(intro upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to our continued coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited about the conversation coming up. Not only are we joined by two brilliant minds in the cloud, one of them happens to be a CUBE alumni. Please welcome Mike from AMD and Ali from Dropbox. Ali, welcome back to the show, how you been? >> Thanks Savannah. I'm doing great and really excited to be back on theCUBE. It was great discussion last time and really excited for both re:Invent and also to see how this video turns out. >> Hey, that makes two of us and probably three of us. How are you doing today, Mike? >> Doing great. It's really nice to be getting back to in-person events again and to be out solving problems with customers and partners like Dropbox. >> I know, isn't it? We've all missed each other. Was a lonely couple of years. Mike, I'm going to open it up with you. I'm sure a lot of people are curious. What's new at AMD? >> Well, there's a lot that's new at AMD, so I'll share a subset of what's new and what we've been working on. We've expanded our global coverage in Amazon EC2 with new regions and instance types. So users can deploy any application pretty much anywhere AWS has a presence. Our partner ecosystems for solutions and services has expanded quite a bit. We're currently focused on enabling partners and solutions that focus on cloud cost optimization, modernizing infrastructure, and pushing performance to the limit, especially for HPC. But the biggest buzz, of course, is around AMD's new fourth generation of our EPYC CPU Genoa. It's the world's fastest data center CPU with transformative energy efficiency and that's a really interesting combination, highest performance and most efficient. So on launch day, AWS announced their plans to roll out AMD EPYC Genoa processor-based EC2 instances. So we're pretty excited about that and that's what we'll be working on in the near term. >> Wow, that's a big deal and certainly not a casual announcement. Obviously, power and efficiency hot topics here at re:Invent but also looking at the greater impact on the planet is a big conversation we've been having here as well. So this is exciting and timely and congratulations to you and the team on all that seems to be going on. Ali, what's going on at Dropbox? >> Yeah, thanks Savannah. The Q3 2022 was actually a very strong quarter for Dropbox during a very difficult macroeconomic backdrop. Our focus has continued to be on innovation and this is around both new products and also driving multi-product adoption which is paying a lot of dividends for us, so essentially, bringing products like Dropbox Sign, DocSend, Capture, and other exciting products to our customers. On the infra side, it's all about how do we scale our infrastructure to meet the business needs, right? How do we keep up with the accelerated growth during the pandemic and also leveraging both AMD and AWS for investments in our public cloud? >> Let's talk about the cloud a bit. You are both cloud experts and I'm glad that you brought that up. We'll keep it there with Ali. When, why, and how should users leverage public cloud? >> Yeah, so Dropbox is hybrid cloud which means we are running applications both in private and public cloud and within a unique position to leverage the best of both worlds. And Savannah, this is a decision we continue to reevaluate on a regular basis. And there are really three key factors that come into play here. First is scale and scale, are we operating at a scale where customization is cost-efficient for us? Next is uniqueness. Is our workload unique compared to what the public cloud supports? And lastly, innovation. Do we have the expertise to innovate faster than public cloud or not? So based on these three key factors, we try and balance all of them and then come up with the best option for us at Dropbox. And kind of elaborating over here, things like international storage, we're leveraging public cloud, things like AI and ML, we're leveraging public cloud, but when we talk about Magic Pocket, which is our multi-exabyte storage system, that has the scale which is why we are doing that on our own private cloud. >> Wow, I think you just gave everybody a fantastic framework for thinking about their decision matrix there if nothing else. Mike, is there anything that you'd like to add to that? Anything that AMD considers when contemplating public cloud versus private? >> Yeah, so there's really three main drivers that I see when users consider when, why, and how should they leverage public cloud. Three main drivers: establishing a global footprint, accelerating product release cycles, and efficiently rightsizing infrastructure. So customers looking to establish a global footprint often turn to public cloud deployments to quickly reach their clients in workforces around the world, most importantly with minimal capital expense. I understand Dropbox uses public cloud to establish their global presence scaling out from their core data centers in North America. And then a lot of industries have tremendous pressure to accelerate product release cycles. With public cloud, organizations can immediately deploy new applications without a long site and hardware acquisition cycle and then the associated ongoing maintenance and operational overhead. And the third thing is customers that need to rightsize and dynamically scale their infrastructure and application deployments are drawn to public cloud, for example, customers that have cyclical compute or application load peaks can efficiently deploy in the cloud without overdeploying their on-prem infrastructure for most of the year which is off-peak during those off-peak times. That infrastructure idle time is a waste of resources and OPEX. So scalable rightsizing draws a lot of users to cloud deployment. >> Yeah, wow. I think there's a lot of factors to consider but also it seems like a pretty streamlined process for navigating that or at least you two both made it sound that way. Another hot topic in the space right now is security. Mike, let's start with you a little bit. What are the most important security issues for AMD right now that you can talk about? >> Yeah, sure. So, well, first of all, AWS provides a wide variety of really good security services to protect customers that are working in the cloud. Like from a processor technology perspective, there's three main security aspects to consider, two of which are common practice today and one of which AMD brings significant differentiation and value. The first two are protecting data at rest and data in transit. And these two are part of the prevalent security models of today where AMD provides distinct value and differentiation is in protecting data in use. So EPYC Milan and Genoa processors support a function called SEV-SNP and this enables users to reside and their applications to reside within their own cryptographic context and environment with data integrity protection to accomplish what's called comprehensive confidential computing. Ethics confidential computing solution is hardware-based. So it's easy to leverage, there's no code rewrite required unlike comparable solutions that are software-based that require recoding to a proprietary SDK and come with a significant performance trade-off. So with EPYC processors, you can protect your data at rest, in transit, and most importantly, in use. >> Everybody needs to protect their data everywhere it is. So I love that. That's fantastic to hear and I'm sure gives your customers a lot of confidence. What about over at Dropbox? What security issues are you facing, Ali? >> Yeah, so the first company value at Dropbox is actually being worthy of trust, and what this really means from a security perspective is how do we keep all of our users content safe? And this means keeping everything down to all of the infrastructure hardware secure. So partnering with AMD, which is one of our strongest partners out there, the new security features that AMD have and the hardware are critical for us and we are able to take advantage of some of these best security practices within our compute infrastructure by leveraging AMD's secure ship architecture. >> How important, you just touched on it a little bit, and I want to ask, how important are partnerships like the one you have with each other as you innovate at scale? Ali, you're nodding, I'm going to go to you first. >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, the partnership with with AMD is one of the strongest that we have and it just goes beyond like a regular partnership where it's just buy and sell. We talk about technology together, we talk about innovation together, we talk about partnership together, and for us, as I look look at our hybrid cloud strategy, we would not be able to get the benefits in terms of efficiency, scale, or liability performance without having a strong partner like AMD. >> That's awesome. Mike, anything you want to add there? >> I'd reiterate some of what Ali had to say. One of my favorite parts about my job is getting together with partners and customers to figure out how to optimize their applications and deployments around the world to get the most efficient use of the cloud infrastructure for servers that are based on AMD technology. In many cases, we can find 10% or better performance or cost optimization by working closely with partners like Dropbox. And then in addition, if we keep in lock step together to look at what's coming on the roadmap, by the time the latest and greatest technology is finally deployed, our customers and our partners are ready to take advantage of it. So that's the fun part of the job and I really appreciate the Dropbox's cooperation, optimizing their infrastructure, and using AMD products >> Well, what a synergistic relationship of mutual admiration and support. We love to hear it here in the tech world. Mike, last question for you. What's next for AMD? >> Well, heading into 2023, considering the current challenge macroeconomic environment and geopolitical instability, doing more with less will be top of mind for many CFOs and CEOs in 2023. And AMD can help accomplish that. AMD's EPYC processors, leadership performance, and lower EC2 retail costs can help users reduce costs without impacting performance, or the flip side of that, they can scale capacity without increasing costs. And because of EPYC's higher core counts, really high core density, applications can be deployed with fewer servers or smaller instances that has both economic and environmental benefits that reduce usage costs as well as environmental impacts. And that allows customers to optimize their application and infrastructure spend. And then the second thing that I've seen over the last couple of years and I see this trajectory continuing is increased geographic distribution of our colleagues and workforces is here to stay, people work from everywhere. In modern cross platform, collaboration platforms, that bring teams, tools, and content together have a really important role to play to enable that new, more flexible style of working. And those tools need to be really agile and easy to use. I think Dropbox is really well positioned to enable this new style of working. AMD's really happy to work closely with Dropbox to enable these modern work styles, both on premises, hybrid, and fully in the public cloud. >> Well, it sounds like a very exciting and optimistically, bright future for you all at AMD. We love to hear that here at theCUBE. Ali, what about you? What is 2023 going to hold for Dropbox? >> Yeah, so I think we're going to continue on this journey of transformation where our focus is on new products and also multi-product adoption. And from a cloud perspective, how do we continue to evolve our hybrid cloud so that we remain a competitive advantage for our business and also for our customers? I think right now, Savannah, we're in a very unique position to utilize some of the best AMD technology that's out there and that's both on premise and in the cloud. Some of the AMD Epic processors delivered the performance that we need for our hybrid cloud and we want to continue to leverage these also in public cloud which is the EC2 instances that are powered by AMD in the long run. So overall, Dropbox is looking forward to continue to evaluate some of the AMD's Genoa CPUs that are coming out but also want to continue to grow our EC2 footprint powered by AMD in the long run. >> Fantastic. Well, it sounds like this second showing here on theCUBE is just the tee up for your third and we'll definitely have to have Mike back on for the second time around to hear how things are going. Thank you both so much for taking the time today to join me here. Mike and Ali, it was fantastic getting to chat to you and thank you to our audience for tuning into theCUBE's special coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name's Savannah Peterson and I hope we can learn together soon. (outro upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, back here with you with Dave Nicholson, we have a couple of guests from VMware. Joining us, please. Welcome Jay Workman, senior director, cloud partner, and alliances marketing, and Jeff Thompson, VP cloud provider sales at VMware guys. It's great to have you on the program. >>Ah, good to be here. Thanks for having us on. >>We're gonna be talking about a really interesting topic. Sovereign cloud. What is sovereign cloud? Jeff? Why is it important, but fundamentally, what is >>It? Yeah, well, we were just talking a second ago. Aren't we? And it's not about royalty. So yeah, data sovereignty is really becoming super important. It's about the regulation and control of data. So lots of countries now are being very careful and advising companies around where to place data and the jurisdictional controls mandate that personal data or otherwise has to be secured. We ask, we have to have access controls around it and privacy controls around it. So data sovereign clouds are clouds that have been built by our cloud providers in, in, in VMware that specifically satisfy the requirements of those jurisdictions and regulated industries. So we've built a, a little program around that. We launched it about a year ago and continuing to add cloud providers to that. >>Yeah, and I, I think it's also important just to build on what Jeff said is, is who can access that data is becoming increasingly important data is, is almost in it's. It is becoming a bit of a currency. There's a lot of value in data and securing that data is, is becoming over the years increasingly important. So it's, it's not like we built a problem or we created a solution for problem that didn't exist. It's gotten it's, it's been a problem for a while. It's getting exponentially bigger data is expanding and growing exponentially, and it's becoming increasingly important for organizations and companies to realize where my data sits, who can access it, what types of data needs to go and what type of clouds. And it's very, very aligned with multi-cloud because some data can sit in a, in a public cloud, which is fine, but some data needs to be secure. It needs to be resident within country. And so this is, this is what we're addressing through our partners. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a classification there there's data residency, and then there's data sovereignty. So residency is just about where is the data, which country is it in sovereignty is around who can access that data. And that's the critical aspect of, of data sovereignty who's got control and access to that data. And how do we make sure that all the controls are in place to make sure that only the right people can get access to that data? Yeah. >>So let's, let's sort of build from the ground up an example, and let's use Western Europe as an example, just because state to state in the United States, although California is about to adopt European standards for privacy in a, in a unique, in a unique, unique way, pick a country in, in Europe, I'm a service provider. I have an offering and that offering includes a stack of hardware and I'm running what we frequently refer to as the STDC or software defined data center stack. So I've got NEX and I've got vs N and I've got vSphere and I'm running and I have a cloud and you have all of the operational tools around that, and you can spin up VMs and render under applications there. And here we are within the borders of this country, what makes it a sovereign cloud at that? So at that point, is that a sovereign cloud or? >>No, not yet. Not it's close. I mean, you nailed, >>What's >>A secret sauce. You nailed the technology underpinning. So we've got 4,500 plus cloud provider partners around the world. Less than 10% of those partners are running the full STDC stack, which we've branded as VMware cloud verified. So the technology underpinning from our perspective is the starting point. Okay. For sovereignty. So they, they, they need that right. Technology. Okay. >>Verified is required for sovereign. Yes. >>Okay. Cloud verified is the required technology stack for sovereign. So they've got vSphere vs. A NSX in there. Okay. A lot of these partners are also offering a multitenant cloud with VMware cloud director on top of that, which is great. That's the starting point. But then we've, we've set a list of standards above and beyond that, in addition to the technology, they've gotta meet certain jurisdiction requirements, certain local compliance requirements and certifications. They've gotta be able to address the data re data residency requirements of their particular jurisdiction. So it's going above and beyond. But to your point, it does vary by country. >>Okay. So, so in this hypothetical example, this is this country. You a stand, I love it. When people talk about Stan, people talk about EMIA and you know, I, I love AMEA food. Isn't AIAN food. One. There's no such thing as a European until you have an Italian, a Britain, a German yep. In Florida arguing about how our beer and our coffee is terrible. Right. Right. Then they're all European. They go home and they don't like each other. Yeah. So, but let's just pretend that there's a thing called Europe. So this, so there's this, so we've got a border, we know residency, right. Because it physically is here. Yep. But what are the things in terms of sovereignty? So you're talking about a lot of kind of certification and validation, making sure that, that everything maps to those existing rules. So is, this is, this is a lot of this administrative and I mean, administrative in the, in the sort of state administrative terminology, >>I I'm let's build on your example. Yeah. So we were talking about food and obviously we know the best food in the world comes from England. >>Of course it does. Yeah. I, no doubt. I agree. I Don not get that. I do. I do do agree. Yeah. >>So UK cloud, fantastic partner for us. Okay. Whether they're one of our first sovereign cloud providers in the program. So UK cloud, they satisfied the requirements with the local UK government. They built out their cloud verified. They built out a stack specifically that enables them to satisfy the requirements of being a sovereign cloud provider. They have local data centers inside the UK. The data from the local government is placed into those data centers. And it's managed by UK people on UK soil so that they know the privacy, they know the security aspects, the compliance, all of that wrapped up on top of a secure SDDC platform. Okay. Satisfies the requirements of the UK government, that they are managing that data in a sovereign way that, that, that aligns to the jurisdictional control that they expect from a company like UK cloud. Well, >>I think to build on that, a UK cloud is an example of certain employees at UK, UK cloud will have certain levels of clearance from the UK government who can access and work on certain databases that are stored within UK cloud. So they're, they're addressing it from multiple fronts, not just with their hardware, software data center framework, but actually at the individual compliance level and individual security clearance level as to who can go in and work on that data. And it's not just a governmental, it's not a public sector thing. I mean, any highly regulated industry, healthcare, financial services, they're all gonna need this type of data protection and data sovereignty. >>Can this work in a hyperscaler? So you've got you, have, you have VMC AVS, right? GC V C >>O >>CVAs O CVS. Thank you. Can it be, can, can a sovereign cloud be created on top of physical infrastructure that is in one of those hyperscalers, >>From our perspective, it's not truly sovereign. If, if it's a United States based company operating in Germany, operating in the UK and a local customer or organization in Germany, or the UK wants to deploy workloads in that cloud, we wouldn't classify that as totally sovereign. Okay. Because by virtue of the cloud act in the United States, that gives the us government rights to request or potentially view some of that data. Yeah. Because it's, it's coming out of a us based operator data center sitting on foreign soil so that the us government has some overreach into that. And some of that data may actually be stored. Some of the metadata may reside back in the us and the customer may not know. So certain workloads would be ideally suited for that. But for something that needs to be truly sovereign and local data residency, that it wouldn't be a good fit. I think that >>Perspectives key thing, going back to residency versus sovereignty. Yeah. It can be, let's go to our UK example. It can be on a hyperscaler in the UK now it's resident in the UK, but some of the metadata, the profiling information could be accessible by the entity in the United States. For example, there now it's not sovereign anymore. So that's the key difference between a, what we view as a pro you know, a pure sovereign cloud play and then maybe a hyperscaler that's got more residency than sovereignty. >>Yeah. We talk a lot about partnerships. This seems to be a unique opportunity for a certain segment of partners yeah. To give that really is an opportunity for them to have a line of business established. That's unique from some of the hyperscale cloud providers. Yeah. Where, where sort of the, the modesty of your size might be an advantage if you're in a local. Yes. You're in Italy and you are a service provider. There sounds like a great fit, >>That's it? Yeah. You've always had the, the beauty of our program. We have 4,500 cloud providers and obviously not, all of them are able to provide a data, a sovereign cloud. We have 20 in the program today in, in the country. You you'd expect them to be in, you know, the UK, Italy, Italy, France, Germany, over in Asia Pacific. We have in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and, and we have Canada and Latin America to, to dovetail, you know, the United States. But those are the people that have had these long term relationships with the local governments, with these regulated industries and providing those services for many, many years. It's just that now data sovereignty has become more important. And they're able to go that extra mile and say, Hey, we've been doing this pretty much, you know, for decades, but now we're gonna put a wrap and some branding around it and do these extra checks because we absolutely know that we can provide the sovereignty that's required. >>And that's been one of the beautiful things about the entire initiative is we're actually, we're learning a lot from our partners in these countries to Jeff's point have been doing this. They've been long time, VMware partners they've been doing sovereignty. And so collectively together, we're able to really establish a pretty robust framework from, from our perspective, what does data sovereignty mean? Why does it matter? And then that's gonna help us work with the customers, help them decide which workloads need to go and which type of cloud. And it dovetails very, very nicely into a multi-cloud that's a reality. So some of those workloads can sit in the public sector and the hyperscalers and some of 'em need to be sovereign. Yeah. So it's, it's a great solution for our customers >>When you're in customer conversations, especially as, you know, data sovereign to be is becomes a global problem. Where, who are you talking to? Are you talking to CIOs? Are you talking to chief data officers? I imagine this is a pretty senior level conversation. >>Yeah. I it's, I think it's all of the above. Really. It depends. Who's managing the data. What type of customer is it? What vertical market are they in? What compliance regulations are they are they beholden to as a, as an enterprise, depending on which country they're in and do they have a need for a public cloud, they may already be all localized, you know? So it really depends, but it, it could be any of those. It's generally I think a fair, fairly senior level conversation. And it's, it's, it's, it's consultancy, it's us understanding what their needs are working with our partners and figuring out what's the best solution for them. >>And I think going back to, they've probably having those conversations for a long time already. Yeah. Because they probably have had workloads in there for years, maybe even decades. It's just that now sovereignty has become, you know, a more popular, you know, requirements to satisfy. And so they've gone going back to, they've gone the extra mile with those as the trusted advisor with those people. They've all been working with for many, many years to do that work. >>And what sort of any examples you mentioned some of the highly regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, any customer come to mind that you think really articulates the value of what VMware's delivering through its service through its cloud provider program. That makes the obvious why VMware an obvious answer? >>Wow. I, I, I get there's, there's so many it's, it's actually, it's each of our different cloud providers. They bring their win wise to us. And we just have, we have a great library now of assets that are on our sovereign cloud website of those win wires. So it's many industries, many, many countries. So you can really pick, pick your, your choice. There. That's >>A good problem >>To have, >>To the example of UK cloud they're, they're really focused on the UK government. So some of them aren't gonna be referenced. Well, we may have indication of a major financial services company in Australia has deployed with AU cloud, one of our partners. So we we've also got some semi blind references like that. And, and to some degree, a lot of these are maintained as fairly private wins and whatnot for obvious security reasons, but, and we're building it and building that library up, >>You mentioned the number 4,500, a couple of times, you, you referencing VMware cloud provider partners or correct program partners. So VCP P yes. So 45, 4500 is the, kind of, is the, is the number, you know, >>That's the number >>Globally of our okay. >>Partners that are offering a commercial cloud service based at a minimum with vSphere and they're. And many of 'em have many more of our technologies. And we've got little under 10% of those that have the cloud verified designation that are running that full STDC, stack >>Somebody, somebody Talli up, all of that. And the argument has been made that, that rep that, that would mean that VMware cloud. And although some of it's on IAS from hyperscale cloud providers. Sure. But that, that rep, that means that VMware has the third or fourth largest cloud on the planet already right now. >>Right. Yep. >>Which is kind of interesting because yeah. If you go back to when, what 2016 or so when VMC was at least baned about yeah. Is that right? A lot of people were skeptical. I was skeptical very long history with VMware at the time. And I was skeptical. I I'm thinking, nah, it's not gonna work. Yeah. This is desperation. Sorry, pat. I love you. But it's desperation. Right. AWS, their attitude is in this transaction. Sure. Send us some customers we'll them. Yeah. Right. I very, very cynical about it. Completely proved me wrong. Obviously. Where did it go? Went from AWS to Azure to right. Yeah. To GCP, to Oracle, >>Oracle, Alibaba, >>Alibaba. Yep. Globally. >>We've got IBM. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. So along the way, it would be easy to look at that trajectory and say, okay, wow, hyperscale cloud. Yeah. Everything's consolidating great. There's gonna be five or six or 10 of these players. And that's it. And everybody else is out in the cold. Yeah. But it turns out that long tail, if you look at the chart of who the largest VCP P partners are, that long tail of the smaller ones seem to be carving out specialized yes. Niches where you can imagine now, at some point in the future, you sum up this long tail and it becomes larger than maybe one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Right. I don't think a lot of people predicted that. I think, I think people predicted the demise of VMware and frankly, a lot of people in the VMware ecosystem, just like they predicted the demise of the mainframe. Sure. The storage area network fill in the blank. I >>Mean, Jeff and I we've oh yeah. We've been on the, Jeff's been a little longer than I have, but we've been working together for 10 plus years on this. And we've, we've heard that many times. Yeah. Yeah. Our, our ecosystem has grown over the years. We've seen some consolidation, some M and a activity, but we're, we're not even actively recruiting partners and it's growing, we're focused on helping our partners gain more, share internally, gain, more share at wallet, but we're still getting organic growth in the program. Really. So it, it shows, I think that there is value in what we can offer them as a platform to build a cloud on. >>Yeah. What's been interesting is there's there's growth and there's some transition as well. Right? So there's been traditional cloud providers. Who've built a cloud in their data center, some sovereign, some not. And then there's other partners that are adopting VCP P because of our SA. So we've either converted some technology from product into SA or we've built net new SA or we've acquired companies that have been SA only. And now we have a bigger portfolio that service providers, cloud providers, managed service providers are all interested in. So you get resellers channel partners. Who've historically been doing ELAs and reselling to end customers. They're transitioning their business into doing recurring revenue and the only game in town where you really wanna do recurring revenues, VCP P. So our ecosystem is both growing because our cloud providers with their data center are doing more with our customers. And then we're adding more managed service providers because of our SA portfolio. And that, that, that combo, that one, two punch is creating a much bigger VCP P ecosystem overall. >>Yeah. >>Impressive. >>Do you think we have a better idea of what sovereign cloud means? Yes. I think we do. >>It's not Royal. >>It's all about royalty, >>All royalty. What are some of the things Jeff, as we look on the horizon, obviously seven to 10,000 people here at, at VMwares where people really excited to be back. They want to hear it from VMware. They wanna hear from its partner ecosystem, the community. What are some of the things that you think are on the horizon where sovereign cloud is concerned that are really opportunities yeah. For businesses to get it right. >>Yeah. We're in the early days of this, I think there's still a whole bunch of rules, regulatory laws that have not been defined yet. So I think there's gonna be some more learning. There's gonna be some top down guidance like Gaia X in Europe. That's the way that they're defining who gets access and control over what data and what's in. And what's out of that. So we're gonna get more of these Gaia X type things happening around the world, and they're all gonna be slightly different. Everyone's gonna have to understand what they are, how to interpret and then build something around them. So we need to stay on top of that, myself and Jay, to make sure that we've got the right cloud providers in the right space to capitalize on that, build out the sovereign cloud program over time and make sure that what they're building to support aligns with these different requirements that are out there across different countries. So it's an evolving landscape. That's >>Yeah. And one of the things too, we're also doing from a product perspective to better enable partners to, to address these sovereign cloud workloads is where we have, we have gaps maybe in our portfolio is we're partner partnering with some of our ISVs, like a, Konic like a Forex vem. So we can give our partners object storage or ransomware protection to add on to their sovereign cloud service, all accessible through our cloud director consult. So we're, we're enhancing the program that way. And to Jeff's point earlier, we've got 20 partners today. We're hoping to double that by the end of our fiscal year and, and just take a very methodical approach to growth of the program. >>Sounds great guys, early innings though. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what software and cloud is describing it to us, and also talking about the difference between that data residency and all the, all of the challenges and the, in the landscape that customers are facing. They can go turn to VMware and its ecosystem for that help. We appreciate your insights and your time. Guys. Thank >>You >>For >>Having us. Our >>Pleasure. Appreciate it >>For our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube. This is the end of day, two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE. Discover 2022 from the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand convention center in Las Vegas, Dave ante, with John furrier. We're here with Brad parks. Who's the chief product officer at morphia data and Brian Thompson. Who's the vice president of GreenLake cloud product management at Hewlett Packard enterprise gentlemen. Great to see you first time on the queue first time. Wow. I just assumed we've known each other for, so >>We've been around a long time now. I'm happy to be here and thanks for, thanks for making the >>Time. Yeah, you've put a lot of people on the queue, but Morpheus data, when we, you know, we first met, I mean, with your new role here several years ago, tell, give us the update what's Morpheus do, why are you, so why does people, why do people need Morpheus? Think >>People need Morpheus, cuz it is messy, right? Technology promise, you know, simple, better, faster, but it's only gotten more complex, more heterogeneous over the last decade. We are a unified orchestration and automation platform that makes kind of the, the messy labyrinth that is enterprise. It kind of simpler to navigate primary use case. Self-service for developers who wanna push a button, get a database and an abstract deployed into their on-prem or their public cloud without having to wait on it. >>So you've, you've, you've been through the hyper-converged world. You've seen all that hardware come together. The VMware Nutanix of the world's kind of hardware. Now you got this software abstraction where you got operations, you've got AI, you got all kinds of ops AI ops dev ops data ops ops machine, >>You >>Know, they're all there. And so you got developer environments, you got operating environments. It's just getting more complicated at scale. Yep. This is a huge challenge. You guys are tackling this and then by the way, throw in automation in there too. Right? So, so all that's kind of coming together. How does self-service work put all that complication? >>Well, so I was just talking about Robert Christiansen. I know he's probably think he's been on the Q he's on S team and the ven diagram that we see in hundreds of enterprises we talk to is there's a need for central platform engineering at an enterprise to enable developers, to hit a button, get their database, run an I API line, you know, get their app stack deployed. They also wanna do the same thing with Kubernetes, right? Micro clusters deployed, you know, at a service, same thing with Terraform and Ansible. And they're just there aren't enough skilled operators who have moved up that stack. So you have to automate and canonize that knowledge and, and make it easy. >>Brian, one of the sort of pillars of GreenLake is, and as a service is data and we see a change in the way data is data platforms are being architected, data organizations. And one of the things that is a critical principle of sort of what we see as the new data era is self-service infrastructure where the operation of the technical details are an operational detail, not the be all end, all, you have to go beg and get data out. Okay. So you guys are building out, I think, consistent with that principle self-service infrastructure. That's right. So where does Morpheus fit in, in terms of that objective, what's your relationship like and, and help us understand >>That. Yeah. Within GreenLake, specifically think of this as a broad portfolio of different as a service offerings. Part of that key is meeting customers where they are and where they want to be. So we have that array of things which are fully self-service if you will, but serving an it admin type of persona. So it's where as a enterprise, I still have those resources. I want that granular of control all the way through, how do we deliver some of our more advanced cloud services, really trying to serve the end user to your point, how do I empower application owners, developers to, to bring in and, and work with those services? This is key in, in some of those cloud services, we're delivering more of VSC is a key component that we work as we bring to again, provide those interfaces. How do I provide everything from API CLI through a gooey experience that can span across multiple form factors, bring together that more of a homogenous experience? >>What, what options are out there to solve this problem today? I mean, what are the best practices? Is it do it yourself? Is it, you know, a little bit of VMware here, a little bit of, you know, other tooling there, what, what do you see out there in the marketplace? >>I'll give kinda my perspective kind of yeah. Outside the, the tools that we see when we walk into an enterprise, you've got a company that's got a lot of VMware, maybe a little Nutanix, we've got some AWS, they wanna use OpenShift for their clusters. They got Terraform Ansible, and they got service now. And there's a, there's a poor it ops team in the middle, trying to wire all that together. And each of those domains have tried to go up this hill, right. VMware's done with vRealize automation, you know? Yeah. OpenShift will say no where the way, and you use cube vert to >>Do your virtual service now will say the same thing. Right? >>So our goal is, you know, we started in the middle right. Middle out, right. We started unifying that for self-service for developers and finance teams. And we're we're agnostic. We don't have a dog in the fight, right. We don't have a hypervisor business, a hardware business, an ITSM business. We're all about bringing the pieces together. But that said, we work with partners like HP, you have a footprint of thousands of customers who are solving that same problem and need to need to move up stack. So it's been a good win-win. So >>You're not trying to be the cloud operating system per se. I mean, right. The way, the way a VMware wants to be, or you could even argue, well, I guess open, you >>Got, you got the hyperscalers coming down, you got VMware moving up. But again, they all at the end of the day are trying to control their cash cow, right. Their hardcore business. We wanna make them all transparent. So >>Your bet is it's gonna be all of the above. Yeah. That's not gonna change. Right. That's the complexity is, is that right? Or do you think they're gonna consolidate? >>No, I think there's definitely something to that. I also think there's enough. Disparate. Technology's not gonna be one size fits all or one to rule them all. In fact, I think that's part of the examples in the past, like private cloud is we announced yesterday private cloud for enterprise. It's not a new term. People are doing that for quite a while now, but they are typically fairly brittle hand rolled disparate technologies, some poor it team trying to hold it together. So where we can provide that kind of life cycle management in a cloud operating model, remove that complexity and provide that stability. And in that experience across what will be interchangeable parts at times, I think that's really that direction in, >>Yeah. You guys talk about this whole starting in the middle. I like that because there's a skills gap as well. Right. Not only is there for a challenge on it that transforms, there's not enough. People actually know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster spin one up. Yeah. So there's been a rise of managed services. We're seeing come outta the woodwork almost in all areas where it's complex. Yeah. How does that fit into the makeup of as customers, engineer or rearchitect or, or just evolve to edge on premises and public cloud? Yeah. In a cloud operating way, because if I got managed service, do they just plug in, I mean, new orchestrating services, managed services all the above, take us through this dynamic because we're seeing more and more customers saying, just gimme the service. Yeah. >>I, I know manage perspective. This, this kinda goes back to that portfolio of meeting customers where they are. There are some that, that have that expertise in house they're opinionated. They just want a different consumption model. But on the other side of that, it's difficult to attract and retain that type of talent. And if I have limited resources, am I gonna focus on the care and feeding of that underlying infrastructure? Or am I gonna try to up level and focus on things more strategic to the business? So that's where we've certainly been focusing. And I think this type of management capability is what feeds into that. Right? >>Talk about the trust aspect, because if I'm gonna go manage service, it better work. I need to trust it. It's not a zero trust environment. It's actually a trust and verified, but you're seeing the software supply chain is a big discussion point. Developers don't wanna have to get back off their CDC pipeline to go in and manage stuff. So a managed service has to be verified. Yeah. There's a huge trust factor in there. How does what's the status of this now? Is it real? >>I think one of the, one of the pieces we see in terms of trust organizationally, I mean, people in process is always harder than the tech usually. And, and a lot of the trust is just internal. You get, you know, developers don't trust the ops team, right? Security doesn't trust anybody, you know, finance doesn't trust, you know, who's billing them. Part of what we do as a stack is we give each of those stakeholder groups, the ability to get their core needs met without getting each other's way. And from a delivery perspective where we partner with HPE is we are, you know, we're a platform framework, we're a technology provider we're inside, you know, products like the private cloud. We work their GMs team, the manage services team. If they wanna take on more of that operational concern, right. They use us or if the customer wants to manage it themselves. So we we're all about enabling them at the end of the day. And, and HP brings >>And how hard bread is it to unify? UN unification is a great word. I love let's unify everybody. Right. So how, how hard is that? Can you scope that problem statement for us? What does that mean? >>I'll separate it from a technology perspective and then the people process. So a lot of the traditional people that have played in that space that do it yourself, you mention right. Scripting it all together is hard, right? And if you change from cloud a to cloud B, you're set back six months, like why we exist is we wanna very quickly pull the pieces together. We can usually get a POC up and running in about two hours, right? That's a, self-service VMware private cloud, right? That doesn't mean you've solved the organizational inertia. You know, that's, that takes time, weeks, months. And that's where people are like Accenture GreenLake, other SI other channel partners bring that together to, to help make that change happen. >>How mature is the platform? Where are you in terms of determining product market fit? Are you, are you scaling at this point? >>Well, the, the great part about our origin story, right? We got our start as an internal tool set inside a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm that was transforming it at dozens of companies. So we were built for the use case product market fit happened, cuz a bunch of guys needed to get their jobs done. So we've been an outbound since 2015, right? We were top of the stack ranking, you know, all the MQs, all the quadrants, all the analysis. So we think we're their product market fit. The nice thing is customers have actually moved to where we are. Right? Five years ago, cloud management meant cleaning up the lift and shift mess. Now it's automation platform engineering. So it it's a fun time. >>It's it's operational. Yeah. It's they're operationalizing it. >>What's your go to market model. Maybe you could double click on those through >>Partners. So honestly through HP is a big one. We're small, right? We want to be the best unified platform we can be. Our go to market is via technology partners like HPE, right? The other systems integrators, other channel partners globally. So, so yeah. It's >>So then you've got kind of a tiger team overly. Yep. Salesforce is that, that >>Yeah, we've got teams globally. So we've got about 700,000 workloads under management around the world. About 70% of those are OnPrem VMware Nutanix. The rest are up in the public cloud. So we work with partners, solution providers, services, engines to, to help deliver that to >>Customers. What do you make of the 61 billion acquisition of VMware from Broadcom? >>We're, you know, I think your analysis was spot on. It is gonna be a, a war of, you know, what is the, the most profitable to that new Broadcom business and things like vRealize automation, some of these fringe products that are core at a customer use cases, but may not be driving a lot of bottom revenue for VMware, I think are gonna be gonna be on the bubble. And we've seen more interest in the last few weeks from people who just want to hedge their bets. Right. They want to be able to switch from hypervisor a to hypervisor B or cloud a to cloud B without being locked into anyone's stack. And that is, that is why we exist. Mm. >>You wanna comment on that? >>I mean, it's, you know, for HP and from a GreenLake and even just historically, right. It's about customer choice. Mm. We have a strong relationship with VMware. Sure. We have, I don't know how many bajillions of servers out there running VMware that we, we support with. So, you know, it's, it's, it's all just looking at that ecosystem and helping deliver those customer solutions and outcomes is our focus. Yeah. >>Thank >>You. Brian. Talk about the GreenLake success with partners. We're seeing ecosystem is a big part of that and we know the formula for ecosystems create value. What is the pitch that green lakes making to the marketplace right now to attract more folks to build and or integrate into the >>Platform? Yeah. I mean, GreenLake started with a, a vehicle of how do I start to deliver an OPEX model, a consumption model for traditional infrastructure that we've been providing more and more as the services and solutions really have emerged and evolved. It's gone from, how do I just give you kit and a consumption model for it to now looking at embedded solutions with third party ISV software building or wrapping those services around it, really delivering outcomes and solutions you're seeing. And hopefully you'll solve just from announcement more and more of that, where we have kind of turnkey solutions with key partners, how do we bring a marketplace ecosystem together? How do we help enable those kind of full solutions? Because we're not gonna build it all ourselves, right. We wanna make sure that we can deliver those outcomes. >>So marketing is often and should be ahead of the actual product, early days of GreenLake. It was really a, you know, financial model. Sure. Right. Where do, where do you see GreenLake today? How far is it matured? We saw some of the, the announcements yesterday. We saw some demos. Where are we at? >>Yeah. So this actually, I think really the exciting part is you might have heard Antonio refer to as that journey to one each of our different businesses within green or within HPE, they've all been building these cloud services in GreenLake enabled services. But as you saw Alma share the path to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform that really is bringing these services together into a functional platform, right? Common identity, common telemetry services, bringing these together as now, integrable interoperable services. Like you're starting to see that come together and you can really see the Chrome trail of, of where we're going with a very powerful hybrid cloud experience, right? Spanning private public on-prem colo and a, and a full solution set within there. So it that's, that's the exciting part >>For me and Brad Morpheus will be a capability inside of GreenLake that a customer can consume. Do you have to write to GreenLake APIs to enable that? Or is it, is it more just certify that you work inside a GreenLake? What has to get done? I'll say a lot >>Of what they've done is actually written into, into our APIs. Like we've normalized hybrid it. We have a, a database model of every load balance or a cloud endpoint automation tool. So we are, we're all about making it easier to consume it. And the vision that Alma and HP has around GreenLake fits very well with why we exist. So they're able to extract metering data from our, you know, from our API, we know who provisioned what, where how much they spent. So we're a good repository and platform partner for them to, to build on. It's >>Great for that console that you guys have. Yeah. >>You got the, you got the open APIs, you publish those, you guys take advantage of 'em and then sure. Boom. Then you can consume. Got it. All right, guys. Hey, great to see you again, red. Thanks for, for >>Coming on. Thanks. Thanks for having us on >>Our pleasure. Great stuff. Congratulations. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Valante for John furrier. Are you watching the cubes coverage of HPE discover 2022 from Las Vegas? We'll be right back.

>>mhm. Here live in Washington D. C. For two days of wall to wall coverage. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got two great guests here, constant Thompson V. P. Of diversity equity inclusion program at a core american council of renewable energy and Blair Anderson, director of public policy industries at AWS. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for having us. So first of all, big announcement on stage max Peterson, head of public sector announced some big news with a core. Tell us what it >>is. Well we are going to be partnered with amazon to do a supply chain study on how we can best diversify the renewable energy supply chain. So we're actually gonna have baseline data on where we should start to be able to create a program that's going to be a model for the renewable energy industry on how to develop and support the success of black women and bipac owned um firms. So >>this program that you're running accelerate accelerate your programs and membership tell more has it worked? And why the successes having, what is amazon's relationship with it Besides funding? Is there other things you can talk about? >>Yeah. So accelerate wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for people like Shannon Kellogg with a W. S. Um who about a year ago after the George Floyd murders said, you know, what are we doing as a core? He sits on our board um in this area and we had to say nothing. So um Shannon. And a group of leaders got together and workshop this idea. Let's create a membership program for women and minority owned businesses so that they can be successful in renewable energy. Let's pick a cohort and let's do whether it takes to make them successful. Everything from introducing them to business connects, to mentoring them to even legal services for them. >>Well, yeah, this is like an interesting dynamic. Remember Andy Jassy was on stage when he was the ceo of a W S a year ago, I kind of was preaching, you hate that, I said that word, but preaching to the audience build, build, build, there's an entrepreneurship, public sector vibe going on right now, very entrepreneurial across every industry. I mean, this is a real thing that's going on. >>Yeah, so we're super excited about this opportunity, the work that core has done to lead on this program for the last year, especially with Constance coming in, becoming the leader has kind of been able to take this idea that she mentioned that AWS was kind of a founding member at the genesis of it about a year ago. She's taking this idea that many of these folks put on paper And been able to turn it into a really hard substantive efforts to move it forward. So we've been able to have great conversations with many of these 15 companies that have been brought into the program and start building a relationship with them. I think, as you have seen around a WS like we believe strongly in innovation and creativity. the renewable energy industry is very similarly there is a lot of kind of thinking big and innovative spirit that needs to take place in that space and having the diversity at all levels of these companies is kind of an important component to be able to move that entrepreneurship forward. >>You know, cost is one of the things that we've been reporting on until getting on the cube is right in the wheelhouse of what you're doing is a cultural change happening. And that cultural change with amazon and cloud computing is causing structural changes which are opportunities like radical structural changes. So that means old incumbent, the old guard as you guys call it, this can be replaced not because people hate them because they're inadequate. So you start to see this kind of mindset shift, entrepreneurial, impact oriented I can make a change but actually I can level up pretty quick because the people in charge don't know cloud, I mean I hate to put it bluntly like that, but if you're not on that edge, if you're not not on that wave, your driftwood. >>Yeah. You know it's funny you say that I like to call it, our members are making systemic disruptions to the system in a very equitable way, meaning our members are in communities like Chicago Jackson Tennessee there in the north end of texas, they are in um everywhere and they're in the communities, making these systemic disruptions to the way things happen, the way we talk about renewable energy to the way we deploy solar, they're making those kind of changes. So to your point they're doing it, we have to catch up to them because they're already out there, they're moving their entrepreneurial, >>it's like, it's like there's a class of entrepreneurship and evolving and it's like everyone's got the pedigree, this or that knowledge is knowledge and you can apply it in software, you could be shrink wrapped software you put on the shelves called shelf where no successful inventory, give it back cloud computing. If you're not successful. Like right now it's not working. So if you don't have results, no one bought it, it must not work. So it's easy to identify what's working. Yes, so that eliminates a lot of dogma, a lot of weird blocking. It's true, this is a democratization of >>absolutely, I think you're talking about transparency and transparency is one of the tenets of inclusion. If you're truly doing things to be inclusive, transparent and that's where you see the changes, that's exactly what you're talking >>about data driven. That's one thing I love about this data world data is now part of like how apps are built, it's not like a database, then you go fetch a file data is now transparently available. If you know what to look for it if it's available. So the whole old silo mentality, this is one of the amazon strength blair you guys are doing. So I have to ask how is this translating out in the public policy world because you know, when you can make this kind of change quicker, you're gonna have some wins under your belt. Yeah, you gotta double down on those. I >>think, I think there's a lot of transformation we're talking about in this conversation. You take kind of one of the missions we're talking about here, which is around clean energy and the expansion of clean energy, Aws and Amazon. We have procured 10 gigawatts of renewable power and making us the largest corporate procure globally, to kind of put that in maybe a little bit more approachable context, that's the equivalent of powering 2.5 million homes. Um and there's still farther to go to be able to meet that kind of think big that is happening in the industry right now, you have to have a broad, diverse industry to be able to reach all those communities to be, have kind of all types of different leaders in it, because we need everybody at the table both for the industry, but also for the communities that are being served. >>What does sustainability mean to you? Because this is a core focus, I know the energy things huge, but it's not obvious to some people, but it's getting better. What are the what's the core 10ets behind the sustainability strategy? >>Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of different ways you can take a stab at that for us. It's uh probably most uh out there in the public that people talk about is our climate pledge. This is kind of a um goal that we've set to be uh net zero carbon by 2040 which is 10, 10 years ahead of the paris Climate change within that. There are components of that that are related to electric vehicles, clean energy, renewable energy procurement, carbon offset programs around the world. I think throughout all of that is kind of coming back to, as you said, with sustainability and approaching climate change as a as an issue that needs a comprehensive holistic approach to talk >>about some of the stories and the members that you have because is the recruiting strategy climate change? Or is there another like how do you because renewable energy could be a no brainer, but how to get people excited? Like save the world. What's the what's the what's the, what are people aligning with then? What's their reaction? So, >>You know, it's very simply the way we see with our members, most of our members, 87% of them are in the solar area. Many of them when we talk about sustainability, how can people live their lives in a way where they save money on their energy bills? How can communities understand how they can harness their own renewable energy, make a little money from that, but also live their lives in a very peaceful, sustainable, peaceful, sustainable way. Right, so that's part of it as an example, a couple of examples is that we have um 548 capital is a member company. And keep in mind that these are early startup companies. 