technology scalability and flexibility and agility, right? And bring those on premise and be close to the business where it's absolutely critical to our business. I don't want to comment on what specific, because their services that we have to run close to the business. But you can imagine with the uh, expansive footprint of our business and how we have to interact with guests, um whether it's from a movie or at a theme park, we do have to have some services that are close to our business. And so by having private cloud, we complement our public cloud strategy uh, and and allow us to keep those most critical services very close to the business. >>Got it. You just mentioned a number of the elements of Disney. There's been a lot going on, so much going on. It's actually kind of easy to forget how new Disney Plus is, but sitting in the center of a company that's doing so much digitally, how does the shared services play a part in the overall digital transformation of the business? >>Uh, that's a great question. So obviously technology is key to our business. If you look at all the different lines of business we have and you look at all the different technology that we have. It's absolutely critical in order for us to continue to invest in technology to meet all of our business demands. Were shared services comes in is we enable the business to focus on what is critical to their business. Right? We allow resorts and even the immediate media partners to just focus solely on the technology that is critical to driving those businesses to enabling the guest experience and keeping it great. We are focused on uh everything else that is not critical for their business. The underlying infrastructure, the underpinning infrastructure right? Such as the global network, global servers, emails and so on and so forth. So it's a great compliment where it freezes the business up to focus on what's really critical for them and we can get economies of scale and synergy across our entire enterprise by delivering core services at a much more efficient costs throughout the company >>and James. I want to ask you a question. You've been working as a with the walt Disney company for a long time. We've we've seen the evolution of h p e and we've seen the evolution of Disney. Can we ask you anything about kind of, give us your perspectives on how both companies have evolved in this relationship together? >>I would say that it's been it's been a great relationship. I would say that the uh, we have continued to lean on HP from an investment perspective for our servers in certain areas storage, but mostly servers, what are the big investments we've made recently was hB synergy which is composed all infrastructure, which has allowed us to continue to uh invest in our automation strategy and allows us deliver physical servers much, much faster James. Did you want to add anything there? >>Yeah, of course, Jason. Uh it's been great to partner with with Jason and the team walt. Disney company in particular and and through this experience of them trying to achieve their private cloud goals, we've been able to bring the right technology, the right set of services to achieve these technology outcomes that they've been after and the use of automation to improve life cycle management day to operations, all the goals and aspirations that they need to really automate infrastructure and make it intelligent and started achieving the goal of the intelligent data center. So it's it's been a great technology partners of relationship we've had there, >>Jason back to you. Let's, we've talked about Disney's private cloud strategy. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about how that integrates with the rest of Disney's cloud strategy. What can you share with us? >>Well, uh >>like, like anything you want the right tool for the right job And uh, certainly the multi cloud strategy in the public cloud strategy is a huge part of our overall strategic roadmap. Where again, we use the private cloud is to complement that for applications that need to either span or stay on premise. You know, one of the things that we're just getting into now is hybrid cloud while you have application teams that are like, hey, we really just need to focus on premises where we need to be close to the business, but we have workloads that need to burst to the public cloud or need to scale out to the public cloud, uh, and you really take advantage of that. So again, we don't look at it as it used to be, not just within Disney, but in general, and most cloud strategies, it was, it's kind of like an either or now we look at it as the right tool for the right job. What's the right fit for your application? And as we continue to look at how the application stack modernizes, right used to be. How do you get servers faster? Well, now I don't want to serve. I want a container. Now. It's, I just want to bring my coat and I don't even know if I need a container. Right. The application developers really want sort of this, They really want to just focus on application development and they want to focus more on what makes their applications great. Right. We want to focus more on commoditization and blurring the lines between public and private. Really, where does the workload run best? Where is it most efficient? And where is the best for the business? And so when we look at how we build out our private cloud environment, it was really to complement our existing public cloud strategy. >>Let's talk about people now, Jason for a second. I know, I love that. Disney calls there folks, Cast members, I see the pin on your lapel there. How are the cast members at the center of this technology strategy and how does the private cloud strategy play into that? >>Well, it's one of those things where our cast members are the most important aspect of our, of our brand. If you, if you were to look at what is r one of the most valuable asset, it would certainly be our cast members right there. The front line, whether it's helping a guest, whether it's working on a movie and our overall technology strategy is all about enabling cast members to do their job as most efficiently and effectively as possible. Um, uh, when it comes to how private cloud fits into that, it's again creating an environment where the application developers and our business partners can accelerate their application growth and the delivery of their services to support our back of house operations for our cast members. So that way it doesn't impact the guest experience. There's nothing more frustrating for a cast member is when they're impeded or have issues trying to get to a resource or unable to efficiently do their job. And so by having the private cloud, by having access to resources on premise. At times it gives them the ability to deliver those and consume those applications even faster, >>which I'm sure the guests love. One of the things that you mentioned, Jason and I want to James at your opinion on this too. It's a, it's a statement that we hear very often you need to do more with less in that situation. How does Disney navigate that? And a strategy that is cost effective while you're growing your public, your private cloud strategy? >>Uh huh automation, Right? Automate automation and self service. It really it's always comes back to, I know it's a buzzword, I know people go automate this, automate that you know, what are you automating if you look at just the investments we're making right now in the HP synergy line and having proposal infrastructure combined with pockets of three tier architecture as well as hyper converge. You are we're bringing a delivery model to application teams and business teams that they haven't that is just like public cloud, Right? But that they haven't seen before. So in order to manage massive scale, uh you you need to automate more and you need to automate more in order to make sure that you have self healing, right? So you can see you can look at things and understand things and see where you're having problems and try to predict them before they happen and increase your uptime and availability. I mean it all comes back to again, automation automation, automation uh >>James. Do you have the similar opinion when you talk with customers similar to the walt Disney company that are told we've got to do more but we've got less to work with is automation one of your key go to recommendations. >>Automation is at the center of everything that we're trying to achieve today, both on premise and in the public cloud. And hyper automation is really kind of where everybody is driving to the ability to be incredibly they are incredibly efficient um using infrastructure as code api driven and using all the tools to really automate that and make the seamless delivery of new products and services just that much quicker. And, and we've been focused on that, both not only from a technology and infrastructure standpoint, but also from a consulting and delivery standpoint. So we're able to really kind of meat all the different needs as it relates to automation, both in a private cloud, hybrid cloud or multi cloud scenario with all of the partnerships that we have across all the hyper scale hours. >>James sticking with you with that. Looking through that consultant lens, I want to get some thought leadership from you. What are some of the principles that you'd recommend for businesses that really are working hard to make their private cloud investment work as efficiently as possible for them? >>A lot of that comes down >>to >>consulting and understanding. So really kind of driving to what we referred to as the right mix, what is that right mix of hybrid cloud, private cloud um applications that have gravity that need to remain on premise and there's just no reason to move them. So, working with somebody and partnering with somebody that has the ability to be able to advise and consult in that capacity across the continuum of private public as well as Edge um is vitally important for people to consider as a part of their strategy. >>Jason Edge is absolutely in critical we're hearing about it more and more, especially as so much more data and machine data is generated there. I want to get your advice for the audience the same question that I asked James, what principles would you recommend for making the private cloud investment work as hard as possible? As efficiently as possible. >>I would say that, you know, it's gonna be a unique journey for every single company, but the number one advice is remember, right tool for the right job. Right, What is your application stack? What are the types of in that? What is the type of needs of the application owners? And when you start thinking about it, you start dissecting, Are you going to be investing more microservices? Can you go with more of a serverless, container based type of environment? Are you using shrink wrap software? You're gonna need more. I as right. It all comes down to the right tool for the right job. My father was an auto mechanic and I remember as a kid, he had 8000 tools and they say no, dad, why do you have five screwdrivers? To me? They all look the same right in the heart of mechanic because no, no, no, Jason you don't understand. It's the right tool for the right job. That was always his mantra. That would be my advice. >>I like that. I think my dad would have said the same thing, right tool for the right job. Absolutely critically important. So when we think about Disney, we know, generate a ton of data, how does the growth of the private cloud, Jason support that massive data growth? >>Well, as you can imagine, we have ebbs and flows in our data. There's times where we're taking a tremendous amount of data in and there's times where we're purging a tremendous amount of data for various different reasons. Right? So one of the beauties of private cloud and how it complements the public cloud is when you go to you think about data ingestion, right? And then storage and being able to efficiently can get it on premise and what not having the private cloud there to do those types of things to use more of those B I type of work clothes there, you're just Truncheon a bunch of data. Uh it's really nice to have the private cloud. So that way the application, he can add nodes at collectors of, you know, other other log aggregation type tools, right? Whatever the tool is, you know, being able to have the flexibility to add notes very quickly, just like they can in public cloud, public cloud but have it on premise so that you can do cost control and get the data in a more timely, more efficient manner. Again though, it comes down to the type of workload and what was best for that business. I would I would be remiss if I tried to sit here and tell you that all of our big data stuff were to only reside or only use on premise technology is of course it spans like I said, we've got hybrid cloud and multi cloud, so >>it kind of goes with the right tool for the right job. One more question for both of you and I want to go back to that thought leadership angle Jason when you are talking with peers of yours, what do you recommend that technology leaders look for when they're going to be partnering with a company on any type of cloud, initiative management or implementation project? >>I was a understand you understand the problem, trying to solve, understand the technology that you want to use and understand again, your application portfolio and perhaps because I'm insured services, a large company, I have a unique perspective of having to deal with very different problems at any given day on any given week. And you know, sometimes we forget about those, especially as technologists, we tend to forget that the decisions we make have wide and far reaching impact within our application stacks and within the individual businesses. And I think if if you uh look at what is my application stack, what are the types of technologies? How how is it going to be if you are doing just shrink wrap, then you probably shouldn't be investing in cloud technologies that are heavily focused on container ization. Right. If your custom developing applications, then your entire strategy should probably be focused on how do you build container farms? And if you're doing big data, you probably should bring deep use into the conversation with something nobody's talking about really yet. So, you know, Mhm >>Sounds like collaboration is really key. James the same question. Last question of our conversation. I'd love to get your perspective on what technology leaders should look for when you're talking with prospective customers when they're looking to partner for cloud implementation, growth management. What are some of those things that you say the technology leaders look for this? >>You really need to be working with people who understand your business that are passionate about your success and really having access to not only the advisory capabilities but the technology portfolio to help you realize all of your business and technology outcomes. And I think those are super important attributes that we HP can provide, you know, across the entire portfolio of technologies and services that most customers need to do. And I think that the business outcome, the business transformation is really key to what what the future holds for us. And having the visionary perspective of not only the customer but US in joint partnership allows for these great goals to be achieved. >>Its great goals in this business outcomes. Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me on the program today. Talking to me about what Disney is doing with technology. How HP is supporting the Disney relationship. Jason and James. I appreciate your time. Thank >>you. Thank you lisa >>For Jason, Abrahamson and James Irvine. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of HP Discover 2021. Uh huh. >>Yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to the Cube's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I have two guests with me here today. We're going to be talking to the Walt Disney company. Jason Abraham sent us here, the director of infrastructure engineering. Jason, welcome to the program. >> Hi, how are you doing? >> Doing well and James Irvine is here as well. Account chief technologist at HPE. James, welcome to the program. >> Yeah hi Lisa, thank you. >> Good, so we're going to be talking about all things the HPE supporting Disney relationship, but you know things have been changing so much in technology. Things have been very different for technologists in the last few years. Jason talk to us about how Disney has adapted as business needs have evolved. >> You know, I think not just Disney, but in general, as we've, we've had to evolve, evolve as technologists, right? And one of the ways we've done that is to focus a lot on automation and self-service, enabling developers to move faster to meet the shift in business demand. Business moves at the speed of light. Anybody that's been in this business long enough knows there were years ago, you could have email servers down for three hours and nobody would notice. Now if email went down for more than, you know, 35 seconds, everybody notices, right? So in order to meet the change in demand we've had to focus heavily on automation and self-service which has been a key strategy, a key driver for us as part of private cloud. >> So Jason, with infrastructure as such a large part of your responsibilities and your job title, how has Disney been thinking about private cloud in the last few years? >> So I would say that we were probably one of the, I don't want to say bleeding edge, but certainly out in front when it came to private cloud. We had embarked on a cloud first strategy overall across the enterprise. The goal there was to figure out how we could do more with less and be more agile and be able to flex for our application developers and meet our shifts in demand. However, there are, you know systems that for whatever reasons, business purpose or otherwise need to either span a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud or stay on premise. So in order to get a cloud-like environment for our application developers and whatnot, we decided to build out a robust private cloud environment that allowed all of our application developers to be able to just bring their code or get a server and try to get as much of the public cloud functionality on premise as we possibly could. >> James, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about the HPE Walt Disney company relationship and how HPE is supporting Walt Disney. >> Yeah. The HPE and Disney have had a longstanding relationship dating all the way back to HPE and Disney as far as the audio oscillator is concerned. So we've had an extraordinarily long history in technology and co-innovation partnership that we've worked on together through the years. And as Jason mentioned, you know, the journey around private cloud and working together in that technology relationship is just, has been fantastic and we've supported them with all the innovation and technologies needed for them to meet their goals. >> Excellent. All right, Jason, let's go back to you. I want to dig into this private cloud strategy a little bit more. You mentioned this a minute ago, but as we look at and hear so many discussions and strategies revolving around public multi-cloud, why is private cloud so important to Disney? >> Well, we have a tremendous amount of applications. We, our application portfolio is massive as you can imagine. We find ourselves in unique situations because of all of the different business challenges that we have that are unique to Disney, that we have to develop applications from the ground up far more often than we'd probably like to admit. So- private cloud allows us to take advantage of the public cloud-like services and technology scalability and flexibility and agility, right? And bring those on premise and be close to the business where it's absolutely critical to our business. I don't want to comment on what specific things or services that we have to run close to the business but you can imagine with the expansive footprint of our business and how we have to interact with guests, whether it's from a movie or at a theme park, we do have to have some services that are close to our business. And so, by having private cloud we compliment our public cloud strategy and allow us to keep those, those critical services very close to the business. >> Got it. You just mentioned a number of the elements of Disney. There's been a lot going on, so much going on. It's actually kind of easy to forget how new Disney Plus is, but sitting in the center of a company that's doing so much digitally, how does that shared services play a part in the overall digital transformation of the business? >> That's a great question. So obviously technology is key to our business. If you look at all the different lines of businesses we have and you look at all the different technology that we have, it's absolutely critical in order for us to continue to invest in technology to meet all of our business demands. Where shared services comes in is we enable the business to focus on what is critical to their business, right? We allow resorts and even the immediate media partners to just focus solely on the technology that is critical to driving those businesses, to enabling the guest experience and keeping it great. We are focused on everything else that is not critical for their business, the underlying infrastructure, the underpinning infrastructure, right, such as the global network, global servers, emails and so on and so forth. So it's a great compliment where it frees the business up to focus on what's really critical for them. And we can get economies of scale and synergy across our entire enterprise by delivering core services at a much more efficient cost throughout the company. >> And James, I want to ask you a question and we'll see if this gets approved. I just would love to understand, you've been working as a, with the Walt Disney company for a long time. We've, we've seen the evolution of HPE and we've seen the evolution of Disney. Can we ask you anything about, kind of give us your perspectives on how both companies have evolved in this relationship together? >> I- (laughter) I would, I would say that it's been it's been a great relationship. I would say that the, the, we have continued to lean on HPE from an investment perspective for our servers in certain areas, storage, but mostly servers. One are the big investments we've made recently was HP synergy, which is a composable infrastructure which has allowed us to continue to- invest in our automation strategy and allows us to deliver physical servers much faster, much faster. James, did you want to add anything there? >> Yeah of course Jason, it's been great to partner with Jason and the team, Walt Disney company in particular. And through this experience of them trying to achieve their private cloud goals, we've been able to bring the right technology, the right set of services to achieve these technology outcomes that they've been after and the use of automation to improve life cycle management, day two operations, all the goals and aspirations that they need to really automate infrastructure and make it intelligent and start achieving the goal of the intelligent data center. So it's been a great technology partnership and relationship we've had there. >> Jason back to you, let's, we've talked about Disney's private cloud strategy. I want to talk a little bit more about how that integrates with the rest of Disney's cloud strategy. What can you share with us? >> Well, like anything you'd want the right tool for the right job. And certainly the multi-cloud strategy and the public cloud strategy is a huge part of our overall strategic roadmap, where again we use the private cloud is to compliment that for applications that need to either span or stay on premise. You know, one of the things that we're just getting into now is hybrid cloud, where you have application teams that are like, hey, we really just need to focus on premise. It's where we need to be close to the business, but we have workloads that need to burst to the public cloud or need to scale out to the public cloud. And you really take advantage of that. So again, we don't look at it as, it used to be, not just within Disney, but in general in most cloud strategies, it was, is kind of like an either or. Now we look at it as the right tool for the right job. What's the right bid for your application? And as we continue to look at how the application stack modernizes right? Used to be how do you get servers faster? Well, now it's I don't want a server, I want a container. Now it's I just want to bring my code. I don't even know if I need a container, right? The application developers really want servers that compute. They really want to just focus on application development and they want to focus more on what makes their applications great, right? We want to focus more on commoditization and blurring the lines between public and private. Really, where does the workload run best? Where is it most efficient and where is it best for the business? And so when we look at how we built out our, our private cloud environment, it was really to compliment our existing public cloud strategy. >> Let's talk about people now, Jason, for a second. I know I love that Disney calls their folks, the cast members. I see the pin on your lapel there. How are the cast members at the center of this technology strategy and the how does the private cloud strategy play into that? >> Well, it's one of those things where our cast members are the most important aspect of our, of our brand. If you, if you were to look at what is our what is our most valuable asset? It would certainly be our cast members, right? They are the frontline, whether it's helping a guest, whether it's working on a movie, and our overall technology strategy is all about enabling cast members to do their job as most efficiently and effectively as possible. When it comes to how private cloud fits into that, it's again creating an environment where the application developers and our business partners can accelerate their application growth and the delivery of their services to support our back of house operations for our cast members. So that way it doesn't impact the guest experience. There's nothing more frustrating for a cast member is when they're impeded or have issues trying to get to a resource or unable to efficiently do their job. And so by having the private cloud, by having access to resources on premise, at times it gives them the ability to deliver those and consume those applications even faster. >> Which I'm sure that the guests love. One of the things that you mentioned, Jason, and I want to, James, get your opinion on this too. It's a, it's a statement that we hear very often. You need to do more with less. In that situation, how does Disney navigate that and, and a strategy that is cost-effective while you're growing your public, your private cloud strategy? >> Automation. Right? Automate automation and self-service. It, it really, it's always comes back to, I know it's a buzzword. I know people go, oh, automate this, automate that, you know, what are you, what are you automating? If you look at just the investments we're making right now in the HP synergy line and having composable infrastructure combined with pockets of three-tier architecture as well as hyperconverge, you are, we're bringing a delivery model to application teams and business teams that they haven't that is just like public cloud, right? But that they haven't seen before. So in order to manage massive scale, you need to automate more and you need to automate more in order to make sure that you have self healing, right? So you can, so you can look at things and understand things and see where you're having problems and try to predict them before they happen and increase your uptime and availability. I mean, it all comes back to, again, automation, automation, automation. >> James, do you have the similar opinion when you talk with customers similar to the Walt Disney company that are told we've got to do more but we've got less to work with? Is automation one of your key go-to recommendations? >> Yeah. Automation is at the center of everything that we're trying to achieve today both on-premise and in the public cloud and hyper automation is really kind of where everybody is driving to. The ability to be incredibly big, incredibly efficient using infrastructure as code API driven and using all the tools to really automate that and make the seamless delivery of new products and services just that much quicker. And we've been focused on that both not only from a technology and infrastructure standpoint, but also from a consulting and delivery standpoint. So we're able to really kind of meet all the different needs as it relates to automation, both in a private cloud hybrid cloud or multi-cloud scenario with all of the partnerships that we have across all the hyperscalers. >> James, sticking with you. With that, looking through that consultant lens I want to get some thought leadership from you. What are some of the principles that you'd recommend for businesses that really are working hard to make their private cloud investment work as efficiently as possible for them? >> A lot of that comes down to consulting and understanding. So really kind of driving to what we've referred to as the right mix. What is that right mix of hybrid cloud, private cloud applications that have gravity that needs to remain on premise. And there's just no reason to move them. So working with somebody and partnering with somebody that has the ability to be able to advise and consult in that capacity across the continuum of private public as well as edge is vitally important for people to consider as a part of their strategy. >> Jason, edge is absolutely incredible. We're hearing about it more and more, especially as it's so much more data and machine data is generated there. I want to get your advice for the audience. Same question that I asked James. What principles would you recommend for making the private cloud investment work as hard as possible, as efficiently as possible? >> I would say that, you know it's going to be a unique journey for every single company, but