>>Alteryx is a company with a long history that goes all the way back to the late 1990s. Now the one consistent theme over 20 plus years has been that Ultrix has always been a data company early in the big data and Hadoop cycle. It saw the need to combine and prep different data types so that organizations could analyze data and take action Altrix and similar companies played a critical role in helping companies become data-driven. The problem was the decade of big data, brought a lot of complexities and required immense skills just to get the technology to work as advertised this in turn limited, the pace of adoption and the number of companies that could really lean in and take advantage of the cloud began to change all that and set the foundation for today's theme to Zuora of digital transformation. We hear that phrase a ton digital transformation. >>People used to think it was a buzzword, but of course we learned from the pandemic that if you're not a digital business, you're out of business and a key tenant of digital transformation is democratizing data, meaning enabling, not just hypo hyper specialized experts, but anyone business users to put data to work. Now back to Ultrix, the company has embarked on a major transformation of its own. Over the past couple of years, brought in new management, they've changed the way in which it engaged with customers with the new subscription model and it's topgraded its talent pool. 2021 was even more significant because of two acquisitions that Altrix made hyper Ana and trifecta. Why are these acquisitions important? Well, traditionally Altryx sold to business analysts that were part of the data pipeline. These were fairly technical people who had certain skills and were trained in things like writing Python code with hyper Ana Altryx has added a new persona, the business user, anyone in the business who wanted to gain insights from data and, or let's say use AI without having to be a deep technical expert. >>And then Trifacta a company started in the early days of big data by cube alum, Joe Hellerstein and his colleagues at Berkeley. They knocked down the data engineering persona, and this gives Altryx a complimentary extension into it where things like governance and security are paramount. So as we enter 2022, the post isolation economy is here and we do so with a digital foundation built on the confluence of cloud native technologies, data democratization and machine intelligence or AI, if you prefer. And Altryx is entering that new era with an expanded portfolio, new go-to market vectors, a recurring revenue business model, and a brand new outlook on how to solve customer problems and scale a company. My name is Dave Vellante with the cube and I'll be your host today. And the next hour, we're going to explore the opportunities in this new data market. And we have three segments where we dig into these trends and themes. First we'll talk to Jay Henderson, vice president of product management at Ultrix about cloud acceleration and simplifying complex data operations. Then we'll bring in Suresh Vetol who's the chief product officer at Altrix and Adam Wilson, the CEO of Trifacta, which of course is now part of Altrix. And finally, we'll hear about how Altryx is partnering with snowflake and the ecosystem and how they're integrating with data platforms like snowflake and what this means for customers. And we may have a few surprises sprinkled in as well into the conversation let's get started. >>We're kicking off the program with our first segment. Jay Henderson is the vice president of product management Altryx and we're going to talk about the trends and data, where we came from, how we got here, where we're going. We get some launch news. Well, Jay, welcome to the cube. >>Great to be here, really excited to share some of the things we're working on. >>Yeah. Thank you. So look, you have a deep product background, product management, product marketing, you've done strategy work. You've been around software and data, your entire career, and we're seeing the collision of software data cloud machine intelligence. Let's start with the customer and maybe we can work back from there. So if you're an analytics or data executive in an organization, w J what's your north star, where are you trying to take your company from a data and analytics point of view? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, look, I think all organizations are really struggling to get insights out of their data. I think one of the things that we see is you've got digital exhaust, creating large volumes of data storage is really cheap, so it doesn't cost them much to keep it. And that results in a situation where the organization's, you know, drowning in data, but somehow still starving for insights. And so I think, uh, you know, when I talk to customers, they're really excited to figure out how they can put analytics in the hands of every single person in their organization, and really start to democratize the analytics, um, and, you know, let the, the business users and the whole organization get value out of all that data they have. >>And we're going to dig into that throughout this program data, I like to say is plentiful insights, not always so much. Tell us about your launch today, Jay, and thinking about the trends that you just highlighted, the direction that your customers want to go and the problems that you're solving, what role does the cloud play in? What is what you're launching? How does that fit in? >>Yeah, we're, we're really excited today. We're launching the Altryx analytics cloud. That's really a portfolio of cloud-based solutions that have all been built from the ground up to be cloud native, um, and to take advantage of things like based access. So that it's really easy to give anyone access, including folks on a Mac. Um, it, you know, it also lets you take advantage of elastic compute so that you can do, you know, in database processing and cloud native, um, solutions that are gonna scale to solve the most complex problems. So we've got a portfolio of solutions, things like designer cloud, which is our flagship designer product in a browser and on the cloud, but we've got ultra to machine learning, which helps up-skill regular old analysts with advanced machine learning capabilities. We've got auto insights, which brings a business users into the fold and automatically unearths insights using AI and machine learning. And we've got our latest edition, which is Trifacta that helps data engineers do data pipelining and really, um, you know, create a lot of the underlying data sets that are used in some of this, uh, downstream analytics. >>Let's dig into some of those roles if we could a little bit, I mean, you've traditionally Altryx has served the business analysts and that's what designer cloud is fit for, I believe. And you've explained, you know, kind of the scope, sorry, you've expanded that scope into the, to the business user with hyper Anna. And we're in a moment we're going to talk to Adam Wilson and Suresh, uh, about Trifacta and that recent acquisition takes you, as you said, into the data engineering space in it. But in thinking about the business analyst role, what's unique about designer cloud cloud, and how does it help these individuals? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, really, I go back to some of the feedback we've had from our customers, which is, um, you know, they oftentimes have dozens or hundreds of seats of our designer desktop product, you know, really, as they look to take the next step, they're trying to figure out how do I give access to that? Those types of analytics to thousands of people within the organization and designer cloud is, is really great for that. You've got the browser-based interface. So if folks are on a Mac, they can really easily just pop, open the browser and get access to all of those, uh, prep and blend capabilities to a lot of the analysis we're doing. Um, it's a great way to scale up access to the analytics and then start to put it in the hands of really anyone in the organization, not just those highly skilled power users. >>Okay, great. So now then you add in the hyper Anna acquisition. So now you're targeting the business user Trifacta comes into the mix that deeper it angle that we talked about, how does this all fit together? How should we be thinking about the new Altryx portfolio? >>Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty exciting. Um, you know, when you think about democratizing analytics and providing access to all these different groups of people, um, you've not been able to do it through one platform before. Um, you know, it's not going to be one interface that meets the, of all these different groups within the organization. You really do need purpose built specialized capabilities for each group. And finally, today with the announcement of the alternates analytics cloud, we brought together all of those different capabilities, all of those different interfaces into a single in the end application. So really finally delivering on the promise of providing analytics to all, >>How much of this you've been able to share with your customers and maybe your partners. I mean, I know OD is fairly new, but if you've been able to get any feedback from them, what are they saying about it? >>Uh, I mean, it's, it's pretty amazing. Um, we ran a early access, limited availability program that led us put a lot of this technology in the hands of over 600 customers, um, over the last few months. So we have gotten a lot of feedback. I tell you, um, it's been overwhelmingly positive. I think organizations are really excited to unlock the insights that have been hidden in all this data. They've got, they're excited to be able to use analytics in every decision that they're making so that the decisions they have or more informed and produce better business outcomes. Um, and, and this idea that they're going to move from, you know, dozens to hundreds or thousands of people who have access to these kinds of capabilities, I think has been a really exciting thing that is going to accelerate the transformation that these customers are on. >>Yeah, those are good. Good, good numbers for, for preview mode. Let's, let's talk a little bit about vision. So it's democratizing data is the ultimate goal, which frankly has been elusive for most organizations over time. How's your cloud going to address the challenges of putting data to work across the entire enterprise? >>Yeah, I mean, I tend to think about the future and some of the investments we're making in our products and our roadmap across four big themes, you know, in the, and these are really kind of enduring themes that you're going to see us making investments in over the next few years, the first is having cloud centricity. You know, the data gravity has been moving to the cloud. We need to be able to provide access, to be able to ingest and manipulate that data, to be able to write back to it, to provide cloud solution. So the first one is really around cloud centricity. The second is around big data fluency. Once you have all of the data, you need to be able to manipulate it in a performant manner. So having the elastic cloud infrastructure and in database processing is so important, the third is around making AI a strategic advantage. >>So, uh, you know, getting everyone involved and accessing AI and machine learning to unlock those insights, getting it out of the hands of the small group of data scientists, putting it in the hands of analysts and business users. Um, and then the fourth thing is really providing access across the entire organization. You know, it and data engineers, uh, as well as business owners and analysts. So, um, cloud centricity, big data fluency, um, AI is a strategic advantage and, uh, personas across the organization are really the four big themes you're going to see us, uh, working on over the next few months and, uh, coming coming year. >>That's good. Thank you for that. So, so on a related question, how do you see the data organizations evolving? I mean, traditionally you've had, you know, monolithic organizations, uh, very specialized or I might even say hyper specialized roles and, and your, your mission of course is the customer. You, you, you, you and your customers, they want to democratize the data. And so it seems logical that domain leaders are going to take more responsibility for data, life cycles, data ownerships, low code becomes more important. And perhaps this kind of challenges, the historically highly centralized and really specialized roles that I just talked about. How do you see that evolving and, and, and what role will Altryx play? >>Yeah. Um, you know, I think we'll see sort of a more federated systems start to emerge. Those centralized groups are going to continue to exist. Um, but they're going to start to empower, you know, in a much more de-centralized way, the people who are closer to the business problems and have better business understanding. I think that's going to let the centralized highly skilled teams work on, uh, problems that are of higher value to the organization. The kinds of problems where one or 2% lift in the model results in millions of dollars a day for the business. And then by pushing some of the analytics out to, uh, closer to the edge and closer to the business, you'll be able to apply those analytics in every single decision. So I think you're going to see, you know, both the decentralized and centralized models start to work in harmony and a little bit more about almost a federated sort of a way. And I think, you know, the exciting thing for us at Altryx is, you know, we want to facilitate that. We want to give analytic capabilities and solutions to both groups and types of people. We want to help them collaborate better, um, and drive business outcomes with the analytics they're using. >>Yeah. I mean, I think my take on another one, if you could comment is to me, the technology should be an operational detail and it has been the, the, the dog that wags the tail, or maybe the other way around, you mentioned digital exhaust before. I mean, essentially it's digital exhaust coming out of operationals systems that then somehow, eventually end up in the hand of the domain users. And I wonder if increasingly we're going to see those domain users, users, those, those line of business experts get more access. That's your goal. And then even go beyond analytics, start to build data products that could be monetized, and that maybe it's going to take a decade to play out, but that is sort of a new era of data. Do you see it that way? >>Absolutely. We're actually making big investments in our products and capabilities to be able to create analytic applications and to enable somebody who's an analyst or business user to create an application on top of the data and analytics layers that they have, um, really to help democratize the analytics, to help prepackage some of the analytics that can drive more insights. So I think that's definitely a trend we're going to see more. >>Yeah. And to your point, if you can federate the governance and automate that, then that can happen. I mean, that's a key part of it, obviously. So, all right, Jay, we have to leave it there up next. We take a deep dive into the Altryx recent acquisition of Trifacta with Adam Wilson who led Trifacta for more than seven years. It's the recipe. Tyler is the chief product officer at Altryx to explain the rationale behind the acquisition and how it's going to impact customers. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage. >>It's go time, get ready to accelerate your data analytics journey with a unified cloud native platform. That's accessible for everyone on the go from home to office and everywhere in between effortless analytics to help you go from ideas to outcomes and no time. It's your time to shine. It's Altryx analytics cloud time. >>Okay. We're here with. Who's the chief product officer at Altryx and Adam Wilson, the CEO of Trifacta. Now of course, part of Altryx just closed this quarter. Gentlemen. Welcome. >>Great to be here. >>Okay. So let me start with you. In my opening remarks, I talked about Altrix is traditional position serving business analysts and how the hyper Anna acquisition brought you deeper into the business user space. What does Trifacta bring to your portfolio? Why'd you buy the company? >>Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Um, you know, we see, uh, we see a massive opportunity of helping, um, brands, um, democratize the use of analytics across their business. Um, every knowledge worker, every individual in the company should have access to analytics. It's no longer optional, um, as they navigate their businesses with that in mind, you know, we know designer and are the products that Altrix has been selling the past decade or so do a really great job, um, addressing the business analysts, uh, with, um, hyper Rana now kind of renamed, um, Altrix auto. We even speak with the business owner and the line of business owner. Who's looking for insights that aren't real in traditional dashboards and so on. Um, but we see this opportunity of really helping the data engineering teams and it organizations, um, to also make better use of analytics. Um, and that's where the drive factor comes in for us. Um, drive factor has the best data engineering cloud in the planet. Um, they have an established track record of working across multiple cloud platforms and helping data engineers, um, do better data pipelining and work better with, uh, this massive kind of cloud transformation that's happening in every business. Um, and so fact made so much sense for us. >>Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, you, look, you could have built it yourself would have taken, you know, who knows how long, you know, but, uh, so definitely a great time to market move, Adam. I wonder if we could dig into Trifacta some more, I mean, I remember interviewing Joe Hellerstein in the early days. You've talked about this as well, uh, on the cube coming at the problem of taking data from raw refined to an experience point of view. And Joe in the early days, talked about flipping the model and starting with data visualization, something Jeff, her was expert at. So maybe explain how we got here. We used to have this cumbersome process of ETL and you may be in some others changed that model with ELL and then T explain how Trifacta really changed the data engineering game. >>Yeah, that's exactly right. Uh, David, it's been a really interesting journey for us because I think the original hypothesis coming out of the campus research, uh, at Berkeley and Stanford that really birth Trifacta was, you know, why is it that the people who know the data best can't do the work? You know, why is this become the exclusive purview of the highly technical? And, you know, can we rethink this and make this a user experience, problem powered by machine learning that will take some of the more complicated things that people want to do with data and really help to automate those. So, so a broader set of, of users can, um, can really see for themselves and help themselves. And, and I think that, um, there was a lot of pent up frustration out there because people have been told for, you know, for a decade now to be more data-driven and then the whole time they're saying, well, then give me the data, you know, in the shape that I could use it with the right level of quality and I'm happy to be, but don't tell me to be more data-driven and then, and, and not empower me, um, to, to get in there and to actually start to work with the data in meaningful ways. >>And so, um, that was really, you know, what, you know, the origin story of the company and I think is, as we, um, saw over the course of the last 5, 6, 7 years that, um, you know, uh, real, uh, excitement to embrace this idea of, of trying to think about data engineering differently, trying to democratize the, the ETL process and to also leverage all these exciting new, uh, engines and platforms that are out there that allow for processing, you know, ever more diverse data sets, ever larger data sets and new and interesting ways. And that's where a lot of the push-down or the ELT approaches that, you know, I think it could really won the day. Um, and that, and that for us was a hallmark of the solution from the very beginning. >>Yeah, this is a huge point that you're making is, is first of all, there's a large business, it's probably about a hundred billion dollar Tam. Uh, and the, the point you're making, because we've looked, we've contextualized most of our operational systems, but the big data pipeline is hasn't gotten there. But, and maybe we could talk about that a little bit because democratizing data is Nirvana, but it's been historically very difficult. You've got a number of companies it's very fragmented and they're all trying to attack their little piece of the problem to achieve an outcome, but it's been hard. And so what's going to be different about Altryx as you bring these puzzle pieces together, how is this going to impact your customers who would like to take that one? >>Yeah, maybe, maybe I'll take a crack at it. And Adam will, um, add on, um, you know, there hasn't been a single platform for analytics, automation in the enterprise, right? People have relied on, uh, different products, um, to solve kind of, uh, smaller problems, um, across this analytics, automation, data transformation domain. Um, and, um, I think uniquely Alcon's has that opportunity. Uh, we've got 7,000 plus customers who rely on analytics for, um, data management, for analytics, for AI and ML, uh, for transformations, uh, for reporting and visualization for automated insights and so on. Um, and so by bringing drive factor, we have the opportunity to scale this even further and solve for more use cases, expand the scenarios where it's applied and so multiple personas. Um, and we just talked about the data engineers. They are really a growing stakeholder in this transformation of data and analytics. >>Yeah, good. Maybe we can stay on this for a minute cause you, you you're right. You bring it together. Now at least three personas the business analyst, the end user slash business user. And now the data engineer, which is really out of an it role in a lot of companies, and you've used this term, the data engineering cloud, what is that? How is it going to integrate in with, or support these other personas? And, and how's it going to integrate into the broader ecosystem of clouds and cloud data warehouses or any other data stores? >>Yeah, no, that's great. Uh, yeah, I think for us, we really looked at this and said, you know, we want to build an open and interactive cloud platform for data engineers, you know, to collaboratively profile pipeline, um, and prepare data for analysis. And that really meant collaborating with the analysts that were in the line of business. And so this is why a big reason why this combination is so magic because ultimately if we can get the data engineers that are creating the data products together with the analysts that are in the line of business that are driving a lot of the decision making and allow for that, what I would describe as collaborative curation of the data together, so that you're starting to see, um, uh, you know, increasing returns to scale as this, uh, as this rolls out. I just think that is an incredibly powerful combination and, and frankly, something that the market is not crack the code on yet. And so, um, I think when we, when I sat down with Suresh and with mark and the team at Ultrix, that was really part of the, the, the big idea, the big vision that was painted and got us really energized about the acquisition and about the potential of the combination. >>And you're really, you're obviously writing the cloud and the cloud native wave. Um, and, but specifically we're seeing, you know, I almost don't even want to call it a data warehouse anyway, because when you look at what's, for instance, Snowflake's doing, of course their marketing is around the data cloud, but I actually think there's real justification for that because it's not like the traditional data warehouse, right. It's, it's simplified get there fast, don't necessarily have to go through the central organization to share data. Uh, and, and, and, but it's really all about simplification, right? Isn't that really what the democratization comes down to. >>Yeah. It's simplification and collaboration. Right. I don't want to, I want to kind of just what Adam said resonates with me deeply. Um, analytics is one of those, um, massive disciplines inside an enterprise that's really had the weakest of tools. Um, and we just have interfaces to collaborate with, and I think truly this was all drinks and a superpower was helping the analysts get more out of their data, get more out of the analytics, like imagine a world where these people are collaborating and sharing insights in real time and sharing workflows and getting access to new data sources, um, understanding data models better, I think, um, uh, curating those insights. I boring Adam's phrase again. Um, I think that creates a real value inside the organization because frankly in scaling analytics and democratizing analytics and data, we're still in such early phases of this journey. >>So how should we think about designer cloud, which is from Altrix it's really been the on-prem and the server desktop offering. And of course Trifacta is with cloud cloud data warehouses. Right. Uh, how, how should we think about those two products? Yeah, >>I think, I think you should think about them. And, uh, um, as, as very complimentary right designer cloud really shares a lot of DNA and heritage with, uh, designer desktop, um, the low code tooling and that interface, uh, the really appeals to the business analysts, um, and gets a lot of the things that they do well, we've also built it with interoperability in mind, right. So if you started building your workflows in designer desktop, you want to share that with design and cloud, we want to make it super easy for you to do that. Um, and I think over time now we're only a week into, um, this Alliance with, um, with, um, Trifacta, um, I think we have to get deeper inside to think about what does the data engineer really need? What's the business analysts really need and how to design a cloud, and Trifacta really support both of those requirements, uh, while kind of continue to build on the trifecta on the amazing Trifacta cloud platform. >>You know, >>I think we're just going to say, I think that's one of the things that, um, you know, creates a lot of, uh, opportunity as we go forward, because ultimately, you know, Trifacta took a platform, uh, first mentality to everything that we built. So thinking about openness and extensibility and, um, and how over time people could build things on top of factor that are a variety of analytic tool chain, or analytic applications. And so, uh, when you think about, um, Ultrix now starting to, uh, to move some of its capabilities or to provide additional capabilities, uh, in the cloud, um, you know, Trifacta becomes a platform that can accelerate, you know, all of that work and create, uh, uh, a cohesive set of, of cloud-based services that, um, share a common platform. And that maintains independence because both companies, um, have been, uh, you know, fiercely independent, uh, and, and really giving people choice. >>Um, so making sure that whether you're, uh, you know, picking one cloud platform and other, whether you're running things on the desktop, uh, whether you're running in hybrid environments, that, um, no matter what your decision, um, you're always in a position to be able to get out your data. You're always in a position to be able to cleanse transform shape structure, that data, and ultimately to deliver, uh, the analytics that you need. And so I think in that sense, um, uh, you know, this, this again is another reason why the combination, you know, fits so well together, giving people, um, the choice. Um, and as they, as they think about their analytics strategy and their platform strategy going forward, >>Yeah. I make a chuckle, but one of the reasons I always liked Altrix is cause you kinda did the little end run on it. It can be a blocker sometimes, but that created problems, right? Because the organization said, wow, this big data stuff has taken off, but we need security. We need governance. And it's interesting because you've got, you know, ETL has been complex, whereas the visualization tools, they really, you know, really weren't great at governance and security. It took some time there. So that's not, not their heritage. You're bringing those worlds together. And I'm interested, you guys just had your sales kickoff, you know, what was their reaction like? Uh, maybe Suresh, you could start off and maybe Adam, you could bring us home. >>Um, thanks for asking about our sales kickoff. So we met for the first time and you've got a two years, right. For, as, as it is for many of us, um, in person, uh, um, which I think was a, was a real breakthrough as Qualtrics has been on its transformation journey. Uh, we added a Trifacta to, um, the, the potty such as the tour, um, and getting all of our sales teams and product organizations, um, to meet in person in one location. I thought that was very powerful for other the company. Uh, but then I tell you, um, um, the reception for Trifacta was beyond anything I could have imagined. Uh, we were working out him and I will, when he's so hot on, on the deal and the core hypotheses and so on. And then you step back and you're going to share the vision with the field organization, and it blows you away, the energy that it creates among our sellers out of partners. >>And I'm sure Madam will and his team were mocked, um, every single day, uh, with questions and opportunities to bring them in. But Adam, maybe you should share. Yeah, no, it was, uh, it was through the roof. I mean, uh, uh, the, uh, the amount of energy, the, uh, certainly how welcoming everybody was, uh, uh, you know, just, I think the story makes so much sense together. I think culturally, the company is, are very aligned. Um, and, uh, it was a real, uh, real capstone moment, uh, to be able to complete the acquisition and to, and to close and announced, you know, at the kickoff event. And, um, I think, you know, for us, when we really thought about it, you know, when we ended, the story that we told was just, you have this opportunity to really cater to what the end users care about, which is a lot about interactivity and self-service, and at the same time. >>And that's, and that's a lot of the goodness that, um, that Altryx is, has brought, you know, through, you know, you know, years and years of, of building a very vibrant community of, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of users. And on the other side, you know, Trifacta bringing in this data engineering focus, that's really about, uh, the governance things that you mentioned and the openness, um, that, that it cares deeply about. And all of a sudden, now you have a chance to put that together into a complete story where the data engineering cloud and analytics, automation, you know, coming together. And, um, and I just think, you know, the lights went on, um, you know, for people instantaneously and, you know, this is a story that, um, that I think the market is really hungry for. And certainly the reception we got from, uh, from the broader team at kickoff was, uh, was a great indication. >>Well, I think the story hangs together really well, you know, one of the better ones I've seen in, in this space, um, and, and you guys coming off a really, really strong quarter. So congratulations on that jets. We have to leave it there. I really appreciate your time today. Yeah. Take a look at this short video. And when we come back, we're going to dig into the ecosystem and the integration into cloud data warehouses and how leading organizations are creating modern data teams and accelerating their digital businesses. You're watching the cube you're leader in enterprise tech coverage. >>This is your data housed neatly insecurely in the snowflake data cloud. And all of it has potential the potential to solve complex business problems, deliver personalized financial offerings, protect supply chains from disruption, cut costs, forecast, grow and innovate. All you need to do is put your data in the hands of the right people and give it an opportunity. Luckily for you. That's the easy part because snowflake works with Alteryx and Alteryx turns data into breakthroughs with just a click. Your organization can automate analytics with drag and drop building blocks, easily access snowflake data with both sequel and no SQL options, share insights, powered by Alteryx data science and push processing to snowflake for lightning, fast performance, you get answers you can put to work in your teams, get repeatable processes they can share in that's exciting because not only is your data no longer sitting around in silos, it's also mobilized for the next opportunity. Turn your data into a breakthrough Alteryx and snowflake >>Okay. We're back here in the queue, focusing on the business promise of the cloud democratizing data, making it accessible and enabling everyone to get value from analytics, insights, and data. We're now moving into the eco systems segment the power of many versus the resources of one. And we're pleased to welcome. Barb Hills camp was the senior vice president partners and alliances at Ultrix and a special guest Terek do week head of technology alliances at snowflake folks. Welcome. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Good to see >>Dave. Great to see you guys. So cloud migration, it's one of the hottest topics. It's the top one of the top initiatives of senior technology leaders. We have survey data with our partner ETR it's number two behind security, and just ahead of analytics. So we're hovering around all the hot topics here. Barb, what are you seeing with respect to customer, you know, cloud migration momentum, and how does the Ultrix partner strategy fit? >>Yeah, sure. Partners are central company's strategy. They always have been. We recognize that our partners have deep customer relationships. And when you connect that with their domain expertise, they're really helping customers on their cloud and business transformation journey. We've been helping customers achieve their desired outcomes with our partner community for quite some time. And our partner base has been growing an average of 30% year over year, that partner community and strategy now addresses several kinds of partners, spanning solution providers to global SIS and technology partners, such as snowflake and together, we help our customers realize the business promise of their journey to the cloud. Snowflake provides a scalable storage system altereds provides the business user friendly front end. So for example, it departments depend on snowflake to consolidate data across systems into one data cloud with Altryx business users can easily unlock that data in snowflake solving real business outcomes. Our GSI and solution provider partners are instrumental in providing that end to end benefit of a modern analytic stack in the cloud providing platform, guidance, deployment, support, and other professional services. >>Great. Let's get a little bit more into the relationship between Altrix and S in snowflake, the partnership, maybe a little bit about the history, you know, what are the critical aspects that we should really focus on? Barb? Maybe you could start an Interra kindly way in as well. >>Yeah, so the relationship started in 2020 and all shirts made a big bag deep with snowflake co-innovating and optimizing cloud use cases together. We are supporting customers who are looking for that modern analytic stack to replace an old one or to implement their first analytic strategy. And our joint customers want to self-serve with data-driven analytics, leveraging all the benefits of the cloud, scalability, accessibility, governance, and optimizing their costs. Um, Altrix proudly achieved. Snowflake's highest elite tier in their partner program last year. And to do that, we completed a rigorous third party testing process, which also helped us make some recommended improvements to our joint stack. We wanted customers to have confidence. They would benefit from high quality and performance in their investment with us then to help customers get the most value out of the destroyed solution. We developed two great assets. One is the officer starter kit for snowflake, and we coauthored a joint best practices guide. >>The starter kit contains documentation, business workflows, and videos, helping customers to get going more easily with an altered since snowflake solution. And the best practices guide is more of a technical document, bringing together experiences and guidance on how Altryx and snowflake can be deployed together. Internally. We also built a full enablement catalog resources, right? We wanted to provide our account executives more about the value of the snowflake relationship. How do we engage and some best practices. And now we have hundreds of joint customers such as Juniper and Sainsbury who are actively using our joint solution, solving big business problems much faster. >>Cool. Kara, can you give us your perspective on the partnership? >>Yeah, definitely. Dave, so as Barb mentioned, we've got this standing very successful partnership going back years with hundreds of happy joint customers. And when I look at the beginning, Altrix has helped pioneer the concept of self-service analytics, especially with use cases that we worked on with for, for data prep for BI users like Tableau and as Altryx has evolved to now becoming from data prep to now becoming a full end to end data science platform. It's really opened up a lot more opportunities for our partnership. Altryx has invested heavily over the last two years in areas of deep integration for customers to fully be able to expand their investment, both technologies. And those investments include things like in database pushed down, right? So customers can, can leverage that elastic platform, that being the snowflake data cloud, uh, with Alteryx orchestrating the end to end machine learning workflows Alteryx also invested heavily in snow park, a feature we released last year around this concept of data programmability. So all users were regardless of their business analysts, regardless of their data, scientists can use their tools of choice in order to consume and get at data. And now with Altryx cloud, we think it's going to open up even more opportunities. It's going to be a big year for the partnership. >>Yeah. So, you know, Terike, we we've covered snowflake pretty extensively and you initially solve what I used to call the, I still call the snake swallowing the basketball problem and cloud data warehouse changed all that because you had virtually infinite resources, but so that's obviously one of the problems that you guys solved early on, but what are some of the common challenges or patterns or trends that you see with snowflake customers and where does Altryx come in? >>Sure. Dave there's there's handful, um, that I can come up with today, the big challenges or trends for us, and Altrix really helps us across all of them. Um, there are three particular ones I'm going to talk about the first one being self-service analytics. If we think about it, every organization is trying to democratize data. Every organization wants to empower all their users, business users, um, you know, the, the technology users, but the business users, right? I think every organization has realized that if everyone has access to data and everyone can do something with data, it's going to make them competitively, give them a competitive advantage with Altrix is something we share that vision of putting that power in the hands of everyday users, regardless of the skillsets. So, um, with self-service analytics, with Ultrix designer they've they started out with self-service analytics as the forefront, and we're just scratching the surface. >>I think there was an analyst, um, report that shows that less than 20% of organizations are truly getting self-service analytics to their end users. Now, with Altryx going to Ultrix cloud, we think that's going to be a huge opportunity for us. Um, and then that opens up the second challenge, which is machine learning and AI, every organization is trying to get predictive analytics into every application that they have in order to be competitive in order to be competitive. Um, and with Altryx creating this platform so they can cater to both the everyday business user, the quote unquote, citizen data scientists, and making a code friendly for data scientists to be able to get at their notebooks and all the different tools that they want to use. Um, they fully integrated in our snow park platform, which I talked about before, so that now we get an end to end solution caring to all, all lines of business. >>And then finally this concept of data marketplaces, right? We, we created snowflake from the ground up to be able to solve the data sharing problem, the big data problem, the data sharing problem. And Altryx um, if we look at mobilizing your data, getting access to third-party datasets, to enrich with your own data sets, to enrich with, um, with your suppliers and with your partners, data sets, that's what all customers are trying to do in order to get a more comprehensive 360 view, um, within their, their data applications. And so with Altryx alterations, we're working on third-party data sets and marketplaces for quite some time. Now we're working on how do we integrate what Altrix is providing with the snowflake data marketplace so that we can enrich these workflows, these great, great workflows that Altrix writing provides. Now we can add third party data into that workflow. So that opens up a ton of opportunities, Dave. So those are three I see, uh, easily that we're going to be able to solve a lot of customer challenges with. >>So thank you for that. Terrick so let's stay on cloud a little bit. I mean, Altrix is undergoing a major transformation, big focus on the cloud. How does this cloud launch impact the partnership Terike from snowflakes perspective and then Barb, maybe, please add some color. >>Yeah, sure. Dave snowflake started as a cloud data platform. We saw our founders really saw the challenges that customers are having with becoming data-driven. And the biggest challenge was the complexity of having imagine infrastructure to even be able to do it, to get applications off the ground. And so we created something to be cloud-native. We created to be a SAS managed service. So now that that Altrix is moving to the same model, right? A cloud platform, a SAS managed service, we're just, we're just removing more of the friction. So we're going to be able to start to package these end to end solutions that are SAS based that are fully managed. So customers can, can go faster and they don't have to worry about all of the underlying complexities of, of, of stitching things together. Right? So, um, so that's, what's exciting from my viewpoint >>And I'll follow up. So as you said, we're investing heavily in the cloud a year ago, we had two pre desktop products, and today we have four cloud products with cloud. We can provide our users with more flexibility. We want to make it easier for the users to leverage their snowflake data in the Alteryx platform, whether they're using our beloved on-premise solution or the new cloud products were committed to that continued investment in the cloud, enabling our joint partner solutions to meet customer requirements, wherever they store their data. And we're working with snowflake, we're doing just that. So as customers look for a modern analytic stack, they expect that data to be easily accessible, right within a fast, secure and scalable platform. And the launch of our cloud strategy is a huge leap forward in making Altrix more widely accessible to all users in all types of roles, our GSI and our solution provider partners have asked for these cloud capabilities at scale, and they're excited to better support our customers, cloud and analytic >>Are. How about you go to market strategy? How would you describe your joint go to market strategy with snowflake? >>Sure. It's simple. We've got to work backwards from our customer's challenges, right? Driving transformation to solve problems, gain efficiencies, or help them save money. So whether it's with snowflake or other GSI, other partner types, we've outlined a joint journey together from recruit solution development, activation enablement, and then strengthening our go to market strategies to optimize our results together. We launched an updated partner program and within that framework, we've created new benefits for our partners around opportunity registration, new role based enablement and training, basically extending everything we do internally for our own go-to-market teams to our partners. We're offering partner, marketing resources and funding to reach new customers together. And as a matter of fact, we recently launched a fantastic video with snowflake. I love this video that very simply describes the path to insights starting with your snowflake data. Right? We do joint customer webinars. We're working on joint hands-on labs and have a wonderful landing page with a lot of assets for our customers. Once we have an interested customer, we engage our respective account managers, collaborating through discovery questions, proof of concepts really showcasing the desired outcome. And when you combine that with our partners technology or domain expertise, it's quite powerful, >>Dark. How do you see it? You'll go to market strategy. >>Yeah. Dave we've. Um, so we initially started selling, we initially sold snowflake as technology, right? Uh, looking at positioning the diff the architectural differentiators and the scale and concurrency. And we noticed as we got up into the larger enterprise customers, we're starting to see how do they solve their business problems using the technology, as well as them coming to us and saying, look, we want to also know how do you, how do you continue to map back to the specific prescriptive business problems we're having? And so we shifted to an industry focus last year, and this is an area where Altrix has been mature for probably since their inception selling to the line of business, right? Having prescriptive use cases that are particular to an industry like financial services, like retail, like healthcare and life sciences. And so, um, Barb talked about these, these starter kits where it's prescriptive, you've got a demo and, um, a way that customers can get off the ground and running, right? >>Cause we want to be able to shrink that time to market, the time to value that customers can watch these applications. And we want to be able to, to tell them specifically how we can map back to their business initiatives. So I see a huge opportunity to align on these industry solutions. As BARR mentioned, we're already doing that where we've released a few around financial services working in healthcare and retail as well. So that is going to be a way for us to allow customers to go even faster and start to map two lines of business with Alteryx. >>Great. Thanks Derek. Bob, what can we expect if we're observing this relationship? What should we look for in the coming year? >>A lot specifically with snowflake, we'll continue to invest in the partnership. Uh, we're co innovators in this journey, including snow park extensibility efforts, which Derek will tell you more about shortly. We're also launching these great news strategic solution blueprints, and extending that at no charge to our partners with snowflake, we're already collaborating with their retail and CPG team for industry blueprints. We're working with their data marketplace team to highlight solutions, working with that data in their marketplace. More broadly, as I mentioned, we're relaunching the ultra partner program designed to really better support the unique partner types in our global ecosystem, introducing new benefits so that with every partner, achievement or investment with ultra score, providing our partners with earlier access to benefits, um, I could talk about our program for 30 minutes. I know we don't have time. The key message here Alteryx is investing in our partner community across the business, recognizing the incredible value that they bring to our customers every day. >>Tarik will give you the last word. What should we be looking for from, >>Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Dave. As BARR mentioned, Altrix has been the forefront of innovating with us. They've been integrating into, uh, making sure again, that customers get the full investment out of snowflake things like in database push down that I talked about before that extensibility is really what we're excited about. Um, the ability for Ultrix to plug into this extensibility framework that we call snow park and to be able to extend out, um, ways that the end users can consume snowflake through, through sequel, which has traditionally been the way that you consume snowflake as well as Java and Scala, not Python. So we're excited about those, those capabilities. And then we're also excited about the ability to plug into the data marketplace to provide third party data sets, right there probably day sets in, in financial services, third party, data sets and retail. So now customers can build their data applications from end to end using ultrasound snowflake when the comprehensive 360 view of their customers, of their partners, of even their employees. Right? I think it's exciting to see what we're going to be able to do together with these upcoming innovations. Great >>Barb Tara, thanks so much for coming on the program, got to leave it right there in a moment, I'll be back with some closing thoughts in a summary, don't go away. >>1200 hours of wind tunnel testing, 30 million race simulations, 2.4 second pit stops make that 2.3. The sector times out the wazoo, whites are much of this velocity's pressures, temperatures, 80,000 components generating 11.8 billion data points and one analytics platform to make sense of it all. When McLaren needs to turn complex data into insights, they turn to Altryx Qualtrics analytics, automation, >>Okay, let's summarize and wrap up the session. We can pretty much agree the data is plentiful, but organizations continue to struggle to get maximum value out of their data investments. The ROI has been elusive. There are many reasons for that complexity data, trust silos, lack of talent and the like, but the opportunity to transform data operations and drive tangible value is immense collaboration across various roles. And disciplines is part of the answer as is democratizing data. This means putting data in the hands of those domain experts that are closest to the customer and really understand where the opportunity exists and how to best address them. We heard from Jay Henderson that we have all this data exhaust and cheap storage. It allows us to keep it for a long time. It's true, but as he pointed out that doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Data is spewing out from our operational systems, but much of it lacks business context for the data teams chartered with analyzing that data. >>So we heard about the trend toward low code development and federating data access. The reason this is important is because the business lines have the context and the more responsibility they take for data, the more quickly and effectively organizations are going to be able to put data to work. We also talked about the harmonization between centralized teams and enabling decentralized data flows. I mean, after all data by its very nature is distributed. And importantly, as we heard from Adam Wilson and Suresh Vittol to support this model, you have to have strong governance and service the needs of it and engineering teams. And that's where the trifecta acquisition fits into the equation. Finally, we heard about a key partnership between Altrix and snowflake and how the migration to cloud data warehouses is evolving into a global data cloud. This enables data sharing across teams and ecosystems and vertical markets at massive scale all while maintaining the governance required to protect the organizations and individuals alike. >>This is a new and emerging business model that is very exciting and points the way to the next generation of data innovation in the coming decade. We're decentralized domain teams get more facile access to data. Self-service take more responsibility for quality value and data innovation. While at the same time, the governance security and privacy edicts of an organization are centralized in programmatically enforced throughout an enterprise and an external ecosystem. This is Dave Volante. All these videos are available on demand@theqm.net altrix.com. Thanks for watching accelerating automated analytics in the cloud made possible by Altryx. And thanks for watching the queue, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> And, welcome back to theCube's coverage of Red Hat Summit, 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We've got a great segment here on how Red Hat is working with telcos and the disruption in the telco cloud. We've got a great guest Cube alumni, Darrell Jordan Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts at Red Hat. Darrell, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on theCube. >> Oh, it's been, it's great to be here and I'm really excited about having the opportunity to talk to you today. >> Yeah, we're not in person, in real life's coming back soon. Although I hear Mobile World Congress, might be in person this year, looking like it's good. A lot of people are going to be virtual and activating I know. A lot to talk about. This is probably one of the most important topics in the industry because when you talk about telco industry, you're really talking about the edge. You're talking about 5G, talking about industrial benefits for business, because it's not just edge for connectivity access. We're talking about innovative things from self-driving cars to business benefits. It's not just consumer, it's really bringing that together. You guys are really leading with the cloud-native platform from REL, OpenShift managed services. Everything about the cloud-native underpinnings, you guys have been successful as a company. But now in your area, telco is being disrupted. You're leading the way >> Absolutely. Give us your take on this, this is super exciting. >> Well, it's actually one of the most exciting times. I've been in the industry for 30 years. I'm probably aging myself now, but in the telecommunications industry, this for me, is the most exciting. It's where, you know, technology is actually going to visibly change, the way, that everyone interacts with the network. And with the applications that are being developed out there on, on our platform. and, you know, as you mentioned, IoT, and a number of the other AI and ML innovations, that are occurring in the marketplace. We're going to see a new wave of applications and innovation. >> What's the key delivery workload you're seeing, with 5G environment. Obviously it's not just, you know 5G in the sense of thinking about mobile phones or mobile computers as they are now. It's not just that consumer, "Hey surf the web and check your email and get an app and download and, and communicate". It's bigger than that now. Can you tell us, where you see the workloads coming in on the 5G environment? >> You, you hit the nail on the head. The, the, the, the killer application, isn't the user or the consumer and the way that we traditionally have known it. Because you might be able to download a video and that might take 20 seconds less, but you're not going to pay an awful lot more money for that. The real opportunity around 5G, is the industrial applications. Things like connected car. You know automotive driving, factory floor automation. How you actually interface digitally with your bank. How we're doing all sorts of things, more intelligently at the edge of the network, using artificial intelligence and machine learning. So all of those things are going to deliver a new experience, for everyone that interacts with the network and the telcos are at the heart of it. >> You know, I want to get into the real kind of underpinnings, of what's going on with the innovations happening. You just kind of laid out kind of the implications of the use cases and the target application workloads, but there's kind of two big things going on with the edge and 5G. One is under the hood networking, you know, what's going on with the moving the packets around the workload, throughput, bandwidth, et cetera, and all that, that goes on under the hood. And then there's the domain expertise in the data, where AI and machine learning have to kind of weave in. So let's take the first part, first. OpenShift is out there. Red Hat's got a lot of products, but you have to nail the networking requirements and cloud native with containerization, because at large scales, not just packets, it's all kinds of things going on, security, managing compute at the edge. There's a lot of things under the hood, if you will, from a networking perspective. >> Could you share what Red Hat's doing in that area? >> Yep, so, so that's a very good question, in that we've been building on our experience with OpenStack and the last time I was on theCube, I talked about, you know, people virtualizing network applications and network services. We're taking a lot of that knowledge, that we've learned from OpenStack and we're bringing that into the container based world. So we're looking at how we accelerate packets. We're looking at how we build cloud-native applications, on bare metal, in order to drive that level of performance. We're looking at actually how we do, the certification around these applications and services, because they may be sitting in different applets across the cloud. And in some instances running on multiple clouds, at the same time. So we're building on our experience from OpenStack. We're bringing all of that into OpenShift, our container based environment. With all of the tooling necessary to make that effective. >> It's interesting with all the automation going on and certainly with the edge developing nicely, the way you're describing it, it's certainly disrupting the telco cloud. You have an operator mindset a cloud-native operator thinking, kind of, I mean it's distributed computing. We know that, but it's hybrid. So it's essentially cloud operations. So there's an operator mindset here, that's just different. Could you just share quickly, before we move on to the next segment, what's different about this operating model, for the, these new kinds of operators. As, as you guys have been saying, the CIO is the new cloud operator. That's the skill set they have to be thinking. And certainly IT, to anyone else provisioning and managing infrastructure has to think like an operator, what's your view? >> Exactly. They certainly do need to think like an operator. They need to look at how they automate a lot of these functions, because they're actually deployed in many different places, all at the same time. They have to live independently of each other, that's what cloud-native actually really is. So the whole, the whole notion of five nines and vertically orientated stacks of five nines availability that's kind of going out the window. We're looking at application availability, across a hybrid cloud environment and making sure the application can live and sustain itself. So operators as part of OpenShift is one element of that, operations in terms of management and orchestration and all the tooling that we actually also provide as Red Hat, but also in conjunction with a big partner ecosystem, such as companies like Netcracker, for example, or IBM as another example. Or Ericsson bringing their automation tool sets and their orchestration tool sets, to that whole equation, to address exactly that problem. >> Yeah. You bring up the ecosystem and this is really an interesting point. I want to, just hit on that real quick, because it reminds me of the days, when we had this massive innovation wave in the nineties. During that era, the client server movement, really was about multi-vendor, right? And that, you start to see that now and where this ties into here I think, is and I want to get your reaction to this is that, you know, moving to the cloud was all about to 2015, moved to the cloud, move to the cloud, cloud-native. Now it's all about not only being agile and better performance, but you're going to have smaller footprints, with more security requirements, more net, enterprise requirements. This is now, it's more complicated. So you have to kind of make the complication go away. And now you have more people in the ecosystem, filling in these white spaces. So, you have to be performance and purpose built, if you will. I hate to use that word, but, or, or at least performing and agile, smaller footprint, greater security, enabling other people to participate. That's a requirement. Can you share your reactions to that? >> Well, that's core of what we do at Red Hat. I mean, we take open source community software, into a hardened distribution, fit for the telecommunications marketplace. So we're very adapt to working with communities and third parties. That ecosystem is really important to us. We're investing hundreds of engineers, literally hundreds of engineers, working with our ecosystem partners, to make sure that their application is services certified running on our platform. But also importantly, is certified to be running in conjunction with other cloud-native applications that sit under the same cloud. So that, that is not trivial to achieve, in any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of IT technology skills come to bear. And as you mentioned earlier a lot of networking skills, things that we've learned, and we build with a lot of these traditional vendors as we bring that to the marketplace. >> You know, I've been saying on theCube, I think five years ago, I started talking about this and it was kind of a loose formulation. I want to get your reaction, because you brought up ecosystem. Now saying, you know, you're going to see the big clouds develop obviously Amazon and Microsoft came in after and now Google and others. And then I said, there's going to be a huge wave of, of what I call secondary clouds. And you see companies, like Snowflake building on top of Amazon. And so you start to see the power law, of new cloud service providers emerging, that can either sit and work with, across multiple clouds, either one cloud or others, that's now multi-cloud and hybrid. But this rise of the new, more CSPs, more cloud service providers. This is a huge part of your area right now because some call that telco, telco cloud, edge hits that. What is Red Hat doing in this cloud service provider market specifically? How do you help them? If I'm a cloud service provider, what do I get in working with Red Hat? How do I be successful? Because it's very easy to be a cloud service provider now more than ever. What do I do? How do you help? How do you help me? >> Well, we, we, we offer a, a platform called OpenShift which is our containerized based platform, but it's not just a container. It involves huge amounts of tooling associated with operating it, developing in and around it. So the, the concept that we have, is that you can bring those applications, develop them once, on one, one single platform, and run it on premise. You can run it natively as a service in Microsoft's environment. You can actually run it natively as a service in Amazon's environment. You can run it natively in IBM's environment. You can build an application once and run it in all of them, depending on what you want to achieve and who actually provides you the best zoning, the best terms and conditions, the best, the best tooling in terms of other services, such as an AI, associated with that. So it's all about developing it once, certifying it once, but deploying it in many, many different locations, leveraging the largest possible developer ecosystem, to drive innovation through applications on that common platform. >> So the assumption there, is that's going to drive down costs. Can you tell me about why the benefits, the economics are there? Talk about the economics. >> Well, Yeah, so, so, A, it does drive down costs and that's an important aspect but more importantly, it drives up agility, so time to market advantage is actually attainable for you. So many of the telcos when they deploy a network service, traditionally it would take them literally, maybe a year to roll it all out. They have to do it in days, they have to do updates in real time, in day two operations, in literally minutes. So we were building the fabric necessary, in order to enable those applications and services to occur. And as you move into the edge of the network and you look at things like private 5G networks, service providers or telcos, in this instance, will be able to deliver services all the way out to the edge, into that private 5G environment and operate that, in conjunction with those enterprise clients. >> So OpenShift allows me if I get this right, from the CSP to run, have a horizontally scalable organization. Okay. And from a unification platform standpoint. Okay. Whether it's 5G and other functions, is that correct? >> Darrell: That's correct. >> Okay. So you've got that. Now I want to come in and bring in the top of the stack with the other element that's been been a big conversation here at Red Hat Summit and in the industry. That is AI and the use of data. One of the things that's emerging is the ability to have both the horizontal scale, as well as the specialism of the data and have that domain expertise. You're in the industries for Red Hat. This is important because you're going to have, one industry is going to have different jargon, different language, different data, different KPIs. So you got to have that domain expertise, to enable the ability, to, to write the apps and also enable AI. Can you comment on how that works and what's Red Hat do in there? >> So, so, so, we, we're developing OpenShift and a number of our, other technologies, to be fit for the edge of the network, where a lot of these AI applications will reside, because you want them at the closest to the client or the, or the application itself, where it needs to reside. We're, we're creating that edge fabric, if you like. The next generation of hybrid cloud is really going to be, in my view at the edge. We're enabling a lot of the service providers to go after that, but we're also igniting by industry. You mentioned different industries. So if I look at, for example, manufacturing with MindSphere, we recently announced with Siemens, how they do at the edge of the network, factory automation, collecting telemetry, doing real-time data and analytics, looking at materials going through the factory floor, in order to get a better quality result, with lower, lower levels of imperfections, as they run through that system. It's just one industry and they have, their own private and favorite AI platforms and data sets they want to work with. With their own data scientists who understand that, that, that ecosystem inherently. You can move that to healthcare. And you can imagine, you know, how you actually interface with your healthcare professionals here in North America, but also around the world. How those applications and services and what the AI needs to do, in terms of understanding x-rays and looking at, you know common errors associated with different x-rays, so, so our practitioner can make a more specific diagnosis, faster, saving money and potentially lives as well. So different, different vertical markets in this space, have different AI and ML requirements and needs, different data sciences and different data models. And what we're seeing is an ecosystem of companies, that are starting up there in that space, you know, we have Watson as part of IBM, but you have Perceptor Labs, you have H2O and a number of other, very very important AI based companies in that ecosystem. >> Yeah. And you've got the horizontal scalability of the control plane then in the platform, if you will, that gives us cross-organizational leverage and enable that, that vertical domain expertise. >> Exactly. And you'd want to build an AI application, that might run on a factory floor for certain reasons, it's location and what they're actually physically building. You might want to run that on premise. You might actually want to put it in the IBM cloud, or in Zuora or into AWS. You develop it once to OpenShift, you can deploy it in all of those as a service, sitting natively in those environments. >> Darrell, great chat. You got a lot going on. telco cloud, there is a lot of cloud-native disruption going on. It's a challenge and an opportunity. And some people have to be on the right side of history, on this one, if they're going to get it right. We'll know, and the scoreboard will be very clear, 'cause this is a shift, it's a shift. So again, you hit all the key points that I wanted to get out, but I want to ask you two more areas that are hot here at Red Hat Summit 21, as well, again as well in the industry. I want to get your reaction and thoughts on. And they are DevSecOps and automation. Okay. Two areas everyone's talking about, DevOps, which we know is infrastructure as code, programmability, under the hood, modern application development, all good. You add the second there, security, DevSecOps, it's critical. Automation is continuing to be the benefits of cloud-native. So DevSecOps and automation, what's your take, and how's that impact the telco world and your world? >> You can't, you can't operate a network without having security in place. You're talking about very sensitive data. You're talking about applications that could be real-time critical And this is actually, even lifesaving or life threatening, if you don't get them right. So the acquisition that Red Hat recently made around StackRox, really helps us, make that next level of transition into that space. And we're looking at about how we go about securing containers, in a cloud-native environment. As you can imagine, there'll be many many thousands, tens of thousands of containers running. If one is actually misbehaving for want of a better term, that creates a security risk and a security loophole. We're shoring that up. That's important for the deployment OpenShift in the telco domain and other domains. In terms of automation, if you can't do it at scale and if you look at 5G and you look at the radios at the edge of the network and how you're going to provision those services. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands. So you have to automate a lot of those processes, otherwise you can't scale to meet the opportunity. You can't physically deploy. >> You know, Darrell this is a great conversation, you know as a student of history and Dave Vellante and I always kind of joke about that. And you've been in and around the industry for a long time. Telcos have been balancing this evolution of digital business for many, many decades. And now with cloud-native, it's finally a time where you're startin' to see, that it's just the same game, now, new infrastructure. You know, video, voice, text, data, all now happening, all transformed and going digital, all the way, all aspects of it. In your opinion, how should telcos be thinking about, as they put their plans in place for next generation? Because you know, the world is, is now cloud-native. There's a huge surface here of opportunities, different ecosystem relationships. The power dynamics are shifting. It's, it's really a time where there will be winners and there will be losers. What's your, what's your view on on how the telco industry needs to Cloudify, and how to be positioned for success? >> So, so one of the things I, I truly believe very deeply, that the telcos need to create a platform, horizontal platform that attracts developer and ecosystems to their platform, because innovation is going to sit elsewhere. Then you know, there might be a killer application that one telco might create, but in reality, most of those innovations, the most of those disruptors are going to occur from outside of that telco company. So you want to create an environment, where you're easy to engage and you've got maximum sets of tools and versatility and agility in order to attract that innovation. If you attract the innovation, you're going to ignite the business opportunity that 5G and 6G and beyond is going to actually provide you, or enable your business to drive. And you've really got to unlock that innovation. And you can only unlock it, in our view at Red Hat innovation, if you're open. You know, you follow open standards, you're using open systems and open source, is a method or a tool, that you guys, if you're a telco I would ask, you guys need to leverage and harness. >> Yeah. And there's a lot. And there's a lot of upside there if you get that right. >> Yes. >> There's plenty of upside. A lot of leverage, a lot of assets, take advantage of the whole offline, online, coming back together. We are living in a hybrid world, certainly with the pandemic. We've seen what that means. It's put a spotlight, on critical infrastructure and the critical shifts. If you had to kind of get pinned down Darrell, how would you describe that learnings from the pandemic. As folks start to come out of the pandemic, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. As we come out of this pandemic, companies want a growth strategy. Want to be positioned for success. What's your learning coming out of the pandemic? >> So from, from my perspective, which really kind of in one respect was, was very admirable, but, in another respect is actually deeply, a lot of gratitude, is the fact that the telecommunications companies, because of their carrier grade capabilities and their operational prowess, were able to keep their networks up and running and they had to move significant capacity from major cities to rural areas, because everyone was working from home. And in many different countries around the world, they did that extremely, extremely well. And their networks held up. I don't know, and maybe someone will correct me and email me, but I don't know one telco had a huge network outage, through this pandemic. And that kept us connected. It kept us working. And it also, what I also learned is, that in certain countries, particularly Latam, where they have a very large prepaid market. They were worried that the prepaid market in the pandemic would go down, because they felt that people would have less money to spend. And therefore they wouldn't top up their phones as much. The opposite effect occurred. They saw prepaid grow. And that really taught me, that, that connectivity is critical, in times of stress, that we are also, where everyone's going through. So, I think there were some key learnings there. >> Yeah, I think you're right on the money there. It's like they pulled the curtain back of all the FUD and said, you know, necessity's the mother of invention. And when you look at what happened and what had to happen, to survive in the pandemic and be functional, you're, you nailed it. The network stability, the resilience, but also the new capabilities that were needed, had to be delivered in an agile way. And I think, you know, it's pretty much a forcing function, for all the projects that are on the table, to know which ones to double down on. So, I think you pretty much nailed it. >> Thank you. Darrell Jordan Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts for Red Hat, theCube alumni. Thanks for that insight. Thanks for sharing. Great conversation around telcos and telco clouds and all the edge opportunities. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. It's theCube's coverage of Red Hat Summit 21. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> From Santa Clara, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, its theCUBE. Covering Altitude 2020, brought to you by Aviatrix. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude. (upbeat music) Please keep your seat belts fastened and remain in your seat. We will be experiencing turbulence, until we are above the clouds. (thunder blasting) (electronic music) (seatbelt alert sounds) Ladies and gentlemen, we are now cruising at altitude. Sit back and enjoy the ride. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers, cloud architects and enlightened network engineers, who have individually and are now collectively, leading their own IT teams and the industry. On a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds. Empowering enterprise IT to architect, design and control their own cloud network, regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them. It's time to gain altitude. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Mullaney, president and CEO of Aviatrix. The leader of multi-cloud networking. (electronic music) (audience clapping) >> Steve: All right. (audience clapping) Good morning everybody, here in Santa Clara as well as to the millions of people watching the livestream worldwide. Welcome to Altitude 2020, all right. So, we've got a fantastic event, today, I'm really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started. So, one of the things I wanted to share was this is not a one-time event. This is not a one-time thing that we're going to do. Sorry for the Aviation analogy, but, you know, Sherry Wei, aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do has an aviation theme. This is a take-off, for a movement. This isn't an event, this is a take-off of a movement. A multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of. And why we're doing that, is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds, so to speak and build their network architecture, regardless of which public cloud they're using. Whether it's one or more of these public clouds. So the good news, for today, there's lots of good news but this is one good news, is we don't have any PowerPoint presentations, no marketing speak. We know that marketing people have their own language. We're not using any of that, and no sales pitches, right? So instead, what are we doing? We're going to have expert panels, we've got Simon Richard, of Gartner here. We've got ten different network architects, cloud architects, real practitioners that are going to share their best practices and their real world experiences on their journey to the multi-cloud. So, before we start, everybody know what today is? In the U.S., it's Super Tuesday. I'm not going to get political, but Super Tuesday there was a bigger, Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago. And Aviatrix employees know what I'm talking about. Eighteen months ago, on a Tuesday, every enterprise said, "I'm going to go to the cloud". And so what that was, was the Cambrian explosion, for cloud, for the enterprise. So, Frank Cabri, you know what a Cambrian explosion is. He had to look it up on Google. 500 million years ago, what happened, there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex, multi-cell organisms. Guess what happened 18 months ago, on a Tuesday, I don't really know why, but every enterprise, like I said, all woke up that day and said, "Now I'm really going to go to cloud" and that Cambrian explosion of cloud meant that I'm moving from a very simple, single cloud, single-use case, simple environment, to a very complex, multi-cloud, complex use case environment. And what we're here today, is we're going to go undress that and how do you handle those, those complexities? And, when you look at what's happening, with customers right now, this is a business transformation, right? People like to talk about transitions, this is a transformation and it's actually not just a technology transformation, it's a business transformation. It started from the CEO and the Boards of enterprise customers where they said, "I have an existential threat to the survival of my company." If you look at every industry, who they're worried about is not the other 30-year-old enterprise. What they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud, that's leveraging AI, and that's where they fear that they're going to actually wiped out, right? And so, because of this existential threat, this is CEO led, this is Board led, this is not technology led, it is mandated in the organizations. We are going to digitally transform our enterprise, because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that. And so, IT is now put back in charge. If you think back just a few years ago, in cloud, it was led by DevOps, it was led by the applications and it was, like I said, before the Cambrian explosion, it was very simple. Now, with this Cambrian explosion, an enterprise is getting very serious and mission critical. They care about visibility, they care about control, they care about compliance, conformance, everything, governance. IT is in charge and that's why we're here today to discuss that. So, what we're going to do today, is much of things but we're going to validate this journey with customers. >> Steve: Did they see the same thing? We're going to validate the requirements for multi-cloud because, honestly, I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multicloud. Many are one cloud today but they all say, " I need to architect my network for multiple clouds", because that's just what, the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run in whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that. The second thing is, is architecture. Again, with IT in charge, you, architecture matters. Whether its your career, whether its how you build your house, it doesn't matter. Horrible architecture, your life is horrible forever. Good architecture, your life is pretty good. So, we're going to talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network. If you don't get that right, nothing works, right? Way more important than compute. Way more important than storage. Network is the foundational element of your infrastructure. Then we're going to talk about day two operations. What does that mean? Well day one is one day of your life, where you wire things up they do and beyond. I tell everyone in networking and IT -- it's every day of your life. And if you don't get that right, your life is bad forever. And so things like operations, visibility, security, things like that, how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud, it's actually about how do I operationalize it? And that's a huge benefit that we bring as Aviatrix. And then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have, I always sayyou can't forget about the humans, right? So all this technology, all these things that we're doing, it's always enabled by the humans. At the end of the day, if the humans fight it, it won't get deployed. And we have a massive skills gap, in cloud and we also have a massive skills shortage. You have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects, right? There's just not enough of them going around. So, at Aviatrix, we said as leaders do, "We're going to help address that issue and try to create more people." We created a program, what we call the ACE Program, again, aviation theme, it stands for Aviatrix Certified Engineer. Very similar to what Cisco did with CCIEs where Cisco taught you about IP networking, a little bit of Cisco, we're doing the same thing, we're going to teach network architects about multicloud networking and architecture and yeah, you'll get a little bit of Aviatrix training in there, but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organizations. So we're going to go talk about that. So, great, great event, great show. We're going to try to keep it moving. I next want to introduce, my host, he is the best in the business, you guys have probably seen him multiple, many times, he is the co-CEO and co founder of theCUBE, John Furrier. (audience clapping) (electronic music) >> John: Okay, awesome, great speech there, awesome. >> Yeah. >> I totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited, here at the heart of silicon valley to have this event. It's a special digital event with theCUBE and Aviatrix, where we're live-streaming to, millions of people, as you said, maybe not a million. >> Maybe not a million. (laughs) Really to take this program to the world and this is really special for me, because multi-cloud is the hottest wave in cloud. And cloud-native networking is fast becoming the key engine, of the innovations, so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming. We have a customer panel. Two customer panels. Before that Gartner's going to come out, talk about the industry. We have global system integrators, that will talk about, how their advising and building these networks and cloud native networking. And then finally the ACE's, the Aviatrix Certified Engineers, are going to talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed. So, let's jump right in, let's ask, Simon Richard to come on stage, from Gartner. We'll kick it all off. (electronic music) (clapping) >> John: Hi, can I help you. Okay, so kicking things off, getting started. Gartner, the industry experts on cloud. Really kind of more, cue your background. Talk about your background before you got to Gartner? >> Simon: Before being at Gartner, I was a chief network architect, of a Fortune 500 company, that with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything in IT from a C programmer, in the 90, to a security architect, to a network engineer, to finally becoming a network analyst. >> So you rode the wave. Now you're covering the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi-cloud, is really what everyone is talking about. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native's been discussed, but the networking piece is super important. How do you see that evolving? >> Well, the way we see Enterprise adapting, cloud. The first thing you do about networking, the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way. Is usually led by none IT, like a shadow IT, or application people, sometime a DevOps team and it just goes as, it's completely unplanned. They create VPC's left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and they have Direct Connect or Express Route to any of them. So that's the first approach and on the other side. again within our first approach you see what I call, the lift and shift. Where we see like enterprise IT trying to, basically replicate what they have in a data center, in the Cloud. So they spend a lot of time planning, doing Direct Connect, putting Cisco routers and F5 and Citrix and any checkpoint, Palo Alto device, that in a sense are removing that to the cloud. >> I got to ask you, the aha moment is going to come up a lot, in one our panels, is where people realize, that it's a multi-cloud world. I mean, they either inherit clouds, certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever. When's that aha moment? That you're seeing, where people go, "Well I got to get my act together and get on this cloud." >> Well the first, right, even before multi-cloud. So there is two approach's. The first one, like the adult way doesn't scare. At some point IT has to save them, 'cause they don't think about the tools, they don't think about operation, they have a bunch of VPC and multiple cloud. The other way, if you do the lift and shift way, they cannot take any advantages of the cloud. They lose elasticity, auto-scaling, pay by the drink. All these agility features. So they both realize, okay, neither of these ways are good, so I have to optimize that. So I have to have a mix of what I call, the cloud native services, within each cloud. So they start adapting, like all the AWS Construct, Azure Construct or Google Construct and that's what I call the optimal phase. But even that they realize, after that, they are all very different, all these approaches different, the cloud are different. Identities is constantly, difficult to manage across clouds. I mean, for example, anybody who access' accounts, there's subscription, in Azure and GCP, their projects. It's a real mess, so they realized, well I don't really like constantly use the cloud product and every cloud, that doesn't work. So I have, I'm going multi-cloud, I like to abstract all of that. I still want to manage the cloud from an EPI point of view, I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products, but I have to do that and in a more EPI driven cloud environment. >> So, the not scaling piece that you where mentioning, that's because there's too many different clouds? >> Yes. >> That's the least they are, so what are they doing? What are they, building different development teams? Is it software? What's the solution? >> Well, the solution is to start architecting the cloud. That's the third phase. I called that the multi-cloud architect phase, where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud. Fact, even across one cloud it might not scale as well, If you start having like ten thousand security agreement, anybody who has that doesn't scale. You have to manage that. If you have multiple VPC, it doesn't scale. You need a third-party, identity provider. In variously scales within one cloud, if you go multiple cloud, it gets worse and worse. >> Steve, weigh in here. What's your thoughts? >> I thought we said this wasn't going to be a sales pitch for Aviatrix. (laughter) You just said exactly what we do, so anyway, that's a joke. What do you see in terms of where people are, in that multi-cloud? So, like lot of people, you know, everyone I talk to, started at one cloud, right, but then they look and then say okay but I'm now going to move to Azure and I'm going to move to... (trails off) Do you see a similar thing? >> Well, yes. They are moving but there's not a lot of application, that uses three cloud at once, they move one app in Azure, one app in AWS and one app in Google. That's what we see so far. >> Okay, yeah, one of the mistakes that people think, is they think multi-cloud. No one is ever going to go multi-cloud, for arbitrage. They're not going to go and say, well, today I might go into Azure, 'cause I get a better rate on my instance. Do you agree? That's never going to happen. What I've seen with enterprise, is I'm going to put the workload in the app, the app decides where it runs best. That may be Azure, maybe Google and for different reasons and they're going to stick there and they're not going to move. >> Let me ask you guys-- >> But the infrastructure, has to be able to support, from a networking team. >> Yes. >> Be able to do that. Do you agree with that? >> Yes, I agree. And one thing is also very important, is connecting to the cloud, is kind of the easiest thing. So, the wide area network part of the cloud, connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple. >> Steve: I agree. >> IP's like VPN, Direct Connect, Express Route. That's the simple part, what's difficult and even the provisioning part is easy. You can use Terraform and create VPC's and Vnet's across your three cloud provider. >> Steve: Right. >> What's difficult is that they choose the operation. So we'll define day two operation. What does that actually mean? >> Its just the day to day operations, after you know, the natural, lets add an app, lets add a server, lets troubleshoot a problem. >> Something changes, now what do you do? >> So what's the big concerns? I want to just get back to the cloud native networking, because everyone kind of knows what cloud native apps are. That's been the hot trend. What is cloud native networking? How do you guys, define that? Because that seems to be the hardest part of the multi-cloud wave that's coming, is cloud native networking. >> Well there's no, you know, official Gartner definition but I can create one on the spot. >> John: Do it. (laughter) >> I just want to leverage the Cloud Construct and the cloud EPI. I don't want to have to install, like a... (trails off) For example, the first version was, let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand the cloud environment. >> Right. If I have if I have to install a virtual machine, it has to be cloud aware. It has to understand the security group, if it's a router. It has to be programmable, to the cloud API. And understand the cloud environment. >> And one thing I hear a lot from either CSO's, CIO's or CXO's in general, is this idea of, I'm definitely not going API. So, its been an API economy. So API is key on that point, but then they say. Okay, I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers, aka you called it above the clouds. So the question is... What do I do from an architectural standpoint? Do I just hire more developers and have different teams, because you mentioned that's a scale point. How do you solve this problem of, okay, I got AWS, I got GCP, or Azure, or whatever. Do I just have different teams or do I just expose EPI's? Where is that optimization? Where's the focus? >> Well, I think what you need, from a network point of view is a way, a control plane across the three clouds. And be able to use the API's of the cloud, to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do day to day operation. So you need a view across the three clouds, that takes care of routing, connectivity. >> Steve: Performance. >> John: That's the Aviatrix plugin, right there. >> Steve: Yeah. So, how do you see, so again, your Gartner, you see the industry. You've been a network architect. How do you see this this playing out? What are the legacy incumbent client server, On Prem networking people, going to do? >> Well they need to.. >> Versus people like a Aviatrix? How do you see that playing out? >> Well obviously, all the incumbents, like Arista, Cisco, Juniper, NSX. >> Steve: Right. >> They want to basically do the lift and shift part, they want to bring, and you know, VMware want to bring in NSX on the cloud, they call that "NSX everywhere" and Cisco want to bring in ACI to the cloud, they call that "ACI Anywhere". So, everyone's.. (trails off) And then there's CloudVision from Arista, and Contrail is in the cloud. So, they just want to bring the management plane, in the cloud, but it's still based, most of them, is still based on putting a VM in them and controlling them. You extend your management console to the cloud, that's not truly cloud native. >> Right. >> Cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch. >> We like to call that cloud naive. >> Cloud naive, yeah. >> So close, one letter, right? >> Yes. >> That was a big.. (slurs) Reinvent, take the T out of Cloud Native. It's Cloud Naive. (laughter) >> That went super viral, you guys got T-shirts now. I know you're loving that. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But that really, ultimately, is kind of a double-edged sword. You can be naive on the architecture side and ruleing that. And also suppliers or can be naive. So how would you define who's naive and who's not? >> Well, in fact, their evolving as well, so for example, in Cisco, it's a little bit more native than other ones, because there really is, "ACI in the cloud", you can't really figure API's out of the cloud. NSX is going that way and so is Arista, but they're incumbent, they have their own tools, its difficult for them. They're moving slowly, so it's much easier to start from scratch. Even you, like, you know, a network company that started a few years ago. There's only really two, Aviatrix was the first one, they've been there for at least three or four years. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And there's other one's, like Akira, for example that just started. Now they're doing more connectivity, but they want to create an overlay network, across the cloud and start doing policies and things. Abstracting all the clouds within one platform. >> So, I got to ask you. I interviewed an executive at VMware, Sanjay Poonen, he said to me at RSA last week. Oh, there'll only be two networking vendors left, Cisco and VMware. (laughter) >> What's you're response to that? Obviously when you have these waves, these new brands that emerge, like Aviatrix and others. I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork. How do you respond to that comment? >> Well there's still a data center, there's still, like a lot, of action on campus and there's the wan. But from the cloud provisioning and cloud networking in general, I mean, they're behind I think. You know, you don't even need them to start with, you can, if you're small enough, you can just keep.. If you have AWS, you can use the AWS construct, they have to insert themselves, I mean, they're running behind. From my point of view. >> They are, certainly incumbents. I love the term Andy Jess uses at Amazon web services. He uses "Old guard, new guard", to talk about the industry. What does the new guard have to do? The new brands that are emerging. Is it be more DevOp's oriented? Is it NetSec ops? Is it NetOps? Is it programmability? These are some of the key discussions we've been having. What's your view, on how you see this programmability? >> The most important part is, they have to make the network simple for the Dev teams. You cannot make a phone call and get a Vline in two weeks anymore. So if you move to the cloud, you have to make that cloud construct as simple enough, so that for example, a Dev team could say, "Okay, I'm going to create this VPC, but this VPC automatically associates your account, you cannot go out on the internet. You have to go to the transit VPC, so there's lot of action in terms of, the IAM part and you have to put the control around them to. So to make it as simple as possible. >> You guys, both. You're the CEO of Aviatrix, but also you've got a lot of experience, going back to networking, going back to the, I call it the OSI days. For us old folks know what that means, but, you guys know what this means. I want to ask you the question. As you look at the future of networking, you hear a couple objections. "Oh, the cloud guys, they got networking, we're all set with them. How do you respond to the fact that networking's changing and the cloud guys have their own networking. What's some of the paying points that's going on premises of these enterprises? So are they good with the clouds? What needs... What are the key things that's going on in networking, that makes it more than just the cloud networking? What's your take on it? >> Well as I said earlier. Once you could easily provision in the cloud, you can easily connect to the cloud, its when you start troubleshooting applications in the cloud and try to scale. So that's where the problem occurred. >> Okay, what's your take on it. >> And you'll hear from the customers, that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the clouds by definition, designed to the 80-20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality. And then lead to 20% extra functionality, that of course every Enterprise needs, to leave that to ISV's, like Aviatrix. Because why? Because they have to make money, they have a service and they can't have huge instances, for functionality that not everybody needs. So they have to design to the common and that, they all do it, right? They have to and then the extra, the problem is, that Cambrian explosion, that I talked about with enterprises. That's what they need. They're the ones who need that extra 20%. So that's what I see, there's always going to be that extra functionality. In an automated and simple way, that you talked about, but yet powerful. With the up with the visibility and control, that they expect of On Prem. That kind of combination, that Yin and the Yang, that people like us are providing. >> Simon I want to ask you? We're going to ask some of the cloud architect, customer panels, that same question. There's pioneer's doing some work here and there's also the laggards who come in behind their early adopters. What's going to be the tipping point? What are some of these conversations, that the cloud architects are having out there? Or what's the signs, that they need to be on this, multi-cloud or cloud native networking trend? What are some of the signal's that are going on in the environment? What are some of the thresholds? Are things that are going on, that they can pay attention to? >> Well, once they have the application on multiple cloud and they have to get wake up at two in the morning, to troubleshoot them. They'll know it's important. (laughter) So, I think that's when the rubber will hit the road. But, as I said, it's easier to prove, at any case. Okay, it's AWS, it's easy, user transit gateway, put a few VPC's and you're done. And you create some presents like Equinox and do a Direct Connect and Express Route with Azure. That looks simple, its the operations, that's when they'll realize. Okay, now I need to understand! How cloud networking works? I also need a tool, that gives me visibility and control. But not only that, I need to understand the basic underneath it as well. >> What are some of the day in the life scenarios. you envision happening with multi-cloud, because you think about what's happening. It kind of has that same vibe of interoperability, choice, multi-vendor, 'cause they're multi-cloud. Essentially multi-vendor. These are kind of old paradigms, that we've lived through with client server and internet working. What are some of the scenarios of success, that might be possible? Will be possible, with multi-cloud and cloud native networking. >> Well, I think, once you have good enough visibility, to satisfy your customers, not only, like to, keep the service running and application running. But to be able to provision fast enough, I think that's what you want to achieve. >> Simon, final question. Advice for folks watching on the Livestream, if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or CXO. What's your advice to them right now, in this market, 'cause obviously, public cloud check, hybrid cloud, they're working on that. That gets on premises done, now multi-cloud's right behind it. What's your advice? >> The first thing they should do, is really try to understand cloud networking. For each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitations. And, is what the cloud service provider offers enough? Or you need to look to a third party, but you don't look at a third party to start with. Especially an incumbent one, so it's tempting to say "I have a bunch of F5 experts", nothing against F5. I'm going to bring my F5 in the Cloud, when you can use an ELB, that automatically understand eases and auto scaling and so on. And you understand that's much simpler, but sometimes you need your F5, because you have requirements. You have like iRules and that kind of stuff, that you've used for years. 