5 48 capital is in Chicago and their models started off with we want all homes in our communities and these are places in the hood, some of them um son text works with people, it works with spanish speaking customers solely in texas where they explain to them the benefits of renewable energy. They explain the benefits of a sustainability and what it is. I mean that's so that's kind of what we're looking >>at here is just kind of show up and just kind of telling the truth >>exactly and show them the benefits that they've kind of not been leading on. Actually. The other thing is that this is about economics. So this renewable energy movement that we're going through is about economics. It is a it's our next wave of being able to ensure americans are able to live lives in a in a way that's meaningful economic. >>Well you've got visibility on the unit economics event good energy. There's also a community angle. >>Yes, absolutely. >>About some of those stories around the community response to this idea, wow this actually is gettable. Yeah, we >>solar is one of our members and it's owned by the first female community solar own company out of. She's out of Baltimore but she has a solar farm here in D. C. And what she did was was engaged churches in how can you get involved in this renewable energy movement? How can you save money? How can you create a community around around this work? We sold as an example of that um son text, I have to mention them again. They speak with they work with only spanish speaking customers who had no clue about this and who are now making having their lives live better because of it, >>you know, affecting change is hard now you've got a tailwind with structural change in systemic opportunities there. What are the blockers? What are the blockers right now? Is an awareness, is it participation community? >>I'm sorry, it's your show and I've >>interrupted, you know, >>we talk about entrepreneurs in the space, particularly women and those from bipod communities. The first thing that you'll hear is they'll say we don't have access to capital people. The terms around getting capital to start up are tough and their barriers there's so that's one the second is awareness and that's awareness of introducing them to companies that might want to do business with them. So that's something that's a benefit for a core occurs. Members are all people who touch every renewable energy transaction from the finances to the developers to the to the buyers. So this is what makes it unique. So what we're doing with accelerate is breaking down the barriers of access to capital by introducing them to people who can potentially support their work but also introducing them to companies that can help them be a part of their supply chain, which is why the study that max announced is amazing because we're going to be able to have baseline data on what, what are the demographics of the supply chain in the renewable energy and what can we do about it? And we're gonna scale accelerate to be a model for the industry >>and that's the transparency angle. Get the baseline, understand this is classic Amazonian thinking, get the baseline, raise the bar, >>you can see why you get >>so OK, so a lot of great stories, how do people get involved? Obviously amazon is taking the lead leadership role here. What can people do to get involved? >>So if you want to support the program as amazon is a corn dot org accelerate or Thompson at a core dot org. That's my email address. If you'd like to become a member company and accelerate program will be opening up applications towards the latter part of this year november december again a core dot org slash accelerate >>renewable energy. What's the coolest thing you've seen so far in your programme around neutral energy um, could be story, it could be people story could be tech story. What's the coolest thing you've seen spot there? Yeah, you really did. You >>know, I think we have a company called clear look, that's a member there out of Jackson Tennessee and they're actually working with retailers are renewable energy credits to create, to create renewable energy farms in their area. And I, what I think is so cool is that she's disrupting the way that you go about using renewable energy credits. Clear loop dot org. Look them >>up in the new york times. Had a story. I'm just reading California other areas. We have a high density of electric vehicles, it's training the power grid. So this idea of coming in, come back is what it's not sure yet. It's not, this is kind of where it's going. So okay, what's the cool thing you've seen? >>No, for me, I've just enjoyed kind of, I've enjoyed the journey. I think the moment for me where I could see that this was real and this was going to be a impactful program constants organized. It's called a speed dating, a virtual speed dating for us with about eight different companies and it was fascinating to get on, spend some time being able to interact with eight different companies. Um, who we probably would not have ever had kind of introduction to before in the past either. They didn't know how to get in touch with us. We didn't know how to get in touch with them and it kind of opens your eyes to all the different ways. People are approaching this problem and starts the executives who I had in these colors. You can see their wheels spinning the ideas sparking of oh there's some cool ideas here. There's something new that we could do. We should explore further. Nothing I can announce at the moment but lots of lots of good uh I'm >>sure the baseline max got baseline studies. I'm sure there will be a lot of doubling down opportunities on success or not success because you want to have the data, you know what to work on. Its true cause a great mission. I'm really impressed. Congratulations. Thank you announcement and love the programme. Thank you. Take a minute to give a plug anyone or public >>thanks Shannon Kellogg. Shannon was really behind it. He's a member of our board represents a W. S. And was really behind, we gotta do something. It's got to be unique and it's got to be something intentional. And here we are today I want to give a >>great opportunity. Thanks for coming in, appreciate it. Thank you for having more cube coverage here from Washington D. C. Amazon web services, public Sector summit. An event in person where people are face to face. This is great stuff is the cube right back after this short break. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Exciting conversation coming up about in vaccine cloud management. I've got two guests with me, Tim Elcott is here, the sales and delivery director of IBM services for Salesforce and Fran Thompson joins us as well, the CEO of the Health Service Executive in Ireland. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Hi, there. >> Hi. >> Good to be here. >> So we're very socially distance, Northern California, UK. Glad to have you guys here. We're going to talk about what the Health Service Executive or HSE in Ireland has done with IBM and Salesforce to facilitate vaccine management. But Fran, let's go ahead and start with you, talk to us a little bit about HSE. >> Well, the HSE provides public health and social services to everyone living in Ireland, okay. We got Acute hospitals, community services nationally. We directly employ about 80,000 people and we formed a farther about 40,000 people. And our annual budget is slightly North of 21.6 billion a year. We are the largest employer in the state and the largest organizations in the state. And, you know, we provide a huge range of services right across the whole spectrum. And we also formed other organizations who provide those services as well. So we would fund some voluntary and charity organizations and we would also buy services from the likes of say GP and other organizations as well. >> So talk to me about a year or so ago when the pandemic hit what were some of the challenges that HSE faced? And then when it came time to, we have a vaccine, we have multiple vaccines that rollout capability what were some of the challenges that you faced initially? >> So from an organizational perspective, there were huge challenges in that we were like every other health service worldwide facing an enormous pandemic that was impacting on people. And this is all about people, it's all about people's lives at the end of the day. People can talk about numbers and they can talk about costs and they can talk about other elements but at the end of the day this is about individual, people's lives, their families and their communities. And for the HSE, our challenge was really about how do we manage to protect the totality of the population in Ireland, as much as we can from the ravages of the virus. And the initial challenge we had was around contact tracing and managing that before a vaccine became available. And once the vaccine became available it was then how do we stand up a national vaccine solution that we would be able to deliver and record vaccines to the totality of the population who were getting a vaccine. >> Yeah, so there was no preexisting vaccination program of course, probably in most places you needed to get healthcare workers vaccinated ASAP and it's also needed to be a national program. So what did you do next after determining all right, we need to work with some partners to be able to build technology to facilitate equitable efficient rollout of the vaccine? >> So we did have regional vaccine systems and we do have a number of vaccine programs out there that were managing flu vaccine, Hep C vaccine, but we didn't have a national program and we needed to vaccinate people immediately. And we also wanted to make sure that vaccine program was not dependent on the HSE infrastructure, because we want to be able to vaccinate people in non HSE sites, and we wanted non HSE staff to be able to vaccinate. And we didn't want a huge pre-dependence on our existing infrastructure. So the first thing we did, we looked at a number of vendors and we chose IBM as our partner with Salesforce. And that partnership is really a strategic partnership and it's a partnership that we worked to all the bumps and all the lumps through the program together and there have been challenges but like it's still working with Tim and his team and to our team that we've overcome some of those challenges. And like, when we started off I remember the very first conversation I had with Tim he said, "Look, we need to vaccinate healthcare workers now, okay? And you've got two weeks to start and we need to configure a system, get it up and running and to be able to roll it out to the hospitals and very quickly then to all of our nursing care homes now" and that was the challenge. >> And let's bring Tim in, and this is a radically quick project from MPV to roll out in two weeks. Tim talk to us first about the IBM partnership with Salesforce and what you're building together. >> Absolutely, it's great and Fran it's interesting to hear you speaking about the running into this, 'cause from my perspective a week before we all started this we had a simple conversation called into the Health Service Executive they're talking about some vaccination program how can we help? And then within a week, we've gone from zero to having how many calls with Fran and team just to understand and with the Salesforce team to really understand how the three parties can bring the best of IBM, the best of Salesforce and the best of HSE in terms of the adaptability and what we need to get done to get those vaccinations up and running for the healthcare workers now. When Fran said to me, "We need something in two weeks." There was absolutely clarity, if you can't do it in two weeks there's the door, right? So we knew exactly the challenge and that's the kind of thing right before Christmas that we were so fortunate to really bring in the team, like everyone you think about this, everyone has probably the 14th of December was thinking of winding down, thinking of having their Christmas holidays and vacation time. And everybody from the Irish team and from the English team said, "No, we will cancel Christmas, we will cancel everything." So is it really Christmas came early and Christmas was canceled all at once. So, and the key bit here, the strategic partnership is IBM and Salesforce have been working together for years and years and years growing out a partnership. We know their products really well, we've got huge capability in that space. But actually with the new health cloud part of it the vaccine management parts are quite new to Salesforce as well only launched back in sort of the August, September time. So it's quite new. So we had to go in together as a sort of a partnership there to say, "Did you get this done?" So we had the best people from Salesforce who know the product, the best people from IBM all turning up on the 14th of December and saying, "Right, we've got to get this done by the 29th, with Christmas holidays in the way, the vacation time in the way." I think we had 36 hours of time off to eat turkey and fill ourselves before getting back to the wheel and really getting this done. And to get I think it was four acute hospitals we went into as of the 29th to start the vaccination program. So trying to do that, understanding everything is a compromise at that point. Yeah, but it has to be secure, you know this is personal data going into these systems. So you can't forget about all the aspects it's got as minimum, but minimum with those kinds of constraints as a health system. So it needs to be secure, it needs to also be that national platform going forwards as well. So basing on a great platform like Salesforce, you know you can scale out, you know you've got those options to grow in the future, but yeah, not without a lot of challenge and then working out what's now getting to know each other, but if we only talked about twice before we ever know each other pretty well now. But just trying to work out how we then structure what's going to happen every two weeks afterwards, how's that going to move forward? We're going live every two weeks and we have done that now for the last three months, so, good fun. >> So, yeah, good fun. But so much work to get done and accord a huge coordinated effort in a very short time period during a very challenging time. Talk to me a little bit about Fran but you launched this Vaccine Cloud Management in January, 2021. And to date, I think you told me 1 million people have been vaccinated so far. Talk to me about what the IBM, Salesforce solution enables you to deliver to the HSE and to the Irish citizens. >> So we have delivered a million vaccines, okay in two stages. The dose one, the dose two for most people in Ireland. And there's about 720,000 people got their dose one and the balance have got the dose two. That's about sort of just about one in five of the population that has to be vaccinated. And one of things we were very conscious of is that as an organization like that we need to take a risk based approach to this. So we need to look at the most vulnerable groups there were lots of people who were dying from this. And a lot of people were elderly groups, and people who were vulnerable with pre medical conditions. So our challenge was how do we vaccinate those people quickly and effectively and also vaccinate healthcare workers who are going to care for these people. And that's where we prioritize the work. So we have to go into 50 acute sites about 600 or so care homes, we set up a lot of what we call pop-up clinics literally a tent in a location, or we took over a sports hall or whatever we did. We rolled it out to the GP so about two and a half thousand GP sites. And all of that was being done while we were building the system. So we were building the system and designing a system on two week sprints. We have to be agile, we have to be quick, we had to make huge compromises and we know that. Though I hate to admit it everyone wants a perfect system, which will make the compromise and look into what do you need to do now to keep the program running? And how you manage that with about 3,000 users all to be set up fairly quickly or a little over half thousand users. So you have to manage all that as you're going through everything. >> I think agile is the name of the game here. Tim, talk to us about how you're delivering the agility in such a tenuous time. >> Well, we're all virtual, which is added to the mix. But the funny thing with that agility we've got a span of people across all the countries and everywhere that we can bring in to that party. And yeah, we're running what I would call a normal agile project, except normally it would take two, three months to really get that team working effectively, getting to know each other and we just not had time to do that. So there's been a core team here and we're bringing in the experts around it but really just everything is working with Fran, worked very hand in glove trying just to work out, what we need to do here, to look at the next sprint to look at the next go live, to look at the compromise. How do we compromise for two weeks? What can we live with for two weeks? What's in the backlog for now and Fran and I have many conversations. What do we need to do this week and then what's next week? And that's level of fluidity and that's in part because of the way the pandemics and the response of pandemic is mapping out. As we saw the vaccines are changing, availability is changing, the rollout plan is changing. None of us have worked through a pandemic before. So agility is the name of the game at the highest level. I think we're all now very used to being, sorry there's a problem something's changed, can we adapt the system too, you know, and normally in a sprint I'll be thinking, I've got some fixed requirements for two weeks, I'll build that and then do the next two weeks. Everything is up for grabs and we're just having to maintain quality at the pace, the responsiveness and balancing it all as an IBM team and you think. And whilst we're also doing that on a platform that it takes time to configure and build these things as well. So it's some of it is you're going to have to wait a few days. So we're sorry, you know, a few days is really the probably sometimes the maximum amount of time that can be you can defer, but as Fran and everyone in the HSE and the National Immunization Office, everyone's pragmatic about realizing we're all in this together and it's really just being one single team, one unit working out and very open and transparent about the odds that are possible. >> And when doing something... Go ahead, Fran. >> We had a phrase there like there was a pieces we just had, "Just do it now." And we did a lot of that, okay? You know, where there were things that were prioritized were in the middle of a sprint, there were changes in the program or there were changes in how the vaccination was going to be delivered. And we couldn't waste the week just wasn't available. So we have the thing just got to do it now. And Tim and the team they'll drop what they were doing you know, made the changes, we tested them fast and we pulled them in and then gave us an extra time to actually then deliver the rest of the sprint. We have to do that several occasions, several very, very late night delivers. >> And I imagine that's still going on, but to wrap here guys, an amazing work that you've done together so far with the Salesforce Vaccine Club Management rolling out across the HSE you said 1 million vaccinations delivered many hundreds of thousands in the queue. I'm sure more iterative work and sleepless nights but what you're doing for the country of Ireland is literally as Fran said in the beginning, lifesaving. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today on the program. >> You're welcome, thank you. >> You're very welcome. Thank you. >> From Tim and Fran I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm lisa martin, exciting conversation coming up about vaccine cloud management. I've got two guests with me, tim Elka is here, the sales and delivery director of IBM Services for Salesforce and fred Thompson joins us as well. The C. I. O. Of the health service executive in Ireland. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >>Either I have to be here >>so we're very socially distant northern California UK. Glad to have you guys here. We're gonna talk about what the health service executive or HST and Ireland has done with IBM and Salesforce to facilitate vaccine management. But Fran let's go ahead and start with you talk to us a little bit about HSC >>So that the HSC provides public health and social services to everyone living in Ireland. Okay. We that acute hospitals community services nationally. We directly employ about 80,000 people and we fund a further about about 40,000 people. Um and our annual budget is slightly north of 21.6 billion a year. We are the largest employer in the state of the largest organizations the state. Uh you know, we provide a huge range of services right across the whole spectrum and we also fund other organizations who provide those services as well. So we would we would fund some voluntary and charity organizations and we would also uh by services from the latest A GP and other organizations as well. >>So talk to me about a year or so ago when the pandemic hit, what were some of the challenges that HSC faced and then when it came time to we have a vaccine, we have multiple vaccines that roll out um capability. What were some of the challenges that you faced initially? >>So from a an organizational perspective, um, there are, there were huge challenges in that. We were like every other health service worldwide facing uh, an enormous pandemic that was impacting on people. And this is all about people, it's all about people's lives. At the end of the day, people can talk about numbers and they can talk about costs and they can talk about other elements at the end of the day. This is about individual people's lives, their families and their communities. And for the HFC, our challenge was really about how do we manage to protect the totality of the population in Ireland as much as we can from, from the ravages of the virus. Um, and you know, the initial challenge we had was around contact tracing and managing that before a vaccine became available and once the vaccine became available it was then how do we stand up and national vaccine solution that we would be able to deliver and record vaccine to the totality of the population who were getting back? >>Yeah. So there was no pre existing vaccination program. Of course, probably in most places, you needed to get health care workers vaccinated ASAP. And it's also needed to be a national program. So what did you do next? After determining? All right, we need to work with some partners to be able to build technology to facilitate uh equitable, efficient rollout of the vaccine. >>So we did have regional vaccine systems and we do have a number of vaccine programs out there that were that were managing flu vaccine, heP C vaccine. But we needed we did we didn't have a national program and we needed to vaccinate people immediately. Um, and we also wanted to make sure that vaccine program was not dependent on the HSC infrastructure because, you know, we want to be able to vaccinate people in non HSC sites and we wanted non HSC staff to be able to vaccination. Uh, and we didn't want a huge pre dependent on our existing infrastructure. Um, so the first thing we did, we we looked at a number of vendors. Um, and we chose IBM as our partner with Salesforce. And that partnership is really a strategic partnership and it's a partnership that we worked through all the bumps and all the lumps of the program together. Um, and you know, and and there there have been challenges, but like it's too working with him and his team and through our team that we've overcome some of those challenges. Um, and like when we started off, remember the very first conversation I had with him as legislators, we need to vaccinate healthcare workers now, okay, you've got two weeks to start, um and we need to configure a system, get it up and running and to be able to um roll it out to the hospital And two. I'm very quickly then to all of our nursing care homes. Now, that was the challenge. >>And let's bring tIM in is this is a radically quick project from MPB to roll out in two weeks to talk to us about first about the IBM partnership with Salesforce and what you're building together. >>Absolutely. And it's great and Fran. It's interesting to hear you speaking about the run into this because from my perspective, a week before we all started this, we had a simple conversation called into Health Service Executive has some talking about some vaccination program, how can we help? And then within a week we've gone from zero to having how many calls with Fran and team just to understand and with the salesforce team to really understand how the 33 parties can bring the best of IBM, the best of Salesforce and the best of HSC in terms of the adaptability and what we need to get done to get those vaccinations up and running for the health care workers. Now, you know when franz said to me, we need something in two weeks, there was absolutely clarity. If you can't do it in two weeks there's a door, right? So we knew exactly the challenge and that's the kind of thing right before christmas that we were so fortunate to really bring in the team like everyone you think about this, everyone has probably the 14th of december, I was thinking of winding down thinking of having their christmas holidays and vacation time and everybody from the irish team and from the english team said no or cancel, christmas will cancel everything. So it's really christmas came early and christmas was canceled all at once, so and the key bit here, the strategic partnership is, I'm in the sales force have been working together for years and years and years growing out a partnership, we know their products really well, we've got huge capability in that space, but actually with the new health cloud part of it, the vaccine management parts are quite new to salesforce as well, only launched back in august september time, so it's quite new, so we had to go in together as a sort of partnership there to say to just get this done. So we had the best people from salesforce, I know the product, the best people from IBM all turning up on the 14th of december and saying right, we've got to get this done By the 29th with christmas and christmas holidays in the way the vacation time in the way, I think we have 36 hours of time off to eat turkey and fill ourselves before getting back to the wheel and really getting this done and to get I think was four acute hospitals we went into as of the 29th to start the vaccination program, so trying to do that, understanding everything is a compromise at that point, but it has to be secure, you know, this, this is, this is personal data going into these systems, so you can't forget about all the aspects, it's got this minimum but minimum with those kind of constraints as a health system. So it needs to be secure, it needs to also be that national platform going forward as well. So basing on a great platform like Salesforce, you know, you can scale out, you know, you've got those options to grow in the future, but yeah, not without a lot of challenge and then working out what's now getting to know each other, but if we only talked about twice before, we have to know each other pretty well now, um, but just trying to work out how we then structure, what's going to happen every two weeks afterwards, How is that going to move forward? We're going live every two weeks and we haven't done that now for the last three months, So good fun. >>So yeah, good fun. And but so much work to get done and according huge, coordinated effort in a very short time period, during a very challenging time. Talk to me a little bit about France, but you launched this um cloud management vaccine, Cloud management in january 2021 today to thank you. Told me one million people have been vaccinated so far. Talk to me about what the IBM Salesforce solution enables you to deliver to the HSC and to the irish citizens. >>So we have delivered a million vaccines. Okay to uh to stage is uh there's a dose one of those two for most people in Ireland. Um and there's about 720,000 people have got their dose one and the balance I've got, I've got the dose too, that's about sort of just about one in five of the population. That has to be that there has to be vaccinated. And one of these were very conscious of is that, you know, an organization is that we need to take a risk-based approach to this. So we need to look at the most vulnerable groups. There were lots of people who were dying from, you know, from this and they were all the a lot of people are elderly groups and people who were who were vulnerable with uh with pre medical condition. So our challenge was how do we, how do we vaccinate those people quickly and effectively uh and also vaccinate health care workers who are going to care for these people? Uh and and that's what we're, we prioritize the work. So we have to go into 50 acute sites, about 600 or so care homes. We set up a lot of what we call pop up clinics literally attended the in a location or we took over a sports hall or whatever we did. We rolled it out to the GPS to about 2.5 1000 G. P. Site. Um and all of that was being done while we were building the system. So we were, you know, building the system and designing the system on two weeks prints. We have to be agile way too quick. We can make huge compromises and we know that okay. I mean everyone wants a perfect system which is to make the compromise and look and see what you need to do now to keep the program running and how you manage that were, you know, Uh about 3000 users all to be set up fairly quickly or a little over between 1000 users so you can manage all that as you're going through everything. >>I think agile is the name of the game here. Tim talked to us about how you're delivering the agility in such a 10uous time. >>Well, we're all virtual which is added to the mix. But the funny thing with that agility, we've got a span of people across all the countries and everywhere that we can bring to that that party and we're running a normal but I was kind of a normal agile project except normally it would take 23 months to really get that team working effectively, getting to know each other and we just not had time to that to do that. So there's been a core team here and we're bringing in the experts around it. But really just everything is working with Fran work very hand in glove, trying just to work out what we need to do here to look at the next sprint, to look at the next go Live, to look at the compromise. How do we compromise for two weeks? What can we live with for two weeks? What's in the backlog for now? And Fran and I have many conversations, what do we need to do this week and then what's next week? And that's the level of fluidity And that's in part because of the way the pandemics and the response to pandemic is mapping out as we saw the vaccines are changing availability, is changing the rollout plan is changing. None of us have worked through a pandemic before. So agility is the name of the game at the highest level. I think we're all now very used to being sorry, there's a problem. Something's changed. Can we adapt the system to you know where normally in a sprint, I'd be thinking I've got some fixed requirements for two weeks. I'll build that and then do the next two weeks, everything is up for grabs and we're just having to maintain quality at the pace, the responsiveness and balancing it all as an IBM team and you think, and whilst we're also doing that on a platform that it takes time to configure and build these things as well. So it's some of it is you're gonna have to wait a few days. So sorry, you know, in a few days is really probably sometimes the maximum amount of time that can be, you can differ. But as Fran and everyone in the HRC and the, the national immunization office, everyone's pragmatic about realizing we're all in this together and it's really just being one single team, one unit working out and very open and transparent about the, after the possible >>we're doing something, go ahead. >>And we had a phrase, there was like, those are the pieces, we just just do it now and, and we did a lot of that. Okay. Um, you know, where there were things that were prioritized, we're in the middle of a sprint. Um, there were there were changes in the program or there were changes in how, how the vaccination was going to be delivered. Um, and we couldn't wait the week. Just it wasn't available. So we have this thing is just gonna do it now and him and the team, you know, drop what they were doing, you know, made the changes, we test them fast and we put them in and and that gave us then, you know, an extra time to actually then deliver the rest of the sprint and we have to do that. Several Okay. Several very, very late night to deliver >>and I imagine that's still going on. But to wrap here guys, amazing work that you've done together so far with the Salesforce vaccine Club Management rolling out across the HSC, you said one million vaccinations delivered many hundreds of thousands in the queue. I'm sure more iterative work and sleepless nights. But what you're doing for the country of Ireland is literally as friends in the beginning. Life saving Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today on the program. >>You're welcome. Thank you. You're very welcome. Thank you. >>Tim and Fran. I'm lisa martin. You're watching two cubes coverage of IBM think 2021. >>Mhm >>mm.