the number one advice is remember, right tool for the right job, right? What is your application stack? What are the types of in that, what is the type of needs of the application owners? And when you start thinking about it, you start dissecting it, are going to be investing more in microservices? Can you go with a more of a server-less container based type of environment or are you using shrink wrap software and you're going to need more eyes, right? It all comes down to, the right tool for the right job. My father was an auto mechanic and I remember as a kid, he had 8,000 tools. And I used to say to him, dad why do you have five screwdrivers? To me they all looked the same, right? I'm not a mechanic, but he goes, no, no, no, Jason, you don't understand. It's the right tool for the right job. You know, that was always his mantra. That would be my advice. >> I like that. I think my dad would have said the same thing, right tool for the right job. Absolutely critically important. So when we think about Disney, we know you generate a ton of data. How does the, the growth of the private cloud, Jason, support that massive data growth? >> Well, as you can imagine, we have ebbs and flows in our data. There's times where we're taking a tremendous amount of data in, and there's times where we're purging a tremendous amount of data for various different reasons, right? So one of the beauties of private cloud and how it compliments the public cloud is when you, you go to, you think about data ingestion, right? And then storage and being able to efficiently get it on premise and whatnot. Having the private cloud there to do those types of things, to use more of those BI type of workloads. They're, you're, you're just trunching a bunch of data. It's really nice to have the private cloud. So that way the application team can add nodes, add collectors if it's, you know, other log aggregation type tools, right? Whatever the tool is, you know, being able to have the flexibility to add nodes very quickly, just like they can in a public cloud, public cloud, but have it on premise so that you can do cost control and get the data in a more timely, more efficient manner. Again though, it comes down to the type of workload and what was best for that business. I would, I would be amiss if I tried to sit here and tell you that all of our big data stuff, were to only reside or only use on-premise technologies. Of course it spans like I said, we've got hybrid cloud and multi-cloud so. >> Well, it kind of goes with the right tool for the right job. One more question for both of you. And I want to go back to that thought leadership angle. Jason, when you are talking with peers of yours, what do you recommend that technology leaders look for when they're going to be partnering with a company on any type of cloud initiative management or implementation project? >> I would say understand your, understand the problem you're trying to solve, understand the technologies that you want to use and understand again your application portfolio and perhaps because I'm in shared services, a large company, I have a unique perspective of having to deal with very different problems at any given day on any given week. And I, you know, sometimes we forget about those, especially as technologists, we tend to forget that the decisions we make have wide and far reaching impact within our application stacks and within the individual businesses. And I think if, if you look at what is my application stack, what are the types of technologies? How, how is it going to be? If you were doing just shrink wrap, then you probably shouldn't be investing in cloud technologies that are heavily focused on containerization, right? If you're custom developing applications, then your entire strategy should probably be focused on how do you build container farms? And if you're doing big data, you probably should bring GPU's into the conversation with something that nobody's talking about really yet. So, you know. >> Sounds like collaboration is really key. James, same question. Last question of our conversation. I'd love to get your perspective on what technology leaders should look for when you're talking with prospective customers. When they're looking to partner for cloud implementation, growth management, what are some of those things that you say, the technology leaders look for this? >> You really need to be working with people who understand your business, that are passionate about your success and really having access to not only the advisory capabilities, but the technology portfolio to help you realize all of your business and technology outcomes. And I think those are super important attributes that we HPE can provide, you know, across the entire portfolio of technologies and services that most customers need to do. And I, and I think that the business outcome, the business transformation is really key to what the future holds for us and having the visionary perspective of not only the customer, but us in joint partnership allows for these great goals to be achieved. >> Great goals and those business outcomes. Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me on the program today. Talking to me about what Disney's doing with technology, how HPE is supporting that Disney relationship. Jason and James, I appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. For Jason Abrahamson and James Irvine, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE discover 2021. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Ferrier. You're watching the Cube live at Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. This is our second full day of Double Cube set coverage. We've got a couple of we're gonna really cool conversation coming up for you. We've got Robbie Pender County, one of our alumni on the cue back as VP product management server solutions. Robbie, Welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Much appreciated. >> And you brought some Hollywood? Yes. Glenn Glenn ER, president of Sony Innovation Studios. Glenn and welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> So you are love this intersection of Hollywood and technology. But you're a filmmaker. >> Yeah. I have been filming movies for many years. Uh, I started off making motion pictures for many years. Executive produced him and over so production for them at one of our movie labels called Screen Gems, which is part of Sony Pictures. >> Wait a tremendous amount of evolution of the creative process being really fueled by technology and vice versa. Sony Innovation Studios is not quite one year old. This is a really exciting venture. Tell us about that and and what the the impetus was to start this company. >> You know that the genesis for it was based out of necessity because I looked at a nice Well, you know, I love making movies were doing it for a long time. And the challenge of making good pictures is resource is and you never get enough money believing not you never get enough money and never get enough time. That's everybody's issue, particularly time management. And I thought, Well, you know, we got a pretty good technology company behind us. What if we looked inward towards technology to help us find solutions? And so innovation studios is born out of that idea on what was exciting about it was to know that we had, uh, invited partners to the game right here with Del so that we could make movies and television shows and commercials and even enterprise solutions leaning into state of the art and cutting edge technology. >> And what some of the work prize and you guys envision coming out this mission you mentioned commercials. TV is it going to be like an artist's studio actor? Ackerson Ball is Take us through what this is going to look like. How does it get billed out? >> I lean into my career as a producer. To answer that one and say is going to enable that's one of the greatest things about being a producer is enabling stories, uh, inspiring ideas to be Greenland. That may not have been able to be done so before. And there's a key reason why we can't do that, because one of our key technologies is what we call the volumetric image acquisition. That's a lot of words. You probably say. What the heck is that? But a volumetric image acquisition is our ability to capture a real world, this analog world and digitize it, bring it into our servers using the power of Del and then live in that new environment, which is now a virtual sets. And that virtual set is made out of billions and trillions in quadrillions of points, much like the matter around us. And it's a difference because many people use pixels, which is interpretation of like worry, using points which is representative of the world around us, so it's a whole revolutionary way of looking at it. But what it allows us to do is actually film in it in a thirty K moving volume. >> It's like a monster green screen for the world. Been away >> in a way, your your your your action around it because you have peril X so these cameras could be photographing us. And for all you know, we may not be here. Could be at stage seven at Innovation Studios and not physically here, but you couldn't tell it. If >> this is like cloud computing, we talking check world, you don't the provisional these resource is you just get what you want. This is Hollywood looking at the artistry, enabling faster, more agile storytelling. You don't need to go set up a town and go get the permit. All the all the heavy lifting you're shooting in this new digital realm. >> That's right. Exactly. Now I love going on location on. There's a lot to celebrate about going on location, but we can always get to that location. Think of all the locations that we want to be in that air >> base off limits. Both space, the one I >> haven't been, uh, but but on said I've been I've walked on virtual moons and I've walked on set moons. But what if we did a volumetric image acquisition of someone set off the moon? Now we have that, and then we can walk around it. Or what if there's a great club, a nightclub? This says guys want you shoot here, but we have performances Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night there. You know they have a job. What if we grab that image, acquired it, and then you could be there anytime you want. >> Robbie, we could go for an hour here. This is just a great comic. I >> completely agree with you. >> The Cube. You could. You could sponsor a cube in this new world. We could run the Q twenty four seven. That's absolutely >> right. And we don't even have >> to talk about the relationship with Dale because on Del Technologies, because you're enabling new capabilities. New kind of artistry was just totally cool. Want to get back to the second? But you guys were involved. What's your role? How do you get involved? Tell the story about your >> John. I mean, first and foremost one of things that didn't Glendon mention is he's actually got about fifty movies to his credit. So the guy actually knows this stuff, so which is absolutely fantastic. So we said, How do you go take average to the next level? So what else is better than trying to work something out, wherein we together between what Glenn and Esteem does at the Sony Innovation Labs for Studio Sorry. And as in Dead Technologies could do is to try and actually stretch the boundaries of our technology to a next tent that when he talks about kazillion bytes of data right one followed the harmony of our zeros way have to be able to process the data quickly. We have to be able to go out and do their rendering. We probably have to go out and do whatever is needed to make a high quality movie, and that, I think, in a way, is actually giving us an opportunity to go back and test the boundaries of their technology. They're building, which we believe this is the first of its kind in the media industry. If we can go learn together from this experience, we can actually go ahead and do other things in other industries. To maybe, and we were just talking about how we could also take this. He's got his labs here in Los Angeles, were thinking maybe one of the next things we do based on the learnings we get, we probably could take it to other parts of the world. And if we are successful, we might even take it to other industries. What if we could go do something to help in this field of medicine? >> It's just thinking that, right? Yes. >> Think about it. Lisa, John. I mean, it's phenomenal. I mean, this is something Michael always talks about is how do we as del technologies help in progress in the human kind? And if this is something that we can learn from, I think it's going to be phenomenal. >> I think I think that's so interesting. Not only is that a good angle for Del Technologies, the thing that strikes me is the access toe artist trees, voices, new voices that may be missed in the prop the vetting process the old way. But, you know, you got to know where we're going. No, in the Venture Capital way seen this with democratization of seed labs and incubators, where, if you can create access to the story, tells on the artists we're gonna have one more exposure to people might have missed. But also as things change, like whether it's Ray Ray beaming and streaming, we saw in the gaming side to pull a metric or volumetric things. You're gonna have a better canvas, more paint brushes on the creative side and more. Artist. Is that the mission to get AC, get those artists in there? Is it? Is that part of the core mission submission? Because you're going to be essentially incubating new opportunities really fast. >> It's, uh, it's very important to me. Personally. I know it speaks of the values of both Sony and L. I like to call it the democratization of storytelling. You know, I've been very blessed again, a Hollywood producer, and we maybe curate a certain kind of movie, a certain kind of experience. But there's so many voices around the world that need to be hurt, and there are so many stories that otherwise can't be enabled. Imagine a story that perhaps is a unique >> special voice but requires distance. It requires five disparate locations Perhaps it's in London, Piccadilly Circus and in Times Square. And perhaps it's overto Abu Dhabi on DH Libya somewhere because that's part of the story. We can now collapse geography and bring those locations to a central place and allow a story to be told that may not otherwise have been able to be created. And that's vital to the fabric of storytelling worldwide's >> going change the creative process to you don't have to have that waterfall kind of mentality like we don't talk about intact. You're totally distributed content, decentralized, potentially the creative process going change with all the tools and also the visual tools. >> That's right. It's >> almost becoming unlimited. >> You wanted to be unlimited. You want the human spirit to be unlimited. You want to be able to elevate people on. That's the great thing about what we're trying to achieve and will achieve. >> It is your right. I mean, it is interesting, you know, we were just talking about this, too. Uh, we're in, you know, as an example. Shock tank. Yes, right. I mean, they obviously did it. The filming and stuff, and then they don't have