'cause you cannot do it. Okay, I have requirement and that's not met, I'm going to use Legacy Star and then you have to start thinking, okay, what about visibility control, above the true cloud. But before you do that you have to understand the limitations of the existing cloud providers. First, try to be as native as possible, until things don't work, after that you can start thinking of the cloud. >> Great insight, Simon. Thank you. >> That's great. >> With Gartner, thank you for sharing. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to ALTITUDE 2020. For the folks in the live stream, I'm John Furrier, Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix. For our first of two customer panels with cloud network architects, we've got Bobby Willoughby, AEGON Luis Castillo from National Instruments and David Shinnick with FactSet. Guys, welcome to the stage for this digital event. Come on up. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) Hey good to see you, thank you. Customer panel, this is my favorite part. We get to hear the real scoop, we get the Gardener giving us the industry overview. Certainly, multi-cloud is very relevant, and cloud-native networking is a hot trend with the live stream out there in the digital events. So guys, let's get into it. The journey is, you guys are pioneering this journey of multi-cloud and cloud-native networking and are soon going to be a lot more coming. So I want to get into the journey. What's it been like? Is it real? You've got a lot of scar tissue? What are some of the learnings? >> Absolutely. Multi-cloud is whether or not we accept it, as network engineers is a reality. Like Steve said, about two years ago, companies really decided to just bite the bullet and move there. Whether or not we accept that fact, we need to not create a consistent architecture across multiple clouds. And that is challenging without orchestration layers as you start managing different tool sets and different languages across different clouds. So it's really important to start thinking about that. >> Guys on the other panelists here, there's different phases of this journey. Some come at it from a networking perspective, some come in from a problem troubleshooting, what's your experiences? >> From a networking perspective, it's been incredibly exciting, it's kind of once in a generational opportunity to look at how you're building out your network. You can start to embrace things like infrastructure as code that maybe your peers on the systems teams have been doing for years, but it just never really worked on-prem. So it's really exciting to look at all the opportunities that we have and all of the interesting challenges that come up that you get to tackle. >> And effects that you guys are mostly AWS, right? >> Yeah. Right now though, we are looking at multiple clouds. We have production workloads running in multiple clouds today but a lot of the initial work has been with Amazon. >> And you've seen it from a networking perspective, that's where you guys are coming at it from? >> Yup. >> Awesome. How about you? >> We evolve more from a customer requirement perspective. Started out primarily as AWS, but as the customer needed more resources from Azure like HPC, Azure AD, things like that, even recently, Google analytics, our journey has evolved into more of a multi-cloud environment. >> Steve, weigh in on the architecture because this is going to be a big conversation, and I wanted you to lead this section. >> I think you guys agree the journey, it seems like the journey started a couple of years ago. Got real serious, the need for multi-cloud, whether you're there today. Of course, it's going to be there in the future. So that's really important. I think the next thing is just architecture. I'd love to hear what you, had some comments about architecture matters, it all starts, every enterprise I talked to. Maybe talk about architecture and the importance of architects, maybe Bobby. >> From architecture perspective, we started our journey five years ago. >> Wow, okay. >> And we're just now starting our fourth evolution over network architect. And we call it networking security net sec, versus just as network. And that fourth-generation architecture should be based primarily upon the Palo Alto Networks and Aviatrix. Aviatrix to new orchestration piece of it. But that journey came because of the need for simplicity, the need for a multi-cloud orchestration without us having to go and do reprogramming efforts across every cloud as it comes along. >> I guess the other question I also had around architecture is also... Luis maybe just talk about it. I know we've talked a little bit about scripting, and some of your thoughts on that. >> Absolutely. So for us, we started creating the network constructs with cloud formation, and we've stuck with that for the most part. What's interesting about that is today, on-premise, we have a lot of automation around how we provision networks, but cloud formation has become a little bit like the new manual for us. We're now having issues with having to automate that component and making it consistent with our on-premise architecture and making it consistent with Azure architecture and Google cloud. So, it's really interesting to see companies now bring that layer of abstraction that SD-WAN brought to the wound side, now it's going up into the cloud networking architecture. >> Great. So on the fourth generation, you mentioned you're on the fourth-gen architecture. What have you learned? Is there any lessons, scratch issue, what to avoid, what worked? What was the path that you touched? >> It's probably the biggest lesson there is that when you think you finally figured it out, you haven't. Amazon will change something, Azure change something. Transit Gateway is a game-changer. And listening to the business requirements is probably the biggest thing we need to do upfront. But I think from a simplicity perspective, like I said, we don't want to do things four times. We want to do things one time, we want be able to write to an API which Aviatrix has and have them do the orchestration for us. So that we don't have to do it four times. >> How important is architecture in the progression? Is it do you guys get thrown in the deep end, to solve these problems, are you guys zooming out and looking at it? How are you guys looking at the architecture? >> You can't get off the ground if you don't have the network there. So all of those, we've gone through similar evolutions, we're on our fourth or fifth evolution. I think about what we started off with Amazon without Direct Connect Gateway, without Transit Gateway, without a lot of the things that are available today, kind of the 80, 20 that Steve was talking about. Just because it wasn't there doesn't mean we didn't need it. So we needed to figure out a way to do it, we couldn't say, "Oh, you need to come back to the network team in a year, and maybe Amazon will have a solution for it." We need to do it now and evolve later and maybe optimize or change the way you're doing things in the future. But don't sit around and wait, you can't. >> I'd love to have you guys each individually answer this question for the live streams that comes up a lot. A lot of cloud architects out in the community, what should they be thinking about the folks that are coming into this proactively and, or realizing the business benefits are there? What advice would you guys give them on architecture? What should be they'd be thinking about, and what are some guiding principles you could share? >> So I would start with looking at an architecture model that can spread and give consistency to the different cloud vendors that you will absolutely have to support. Cloud vendors tend to want to pull you into using their native tool set, and that's good if only it was realistic to talk about only one cloud. But because it doesn't, it's super important to talk about, and have a conversation with the business and with your technology teams about a consistent model. >> And how do I do my day one work so that I'm not spending 80% of my time troubleshooting or managing my network? Because if I'm doing that, then I'm missing out on ways that I can make improvements or embrace new technologies. So it's really important early on to figure out, how do I make this as low maintenance as possible so that I can focus on the things that the team really should be focusing on? >> Bobby, your advice there, architecture. >> I don't know what else I can add to that. Simplicity of operations is key. >> So the holistic view of day two operations you mentioned, let's can jump in day one as you're getting stuff set up, day two is your life after. This is kind of of what you're getting at, David. So what does that look like? What are you envisioning as you look at that 20-mile stair, out post multi-cloud world? What are some of the things that you want in the day two operations? >> Infrastructure as code is really important to us. So how do we design it so that we can start fit start making network changes and fitting them into a release pipeline and start looking at it like that, rather than somebody logging into a router CLI and troubleshooting things in an ad hoc nature? So, moving more towards a dev-ops model. >> You guys, anything to add on that day two? >> Yeah, I would love to add something. In terms of day two operations you can either sort of ignore the day two operations for a little while, where you get your feet wet, or you can start approaching it from the beginning. The fact is that the cloud-native tools don't have a lot of maturity in that space and when you run into an issue, you're going to end up having a bad day, going through millions and millions of logs just to try to understand what's going on. That's something that the industry just now is beginning to realize it's such a big gap. >> I think that's key because for us, we're moving to more of an event-driven or operations. In the past, monitoring got the job done. It's impossible to monitor something that is not there when the event happens. So the event-driven application and then detection is important. >> Gardner is all about the cloud-native wave coming into networking. That's going to be a serious thing. I want to get your guys' perspective, I know you have each different views of how you come into the journey and how you're executing. And I always say the beauty's in the eye of the beholder and that applies to how the network's laid out. So, Bobby, you guys do a lot of high-performance encryption, both on AWS and Azure. That's a unique thing for you. How are you seeing that impact with multi-cloud? >> That's a new requirement for us too, where we have an increment to encrypt. And then if you ever get the question, should I encrypt, should I not encrypt? The answer is always yes. You should encrypt when you can encrypt. For our perspective, we need to migrate a bunch of data from our data centers. We have some huge data centers, and getting that data to the cloud is a timely expense in some cases. So we have been mandated, we have to encrypt everything, leave in the data center. So we're looking at using the Aviatrix insane mode appliances to be able to encrypt 10, 20 gigabits of data as it moves to the cloud itself. >> David, you're using Terraform, you've got FireNet, you've got a lot of complexity in your network. What do you guys look at the future for your environment? >> So many exciting that we're working on now as FireNet. So for our security team that obviously have a lot of knowledge base around Palo Alto, and with our commitments to our clients, it's not very easy to shift your security model to a specific cloud vendor. So there's a lot of SOC 2 compliance and things like that were being able to take some of what you've worked on for years on-prem and put it in the cloud and have the same type of assurance that things are going to work and be secure in the same way that they are on-prem, helps make that journey into the cloud a lot easier. >> And Louis, you guys got scripting, you got a lot of things going on. What's your unique angle on this? >> Absolutely. So for disclosure, I'm not an Aviatrix customer yet. (laughs) >> It's okay, we want to hear the truth, so that's good. Tell us, what are you thinking about? What's on your mind? >> When you talk about implementing a tool like this, it's really just really important to talk about automation focus on value. When you talk about things like encryption and things like so you're encrypting tunnels and encrypting the path, and those things should be second nature really. When you look at building those back-ends and managing them with your team, it becomes really painful. So tools like Aviatrix that add a lot automation it's out of sight, out of mind. You can focus on the value, and you don't have to focus on this. >> So I got to ask you guys. I see Aviatrix was here, they're supplier to this sector, but you guys are customers. Everyone's pitching your stuff, people knock on you, "Buy my stuff." How do you guys have that conversation with the suppliers, like the cloud vendors and other folks? What's it like? We're API all the way? You've got to support this? What are some of your requirements? How do you talk to and evaluate people that walk in and want to knock on your door and pitch you something? What's the conversation like? >> It's definitely API driven. We definitely look at the API structure that the vendors provide before we select anything. That is always first of mine and also, what problem are we really trying to solve? Usually, people try to sell or try to give us something that isn't really valuable, like implementing a Cisco solution on the cloud doesn't really add a lot of value, that's where we go. >> David, what's your conversation like with suppliers? Do you have a certain new way to do things? As it becomes more agile, essentially networking, and getting more dynamic, what are some of the conversations with either in commits or new vendors that you're having? What do you require? >> Ease of use is definitely high up there. We've had some vendors come in and say, "Hey, when you go to set this up, "we're going to want to send somebody on-site." And they're going to sit with you for a day to configure it. And that's a red flag. Well, wait a minute, do we really, if one of my really talented engineers can't figure it out on his own, what's going on there and why is that? Having some ease of use and the team being comfortable with it and understanding it is really important. >> Bobby, how about you? Old days was, do a bake-off and the winner takes all. Is it like that anymore? What's evolving? Bake-off last year for but still win. But that's different now because now when you get the product, you can install the product in AWS and Azure, have it up running in a matter of minutes. So the key is that can you be operational within hours or days instead of weeks? But do we also have the flexibility to customize it, to meet your needs? Because you don't want to be put into a box with the other customers when you have needs that are past their needs. >> I can almost see the challenge that you guys are living, where you've got the cloud immediate value, depending how you can roll up any solutions, but then you might have other needs. So you've got to be careful not to buy into stuff that's not shipping. So you're trying to be proactive and at the same time, deal with what you got. How do you guys see that evolving? Because multi-cloud to me is definitely relevant, but it's not yet clear how to implement across. How do you guys look at this baked versus future solutions coming? How do you balance that? >> Again, so right now, we're taking the ad hoc approach and experimenting what the different concepts of cloud are and really leveraging the native constructs of each cloud. But there's a breaking point for sure. You don't get to scale this like someone said, and you have to focus on being able to deliver, developers their sandbox or their play area for the things that they're trying to build quickly. And the only way to do that is with some consistent orchestration layer that allows you to-- >> So you expect a lot more stuff to becoming pretty quickly in that area. >> I do expect things to start maturing quite quickly this year. >> And you guys see similar trend, new stuff coming fast? >> Yeah. Probably the biggest challenge we've got now is being able to segment within the network, being able to provide segmentation between production, non-production workloads, even businesses, because we support many businesses worldwide and isolation between those is a key criteria there. So the ability to identify and quickly isolate those workloads is key. So the CIOs that are watching are saying, "Hey, take that hill, do multi-cloud." And then you have the bottoms up organization, "Pause, you're like off a little bit, it's not how it works." What is the reality in terms of implementing as fast as possible? Because the business benefits are clear, but it's not always clear on the technology how to move that fast. What are some of the barriers, what are the blockers, what are the enablers? >> I think the reality is that you may not think you're multi-cloud, but your business is. So I think the biggest barrier there is understanding what the requirements are and how best to meet those requirements in a secure manner. Because you need to make sure that things are working from a latency perspective that things work the way they did and get out of the mind shift that it was a tier-three application and the data center, it doesn't have to be a tier-three application in the cloud. So, lift and shift is not the way to go. >> Scale is a big part of what I see is the competitive advantage by these clouds and used to be proprietary network stacks in the old days, and then open systems came, that was a good thing. But as cloud has become bigger, there's an inherent lock-in there with the scale. How do you guys keep the choice open? How are you guys thinking about interoperability? What are some of the conversations that you guys are having around those key concepts? >> When we look at from a networking perspective, it's really key for you to just enable all the class to be able to communicate between them. Developers will find a way to use the cloud that best suits their business needs. And like you said, it's whether you're in denial or not, of the multi-cloud fact that your company is in already that's it becomes really important for you to move quickly. >> Yeah. And a lot of it also hinges on how well is the provider embracing what that specific cloud is doing? So, are they swimming with Amazon or Azure and just helping facilitate things, and they're doing the heavy lifting API work for you? Or are they swimming upstream and they're trying to hack it all together in messy way? And so that helps you stay out of the lock-in because there, if they're using Amazon native tools to help you get where you need to be, it's not like Amazon is going to release something in the future that completely makes you have designed yourself into a corner. So the closer, more than cloud-native they are, the more, the easier it is to deploy. >> Which also need to be aligned in such a way that you can take advantage of those cloud-native technologies. Will it make sense? TGW is a gamechanger in terms of cost and performance. So to completely ignore that, would be wrong. But if you needed to have encryption, TGW is not encrypted, so you need to have some type of Gateway to do the VPN encryption. So, the Aviatrix tool will give you the beauty of both worlds. You can use TGW or the Gateway. Real quick on the last minute we have, I want to just get a quick feedback from you guys. I hear a lot of people say to me, "Hey, pick the best cloud for the workload you got, then figure out multicloud behind the scenes." Do you guys agree with that? Do I go more to one cloud across the whole company or this workload works great on AWS, that workload works great on this. From a cloud standpoint, do you agree with that premise, and then when is multi-cloud stitching altogether? >> From an application perspective, it can be per workload, but it can also be an economical decision, certain enterprise contracts will pull you in one direction to add value, but the network problem is still the same. >> It doesn't go away. >> You don't want to be trying to fit a square into a round hall. If it works better on that cloud provider, then it's our job to make sure that service is there and people can use it. >> I agree, you just need to stay ahead of the game, make sure that the network infrastructure is there, security is available and is multi-cloud capable. >> At the end of the day, you guys are just validating that it's the networking game now. Cloud storage, compute check, networking is where the action is. Awesome. Thanks for your insights guys, appreciate you coming on the panel. Appreciate it, thanks. (upbeat music) >> John: Our next customer panel, got great another set of cloud network architects, Justin Smith with Zuora, Justin Brodley with EllieMae and Amit Utreja with Coupa. Welcome to stage. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> All right, thank you. >> How are ya? >> Thank you. Thank You. >> Hey Amit. How are ya? >> Did he say it right? >> Yeah. >> Okay he's got all the cliff notes from the last session, welcome back. Rinse and repeat. We're going to go into the hood a little bit. And I think they nailed what we've been reporting, we've been having this conversation around, networking is where the action is because that's at the end of the day you got to move packet from A to B and you got workloads exchanging data. So it's really killer. So let's get started. Amit, what are you seeing as the journey of multicloud as you go under the hood and say, "Okay, I got to implement this. "I have to engineer the network, "make it enabling, make it programmable, "make it interoperable across clouds." That almost sounds impossible to me. What's your take? >> Yeah, it seems impossible but if you are running an organization which is running infrastructure as a code it is easily doable. Like you can use tools out there that's available today, you can use third party products that can do a better job. But put your architecture first, don't wait. Architecture may not be perfect, put the best architecture that's available today and be agile, to iterate and make improvements over the time. >> We get to Justin's over here, so I have to be careful when I point a question to Justin, they both have the answer. Okay, journeys, what's the journey been like? Is there phases, We heard that from Gardner, people come into multicloud and cloud native networking from different perspectives? What's your take on the journey, Justin? >> Yeah, from our perspective, we started out very much focused on one cloud and as we've started doing acquisitions, we started doing new products to the market, the need for multicloud becomes very apparent, very quickly for us. And so having an architecture that we can plug and play into and be able to add and change things as it changes is super important for what we're doing in the space. >> Justin, your journey. >> Yes. For us, we were very ad hoc oriented and the idea is that we were reinventing all the time, trying to move into these new things and coming up with great new ideas. And so rather than it being some iterative approach with our deployments that became a number of different deployments. And so we shifted that toward and the network has been a real enabler of this. There's one network and it touches whatever cloud we want it to touch, and it touches the data centers that we need it to touch, and it touches the customers that we needed to touch. Our job is to make sure that the services that are available in one of those locations are available in all of the locations. So the idea is not that we need to come up with this new solution every time, it's that we're just iterating on what we've already decided to do. >> Before we get the architecture section, I want to ask you guys a question? I'm a big fan of let the app developers have infrastructure as code, so check. But having the right cloud run that workload, I'm a big fan of that, if it works great. But we just heard from the other panel, you can't change the network. So I want to get your thoughts, what is cloud native networking? And is that the engine really, that's the enabler for this multicloud trend? What's you guys take? We'll start with Amit, what do you think about that? >> Yeah, so you're going to have workloads running in different clouds and the workloads would have affinity to one cloud or other. But how you expose that it's a matter of how you are going to build your networks. How you're going to run security. How you're going to do egress, ingress out of it so -- >> You said networking is the big problem to solve. >> Yes. >> What's the solution? What's the key pain points and problem statement? >> The key pain point for most companies is how do you take your traditionally on premise network and then blow it out to the cloud in a way that makes sense. You have IP conflicts, you have IP space, you have public IPs on premise as well as in the cloud. And how do you kind of make sense of all of that? And I think that's where tools like Aviatrix make a lot of sense in that space. >> From our side, it's really simple. It's a latency, it's bandwidth and availability. These don't change whether we're talking about cloud or data center, or even corporate IT networking. So our job when these all of these things are simplified into like, S3, for instance and our developers want to use those. We have to be able to deliver that and for a particular group or another group that wants to use just just GCP resources. We have to support these requirements and these wants, as opposed to saying, "Hey, that's not a good idea." No, our job is to enable them not to disable them. >> Do you guys think infrastructure is code? Which I love that, I think that's the future in this. We even saw that with DevOps. But as you start getting the networking, is it getting down to the network portion where its network as code? Because storage and compute working really well, we're seeing all Kubernetes on service mesh trend. Network has code, reality is it there? Is it still got work to do? >> It's absolutely there, you mentioned net DevOps and it's very real. In Coupa we build our networks through terraform and not only just terraform, build an API so that we can consistently build VNets and VPC all across in the same way. >> So you guys are doing it? >> Yup. And even security groups. And then on top and Aviatrix comes in, we can peer the networks bridge all the different regions through code. >> Same with you guys. >> Yeah. >> What do you think about this? >> Everything we deploy is done with automation and then we also run things like Lambda on top to make changes in real time, we don't make manual changes on our network. In the data center, funny enough, it's still manual but the cloud has enabled us to move into this automation mindset. And all my guys, that's what they focus on is bringing, now what they're doing in the cloud into the data center, which is kind of opposite of what it should be or what it used to be. >> It's full DevOps then? >> Yes. >> For us, it was similar on-prem is still somewhat very manual, although we're moving more and more to ninja and terraform type concepts. But everything in the production environment is code, confirmation terraform code and now coming into the data center same (mumbles). >> So I just wanted to jump in Justin Smith, one of the comment that you made, because it's something that we always talk about a lot is that the center of gravity of architecture used to be an on-prem and now it's shifted in the cloud. And once you have your strategic architecture, what do you do? You push that everywhere. So what you used to see at the beginning of cloud was pushing the architecture on-prem into cloud. Now, I want to pick up on what you said, do you others agree that the center of gravity is here, I'm now pushing what I do in the cloud back into on-prem? And then so first that and then also in the journey, where are you at from zero to 100 of actually in the journey to cloud? Are you 50% there, are you 10%? Are you evacuating data centers next year? Where are you guys at? >> Yeah, so there's there's two types of gravity that you typically are dealing with, with the migration. First is data, gravity and your data set, and where that data lives. And then the second is the network platform that wraps all that together. In our case, the data gravity solely mostly on-prem but our network is now extending out to the app tier, it's going to be in cloud. Eventually, that data, gravity will also move to cloud as we start getting more sophisticated but in our journey, we're about halfway there. About halfway through the process, we're taking a handle of lift and shift and -- >> Steve: And when did that start? >> We started about three years ago. >> Okay, okay. >> Well for Coupa it's a very different story. It started from a garage and 100% on the cloud. So it's a business plan management platform, software as a service run 100% on the cloud. >> That was was like 10 years ago, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> You guys are riding the wave of the architecture. Justin I want to ask you, Zuora, you guys mentioned DevOps. Obviously, we saw the huge observability wave, which essentially network management for the cloud, in my opinion. It's more dynamic, but this is about visibility. We heard from the last panel you don't know what's being turned on or turned off from a services standpoint, at any given time. How is all this playing out when you start getting into the DevOps down (mumbles)? >> This is the big challenge for all of us is visibility. When you talk transport within a cloud, very interestingly we we have moved from having a backbone that we bought, that we own, that would be data center connectivity. Zuora's a subscription billing company, so we want to support the subscription mindset. So rather than going and buying circuits and having to wait three months to install and then coming up with some way to get things connected and resiliency and redundancy. My backbone is in the cloud. I use the cloud providers interconnections between regions to transport data across and so if you do that with their native solutions, you do lose visibility. There are areas in that that you don't get, which is why controllers and having some type of management plane is a requirement for us to do what we're supposed to do and provide consistency while doing it. >> Great conversation. I loved what you said earlier latency, bandwidth, I think availability were your top three things. Guys SLA, just do ping times between clouds it's like, you don't know what you're getting for round trip time. This becomes a huge kind of risk management, black hole, whatever you want to call it, blind spot. How are you guys looking at the interconnect between clouds? Because I can see that working from ground to cloud on per cloud but when you start dealing with multiclouds workloads, SLAs will be all over the map, won't they just inherently. How do you guys view that? >> Yeah, I think we talked about workload and we know that the workloads are going to be different in different clouds, but they're going to be calling each other. So it's very important to have that visibility, that you can see how data is flowing at what latency and what availability is there and our authority needs to operate on that. >> So use the software dashboard, look at the times and look at the latency -- >> In the old days, Strongswan Openswan you try to figure it out, in the new days you have to figure out. >> Justin, what's your answer to that because you're in the middle of it? >> Yeah, I think the key thing there is that we have to plan for that failure, we have to plan for that latency in our applications. If certain things are tracking in your SLI, certain things are planning for and you loosely coupled these services in a much more microservices approach. So you actually can handle that kind of failure or that type of unknown latency and unfortunately, the cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions in a much better way. >> You guys are all great examples of cloud native from day one. When did you have the tipping point moment or the epiphany of saying a multiclouds real, I can't ignore it, I got to factor that into all my design principles and everything you're doing? Was there a moment or was it from day one? >> There are two reasons, one was the business. So in business, there were some affinity to not be in one cloud or to be in one cloud and that drove from the business side. So as a cloud architect our responsibility was to support that business. Another is the technology, some things are really running better in, like if you're running Dotnet workload or your going to run machine learning or AI so that you would have that preference of one cloud over other. >> Guys, any thoughts on that? >> That was the bill that we got from AWS. That's what drives a lot of these conversations is the financial viability of what you're building on top of. This failure domain idea which is fairly interesting. How do I solve our guarantee against a failure domain? You have methodologies with back end direct connects or interconnect with GCP. All of these ideas are something that you have to take into account but that transport layer should not matter to whoever we're building this for. Our job is to deliver the frames and the packets, what that flows across, how you get there? We want to make that seamless. And so whether it's a public internet API call or it's a back end connectivity through direct connect, it doesn't matter. It just has to meet a contract that you've signed with your application, folks. >> Yeah, that's the availability piece. >> Justin, your thoughts on that, any comment on that? >> So actually multiclouds become something much more recent in the last six to eight months, I'd say. We always kind of had a very much an attitude of like moving to Amazon from our private cloud is hard enough, why complicate it further? But the realities of the business and as we start seeing, improvements in Google and Azure and different technology spaces, the need for multicloud becomes much more important. As well as our acquisition strategies are matured, we're seeing that companies that used to be on premise that we typically acquire are now very much already on a cloud. And if they're on a cloud, I need to plug them into our ecosystem. And so that's really changed our multicloud story in a big way. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on the clouds versus the clouds, because you compare them Amazon's got more features, they're rich with features. Obviously, the bills are high to people using them. But Google's got a great network, Google's networks pretty damn good And then you got Azure. What's the difference between the clouds? Where do they fall? Where do they peak in certain areas better than others? What are the characteristics, which makes one cloud better? Do they have a unique feature that makes Azure better than Google and vice versa? What do you guys think about the different clouds? >> Yeah, to my experience, I think the approach is different in many places. Google has a different approach very DevOps friendly and you can run your workloads with your network can span regions. But our application ready to accept that. Amazon is evolving. I remember 10 years back Amazon's network was a flat network, we would be launching servers in 10.0.0/8, right. And then the VPCs came out. >> We'll have to translate that to English for the live feed. Not good. So the VPCs concept came out, multi account came out, so they are evolving. Azure had a late start but because they have a late start, they saw the pattern and they have some mature setup on the network. >> They've got around the same price too. >> I think they're all trying to say they're equal in their own ways. I think they all have very specific design philosophies that allow them to be successful in different ways and you have to kind of keep that in mind as you architect your own solution. For example, Amazon has a very regional affinity, they don't like to go cross region in their architecture. Whereas Google is very much it's a global network, we're going to think about as a global solution. I think Google also has advantage that it's third to market and so has seen what Azure did wrong, it seeing what AWS did wrong and it's made those improvements and I think that's one of their big advantage. >> They got great scale too. Justin thoughts on the cloud. >> So yeah, Amazon built from the system up and Google built from the network down. So their ideas and approaches are from a global versus original, I agree with you completely that is the big number one thing. But the if you look at it from the outset, interestingly, the inability or the ability for Amazon to limit layer to broadcasting and what that really means from a VPC perspective, changed all the routing protocols you can use. All the things that we had built inside of a data center to provide resiliency and make things seamless to users, all of that disappeared. And so because we had to accept that at the VPC level, now we have to accept that at the WAN level. Google's done a better job of being able to overcome those things and provide those traditional network facilities to us. >> Just a great panel, we could go all day here, it's awesome. So I heard, we will get to the cloud native naive questions. So kind of think about what's naive and what's cloud, I'll ask that next but I got to ask you I had a conversation with a friend he's like, "WAN is the new LAN?" So if you think about what the LAN was at a data center, WAN is the new LAN, cause you keep talking about the cloud impact? So that means ST-WAN, the old ST-WAN kind of changing. There's a new LAN. How do you guys look at that? Because if you think about it, what LANs were for inside a premises was all about networking, high speed. But now when you take the WAN and make it, essentially a LAN, do you agree with that? And how do you view this trend? Is it good or bad or is it ugly? What you guys take on this? >> Yeah, I think it's a thing that you have to work with your application architects. So if you are managing networks and if you're a server engineer, you need to work with them to expose the unreliability that it would bring in. So the application has to handle a lot of the difference in the latencies and the reliability has to be worked through the application there. >> LAN, WAN, same concept is that BS? Can you give some insight? >> I think we've been talking about for a long time the erosion of the edge. And so is this just a continuation of that journey we've been on for last several years. As we get more and more cloud native and we talked about API's, the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away. And so I think this is just continuation. I think it has challenges. We start talking about WAN scale versus LAN scale, the tooling doesn't work the same, the scale of that tooling is much larger. and the need to automation is much, much higher in a WAN than it wasn't a LAN. That's why you're seeing so much infrastructure as code. >> Yeah. So for me, I'll go back again to this, it's bandwidth and its latency that define those two LAN versus WAN. But the other thing that's comes up more and more with cloud deployments is whereas our security boundary and where can I extend this secure aware appliance or set of rules to protect what's inside of it. So for us, we're able to deliver VRFs or route forwarding tables for different segments wherever we're at in the world. And so they're trusted to talk to each other but if they're going to go to someplace that's outside of their network, then they have to cross the security boundary, where we enforce policy very heavily. So for me, there's it's not just LAN, WAN it's how does environment get to environment more importantly. >> That's a great point in security, we haven't talked it yet but that's got to be baked in from the beginning, this architecture. Thoughts on security, how you guys are dealing with it? >> Yeah, start from the base, have app to app security built in. Have TLS, have encryption on the data at transit, data at rest. But as you bring the application to the cloud and they're going to go multicloud, talking to over the internet, in some places, well have app to app security. >> Our principles day, security is day zero every day. And so we always build it into our design, build into our architecture, into our applications. It's encrypt everything, it's TLS everywhere. It's make sure that that data is secure at all times. >> Yeah, one of the cool trends at RSA, just as a side note was the data in use encryption piece, which is homomorphic stuff was interesting. Alright guys, final question. We heard on the earlier panel was also trending at re:Invent, we think the T out of cloud native, it spells cloud naive. They have shirts now, Aviatrix kind of got this trend going. What does that mean to be naive? To your peers out there watching the live stream and also the suppliers that are trying to supply you guys with technology and services, what's naive look like and what's native look like? When is someone naive about implementing all this stuff? >> So for me, because we are in 100% cloud, for us its main thing is ready for the change. And you will find new building blocks coming in and the network design will evolve and change. So don't be naive and think that it's static, evolve with the change. >> I think the biggest naivety that people have is that well, I've been doing it this way for 20 years, I've been successful, it's going to be successful in cloud. The reality is that's not the case. You got to think some of the stuff a little bit differently and you need to think about it early enough, so that you can become cloud native and really enable your business on cloud. >> Yeah for me it's being open minded. Our industry, the network industry as a whole, has been very much I'm smarter than everybody else and we're going to tell everybody how it's going to be done. And we fell into a lull when it came to producing infrastructure and so embracing this idea that we can deploy a new solution or a new environment in minutes as opposed to hours, or weeks or months in some cases, is really important in and so >> - >> It's naive being closed minded, native being open minded. >> Exactly. For me that was a transformative kind of where I was looking to solve problems in a cloud way as opposed to looking to solve problems in this traditional old school way. >> All right, I know we're at a time but I got to asked one more question, so you guys so good. Give me a quick answer. What's the BS language when you, the BS meter goes off when people talk to you about solutions? What's the kind of jargon that you hear, that's the BS meter going off? What are people talking about that in your opinion you here you go, "That's total BS?" What triggers you? >> So that I have two lines out of movies if I say them without actually thinking them. It's like 1.21 gigawatts are you out of your mind from Back to the Future right? Somebody's giving you all these wiz bang things. And then Martin Maul and Michael Keaton in Mr Mom when he goes to 220, 221, whatever it takes. >> Yeah. >> Those two right there, if those go off in my mind where somebody's talking to me, I know they're full of baloney. >> So a lot of speeds and feeds, a lot of speeds and feeds a lot of -- >> Just data. Instead of talking about what you're actually doing and solutioning for. You're talking about, "Well, it does this this this." Okay to 220, 221. (laughter) >> Justin, what's your take? >> Anytime I start seeing the cloud vendors start benchmarking against each other. Your workload is your workload, you need to benchmark yourself. Don't listen to the marketing on that, that's just awful. >> Amit, what triggers you in the BS meter? >> I think if somebody explains to you are not simple, they cannot explain you in simplicity, then it's all bull shit. >> (laughs) That's a good one. Alright guys, thanks for the great insight, great panel. How about a round of applause to practitioners. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> John: Okay, welcome back to Altitude 2020 for the digital event for the live feed. Welcome back, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE with Steve Mullaney, CEO Aviatrix. For the next panel from Global System Integrated, the folks who are building and working with folks on their journey to multicloud and cloud-native networking. We've got a great panel, George Buckman with DXC and Derrick Monahan with WWT, welcome to the stage. (Audience applauds) >> Hey >> Thank you >> Groovy spot >> All right (upbeat music) >> Okay, you guys are the ones out there advising, building, and getting down and dirty with multicloud and cloud-native networking, we just heard from the customer panel. You can see the diversity of where people come in to the journey of cloud, it kind of depends upon where you are, but the trends are all clear, cloud-native networking, DevOps, up and down the stack, this has been the main engine. What's your guys' take of this journey to multicloud? What do you guys think? >> Yeah, it's critical, I mean we're seeing all of our enterprise customers enter into this, they've been through the migrations of the easy stuff, ya know? Now they're trying to optimize and get more improvements, so now the tough stuff's coming on, right? They need their data processing near where their data is. So that's driving them to a multicloud environment. >> Yeah, we've heard some of the Edge stuff, I mean, you guys are-- >> Exactly. >> You've seen this movie before, but now it's a whole new ballgame, what's your take? Yeah, so, I'll give you a hint, our practice is not called the cloud practice, it's the multicloud practice, and so if that gives you a hint of how we approach things. It's very consultative. And so when we look at what the trends are, like a year ago. About a year ago we were having conversations with customers, "Let's build a data center in the cloud. Let's put some VPCs, let's throw some firewalls, let's put some DNS and other infrastructure out there and let's hope it works." This isn't a science project. What we're starting to see is customers are starting to have more of a vision, we're helping with that consultative nature, but it's totally based on the business. And you've got to start understanding how lines of business are using the apps and then we evolve into the next journey which is a foundational approach to-- >> What are some of the problems some of your customers are solving when they come to you? What are the top things that are on their mind, obviously the ease of use, agility, all that stuff, what specifically are they digging into? >> Yeah, so complexity, I think when you look at a multicloud approach, in my view is, network requirements are complex. You know, I think they are, but I think the approach can be, "Let's simplify that." So one thing that we try to do, and this is how we talk to customers is, just like you simplify in Aviatrix, simplifies the automation orchestration of cloud networking, we're trying to simplify the design, the plan, and implementation of the infrastructure across multiple workloads, across multiple platforms. And so the way we do it, is we sit down, we look at not just use cases, not just the questions we commonly anticipate, we actually build out, based on the business and function requirements, we build out a strategy and then create a set of documents, and guess what? We actually build it in a lab, and that lab that we platform rebuilt, proves out this reference architectural actually works. >> Absolutely, we implement similar concepts. I mean, they're proven practices, they work, right? >> But George, you mentioned that the hard part's now upon us, are you referring to networking, what specifically were you getting at there when you said, "The easy part's done, now the hard part?" >> So for the enterprises themselves, migrating their more critical apps or more difficult apps into the environments, ya know, we've just scratched the surface, I believe, on what enterprises are doing to move into the cloud, to optimize their environments, to take advantage of the scale and speed to deployment and to be able to better enable their businesses. So they're just now really starting to-- >> So do you guys see what I talked about? I mean, in terms of that Cambrian explosion, I mean, you're both monster system integrators with top fortune enterprise customers, you know, really rely on you for guidance and consulting and so forth, and deploy their networks. Is that something that you've seen? I mean, does that resonate? Did you notice a year and a half ago all of a sudden the importance of cloud for enterprise shoot up? >> Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it now. >> Okay. >> In our internal environment as well, ya know, we're a huge company ourselves, customer zero, our internal IT, so, we're experiencing that internally and every one of our other customers as well. >> So I have another question and I don't know the answer to this, and a lawyer never asks a question that you don't know the answer to, but I'm going to ask it anyway. DXC and WWT, massive system integrators, why Aviatrix? >> Great question, Steve, so I think the way we approach things, I think we have a similar vision, a similar strategy, how you approach things, how we approach things, at World Wide Technology. Number one, we want a simplify the complexity. And so that's your number one priority. Let's take the networking, let's simplify it, and I think part of the other point I'm making is we see this automation piece as not just an after thought anymore. If you look at what customers care about, visibility and automation is probably at the top three, maybe the third on the list, and I think that's where we see the value. I think the partnership that we're building and what I get excited about is not just putting yours and our lab and showing customers how it works, it's co-developing a solution with you. Figuring out, "Hey, how can we make this better?" >> Right >> Visibility is a huge thing, just in security alone, network everything's around visibility. What automation do you see happening, in terms of progression, order of operations, if you will? What's the low hanging fruit? What are people working on now? What are some of the aspirational goals around when you start thinking about multicloud and automation? >> So I wanted to get back to his question. >> Answer that question. >> I wanted to answer your question, you know, what led us there and why Aviatrix. You know, in working some large internal IT projects, and looking at how we were going to integrate those solutions, you know, we like to build everything with recipes. Network is probably playing catch-up in the DevOps world but with a DevOps mindset, looking to speed to deploy, support, all those things, so when you start building your recipe, you take a little of this, a little of that, and you mix it all together, well, when you look around, you say, "Wow, look, there's this big bag of Aviatrix. "Let me plop that in. That solves a big part "of my problems that I had, the speed to integrate, "the speed to deploy, and the operational views "that I need to run this." So that was what led me to-- >> John: So how about reference architectures? >> Yeah, absolutely, so, you know, they came with a full slate of reference architectures already out there and ready to go that fit our needs, so it was very easy for us to integrate those into our recipes. >> What do you guys think about all the multi-vendor inter-operability conversations that have been going on? Choice has been a big part of multicloud in terms of, you know, customers want choice, they'll put a workload in the cloud if it works, but this notion of choice and interoperability has become a big conversation. >> It is, and I think that our approach, and that's the way we talk to customers is, "Let's speed and de-risk that decision making process, "and how do we do that?" Because interoperability is key. You're not just putting, it's not just a single vendor, we're talking, you know, many many vendors, I mean think about the average number of cloud applications a customer uses, a business, an enterprise business today, you know, it's above 30, it's skyrocketing and so what we do, and we look at it from an interoperability approach is, "How do things inter-operate?" We test it out, we validate it, we build a reference architecture that says, "These are the critical design elements, "now let's build one with Aviatrix "and show how this works with Aviatrix." And I think the important part there, though, is the automation piece that we add to it and visibility. So I think the visibility is what I see lacking across industry today. >> In cloud-native that's been a big topic. >> Yep >> Okay, in terms of Aviatrix, as you guys see them coming in, they're one of the ones that are emerging and the new brands emerging with multicloud, you've still got the old guard encumbered with huge footprints. How are customers dealing with that kind of component in dealing with both of them? >> Yeah, I mean, we have customers that are ingrained with a particular vendor and you know, we have partnerships with many vendors. So our objective is to provide the solution that meets that client. >> John: And they all want multi-vendor, they all want interoperability. >> Correct. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question while we were defining Day-2 operations. What does that mean? You guys are looking at the big business and technical components of architecture, what does Day-2 operations mean, what's the definition of that? >> Yeah, so I think from our perspective, with my experience, we, you know, Day-2 operations, whether it's not just the orchestration piece in setting up and let it automate and have some, you know, change control, you're looking at this from a Day-2 perspective, "How do I support this ongoing "and make it easy to make changes as we evolve?" The cloud is very dynamic. The nature of how fast it's expanding, the number features is astonishing. Trying to keep up to date with the number of just networking capabilities and services that are added. So I think Day-2 operations starts with a fundamental understanding of building out supporting a customer's environments, and making the automation piece easy from a distance, I think. >> Yeah and, you know, taking that to the next level of being able to enable customers to have catalog items that they can pick and choose, "Hey I need this network connectivity "from this cloud location back to this on-prem." And being able to have that automated and provisioned just simply by ordering it. >> For the folks watching out there, guys, take a minute to explain as you guys are in the trenches doing a lot of good work. What are some of the engagements that you guys get into? How does that progress? What happens there, they call you up and say, "Hey I need some multicloud," or you're already in there? I mean, take us through how someone can engage to use a global SI, they come in and make this thing happen, what's the typical engagement look like? >> Derrick: Yeah, so from our perspective, we typically have a series of workshops in the methodology that we kind of go along the journey. Number one, we have a foundational approach. And I don't mean foundation meaning the network foundation, that's a very critical element, we got to factor in security and we got to factor in automation. So when you think about foundation, we do a workshop that starts with education. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll just educate the customer, what is VPC sharing? You know, what is a private link in Azure? How does that impact your business? We have customers that want to share services out in an ecosystem with other customers and partners. Well there's many ways to accomplish that. Our goal is to understand those requirements and then build that strategy with them. >> Thoughts George, on-- >> Yeah, I mean, I'm one of the guys that's down in the weeds making things happen, so I'm not the guy on the front line interfacing with the customers every day. But we have a similar approach. We have a consulting practice that will go out and apply their practices to see what those-- >> And when do you parachute in? >> Yeah, when I parachute in is, I'm on the back end working with our offering development leads for networking, so we understand and are seeing what customers are asking for and we're on the back end developing the solutions that integrate with our own offerings as well as enable other customers to just deploy quickly to meet their connectivity needs. So the patterns are similar. >> Right, final question for you guys, I want to ask you to paint a picture of what success looks like. You don't have to name customers, you don't have to get in and reveal who they are, but what does success look like in multicloud as you paint a picture for the folks here and watching on the live stream, if someone says, "Hey I want to be multicloud, I got to to have my operations Agile, I want full DevOps, I want programmability and security built in from Day-zero." What does success look like? >> Yeah, I think success looks like this, so when you're building out a network, the network is a harder thing to change than some other aspects of cloud. So what we think is, even if you're thinking about that second cloud, which we have most of our customers are on two public clouds today, they might be dabbling in it. As you build that network foundation, that architecture, that takes in to consideration where you're going, and so once we start building that reference architecture out that shows, this is how to approach it from a multicloud perspective, not a single cloud, and let's not forget our branches, let's not forget our data centers, let's not forget how all this connects together because that's how we define multicloud, it's not just in the cloud, it's on-prem and it's off-prem. And so collectively, I think the key is also is that we provide them an HLD. You got to start with a high level design that can be tweaked as you go through the journey but you got to give it a solid structural foundation, and that networking which we think, most customers think as not the network engineers, but as an after thought. We want to make that the most critical element before you start the journey. >> George, from your seat, how does success look for you? >> So, you know it starts out on these journeys, often start out people not even thinking about what is going to happen, what their network needs are when they start their migration journey to the cloud. So I want, success to me looks like them being able to end up not worrying about what's happening in the network when they move to the cloud. >> Steve: Good point. >> Guys, great insight, thanks for coming on and sharing. How about a round of applause for the global system integrators? (Audience applauds) (Upbeat music) >> The next panel is the AVH certified engineers, also known as ACEs. This is the folks that are certified, they're engineering, they're building these new solutions. Please welcome Toby Foss from Informatica, Stacey Lanier from Teradata, and Jennifer Reed with Viqtor Davis to the stage. (upbeat music) (audience cheering) (panelists exchanging pleasantries) >> You got to show up. Where's your jacket Toby? (laughing) You get it done. I was just going to rib you guys and say, where's your jackets, and Jen's got the jacket on. Okay, good. >> Love the Aviatrix, ACEs Pilot gear there above the Clouds. Going to new heights. >> That's right. >> So guys Aviatrix aces, I love the name, think it's great, certified. This is all about getting things engineered. So there's a level of certification, I want to get into that. But first take us through the day in the life of an ACE, and just to point out, Stacy is a squad leader. So he's, he's like a-- >> Squadron Leader. >> Squadron Leader. >> Yeah. >> Squadron Leader, so he's got a bunch of ACEs underneath him, but share your perspective a day in the Life. Jennifer, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so I have actually a whole team that works for me both in the North America, both in the US and in Mexico. So I'm eagerly working to get them certified as well, so I can become a squad leader myself. But it's important because one of the critical gaps that we've found is people having the networking background because you graduate from college, and you have a lot of computer science background, you can program you've got Python, but networking in packets they just don't get. So, just taking them through all the processes that it's really necessary to understand when you're troubleshooting is really critical. Because you're going to get an issue where you need to figure out where exactly is that happening on the network, Is my issue just in the VPCs? Is it on the instance side is a security group, or is it going on prem? This is something actually embedded within Amazon itself? I mean, I troubleshot an issue for about six months going back and forth with Amazon, and it was the VGW VPN. Because they were auto scaling on two sides, and we ended up having to pull out the Cisco's, and put in Aviatrix so I could just say, " okay, it's fixed," and actually helped the application teams get to that and get it solved. But I'm taking a lot of junior people and getting them through that certification process, so they can understand and see the network, the way I see the network. I mean, look, I've been doing this for 25 years when I got out. When I went in the Marine Corps, that's what I did, and coming out, the network is still the network. But people don't get the same training they got in the 90s. >> Was just so easy, just write some software, and they were, takes care of itself. I know, it's pixie dust.  >> I'll come back to that, I want to come back to that, the problem solved with Amazon, but Toby. >> I think the only thing I have to add to that is that it's always the network's fault. As long as I've been in networking, it's always been the network's fault. I'm even to this day, it's still the network's fault, and part of being a network guy is that you need to prove when it is and when it's not your fault. That means you need to know a little bit about 100 different things, to make that work. >> Now you got a full stack DevOps, you got to know a lot more times another hundred. >> Toby: And the times are changing, yeah. >> This year the Squadron Leader and get that right. What is the Squadron Leader firstly? Describe what it is. >> I think is probably just leading on the network components of it. But I think, from my perspective, when to think about what you asked them was, it's about no issues and no escalations. So of my day is like that, I'm happy to be a squadron leader. >> That is a good outcome, that's a good day. >> Yeah, sure, it is. >> Is there good days? You said you had a good day with Amazon? Jennifer, you mentioned the Amazon, and this brings up a good point, when you have these new waves come in, you have a lot of new things, new use cases. A lot of the finger pointing it's that guy's problem , that girl's problems, so how do you solve that, and how do you get the Young Guns up to speed? Is there training, is it this where the certification comes in? >> This is where the certifications really going to come in. I know when we got together at Reinvent, one of the questions that we had with Steve and the team was, what should our certification look like? Should we just be teaching about what AVH troubleshooting brings to bear, but what should that be like? I think Toby and I were like, No, no, no, no. That's going a little too high, we need to get really low because the better someone can get at actually understanding what's actually happening in the network, and where to actually troubleshoot the problem, how to step back each of those processes. Because without that, it's just a big black box, and they don't know. Because everything is abstracted, in Amazon and in Azure and in Google, is abstracted, and they have these virtual gateways, they have VPNs, that you just don't have the logs on, is you just don't know. So then what tools can you put in front of them of where they can look? Because there are full logs. Well, as long as they turned on the flow logs when they built it, and there's like, each one of those little things that well, if they'd had decided to do that, when they built it, it's there. But if you can come in later to really supplement that with training to actual troubleshoot, and do a packet capture here, as it's going through, then teaching them how to read that even. >> Yeah, Toby, we were talking before we came on up on stage about your career, you've been networking all your time, and then, you're now mentoring a lot of younger people. How is that going? Because the people who come in fresh they don't have all the old war stories, like they don't talk about it, There's never for, I walk in bare feet in the snow when I was your age, I mean, it's so easy now, right, they say. What's your take on how you train the young People. >> So I've noticed two things. One is that they are up to speed a lot faster in generalities of networking. They can tell you what a network is in high school level now, where I didn't learn that til midway through my career, and they're learning it faster, but they don't necessarily understand why it's that way here. Everybody thinks that it's always slash 24 for a subnet, and they don't understand why you can break it down smaller, why it's really necessary. So the ramp up speed is much faster for these guys that are coming in. But they don't understand why and they need some of that background knowledge to see where it's coming from, and why is it important, and that's old guys, that's where we thrive. >> Jennifer, you mentioned you got in from the Marines, it helps, but when you got into networking, what was it like then and compare it now? Because most like we heard earlier static versus dynamic Don't be static is like that. You just set the network, you got a perimeter. >> Yeah, no, there was no such thing. So back in the day, I mean, we had Banyan vines for email, and we had token ring, and I had to set up token ring networks and figure out why that didn't work. Because how many of things were actually sharing it. But then actually just cutting fiber and running fiber cables and dropping them over shelters to plug them in and all crap, they swung it too hard and shattered it and now I got to figure eight Polish this thing and actually should like to see if it works. I mean, that was the network , current cat five cables to run an Ethernet, and then from that I just said, network switches, dumb switches, like those were the most common ones you had. Then actually configuring routers and logging into a Cisco router and actually knowing how to configure that. It was funny because I had gone all the way up, I was the software product manager for a while. So I've gone all the way up the stack, and then two and a half, three years ago, I came across to work with Entity group that became Viqtor Davis. But we went to help one of our customers Avis, and it was like, okay, so we need to fix the network. Okay, I haven't done this in 20 years, but all right, let's get to it. Because it really fundamentally does not change. It's still the network. I mean, I've had people tell me, Well, when we go to containers, we will not have to worry about the network. And I'm like, yeah, you don't I do. >> And that's within programmability is a really interesting, so I think this brings up the certification. What are some of the new things that people should be aware of that come in with the Aviatrix A certification? What are some of the highlights? Can you guys share some of the highlights around the certifications? >> I think some of the importance is that it doesn't need to be vendor specific for network generality or basic networking knowledge, and instead of learning how Cisco does something, or how Palo Alto does something, We need to understand how and why it works as a basic model, and then understand how each vendor has gone about that problem and solved it in a general. That's true in multicloud as well. You can't learn how Cloud networking works without understanding how AWS and Azure and GCP are all slightly the same but slightly different, and some things work and some things don't. I think that's probably the number one take. >> I think having a certification across Clouds is really valuable because we heard the global s eyes as you have a business issues. What does it mean to do that? Is it code, is it networking? Is it configurations of the Aviatrix? what is, he says,the certification but, what is it about the multiCloud that makes it multi networking and multi vendor? >> The easy answer is yes, >> Yes is all of us. >> All of us. So you got to be in general what's good your hands and all You have to be. Right, it takes experience. Because every Cloud vendor has their own certification. Whether that's SOPs and advanced networking and event security, or whatever it might be, yeah, they can take the test, but they have no idea how to figure out what's wrong with that system. The same thing with any certification, but it's really getting your hands in there, and actually having to troubleshoot the problems, actually work the problem, and calm down. It's going to be okay. I mean, because I don't know how many calls I've been on or even had aviators join me on. It's like, okay, so everyone calm down, let's figure out what's happening. It's like, we've looked at that screen three times, looking at it again is not going to solve that problem, right. But at the same time, remaining calm but knowing that it really is, I'm getting a packet from here to go over here, it's not working, so what could be the problem? Actually stepping them through those scenarios, but that's like, you only get that by having to do it, and seeing it, and going through it, and then you get it. >> I have a question, so, I just see it. We started this program maybe six months ago, we're seeing a huge amount of interest. I mean, we're oversubscribed on all the training sessions. We've got people flying from around the country, even with Coronavirus, flying to go to Seattle to go to these events where we're subscribed, is that-- >> A good emerging leader would put there. >> Yeah. So, is that something that you see in your organizations? Are you recommending that to people? Do you see, I mean, I'm just, I guess I'm surprised or not surprised. But I'm really surprised by the demand if you would, of this MultiCloud network certification because there really isn't anything like that. Is that something you guys can comment on? Or do you see the same things in your organization? >> I see from my side, because we operate in a multiCloud environments that really helps and some beneficial for us. >> Yeah, true. I think I would add that networking guys have always needed to use certifications to prove that they know what they know. >> Right. >> It's not good enough to say, Yeah, I know IP addresses or I know how a network works. A couple little check marks or a little letters body writing helps give you validity. So even in our team, we can say, Hey, we're using these certifications to know that you know enough of the basics and enough of the understandings, that you have the tools necessary, right. >> I guess my final question for you guys is, why an ACE certification is relevant, and then second part is share with the live stream folks who aren't yet ACE certified or might want to jump in to be aviatrix certified engineers. Why is it important, so why is it relevant and why should someone want to be a certified aviatrix certified engineer? >> I think my views a little different. I think certification comes from proving that you have the knowledge, not proving that you get a certification to get an army there backwards. So when you've got the training and the understanding and you use that to prove and you can, like, grow your certification list with it, versus studying for a test to get a certification and have no understanding of it. >> Okay, so that who is the right person that look at this and say, I'm qualified, is it a network engineer, is it a DevOps person? What's your view, a little certain. >> I think Cloud is really the answer. It's the, as we talked like the edges getting eroded, so is the network definition getting eroded? We're getting more and more of some network, some DevOps, some security, lots and lots of security, because network is so involved in so many of them. That's just the next progression. >> Do you want to add something there? >> I would say expand that to more automation engineers, because we have those now, so I probably extend it beyond this one. >> Jennifer you want to? >> Well, I think the training classes themselves are helpful, especially the entry level ones for people who may be "Cloud architects" but have never done anything in networking for them to understand why we need those things to really work, whether or not they go through to eventually get a certification is something different. But I really think fundamentally understanding how these things work, it makes them a better architect, makes them better application developer. But even more so as you deploy more of your applications into the Cloud, really getting an understanding, even from people who have traditionally done Onprem networking, they can understand how that's going to work in Cloud. >> Well, I know we've got just under 30 seconds left. I want to get one more question then just one more, for the folks watching that are maybe younger than, that don't have that networking training. From your experiences each of you can answer why should they know about networking, what's the benefit? What's in it for them? Motivate them, share some insights of why they should go a little bit deeper in networking. Stacy, we'll start with you, we'll go then. >> I'll say it's probably fundamental, right? If you want to deliver solutions, networking is the very top. >> I would say if you, fundamental of an operating system running on a machine, how those machines start together is a fundamental changes, something that start from the base and work your way up. >> Jennifer? >> Right, well, I think it's a challenge. Because you've come from top down, now you're going to start looking from bottom up, and you want those different systems to cross-communicate, and say you've built something, and you're overlapping IP space, note that that doesn't happen. But how can I actually make that still operate without having to re IP re platform. Just like those challenges, like those younger developers or assistant engineers can really start to get their hands around and understand those complexities and bring that forward in their career. >> They get to know then how the pipes are working, and they're got to know it--it's the plumbing. >> That's right, >> They got to know how it works, and how to code it. >> That's right. >> Awesome, thank you guys for great insights, ACE Certified Engineers, also known as ACEs, give them a round of applause. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) >> Thank you, okay. All right, that concludes my portion. Thank you, Steve Thanks for having me. >> John, thank you very much, that was fantastic. Everybody round of applause for John Furrier. (audience applauding) Yeah, so great event, great event. I'm not going to take long, we got lunch outside for the people here, just a couple of things. Just to call the action, right? So we saw the ACEs, for those of you out of the stream here, become a certified, right, it's great for your career, it's great for not knowledge, is fantastic. It's not just an aviator's thing, it's going to teach you about Cloud networking, MultiCloud networking, with a little bit of aviatrix, exactly like the Cisco CCIE program was for IP network, that type of the thing, that's number one. Second thing is learning, right? So there's a link up there to join the community. Again like I started this, this is a community, this is the kickoff to this community, and it's a movement. So go to community.avh.com, starting a community of multiCloud. So get get trained, learn. I'd say the next thing is we're doing over 100 seminars across the United States and also starting into Europe soon, we will come out and we'll actually spend a couple hours and talk about architecture, and talk about those beginning things. For those of you on the livestream in here as well, we're coming to a city near you, go to one of those events, it's a great way to network with other people that are in the industry, as well as to start alone and get on that MultiCloud journey. Then I'd say the last thing is, we haven't talked a lot about what Aviatrix does here, and that's intentional. We want you leaving with wanting to know more, and schedule, get with us and schedule a multi hour architecture workshop session. So we sit down with customers, and we talk about where they're at in that journey, and more importantly, where they're going, and define that end state architecture from networking, computer, storage, everything. Everything you've heard today, everybody panel kept talking about architecture, talking about operations. Those are the types of things that we solve, we help you define that canonical architecture, that system architecture, that's yours. So many of our customers, they have three by five, plotted lucid charts, architecture drawings, and it's the customer name slash Aviatrix, network architecture, and they put it on their whiteboard. That's the most valuable thing they get from us. So this becomes their 20 year network architecture drawing that they don't do anything without talking to us and look at that architecture. That's what we do in these multi hour workshop sessions with customers, and that's super, super powerful. So if you're interested, definitely call us, and let's schedule that with our team. So anyway, I just want to thank everybody on the livestream. Thank everybody here. Hopefully it was it was very useful. I think it was, and Join the movement, and for those of you here, join us for lunch, and thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE covering the IBM Chief Data Officers Summit, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody. I'm Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is the end of the day panel at the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. This is the 10th CDO event that IBM has held and we love to to gather these panels. This is a data all-star panel and I've recruited Seth Dobrin who is the CDO of the analytics group at IBM. Seth, thank you for agreeing to chip in and be my co-host in this segment. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. Like I said before we started, I don't know if this is a promotion or a demotion. (Dave laughing) >> We'll let you know after the segment. So, the data all-star panel and the data all-star awards that you guys are giving out a little later in the event here, what's that all about? >> Yeah so this is our 10th CDU Summit. So two a year, so we've been doing this for 5 years. The data all-stars are those people that have been to four at least of the ten. And so these are five of the 16 people that got the award. And so thank you all for participating and I attended these like I said earlier, before I joined IBM they were immensely valuable to me and I was glad to see 16 other people that think it's valuable too. >> That is awesome. Thank you guys for coming on. So, here's the format. I'm going to introduce each of you individually and then ask you to talk about your role in your organization. What role you play, how you're using data, however you want to frame that. And the first question I want to ask is, what's a good day in the life of a data person? Or if you want to answer what's a bad day, that's fine too, you choose. So let's start with Lucia Mendoza-Ronquillo. Welcome, she's the Senior Vice President and the Head of BI and Data Governance at Wells Fargo. You told us that you work within the line of business group, right? So introduce your role and what's a good day for a data person? >> Okay, so my role basically is again business intelligence so I support what's called cards and retail services within Wells Fargo. And I also am responsible for data governance within the business. We roll up into what's called a data governance enterprise. So we comply with all the enterprise policies and my role is to make sure our line of business complies with data governance policies for enterprise. >> Okay, good day? What's a good day for you? >> A good day for me is really when I don't get a call that the regulators are knocking on our doors. (group laughs) Asking for additional reports or have questions on the data and so that would be a good day. >> Yeah, especially in your business. Okay, great. Parag Shrivastava is the Director of Data Architecture at McKesson, welcome. Thanks so much for coming on. So we got a healthcare, couple of healthcare examples here. But, Parag, introduce yourself, your role, and then what's a good day or if you want to choose a bad day, be fun the mix that up. >> Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, so mainly I'm responsible for the leader strategy and architecture at McKesson. What that means is McKesson has a lot of data around the pharmaceutical supply chain, around one-third of the world's pharmaceutical supply chain, clinical data, also around pharmacy automation data, and we want to leverage it for the better engagement of the patients and better engagement of our customers. And my team, which includes the data product owners, and data architects, we are all responsible for looking at the data holistically and creating the data foundation layer. So I lead the team across North America. So that's my current role. And going back to the question around what's a good day, I think I would say the good day, I'll start at the good day. Is really looking at when the data improves the business. And the first thing that comes to my mind is sort of like an example, of McKesson did an acquisition of an eight billion dollar pharmaceutical company in Europe and we were creating the synergy solution which was based around the analytics and data. And actually IBM was one of the partners in implementing that solution. When the solution got really implemented, I mean that was a big deal for me to see that all the effort that we did in plumbing the data, making sure doing some analytics, is really helping improve the business. I think that is really a good day I would say. I mean I wouldn't say a bad day is such, there are challenges, constant challenges, but I think one of the top priorities that we are having right now is to deal with the demand. As we look at the demand around the data, the role of data has got multiple facets to it now. For example, some of the very foundational, evidentiary, and compliance type of needs as you just talked about and then also profitability and the cost avoidance and those kind of aspects. So how to balance between that demand is the other aspect. >> All right good. And we'll get into a lot of that. So Carl Gold is the Chief Data Scientist at Zuora. Carl, tell us a little bit about Zuora. People might not be as familiar with how you guys do software for billing et cetera. Tell us about your role and what's a good day for a data scientist? >> Okay, sure, I'll start by a little bit about Zuora. Zuora is a subscription management platform. So any company who wants to offer a product or service as subscription and you don't want to build your billing and subscription management, revenue recognition, from scratch, you can use a product like ours. I say it lets anyone build a telco with a complicated plan, with tiers and stuff like that. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. You guys'll have to make up your own mind. My role is an interesting one. It's split, so I said I'm a chief data scientist and we work about 50% on product features based on data science. Things like churn prediction, or predictive payment retries are product areas where we offer AI-based solutions. And then but because Zuora is a subscription platform, we have an amazing set of data on the actual performance of companies using our product. So a really interesting part of my role has been leading what we call the subscription economy index and subscription economy benchmarks which are reports around best practices for subscription companies. And it's all based off this amazing dataset created from an anonymized data of our customers. So that's a really exciting part of my role. And for me, maybe this speaks to our level of data governance, I might be able to get some tips from some of my co-panelists, but for me a good day is when all the data for me and everyone on my team is where we left it the night before. And no schema changes, no data, you know records that you were depending on finding removed >> Pipeline failures. >> Yeah pipeline failures. And on a bad day is a schema change, some crucial data just went missing and someone on my team is like, "The code's broken." >> And everybody's stressed >> Yeah, so those are bad days. But, data governance issues maybe. >> Great, okay thank you. Jung Park is the COO of Latitude Food Allergy Care. Jung welcome. >> Yeah hi, thanks for having me and the rest of us here. So, I guess my role I like to put it as I'm really the support team. I'm part of the support team really for the medical practice so, Latitude Food Allergy Care is a specialty practice that treats patients with food allergies. So, I don't know if any of you guys have food allergies or maybe have friends, kids, who have food allergies, but, food allergies unfortunately have become a lot more prevalent. And what we've been able to do is take research and data really from clinical trials and other research institutions and really use that from the clinical trial setting, back to the clinical care model so that we can now treat patients who have food allergies by using a process called oral immunotherapy. It's fascinating and this is really personal to me because my son as food allergies and he's been to the ER four times. >> Wow. >> And one of the scariest events was when he went to an ER out of the country and as a parent, you know you prepare your child right? With the food, he takes the food. He was 13 years old and you had the chaperones, everyone all set up, but you get this call because accidentally he ate some peanut, right. And so I saw this unfold and it scared me so much that this is something I believe we just have to get people treated. So this process allows people to really eat a little bit of the food at a time and then you eat the food at the clinic and then you go home and eat it. Then you come back two weeks later and then you eat a little bit more until your body desensitizes. >> So you build up that immunity >> Exactly. >> and then you watch the data obviously. >> Yeah. So what's a good day for me? When our patients are done for the day and they have a smile on their face because they were able to progress to that next level. >> Now do you have a chief data officer or are you the de facto CFO? >> I'm the de facto. So, my career has been pretty varied. So I've been essentially chief data officer, CIO, at companies small and big. And what's unique about I guess in this role is that I'm able to really think about the data holistically through every component of the practice. So I like to think of it as a patient journey and I'm sure you guys all think of it similarly when you talk about your customers, but from a patient's perspective, before they even come in, you have to make sure the data behind the science of whatever you're treating is proper, right? Once that's there, then you have to have the acquisition part. How do you actually work with the community to make sure people are aware of really the services that you're providing? And when they're with you, how do you engage them? How do you make sure that they are compliant with the process? So in healthcare especially, oftentimes patients don't actually succeed all the way through because they don't continue all the way through. So it's that compliance. And then finally, it's really long-term care. And when you get the long-term care, you know that the patient that you've treated is able to really continue on six months, a year from now, and be able to eat the food. >> Great, thank you for that description. Awesome mission. Rolland Ho is the Vice President of Data and Analytics at Clover Health. Tell us a little bit about Clover Health and then your role. >> Yeah, sure. So Clover is a startup Medicare Advantage plan. So we provide Medicare, private Medicare to seniors. And what we do is we're because of the way we run our health plan, we're able to really lower a lot of the copay costs and protect seniors against out of pocket. If you're on regular Medicare, you get cancer, you have some horrible accident, your out of pocket is infinite potentially. Whereas with Medicare Advantage Plan it's limited to like five, $6,000 and you're always protected. One of the things I'm excited about being at Clover is our ability to really look at how can we bring the value of data analytics to healthcare? Something I've been in this industry for close to 20 years at this point and there's a lot of waste in healthcare. And there's also a lot of very poor application of preventive measures to the right populations. So one of the things that I'm excited about is that with today's models, if you're able to better identify with precision, the right patients to intervene with, then you fundamentally transform the economics of what can be done. Like if you had to pa $1,000 to intervene, but you were only 20% of the chance right, that's very expensive for each success. But, now if your model is 60, 70% right, then now it opens up a whole new world of what you can do. And that's what excites me. In terms of my best day? I'll give you two different angles. One as an MBA, one of my best days was, client calls me up, says, "Hey Rolland, you know, "your analytics brought us over $100 million "in new revenue last year." and I was like, cha-ching! Excellent! >> Which is my half? >> Yeah right. And then on the data geek side the best day was really, run a model, you train a model, you get ridiculous AUC score, so area under the curve, and then you expect that to just disintegrate as you go into validation testing and actual live production. But the 98 AUC score held up through production. And it's like holy cow, the model actually works! And literally we could cut out half of the workload because of how good that model was. >> Great, excellent, thank you. Seth, anything you'd add to the good day, bad day, as a CDO? >> So for me, well as a CDO or as CDO at IBM? 'Cause at IBM I spend most of my time traveling. So a good day is a day I'm home. >> Yeah, when you're not in an (group laughing) aluminum tube. >> Yeah. Hurdling through space (laughs). No, but a good day is when a GDPR compliance just happened, a good day for me was May 20th of last year when IBM was done and we were, or as done as we needed to be for GDPR so that was a good day for me last year. This year is really a good day is when we start implementing some new models to help IBM become a more effective company and increase our bottom line or increase our margins. >> Great, all right so I got a lot of questions as you know and so I want to give you a chance to jump in. >> All right. >> But, I can get it started or have you got something? >> I'll go ahead and get started. So this is a the 10th CDO Summit. So five years. I know personally I've had three jobs at two different companies. So over the course of the last five years, how many jobs, how many companies? Lucia? >> One job with one company. >> Oh my gosh you're boring. (group laughing) >> No, but actually, because I support basically the head of the business, we go into various areas. So, we're not just from an analytics perspective and business intelligence perspective and of course data governance, right? It's been a real journey. I mean there's a lot of work to be done. A lot of work has been accomplished and constantly improving the business, which is the first goal, right? Increasing market share through insights and business intelligence, tracking product performance to really helping us respond to regulators (laughs). So it's a variety of areas I've had to be involved in. >> So one company, 50 jobs. >> Exactly. So right now I wear different hats depending on the day. So that's really what's happening. >> So it's a good question, have you guys been jumping around? Sure, I mean I think of same company, one company, but two jobs. And I think those two jobs have two different layers. When I started at McKesson I was a solution leader or solution director for business intelligence and I think that's how I started. And over the five years I've seen the complete shift towards machine learning and my new role is actually focused around machine learning and AI. That's why we created this layer, so our own data product owners who understand the data science side of things and the ongoing and business architecture. So, same company but has seen a very different shift of data over the last five years. >> Anybody else? >> Sure, I'll say two companies. I'm going on four years at Zuora. I was at a different company for a year before that, although it was kind of the same job, first at the first company, and then at Zuora I was really focused on subscriber analytics and churn for my first couple a years. And then actually I kind of got a new job at Zuora by becoming the subscription economy expert. I become like an economist, even though I don't honestly have a background. My PhD's in biology, but now I'm a subscription economy guru. And a book author, I'm writing a book about my experiences in the area. >> Awesome. That's great. >> All right, I'll give a bit of a riddle. Four, how do you have four jobs, five companies? >> In five years. >> In five years. (group laughing) >> Through a series of acquisition, acquisition, acquisition, acquisition. Exactly, so yeah, I have to really, really count on that one (laughs). >> I've been with three companies over the past five years and I would say I've had seven jobs. But what's interesting is I think it kind of mirrors and kind of mimics what's been going on in the data world. So I started my career in data analytics and business intelligence. But then along with that I had the fortune to work with the IT team. So the IT came under me. And then after that, the opportunity came about in which I was presented to work with compliance. So I became a compliance officer. So in healthcare, it's very interesting because these things are tied together. When you look about the data, and then the IT, and then the regulations as it relates to healthcare, you have to have the proper compliance, both internal compliance, as well as external regulatory compliance. And then from there I became CIO and then ultimately the chief operating officer. But what's interesting is as I go through this it's all still the same common themes. It's how do you use the data? And if anything it just gets to a level in which you become closer with the business and that is the most important part. If you stand alone as a data scientist, or a data analyst, or the data officer, and you don't incorporate the business, you alienate the folks. There's a math I like to do. It's different from your basic math, right? I believe one plus one is equal to three because when you get the data and the business together, you create that synergy and then that's where the value is created. >> Yeah, I mean if you think about it, data's the only commodity that increases value when you use it correctly. >> Yeah. >> Yeah so then that kind of leads to a question that I had. There's this mantra, the more data the better. Or is it more of an Einstein derivative? Collect as much data as possible but not too much. What are your thoughts? Is more data better? >> I'll take it. So, I would say the curve has shifted over the years. Before it used to be data was the bottleneck. But now especially over the last five to 10 years, I feel like data is no longer oftentimes the bottleneck as much as the use case. The definition of what exactly we're going to apply to, how we're going to apply it to. Oftentimes once you have that clear, you can go get the data. And then in the case where there is not data, like in Mechanical Turk, you can all set up experiments, gather data, the cost of that is now so cheap to experiment that I think the bottleneck's really around the business understanding the use case. >> Mm-hmm. >> Mm-hmm. >> And I think the wave that we are seeing, I'm seeing this as there are, in some cases, more data is good, in some cases more data is not good. And I think I'll start it where it is not good. I think where quality is more required is the area where more data is not good. For example like regulation and compliance. So for example in McKesson's case, we have to report on opioid compliance for different states. How much opioid drugs we are giving to states and making sure we have very, very tight reporting and compliance regulations. There, highest quality of data is important. In our data organization, we have very, very dedicated focus around maintaining that quality. So, quality is most important, quantity is not if you will, in that case. Having the right data. Now on the other side of things, where we are doing some kind of exploratory analysis. Like what could be a right category management for our stores? Or where the product pricing could be the right ones. Product has around 140 attributes. We would like to look at all of them and see what patterns are we finding in our models. So there you could say more data is good. >> Well you could definitely see a lot of cases. But certainly in financial services and a lot of healthcare, particularly in pharmaceutical where you don't want work in process hanging around. >> Yeah. >> Some lawyer could find a smoking gun and say, "Ooh see." And then if that data doesn't get deleted. So, let's see, I would imagine it's a challenge in your business, I've heard people say, "Oh keep all the, now we can keep all the data, "it's so inexpensive to store." But that's not necessarily such a good thing is it? >> Well, we're required to store data. >> For N number of years, right? >> Yeah, N number of years. But, sometimes they go beyond those number of years when there's a legal requirements to comply or to answer questions. So we do keep more than, >> Like a legal hold for example. >> Yeah. So we keep more than seven years for example and seven years is the regulatory requirement. But in the case of more data, I'm a data junkie, so I like more data (laughs). Whenever I'm asked, "Is the data available?" I always say, "Give me time I'll find it for you." so that's really how we operate because again, we're the go-to team, we need to be able to respond to regulators to the business and make sure we understand the data. So that's the other key. I mean more data, but make sure you understand what that means. >> But has that perspective changed? Maybe go back 10 years, maybe 15 years ago, when you didn't have the tooling to be able to say, "Give me more data." "I'll get you the answer." Maybe, "Give me more data." "I'll get you the answer in three years." Whereas today, you're able to, >> I'm going to go get it off the backup tapes (laughs). >> (laughs) Yeah, right, exactly. (group laughing) >> That's fortunately for us, Wells Fargo has implemented data warehouse for so many number of years, I think more than 10 years. So we do have that capability. There's certainly a lot of platforms you have to navigate through, but if you are able to navigate, you can get to the data >> Yeah. >> within the required timeline. So I have, astonished you have the technology, team behind you. Jung, you want to add something? >> Yeah, so that's an interesting question. So, clearly in healthcare, there is a lot of data and as I've kind of come closer to the business, I also realize that there's a fine line between collecting the data and actually asking our folks, our clinicians, to generate the data. Because if you are focused only on generating data, the electronic medical records systems for example. There's burnout, you don't want the clinicians to be working to make sure you capture every element because if you do so, yes on the back end you have all kinds of great data, but on the other side, on the business side, it may not be necessarily a productive thing. And so we have to make a fine line judgment as to the data that's generated and who's generating that data and then ultimately how you end up using it. >> And I think there's a bit of a paradox here too, right? The geneticist in me says, "Don't ever throw anything away." >> Right. >> Right? I want to keep everything. But, the most interesting insights often come from small data which are a subset of that larger, keep everything inclination that we as data geeks have. I think also, as we're moving in to kind of the next phase of AI when you can start doing really, really doing things like transfer learning. That small data becomes even more valuable because you can take a model trained on one thing or a different domain and move it over to yours to have a starting point where you don't need as much data to get the insight. So, I think in my perspective, the answer is yes. >> Yeah (laughs). >> Okay, go. >> I'll go with that just to run with that question. I think it's a little bit of both 'cause people touched on different definitions of more data. In general, more observations can never hurt you. But, more features, or more types of things associated with those observations actually can if you bring in irrelevant stuff. So going back to Rolland's answer, the first thing that's good is like a good mental model. My PhD is actually in physical science, so I think about physical science, where you actually have a theory of how the thing works and you collect data around that theory. I think the approach of just, oh let's put in 2,000 features and see what sticks, you know you're leaving yourself open to all kinds of problems. >> That's why data science is not democratized, >> Yeah (laughing). >> because (laughing). >> Right, but first Carl, in your world, you don't have to guess anymore right, 'cause you have real data. >> Well yeah, of course, we have real data, but the collection, I mean for example, I've worked on a lot of customer churn problems. It's very easy to predict customer churn if you capture data that pertains to the value customers are receiving. If you don't capture that data, then you'll never predict churn by counting how many times they login or more crude measures of engagement. >> Right. >> All right guys, we got to go. The keynotes are spilling out. Seth thank you so much. >> That's it? >> Folks, thank you. I know, I'd love to carry on, right? >> Yeah. >> It goes fast. >> Great. >> Yeah. >> Guys, great, great content. >> Yeah, thanks. And congratulations on participating and being data all-stars. >> We'd love to do this again sometime. All right and thank you for watching everybody, it's a wrap from IBM CDOs, Dave Vellante from theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (light music)