from around the globe it's thecube covering space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly hello everyone welcome to the space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together i'm john furrier your host with thecube here in california i want to welcome our featured guest lieutenant general john f thompson with the united states space force approach to cyber security that's the topic of this session and of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in los angeles air force base also heading up space force general thank you for coming on really appreciate you kicking this off welcome to the symposium hey so uh thank you very much john for that very kind introduction also uh very much thank you to cal poly uh for this opportunity to speak to this audience today also a special shout out to one of the organizers uh dustin brun for all of his work uh helping uh get us uh to this point uh ladies and gentlemen as uh as uh john mentioned uh i'm jt thompson uh i lead the 6 000 men and women of the united states space forces space and missile system center which is headquartered here at los angeles air force base in el segundo if you're not quite sure where that's at it's about a mile and a half from lax this is our main operating location but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country with about 500 people at kirtland air force base in albuquerque new mexico uh and about another 500 people on the front range of the rockies uh between colorado springs and uh and denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide uh we're responsible for uh acquiring developing and sustaining the united states space force's critical space assets that includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites and we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the u.s space force and a number of our critical mission partners across the uh department of defense and the intelligence community um just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustained the 31 satellite gps constellation that satellite constellation while originally intended to help with global navigation those gps signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy uh over the past three decades i mean gps is everywhere i think everybody realizes that agriculture banking the stock market the airline industry uh separate and distinct navigation systems it's really pervasive across both the capabilities for our department of defense and capabilities for our economy and and individuals billions of individuals across our country and the planet some of the other work we do for instance in the communications sector uh secure communications satellites that we design and build that link america's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real-time support and comms for our deployed forces and those of our allies we also acquire uh infrared missile warning satellites uh that monitor the planet for missile launches and provide advanced warning uh to the u.s homeland and to our allies uh in case some of those missile launches are uh nefarious um on a note that's probably a lot closer to home maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of california in 2018 smc jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy uh to partner with the u.s forest service during the two of the largest wildfires in the state's history the camp and woolsey fires in northern california as those fires spread out of control we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet and we collaborated with the us forest service so that firefighters on the ground uh could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading thereby saving lives and and property by identifying hot spots and flare-ups for firefighters that data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the u.s forest service and authorities here in california was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters it was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread we've continued uh that involvement in recent years using multiple systems to support firefighters across the western u.s this fall as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue working together with the u.s forest service and with other partners uh we like to make uh we like to think that we made a difference here but there's still a lot more work to go and i think that we should always be asking ourselves uh what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to uh stakeholders so that they can use it for for purposes of good if you will how else can we protect our nation how else can we protect our friends and allies um i think a major component of the of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly um just over the past few years uh john and i were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have uh space programs 80 nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet um if you just look at one mission area that uh the department of defense is interested in and that's small launch there are currently over a hundred different small launch companies uh within the u.s industrial base vying for commercial dod and civil uh payload capabilities uh mostly to low earth orbit it's it's just truly a remarkable time if you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning um where we're revolutionary revolutionizing really uh the ways that we generate process and use data i mean it's really remarkable in 2016 so if you think about this four years ago uh nasa estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day and that was four years ago um uh obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience of this congress or in this conference uh we need to work with big thinkers like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data we need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge edge theories of data mining cyber behaviorism and internet of things 2.0 it's just truly a remarkable time uh to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the states of the space business are truly truly daunting and important to uh to all of us um integrating cyber security into our space systems both commercial and government is a mandate um it's no longer just a nice to have as the us space force and department of the air force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years space is becoming congested and contested and that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security uh in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on uh cyber security day in and day out the value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer from the ground control segments associated with it and this value is not just military it's also economic and it's not just american it's also a value for the entire world particularly particularly our allies as we all depend upon space and space systems your neighbors and friends here in california that are employed at the space and missile system center uh work with network defenders we work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers um our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global commons of space free and open for exploration and for commerce um as john and i were talking earlier before we came online there's an aspect of cyber security for space systems especially for some of our legacy systems that's more how do we bolt this on because we fielded those space systems a number of years ago and the the challenges of cyber security in the space domain have grown so we have a part that we have to worry about bolting it on but then we have to worry about building it in as we as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that that realizes that the cyber threat or the cyber security landscape will evolve over time it's not just going to be stagnant there will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we always have to look at look uh as secretary barrett who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning the american way of life really depends on space and as part of the united states space force we work with defense leaders our congress joint and international military teammates and industry to ensure american leadership in space i really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today john and thanks so much to cal poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event i really look forward to this for uh several months and so with that i look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here general thank you very much for the awesome uh introductory statement uh for the folks watching on the stream brigadier general carthan is going to be in the chat answering any questions feel free to chat away he's the vice commander of space and missile systems center he'll be available um a couple comments from your keynote before i get to my questions because it just jumped in my head you mentioned the benefits of say space but the fires in california we're living that here that's really real time that's a benefit you also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space and i only imagine moore's law smaller faster cheaper applies to rockets too so i'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned so you know is it going to be more rules around that i mean this is an interesting question because it's exciting space force but for all the good there is potentially bad out there yeah so i i john i think the uh i think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space what kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps deorbit themselves what kind of basic protections does do all satellites should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space i think those are all fantastic questions and i know that u.s and many uh allied policy makers are looking very very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we uh you know how how we field and field is the military term but you know how we uh populate uh using civil or uh commercial terms uh that space layer at different altitudes uh low earth orbit mid mid-earth orbit geosynchronous earth orbit different kinds of orbits uh what the kind of mission areas we accomplish from space that's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as uh as the place gets a little bit not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out well i'm super excited for space force i know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging changing great space the focus here at this conference is space and cyber security intersection i'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that space force is taking to cyber security and how it impacts our national goals here in the united states yeah yeah so that's a that's a great question john let me let me talk about in two uh two basic ways but number one is and and i know um some people in the audience this might make them a little bit uncomfortable but i have to talk about the threat right um and then relative to that threat i really have to talk about the importance of uh of cyber and specifically cyber security as it relates to that threat um the threats that we face um really represent a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber uh we've seen a lot of action in recent months uh from certain countries notably china and russia uh that have threatened what i referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space for example uh it through many unclassified sources and media sources everybody should understand that um uh the russians have been testing on orbit uh anti-satellite capabilities it's been very clear if you were following just the week before last the department of defense released its uh 2020 military and security developments involving the people's republic of china um uh and uh it was very clear that china is developing asats electronic jammers directed energy weapons and most relevant to today's discussion offensive cyber uh capabilities there are kinetic threats uh that are very very easy to see but a cyber attack against a critical uh command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of gps and important to note that that gps system also impacts many civilians who are dependent upon those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to a system to mislead operators so that they send emergency services personnel to the to the wrong address right attacks on spacecraft on orbit whether directly via a network of intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the systems production uh while we're building the satellite can [ __ ] or corrupt the data denial of service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control i mean if gps went down i you know i hesitate to say it this way because we might elicit some screams from the audience but if gps went down a starbucks wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you and domino's certainly certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less right so with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek there from a military operations perspective it's dead serious um uh we have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like lance ransomware and malware and those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems however what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled if you will to use against our national security space systems uh day in and day out um as i said during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity if commanders in the field uh firefighters in california or baristas in in starbucks can't trust the data they see they're receiving then that really harms their decision-making capabilities one of the big trends we've recently seen is the mood move towards proliferated leo uh uh constellations obviously uh spacex's uh starlink uh on the commercial side and on the military side the work that darpa and my organization smc are doing on blackjack and casino as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionize how we plan and field warfighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems but they're also heavily reliant on cyber security uh we've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage uh loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from uh you know satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning on board spacecraft or at the edge our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector they're basically flying boxes full of software right and we need to ensure the data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms govern governing the right actions and that those uh that those systems are impervious to the extent possible uh to nefarious uh modifications so in summation a cyber security is vital element of everything in our national security space goals and i would argue for our national uh goals uh writ large including uh economic and information uh uh dimensions uh the space force leadership at all levels uh from uh some of the brand new second lieutenants that general raymond uh swore into the space force this morning uh ceremonially from the uh air force association's air space and cyberspace conference uh to the various highest levels general raymond uh general d t thompson myself and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise we've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems because it they absolutely depend on it you know you mentioned uh hardware software threats opportunities challenges i want to ask you because you you got me thinking of the minute there around infrastructure i mean we've heard critical infrastructure you know grids here on on earth you're talking about critical infrastructure a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is an extension of what we have so i'd love to get your thoughts about space force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors because you know the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyber space oh yeah threat vectors they're always increasing the surface area well if the surface area is from space it's an unlimited surface area so you got different vectors so you got new critical infrastructure developing real time really fast and you got an expanded threat vector landscape putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues how would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things well so i tell you um i just like um uh just like uh i'm sure people in the security side or the cyber security side of the business in the banking industry feel they feel like it's uh all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system to the financial sector on the department of defense side we've got to have sort of the same mindset um that threat vector from to and through space against critical space systems ground segments the launch enterprise or transportation uh to orbit and the various different uh domains within uh within space itself like i mentioned before uh leo mio and geo-based satellites with different orbits all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that i mentioned earlier some that i didn't mention like weather tactical or wide band communications uh various new features of space control all of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security uh threat perspective and it's a it's a daunting challenge right now right yeah it's awesome and one of the things we've been following on the hardware side here in the on the ground is the supply chain we've seen you know malware being you know really put into really obscure hardware who manufactures it as being outsourced obviously government has restrictions but with the private sector uh you mentioned china and and the us kind of working together across these these peaceful areas but you got to look at the supply chain how does the supply chain the security aspect impact the mission of the u.s space force yeah yeah so so um how about another um just in terms of an example another kind of california-based historical example right um the very first u.s satellite uh explorer one was built by uh the jet propulsion uh laboratory folks uh not far from here in el segundo up in uh up in pasadena um that satellite when it was first built in the late 50s uh weighed a little bit over 30 pounds and i'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by u.s companies fast forward to today the global supply chain is so tightly coupled and frankly many industries are so specialized almost specialized regionally around the planet we focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the the heritage if you will of some of the parts that are used the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized right the space industry especially uh national security space sector um uh is relatively small compared to other commercial industries and we're moving to towards using more and more parts uh from non-us companies uh cyber security and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily um understand 100 percent like an explorer one uh the the lineage of that particular part the environmental difficulties in space are well known the radiation environment the temperature extremes the vacuum those require specialized component and the us military is not the only uh customer in that space in fact we're definitely not the dominant customer uh in space anymore all those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains from a quality perspective a security perspective and availability um there's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from um many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of uh you know compromised patches if you will and our adversaries are aware of these techniques as i mentioned earlier with other forms of attack considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries so we have to uh take that threat seriously um between the government and industry sectors here in the u.s we're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities last fall we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at space and missile system center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio and it sounds really kind of you know businessy geeky if you will you know hey we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cyber security as dynamically as we possibly could and so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts to require system developers to implement some more advanced uh protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment so that data handling and supply chain perspective uh protections um from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account uh cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now it's as important as the the mission performance of the system it's as important as cost it's as important as schedule because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost uh it can perform that missile warning or that communications mis mission perfectly but it's not cyber secure if it doesn't have cyber protections built into it or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber uh threats then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the k the the war fighter or the nation uh any good um supply chain risk management is a is a major challenge for us uh we're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners uh we're all facing it head on uh to try and build secure and trusted components uh that keep our confidence as leaders firefighters and baristas uh as the case may be uh but it is a challenge and we're trying to rise to that challenge you know this so exciting this new area because it really touches everything you know talk about geeking out on on the tech the hardware the systems but also you put your kind of mba hat on you go what's the roi of the extra development and how you how things get built because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like you're building cool stuff people love it's it's exciting but you still have to build and cyber security has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture so you're still building things which means you've got to acquire things you got to acquire parts you got to acquire build software and and sustain it how is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space yeah from initial development uh through planning for the acquisition design development fielding or production fielding and sustainment it impacts all aspects of of the life cycle john uh we simply especially from the concept of baking in cyber security uh we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure so we've moved way further uh towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cyber security from the very beginning of a system's development cyber security and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute as i mentioned earlier equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance we like to talk in uh in the space world about uh mission assurance and mission assurance has always you know sort of taken us as we as we technically geek out right mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space right can it work in a vacuum can it work in you know as it as it uh you know transfers through uh the van allen radiation belt or through the the um the southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly right will it work out in space and now from a resiliency perspective yeah it has to work in space it's got to be functional in space but it's also got to be resistant to these cyber security threats it's it's not just i think uh general dt thompson quoted this term it's not just widget assurance anymore it's mission assurance um uh how does that satellite uh operator that ground control segment operate while under attack so let me break your question a little bit uh just for purposes of discussion into into really two parts uh cyber uh for cyber security for systems that are new and cyber security uh for systems that are in sustainment or kind of old and legacy um obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threaten both and we really have to employ different strategies for for defense of of each one for new systems uh we're desperately trying to implement across the department of defense in particular in the space world a kind of a devsecops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems here at smc we have a program called enterprise ground services which is a tool kit basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems egs as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of of bad behavior malicious behavior if you will um uh it's rudimentary at this point but because we're using devsecops and that incremental development approach as we scale it it just becomes more and more capable you know every every product increment that we field here at uh at uh la air force base uh uh we have the united space space forces west coast software factory which we've dubbed kobayashi maru they're using those agile devops uh software development practices uh to deliver uh space awareness software uh to the combined space operations center uh affectionately called the csp that c-spock is just down the road uh from cal poly uh there in san luis obispo at vandenberg air force base they've securely linked the c-spock with other space operation centers around the planet our allies australia canada and the uk uh we're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations so lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development uh capabilities for our our space systems but as i mentioned earlier we've got large constellations on satellite of satellites on orbit right now some of them are well in excess of a decade or more old on orbit and so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old and so but we still have to worry about them because they're critical to our space capabilities um we've been working with an air force materiel command organization uh called crows which stands for the cyber resiliency office for uh weapon systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to to live through this increasingly cyber security uh concerned era that we currently live in our industry partners have been critical to to both of those different avenues both new systems and legacy systems we're working closely with them to defend and upgrade uh national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with uh with new national assets coming online the vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threaten the way we've done business in the past both militarily and in the case of gps economically the impacts of that cyber security risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes but i've got to tell you it that as the threat vectors change as the vulnerabilities change we've got to be nimble enough agile enough to be able to bounce back and forth we can't just say uh many people in the audience are probably familiar with the rmf or the risk management framework approach to um to reviewing uh the cyber security of a system we can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an rmf on a system and then hey high five we're all good uh it's a journey not a destination that's cyber security and it's a constant battle rhythm throughout a weapon systems life cycle not just a single event i want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question but before i go there you mentioned the agile and i see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles you've got to be faster and we saw this in the computer industry mainframes mini computers and then when you started getting beyond me when the internet hit and pcs came out you saw the big enterprises the banks and and government start to work with startups it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that you know there's no way if you're a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise now that used to be for public sector and certainly uh for you guys so as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved i'm sure would love to love to have a contract with space force there's an roi calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view edit software you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you uh whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile but they might not be that big company we are john that's a fantastic question we are desperately trying to reach out to to those new space advocates to those startups to those um what we sometimes refer to within the department of defense those non-traditional uh defense contractors a couple of things just for uh thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight um uh three years ago we created here at uh space and missile system center uh the space enterprise consortium uh to provide a platform uh a contractual vehicle really to enable us to rapidly prototype uh development of space systems and to collaborate uh between the u.s space force uh traditional defense contractors non-traditional vendors like startups and even some academic institutions uh spec as we call it space enterprise consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts uh awarded quickly many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements and that's what spec is based on and so far in just three years spec has awarded 75 different uh prototyping contracts worth over 800 million dollars with a 36 reduction in time to award and because it's a consortium based competition for um for these kinds of prototyping efforts the barrier to entry for small and non-traditional for startups even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototypings is really lowered right um uh these types of partnerships uh that we've been working through on spec uh have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security uh for their systems both their developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build we want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together and support um uh kind of mutually beneficial uh relationships between all um recently uh at the annual air force association uh conference that i mentioned earlier i moderated a panel with several space industry leaders uh all from big traditional defense contractors by the way and they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships uh between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrants uh and that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those uh larger contractors uh that we rely on day in and day out advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that i think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations as i mentioned earlier the spec has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values and it's just going to get better right there's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium 80 of them are non-traditional kinds of vendors and we just love working with them another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators uh if you will and innovators that include uh cyber security experts is our space pitch day events right so we held our first event last november in san francisco uh where we awarded over a two-day period about 46 million dollars to 30 different companies um that had potentially game-changing ideas these were phase two small business innovative research efforts uh that we awarded with cash on the spot uh we're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. uh we're planning on doing it right here in los angeles uh covent 19 environment permitting um and we think that these are you know fantastic uh uh venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups startups and small businesses who are interested in uh really truly partnering with the us air force it's a as i said before it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business uh and working with the innovation economy uh is something that the department of defense uh really needs to do in that um the innovation that we used to think was ours you know that 80 percent of the industrial-based innovation that came from the department of defense uh the the script has been flipped there and so now more than 70 percent uh particularly in space innovation uh comes from the commercial sector not from uh not from the defense business itself and so um that's a tsunami of uh investment and a tsunami of uh capability and i need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it you know what i mean yeah i mean it's one of those things where the flip the script has been flipped but it's exciting because it's impacting everything are you talking about systems architecture you're talking about software you're talking about a business model you talk about devsecops from a technical perspective but now you have a business model innovation all the theaters of uh are exploding in innovation technical business personnel this brings up the workforce challenge you've got the cyber needs for the u.s space force there's probably a great roi model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts that's a entrepreneurial innovation you got the the business model theater you've got the personnel how does the industry adopt and change you guys are clearly driving this how does the industry adjust to you yeah so um i think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the u.s space force from a from an acquisition perspective and in this particular case from a from a cyber security perspective as i mentioned earlier it's the most exciting time to be in space programs uh really since the days of apollo um uh you know just to put it in terms that you know maybe have an impact with the audience uh from 1957 until today approximately 9 000 satellites uh have been launched from the various space faring countries around the planet uh less than two thousand of those nine thousand are still up on orbit and operational and yet in the new space regime um players like spacex have plans to launch you know 12 000 satellites for some of their constellations alone it really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities whether they're commercial civil or defense are going to require appropriate cyber security uh protections it's just a really exciting time uh to be working in stuff like this and so uh folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cyber security are just the kind of people that we want to work with because we need to make sure our systems are are secure and resilient we need folks that have technical and computing expertise engineering skills to be able to design cybersecure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks uh but we also as you alluded to we need people that have that business and um you know business acumen human networking background so that we can launch the startups and work with the non-traditional businesses uh help to bring them on board help to secure both their data and our data and uh and and make sure our processes and systems are are free as much as possible from uh uh from attack um for preparation for for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this uh trade space um you gotta be smart on digital networking uh you gotta understand basic internet protocols concepts uh programming languages uh database design uh learn what you can from penetration or vulnerability testing and and uh risk assessment i will tell you this and i don't think he will i know he will not mind me telling you this but you've got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago i'm at home one evening and i get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss the commander of air force space command uh general j raymond who is now currently the chief of space operations and he is on temporary duty flying overseas he lands where he's going and he first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes jt um while i was traveling um i noticed that there were e-books available on the commercial airliner i was traveling on and there was an e-book on something called scrumming and agile devsecops and i read it have you read it um and i said no sir but if you tell me what the title of the book is i will read it and so i got to go to my staff meeting um you know the very next week the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the stab meeting hey if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming then i'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our gs13s all of our government employees can get smart on uh the scrumming development process and interestingly as another side i had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays where he was trying to take some leave and i said sir what are you up to today are you are you you know making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever and the chief of space operations told me no i'm trying to teach myself python i'm at lesson two and it's not going so well but i'm i'm gonna figure this out and so that kind of thing if the chief of staff or the you know the the the chief of space operations can prioritize scrumming and python language and innovation in his daily schedule then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that and we'll just say lower levels of rank uh throughout our entire space force enterprise um look i i we don't need to need people that can code a satellite from scratch but we need to know we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cyber security requirements and that can turn those things into into meaningful actions obviously in the space domain things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important uh space is not an intuitive uh domain so under understanding how things survive uh on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions and you know i know there's probably a lot because of this conference i know there's a probably a whole lot of high-speed cyber security experts out in the audience and i need those people in the u.s space force the the country is counting on it but i wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy right i have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers and they don't have to be high-end cyber security experts but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections um into our space system so the skill set is is really really broad um our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into uh define designing uh and fielding offensive and destructive space cyber security weapons right they've repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit and the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that as i mentioned before peaceful uh global commons of space we really need all hands on deck if you're interested in helping in uniform if you're interested in helping uh not in uniform uh but as a government employee a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important uh or more cape more able to be developed for our space systems then we'd really love to uh to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems lieutenant general john thompson great insight thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too and motivation for the young next generation the united states space force approach of cyber security really amazing talk thank you for your time final parting question is as you look out and you had your magic wand what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish it's a super exciting time what do you hope for so um um first of all john thanks to you and and thanks to cal poly uh for the invitation and and thanks to everybody for uh for their interest in cyber security especially as it relates to space systems that's here at the conference um uh there's a quote and i'll read it here uh from uh bernard schriever who was the uh the founder if you will uh a legend in uh dod space the founder of the western development division which was a predecessor organization to space and missile systems center general shrever i think captures the essence of what how we see the next couple of years the world has an ample supply of people who can always come up with a dozen good reasons why new ideas will not work and should not be tried but the people who produce progress are breed apart they have the imagination the courage and the persistence to find solutions and so i think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cyber security innovation are going to be a pony ride at the county fair then perhaps you should look for another line of work because i think the next few years in space and cyber security innovation are going to be more like a rodeo um and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes it is a an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem it's really an honor for me to um to be able to play some small role uh in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it uh while i'm trying to improve the chances of uh of the united states of america in a uh in a space war fighting uh uh environment um and so i thank all of you for uh participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you thank you sir thank you for your leadership and thank you for the for the time for this awesome event space and cyber security symposium 2020 i'm john furrier on behalf of cal poly thanks for watching [Music]