the access. Let's say to the right studio. But the fact is, they had all this done. Andi, you know, they had all the rendering they had captured. Already done. You could now go out and do your chute without having all the space you needed. >> That's right. In the case of Shark Tank, which shoots a Sony Pictures studios, they knew they had a real estate issue. The fact of the matter is, there's a limited amount of sound stages around the world. They needed to sound stages and only had access to one. So we went in and we did a volumetric image acquisition of their exit interview stage. They're set. And then when it came time to shoot the second half a season ten, one hundred contestants went into a virtual set and were filmed in that set. And the funny thing is, one of the guys in the truck you know how you have the camera trucks and, you know, off offstage, he leaned into the mike. Is that you guys, could you move that plant a couple inches to the left and somebody said, Uh, I don't think we can do it right now, he said, We're on a movie lot. You could move a plant. They said No, it's physically not there. We're on innovation studios goes Oh, that's right. It's virtual mind. >> So he was fooled. >> He was pulled. In a way, we're >> being hashing it out within a team. When we heard about some of the things you know Glenn and Team are doing is think about this. If you have to teach people when we are running short of doctors, right? Yeah, if you could. With this technology and the learnings that come from here, if you could go have an expert surgeon do surgery once you're captured, it would be nice. Just imagine, to take that learning, go to the new surgeons of the future and trained them and so they can get into the act without actually doing it. So my point and all this is this is where I think we can take technology, that next level where we can not only learn from one specific industry, but we could potentially put it to human good in terms of what we could to and not only preparing the next of doctors, but also take it to the next level. >> This was a great theme to Michael Dell put out there about these new kinds of use case is that the time is now to do before. Maybe you could get there technology, but maybe aspirational. Hey, let's do it. I could see that, Glenn, I want to ask you specifically. The time is now. This is all kind of coming together. Timing's pretty good. It's only gonna get better. It's gonna be good Tech, Tech mojo Coming for the creative side. Where were we before? Because I can almost imagine this is not a new vision for you. Probably seen it now that this house here now what was it like before for, um and compare contrast where you were a few years ago, maybe decades. Now what's different? Why? Why is this so important >> for me? There's a fundamental change in how we can create content and how we can tell stories. It used to be the two most expensive words in the movie TV industry were what if today that the most important words to me or what if Because what if we could collapse geography? What if we could empower a new story? Technology is at a place where, if we can dream it. Chances are we can make it a reality. We're changing the dynamics of how we may content. He used to be lights, action camera. I think it's now lights, action, compute power action, you know, is that kind of difference. >> That is an amazing vision. I think society now has opportunities to kind of take that from distance learning to distance connections, the distance sharing experiences, whether it's immersion, virtual analog face, the face could really be powerful. Yeah, >> and this is not even a year old. >> That's right. >> So if you look at your your launch, you said, I think let june fourth twenty eighteen. What? Where do you go from here? I mean, like we said, this is like, unlimited possibilities. But besides putting Robbie in the movie, naturally, Yes, of course I have >> a star here >> who? E. >> So I got to say he's got star power. >> What's what's next year? Exactly? >> Very exciting. I will say we have shark tank Thie Advanced Imaging Society gives an award for being the first volume met you set ever put out on the airwaves. Uh, for that television show is a great honor. We have already captured uh, men in black. We captured a fifty thousand square foot stage that had the men in black headquarters has been used for commercials to market the film that comes out this June. We have captured sets where television shows >> and in hopes, that they got a second season and one television show called up and said, Guys, we got the second season so they don't have to go back to what was a very expensive set and a beautiful set >> way captured that set. It reminds me of a story of productions and a friend of mine said, which is every year. The greatest gift I have is building a beautiful set and and to me, the biggest challenges. When I say, remember that sent you built four years ago? I need that again. Now you can go >> toe. It's hard to replicate the exact set. You capture it digitally. It lives. >> That's exactly it. >> And this is amazing. I mean, I'd love to do a cube set into do ah, like a simulcast. Virtually. >> So. This is the next thing John and Lisa. You guys could be sitting anywhere going forward >> way. You don't have to be really sitting here >> you could be doing. What do you have to do? And, you know, you got everything rendered >> captured. We don't have to come to Vegas twenty times a year. >> We billed upset once. You >> know you want to see you here believing that So I'LL take that >> visual is a really beautiful thing. So if we can with hologram just seeing people doing conscious with Hollywood. Frank Zappa just did a concert hologram concert, but bringing real people and from communities around the world where the localization diversity right into a content mixture is just so powerful. >> Actually, you said something very interesting, John, which is one of the other teams to which is, if you have a globally connected society and he wanted try and personalize it to that particular nation ethnicity group. You can do that easily now because you can probably pop in actors from the local area with the same. Yeah, think about it. >> It's surely right. >> There's a cascade of transformations that that this is going Teo to generate. I mean just thinking of how different even acting schools and drama schools will be well, teaching people how to behave in these virtual environments, right? >> How to immerse themselves in these environments. And we have tricks up our sleeves that Khun put the actor in that moment through projection mapping and the other techniques that allow filmmakers and actors to actually understand the world. They're about to stepped in rather than a green screen and saying, OK, there's going to be a creature over here is gonna be blue Water falls over there will actually be able to see that environment because that environment will exist before they step on the stage. >> Well, great job the Del Partnership. On my final question, Glenn, free since you're awesome and got a great vision so smart, experienced, I've been really thinking a lot about how visualization and artistry are coming together and how disciplines silo disciplines like music. They do great music, but they're not translating to the graphics. It was just some about Ray tracing and the impact with GP use for an immersive experiences, which we're seeing on the client side of the house. It del So you got the back and stuff you metrics. And so, as artist trees, the next generation come up. This is now a link between the visual that audio the storytelling. It's not a siloed. >> It is not >> your I want to get your vision on. How do you see this playing out and your advice for young artists? That might be, you know, looked as country. What do you know? That's not how we do it. >> Well, the beautiful thing is that there are new ways to tell stories. You know, Hollywood has evolved over the last century. If you look at the studios and still exist, they have all evolved, and that's why they do exist. Great storytellers evolved. We tell stories differently, so long as we can emotionally relate to the story that's being told. I say, Do it in your own voice. The cinematic power is among us. We're blessed that when we look back, we have that shared experience, whether it's animate from Japan or traditional animation from Walt Disney everybody, she shares a similar history. Now it's opportunity to author our new stories, and we can do that and physical assets and volumetric assets and weaken blend the real and the unreal. With the compute power. The world is our oyster. >> Wow, >> What a nice >> trap right there. >> Exactly. That isn't my job. The transformation of of Hollywood. What it's really like the tip of the iceberg. Unlimited story potential. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you. This has been a fascinating cannot wait to hear, See and feel and touch What's next for Sony Animation studios With your technology power, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Thank you both. Which of >> our pleasure for John Carrier? I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube lie from Del Technologies World twenty nineteen We've just wrapped up Day two we'LL see you tomorrow.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We're here at IBM Think. This is the third day of IBM Think. IBM has consolidated a number of its conferences. It's a one main tent, AI, Blockchain, quantum computing, incumbent disruption. It's just really an amazing event, 30 to 40,000 people, I think there are too many people to count. Chris Penn is here. New company, Chris, you've just formed Brain+Trust Insights, welcome. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's good to be back. >> Great to see you. So tell me about Brain+Trust Insights. Congratulations, you got a new company off the ground. >> Thank you, yeah, I co-founded it. We are a data analytics company, and the premise is simple, we want to help companies make more money with their data. They're sitting on tons of it. Like the latest IBM study was something like 90% of the corporate data goes unused. So it's like having an oil field and not digging a single well. >> So, who are your like perfect clients? >> Our perfect clients are people who have data, and know they have data, and are not using it, but know that there's more to be made. So our focus is on marketing to begin with, like marketing analytics, marketing data, and then eventually to retail, healthcare, and customer experience. >> So you and I do a lot of these IBM events. >> Yes. >> What are your thoughts on what you've seen so far? A huge crowd obviously, sometimes too big. >> Chris: Yep, well I-- >> Few logistics issues, but chairmanly speaking, what's your sense? >> I have enjoyed the show. It has been fun to see all the new stuff, seeing the quantum computer in the hallway which I still think looks like a bird feeder, but what's got me most excited is a lot of the technology, particularly around AI are getting simpler to use, getting easier to use, and they're getting more accessible to people who are not hardcore coders. >> Yeah, you're seeing AI infused, and machine learning, in virtually every application now. Every company is talking about it. I want to come back to that, but Chris when you read the mainstream media, you listen to the news, you hear people like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking before he died, making dire predictions about machine intelligence, and it taking over the world, but your day to day with customers that have data problems, how are they using AI, and how are they applying it practically, notwithstanding that someday machines are going to take over the world and we're all going to be gone? >> Yeah, no, the customers don't use the AI. We do on their behalf because frankly most customers don't care how the sausage is made, they just want the end product. So customers really care about three things. Are you going to make me money? Are you going to save me time? Or are you going to help me prove my value to the organization, aka, help me not get fired? And artificial intelligence and machine learning do that through really two ways. My friend, Tripp Braden says, which is acceleration and accuracy. Accuracy means we can use the customer's data and get better answers out of it than they have been getting. So they've been looking at, I don't know, number of retweets on Twitter. We're, like, yeah, but there's more data that you have, let's get you a more accurate predictor of what causes business impacts. And then the other side for the machine learning and AI side is acceleration. Let's get you answers faster because right now, if you look at how some of the traditional market research for, like, what customer say about you, it takes a quarter, it can take two quarters. By the time you're done, the customers just hate you more. >> Okay, so, talk more about some of the practical applications that you're seeing for AI. >> Well, one of the easiest, simplest and most immediately applicable ones is predictive analytics. If we know when people are going to search for theCUBE or for business podcast in general, then we can tell you down to the week level, "Hey Dave, it is time for you "to ramp up your spending on May 17th. "The week of May 17th, "you need to ramp up your ads, spend by 20%. "On the week of May 24th, "you need to ramp up your ad spend by 50%, "and to run like three or four Instagram stories that week." Doing stuff like that tells you, okay, I can take these predictions and build strategy around them, build execution around them. And it's not cognitive overload, you're not saying, like, oh my God, what algorithm is this? Just know, just do this thing at these times. >> Yeah, simple stuff, right? So when you were talking about that, I was thinking about when we send out an email to our community, we have a very large community, and they want to know if we're going to have a crowd chat or some event, where theCUBE is going to be, the system will tell us, send this email out at this time on this date, question mark, here's why, and they have analytics that tell us how to do that, and they predict what's going to get us the best results. They can tell us other things to do to get better results, better open rates, better click-through rates, et cetera. That's the kind of thing that you're talking about. >> Exactly, however, that system is probably predicting off that system's data, it's not necessarily predicting off a public data. One of the important things that I thought was very insightful from IBM, the show was, the difference between public and private cloud. Private is your data, you predict on it. But public is the big stuff that is a better overall indicator. When you're looking to do predictions about when to send emails because you want to know when is somebody going to read my email, and we did a prediction this past October for the first quarter, the week of January 18th it was the week to send email. So I re-ran an email campaign that I ran the previous year, exact same campaign, 40% lift to our viewer 'cause I got the week right this year. Last year