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering space in cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 hosted by Cal Poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE here in California. I want to welcome our featured guest, Lieutenant General, John F. Thompson with the United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. That's the topic of this session. And of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in Los Angeles Air Force Base. Also heading up Space Force. General, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate to you kicking this off. Welcome to the symposium. >> Hey, so thank you very much, John, for that very kind introduction. Also very much thank you to Cal Poly for this opportunity to speak to this audience today. Also a special shout out to one of the organizers, Dustin Debrun, for all of his work, helping get us to this point. Ladies and gentlemen as a John mentioned, I'm JT Thompson. I lead the 6,000 men and women of the United States Space Force's Space and Missile System Center, which is headquartered here at Los Angeles Air Force Base and El Segundo. If you're not quite sure where that's at, it's about a mile and a half from LAX. This is our main operating location, but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country. We're about 500 people at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and an about another 500 people on the front range of the Rockies between Colorado Springs and Denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide. We're responsible for acquiring, developing and sustaining the United States Space Force's, critical space assets. That includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites. And we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the US Space Force and a number of our critical mission partners across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do, if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustain the 31 satellite GPS constellation that satellite constellation, while originally intended to help with global navigation, those GPS signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy over the past three decades. GPS is everywhere. I think everybody realizes that. Agriculture, banking, the stock market, the airline industry, separate and distinct navigation systems. It's really pervasive across both capabilities for our Department of Defense and capabilities for our economy and individuals, billions of individuals across our country and the planet. Some of the other work we do for instance, in the communications sector, secure communications satellites that we designed and build that link America's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real time support and comms for our deployed forces. And those of our allies. We also acquire infrared missile warning satellites that monitor the planet for missile launches that provide advanced warning to the US Homeland and to our allies in case some of those missile launches are nefarious. On a note, that's probably a lot closer to home, maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of California. In 2018, SMC jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy to partner with the US Forest Service during two of the largest wildfires in the state's history, the Camp and Woolsey fires in Northern California. As those fires spread out of control, we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites. Those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet. And we collaborated with the US Forest Service so that firefighters on the ground could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading, thereby saving lives and property by identifying hotspots and flareups for firefighters. That data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the US Forest Service and authorities here in California, was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders, the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters. It was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread. We've continued that involvement in recent years, using multiple systems to support firefighters across the Western US this fall, as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue. Working together with the US Forest Service and with other partners we'd like to think that we've made a difference here, but there's still a lot more work to go. And I think that we should always be asking ourselves what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to stakeholders so that they can use it for purposes of good, if you will. How else can we protect our nation? How else can we protect our friends and allies? I think a major component of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly. Just over the past few years, John and I were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have space programs. Nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet. If you just look at one mission area that the Department of Defense is interested in, and that's small launch, there are currently over 100 different small launch companies within the US industrial base vying for commercial DoD and civil payload capabilities, mostly to lower earth orbit. It's truly a remarkable time. If you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, where we're revolutionizing really, the ways that we generate process and use data. It's really remarkable. In 2016, so if you think about this four years ago, NASA estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day. And that was four years ago. Obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience in this conference, we need to work with big thinkers, like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data. We need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge theories of data mining, cyber behaviorism, and Internet of Things 2.0, it's just truly a remarkable time to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the space business are truly, truly daunting and important to all of us. Integrating cyber security into our space systems, both commercial and government is a mandate. it's no longer just a nice to have as the US Space Force and Department of the Air Force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years, space is becoming congested and contested. And that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on cybersecurity day in and day out. The value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer, from the ground control segments associated with it. And this value is not just military, it's also economic and it's not just American, it's also a value for the entire world, particularly our allies, as we all depend upon space and space systems. Your neighbors and friends here in California that are employed at the space and missile system center work with network defenders. We work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers, our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global comments of space free and open for exploration and for commerce as John and I were talking earlier, before we came online, there's an aspect of cybersecurity for space systems, especially for some of our legacy systems, that's more, how do we bolt this on? Cause we fielded those space systems a number of years ago, and the challenges of cybersecurity in the space domain have grown. So we have a part that we have to worry about, bolting it on, but then we have to worry about building it in as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that realizes that the cyber threat or the cybersecurity landscape will evolve over time. It's not just going to be stagnant. There will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we all have to look at. Look, as Secretary Barrett, who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most Americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning. The American way of life really depends on space. And as part of the United States Space Force, we work with defense leaders, our Congress joint, and international military teammates and industry to ensure American leadership in space. I really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today, John, and thanks so much to Cal Poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event. I've really looked forward to this for several months. And so with that, I look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here. >> General, thank you very much for those awesome introductory statement. For the folks watching on the stream, Brigadier General Carthan's going to be in the chat, answering any questions, feel free to chat away. He's the vice commander of Space and Missile System Center, he'll be available. A couple of comments from your keynote before I get to my questions. Cause it just jumped into my head. You mentioned the benefits of say space with the fires in California. We're living that here. That's really realtime. That's a benefit. You also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space. I'm only imagined Moore's law smaller, faster, cheaper applies to rockets too. So I'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned. So is it going to be more rules around that? This is an interesting question cause it's exciting Space Force, but for all the good there is potentially bad out there. >> Yeah. So John, I think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested, is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space? What kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps de orbit themselves? What kind of basic protections should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space? I think those are all fantastic questions. And I know that US and many allied policy makers are looking very, very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we field, and field as the military term. But how we populate using civil or commercial terms that space layer at different altitudes, lower earth orbit, mid earth orbit, geosynchronous earth orbit, different kinds of orbits, what the kind of mission areas we accomplished from space. That's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as the place gets a little bit, not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out. >> I'm super excited for Space Force. I know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging, changing great space. The focus here at this conference is space and cybersecurity, the intersection. I'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that a space force is taking to cybersecurity and how it impacts our national goals here in the United States. >> Yeah. So that's a great question John, let me talk about it in two basic ways. At number one is an and I know some people in the audience, this might make them a little bit uncomfortable, but I have to talk about the threat. And then relative to that threat, I really have to talk about the importance of cyber and specifically cyber security, as it relates to that threat. The threats that we face really represented a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber. We've seen a lot of action in recent months from certain countries, notably China and Russia that have threatened what I referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space. For example, it threw many unclassified sources and media sources. Everybody should understand that the Russians have been testing on orbit anti-satellite capabilities. It's been very clear if you were following just the week before last, the Department of Defense released its 2020 military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China. And it was very clear that China is developing ASATs, electronic jammers, directed energy weapons, and most relevant to today's discussion, offensive cyber capabilities. There are kinetic threats that are very, very easy to see, but a cyber attack against a critical command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of GPS and important to note that that GPS system also impacts many civilians who are dependent on those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services, a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to assist them to mislead operators so that they sent emergency services personnel to the wrong address. Attacks on spacecraft on orbit, whether directly via a network intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the system's production while we're building the satellite can cripple or corrupt the data. Denial-of-service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control. If GPS went down, I hesitate to say it this way, cause we might elicit some screams from the audience. But if GPS went down a Starbucks, wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order, Uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you. And Domino's certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less. So with a little bit of tongue in cheek there from a military operations perspective, it's dead serious. We have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like ransomware and malware. And those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems. However, what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled, if you will, to use against our national security space systems day in and day out. As I said, during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber, the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity. If commanders in the field, firefighters in California or baristas in Starbucks, can't trust the data they're receiving, then that really harms their decision making capabilities. One of the big trends we've recently seen is the move towards proliferated LEO constellations, obviously Space X's Starlink on the commercial side and on the military side, the work that DARPA and my organization SMC are doing on Blackjack and Casino, as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really, really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionaries how we plan and field war fighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems. But they're also heavily reliant on cybersecurity. We've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage. Loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from a satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective. Another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning, onboard spacecraft are at the edge. Our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector, they're basically flying boxes full of software. And we need to ensure that data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms, governing the right actions and that those systems are impervious to the extent possible to nefarious modifications. So in summation, cybersecurity is a vital element of everything in our national security space goals. And I would argue for our national goals, writ large, including economic and information dimensions, the Space Force leadership at all levels from some of the brand new second lieutenants that general Raymond swore in to the space force this morning, ceremonially from the air force associations, airspace and cyberspace conference to the various highest levels, General Raymond, General DT Thompson, myself, and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise. We've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems cause they absolutely depend on it. >> You mentioned hardware, software threats, opportunities, challenges. I want to ask you because you got me thinking of the minute they're around infrastructure. We've heard critical infrastructure, grids here on earth. You're talking about critical infrastructure, a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is, an extension of what we have. So I'd love to get your thoughts about Space Force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors, because the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyberspace. Oh you have threat vectors. They're always increasing the surface area. If the surface area is from space, it's an unlimited service area. So you got different vectors. So you've got new critical infrastructure developing real time, really fast. And you got an expanded threat vector landscape. Putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues. How would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things? >> So I tell you, just like, I'm sure people in the security side or the cybersecurity side of the business in the banking industry feel, they feel like it's all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system, to the financial sector. On the Department of Defense side, we've got to have sort of the same mindset. That threat vector from, to, and through space against critical space systems, ground segments, the launch enterprise, or transportation to orbit and the various different domains within space itself. Like I mentioned before, LEO, MEO and GEO based satellites with different orbits, all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that I mentioned earlier, some that I did mention like a weather tactical or wide band communications, various new features of space control. All of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security threat perspective. And it's a daunting challenge right now. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things we've been falling on the hardware side on the ground is the supply chain. We've seen, malware being, really put in a really obscure hardware. Who manufactures it? Is it being outsourced? Obviously government has restrictions, but with the private sector, you mentioned China and the US kind of working together across these peaceful areas. But you got to look at the supply chain. How does the supply chain in the security aspect impact the mission of the US space Force? >> Yeah. Yeah. So how about another, just in terms of an example, another kind of California based historical example. The very first US Satellite, Explorer 1, was built by the jet propulsion laboratory folks, not far from here in El Segundo, up in Pasadena, that satellite, when it was first built in the late 50s weighing a little bit, over 30 pounds. And I'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by US companies. Fast forward to today. The global supply chain is so tightly coupled, and frankly many industries are so specialized, almost specialized regionally around the planet. We focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them, but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the heritage, if you will, of some of the parts that are used, the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized. The space industry, especially national security space sector is relatively small compared to other commercial industries. And we're moving towards using more and more parts from non US companies. Cybersecurity and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily understand 100% like an Explorer one, the lineage of that particular part. The environmental difficulties in space are well known. The radiation environment, the temperature extremes, the vacuum, those require specialized component. And the US military is not the only customer in that space. In fact, we're definitely not the dominant customer in space anymore. All those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains, from a quality perspective, a security perspective and availability. There's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of compromised patches, if you will. And our adversaries are aware of these techniques. As I mentioned earlier, with other forms of attack, considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries. So we have to take that threat seriously. Between the government and industry sectors here in the US. We're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities. Last fall, we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at Space and Missile System Center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio. And it sounds really kind of businessy geeky, if you will. Hey, we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cybersecurity as dynamically as we possibly could. And so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts, to require system developers, to implement some more advanced protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment. So that data handling and supply chain protections from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account. Cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now. Performance of the system, It's as important as cost, it's as important as schedule, because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost, it can perform that missile warning or that communications mission perfectly, but it's not cyber secure. If it's doesn't have cyber protections built into it, or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber threats, then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the CA the war fighter or the nation any good. Supply chain risk management is a major challenge for us. We're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners. We're all facing it head on to try and build secure and trusted components that keep our confidence as leaders, firefighters, and baristas as the case may be. But it is a challenge. And we're trying to rise to that challenge. >> This is so exciting this new area, because it really touches everything. Talk about geeking out on the tech, the hardware, the systems but also you put your kind of MBA hat on you go, what's the ROI of extra development and how things get built. Because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like, if you're building cool stuff, it's exciting, but you still have to build. And cybersecurity has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture. So you're still building things, which means you got to acquire things, you got to acquire parts, you got acquire build software and sustain it. How is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space? >> Yeah. From initial development, through planning for the acquisition, design, development, our production fielding and sustainment, it impacts all aspects of the life cycle, John. We simply, especially from the concept of baking in cybersecurity, we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure. So we've moved way further towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cybersecurity from the very beginning of a systems development, cyber security, and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute. As I mentioned earlier, equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance. We like to talk in the space world about mission assurance and mission assurance has always sort of taken us as we technically geek out. Mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space. Can it work in a vacuum? Can it work in as it transfers through the Van Allen radiation belt or through the Southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly? Will it work out in space? And now from a resiliency perspective, yeah, it has to work in space. It's got to be functional in space, but it's also got to be resistant to these cybersecurity threats. It's not just, I think a General D.T Thompson quoted this term. It's not just widget assurance anymore. It's mission assurance. How does that satellite operator that ground control segment operate while under attack? So let me break your question a little bit, just for purposes of discussion into really two parts, cybersecurity, for systems that are new and cybersecurity for systems that are in sustainment are kind of old and legacy. Obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threatened both, and we really have to employ different strategies for defensive of each one. For new systems. We're desperately trying to implement across the Department of Defense and particularly in the space world, a kind of a dev sec ops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems. Here at SMC, we have a program called enterprise ground services, which is a toolkit, basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems, EGS as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities. Network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of a bad behavior, malicious behavior, if you will, it's rudimentary at this point, but because we're using DevSecOps and that incremental development approach, as we scale it, it just becomes more and more capable. Every product increment that we feel. Here at LA Air Force Base, we have the United Space Force's West Coast Software Factory, which we've dubbed the Kobayashi Maru. They're using those agile DevOps software development practices to deliver a space awareness software to the combined space operations center. Affectionately called the CSpock that CSpock is just on the road from Cal Poly there in San Luis Obispo at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They've so securely linked the sea Spock with other space operation centers around the planet, our allies, Australia, Canada, and the UK. We're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations. So lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development capabilities for our space systems. But as I mentioned earlier, we've got large constellations of satellites on orbit right now. Some of them are well in excess of a decade or more or old on orbit. And so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old. But we still have to worry about them cause they're critical to our space capabilities. We've been working with an air force material command organization called CROWS, which stands for the Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapon Systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to live through this increasingly cybersecurity concerned era that we currently live in. Our industry partners have been critical to both of those different avenues. Both new systems and legacy systems. We're working closely with them to defend and upgrade national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with new national assets coming online. The vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threatened the way we've done business in the past, both militarily and in the case of GPS economically. The impacts of that cybersecurity risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes, but I've got to tell you, as the threat vectors change, as the vulnerabilities change, we've got to be nimble enough, agile enough, to be able to bounce back and forth. We can't just say, many people in the audience are probably familiar with the RMF or the Risk Management Framework approach to reviewing the cyber security of a system. We can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an RMF on a system. And then, hey, high five, we're all good. It's a journey, not a destination, that's cybersecurity. And it's a constant battle rhythm through our weapon systems lifecycle, not just a single event. >> I want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question. But before I go there, you mentioned agile. And I see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles, you've got to be faster. And we saw this in the computer industry, mainframes, mini computers, and then we started getting beyond maybe when the internet hit and PCs came out, you saw the big enterprises, the banks and government start to work with startups. And it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that, there's no way if you are a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise. Now that used to be for public sector and certainly for you guys. So as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved, I'm sure would love to have a contract with Space Force. There's an ROI calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view and it's software, you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups. Could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you, whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile, but they might not be that big company. >> John, that's a fantastic question. We're desperately trying to reach out to those new space advocates, to those startups, to those what we sometimes refer to, within the Department of Defense, those non traditional defense contractors. A couple of things just for thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight. Three years ago, we created here at Space and Missile System Center, the Space Enterprise Consortium to provide a platform, a contractual vehicle, really to enable us to rapidly prototype, development of space systems and to collaborate between the US Space Force, traditional defense contractors, non traditional vendors like startups, and even some academic institutions. SPEC, as we call it, Space Enterprise Consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts awarded quickly. Many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements. And that's what SPEC is based on. And so far in just three years, SPEC has awarded 75 different prototyping contracts worth over $800 million with a 36% reduction in time to award. And because it's a consortium based competition for these kinds of prototyping efforts, the barrier to entry for small and nontraditional, for startups, even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototyping has really lowered. These types of partnerships that we've been working through on spec have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security for their systems, both our developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build. We want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together in support kind of mutually beneficial relationships between all. Recently at the Annual Air Force Association conference that I mentioned earlier, I moderated a panel with several space industry leaders, all from big traditional defense contractors, by the way. And they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrance. And that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups, as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those larger contractors that we rely on day in and day out. Advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that I think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations. As I mentioned earlier, the SPEC has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values. And it's just going to get better. There's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium, 80% of them are non traditional kinds of vendors. And we just love working with them. Another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators, if you will, and innovators that include cyber security experts is our space pitch day events. So we held our first event last November in San Francisco, where we awarded over a two day period about $46 million to 30 different companies that had potentially game changing ideas. These were phase two small business innovative research efforts that we awarded with cash on the spot. We're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. We're planning on doing it right here in Los Angeles, COVID-19 environment permitting. And we think that these are fantastic venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups, and small businesses who are interested in really, truly partnering with the US Air Force. It's, as I said before, it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business. And working with the innovation economy is something that the Department of Defense really needs to do in that the innovation that we used to think was ours. That 80% of the industrial base innovation that came from the Department of Defense, the script has been flipped there. And so now more than 70%, particularly in space innovation comes from the commercial sector, not from the defense business itself. And so that's a tsunami of investment and a tsunami of a capability. And I need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it, you know what I mean? >> Yeah, It's one of those things where the script has been flipped, but it's exciting because it's impacting everything. When you're talking about systems architecture? You're talking about software, you're talking about a business model. You're talking about dev sec opsx from a technical perspective, but now you have a business model innovation. All the theaters are exploding in innovation, technical, business, personnel. This brings up the workforce challenge. You've got the cyber needs for the US Space Force, It's probably great ROI model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts. That's a entrepreneurial innovation, you've got the business model theater, you've got the personnel. How does the industry adopt and change? You guys are clearly driving this. How does the industry adjust to you? >> Yeah. So I think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the US Space Force from an acquisition perspective, and in this particular case from a cybersecurity perspective. As I mentioned earlier, it's the most exciting time to be in space programs, really since the days of Apollo. Just to put it in terms that maybe have an impact with the audience. From 1957 until today, approximately 9,000 satellites have been launched from the various space varying countries around the planet. Less than 2000 of those 9,000 are still up on orbit and operational. And yet in the new space regime players like Space X have plans to launch, 12,000 satellites for some of their constellations alone. It really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities, whether they're commercial, civil, or defense are going to require appropriate cybersecurity protections. It's just a really exciting time to be working in stuff like this. And so folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cybersecurity are just the kind of people that we want to work with. Cause we need to make sure our systems are secure and resilient. We need folks that have technical and computing expertise, engineering skills to be able to design cyber secure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks. But we also, as you alluded to, we need people that have that business and business acumen, human networking background, so that we can launch the startups and work with the non traditional businesses. Help to bring them on board help, to secure both their data and our data and make sure our processes and systems are free as much as possible from attack. For preparation, for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this trade space, you got to be smart on digital networking. You got to understand basic internet protocols, concepts, programming languages, database design. Learn what you can for penetration or vulnerability testing and a risk assessment. I will tell you this, and I don't think he will, I know he will not mind me telling you this, but you got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago, I'm at home evening and I get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss, the commander of Air Force Space command, General, J. Raymond, who is now currently the Chief of Space Operations. And he is on temporary duty, flying overseas. He lands where he's going and first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes JT, while I was traveling, I noticed that there were eBooks available on the commercial airliner I was traveling on and there was an ebook on something called scrumming and agile DevSecOps. And I read it, have you read it? And I said, no, sir. But if you tell me what the title of the book is, I will read it. And so I got to go to my staff meeting, the very next week, the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the staff meeting, hey, if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming, then I'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our GS13s, All of our government employees can get smart on the scrumming development process. And interestingly as another side, I had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays, where he was trying to take some leave. And I said, sir, what are you up to today? Are you making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever. And the Chief of Space Operations told me no, I'm trying to teach myself Python. I'm at lesson two, and it's not going so well, but I'm going to figure this out. And so that kind of thing, if the chief of staff or the Chief of Space Operations can prioritize scrumming and Python language and innovation in his daily schedule, then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that. And we'll just say, lower levels of rank throughout our entire space force enterprise. Look, we don't need people that can code a satellite from scratch, but we need to know, we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cybersecurity requirements. And that can turn those things into meaningful actions, obviously in the space domain, things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important spaces, not an intuitive domain. So under understanding how things survive on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions. And I know there's probably a lot, because of this conference. I know there's probably a whole lot of high speed cybersecurity experts out in the audience. And I need those people in the US Space Force. The country is counting on it, but I wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy. I have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers, and they don't have to be high end cybersecurity experts, but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections into our space systems. So the skill set is really, really broad. Our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into designing and fielding offensive and destructive space, cybersecurity weapons. They repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit. And the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that. As I mentioned before, peaceful global comments of space, we really need all hands on deck. If you're interested in helping in uniform, if you're interested in helping, not in uniform, but as a government employee, a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important or more able to be developed for our space systems. And we'd really love to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems. >> Lieutenant General John Thompson, great insight. Thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too, and motivation for the young next generation. The United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. Really amazing talk, thank you for your time. Final parting question is, as you look out and you have your magic wand, what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish? It's a super exciting time. What do you hope for? >> So first of all, John, thanks to you and thanks to Cal Poly for the invitation and thanks to everybody for their interest in cybersecurity, especially as it relates to space systems, that's here at the conference. There's a quote, and I'll read it here from Bernard Schriever, who was the founder, if you will, a legend in a DoD space, the founder of the Western development division, which was a predecessor organization to Space and Missile System Center, General Schriever, I think captures the essence of how we see the next couple of years. "The world has an ample supply of people "who can always come up with a dozen good reasons "why new ideas will not work and should not be tried, "but the people who produce progress are breed apart. "They have the imagination, "the courage and the persistence to find solutions." And so I think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cybersecurity innovation are going to be upon a pony ride at the County fair, then perhaps you should look for another line of work, because I think the next few years in space and cybersecurity innovation are going to be more like a rodeo and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes. It is an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem. It's really an honor for me to be able to play some small role in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it while I'm trying to improve the chances of the United States of America in a space war fighting environment. And so I thank all of you for participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you. Thank you. >> Sir, thank you for your leadership and thank you for the time for this awesome event, Space and Cyber Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, I'm John Furrier on behalf of Cal Poly, thanks for watching. (mellow music)

(upbeat music) >> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back here Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Chuchill's, it's the 9th annual award celebration put on by the Churchill club and the theme is all about leadership this year. We're really excited to have a very special guest John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, he's been around a long time. He's known and talks to a lot of leaders. So john, great to have you on. >> Nice to be here, thank you very much for having me. >> So leadership is such an interesting topic right? You go everything from, um, West point and trying to train young men to be leaders in a military situation to a start up that starts as some small company that had some interesting idea that grows to a huge corporate thing that's changing the world. Ya know, what are some of your thoughts as Silicon Valley is going through some hiccups right now and when you look, >> [John W. Thompson] We are? >> Just a couple little ones. >> I did recognize any of those. >> Well maybe not looking at the stock market. I don't know when that thing is coming back down. But you know when you think about leaders, what are somethings people maybe don't think about and really more interestingly how should people grow or what do you look for in a board member when you're talking to some CEO of a hot rising company? >> Well I think leadership is is as much about your personality and the business that use chose to go run is anything else. And the skills and experiences that someone might need to run a, pick a business, a business the size of Microsoft are fundamentally different than what you might need to run Rubrik, which is a company whose board I serve on. But that being said, leadership has some core principles that are critical independent of the size of the company or organization you're on. First of which is, integrity, second of which is focus, third of which is follow through and execution. There is lots of things that fundamental do and do well. And those who don't do well, don't become or stay leaders very long, that's for sure. >> It's interesting to look at Microsoft cause, ya know, three big personalities. Obviously Bill got it started as a young kid, I mean he was literally a kid in college. Um, then you had Steve Ballmer come in, completely different personalities and ya know, interesting for Bill to be willing to give up their reigns and then ya know, some tough times at Microsoft little bit stagnant and then Satya came in and just has supercharged and really driven a huge transformation in a giant big company. What are some of the attributes when you look at those three as leaders and you've worked with them, that make them so successful? >> Well, I think each of them brought something fundamentally different to the table when they were in the leadership role. In the case of Bill, he clearly was a visionary. He defined a point of view about the technology industry. That had he not done that, we wouldn't be where we are in the world today. And so, Bills role was unique. In the case of Steve, the company had hit a significant bump in the road all around the anti-trust activity. And candidly, it's my impression that Bill really didn't want to be involved in that, so he turned to Steve and says tag you're it. And Steve had a very fundamental view about execution. He was very much focus on execute, execute, execute. And if you look at the way the company preformed, its revenue grew from roughly ten, fifteen billion to almost eighty billion dollars during his term as CEO. However, the stock did not perform very well. So people weren't very happy with that. Ironically enough Satya come in, Satya had run the search business, had run the cloud business, had even run the enterprise software business. So he had a very fundamental view about of what he thought the company needed to do. And there were two issues, issues number one was strategy around cloud. And on the day of his announcement, he announced mobile first, cloud first are the strategies of Microsoft. And then he quickly, quickly made it clear that the number two issue, for the company, was about its culture. And while I am unbelievably fascinated by how much progress we've made on the product front, I'm even more encouraged by what has happened on the, candidly, on the cultural front. >> Right. So on the cultural front that is, are you a harder thing to impact especially on a large global company with hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world, so what are the secrets that change culture like that? >> Its fundamental, it's about openness and honesty and candor. Um, one of the things that happens here in the valley, often for some companies is when they do their quarterly or monthly employee all hands meetings, guess what? They screen and filter all of the questions. Well, we don't do that at Microsoft office. Satya does not do that. He wants to be open and honest and candid with his employees with what's going on. My gosh! That's what real leaders do. And so I think what he has done is nothing that is unique, it's just consistent. He has been very very consistent and predictable in his execution of what openness, listening rather than talking, all of the things that good leaders are able to do. >> Right, its funny the one word you haven't said since we have been sitting here, you keep saying execution of focus, which I love focus execute and delight the customer. You haven't said strategy one single time. you said vision, but not strategy. Its interesting because I think a lot of people don't put enough emphasis on, its just work, you just got to execute. >> Its one thing to have a strategy, but if you can't execute the strategy, of what value is it? So I have always had a view in my roles as leader that it's about focus and executing. Yes, you have to come up with a vision and yes you have to create ideas that employees, and partners, and customers can become excited about. But ultimately it's about execution day in and day out. 368 days of the years, not 365. >> Alright, final question I know you've got a busy night. As you look as some leaders that you look up to, maybe not of this generation that you've been working with, but maybe of a past generation, who are some of the folks that you look to for your inspiration on the leadership side? >> Well, I would have to say the first one was the former vice chairman of IBM, who I was the chief of staff to many many many years ago. His name was Paul Rizzo. Paul was probably one of the most influential people in the company during that period of time, but you'd never know it. He had a level of humility about himself. He had a level of openness and candor in his interaction with employees at all levels up and down the line. And a company of IBM's size back in those days, it was two, three hundred thousand people big. And so he would be the first leader that comes to my mind as someone who was impactful on me. Another one would have been, a guy who created Akamai. He's on the board of Oracle and he's an awesome awesome friend of mine. He was the guy that ran the America's and gave me my first really really big job. And the fact that he was willing to give a guy like me a job like that, was a pretty important move. George Conrades is his name by the way. And so those two people were very very influential as leaders. As I would look at them and try to determine whether or not can I, can I pattern myself after that? Or are there things that they do and say and execute that I should consider as I think about my evolving leadership. >> Right so important to have people that you can look up to, learn from, and to take care of ya and help you along the way. >> [John W. Thompson] I agree >> John, thanks for spending some time it's always great to sit down with you >> Nice to see you as well. >> And continue success. We'll hopefully see you next time not to long from now. >> Lets hope not. >> Alright, he's John W. Thompson and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube, were at the Churchill's in Santa Clara California. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) [Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, It's theCUBE Covering Informatica World 2019 Brought to you by Informatica >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here in Las Vegas. I'm your Host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my Co-Host, John Furrier. We have a CUBE alum joining us Graeme Thompson. SVP and CIO of Informatica. Thank you so much for coming, for returning to theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So one of the themes we talk a lot about on theCUBE, It's the 10th anniversary of theCUBE, is the changing role of the CIO and you are a CIO so you are well positioned to answer this question. In addition to the changing role there's also the perception of what it is versus the reality. Can you talk a little about how you see the role having evolved both at Informatica as well as your other peers at other companies as well as sort of what the industry is expecting or maybe those not in the industry thinks you do versus actually what you do? >> Yeah that's a long frustration thank you >> I'm sorry >> You're keeping me on my toes here Yeah so a lot of things, the outcomes are the same but with different methods so vendor management has always been important, cost management has always been important but as it moves from being predominantly on prem to be primarily in the cloud The dynamics of how these deals are put together changes so you need a different kind of approach to how you manage the portfolio of cloud applications. Security if different in the cloud it's still important it always has been always will be. But it's different in the cloud you have to look much more as vendor risk management make sure that you're comfortable with the risk posture of the vendors you are sourcing your applications from. So those things I would put in the category of You're trying to accomplish the same thing you're just doing it differently because your application work load is more likely to be in the cloud. Things that are different though, completely different are expectations. So everyone can see the power of data and the power of having speed and agility in the cloud but they want it immediately and they don't want to do the hard work to get there so I find that the CIO sometimes has to be the educator or the evangelist for change to explain that if you want all this data to generate all these miraculous new outcomes you have to focus on the process and then you have to enable that process within an application that's going to meet your needs today and tomorrow. You have to think end to end which means you have to integrate applications like Marketo and Salesforce. Then you need to find a way to get it all in your data lake That is completely different it's a completely different sport From what we were playing as CIOs 5 years ago and it's definitely the biggest area of change I've seen both internally and talking to PIOs >> Graeme, we've talked in the past, goo to see you again. You are a CIO your work for Informatica so you're the CIO of Informatica so you don't need to be sold on the value of data You're in the data business. You have a data company that thinks hard and has been building products for years in private, in retooling, you see the wave, we've talked about it you've been on the same wave, a great wave, for 4 years everyone else is now on it. SO as a CIO who works for a company that's you know you're not going to get in trouble for doing a data driven project what are some of the things that you've got going on because you do have relationships with all the different cloud providers you do have a great on premises large install base and now you guys as a company what are some of the projects you're doing that would a nice guiding light to folks watching who were really kicked in the tires on digital transmission, not just like talking about it but like okay architecure, roadmap, really thinking through all the hairy problems of what's coming down the pipe for them. What are you working on? >> Yeah so I think our marketing team has done a really good job framing things in the four journeys. So talk about it within that context. So the first one is next gen analytics. So a lot of companies go into this thinking Right all I have to do is find out where the data lives, ingest the data into my data lake or data warehouse, put Tableau on top of it and job done. Not the case, right? So as soon as you start shading data across more than one function, marketing are really good at knowing their data. They know how its generated. They know how it can be used. As soon as you let someone else loose on marketing's data, it's use at your own risk. Right so that introduces the need for governance. If you're going to use data in one organization that was generated in another one, you have to agree on the definition of terms. You have to agree on calculations so that you don't get the finance team and the sales team debating what the renewal rate is. So the next gen analytics journey for us has been an interesting one. We started with an on-prem data warehouse that's now on AZUR. The tipping point for us was when most of the data is generated in the cloud, why move it back on-prem just to do analytics on it? So we made a decision to build that on the cloud with AZUR. >> So leave it on the cloud, it's there. >> Yeah >> and then have the on-premise piece >> Go onto the cloud. >> It's where the MDM it's where the pieces kind of come together? >> Yep >> All right so... >> So that's the analytics journey. >> So I'll give you another curve bal here. So as you come in here, you say okay great the next step is well you know I need to actually make my AI work. Your clear, you know "the clarity starts here" it's a nice slogan. Nice play on words there but AI is ultimately where everyone wants to get to. >> Yeah >> AI is fed by data, machine learning, other things, really kind of feeding the outcome for AI. But without good data, and/or data can can help the AI get smarter. This kind of brings up the conversation of more data or diverse data - different data sets. So accessing data sets actually is a new dynamic that people are getting into and proving it adds value to AI. >> Yeah >> How do you see that playing out because this is really kind of brings up the real complex question which is that as you mentioned earlier; terms, rights, marketplaces, sharing data, uh you know, all these new things? What's your view on this notion of having more data sets feeding intelligent AI? >> So part of the increase in enthusiasm about AI and ML is really the convergence of.. the technology's actually ready to help, its not a science project off to the side anymore. And the need for it has never been greater. There's no way a human can keep up with all the data that's being generated even at a company like ours. So if you want to find out where the data is created, where it's used, who has access to it, then your going to have to apply some AI to it otherwise there's no shot. You'd need an ever increasing team of humans who would fail to do the job adequately. >> So you see data sets merging... not merging but like being merchandised, if you will, for lack of a better word? >> Yeah well you have to manage the linage of it. >> All right. So you have to know where it's created, where it's used, you know, who has access to it? Is that access appropriate? Uh... all those thing have to be taken into account. Especially when you look at all the compliance and privacy things that we're all faced with now that 18 months ago we weren't all that concerned about. >> And that really goes back to what you said earlier in our conversation in that the role of the CIO is so much as an educator and an evangelist. So can you talk a little bit about what you've learned in terms of making that message really sink in with employees in terms of understand where the data lives, who has access to it, all the obstacles that you just talked about? >> Yeah so part of it is those managing the IT team and then those managing the relationships with your business constituents. So let's take the IT team first. Really good IT people, like really good engineers, will work on the most interesting problem available. It's our job as a CIO to make sure that the most profitable problem is also the most interesting one. Fight number one is getting people working on the right things cause IT people with work incredibly hard . You just need to make sure they're working incredibly hard on the right stuff with a focus on the right outcome at the end of it. So that's the IT part. Then working with the business stakeholders, its really setting expectations. Cause quite rightly, they want everything as soon as they can describe it, it should be available. There's often a lot of technical dept that we have as organizations, you know? We had a more than 10 year old deployment of sales force, you got to believe there was a ton of technical debt in there because it was built to perfection for our old business. It wasn't built for our new business. So you have to work with the buiness stakeholders. Bring them along with you on what to do first, what to do next, what the dependencies are, ' and focus on setting exceptions that its not going to be done overnight. >> So about governance. Obviously governance has been around for awhile, we've talked about it before. But now more than ever your seeing in the news first anniversary of GDPR, I predicted that would be... I won't say it... I said like, months before... bad words.. BS basically. But it's reality. More privacy stuff your seeing more and more, um, regions in cloud dealing with certain restrictions. So when it hear regulation, I hear constrained data. That goes in my mind, I hear oh my god. Regulation and innovation are always sometimes at odds. So it's a balancing act. What are you guys doing to address that? What's the solution today and how do you see that playing out because SAS is about data and agility and that's why SAS has been so popular and that's what digital transformation is going to get to is these SAS-like benefits. Agile, risk-taking, high reward. Low-risk, high reward kind of things. How do you get the balance between, you know, regulation, compliance, risk, and innovation? >> Yeah, so I can talk about how we look at it internally and then a little bit about how our customers look at it. So, for us you can look at it like a tax. As a tax on innovation. Or, if you look at a little bit more optimistically, who wouldn't want to honor the customer's right to be forgotten? Who wouldn't want to consult their customer on where you use their data? So you can also look at it as way that by implementing the GDPR or the California Privacy Standard or whatever it is, it makes your company better. It allows you to be the company that you would like to aspire to be. So you don't have to just look at it as a tax. Now I'm going to look at our customers. They fall into 2 categories: those that have to do it because they're in a regulated industry like financial services or healthcare, and then there's those that do it because they know it will help them serve their customers better. And you see a lot of governance and compliance projects starting from a place of defensiveness. They have to do it because they have to comply with new regulations that apply to them and often its companies that are really trying to make the best use of their data but they want to do it in a really responsible way. Um - if done properly and responsibly, it can be something that's good for everyone, I believe. >> I just have one final question about the skills gap. And this is something we've been really talking a lot about here. What are you doing to address it? And is the problem really as bad as the headlines are making it out to be? >> Yeah so there's the macro problem of aging workforce and where are the new people coming from? There's that one - it's been with us for awhile and applies across all functions. Then there's specific skills areas in IT that are always a shortage. Security is one - it's really, really difficult to find really good IT security.. information security people. Often these groups can be ivory tower-ish so its hard to find people who are really practitioners. It's hard to select them and it's hard to retain them because they always want to build and then move on and build something new. So security is one. Obviously data and analytics is a huge one. Finding people that can, that know a little bit more than what an oric in our warehouse does is a challenge and then once you get those people, you have to make sure they are working on things that they find are worthy of their time so that they are motivated to work as hard as you need them to work. And other areas like managing cloud vendors is I think a skill set that will start to grow up. Um - these cloud contracts get really expensive as you scale and there's no friction at the point of consumption. You know, we've got engineers that aren't allowed to order a stapler from Amazon without approval. But they can sign the company up for tens of thousands of dollars worth of compute cost obligations. You need governance and skills to manage uh - that. If you ask an engineer do you want slow or fast and big or small, they're going to pick fast and large, right? >> Just a dumb follow up on that skills gap question. For the folks who are graduating collage, high school, elementary school.. ..education is obviously kind of a little bit linear but you know people have argued that there's no one playbook for the kinds of courses you would take to get into the data kind of world there. Is there any pattern your seeing where the folks who are really excelling in this new environment have certain skills and classes? So if someone is going into collage maybe honing a class on you know on a particular class or dicipline? Have you seen some things that work? >> No >> No? >> What I have seen that works is finding people who have a track record of solving important business problems and using that to select the people that you hire. Cause the.. having a sound education in technology is one thing. You got to understand the business domain and the problem that you are trying to solve. That's where the value comes from. The business stakeholders value someone that can understand the problem they are trying to solve or the opportunity that they are trying to take advantage of. So finding those people that have a track record of solving meaningful problems, uh to me, has been a way to find the right folks in that area. >> Multitalent is then.. it's early, too, I mean, Berkley just had their first graduating class of you know, Data Sciences, kind of gives you an idea of how early this is. >> Yeah and it takes 2 to 4 years to have a University course accredited. By the time you've done that it's out of date. >> It's out of date. >> So that has to change. >> My final question for you, Graeme, is what's the um... For the folks that aren't here at Informatica World 2019 whats the summary in your view? The theme of the show? What's the key highlights that people should walk away with this year for the focus of Informatica World 2019? >> So it's not a new theme, it's more of a expansion on the' theme from the last couple of years. So the importance of the platform is key. You can go off as an IT professional and source one product to solve one problem and before you're done I guarantee you'll have found an adjacent problem and you're going to wish you'd chosen a platform instead of an individual product. So if you listen to Anneals Keynote this morning and Ahmet got into more detail, its really about the platform and the power of Claire and the AI part as part of that overall platform - that's really the theme - but its not new. It's not something we just came up with last week it's been our strategy for at least 24 months so we just continue to build on it. >> Bad data or no data, there's no AI, or bad data is bad AI and no data is no AI? That's essentially the reality as AI becomes mainstream. >> Yeah. >> All right, thank you. >> Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Graeme >> Pleasure. >> You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019 I'm Rebecca Knight and John Furrier. Thanks for staying tuned. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are at Vmworld 2018, Day One. I'm with Justin Warren. Hey Justin. >> Hi Lisa, how you doin'? >> Good. This is VMware's 20th anniversary and we're very excited to welcome two new guests to theCUBE. We've got Scott Brindamour, the Senior Director of the U.S. architect team from CenturyLink. Hey Scott. >> Hello, how are ya? >> Good. And we've got Geoff Thompson, the Senior Director of VMware Cloud Provider Program. Welcome. >> Thank you very much and hello. >> The 20th anniversary of VMware. You've been with VMware a long time. >> Yes. >> Lot of momentum kicked off this show, not just this morning. You guys said you were in here yesterday. >> Yes. >> Just curious to get your perspective, Geoff, on the buzz and the opportunity that you're hearing, not just from your customers but from your partners as well. >> Oh yeah, yeah. I remember the first one I went to way, way back, even before I joined VMware, when I was at Hewlett Packard. Then, it was a little small event back in, I think it was Los Angeles. Now, here we are in 20 thousand something people in Vegas for the nth year running, so the buzz is amazing. This year, I think more than ever for us, because Cloud is just becoming more and more of a focal point and the discussion and topic area for everybody, so the buzz is incredible. Working with CenturyLink here and with Scott is just like an opportunity to dig deeper on all these relationships, find new opportunities to go all in on the strategy that you guys have really already adopted, look at Cloud Verified and take that to the next step. Yep, great so far and looking forward to more. >> So talk to us, Scott, about the partnership that CenturyLink has with VMware. VMware has a massive amount of partners. I saw a stat this morning on stage. What is it about CenturyLink's offering and VMware that's really better together for end users? >> Yeah, I think it's really in our approach and how we really listen to our customers and try to understand where they are in their journey and what they need and not just throw a widget at a customer, but really design a solution that meets their needs and VMware having a flexible architecture and a vision for the future enables us to not only plant the seed today, but where we're going; a lot of co-development with VMware, a lot of partnership with VMware, a lot of making sure our teams that operate the environment and my team on the front lines work with customers are trained and ready for the next technology. I think I've seen a remarkable change in VMware over the last several years in accelerating their road map and working with AWS and a lot of the other partners. It's refreshing. A lot of our business is private Cloud on VMware. We've been a big partner for a long time and the VMware Verified is something we hold dear and we look forward to the relationship ongoing. >> Yeah, that focus on Cloud came through loud and strong in the keynote today and you mentioned it here, the private Cloud, hybrid Cloud, multi Cloud. CenturyLink has a rich heritage in networking and networking is vital for managing Cloud. So tell us a bit more about how CenturyLink's networking skills helps customers to understand how they can manage this multi-Cloud universe they have to live in now. >> Sure and maybe I should even talk about, the viewers that don't know what CenturyLink is. I've been with the company for 15 years, a company called Savvis, but we've made a number of different acquisitions over the years to gain different technology areas, where there'd be ERP, where there'd be dev opps capabilities in the public Cloud, where there'd be Cloud management platforms, et cetera. Now, we see more data is being moved outside of the data center and more data is being originated outside the data center, so customers are really saying, what do I do with all this data? Where do I put my apps? I can't put it in my four walls. I want to move it to the Cloud. Not every customer is on the same path at the same rate and can accept the change. I think the biggest thing we do is helping customers manage pieces of that portfolio, but it's not just a take-over kind of an old ITO play. It's a co-sourcing kind of play, a co-management model where they may have some skills in one area but deficient in another. We can help them with AWS, for instance. We can help them with the new software-defined V-conformate foundation technologies that VMware is going to as well, and bring the network components as well, so that a workload that's running on premise can work and perform just as well off premise by providing that private network connectivity or public network connectivity to those end users as well. >> You mentioned that partnership idea. I'm keen to understand the partnership you can provide essentially as a service provider. Customers rely on service providers a lot to help them manage their own infrastructure, in conjunction with the vendors. So, tell us a bit more about how your partnership with VMware works for customers. >> Yeah, we work a lot with-- VMware at its roots was a software company, so lately, selling services and selling services to clients that are not just a software skew in a software package, so a lot of interaction with VMware client teams and doing strategic discussions with some of our key clients about how we can bring them to the next generation and buying a private Cloud as a service, instead of just selling them a VMware license and have the customer try and figure it out. So, how do we get a customer on the same path and working together to do a lot of that together with our clients, and really making sure we're a partnership and our sales teams are going out to customers together is a big part of6 that. >> Right. >> Yeah, I think from our side, CentralLink is a strategic global partner of ours, so that means several things. The most important thing is we get an opportunity to have more and more briefings together, go deeper on our global strategy as a combined unit so we can look at new technologies that are comin6g down the pike. You can assess them and decide if there's a customer opportunity there and if there is, we'll bring our Cloud practice team in. We'll look at how we take that opportunity and make it a go-to-market strategy together and then we'll go and do sell with. We'll go out into our field teams. We'll educate them on what the offering is and then VMware and CentralLink is co-selling that solution. >> Yeah, I think a lot of the VMware sellers, the public Cloud threat that they have and the move to the public Cloud, how does that still co-exist with customers? I still strongly see that there's a lot of legacy apps. We were talking earlier about only 20% of workloads have moved to the Cloud. There's still a lot of legacy apps that are on VMware that are their crown jewels that are running their companies. They just need to deliver that in a new model and that's where a partner like CentralLink can help, to move it out of their data centers, to move it into VMware on AWS and help a customer understand what are the right workloads to move there, do I need to replatform it, when is it ready, how do I migrate it and how not to disrupt their operations and then manage it, if the customer doesn't have the capabilities to do it off their own premise and skill sets. It's a totally different mindset managing it off your premise than inside your four walls. >> So when you're talking to a customer at the outset of an organization that has multiple Clouds maybe driven by application type, maybe driven by that on a combination of acquisitions. Where does that business conversation start? Are you starting at the C-suite level? Are you starting there to really help the business leaders understand how to extract the power of their data? Tell us a little bit about how do you help them with a multi-phased approach. >> Sure. We definitely talk to the C-suite, CIO, whoever is leading the strategy but it depends on the company. A lot of that's actually done in the line of business, the more innovative lines of business that are transferring their business that have done a first mover. You hear a lot about shadow IT, where the business is going around IT because IT can't move fast enough. CIOs who are transformative, we're typically working with them and we're trying to figure out where they are in their strategy. Are they an early adopter or are they a lagger, do they not have a strategy and then understand; do they want to take a lot of risk and move quickly. Do they want to do it slowly and not disrupt their business. Depending upon the culture and the risk nature of their organization and what is actually running on that infrastructure they're going to move, you got to make those decisions. We call it, in CentralLink terms, my team talks about what's called best execution venue. We're agnostic. We're obviously a big VMware partner, but we also do resale solutions on Azure and AWS as well, as we're a data center provider and we can put it in our four walls on old legacy dedicated server environments as well. Whatever the right venue for our customer is, which is typically going to be hybrid, some on public Cloud, some on private Cloud, some on premise, some off premise and even more moving out to the edge, that customers want to do workloads in smaller quantities in kind of a dynamic nature, spinning up and spinning down, that we work with the clients to figure out what's the right execution venue; cost factor, who's going to manage it, what's the best place to locate it, does it need to be secure, governed, is their data sovereignty or compliance regulations on it. Then, ultimately, how they're going to scale their business and what their vision is to automate as much as possible and standardize it. You heard it today this morning; it's all about automation. So, how can they automate and how can they reduce the labor that the individual persons on the keystrokes and automate the infrastructure and make it look the same. I think the software-defined data center model that VMware has is a step in the right direction and there's a big uptake on customers in that environment today. >> Yeah, we're hearing a lot today, I think Lisa, of people saying it's customer choice. The ability to automate things but in the way that I choose to do it and transforming at the speed I need to do it. It's coming up quite a lot. Maybe you could tell us a bit more from the VMware perspective about how you're enabling that customer choice and we heard a lot about the automation, so how does the automation work with partners in enabling customers to be able to transform their business. >> For us, it's about we give choice and flexibility so within our program, it's all about making sure that we give everything that we build for ourselves and our end user customers, giving that to our partners. So, in terms of Scott and CentralLink, we give them the tools to go and build the Cloud and then set up the automated operations for them to expose to their end user customers and then we also leverage VMware Cloud on AWS, so we made that available to the program as well. So, our partners have choice in flexibility and ease of operations and then they expose that to their customers as well, so it's win-win-win, I think there. >> Yeah, and the keynote this morning, it was SDDC, software-defined data center from VMware was talked about as a self-driving data center and that's ultimately what we see as well in partnership with VMware that a lot of customers understand the VMware tool sets. Extending that to a new platform that's software defined and enabling automation, that it can ultimately one day drive itself, so customers can automate the deployment of applications they're running on, something that can be spun up on AWS very quickly. Applications can be migrated over automatically with tools, managed and then no one responding to an alert that a VM or an application is down, it can autocorrect itself and it really could be automated in the future. We see that and certainly all the tools and capabilities that VMware puts in place that enable that is something that we subscribe, we use it ourselves and we have our customers use it as well. >> I'm curious what your take is, Scott, on the announcements that Andy Jassy made this morning on the stage with Pat Gelsinger. They announced VMware Cloud on AWS a year ago at this same event. There's been a lot of momentum. &They talked about the different M releases now going everywhere. From a partnership perspective, what does that mean to CentralLink and how do you think that will positively impact your business? >> Well, there's two sides of our business. We have a very large, obviously, networking business and we have a hosting and Cloud and data center business, so we see the two of them coming together. I talked about the data center dying and everything moving off; how do you network that all together, but we have a very large retail customer in the, let's say, fast food chicken business, I'll keep it at that level. We started off hosting a lot of their critical applications that run their stores and understand what's the best place to put stores and store operations. We also, from the networking side in acquiring Level three, they had a lot of the networking capabilities. They now want a single platform to run store operations from a network, from a virtual desktop, from an email, from an order fulfillment, supply chain management, all to be contained in a particular region that you can manage it locally without all the data going back. So, the ability to have a software-defined smaller component that can run it that can not only have the data center and the Cloud component as private, to keep the data safe and non-public, but also the network software-defined on one platform together with one provider that can manage the whole thing. Now you're distributing your data out, the network becomes more important, the performance of the network, the resilience of the network becomes more important too. That environment goes down, you don't sell any more chicken. That's the biggest thing that customers are seeing, is converging of those capabilities together and I think there's very few providers out there that can speak both those languages and provide both of those to clients today. >> Taking those benefits all the way out, for what the infrastructure enables from a cost in speed perspective, the Board of Directors at said chicken chain, what are they actually benefitting from? It might be this invisible software, but from a business perspective, how is this going to impact their business? Selling more chicken? >> Yeah, it's basically, they have a strategy to continue to be in more markets and the more markets they do, the time to set up and deploy infrastructure and have that ready, that's the biggest enabler. To have the store front, to have the store ready, then all the infrastructure that supports the store, especially now you have people, they can order chicken on their phones, loyalty, they can place their order ahead of time and pick it up, they don't have to go through drive-through any more, things of that nature. Everything becomes digitized and the I want it now generation that we live in today, that'll accelerate their ability to deliver services to the store and then react to the changes in the market as they happen. Everything is digital now. That's the biggest thing, is growth through stores, growth through being able to meet the demands of the stores as they change going forward, so very dynamic. >> Awesome. Scott, Geoff, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. You're now theCUBE alumni. We'll give you some stickers. >> Yeah, stickers. Great thank you. >> We appreciate you guys sharing what's new. >> Thanks for your time as well. It's such really good VMware. >> Thanks. >> Appreciate it. >> For Justin Warren, my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Vmworld Las Vegas 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE with Peter Burris, my cohost for the next few days. Live coverage from Informatica World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Our next guest is Graeme Thompson, senior vice president and CIO, chief information officer, for Informatica. He handles all the CIO roles, as well, inside the company and also speaks with a lot of their customers, who are also CIOs. Graeme, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. So last year, we had the conversation around your role as a CIO, but also, you're doing a lot of stuff internally, certainly using your own product, but you're spending a lot of time with customers, and a lot of those customers can either be project guys, application developers, CXOs, CDOs, CIOs. You interface a lot of customers, what's changed in the marketplace with respect to the CXO, chief something officer, 'cause there's been movement. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, definitely. So as I talk to POs and our customers, it's very clear that data integration, data management has moved beyond just trying to get a big project done. It's no longer about deploying ERP or CRM in the cloud and needing to move data around, the data management part is really in service of something much greater, and it may be getting close with your customer, it may be using the data that's generated in your company and about your company to generate insight, so the next best action to improve the operational efficiency of the company or more importantly, to improve the customer experience that they have as they deal with your company, so it's moved way beyond just getting a project done, and it's now a strategic thing in service of something higher-level, and that higher-level thing is usually on the radar of the board and the CEO. >> So our research suggests that we're moving from a world of process first, in the IT organization, to data first. Is that too far a stretch, as far as you're concerned? >> Not for some companies. When you look at the most valuable companies in the world today, companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, you could argue they're data companies. The product that they generate is data, the thing they use to compete upon is data, so for those companies, I don't think that's a stretch at all. For everyone else, they need to figure out what they're going to do about that and figure out whether they're going to try and catch up or whether they're going to try and disrupt, but I think for the world's best companies, you're seeing them more and more focused on the data, and the process is turning into just a thing that generates that data, which is the thing that generates the value. >> We've been seeing companies becoming more data companies, and Peter's research and the team has been showing digital business is about data assets, and Facebooks and the Amazons, they're obvious examples, we see them as hyperscalers, but there's going to be, the end-user customers, the traditional enterprises, they're now becoming service providers. They got cloud, they got multi-cloud, they're going to have an IOT edge, they have a bigger set of complexities around this horizontally-scalable digital business architecture. So your point about projects, in old days, easy, you ship, connect everyone, they log in, they do their job, and then they go out and sell to customers. >> Peter: But you still are. >> Well, I mean straightforward, known, right? It was a known enterprise, you had a perimeter. Now you have digital channel, you have more challenges. How do you look at that, and where does Informatica fit in that conversation with the CIO and the CEO, who have to report to the board level and say, we got to manage our security, we got to do all this stuff, how do you guys fit into that new world? >> Yeah, so the thing that differentiates Informatica from everyone else, frankly, is the fact that we look at it holistically, and we cover everything from discovering the data. If it's an asset, you have to know that you have it, so you got to go discover it, you got to be able to catalog it, so you can keep control of what you have. You need to know the lineage of it, where does it get created, where does it get moved to, who has access to it, with GDPR going in effect later this week. It's increasingly important for us to know who has access to the data, it's increasingly important to manage the lifecycle of that data so that you know where it's being created, used, moved. You have to secure it. If your aspiration is to have a true enterprise data lake, you got to make sure that the identity governance is in place, you got to make sure that information that may be HR-related isn't accessible by people who don't have the privilege to see it in the HR application. So that's the discovery, the cataloging. Then you have to clean it, master it, and looking at an MVM solution for getting a true 360 degree view of your customer or your product or your supplier. And then there's the analytics part, which is often the prize at the end. If you can get all the data into your data lake, and potentially with a data warehouse on the back of that, in the cloud, and then you can choose the presentation layer that you love the most and use that to serve up self-service analytics for your customers. So we're different in that we look at all of it. We've got a lot of nimble competitors that do one thing very well, and if our customer is trying to just get a project done, my advice to them is go to an RFP and pick whatever one you like, but if this is really strategic for you, you need to pick someone that they can do all of it and do it all well in a way that's going to be scalable and independent from the big software providers. >> But I want to come back, Graeme, to this, 'cause I think there's one more thing I want to test you on, this is kind of the basis for my comment earlier about moving to a data-first as opposed to a process-first world. Because I think it also, you have to be able to discover it, catalog it, be able to audit it, all those other things. But you also have to be able to deliver it and deliver it with a high degree of certainty that it's the right data at the right time. Historically, application developers started with a process and they presume that the data would be associated with that process. Now we're starting with these assets that are very, very high value, and we're looking for new ways to leverage those assets. It kind of has a different mindset, doesn't it? >> It really does, and that's the fun part, quite honestly. If you think about, the data used to be hostage to its process, the process used to be hostage to the application that it was executed in, and now we're opening up all these opportunities where you can take, just in our company, you can take usage information and make it available to our customer support organization, so they can proactively help our customer adopt the product. We can tell which features the customer may be using and not using to help focus our adoption efforts and really help the customer get more value from the product. That's an opportunity that was either unknown or very difficult to take advantage of when you were just looking at the process of fulfilling an order, delivering the cloud environment to the customer and then 12 months later, going back and trying to renew it. It's now a connected lifecycle of the customer's experience with your product, and it's all based on the data. The applications and the processes are just the things that generate it. >> What's changed, go back, 'cause you mentioned, that's an awesome example, the old way, with process, it now seems like the data is freed up. What changed, what was the catalyst from going, you know, stuck in the process, slave to the process, slave to the app, to what you just referred to, which seems like the outcome people want to get to, which is create data so that people can innovate on it. What's changed? >> Yeah, so I think as individuals, as humans, our expectations have changed. We now know that it's reasonable to expect that if I have an interaction with one part of your company on a Monday, the other part of your company, who I interact with on a Thursday, should know about it. I think as consumers, we've become conditioned to really expect that, and just like we now see in the B-to-C world, folks are expecting it in the B-to-B world. So you've got higher expectations, and then the capabilities to do it didn't really exist before. And now, with all these different, you've got all your different applications in the cloud, you've still got applications on premise, and there's an expectation and now the capability to do analytics on all of it, there's an expectation that information about you is known and used to improve your experience as a customer when you're dealing with these businesses. >> But the whole notion of data as an asset requires different governance, different people. We're strong believers that actually, you can measure the degree to which a company is on its digital transformation journey by the degree to which it has in fact institutionalized work around data or changed that or organized. When you look at the CIO role and how the CIO role is going to change or is changing and is going to change more, as a consequence of this, increasing focus on data as an asset within the business, what are you doing, what do you expect to be doing, what are you counseling other CIOs to do? >> Yeah, so that's a good one. When I talk to POs, I ask them, I try and create an analogy between the data as an asset and money as an asset, so I would ask them, "If you were to take your CFO, say, and ask them, "'Do you know where all your money is?' "They'll say, 'Of course I do.'" "'Do you know which currency your money is stored in? "'Do you know where it's physically? "'Do you know who has access to it? "'Do you have a governance process in place to try "'and figure out the most profitable use of that asset?' "And they'll go, "'Yeah, of course my CFO knows that.'" I say, "Okay, swap the word money for data, "and you as a CIO, can you answer yes "to any of those questions?" And you get a reaction of, "Oh, I believe I should, but I can't." A lot of companies say that data is an asset, but they're really not operating that way. They don't have the governance around it, they don't have the control around it, they don't have the governance in place to make sure they're using it in the most profitable way to get that return that you suggested. So I think that's definitely where we're moving, and some of the world's best companies are definitely going in that direction. >> That is exactly one of the things we were just talking about on our intro here this morning around the CIO and the CEOs don't know where their data is, and I think the GDPR is, I'm not a big fan of it, with all the technical challenges, and ultimately, it's a signal in my opinion, but ultimately, it's going to happen. But I think it's a signal to your point. You need to know about your data, not treat it as some fenced-off storage thing, and the storage administrator, where is it all, and the guy left, who's running it now, where's the data, what's the schema. These are all technical storage questions. >> Yeah, it's not the stuff on the storage assets, is the bottom line. >> That paradigm is over. You're talking about something that's fundamental, strategic business aspect, so I think this is a new generation. So with that, I want to ask you, you had talked before camera that you have a CDO that reports to you, a change for Informatica. Can you explain that decision, why a chief data officer reports to the CIO, why you guys came to that conclusion, and as a result of that, what's happening? >> Yeah, so we're going through a transformation in our company, as we move from being a traditional software company that sells license and maintenance, to being a cloud and subscription company. The processes and the systems you need to be a subscription company, to be a good one, are very different, right? It's a connected, end-to-end process all the way from how you generate your product, your go-to-market strategy, all the way through how you fulfill it, how you drive adoption and value creation with your customer, and ultimately, how you renew it and sell more. That's a different process than a traditional, ship it and forget it license company. So as we go through this transformation, we are solving a lot of the governance problems, we're solving a lot of the system of record and data quality problems, and we need to make sure that once we're done with each part of the project, it doesn't get broken again. In software companies, IT people are really good at fixing things, but they're not always really good at keeping it fixed. So the time was right for us to create this new position, and we debated where it should report, but we believe that as an action-orientated, get-stuff-done function, it has to be collocated with the team who are delivering the new applications and the new processes, and for the moment, that's within the CIO function. >> Are they going to be tracking this notion of asset, tracking like, if you treat data like an asset, like money, are you guys down the road on that? How are you viewing it internally, as you guys roll out the CDO relationship with you, and obviously, we're making it strategic, obviously, you guys know that, you're in the data business. Where are you on that question that you asked rhetorically for yourselves? >> Graeme: Yeah, so-- >> John: Do you know where your data is and-- >> Yeah, I mean, we're very, very fortunate to have unfettered access to all of our products, so we're very proud of our intelligent data lake deployment, which is on Azure Cloud. As more and more of ours and any other customer's workload move to the cloud, it makes more and more sense to have analytics there. People are questioning the wisdom of bringing all the data back on prem just to do analytics. The only people making money out of that are AT&T and Verizon, there's got to be a better way. So that's one thing that would be under the purview of the CDO, and that would be to enable self-service analytics across the company, get IT out of the way of generating the presentation layer of reporting, and enable the great and talented people throughout the company to do that. So that would be the analytics side. And then obviously, cataloging and securing is something we have the best solutions in the industry, so those solutions are deployed, and that'll help us with our GDPR compliance, but it'll also help us make sure that we know what we have and we have a process in place to at least consider what the most profitable use of that data asset would be elsewhere in the company. >> John: So you feel good about it. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so for the people that can't answer that question, a CIO, "Hmm, you know what, that's a good question, "I should know this." What do they do next, what's the next step of action that a CIO should take when they go, "Oh, no, I can't answer that question." They might have their hands on some fingertips of data, but ultimately, the strategic question is what do I do next? Obviously, call Informatica, I mean, do I do an audit? >> Hopefully, you'll call us, but if you take the vendor and the technology out of it, if you were trying to figure out how much money you had, you would put a process in place to go discover it all. >> John: Count it. >> So the equivalent there is cataloging, so our enterprise data catalog product is the fastest-growing product we've ever had in the company, and what that does is allows Google for your data. You can search for where all your customer data lives, you can search for where all your product data lives, you can figure out where it moves, and that is the first thing that I would advise a CIO to do, is figure out what you have, where it's stored, where it moves to, where it's used, and who has access to it, and if you have that, then at least you've got a shot at figuring out how to, you still need intelligent people to figure out where the most profitable use of it would be, but at least you know what you have, where it is, and who has access to it. And then when someone wants to come and ask you about the GDPR and your compliance level, if you can show them that, then at least it's clear that you have an objective to comply with the regulation. >> And they're going to be pretty lenient from what we hear, but they're going to want to see people making steps for compliance, and it's a moving train with GDPR. Again, we're going to go in deep on this this week. Graeme Thompson, senior vice president and CIO. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to see you again, let's keep in touch, love to explore the CDO relationship with the CIO, I think that's cutting-edge, congratulations. Know where your data is, how much it's worth. If you know where your money is and how much it's worth, you don't want to lose your data, you want to make sure you're leveraging it. It's theCUBE coverage here at Informatica World, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, more live coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at the inaugural IBM Think 2018 event. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. And our first guest, on day one of our coverage, is Jerry Thompson, the Chief Revenue Officer of Identity Guard. Hey Jerry, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, well, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So tell us about Identity Guard. What are you guys, what do you do and how are you working with IBM? >> Yeah, Identity Guard is a, is a subsidiary of Intersections. We are a publicly-traded company and we're only in the identity and privacy space. So we, today, protect about 1.4 million people's identities. They, it's a subscription-based service. And two and a half years ago, we made the decision to, to basically invent identity 2.0 and the only way to do that was to use artificial intelligence technology, so we went to Watson to do that. >> This is a giant leap that you mentioned. >> Huge. >> So let's kind of, maybe, break that down a little bit and really talk about what you're doing here that was really transformative. >> Yeah, so, identity protection companies today only look at structured data. And, basically, we look at structured data and we look at it in arrears, so we can't do anything proactive or preventive. We knew if we used Watson in an AI technology, we could monitor unstructured data, which is probably 90% of all the data out there about any of us. And in order, in doing so, we could do preventive and predictive analysis of your personal information, privacy and your identity. So there was a quantum leap to go from just reacting to actually proactively protecting people's identity and privacy. >> So could you take us through, sort of, the journey that you went on to go from, sort of, where you were to where you are now and where you're headed? >> Yeah so, I mean, it starts like every other company with Watson. We took the tour of the Watson building. Went upstairs to the glass conference rooms and in that conference room, waiting for us, was the CIO of Watson. >> Dave: When was this? >> Two and a half years ago. >> Okay. >> And we explained the problem we were trying to solve. And from that day forward, IBM has been an amazing partner for us, amazing partner. So we did all of the things. We went through a Scrum, we wrote some product code, we did, you know, proof of concept, and when we were convinced that we could actually reinvent this industry, we went all-in. >> Keep going. >> And that was two and a half years ago. >> So, so, so a lot of people would say "Okay, Watson's a heavy lift, "you got to have a lot of services." It sounds like you did but the outcome is really what you're driving toward. So what was the outcome you were looking for and what'd you have to do to get there? >> Yeah so, I mean, at the highest level, we wanted to protect not only your financial and credit data, but all of the data that's out there about you and your partner, spouse, wife and kids. And in order to do that you need a processing engine that actually is intelligent. So that was the journey in Watson. We have found it to be not a big, heavy lift. We had the right kind of data scientists and we knew the problems we were trying to solve. Not in the abstract, in the particular. We defined the stories and the categories that we wanted to play in. We defined the product as we wanted to launch it. We knew it was going to be a one to two year run because you have to invent it, create it, then you have to play with it, right? You have to run it through the machine, so, >> Iterate. >> Right, and iterate. So, in order to do that, we knew the timeframe so we were never frustrated. And, along that journey, we came up with other things that we thought would be amazing to include in the service so, like cyberbullying technology, geolocation technology. All kinds of other things where only Watson would help us do that. >> And, and the data scientists were on your team >> Our team, yeah. or IBM brought those to the table? Okay, so you >> Yeah, no, IBM always let us reference their, but we have a handful in Virginia and some more in California in our development center. >> So you're one of the lucky ones who had a team, a bench, of data scientists >> Yes. >> at your disposal to go, is that right? >> Yeah, I wouldn't say a deep bench, but we've added to it over time, as you, as you get into the way you want to solve this problem. >> And, and how, specifically, are you using Watson? Can you give us, add some color on the APIs that you're using >> Sure. >> and how you're applying them? >> So we use natural-language processing because we pour amazing amount of data through the Watson funnel. Social media data, geolocation, Alchemy News. And we need the natural-language to actually jump and, and search for key words and key intimates. We use emotion analysis API, sentiment analysis API for context. So we're reading social media posts, your kids' posts. Your kid might say "Boy, I killed it "on the soccer field today." That's not a threat, right, that's just a statement. You have to add context to the statement. In order to do that, we use emotion and sentiment APIs. We use visual image recognition for inappropriate things that might be coming through. We use Alchemy News, which I believe is Discovery today. We're in the process, with the help of IBM, to create a library, a language, around emojis. Some emojis can be very threatening in the way they're used and the context they're used. You have to be able to read it, intelligently read it, and then put it in context to the string of texts or Instagram posts or whatever, that are going back and forth. So we, we've really taken this holistic view of what Watson can do, help us do for unstructured data and, in that process, it made our ability to monitor structured data better. We learned a lot. So we actually got benefits on both sides of our business. >> So you talked about this quantum leap that, that you made to identity 2.0. Also, what you're doing, in your space is quite pioneering in that, you're >> Yes. >> the only, first and only company, in the space that's using AI. Cyberbullying is such a hot, very challenging topic and, and sadly one that's very much needed in terms of identity. >> Right. >> But why do you think it is that, that Identity Guard is, is so pioneering in this space? >> Yeah, you know, we've always been, we, first of all, Identity Guard invented the identity business 23 years ago. We're the first ones to ever do it, first ones to do credit scores, reports. So we've always innovated in this space. The, the challenge for us as a public company, our biggest competitor is the credit bureaus, right? And the credit bureaus are low-cost providers and, and, candidly, I think they stamp out innovation in our field because they just want it to be about credit data. They don't want it to be about other things. So it was time for somebody to take this leap to predictive and preventive technologies, not just reactive. The rear view mirror can tell you a lot but it can't help you protect today, and that's what we've been doing in our space. >> Well the dossier from a credit bureau is so limited. >> Right. >> It doesn't provide context. You know, your score goes up or down for weird reasons. 