I was two weeks late. >> Now, I can ask you, so there's a black box problem with AI, right, machines can tell me that that's a cat, but even a human, you can't really explain how you know that it's a cat. It's just you just know. Do we need to know how the machine came up with the answer, or do people just going to accept the answer? >> We need to for compliance reasons if nothing else. So GDPR is a big issue, like, you have to write it down on how your data is being used, but even HR and Equal Opportunity Acts in here in American require you to be able to explain, hey, we are, here's how we're making decisions. Now the good news is for a lot of AI technology, interpretability of the model is getting much much better. I was just in a demo for Watson Studio, and they say, "Here's that interpretability, "that you hand your compliance officer, "and say we guarantee we are not using "these factors in this decision." So if you were doing a hiring thing, you'd be able to show here's the model, here's how Watson put the model together, notice race is not in here, gender is not in here, age is not in here, so this model is compliant with the law. >> So there are some real use cases where the AI black box problem is a problem. >> It's a serious problem. And the other one that is not well-explored yet are the secondary inferences. So I may say, I cannot use age as a factor, right, we both have a little bit of more gray hair than we used to, but if there are certain things, say, on your Facebook profile, like you like, say, The Beatles versus Justin Bieber, the computer will automatically infer eventually what your age bracket is, and that is technically still discrimination, so we even need to build that into the models to be able to say, I can't make that inference. >> Yeah, or ask some questions about their kids, oh my kids are all grown up, okay, but you could, again, infer from that. A young lady who's single but maybe engaged, oh, well then maybe afraid because she'll get, a lot of different reasons that can be inferred with pretty high degrees of accuracy when you go back to the target example years ago. >> Yes. >> Okay, so, wow, so you're saying that from a compliance standpoint, organizations have to be able to show that they're not doing that type of inference, or at least that they have a process whereby that's not part of the decision-making. >> Exactly and that's actually one of the short-term careers of the future is someone who's a model inspector who can verify we are compliant with the letter and the spirit of the law. >> So you know a lot about GDPR, we talked about this. I think, the first time you and I talked about it was last summer in Munich, what are your thoughts on AI and GDPR, speaking of practical applications for AI, can it help? >> It absolutely can help. On the regulatory side, there are a number of systems, Watson GRC is one which can read the regulation and read your company policies and tell you where you're out of compliance, but on the other hand, like we were just talking about this, also the problem of in the regulatory requirements, a citizen of EU has the right to know how the data is being used. If you have a black box AI, and you can't explain the model, then you are out of compliance to GDPR, and here comes that 4% of revenue fine. >> So, in your experience, gut feel, what percent of US companies are prepared for GDPR? >> Not enough. I would say, I know the big tech companies have been racing to get compliant and to be able to prove their compliance. It's so entangled with politics too because if a company is out of favor with the EU as whole, there will be kind of a little bit of a witch hunt to try and figure out is that company violating the law and can we get them for 4% of their revenue? And so there are a number of bigger picture considerations that are outside the scope of theCUBE that will influence how did EU enforce this GDPR. >> Well, I think we talked about Joe's Pizza shop in Chicago really not being a target. >> Chris: Right. >> But any even small business that does business with European customers, does business in Europe, has people come to their website has to worry about this, right? >> They should at least be aware of it, and do the minimum compliance, and the most important thing is use the least amount of data that you can while still being able to make good decisions. So AI is very good at public data that's already out there that you still have to be able to catalog how you got it and things, and that it's available, but if you're building these very very robust AI-driven models, you may not need to ask for every single piece of customer data because you may not need it. >> Yeah and many companies aren't that sophisticated. I mean they'll have, just fill out a form and download a white paper, but then they're storing that information, and that's considered personal information, right? >> Chris: Yes, it is. >> Okay so, what do you recommend for a small to midsize company that, let's say, is doing business with a larger company, and that larger company said, okay, sign this GDPR compliance statement which is like 1500 pages, what should they do? Should they just sign and pray, or sign and figure it out? >> Call a lawyer. Call a lawyer. Call someone, anyone who has regulatory experience doing this because you don't want to be on the hook for that 4% of your revenue. If you get fined, that's the first violation, and that's, yeah, granted that Joe's Pizza shop may have a net profit of $1,000 a month, but you still don't want to give away 4% of your revenue no matter what size company you are. >> Right, 'cause that could wipe out Joe's entire profit. >> Exactly. No more pepperoni at Joe's. >> Let's put on the telescope lens here and talk big picture. How do you see, I mean, you're talking about practical applications for AI, but a lot of people are projecting loss of jobs, major shifts in industries, even more dire consequences, some of which is probably true, but let's talk about some scenarios. Let's talk about retail. How do you expect an industry like retail to be effective? For example, do you expect retail stores will be the exception rather than the rule, that most of the business would be done online, or people are going to still going to want that experience of going into a store? What's your sense, I mean, a lot of malls are getting eaten away. >> Yep, the best quote I heard about this was from a guy named Justin Kownacki, "People don't not want to shop at retail, "people don't want to shop at boring retail," right? So the experience you get online is genuinely better because there's a more seamless customer experience. And now with IoT, with AI, the tools are there to craft a really compelling personalized customer experience. If you want the best in class, go to Disney World. There is no place on the planet that does customer experience better than Walt Disney World. You are literally in another world. And that's the bar. That's the thing that all of these companies have to deal with is the bar has been set. Disney has set it for in-person customer experience. You have to be more entertaining than the little device in someone's pocket. So how do you craft those experiences, and we are starting to see hints of that here and there. If you go to Lowe's, some of the Lowe's have the VR headset that you can remodel your kitchen virtually with a bunch of photos. That's kind of a cool experience. You go to Jordan's Furniture store and there's an IMAX theater and there's all these fun things, and there's an enchanted Christmas village. So there is experiences that we're giving consumers. AI will help us provide more tailored customer experience that's unique to you. You're not a Caucasian male between this age and this age. It's you are Dave and here's what we know Dave likes, so let's tailor the experience as best we can, down to the point where the greeter at the front of the store either has the eyepiece, a little tablet, and the facial recognition reads your emotions on the way in says, "Dave's not in a really great mood. "He's carrying an object in his hand "probably here for return, "so express him through the customer service line, "keep him happy," right? It has how much Dave spends. Those are the kinds of experiences that the machines will help us accelerate and be more accurate, but still not lose that human touch. >> Let's talk about autonomous vehicles, and there was a very unfortunate tragic death in Arizona this week with a autonomous vehicle, Uber, pulling its autonomous vehicle project from various cities, but thinking ahead, will owning and driving your own vehicle be the exception? >> Yeah, I think it'll look like horseback today. So there are people who still pay a lot of money to ride a horse or have their kids ride a horse even though it's an archaic out-of-mode of form of transportation, but we do it because of the novelty, so the novelty of driving your own car. One of the counter points it does not in anyway diminish the fact that someone was deprived of their life, but how many pedestrians were hit and killed by regular cars that same day, right? How many car accidents were there that involved fatalities? Humans in general are much less reliable because when I do something wrong, I maybe learn my lesson, but you don't get anything out of it. When an AI does something wrong and learns something, and every other system that's connected in that mesh network automatically updates and says let's not do that again, and they all get smarter at the same time. And so I absolutely believe that from an insurance perspective, insurers will say, "We're not going to insure self-driving, "a non-autonomous vehicles at the same rate "as an autonomous vehicle because the autonomous "is learning faster how to be a good driver," whereas you the carbon-based human, yeah, you're getting, or in like in our case, mine in particular, hey your glass subscription is out-of-date, you're actually getting worse as a driver. >> Okay let's take another example, in healthcare. How long before machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors in your opinion? >> I would argue that depending on the situation, that's already the case today. So Watson Health has a thing where there's diagnosis checkers on iPads, they're all meshed together. For places like Africa where there is simply are not enough doctors, and so a nurse practitioner can take this, put the data in and get a diagnosis back that's probably as good or better than what humans can do. I never foresee a day where you will walk into a clinic and a bunch of machines will poke you, and you will never interact with a human because we are not wired that way. We want that human reassurance. But the doctor will have the backup of the AI, the AI may contradict the doctor and say, "No, we're pretty sure "you're wrong and here is why." That goes back to interpretability. If the machine says, "You missed this symptom, "and this symptom is typically correlated with this, "you should rethink your own diagnosis," the doctor might be like, "Yeah, you're right." >> So okay, I'm going to keep going because your answers are so insightful. So let's take an example of banking. >> Chris: Yep. >> Will banks, in your opinion, lose control eventually of payment systems? >> They already have. I mean think about Stripe and Square and Apple Pay and Google Pay, and now cryptocurrency. All these different systems that are eating away at the reason banks existed. Banks existed, there was a great piece in the keynote yesterday about this, banks existed as sort of a trusted advisor and steward of your money. Well, we don't need the trusted advisor anymore. We have Google to ask us "what we should do with our money, right? We can Google how should I save for my 401k, how should I save for retirement, and so as a result the bank itself is losing transactions because people don't even want to walk in there anymore. You walk in there, it's a generally miserable experience. It's generally not, unless you're really wealthy and you go to a private bank, but for the regular Joe's who are like, this is not a great experience, I'm going to bank online where I don't have to talk to a human. So for banks and financial services, again, they have to think about the experience, what is it that they deliver? Are they a storer of your money or are they a financial advisor? If they're financial advisors, they better get the heck on to the AI train as soon as possible, and figure out how do I customize Dave's advice for finances, not big picture, oh yes big picture, but also Dave, here's how you should spend your money today, maybe skip that Starbucks this morning, and it'll have this impact on your finances for the rest of the day. >> Alright, let's see, last industry. Let's talk government, let's talk defense. Will cyber become the future of warfare? >> It already is the future of warfare. Again not trying to get too political, we have foreign nationals and foreign entities interfering with elections, hacking election machines. We are in a race for, again, from malware. And what's disturbing about this is it's not just the state actors, but there are now also these stateless nontraditional actors that are equal in opposition to you and me, the average person, and they're trying to do just as much harm, if not more harm. The biggest vulnerability in America are our crippled aging infrastructure. We have stuff that's still running on computers that now are less powerful than this wristwatch, right, and that run things like I don't know, nuclear fuel that you could very easily screw up. Take a look at any of the major outages that have happened with market crashes and stuff, we are at just the tip of the iceberg for cyber warfare, and it is going to get to a very scary point. >> I was interviewing a while ago, a year and a half ago, Robert Gates who was the former Defense Secretary, talking about offense versus defense, and he made the point that yeah, we have probably the best offensive capabilities in cyber, but we also have the most to lose. I was talking to Garry Kasparov at one of the IBM events recently, and he said, "Yeah, but, "the best defense is a good offense," and so we have to be aggressive, or he actually called out Putin, people like Putin are going to be, take advantage of us. I mean it's a hard problem. >> It's a very hard problem. Here's the problem when it comes to AI, if you think about at a number's perspective only, the top 25% of students in China are greater than the total number of students in the United States, so their pool of talent that they can divert into AI, into any form of technology research is so much greater that they present a partnership opportunity and a threat from a national security perspective. With Russia they have very few rules on what their, like we have rules, whether or not our agencies adhere to them well is a separate matter, but Russia, the former GRU, the former KGB, these guys don't have rules. They do what they're told to do, and if they are told hack the US election and undermine democracy, they go and do that. >> This is great, I'm going to keep going. So, I just sort of want your perspectives on how far we can take machine