'Cause people are doing credit pulls or whatever it is. You don't really have a context of what's going on there. So, so my question to you, Jerry, is where do you see innovation going in this space? Obviously data is involved and the credit bureaus have data but where is innovation going to come from in the next five to 10 years? >> Yeah, you know, I think it's the, we're going to figure out how to harvest data that's out there and then score that data so that we can help you and your family stay safe. Nobody today wants to have no internet, right? The internet's opened up an amazing amount of capability for people. But, but you have to have a way to play in it without it being too dangerous. And I believe we can use Watson. That's our, it's been our theory from day one. We can use Watson to level the playing field, right? Not, not really get an advantage, but to level the playing field, especially for families where not everybody is aware of all of the malfeasance that's out there on the internet, right? >> Right. >> People are always looking to harvest our data and to use it in a malicious way. Especially kids and minors, right? They're at risk for cyber, you know, predation and stalking and cyberbullying and, and parents today know it's a big issue. >> Okay, go ahead please Lisa. >> I was just going to say, in terms of expectations, you're saying it's to level the playing field with the cyber criminals, the stalkers, in the next, you know, can we look at timeframe? Think that you'll get ahead of that to start actually preventing some of this cyberbullying going on? >> You know, I, that's a good question. I will tell you right now, our ambition is to level the playing field. It's tilted this way today. I think what will happen is technology's like geolocation. It seems, first of all geolocation is not really relevant without Watson Discovery, right? You need all of this massive data going on in the locations that you're relevant in to help us protect you. But I believe, based on the early science that we're doing with IBM, that we can actually help a kid, somebody's stalking them from, you know, four states away but it says it's the little boy across town, we can actually stop things like that happening using the processing and the algorithms that we're doing using Watson. So there are, there are relevant areas that I think we can have a massive impact on the privacy and the protection of people and their families. >> I want to come back to innovation, so data is clearly a key component of that. You're extending the data model into unstructured data. I'm hearing that, correct? >> Yes. >> Also, AI, machine intelligence is another part of that. What about scale? Scale and network effects >> Yeah. >> and that sort of component of innovation. >> That had to be >> Does that come from cloud, is that where it's coming from? >> That had to be part of this. So we, along with all of our competitors in the existing 1.0 business, we use a hard-coded platform. >> Right. >> Right, I mean, if you want to change something, you have to get out a sledgehammer and a chisel and it takes a year. We built Watson using AWS, so we've used all the best tools, the fastest tools. We've run scale testing, you know, and, and the beautiful thing about our business, we're a digital business, right, so our factory's open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Our shopping carts never close. You can always, you know, subscribe to the Identity Guard With Watson service. So we needed the cloud to give us the scale. We also needed the platform to be able to plug in and unplug the APIs. Some partners may not want social media monitoring. Some partners may not want this, so we didn't have to hard-code our product. We actually built three services and we can unplug any of the services. >> So, when you say you're a digital business, it strikes me that your data model is not in a bunch of silos. >> Correct. >> You've got a data model that's accessible, maybe through sets of APIs, et cetera, that your human experts can go attack. >> Correct. >> Is that a fair assertion? >> Yeah, that's fair. One other thing about Watson. We were going to use Watson from day one, I was convinced. And I was the one that took the company on this journey. But the other thing I like about Watson is that you don't, Watson doesn't keep the data, right? We talked to the other big players in this field and one of their mandates is, they always keep the data. All of it. And, and Watson shreds the data and we don't keep all the data. So think of all the social media and other data that flows through this funnel. People out there want to keep it so then they can reverse profile consumers or cohorts or, Watson shreds the data. You're not in the, you're not in the spoofing or spying business, nor are we. So that was also a really important consideration. >> Yeah, I said that at the top, that you're, you're going to hear this from Ginni tomorrow. I can almost guarantee ya, she's going to say that we're not in the business of trying to re-mine your data and re-target. >> Right. >> But, so that was, I was going to ask you why Watson. That was one reason. What about the quality of the, of the machine intelligence? >> Yeah. >> You hear a lot, you know, you hang around Silicon Valley, "Oh yeah, Watson." How does it compare, in your view? >> Yeah. >> You're a practitioner who's, you know, you're familiar with all this. >> So they have more refined, first of all, more APIs, right? More, some of them not relevant to us, the medical ones, which are amazing and fascinating, >> Yeah, but, yeah. >> but they had more structured APIs and a better road map on where they were going. And what we found from day one is that, if we defined something, they would say "We'll jump in and help", right? It's really important when you're the first one, you know, the tip of the spear, you don't know, you don't know what you don't know. And we found from day one, the IBM team has treated us like we're General Electric, right? Or General Motors, right? We're just, you know, a couple of hundred million dollar company trying to make a big difference in a important space. And they have treated us like a Fortune 100 company from day one and really appreciate it. >> So as >> And their science is so good. >> Sorry there, as the CRO, going from identity 1.0 to 2.0, this journey that you're on. You mentioned competition. How many, talk to us about the actual financial impact to the company that you can say that you've been able to achieve on this journey to identity 2.0. Presumably, leaving some of your competition back in the 1.0 land. >> Yeah, yeah, actually, our competition will be behind us for at least a couple years 'cause it takes a couple years. You know, you don't do this quickly. So we are out, we launched, we launched Watson in December. We actually launched, we distribute our product through partners, most of it, 90%. 10%, people come to our site and sign up online but we launched 21 partners in January, 11 in February, 13 in March we'll launch. So by the end of the year, we predict we'll have about 200 Watson partners distributing our product, which would give us a huge head start and advantage over anybody else. Once you see what we're doing and you see what else, the 1.0 version, it's almost impossible to pick 1.0. It's impossible, right? So our job is to get more, create more awareness in the distribution channels so that people are, are understand that Watson is out there and available. >> And, and this is a subscription service, I think you said, upfront? >> Yeah. >> And you've got different tiers, etc? >> Yes, yes. >> And you guys have a couple of, of sessions >> that you're participating in at the event? >> We do. >> Yeah, I know that we're on tomorrow afternoon and I believe Wednesday morning. >> Great. >> So, yeah. >> Well Jerry, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE >> You're welcome. >> and sharing what you guys at Identity Guard are doing with data, >> Thank you. >> I mean, it's fascinating. >> Appreciate you talking to us. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks, pleasure. >> And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante again. This is day one of theCUBE's three days of coverage at the inaugural IBM Think 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back everyone we're here live in San Francisco for the Cube's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier of SiliconAngle Media. My cohost, Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconAngle Media as well as the general manager of Wikibon.com, Wikibon research, check it out. Some great research there on IoT, big data, and certainly cloud computing. Our next guest is Graeme Thompson, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Informatica, great to see you, welcome back to the Cube. >> Nice to see you, John. >> Conference here, lot of customers, you've got an executive summit, dinner last night, you're kind of like the sounding board, they go to you for the checkpoint, hey, does this story jive, what's going on internally, 'cause you're living through a transformation as well at Informatica. Your customers are going through a transformation as well. We're at this tipping point. What's your take so far of the conference, and is that still the case? Anything you'd like to share on that would be great. >> Yeah, I mean we're proud to have some of the world's best companies using our products to do meaningful and important things. And the scale that some of these companies are doing it at is just staggering. I met with someone last night at dinner and, at Allegis, the talent management organization, and they process and keep up to date 55 million resumes every day. And they extract the metadata from those resumes to match the right candidate to the right job. And you know, that's interesting for them as a company but the societal impact of that is significant. Imagine, I mean we're all starved for talent, and you're matching the right talent with the right opportunity more often than not, using the intelligence of the data, it's pretty interesting. And then of course, I know you had Andrew McIntyre from the Cubs on yesterday, I mean how can you not love that story of how an organization as great and renown as the Cubs is using data to transform it's business operation. It's really amazing. >> We had Bruce Chizen on who's Executive Chairman of the Board of Informatica, was on the board at Oracle, but Peter asked him an interesting question that I'll ask you. What's your definition of strategic data management? >> That's a good one, so the way I define it is, if the basis of your competition is on digital assets compared to physical assets. So we're no longer dealing with plant or machinery or even capital, it's digital assets. If that is the basis of your competition, then the data that you rely on is the very foundation of that. And then it becomes strategic just like money is strategic. And the access to talent is strategic. The ability to leverage the data within your company, about your company, is strategic, and you have to be able to do it on-prem, you have to be able to do it on the cloud, you have to be able to do it in the real world where most of us live, which is in both worlds. And that to me, that's what makes it strategic. >> But let me build on that Graeme, 'cause in many respects the whole concept of digital transformation is, oh let me step back. One of the premises of business is to try to reduce what's known in financial or economic worlds as an asset specificity. So traditionally we've looked at assets and said, this asset's going to be applied to that use, and this asset's going to be applied to that use, and if it's the use isn't needed or it's not being applied, you lose the value of the asset. One of the basic premises of digital business and business generally is how to we reduce asset specificity, and data let's us do that by turning an aircraft engine into a service, we have transformed the role that that asset plays in our customer's business. So you're absolutely right, it's the ratio of physical to digital assets, but all businesses have to find ways to reduce their asset specificity by adding digital on top of it so they can appropriate that asset to a lot of new purposes. Do you agree with that? >> Absolutely, so take, so I know you talked to Sally about the data leak. So take a user case like customer support. Who in a software company knows more about the customer, what product their running, what version of product their running, what they're using it for because of the connectors they have. Nobody in the company knows more about that than the customer support organization. But that asset, the most profitable use of that information, may be in marketing, because then we can help our customers adopt something more quickly, we can help them get value from it more quickly. And it helps us because it helps us focus our R&D effort where the customers are really using the product instead of having to guess. So I think you're spot on, if you can remove the constraint on the asset to be for who paid for it, for one particular purpose and make it available to the entire enterprise and outside the enterprise, then you really start to see the value. >> The thing that you mentioned about digital assets Peter, and the Wikibon team talk about this all the time in their research, digital assets, is the data. Whether it's content or whatever. Certainly we're in the content business, but... >> Peter: Well digital assets are data. >> Are data, exactly, and whether it's content or whatever aspect it is. So I've got to ask you... >> Software, software is a digital asset. >> Data is at the center of it all. So I've got to ask you, there's been a lot of artificial intelligence watching going on in the industry. I call it augmented intelligence because it's really not yet artificial by the strictest, purest definition, but machine learning is very relevant. We talked about IoT when you were last in our studio. How is it impacting your business and customer's business? Because that's the real proof in the pudding, if you will. And customers are trying to sift through the BS that they're hearing from other folks. I'm not saying that you guys are saying BS, but what's the acid test? How do you differentiate between smokescreen and real deal? >> I think it comes down to, like any other technology investment, is what is the business outcome that it generated? So if you're trying to... So humans make mistakes, if you're trying to eliminate human error from a process, a machine can execute that process more repeatably and more accurately than a human. It's not about reducing cost, that's only semi-interesting. It's about enabling outcomes that weren't possible before. So you think about healthcare industry. Everyone talks about self-driving cars and how safer it'll be if the cars aren't dependent on a human, but one thing I read recently is we kill more people in the US by prescribing the wrong drug or the wrong dosage than we do on the roads. So humans work hard, but they make mistakes. If we can have the machine do that job because a human can tell it how to do the job and it can learn over time, then you can eliminate that error. And we're able to do things that we can only imagine. >> Machines rarely get tired, they rarely lose attention, blah blah blah blah blah, and it's all those things, and that's where the augmentation is. And there will be the other forms of artificial intelligence, the algorithms have been around for a long time. The hardware now can support it, and the data is being generated to apply it. >> The data's available and the cost of compute is approaching zero. So we're able to do things that the government could only do before. >> Graeme, I want to get your thoughts on data integration. Certainly we saw yesterday the news with Google Spanner. You guys were one of three companies that was early on, before they announced their general release of Spanner Worldwide, the attributed database, horizontally scaled database. Big deal, but you guys were also on the front end of that as it says in their blog post, and you guys are really strong at data integration. What are some of the challenges that the customers face with integration? What are the key things? Because that seems to be, whether you go multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud today, which is a gateway to multi-cloud, which is happening pretty fast, data integration is pretty important. >> Yes, so as a CIO this is something that is a very hot topic for me, and it's not a new hot topic, it was a hot topic 15 years ago when we went nuts and deployed all these client server applications because they were cheap and easy. And then you had to think about, oh these different disconnected applications don't serve an end-to-end process anymore, now we have to stitch them all together. That was hard, but it was all on-prem and you had access to it all. >> Peter: It was all programed. >> Right, whereas now, like you said you've got Salesforce, you've got Workday, you've got Great People, you've got your on-prem stuff, you've got applications that you're hosting on someone's PAS cloud and the IAS cloud and the SAS cloud, but to execute an end-to-end business process to generate an outcome you have to tie it all together. So instead of thinking about... >> John: And it's not on-prem so you can't touch it, and it's not on, you don't have it. >> Right so you can't hand code that, you could, but I would argue that that would be an unintelligent way to do it, which is where Microservices API has come in. So you can leverage the R&D efforts that the great software vendors like Salesforce create for us. And then you use Microservices to plug into that instead of having an army of people hand-coding interfaces, which is what we used to do 15 years ago. >> That's the human error point. I mean, it could be spaghetti code, all kinds of errors could happen. >> But also the maintenance of that is just virtually impossible given the speed and the fact that human beings are now thinking about new ways of doing things. You just can't keep up with that. >> I mean the coding thing's a big deal. We used to call it, back in the day, spaghetti code cause it's like all this integrated purpose-built coding for one purpose to glue it together. >> Right and then you change one data element and you have to rewrite or retest the whole thing. >> John: A guy leaves or a girl leaves, it's a nightmare, right? With APIs and Microservices you're decoupling that. That's kind of what I think you're getting at, right? >> Exactly, and that's what the whole iPass space is about. You can decouple the user experience from the data and just have, what does a user have to do, and then Microservices and APIs will take care of the work behind the scenes between the applications and that really lets... There's this concept of a citizen integrator. So 15 years ago, it was kind of a modern thought to have business people write reports. I think it won't be long before we'll be able to give the business teams the ability to do integration between applications without depending on me. >> I was talking with a young developer the other day and I'm like, yeah you know your coding is like me doing PowerPoints. They're like, what do you mean, it's so easy. No, it's not that easy. >> Well we've been building macros, good or bad, inside for example things like Excel for a long time and one of the primary drivers, in fact of a lot of the BI stuff, was citizen coders building macros and said I need the data to make my little macro run. Now I don't want to say that that is... That's not what we're talking about, we're talking about something that's considerably more robust where we can be very very creative in thinking about how we might use the data. And then being able to discover it and find it and very quickly and with a low-code orientation being able to make the actual application happen that has consequential impact in the marketplace. So Graeme, you're in a company that's trying to help customers move through some of these transitions. You're in a crucial role because we know where the data is, we know how to integrate it. >> Graeme: You did? >> Well we're discovering where the data is, we have tools that's going to help us, we're learning how to integrate it. But one of the big challenges is to get the business to adopt new orientations to the role that data's going to play. That to me is one of the key roles of the CIO, having worked with a lot of CIOs over the years. For a very very simple example, agile development does not line up with annual budget finance. How are you with Informatica helping to acculturate executive teams to think through new processes, new approaches to doing these things so that the business is better able to use the data so that consequential action happens as these concepts of these great insights that you're generating? >> So the whole change in management effort is a huge and complex thing to overcome. But I have a personal passion about making sure that you always remind people why they're doing it. Too often as product people or technologists, we get into the how and the what and we forget the why. And as soon as it gets difficult people abandon because it starts to get too hard, it starts to get painful, and if they've lost sight of the big why they're not going to role their sleeves up and gut it out and get through the process. So that's the first thing you have to do is remind them that the prize at the end is worth the pain. And it will be painful because no longer are you optimizing just your function. You have to think about what happens upstream from you, what happens downstream from you, and try and optimize things at the enterprise level. And that's not how most people were brought up. It's not how their measured, it's not how their compensated, but that's what's really required if you're going to make that transformation I think end-to-end. >> But it's also, even our language, we talk about innovation in this industry as though it was synonymous with just creating something new. Certainly our research very strongly shows that there's a difference between inventing something which is an engineering act and innovating around something which is a social act. Exactly what you just said. How do we get people to adopt things and change behaviors and fully utilize something and embed it within their practices so that we get derivative innovation and all of the other stuff that we're looking for? >> Yeah there's no easy recipe. People are different so people require a different story in order to have them buy in. Some people are loss-framed people, where you got to explain here's what's going to be bad if you don't do this. Other people are gain-framed people where you can say if we can accomplish this, we'll be able to do these great things. And it would be great if everyone was the same and one story worked for everyone, but it doesn't. So it's almost a feet on the street. Go talk to people and just keep reminding everyone why you're doing this and why it's going to be worth it. >> Peter: A little bit of behavioral economics there. >> John: Graeme I want to ask you one final question. You mention client server and how it was easy on-prem in the old days, get your arms around things, which is the IT practice, you know? That's the way it was done. In the cloud, a little bit more complex. But to take that a little step further, I want to get your thoughts on something. You lived through the world of server sprawl. More servers, more glue, you get your arms around it but then it got bloated, IT got bloated. And that's one of the catalysts for going to the cloud is efficiencies, bottom-line costs. But now, top line revenue now is a mandate. So now we have SAS sprawl. So with APIs, a little bit more security concern, but your thoughts on the now we have a SASification happening or API economy. So you have a lot more APIs, there's Microservices coming on the scene, it's emerging very quickly, still emergent. Embryonic some will say, not so, but I think it's embryonic still. Okay server sprawl, client server, VM sprawl, now you got SAS sprawl. Your thoughts on this dynamic and how a CIO tackles that? >> Yes, so it's the modern equivalent of your legacy technical debt. So it's a modern mess instead of an old mess, but it's the same problem. You know, you have to stitch these applications together and it's made worse by the ease of consuming these SAS applications. So one business function can go off and buy an application that's just for them, and the adjacent business function goes off and buys another application that's just for them. And before you know where you are, you're single sign-on page has three pages because you've got so many applications that you're using to run your business. So I think we have to be more thoughtful and not make the same mistake that we made after 2000 when we went nuts on all these client server applications and make sure that we're thinking about the end-to-end business outcome. >> John: So the unification layer is what, Identity, is it the data? I mean how do you think about that just conceptually? >> Well I think you still need a sensible portfolio of applications. I don't advocate that you just go buy every great application that's out there. If your business doesn't compete based on the capability that that application provides, you've got no business innovating. Just be as good as the next guy. But if you compete based on something, go pick the very best application you can but deploy it thoughtfully. Make sure it's integrated, make sure it serves the end-to-end... >> Well I'm also fascinated by the role that Clair might play here at going and looking at the metadata associated with some of these SAS applications to help us identify patterns and utilization. I think Clair and the thing that was announced here actually could have an impact in thinking about some of these things. >> The Clairvoyant app is a great one, Clair, I mean... She, he, it's vendor neutral, that's a whole different story, only kidding. Final thought Graeme on this show? Just color perspective, what's your thought so far just on the show vibe for the folks who aren't here, what's it like? >> So when you and I met a couple weeks ago we talked about the fact that I'd just joined the company just after last year's show. So I have nothing to compare it to, but the energy level is phenomenal. The feedback from the customer's I've talked to just reinforces that we have really really important customers and we're really important to them. You know, the customers are the ones driving this digital transformation and we're proud to be helping them. And every conversation I've had with customers has really reinforced that and it's great, I can't wait to get back to the office. >> And as we say the KPI, the metric of the transformation of the world is not quadrants or category winners, it's customer wins. >> Graeme: Absolutely. >> And I think that's a great point. Graeme Thompson, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Informatica sharing his insight. He is an integral part of their transformation as well as his customers. Informatica World coverage with the Cube continues. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris with Wikimon.com. We'll be back with more, stay with us after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC world 2017 Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell E, Dell EMC world, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We are joined by Fernando Thompson. He is the CIO of University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico. Thanks so much for joining us, Fernando. >> Thanks Rebecca, to you. >> So I want you to just set the scene a little bit for our viewers and talk a little bit about some of the biggest technology problems you were facing on your campus. >> Well, Universidad de las Américas Puebla is in the state of Puebla. We have around, less than 10,000 students. We have 1,000 employees. And we are full dedicated to research and development. And also bachelor's degrees. I used to work for the federal government and also for the private sector in television and entertainment. But I have never been in such a huge challenge, like, in a university because, you know, it is, it is so difficult to implement the governance but at the same time the freedom and, if you think, well for instance, when, when is a period of time where, where more appears in the world, it's on vacations where the students of the universities have enough time to build that kind of thing. Not very creative people, so in, in the sense that, well we live in an environment where you have to deal, to deliver technology, to protect to millennials that doesn't want to be protected and also, you know, they always ask for more services, no? And now is coming the generation C, so, it's going to be real tough for the next years. >> So, so, so set the scene and talk to us about the kinds of things that you are trying to deliver. Better products, better speed, better services to both students, perspective students, faculty and staff. Talk about what some of the needs were. >> Well, we have to think that, actually, technology is very important in the university because we have to prepare our students to give them the tools to face the future. The world is changing. And, in Mexico right now, we have a huge challenge because we're competing against China, Brazil, and India. We used to have an advantage with, with the price, and people that is very well prepared and with their salaries, but not any longer. So, we have to give this advantage to our students. So, nine years ago, when I arrived to university, for instance, we have the subscription system, and it was awful, no? Because it was very slow with the performance and not very reliable, so the people was really complaining, no? Because we're a private, private university. You always suspect, you know, good performance for a private university. And especially in subscription where your main customer, that is a student. So, we start to work to fix the main system and it take us years, years, no? So, we passed through availability and relability but bad performance. Now, performance, but since we implement XtremIO and we changed our data center with Dell products, this very year, in, in, in the spring, in the spring semester, we make a huge change cause the subscription system now became, you know, one of the biggest transformation tools in the service for the students. What happened was that, during the subscription, we announced on a special day, and a special hour, 8:30, and if you are okay with your administrative stuff and qualifications, you can get into the system and subscribe. Four years ago, that takes, like, one hour or 45 minutes. But with the change that we made, now it is a matter of two minutes. So-- >> Wow. It was a change of 100 degrees, no? What happened was that, yes, we changed the application, but also, you know, with this Flash technology, we use it because at the end, what we want to make was, you know, to impact to the student, in order that they can receive the schedule. He can take faster decisions. They move very fast with their computers and with their devices, so they needed the applications, so, we build it, we test it, and it worked fantastic. And let me tell you something, no? How I measure, I don't have a business analytic tool or a business intelligence tool. What I have was, you know, access to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. And, man, they gave us such a compliment, no? Like, hey TI finally did something well for us also and it was thousands of comments, no? >> Members was waiting. >> A lot of thumbs up. >> Yeah, yeah. Members was waiting, you know, to attack us, like, you shall not pass, and stuff like that. Like past years. But not this year. So, it was, it was, it was a successful story and now we are thinking to implement all these changes that we made in an ordered space itself, of the university. >> So let's talk about that a little bit. So that's, I think, is a great example of digital transformation. I don't need to ask you if you believe in digital transformation. That was a digital transformation to your business. Specifically, I'm interested in research. What type of research does the university do and how does your group play a role in enabling that? >> Yeah, basically, for instance, we have four programs of PSD with specialization in technology and also in environment, no? One of the top challenge that we are facing in Latin America. So we have to supply the technology that our researchers need. And it has to be at the same level of the United States. We belong to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in the United States. So, it's not United States soil, but we belong to that association. >> Reporter: So you have the same SLEs? >> Yeah, basically, basically, you know? And we have to supply, you know, all the bandwidth and performance because they're discussing, at the same time, with people in Texas or Wisconsin or Alaska or Brazil and they need, you know, for instance, high-performance computing, storage, cloud tools, and for them, have to be, you know, pretty clear and transparent. What I mean is that they don't care, and they don't have to care about where it's working, of it is expensive or not, no? Do you have, do you have to supply what they need? Let me give you an example. For instance, a fractal. If you send the information of a fractal, we don't have a super-computer in our university, but we have a deal with another university and they have this super-computer. So, what we do is to supply the connection of the computer to send information and to receive information immediately, in order than the graphic can have information in real time. And people are taking decision in different parts of the, of the country with that information that we're sending. Sometimes, could be, you know, if we're facing a hurricane or we're going to have a problem with water or if we want to avoid, you know, you know, something that can happen with an earthquake or something like that. And with that kind of information, now, our researchers certainly can know what is happening. So, we give the info, we give the technology for them. We make a mixture between cloud-computing services and also our data center. Then that a wonderful tool because with XtremIO and with our new servers, if you can go to our new data center, you will realize that it's only Dell and EMC right there, no? And something funny is that we have a wonderful data center, but to be honest with you, we only use, right now, only three racks. So, the space that we are using right now with this new disk is, the space that we are saving is amazing, no? Because if you can, if you can see our racks, you will see that we have, for instance, Clarion, and DMX and another technology. Right now, we shut down all those racks. And right now, we are using just like, 40 inches of disk. And, man, you know, I have more performance, I have savings on air, savings on electricity. The people think then, right, we are having, you know, more space with more racks and more this. But not any longer. So, I think what is going to happen with Dell and EMC in the future, I think that they are going to deliver, for instance, 100 terabytes in just in a USB or something like that, it's the future. So, there's not going to be need over that, that's good, no? >> Hit it on the head of a, on the head of a pin. >> Yeah. >> Fernando, thank you so much for joining us. >> No, thank you to you. Thank you Rebecca, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Keith Townsen. We will have more from Dell EMC world after this. (progressive music)