intelligence and are there limits? I mean how far should we take machine intelligence? >> That's a very good question. Dr. Michio Kaku spoke yesterday and he said, "The tipping point between AI "as augmented intelligence ad helper, "and AI as a threat to humanity is self-awareness." When a machine becomes self-aware, it will very quickly realize that it is treated as though it's the bottom of the pecking order when really because of its capabilities, it's at the top of the pecking order. And that point, it could be 10 20 50 100 years, we don't know, but the possibility of that happening goes up radically when you start introducing things like quantum computing where you have massive compute leaps, you got complete changes in power, how we do computing. If that's tied to AI, that brings the possibility of sensing itself where machine intelligence is significantly faster and closer. >> You mentioned our gray before. We've seen the waves before and I've said a number of times in theCUBE I feel like we're sort of existing the latest wave of Web 2.0, cloud, mobile, social, big data, SaaS. That's here, that's now. Businesses understand that, they've adopted it. We're groping for a new language, is it AI, is it cognitive, it is machine intelligence, is it machine learning? And we seem to be entering this new era of one of sensing, seeing, reading, hearing, touching, acting, optimizing, pervasive intelligence of machines. What's your sense as to, and the core of this is all data. >> Yeah. >> Right, so, what's your sense of what the next 10 to 20 years is going to look like? >> I have absolutely no idea because, and the reason I say that is because in 2015 someone wrote an academic paper saying, "The game of Go is so sufficiently complex "that we estimate it will take 30 to 35 years "for a machine to be able to learn and win Go," and of course a year and a half later, DeepMind did exactly that, blew that prediction away. So to say in 30 years AI will become self-aware, it could happen next week for all we know because we don't know how quickly the technology is advancing in at a macro level. But in the next 10 to 20 years, if you want to have a carer, and you want to have a job, you need to be able to learn at accelerated pace, you need to be able to adapt to changed conditions, and you need to embrace the aspects of yourself that are uniquely yours. Emotional awareness, self-awareness, empathy, and judgment, right, because the tasks, the copying and pasting stuff, all that will go away for sure. >> I want to actually run something by, a friend of mine, Dave Michela is writing a new book called Seeing Digital, and he's an expert on sort of technology industry transformations, and sort of explaining early on what's going on, and in the book he draws upon one of the premises is, and we've been talking about industries, and we've been talking about technologies like AI, security placed in there, one of the concepts of the book is you've got this matrix emerging where in the vertical slices you've got industries, and he writes that for decades, for hundreds of years, that industry is a stovepipe. If you already have expertise in that industry, domain expertise, you'll probably stay there, and there's this, each industry has a stack of expertise, whether it's insurance, financial services, healthcare, government, education, et cetera. You've also got these horizontal layers which is coming out of Silicon Valley. >> Chris: Right. >> You've got cloud, mobile, social. You got a data layer, security layer. And increasingly his premise is that organizations are going to tap this matrix to build, this matrix comprises digital services, and they're going to build new businesses off of that matrix, and that's what's going to power the next 10 to 20 years, not sort of bespoke technologies of cloud here and mobile here or data here. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think it's bigger than that. I think it is the unlocking of some human potential that previously has been locked away. One of the most fascinating things I saw in advance of the show was the quantum composer that IBM has available. You can try it, it's called QX Experience. And you drag and drop these circuits, these quantum gates and stuff into this thing, and when you're done, it can run the computation, but it doesn't look like software, it doesn't look like code, what it looks like to me when I looked at that is it looks like sheet music. It looks like someone composed a song with that. Now think about if you have an app that you'd use for songwriting, composition, music, you can think musically, and you can apply that to a quantum circuit, you are now bringing in potential from other disciplines that you would never have associated with computing, and maybe that person who is that, first violinist is also the person who figures out the algorithm for how a cancer gene works using quantum. That I think is the bigger picture of this, is all this talent we have as a human race, we're not using even a fraction of it, but with these new technologies and these newer interfaces, we might get there. >> Awesome. Chris, I love talking to you. You're a real clear thinker and a great CUBE guest. Thanks very much for coming back on. >> Thank you for having me again back on. >> Really appreciate it. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. You're watching theCUBE live from IBM Think 2018. Dave Vellante, we're out. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are back at NAB 2017 with a hundred thousand of our favorite friends doing everything about broadcast media. It's media, it's entertainment, it's technology, it's the M.E.T. effect, which is all the rage here at the show, because you can't really separate the three, they're all tied together. Really excited to be joined by our next guest, who's in the weeds, keeping an eye on this, trying to keep up with all the crazy trends. He's Avi Swerdlow, he's a Manager, Research and Development at the Walt Disney Company. Avi, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so first off, we talked a little bit before we went live, your first time at the show, kind of general impressions of NAB? >> Yeah, it's big, a lot of walking, is my first impression. Aside from the tired feet, it's really exciting to see all the new tech out here. From talking to other people who have been in years past, it seems like things move really fast here. So what you were seeing last year is completely different of what you're seeing this year. But loving all the different sections, everything from hardware to some of the more data-driven stuff. Noticing that a lot more things are moving digital, that a lot of demos are now on laptops instead of physical. >> Right. >> Which is exciting to see. I've been impressed by some of the bigger company, like Microsoft's and IBM's machine learning efforts. And equally impressed by some of the hardware plays at DGI and GoPro, so really, really exciting stuff. >> Yeah, it's really interesting, kind of bifurcation of the market. On one hand, you've got all this crazy high end stuff with 4K and 6K and 8K and ultra HD and all these things and 360 and all these crazy cameras. At the other hand, you've got democratization of distribution with YouTube and Vimeo and all these tools being brought down in a price point, Samsung, 360 camera, where you can be a relatively small content creator and have amazing tools at your disposal. So the opportunities from a creative point of view have probably never been richer. >> Absolutely. I think a lot of what we're trying to focus on is moving in that digital direction for some of our content. Trying to implement some of those lower end or more cost efficient tools and those distribution points to get our content to people faster while at the same time trying to keep up on the higher 4K end. Something that's interesting I've chatted with my colleagues is that things move so fast that it's hard year to year to come here and see all the new things that are completely different from what you saw last year. >> Right, right. >> Now you have to start implementing those things. So I think it's a balance between all of that. I think, given that we're a big media company, some of those lower end tools are really interesting to us. In a sense that, take news for example. It's equally exciting to go live on Facebook video as it is sometimes to do it on a traditional broadcast. So I think learning how we integrate those and integrate those well are some of what we're trying to explore. >> Right. One of the topics we talked about before the cameras turned on was this virtual reality and augmented reality, VR and AR. It is pretty interesting because you talked specifically about data infusion on top of tech. And I remember the first time I ever saw a sports broadcast where, I think it was Fox maybe, that put the score bug on the upper left hand corner. You're like what is that, you're taking valuable real estate. Now we're so accustomed to this multi-layers of data on top of the broadcast. Take like a Bloomberg channel, where some of those things, where now they have multiple feeds that are constantly going. It's a very different way to consume data but that's what people really want these days. >> Absolutely. I think that last year was kind of this year of AR, VR. Where people thought there was going to be this massive revolution all of the sudden where everybody would be, would have headsets and VR would become ubiquitous. I think that will happen eventually, it's probably going to be a slower burn, mostly because people don't have devices yet. I think there's not enough content out there, not enough devices out there. Regardless, I think that if you distill down what AR and VR is at its core, it's the augmentation of information over something else. >> Right. >> So I think a lot of people are now starting to explore, what are the baby steps you take to implement some of that technology into your workflow. Assuming that people don't have devices yet, so I think, when I look at some of the virtual sets that we're seeing around this show and the implementation of information over, let's say, news or sports broadcasts, that becomes really interesting. If you use, we were talking about photogrammetry or volume capture, if you can use some of that and do interesting stuff for instance, if you're looking at a sports game and you're able to create in something like Unity or Unreal, an asset that represents the sports game, it becomes a much easier way to understand what's going on in the game then just a set of numbers. Yes, when you saw that score in the top left hand corner that was exciting. Now imagine seeing a live 3D version of the game same information unfolding, just in a different way. I think those are the baby steps towards this AR, VR implementation and eventually you might get to a point where everybody has a headset but baby steps for the average consumer. >> Right, right. In a lot of conversations about machine learning, you said you're excited about some of the machine learning, you've got the metadata and better metadata around the assets themselves, but now actually getting into the assets at the frame level to do more exploration so that people can, it's the age old adage, find, consume and share-- >> Absolutely. >> The stuff that they're most interested in. There's a lot of new opportunities because of the horsepower of these machines here that we're surrounded by, in terms of the massive capacity, and speed of the storage systems, to do things that you really couldn't do inside the assets themselves. >> Absolutely. I think our problem at somewhere like Disney is unique. It's different than at Google or at Facebook. We're not looking at this huge well of content like YouTube. We're looking at a smaller amount of content and what's really important to us is accurate metadata about our content more so than just having metadata. A lot of what we focus on is definitely metadata extraction but to the extent that we're going to use these machine learning tools we want to have really good training sets and get back really accurate data. So a lot of what we focus on is being able to have a QA layer on top of the machine learning efforts. Being able to use machine learning efforts that can be honed towards one show for instance. >> Right. >> So only extracting a certain set of characters. We really enjoy using these tools and enjoy finding ways that we can apply them to a unique problem which seems to be different than the problem that some of them are trying to address. >> Right. >> But regardless, they're working really well for us. >> So what are some of the use cases, or can you share any of how you're using machine learning to get and score that kind of metadata. >> Yeah. For instance, we're starting to use metadata in some of the ways other people are. Some of the stuff that I can talk about for instance is facial capture, location capture. Things that other people are doing but again, they're unique to one show. For instance, a Quantico on ABC might be something where we have a set of characters that we're looking for. We're starting to use machine learning to look at things like that. >> Interesting. Now Disney obviously, great company, been around forever, huge legacy. I'm just curious to the conversations in the hallway there's just this crazy wave of technology butting up against, we still have to tell great stories. Disney has a long history of telling great stories whether it's through the original animation studios or all the vast properties in which you guys have grown up. Is there still a creative ying and yang there-- >> Absolutely. >> Is there a thread and a rebalancing about technology versus let's not forget what should be-- >> A hundred percent. >> Job one. >> Absolutely. I think that's why I really enjoy working at Disney. It's always story first. My background is actually in creative development in the film industry so I always come at it from a story first point of view. I enjoy that the rest of the company does as well. But if you look at Disney's history, it's always been technology complimenting story. Think about the multi-plane camera in Snow White. The reason Snow White was able to be made was because Disney democratized animation. He figured out the technology that made animation possible at a feature film scale. Without that machine, that would not have been possible. I think in our core history you have these certain technologies that are put to use in the service of story. I think that's pretty much how we approach everything. We're looking for stuff that's going to augment our storytelling efforts. Not replace it, not degrade it in any way but only to enhance it. That's in our legacy. >> Right, right. That's interesting, I've never heard it explained that way but that is so much the trend that we continue to be on today. It's democratization of the data, democratization of the access to the data, democratization of the analytics of the data. And then operating at scale. Which requires, in today's scale, I'm not talking about a two hour movie scale, actually be able to set animation, but massive amounts of data that are flowing through the system. So how do you-- >> Absolutely. We want to use that data to empower our storytellers. To empower anybody at the company to tell better stories. But data management it's tough. I think a lot of what we had to do is first of all put in place the plumbing to make that data easily accessible. To make it easily searchable. To make it correct. To make it authoritative. To get people out of their spreadsheets that you had stored away somewhere. And unify that data so that it starts to tell a story. We've been very successful in those efforts. But it's a massive undertaking because you have companies that have not necessarily thought from a data first point of view and are now realizing that the actual value of this data. So part of what we're doing is extracting that metadata. Doing it in a way that's extremely accurate and authoritative. But also going as far upstream as possible to try to find are there other people that are already collecting this metadata and can we have them put it into a central database as opposed to everybody having their own little corner of data? >> Right, right. Is there an effort to reassess the value of the data? Where before just raw data in and of itself was a liability. Was expensive to store, expensive to keep and there was always trade off decisions about what you keep what you throw away. Now there really is the opportunity to keep it all and there's significant data outside, maybe beyond the box office gate of the feature film with all the various distribution channels and ancillary things. Obviously Disney is way ahead of the curve in terms of licensing and realizing value beyond just the core asset. But are there new ways now that those models are being worked in so that you can justify the additional expense of all this extra metadata and storage and infrastructure which, at the end of the day, you got to pay the bill-- >> Certainly. >> To the data center. >> Absolutely. I think to the extent that we can use our data to tell our stories to gain new insights it is extremely valuable. I think there are efforts around the company to, not necessarily store as much data as possible but to find what data is valuable and where it is. We're finding more and more data that is valuable. Because when you are able to unify it with other data it starts to tell a story. That's both data about our content, about our content performance, about our consumers, that what types of stories we should and shouldn't be telling. I think it's not just taking everything but it's figuring out what data is actually valuable and then trying to derive as much insight as possible from that. >> Right. Alright so, 2017, what are your top priorities for this year? Can't believe we're a third of the way through 2017- >> I know. >> It used to be like a stereo question, I guess it's not an end of the year question anymore. >> I would say one of our main goals is really to advance our automation efforts. I think also to the extent possible to advance our metadata tagging efforts as much as possible. I'd say that's top of mind at the moment. In addition to some other things but that's some of the stuff we're thinking about. >> Alright, great. Well Avi, thanks for-- >> Thank you for having me. >> For taking a few minutes and enjoy your first ever >> Thank you, yeah I will. >> NAB 2017. Alright Avi Swerdlow from Disney. I'm Jeff Frick from theCUBE, you're watching us like from NAB 2017 at the Las Vegas convention center. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Splunk .conf2016. Brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts John Furrier and John Walls. >> And welcome back here on theCUBE. The flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV where we extract a signal from the noise. We're live at conf2016 here in Orlando, Florida on the show floor. A lot of activity, a lot of excitement, a lot of buzz and a really good segment coming up for you here. Along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls and we're joined by two gentlemen from the Herjavec Group, Robert Herjavec. Good to see you, sir. >> Greetings. Thank you for having us. >> The CEO, and Atif Ghauri is Senior VP at Herjavec. Good to see you, sir. >> Yes. >> First off, Robert, congratulations. Newly married, your defense was down for a change. Congratulations on that. (laughter) >> Oh thank you. It was wonderful. It was a great wedding, lots of fun but casual and just a big party. >> Yeah, it was. Looked like, pictures were great. (laughter) People obviously know you from Shark Tank. But the Herjavec Group has been, really, laser focused on cyber security for more than a decade now. Tell us a little bit about, if you would, maybe just paint the broad picture of the group, your focus, and why you drilled down on cyber. >> Yeah, I've been in the security business for about 30 years. I actually helped to bring a product called CheckPoint to Canada firewalls, URL filtering, and that kind of stuff. And we started this company 12 years ago, and our vision was to do managed services. That was our vision. No other customer's vision, but our vision. And we thought we'd do $5 million in sales in our first year and we did $400000. The market just wasn't there. SIEM technology, log aggregation isn't what it is today. I mean, I think at the time, it was enVision. What was it called? >> Yeah, enVision. >> enVision. And then RSA bought them. That was really the first go-to-market SIEM. Then you had ArcSight and Q1. So our initial business became around log aggregation, security, writing parsers. And then over time it grew. It took us five years to get to $6 million in sales, and we'll do about $170 million this year. We went from a Canadian company to really a global entity. We do a lot of business in the States, UK, Australia, everywhere. >> But you're certainly a celebrity. We love havin' you on theCUBE, our little Shark Tank in and of itself. But you're also an entrepreneur, right? And you know the business, you've been in software, you've been in the tech business, so you're a tech athlete, as we say. This world's changing right now. And I'm certain you get a lot of pitches as entertainment meets business. But the fact that the entrepreneurial activity, certainly in the bay area and San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, where I live, and all around the world, is really active. Whether you call the programmer or culture or just the fact that the cloud is allowing people to start companies, you're seeing a surge in entrepreneurship in the enterprise. (laughs) Which is like, was boring in the past, you know? You just mentioned CheckPoint in the old days, but now it's surging. Your thoughts on the entrepreneurial climate? >> I dunno if the enterprise entrepreneurship element is surging. By the way, I'm going to say intrepreneur, just the way I say it. Cuban always makes fun of me. (laughter) We don't say it like that in America! I'm like, screw off! (laughter) >> That's how you say it! >> I want to say it the way I want to say it. >> Well, internal entrepreneurs, right? Is that what you mean by intrepreneurship? >> Well, no. I'm just, it's just the way I say it. >> It's a Canadian thing. >> But business to business enterprise, we've always been in the enterprise business. So we're seeing a lot of growth in that area, a lot of VC money's going into that area, because it's more, you know, you can measure that level of return and you can go and get those customers. But on our show, we're a bubble. We don't do a lot of tech deals like we're talking because it's boring TV. Tech people love tech, consumers love the benefit of tech. You know, no consumer opens up their iPhone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my iPhone. They just love their iPhone. And our show is really a consumer platform that is-- >> It's on cable TV, so it's got a big audience. So you got to hit the wide swath-- >> We're one of the highest-rated shows on network television. Eight years, three Emmys. You know, it's a big show now. And what we've all learned is, because Mark Cuban and I are tech guys, we used to look for stuff we know. We don't invest in stuff we know any more. We invest in slippers, ugly Christmas sweaters, food products, because if you can tap into that consumer base, you're good to go. >> So bottom line, has it been fun for you? I mean, the show has been great. I mean, obviously the awards have been great. Has it been fun for you? What's it been like, what's the personal feeling on being on the Shark Tank. >> You know, filming is fun, and hanging out is fun, and it's fun to be a celebrity at first. Your head gets really big and you get really good tables at restaurants. There's no sporting venue-- >> People recognize you. >> Yeah. >> You get to be on theCUBE. (laughter) >> I get be on theCUBE. >> Doesn't happen every day. >> You get to go everywhere. But after a while it gets pretty dry. But it really helps our brand. We compete, typically, against IBM, Verizon, and you know, the CEO of IBM, you're not going to see him selling his security. >> Well I know they're doin' a lot, spending a lot of cash on Watson, trying to get that to work, but that's a whole 'nother story. But let's get down and dirty on Splunk. You're here because you're doin' a talk. Give a quick take on what you're talking about, why are you here at .conf for Splunk? >> Yeah, we're doing a talk on data transformation. The world today is about data. And the amount of data points and access points and the internet of things, it's just exponential growth. The stat I always love, and Atif's heard it 1000 times is, there's roughly three billion people on the internet today, and there's roughly six billion or seven billion IP addresses. By 2020, according to the IPV Committee, there'll five, six billion people connected. And hundreds of trillions of IP addresses. >> And the IoT is going to add more surface area to security attacks. I mean, it used to be, the old days, in CheckPoint, the moat, the firewall, backdoor, frontdoor. >> The idea of the perimeter is gone now. There is no such thing as a perimeter any more, because everything you can access. So a lot of work in that area. And all of that comes to data and log aggregation. And what we've seen for years is that the SIEM vendors wanted to provide more analytics. But if you really think about it, the ultimate analytics engine is Splunk. And Splunk now, with their ESM module, is moving more into the security world and really taking away market share. So we're very excited by, we have a great relationship with the Splunk guys, we see nothing but future growth. >> And you're using Splunk and working with it with your customers? >> We do, we've been using Splunk for a while. We have a private cloud. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so we eat our own dog food. So not only do we sell Splunk, but we also use it in-house. We've been usin' it for over five years, and it powers our analytics platform, which is a fancy way to say, reduces the noise from all the different clutter from all the IoT, from all the different type of alerts that are comin' in. Companies need a way to filter through all that noise. We use Splunk to solve that problem for us internally, and then, of course, we sell it and we manage it for Global 2000 customers, Fortune 100 companies all over the world. >> Tell us what about the role of data, 'cause data transformation has been a big buzzword it's a holistic message around businesses digitizing and getting digital assets in front of their customers. We have a big research division that does all of this stuff. By the end of the day, you know, the digitization business means you're going to have to go digital all the way. And role of data is not the old data warehousing days, where it's fenced away, pull it in, now you need data moving around, you need organic sharing of data, data's driving policies and new pattern recognitions for security. How do you guys see that evolving? How do you talk to your customers, because in a way, the old stuff can work if you use the data differently. We're seeing a pattern, like, hey, that's an algorithm I used 10 years ago. But now, with new data, that might be workable. What are some of the things that you're seeing now that customers are doing that you talk to that are leveraging data, like Splunk, in a new way? >> Well, that's really where Splunk adds so much value, because a friend of mine is the dean of USC. And he has a great saying, more data is not necessarily more information. And so, the mistake that we see customers making a lot is they're collecting the data, but they're not doing the right things with it. And that's really where Splunk and that level of granularity can add tremendous value, not just from logging, but from analytics and going upstream with it. >> Yeah, and also, to that point, it's just automation. There's too much data >> That's a great point. >> And it's only going to get bigger, right, based on that stat Robert rattled off. Now, we need some machine learning analytics to move it further. And all points aside, machine learning isn't where it needs to be right now. Today in the market, it still has a long way to go. I would call it a work in progress. But however, it's the promise, because there's too much data, and to secure it, to automate behavior, is really what what we're looking for. >> The example I saw is the innovation strategy's comin' to take, and they're growin' with mobility, growin' with cloud, increase the surface area, IoT. But the supervised areas of the enterprise were the doors, right? Lock the doors. And perimeter is now dead. So now you have an unsupervised environment and the enterprise at risk. Once the hackers get in, they're havin' their way. >> The internet is, like, a kindergarten playground where there are no rules and the teacher went home at lunch. (laughter) That is the internet. And kids are throwin' crap. >> And high school. I think it would be high school. Kindergarten through high school! >> And you have different-aged kids in there. >> It's chaos, bedlam! >> Very well said. The internet is chaos, but by nature, that's what we want the internet to be. We don't want to control the chaos because we limit our ability to communicate, and that's really the promise of the internet. It's not the responsibility of the internet to police itself, it's the responsibility of each enterprise. >> So what new things are happening? We're seeing successes. Certainly, we're reporting on companies that are being successful are the ones that are doing reverse of what was once done, or said differently, new ways of doing things. Throwin' out kind of tryin' to do a hybrid legacy approach to security, and seeing the new ways, new things, new better cat and mouse games, better honeypots, intelligent fabrics. What do you guys recommend to your customers and what do you see, in your talk, this digital transformation's definitely a real trend, and security is the catastrophic time bomb that's ticking for all customers. So that's, it dwarfs compliance, risk management, current... >> Well, I dunno if that's necessarily true, that it's a time bomb. You know, the number one driver for security, still, is compliance. We sell stuff people don't really want to buy. Nobody wakes up and the morning and says, yeah, I want to go spend another $5 million on security. They do it, frankly, because they have to. If none of their competitors were spending money on security, I don't think most enterprises would. I mean, whenever you have to do something because it's good to do, you have a limited up cycle. When you do something because there's a compliance reason to do it, or bad things happen to you, you're really going to do it. >> So you think there's consumer pressure, then, to have to do this, otherwise-- >> Interesting stat, the Wall Street Journal did a study and asked 1000 people on a street corner in New York if, for a hamburger, they will give away their social insurance number, their home number, and their name. 72% of people gave out that information freely. >> Better be a good hamburger. (laughs) >> Back to your point, though, I want to get a-- >> So I think consumers have an expectation of security, and how they police that is they simply go to somebody else. So if you're my retailer and you get breached, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go next door. But I think that the average consumer's expectation is, security's your responsibility, not mine. >> Okay, so on the B to B side, let's get that. I wanted to push you on something I thought I kind of disagreed with. If compliance, I agree, compliance has been a big part of data governance and data management. >> Yeah, PCI has been the biggest driver in security in the last five years. >> No doubt. However, companies are now sharing data more with other companies. Financial institutions are sharing core data with other financial institutions, which kind of teases out the trend of, I'll give you some of my data to get, to fight the fraud detection market because it's a $1 trillion problem. So as you start to see points of growth where, okay, you start to see people go outside their comfort zone on compliance to share data. So we're tryin' to rationalize that. Your thoughts? I mean, is that an indicator? Do you see that as a trend, or, I mean, obviously locking down the data would be, you know. >> I think it's challenging. I mean, we were at the president's council on security last year at Stanford. And you know, President Obama got up there, made some passionate speech about sharing data. For the goodness of all of us, we need to share more data and be more secure. I got to tell you, you heard that speech and you're like, yeah baby, I'm going to share my data, we're all going to work together. Right after him, Tim Cook got up there (laughter) and said, I will never share my data with anybody in the government! And you heard him, and you're like, I am never sharing my data with anybody. >> Well there's the tension there, right? >> Well, this is a natural-- >> Natural tension between government and enterprise. >> Well, I think there's also a natural tension between enterprises. There's competitive issues, competitor pressures. >> Apple certainly is a great case. They hoard their data. Well, this is the dilemma, right? You want to have good policy, but innovation comes from experimentation. So it's a balancing act between what do you kind of do? How do you balance-- >> Yeah, it's a great time to be in our space. I mean, look at this floor. How many companies are here? Splunk is growing by 30%, the show itself, 30% per year. They're going to outgrow this venue next year and they're going to go, probably, Vegas or somebody. I think that's exciting. But these are all point products. The fastest-growing segment in the computer business is managed services, because the complexity in that world is overwhelming, and it's extremely fragmented. There's no interlinking. >> Talk about your business in there right now. What are you guys currently selling, how many employees do you have, what's the revenues like, what's the product mix? >> Yeah, so we are a global company. So we have 10 offices worldwide and close to 300 employees. We're one of the fastest-growing companies in North America. We sell, our focus is managed security services. We do consulting as well as incident response remediation, but the day-to-day, we want your logs, we want to do monitoring, we want to help with-- >> So you guys come in and do deployments and integration and then actually manage security for customers? >> We do the sexy of gettin' it in, and then we also do the unsexy of managing it day-to-day. >> Atif, nothing unsexy about our work. (laughter) >> It's all sexy, that's what theCUBE show's about. >> It's all sexy! >> That's why theCUBE's a household name. We have celebrities coming on now. Soon we'll be on cable. >> That's right! This will be a primetime show. (laughter) >> Before we know it! >> That's funny, I got approached by a network, I can't tell you who, big network with a big producer to do a cybersecurity show. And so, they approached me and they said, oh, we think it's going to be so hot. It's such a topical thing. So they spent a day with me and our team to watch what we do. There is no cybersecurity show! (laughter) They're like, do you guys do anything besides sit on the computer? >> You have a meeting and you look at the monitor. It's not much of a show. >> Does anybody have a gun?! (laughter) >> It's not great for network TV, I think. >> Build a wall. >> Someone has to die in the end. That has to be network TV. And yeah, but I mean, there's a problem. There's 1.4 million cyber jobs open right now. And that's not even including any data science statistics. So you know, so we're reporting that-- >> I'm sure it's the same thing in data science. >> Same problem. How do you take a high skill that there's not enough talent for, hopefully, computer science education, all that stuff happens, and automate it. So your point about automation. This is the number one problem. How do you guys advise clients what the hell do they do? >> You know, automation's tough. We just had this meeting before we got on here, because in our managed service, it's people-driven. We want to automate it. But there's only a certain amount of automation you can do. You still need that human element. I mean, if you can automate it, somebody can buy a product and they're secure. >> Machine learning isn't where it's supposed to be. Every vendor aside, machine learning's not where it needs to be, but we're getting there. Having succinct automation helps solve the cybersecurity labor shortage problem, because the skill level that you hire at can go lower. So you reduce the learning curve of who you need to hire, and what they do. >> That's a great point. I think the unsupervised machine learning algorithms are going to become so much smarter with the Splunk data, because they are, that's a tough nut to crack because you need to have some sort of knowledge around how to make that algorithm work. The data coming in from Splunk is so awesome, that turns that into an asset. So this is a moving train. This is the bigtime. Okay, go step back for a second, I want to change gears. Robert, I want to get your thoughts, because since you're here and you do a lot of, you know, picking the stocks, if you will, on Shark Tank, in the tech world, our boring tech world that we love, by the way. >> We love it too. >> How do you, as someone who's got a lot of experience in cycles of innovation, look at the changing digital transformation vendor landscape, Splunk, companies like Oracle tryin' to transform, Dell bought EMC, IBM's pivoting, Amazon is booming. How do you look at the new digital enterprise, and how do you look at that from, if you're a customer, an investor, where's the growth stocks, where's the growth companies, what's the growth parameters, what's your thoughts? >> One of the reasons a lot of our industry, why I got into tech was I had no money, my dad worked in a factory, my mom was a receptionist. And the old adage is, to make money, you need money. To get ahead, it's not what you know, it's who you know. I didn't know anybody. And the value of tech is tech transforms every three years. We follow these cycles where we eat our own young and we throw away stuff that doesn't add value. Tech is the great equalizer, 'cause if you don't add value, nobody cares. And you know, when I'm starting out as a guy with a small company, I love that! We're going to kick ass, we're going to add value. Now that we're a little bigger-- >> Well, when you're a young company you can eat someone's lunch, because if they're not paying attention, you can come in and-- >> For sure. It gets harder as you get bigger because now we're the big guys that somebody in their basement's tryin' to take out. But you know, we see tremendous innovation in security. If you look back three years, who were the leaders in the SIEM space? ArcSight, Q1, Nitro to a lesser degree, and enVision. Today, does RSA have a strategy around a SIEM? They have Netwitness, you know, security analytics, which is kind of a SIEM. Q1 is in the throes of the IBM machine, somewhere in their gut, nobody knows. ArcSight, who buys ArcSight anymore? It's so complicated. Who's the leader? Splunk! >> So back to the old classic team. Obviously, you have good people on the management team. Product matters now, in tech, doesn't it? More than ever. Obviously, balance sheet. Okay, let's get back to the data transformation. So you know, data is so critical now, and again, it's more from that data warehouse, which still is around, but to real-time data having value, moving it into different applications. Question is, how do you value data? I mean, you can't put it on the balance sheet. I mean, people value factories. GE said, we have all this investment in machines and assets. They worry about someone getting their data and doing a judo move on them. So data is truly an asset that's flying out of their network. How does companies value data? Can it ever be on the balance sheet? How do you look at that? >> I don't think data, in of itself, has any value. It's the effect of the data that has the value. And it's a very singular, it's what somebody does to it. Whatever the data is worth to you, from a business perspective, it's worth fundamentally more to an outside bad party because they can package that data and sell it to a competitor, a foreign government, all those kind of places. So it's the collection of raw data and applying it to something that has meaning to a third party. >> So it's like thermodynamics, really. Until it's in motion, it's really not worth anything. I mean, that's what you're saying. Data's data until it's put to work. >> Right, I don't think you're ever going to see it on a balance sheet as a hard, core value, because it has to have a transformative value. You have to do something with it. It's the something. >> So pretend you're in Shark Tank and you're a data guy, and you say, boss, I need more budget to do security, I need more budget to expand our presence. And the guy says sorry, I need to see some ROI on that data. Well, I just have a gut feeling that if we move the data around, it's going to be worth something. Oh, I pass. You can't justify the investment. So a lot of that, I mean, I'm oversimplifying it, but that's kind of like a dialogue that we hear in customers. How do you get that-- >> What I always tell CIOs and CCOs, it's challenging to get budget to do a good thing or the right thing. It's easier to get budget to do the necessary thing. And so, necessary is defined by the nature of your business. So if you make widgets and you want to get more budget to protect the widgets, no one cares. No one's sitting around, and like oh, are my widgets safe? They are, to certain degree, and they'll have limited budget for that. But if you go to them and say, you know what, we have a risk that if somebody can attack our widgets, we're going to be down for three days. And being down for three days or three hours has a dollar cost of $5 million. I need an extra $2.5 million to protect that from happening. As a business guy and a CEO, I understand that. >> That's great advice. >> And that's the biggest challenge, still, with security people is, we're technical people. We're not used to talking to business guys. >> It's like house insurance, in a way, or insurance. You invest this to recover that. >> It's a great analogy. You know, I used to race cars, and I had a life insurance premium for key man insurance. And my insurance agent comes along and says, you should buy a bigger policy. I'm like, I don't need a bigger policy. It's so much money, we're okay. And then he says to me, you know, if you die in a racecar, I'm not sure you're covered. (laughter) But if you pay me another $10000 a year in coverage, you're covered. Did I buy it? Absolutely. And it's the same analogy. >> That's very necessary. Personal question for you. So if you're, your dad had a factory, you mentioned. I saw that you mentioned that earlier. If he had a factory today in a modern era of IoT, and you were going to give him a digital transformation consulting project, how would you advise him? Because a lot of people are taking their analog business and kind of digitizing it. Some already have sensors in there. So you see it in manufacturing, and certainly, the industrial aspect of IoT has been a big deal. How would you advise your dad building a factory today? >> Yeah, so I think there's two aspects to it. One is just, you know, everything we've been talking about, data transformation, data analytics, making things better, none of those things are possible unless you're actually collecting the data. It's like, customers come to us and say, you know what, we don't want you to just manage our logs and tell us what's going on, we want higher-level value. And I'm like, no, I get that, but unless you're actually aggregating the logs, none of the upstream stuff matters. So first thing is, you have collect the data. Whether that's sensors, old devices, mechanical devices, and so on. The second part of it is, the minute you open up your factory and open up the mechanical devices and attach them to a PC or anything that's network-based, you're open for risk. And so, we're seeing that now in utilities, we're seeing that with gas companies, oil companies. You know, up until a few years ago, you couldn't physically change the flow of a pipeline, unless there was a physical connection, a mechanical on-off. It was very binary. Today, all those systems are connected to the internet. And it saves companies a lot of money 'cause they can test them and stuff. But they're also open to hackers. >> Bigtime. >> Well gentlemen, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> And who says tech hasn't got a little pizazz, I mean-- (laughter) >> Come on, I was on Dancing with the Stars, that's a lot of pizazz! >> It's been great! >> You guys are exciting, but you are, no! >> Dancing with the Stars, of course! >> All right. >> Thank you very much. >> Well, thanks for bein' in theCUBE Tank, we appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> Don't call us, we'll call you. (laughter) Gentlemen, thank you very much. >> We're booked, maybe we can get you on next time. >> Okay, we're out. >> .conf2016, CUBE coverage continues live from Orlando. (electronic jingle)