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit. It's our first time at PagerDuty Summit and Pier 27, our first time to this cool venue. It's right on the water between the Bay Bridge and Pier 39, beautiful view outside. Unfortunately, the fire smoke's a little over-the-top. But we're excited to have one of our favorite guests, Jennifer Tejada. She's the CEO at PagerDuty. Jennifer, great to see you. >> Thank you. It's so great to be back, Jeff. >> Absolutely. So this is, what, your second PagerDuty Summit? >> This is our second PagerDuty Summit. >> 500-some-odd people? >> I think we've had 700 through the door already. We've got a few hundred streaming online. Almost twice what we did last year. So we're really excited. We're still in the infancy stages of sponsoring an industry event, and we've been really focused on trying to make it a little different to insure that people walk away with actionable insights, and best practices and learnings they can take immediately back to their teams, and to their companies. So we've had just some awesome guest speakers and panelists here today, and it's been a lot of fun. The PagerDuty band played live at lunch. >> That's right, I saw them at lunchtime. >> Yeah, which was great. So we're having a good time. >> What are they called? The On-Calls. >> The On-Calls. I let them name themselves. >> And so, you've been here a year now. So, how are things moving, how are you moving the company along since you got here? What are some of the strategic things that you've been able to execute, and now you're looking forward? >> So, it's just been an incredible year, honestly. You always hope for a number of things when you come into a new role. You hope that the team rallies around the business. You hope that the opportunity is as significant as you thought it would. You hope that there aren't more bad surprises than you think there are going to be. PagerDuty's been so unique, in that there have been more good surprises than bad surprises. There's so much potential to unlock in the business. But probably the thing that's most amazing about it is the people, the community, and the culture around PagerDuty, and just the sense of alliance towards making the engineering world work better to insure that customer experience and employee experience is better. There's just a real sense of duty there, and there's a sense that the community is there with you trying to make it happen, as opposed to working against you. So a lot of our innovation this year, and I mean, we've released tons of new technology product, including machine learning and analytics, and going from reactive and responsive to proactive. There's a lot of stuff happening. So much of that has come from input from our practitioner community and our customer base. You just don't always have that kind of vocal engagement, that proactive, constructive engagement from your customer base, so that's just been amazing. And the team's awesome. We've expanded into the UK and western Europe over this summer. We opened an office in Sydney recently. We've shifted from being a single-product company to a platform company. We've more than doubled in size, 150 people to over 350 people. We're in 130 countries now, in terms of where our customer base lives, and just around 10 thousand customers, so really, really amazing progress. Sometimes I feel like we're a little bit of a teenage prodigy, you know? We're growing super fast, other kids are starting to learn how to play the piano. It's a little awkward, but we're still really good at what we do. I think the thing that keeps us out in front is our commitment, and all of our efforts being in service to making both the lives better of the practitioners in our community, and creating quantifiable value for our enterprise customers. >> It's interesting to focus on the duty, because that kind of came with the old days of when you were the person that had to wear the pager, right? Whether you're a doctor on call, or you were the IT person. So it's an interesting metaphor, even though probably most of the kids here have never seen a pager. >> No, I remember as a kid, my dad was in healthcare, and he had a pager, and you knew that when the pager went off, it was time. You were on-duty, you were out. And there's an honor in duty, and it is a service to the organization. Adrian Cockcroft was here this morning, VP of architecture from AWS, and known for cloud architecture that he built out at Netflix. And he said something really interesting, which is, he believes all people should be on-call, because you need the pain to go where it's most useful. And if everybody's on-call, it also creates this kind of self-fulfilling cycle. If you know you're going to be on-call, you build better code. If you know you're going to be on-call on the weekend, you don't ship something stupid on Friday night. If you know you're going to be on-call and you're a non-technical person, you align yourselves with people who are technical that can help you when that happens. So there's something sort of magical that happens when you do have that culture of being available on the spot when things don't go as planned. >> And now you've got a whole new rash of technology that you can apply to this, in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Wonder if you could share a little bit, where is that now taking you for the next step? >> I think the biggest opportunity with machine learning for us is that, over the last eight years, we've been collecting a tremendous amount of data. And AI and machine learning are only as good as the data they sit on top of. So we have three really interesting data sets. We have the events and the signals that come from all of the machine instrumentation, the applications, the monitoring environment, the ticketing platforms that we integrate directly to. We have information around the workflow, what works best for most of our customers, what doesn't work. What's the best agile-centric DevOps related workflow that enables ultimate response and ultimate availability and resilience for customers. And then finally, what's going on with the people? Who are the people that work the hardest for you? Who are the people that have the subject matter expertise to be the most useful when things aren't working the way they should? You bring all of that together, and you build a model that starts to learn, which immediately means you can automate a lot of manual process. You can improve the quality of decisions, because you're making those decisions in context. An example would be, if an incident pops up, we see it in the form of a signal or a set of events. And our machine learning will recognize that we've actually seen those events before. And the last time this happened, here's what the outcome was, here's what went well and not so well, here's how you fixed it, and here's the person who was on top of it, here's the expert you need to call. So I've immediately shortened the distance between signal and action. I've gotten the people, now, that are going to come in to that process to respond to either a problem or an opportunity, are already much more prepared to be successful quickly, efficiently, and effectively. >> So you've shortened it and you've increased the probability of success dramatically. >> Exactly. And maybe you don't even need a person. That person can go off and do other more important proactive work. >> But you're all about people. And we first met when you were at Keynote and we brought you out for a Women in Tech interview. So you had a thing on Tuesday night that I want for you to share. What did you do Tuesday night? >> I was just super moved and inspired and excited. I've had the opportunity to attend lots of diversity events, lots of inclusion events, a lot of support groups, I'm asked to speak a lot on behalf of women and under-represented minorities, and I appreciate that, and I see that as my own civic duty to help lead the way and set an example, and reach back for other people and help develop younger women and minorities coming up. But I've found that a lot of these events, it's a bunch of women sitting in a room talking about all the challenges that we're facing. And I don't need to spend more time identifying the problem. I understand the problem. What I really wanted to do was bring together a group of experts who have seen success, who have a demonstrable track record for overcoming some of these barriers and challenges, and have taken that success and applied it into their own organizations, and sort of beating the averages in terms of building inclusive, diverse teams and companies. So Tuesday was all about one, creating a fun environment, we had cocktails, we had entertainment, it was in a great venue at Dirty Habit, where we could have a proactive, constructive, action-oriented conversation about things that are working. Things that you can hear from a female leader who's a public company executive, and take that directly back to your teams. Expert career advice, how some of these women have achieved what they have. And we just had a phenomenal lineup. Yvonne Wassenaar, who's the CEO of Airware, and Andreessen Horowitz come, theCUBE alumni, previously CIO at New Relic. We had Merline Saintil, who's the head of operations for all of product and technology for Intuit. Sheila Jordan, the CIO of Symantec. We had Alvina Antar, who's the CIO at Zuora. And, I'm missing one ... Oh, Rathi Murthy, the CTO at the Gap. And so, just quite an incredible lineup of executives in their own right. The fact that they happen to be a diverse group of women was just all the more interesting. And then we surprised the organization. After about 45 minutes of this discussion, sharing key learning, sharing best practices, we brought in the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, who are just embarking, in the next 10 days, on a trip called the Lavender Pen Tour, where they're looking to spread love, hope, and social justice, and proof that diversity delivers results, in the southern states, where equality equals gender equality, and I think challenges for equal opportunity for the LGBTQ community are really significant. And Mikkel Svane, who's the CEO of Zendesk, introduced me to Chris, the director there, about a week before, and I was so inspired by what they're doing. This is a group of 450 volunteers, who have day jobs, who perform stunning shows, beautiful music together, that are going to go on four buses for 11 days around the Deep South, and I think, make a big difference. And they're taking the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir with them. So just really cool. So they came, and I mean, when's the last time you went to a diversity event and people were singing, and dancing, and toasting? It was just really different, and everybody walked away learning something new, including the number of male executives, champions that I asked to come as my special guest, to support people in building sponsorship, to support these women and these under-represented minorities in finding connections that can help them build their own careers, they learned a lot at the event. It was incredible. I'm really proud of it, and it's the start of something special. >> I love it. I mean, you bring such good energy, both at your day job, and also in this very, very important role that you play, and it's great that you've embraced that, and not only take it seriously, but also have some fun. >> What's the point if you're not going to have fun? You apply the growth mindset to one of the biggest problems in the industry, and you hack it the same way you would a deeply technical problem, or a huge business problem. And when we get constructive and focused like that, amazing things happen. And so I now have people begging to be on the next panel, and we're trying to find the next venue, and got to come up with a name for it, but this is a thing. >> And oh, by the way, there's better business outcomes as well. >> I mean, I did a ton of business that night. Half that panel were customers that are continuing to invest and partner with PagerDuty, and we're excited about the future. And some of those women happen to be machine learning experts, for instance. So, great opportunity for me to partner and get advice on some of the new innovation that we've undertaken. >> Well, Jennifer, thanks for inviting us to be here. We love to keep up with you and everything that you're doing, both before and in your current journey. And congrats on a great event. >> My pleasure. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. >> She's Jennifer Tejada, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube Were its roar subscribed in San Francisco. David, Jeez. Here. Last we saw you, David, I think was January when this was all building up. Now you said you have 1,500 of people passionate about subscriptions right here in downtown San Francisco. Congratulations. >> Thank you. It's great to be here, and it's great to be on Graham and on site. Like, last time we talked, we were at your office. Is you're getting ready to move? >> That's right. You have to come see the new spaces, like, way bigger >> we're looking forward to it would be great. >> So great selection of customer stories up here today. We love the customer stories and, you know, you think of classic subscriptions like Adobe Creative Cloud or you think of spotify and these things were used to You don't think about caterpillar. You don't necessarily think about Ford. So to see those guys up on stage with you and team this morning was pretty impressive. >> Yeah, So we're very excited about how the description economy is really expanded into the mainstream and large infrastructure companies who are changing the way people interact has really taken hold. I mean, a couple of examples. You mentioned So caterpillar here today, and they're showcasing today. They have all of this machinery out in the field, spin out terabytes and petabytes off telemetry data, and they're able to monetize those. They have autonomous vehicles, virtual reality drones over job sites. All of that is available now as a subscription. We have Ford here today who are talking about the next generation off the company, moving from a car and all my bill company to a transportation company. A meeting that customers where they need to be meeting met where, whether it's Van Services here in San Francisco, like chariot on bicycles and knowing their customer from the moment they pick up their vehicle from they call it from bed to bed from waking up in the morning till the lasting negative at night and having the whole transportation structure around them, enabling them to do some things like that. It's over exciting. >> I thought it was funny. Todd Buckler, who was up on stage from caterpillars, explicitly said, We're not going to be a software company. We like making big iron things, but man, oh man, listen to the description of the services that they're delivering to their customers that benefit the customers, get the benefits they get. As you said, with all the telemetry data, it's very different than just building a unit, shipping it to the dealer. The dealer sense. Tow the farmer, the construction worker. And maybe you get some data back when it comes in for maintenance down, then totally changing >> it totally changes. And what it does, is it. It helps predict downtime that helps predict offline activity, which could be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. In the case of aircraft engines with G We who we had, I stayed well today when those things go down in an unpredictable fashion that causes enormous impact from a revenue, profitability and forecasting standpoint, so that telemetry data can understand their stresses and strains based on environmental factors in Miami does it? I'm gonna call whether acclimate I'm a jet engine, doing short hops versus long harps that provides enormous insight and sophistication for a customer to enable them to plan. And it's all based on this data, which in turn is delivered this part of the subscription >> right and then take it to the next level. Right? This whole theme around democratization of data, democratization of the tools to the data. Yeah, obviously a plane operating in Alaska is going to have different characteristics and one operating in the desert. But what about pilot characteristics? You know, you could just you can You can leverage the power of all the people in your company to start developing hypothesis, testing those hypothesis and driving innovation around a much broader kind of front, if you will. >> Absolutely. And what we're seeing is that the senses air going into everything. So we think about senses and engines. But the aircraft frames themselves of now increasingly having sex, right? How many stresses and strains, we know how many takeoffs and landings. But are they short hop of a long? Are they going over the pole of the growing of the Atlanta They're going over the United States as an example? All of those have different implications for the service and the support, longevity and also the economics. And that data telemetry has intrinsic value that is now being monetized in ways that we've never seen before. >> So the other interesting thing to me that I don't think it's enough talk. David is, is thinking of your customers is either in a club or as a member with this recurring membership, as opposed to transactional customer we had in speech in sporadic on You know, they have a club we had, sir. Fair on. You know you're a member. It's a very different way to think about the people that are your customers. And because you have this ongoing repeat revenue process with them, you know you have to keep delivering value. You have to keep them subscribed, if you will, because it's a very different way to build a relationship on engagement. >> Yes, so we see that is this evolution of from ownership to being a subscriber. Whether it is a second vacation home is a great example. In the case of in Speranza Oh, they've gone from 0 0 to 15,000 members in just a few short years, and they're offering this highly curated, personalized luxury vacation experience that is very individual, very individual and curated. That's a whole new market place, and it's disrupting high end hotels. It's disrupting whether you want a second vacation home, but you always have to go back to write, but also on the show floor. Here we have companies like 11 James. So if you're a watch fanatic and you have a fancy watch, guess what? When you have one fancy watch you pretty one another one right instead of owning them and putting those assets in the safe or in the drawing for months at a time, once you have a new one sent you every single month or every quarter and just change them out for variety. So we see that time and time again as we move from ownership to subscription, you see it in cause you said an asset. Music is part of the case that most people are familiar with. You've gone from your case full of CDs, your case full of DVDs to your streaming services and you're seeing with entertainment. >> Right? Is interesting. Teen in the Kino talked about being free of the shackles of time ownership obsolescence. So when you do consume these things as a service, it really changes the week consume because as we all know, once you get stuff and they get a garage full of stuff, stuff all breaks, it gets out of date, so it's a really an interesting way to think of it. Now. It's supports this whole kind of experience based economy. I want to share a funny story waiting with Esperanza. Oh, is that they see your commitment to subscribing. To there Club is really a demonstrated commitment to your family that you now have put on the dotted line. You're going to take quality vacation time with your family, and if you could afford it, you're probably pretty busy person, so really interesting twist on what their value proposition is. A wide support of their members. >> And actually what they said this morning was really interesting. And you think about a vacation club on a you know, a luxury curated experience. Maybe that's a week or two weeks a year. They're also filling in the gaps for the other 50 weeks a year with all kinds of local events as well. I'm building this lifestyle so it's fascinating, you know, physical experience off this description economy, and they're very sophisticated how they look at the data and looking who their subscribers, their customers are on this subscribes and customs. By definition, I suspect very demanding, >> right. So you've been doing the emcee job did a great job this morning. I'm just curious as you're walking around the show now that the keynotes air done and you can kind of walk around the exhibit hall and bumping into people any surprising stories. What are you hearing? What kind of the buzz that you that you're hearing a lot of hard work? A lot of teams. >> So So first, what? We have an amazing group here and we're so proud of of the work that we do bring the subscription economy to a physical life. You know, we had this vision some months ago when you and I talked about having a showcase and having our customers tell their stories. And you can see from the energy that we have on the show floor today there are hundreds. We have 1,500 people here this week who are experiencing lots and lots of different customers and companies. Subscription economy experiences. Tomorrow we'll hear from Andy Mooney, who is the CEO of Fender Guitar. So you think about you walk into a store, you buy a fender guitar, they're fabulous. The shadow casters and you leave. They never hear from you again. They want to turn that into a life long music experience and really change the way from learning how to play an instrument to being part of a community and having a long term relationship first is just walking out the store with a guitar >> I love. I love the fender story because again, you know it's easy to think of spotify and digital assets that you're subscribing to and deliver digitally. But they're really redefine your relationship with your customer and then to get the lifetime value. The benefits of that. Because they claim or they buy more sheet music, they buy another guitar. You know, they hang out at the store and becomes a hobby and part of a community engagement. What a brilliant, brilliant move >> exactly. And I would say if if I leave you with one final closing thought, you know the other bigger heart is that there is a looming financial accounting change that's coming where the way subscription economy cos any company with recurring revenue is going to have to change the way they account for their revenue and their expenses. It's something called 606 If you're in the financial community. You're having sleepless nights right now because it's as important as socks. Sarbanes Oxley White. Okay, right on. That's an accounting standard that's coming down the line. We'll be mandatory in December 17 or December 18. Dependent, whether you're a private or a public company. And we just acquired a company that is the market leader in automated revenue recognition. So educating the market in what is a very compelling value proposition on a compelling event that's going to hit almost everybody, >> right? All right, we'll leave that there. We'll pick it up next time, and we'll have a little bit more accounting talk. >> Sounds great. >> All right, well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day. And again, congratulations on to prevent >> we appreciate you coming. Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely. Alright. He's David GM Jefe Rick. You're watching the cue from Zor subscribed 2017 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching

(can opening) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in downtown San Francisco at Zuora Subscribe 2017. 2,000 people talking about the subscription economy and subscription equals freedom, and coming right off the keynote, we're excited to have the founder and CEO, Tien Tzuo, founder of Zuora. >> Great to be here. >> Jeff: Well first of all, great job on the keynote. >> Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. >> Great energy. You know, we hear a lot of about subscription economy. Obviously, a lot of people have Amazon Prime, a lot of us subscribe at Costco. We've got streaming music services, like Spotify. But I don't think people think of companies like Caterpillar, or Fender Guitar, as companies that have a subscription-based relationship with their customer. So before we get into the specifics, I want to talk to you, how is the subscription relationship different than a regular, one-off transactional relationship in the way that you are connected to your customer? >> Right, well, we all know that the world has changed. And we're even evangelizing at this event. This is the sixth year we're having this event. There's over 7,000 people that actually come to these events around the world. That the world is moving to a subscription economy. Starting two years ago, people said, "You know what, we get it. "This is a subscription economy. "I can feel myself, I don't buy products anymore. "I simply tap into services that I use." And the great thing about these services is the provider of these services really care about you. They want you to come back and use their services. They're constantly updating it. And it really frees us all from the shackles of product ownership when we want to get from point A to point B today. We don't have to worry about cars. We pull out our phone, tap into our service, and we're able to get what we need when we want it. >> Yeah, you have that as a really big theme. Kind of shackles of ownership, shackles of obsolescence. This idea that if you have a subscription to a service, you don't have to worry about the oil change. You don't have to worry about whether it's last year's model. You've pulled up some funny pictures of CDs and the CD wasn't even in the CD case. >> The CD, and that wasn't that long ago that we had these CD cases. >> I have empty CD cases all over my garage. I'm guilty as charged. Let's dive into this specific example. So Caterpillar is a cool example. Already having autonomous vehicles driving these big mining. That's all right, but let's talk about the Fender example, 'cause I think that's a really interesting one. What is Fender doing in terms of a subscription relationship with their customers to change who they are and what they are as a business? >> Well, we talk to companies that are going through this transformation. What they bring it down to is the shift in mindset of selling a product to thinking about customers. And so when Fender did this, an amazing transformation happened, right? They sell a lot of guitars. And when they look at shipping products out, how do I sell more guitars? And they said, "Let's not look at it that way. "Let's look at our customers." And what they found is that over 40% of their customers, guitar purchases, are first-time customers. And then 90% of the customers quit after about three months because it's just too hard. It's just too hard. And so when they look at it that way, they say, "Gosh, we have a 10% retention rate "for our customers after 90 days. "Now, if we can just extend that, "extend that out," and, oh, by the way, the 10% of customers that stay, they stay for life. They buy additional guitars. They buy additional amps. They buy sheet music. They buy picks. And so that's how we have to think. We have to not think about selling more guitars. We have to think about how to hold on to our customers for life. If we could just go from 10% to 15% to 20%, we are going to find so much more revenue and we're going to double or triple the size of our company. >> So how do they execute that with your guys' software. >> So what they need to do is they need to establish a subscriber ID. So when you buy a Fender now, there's a whole set of digital technologies that they draw you into. There's a tuning app that you can use, 'cause it's hard to tune your guitar. There's applications that teach you how to play a guitar. There's applications that you can use to play like The Edge, or play like Flea, or play like your favorite guitarist so they draw you into the process that creates social community, social networks. And what we do is we help them turn a guitar purchase into a subscription service that the customers opt into for life. >> So interesting, right? 'Cause this is not a transaction; it's an experience. And it's an engagement. And what are the other things you said in the keynote that got my attention? That there's all these other transactions now. You can buy, you can upgrade, you can pause, you can turn off, you can turn on, you can change the level. So it's this much more dynamic, engaged process and relationship between person selling the service and, arguably, guitar enjoyment, not a Fender Guitar versus an actual piece of wood and some metal strings and everything else. >> Right, what we try to talk about is this whole world of subscriptions. Ultimately, when you're successful is when you deliver freedom to customers, right? Freedom to customers that didn't have it before, right? The story of Netflix is if you have, or let's say Spotify, so you have $20 to spend, you don't have to buy one song, one album, one CD. You can access the whole library of music ever created. And there's a freedom to that. Now, what that means for businesses to react to that is that puts a lot of constraints on businesses, right? Before, they just simply take orders, give me a guitar; give me a song; give me five units of this Widget. Now they have to react to what customers want. I want this; I want this now; I want it like this; I want to upgrade; I want to downgrade. And so this creates all these constraints on businesses and what we want to talk about today was in this new world, businesses need freedom too, right? Businesses need freedom to price, to experiment, to design customer experiences, to get the information they need and what's holding them back is their IT architectures are the past. These ERP systems, and so what we presented this morning was an alternative view. A post-CR view, P, ERP view, of a new set of systems that we provide that help companies be successful and grow in this new subscription economy. >> That's a linear. Basically, that was your theme, right? Not because it's linear. >> That's right. >> It's those transaction types. >> These linear systems passed, they don't work anymore. >> Well the other thing I think is really compelling that I think needs more attention is now, if I have to pay $20 a month to Spotify, which I do. We're on the family plan. I love the service. But they have to keep delivering new value, because for me to keep paying every month, it's a much deeper relationship because they got to keep keeping me on the hook. They got to keep innovating. They got to keep delivering new things and so that's what I think is really interesting about this is the relationship between the buyer and the seller when you have an ongoing touch point every single month versus that one-time transaction. >> Well the keyword there is relationships, right? In the old model, which I'll call an asset transfer model, let me convince you to buy my product. Now you own it. I've gotten your money and I'm going to go focus on the next customer. This new model really requires me to care about the relationship, to care about the value that I'm creating, to continue to add to it to make sure that there's not an alternative out there that's moving faster and delivering things that I'm not. That relationship becomes really, really important. And that's why this model is better and that's why when you use services like a Salesforce, like an Uber, a Spotify, a Netflix, an Amazon Prime, you get the feeling that the other person, the vendor on the other side, really cares about you because, of course, they do. >> All right, so I know you're super busy. You got a lot to do but before you leave, just give your impression, you've been at this for a while, how this has grown. Has it grown faster than you expected? Is it about the same line? As you've seen the subscription economy grow from your initial vision six, seven years ago, what's your, kind of, takeaway as you sit here amongst 2,000 people that are in, arguably, the center of this universe right now? >> Gosh, when you look at this subscribed event, when you look at the energy here, And then when you look at the companies here, I would say five, six, seven years ago, we had a lot of software as service companies here. Box, they're great customers. They continue to be customers. But did we think that we would have Ford, right? Showcasing their electric bikes here? Or Caterpillar showcasing their autonomous vehicles? And these are gigantic vehicles that are carrying 200 cars in what they talked about on stage. And the world's clearly being transformed. Did I think it was going to happen? You know, we always knew the subscription economy was going to be here. We always knew the size and scope. But once you hear the stories, right, you can really tell how much our world is going to change and how much it's going to become just, simply, a better place. >> All right Tien, well congratulations to you and thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by the table. >> Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. >> All right, he's Tien, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Zuora Subscribe. Thanks for watching. (can opening)

Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE we're in San Francisco at Zuora Subscribed 2017 about 2,000 people talking about the subscription economy but what I liked is when Tien had some sample stories up he went with the big iron he went with GE and he went with Caterpillar companies that you probably don't think of a subscription economy like maybe do Spotify or Amazon Prime so we're really excited up Tom Buckler he's the Director of IOT and Channel Solutions for Caterpillar Tom welcome >> Yeah I appreciate it thanks for having me >> So I love that you had a ton of industrial internet stories I mean this is real this is not like coming down the road but it's here today >> no absolutely  you know we've I mentioned during the keynote that since the mid 90s we've been connecting equipment since the mid 90s we've been on our autonomous journey and and you know it's just today we can talk about the largest industrial fleets of over five hundred thousand assets connected all of that valuable information coming in to help our customers and then the fully autonomous fleets in the mines which it's pretty exciting stuff >>   right I mean you and you touched on something we talk about often in the context of GE we've had GE on a number of times where those GE sell engines or do they sell propulsion to the airlines and you talked about do we sell you know this big earth-moving equipment or do we sell X number I know how you measure big giant masses of rock and gravel move but really selling it as a service not necessarily just the truck >> yeah I think that you know that was an important part of our discussion because when we talk about IOT and digital it's really a very customer centric strategy so we're going to get into services like IOT type or digital based services which is our cat connect portfolio if it's going to help serve our customers that we have today in the industries we play be more successful increase their operations increase their efficiency so we're not looking to build a platform or be a software company right you know when we get into this space it's focused on those customers and increasing their profitability and that's what leads us into these areas we're going to be a heavy equipment manufacturer we're going to sell big iron that's what we do we're going to leverage digital to help our customers be more successful >> you say that but I'm telling you I can I can turn the lens a little bit I see a whole lot of software company behind that big iron >> so no I'm not you know and there's there's there's a lot of software on those machines right you know there is a lot of software that's coming off those machines and and certainly we want to take all of that information we want to put analytics on it helped our customers go from being reactive to predictive right and really that's why we're at this conference right because when you get to what we call our cat connect services a lot of those are subscription-based you know when we're connecting a you know five hundred thousand machines or we're able to go out and you know enable grade assist on a machine over the air or we're going to have these predictive health services to make sure uptime is maximized all of those are data driven services through CAD connect and they're all subscriptions right so it's a natural fit for us to migrate into that along with our product business it's um >> just interesting numbers that you shared in the keynote five hundred thousand connected machines you talked about you know the obvious stuff no and unplanned downtime these are huge assets that need to run as close to 24/7 as they predictably can but then you mentioned just looking at some other data and not even really heavy lifting data but customers getting tremendous utilization gains right by leveraging some of the software that you guys have incorporated in the machines >> yeah it's powerful stuff I mean if I talk about construction you know the customer we mentioned is they asked us to connect all 16,000 pieces their equipment you know 3,000 of those work at earthmoving machines you know the other 13,000 weren't they were a variety of other types of machines but with the customer with that information and when they can get put it on one screen and they can look at utilization they can look at location they can look at idle time they can increase their utilization significantly so basic data with a fleet that size can help customers realize 10 almost 20 percent utilization gains and across the fleet that size it's big money right and it's big customer value but even all the way down to the person who's got 10 machines you know they can start to look at idle time they can look at you know operator abuse and how you know where they can train their operators better to perform better so basic information on some of these machines is very valuable it's >> it's such an interesting concept because you keep talking about your customers doing better with the assets that you guys provide them you know when you're in a subscription relationship and you have this ongoing back and forth repetitive connection it's a very different relationship than when you just sell something and you ship it and you take the money and you go on to the other one it seems like that's really kind of the secret sauce of the subscripts economy that's not enough people really highlight yeah you know in some cases >> that's a great point and you know one of the strengths of Caterpillar is is our global dealer network and and so you mentioned about selling the product you know when when when we sell the product our dealers provide that product and sell it to our customers they generally have a long-standing relationship with that customer everything from helping them with uptime to machine selection to operations operator training so we're in the business of working with customers through the long haul but to your point that these digital services you know they create a digital relationship that's ongoing along with our dealers relationship that they've had for four decades right it's it's a really powerful kind of combination >> and then I  would imagine the data that you're now getting back off these machines which before before they were all connected you know you kind of saw them at the maintenance cycles and you could kind of see you know maybe what happened or didn't happen or maybe there's some patterns that are at Geographic or type of job or whatever but now you know I love that the quote we used to take a sample of old data and now we take all of current data it must be tremendous value for you guys to develop better products have better maintenance on your own products see how these things can do much much better >> yeah you're absolutely  right and you know when we talk about the data of the products a lot of people initially go to telematics and certainly when we talk about you know five hundred thousand assets where I'm talking telematics but we also do about 5 million fluid samples a year off different compartments we've got visual inspections they're on electronically through can't inspect that's all the data coming back so all of that information is really rich information and to your point we can take that all the way back to new product design and make sure that our next products are optimized >> pretty exciting stuff solutely and it who doesn't love a big yellow tractor truck actually all right Tom well thanks for a taking a few minutes out of your busy day and congratulations >> all right thanks for having me Tom Buckler I'm Jeff Frick you're >> he's  watching theCUBE we'll be back after this short break thanks for watching

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube. We're in this war subscribed conference 2017 downtown San Francisco. 1,000 2 1,000 people talking about the subscription economy, I think is like the sixth year they've been doing this show. First time we've been here. We're excited to be here, but we're joined by a company that we spend a lot of time talking about. I ot in the industrial Internet, and that's G, but a new gas guidance bar. Ducasse. He's the head of predicts product management for Jean Digital. Welcome. >> Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me here. >> So you guys I mean, we were there in 2013 when Beth and Bill lost the industrial Internet initiative at the juiciest museum just across the street. So you guys have been in this space for a while. The G predicts cloud industrial cloud. You guys have been doing a lot of stuff there, so give us kind of an update. Where are you? Obviously picked a highlight. One of the key stories here. People don't think of G as necessarily a subscription economy type of play, but that >> so why are we here >> yet? So why are you here? >> We're here because we are subscription economy. I mean, what we're really focusing on with predicts is building a platform that allows third parties and first party applications to be built around the industrial space. And so a lot of what we're hearing from our customers is that they want to subscribe to those services, right. They want to subscribe to either the production of the services, but more importantly, maybe the different elements that bring the other solution. So the thing about the hospital like a digital twin, a virtual representation with physical asset A lot of times when people want to do is they want to build twins specific to specific asset. But they want to bring together the analytics and the data associated with that. Maybe some environmental factors that they subscribe to from 1/3 party, right, bring those all together doing analysis, right? And then basically give that stuff back. So they want to subscribe to things like analytics they want subscribe to data and the imports. So that's why we're here. We've been using Zamora a CZ part of our subscription service since the we kicked off G predicts last year way Wendy and February, and it's it's going to be a very flexible solution for us. >> So the parts and I don't think it's enough talk, and it really wasn't a lot of talking. The keynote is how a subscription relationship changes the way that you engage with a customer, because if you just sell him something, thank here's the transaction. You know, go off, you run your jet engine, go run your turbine. But if you have a subscription and it's an ongoing value delivery to pay for that ongoing money that they're giving you, it's a much kind of deeper relationship in kind of a single transact, well, >> it can develop. Do you have much deeper relationship? I think the thing that allows you to do is that allows you to experiment a little bit. Try a couple things, figure out what works best for you as a customer, right, and then invest in those areas. You don't have to make a big purchase order, right? Right. You don't have to go off and spend a lot of money on a bunch of software that may eventually go away, right? You can. You can. You can almost try before you buy or try as you buy, right? Probably better way of putting it right. And so what we're saying is you give people the ability to experiment. I think, you know, we talk within G about productivity, right? And the impact we could make him our own productivity to meet predicts, is much about innovation, right? Right. It's giving people the ability to try different things. Teo, Try on DH. See what happens when you bring in environmental factors. Right? Or usage data, right or operational data? Or, you know, we talked about jet engines lot looking at the different pilots. How do they operate the engines? Right, you know. So there's there's there's all these scenarios you can sort of experiment with on a subscription model. Find out what works and then go deep is necessary. >> It's interesting. 10. And the Kino talked about. What's different now is that you can buy. You can upgrade, you can cancel, you can downgrade. So again, this this interaction, as you just described, allows for a bunch of different types of engagement, not just the Big Bang and the other thing that's consistent with we hear over and over. I is a democratization, democratization of the data, democratization of the tools so that somebody does have a hypothesis that, you know, we've been looking at Obviously, a plane operating in the southwest United States is goingto have different characteristics. Is one operating in Alaska. But as you just said, maybe we should look att, pilot characteristics. Maybe we should look at, you know, back in. So when you open up that innovation platform now, you have so many more people coming up with hypothesis, testing hypothesis and you you open up the resource into your company to do so much better >> Well, and you have little innovation like so we have a partner based on Israel Plantain who's doing some stuff in the manufacturing space with G is we start thing about additive manufacturing. You want something about the composites and the materials that actually go into the engine, right, and sort of how of those and held up over time so you could build a much more longitudinal view of that. And again, it could be a subscription service where you start experimenting, you start understanding, especially with additive being sort of ah, mechanism to decentralize a lot of the manufacturing. You don't need to make a huge investment too. Doing that at those analytics. You put some software alongside the additive systems, and you've got the ability to innovate and understand better. Like what? Composites work better. I mean, you talk about the operation of the engine. But how about the manufacturing, the gym? Are there optimal environments right where you want to build those engines? And I think we've done great work. Is an industrial company to understand how to optimize systems and probably even like what the environmental factors are to build an engine effectively. But when you start distributing that, you really want to gauge that real time to understand what the impact would be, >> All right, So we were on short time leash here, actually, but I want to give you the last word. Give a plug for the critics. Transform show Coming up is part of minds of machines. We live for the first year. Last year that was 2,000 developers. Right? Ready? Great turnout for for really a development platform for an industrial Internet cloud. >> Yeah, s. So what we've done this year was a rain together transform, which is the event for our developer community with minds of machines, which is more targeted towards the business leaders were some of the leaders in the organization, and bringing them all under one roof will be here in San Francisco mid October. I don't have the exact dates, but I probably should. But it's like a roundabout on the >> Internet looking over there. >> But we're bringing those together, right? So we can have a dialogue that spans the complete spectrum. Yeah, right. It's the people that are building will have hackathons will have places where people can actually work on that will judge those those different solutions that are being hacked together on. Then we'll be presenting sort of the business value and the impact we're seeing with a lot of the industrial customers again. Many of them are, jeez, existing customers. We've got customers in different, you know, the auto industry elevator escalator industry, you know, fixtures manufacturing spaces that we haven't traditionally played. So we'll be talking about all the benefits were bringing this customer's Blessem new product introduction talk about >> All right, great event. I team meets ot. We went last year. Jeff was there. Beth was there, Bill was there all that? All the players that great show. Well, congratulations on your successful Zorro. And we look forward to seeing your minds machine. Okay, Thanks. Alright, He's Geeta Som Jeffrey, you're watching the cube crumbs or subscribe 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.

(theCube jingle) >> Hey, welcome back everybody! Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are in San Francisco at Zuora Subscribe 2017, about 2,000 people talking about the subscription economy. But what I liked is when Tien had some sample stories up, he went with the big iron. He went with GE, and he went with Caterpillar, companies that you probably don't think of as subscription economy, like maybe you do Spotify or Amazon Prime. So, we're really excited to have Tom Bucklar. He's the director of IoT and Channel Solutions for Caterpillar. Tom, welcome. >> Yeah, I appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> So, I love that you had a ton of industrial Internet stories. I mean this is real. This is not coming down the road, but it's here today. >> No, absolutely. I mentioned during the keynote that since the mid 90s, we've been connecting equipment. Since the mid 90s, we've been on our autonomous journey. And just today we can talk about the largest industrial fleets of over 500,000 assets connected. All of that valuable information coming in to help our customers. And then the fully autonomous fleets in the mines. It's pretty exciting stuff. >> Right, and you touched on something we talk about often in the context of GE. We've had GE on a number of times where do they sell engines or do they sell propulsion to the airlines, and you talked about do we sell this big earth-moving equipment or do we sell x number of, I don't know how you measure big giant masses of rocking gravel move, but really, selling it as a service, not necessarily just the truck. >> Yeah, that was an important part of our discussion because when we talk about IoT and digital, it's really a very customer-centric strategy, so we're going to get into services like IoT type or digital based services, which is our Cat Connect portfolio, if it's going to help serve our customers that we have today in the industries we play, be more successful, increase their operations, increase their efficiency. So, we're not looking to build a platform or be a software company. When we get into this space, it's focused on those customers and increasing their profitability, and that's what leads us into these areas. We're going to be a heavy equipment manufacturer, we're going to sell big iron, that's what we do. We're going to leverage digital to help our customers be more successful. >> Yeah, you say that, but I'm telling you, I can turn the lens a little bit. I see a whole lot of software company behind that big iron, so... >> No, I'm not. You know, there's a lot of software on those machines. >> You're right. >> There's a lot of software that's coming off those machines. And, certainly, we want to take all of that information. We want to put analytics on it, and we want to help our customers go from being reactive to predictive. And, really, that's why we're at this conference, right, because when you get to what we call our Cat Connect services, a lot of those are subscription-based. You know, when we're connecting 500,000 machines, or we're able to go out and, you know, enable grade assist on a machine over the air, or we're going to have these predictive health services to make sure uptime is maximized. All of those are data-driven services through Cat Connect, and they're all subscriptions. So it's a natural fit for us to migrate into that along with our product business. >> Yes, some interesting numbers that you shared in the keynote. 500,000 connected machines. You talked about the obvious stuff, unplanned downtime, these are huge assets that need to run as close to 24/7 as they predictably can. But then, you mentioned looking at some other data, and not even really heavy-lifting data, but customers getting tremendous utilization gains by leveraging some of the software that you guys have incorporated in the machines. >> Yeah, it's powerful stuff. I mean, if I talk about construction, the customer we mentioned, they asked us to connect all 16,000 pieces of their equipment. You know, 3,000 of those were Cat earth-moving machines. You know, the other 13,000 weren't. They were a variety of other types of machines. But with the customer, with that information, and then when they can get put it on one screen, and they can look at utilization, they can look at location, they can look at idle time, they can increase their utilization significantly. So basic data, with a fleet that size, can help customers realize 10, almost 20% utilization gains, and across the fleet that size, it's big money, and it's big customer value. But even all the way down to the person whose got 10 machines. You know, they can start to look at idle time, they can look at operator abuse and where they can train their operators better, to perform better. So basic information of some these machines is very valuable. >> It's such an interesting concept because you keep talking about your customers doing better with the assets that you guy provide them. You know, when you're in a subscription relationship, and you have those ongoing back-and-forth repetitive connection, it's a very different relationship than when you just sell something, and you ship it, and you take the money, and you go on to the other one. And it seems like that's really kind of the secret sauce of the subscription economy that no enough people really highlight. >> Yeah, you know, in some cases, that's a great point. And, you know, one of the strength of Caterpillar is our global dealer network. And so you mention about selling the product. You know, when we sell the product, our dealers provide their product and sell it to our customers, they generally have a long-standing relationship with that customer. Everything from helping the with uptime to machine selection, to operation to operator training. So, we're in the business of working with customers through the long haul. But to your point that these digital services, you know, they create a digital relationship that's ongoing, along with our dealer's relationship that they've had for decades. So, it's a really powerful kind of combination. >> And then, I would imagine the data that you're now getting back off these machines, which before they were all connected. You know, you kind of saw them at the maintenance cycles, and you could kind of see maybe what happened or what didn't happen, or maybe there's some patterns that are geographic or type of job or whatever. But now, I love the quote, you used to take a sample of old data, and now we take all of current data. There must be tremendous value for you guys to develop better products, have better maintenance on your own products, see how these things can do much, much better. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. And, you know, when we talk about the data off the products, a lot of people initially go to telematics, and certainly, when talk about 500,000 assets, I'm talking telematics. But we also do about 5,000,000 fluid samples a year of different compartments. We've got visual inspections that are on electronically through Cat Inspect, that's all the data coming back. So, all of that information is really rich information. And, to your point, we can take that all the way back to new product design and make sure that our next products are optimized. >> Pretty exciting stuff. >> Absolutely. >> And who doesn't love a big yellow tracker truck? (laughs) Absolutely. All right, Tom, well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day and congratulations. >> All right, thanks for having me. >> All right, he's Tom Bucklar, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (theCube jingle)

>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're in downtown San Francisco, at Zuora Subscribe 2017, about fifteen-hundred people according to David Gee, talking about the subscription economy. And a big part of that when you collect money, you got to collect the taxes. And we're excited to have Simon Geach with us. He's a VP of Sales Billing in Commerce Platforms from Avalara. Did I repeat that right? How do you pronounce it? >> Geach. >> Geach. No, Avalara. Did I get that? >> Avalara. >> Avalara. Alright, so welcome. (laughs) >> Thank you. >> Collecting taxes: everybody's got to do it, everybody's got to pay 'em. >> Not fun though. >> It's not fun, and not simple, right? And usually with sales tax especially, you got the state, you got the county, you got special assessments, you got this, you got that. So that's what you guys do. >> That's right. So, if you think about the subscription economy, one of the most important things in that is making sure that what's on the invoice is accurate for the customer, because of course, the subscription economy is built around that engagement through an invoice, and that can be the important document that a customer gets, as you're building that long-term relationship. So, ensuring what's on that document is accurate, including the taxes, is really important. And for some companies it can be actually fairly simple. But for a lot of companies, particularly as they're growing and expanding their business requirements, it becomes ever more complex, and the costs of dealing with it manually can really sneak up on you and start to increase, and before you know it you're investing a lot of time and resource in trying to manage it, with really no guarantee of accuracy, and then of course, there's the longer term risk that comes if you get something wrong, you miss a rate, there's a change in product taxability that you don't capture, you can get hit and penalized really heavily in an audit. >> Right, and then in the subscription economy there's a lot more transactions, right? So the opportunity to mess it up goes up dramatically. >> Exactly. Tax legislation changes really frequently. So if you're billing customers on an ongoing, constant basis, the need to be up to date with the latest changes is really important, because if you're not, and you miss it, it can cost you a lot of money. >> So where's the "they're" there? So if I, buying something on a subscription, which tax do I pay? Do I pay where my residence is? Do I pay where my phone happened to be when I said "go". Do I pay where my phone happened to be when the end of the month hit? I mean, what are some of the jurisdictional rules? >> Right, so if you think about, Colorado's a really good example of this. Think about Colorado's estate, it not only has state-level assessments, it has then county and city level assessments as well. So it very much depends on where you live. We could be neighbors, and you could pay 4 percent less tax than me, literally being next door to each other. Because tax jurisdictions don't correlate with zip codes at all, and people make the assumption that they do. So it's very easy for that tax rate to change, even across the street. So then you have to factor in origin rules, and destination rules. So some states have origin rules, and some states have destination rules, and some states, like California, have a combination of both. So you really have to have a way of capturing all of that and managing all of that, and as I said, as it gets bigger, and revenue for states is more of an issue, because they're looking to generate more and more revenue to deal with budget deficits, sales tax is a really easy way for them to do that, so the states are paying more and more attention to how accurate you are in doing that. >> And you got to have it right at the invoice, you can't go back and fix it after the fact, right? >> Well, you could, but then >> It's coming out of your, it's coming out of your pocket. >> Right, and if you get it wrong and you get assessed for the difference, it's coming out of your pocket potentially, or you're overcharging the customer, which the state doesn't care about, they just want what you've charged the customer. So being accurate with it not only optimizes the efficiency within your business, it also means your resources can actually be used for other activities, because sales tax compliance is just a cost of doing business. It's not going to help your business grow, it's not going to make your business more profitable. >> So, so, what's the smallest granularity that you look at then, when you're trying to figure out which of the many rules impacts the decision that I'm making? Is it zip code? You're saying it's even smaller than zip code? >> Yes, so we actually determine the tax rate, using a latitude and longitude coordinate, overlaid by a tax jurisdictional boundary of the US. And that's proprietary technology that we maintain. Then we overlay that with product taxability content. So, for example, in Kansas if you buy a Kit-kat, or you buy a Snickers, the Kit-Kat has a lower, or zero tax rate, because it has flour in it, the Snickers doesn't. So (laughs) if I'm in New York, and I sell-- >> More benefits to gluten-free, less tax! >> If I sell you a bagel in New York, and I don't cut it, it's tax free. If I slice it, it's taxable, because I rendered you a service. >> 'Cause one's a grocery item, and now it's like a restaurant item. >> So, the different tax rates apply just based on what you do with the product. >> And how do you capture that in your rules? >> So we have a content team of over 100 people who are managing state compliance legislation, and are working to ensure that our tax engine is always up to date, and we actually guarantee the accuracy of our calculations. >> Is it easier just to put a 20 percent flat rate and then you figure it out on the back end? (laughter) I mean, it's got to be amazingly complex, so you got people by jurisdiction, you've got it by state, you've got it by content type. >> You've got also special taxing jurisdictions, so if they build a new stadium, or a new transit system, the tax may apply for a period, and then go away again, so really having someone who universally can supply you with an engine that's going to take care of all that and update all of that, it not only helps your profitability, it also helps your customer experience, because you don't have customers ringing you, going: "Why have you charged me this?" >> Right, right. >> We automate everything about the returns and remittance process, and the exemption process on the back end as well, so it isn't just the way that we calculate, it's a full end-to-end process of remitting and filing those taxes, responding to tax notices, and then managing exemptions. So universally we can help people outsource this burden. >> So you guys do that for transactions regardless of whether it's subscription or not subscription, correct? >> Right, correct. >> So from your point of view, what's different now with the growth of the subscription economy? How does that impact your business, or does it, or does it just make more transactions, more complexity? >> Well, I think to your point earlier, about the fact that because rules change, and they're not uniform necessarily in the way they change, sure, if a state decides to change a rule, they'll publish a date when they're going to change the rule by, they're not always uniform. There's not always just one time a year when those rules change. And of course if you're a national company or a growing company, trying to stay abreast of that across the 45 states that charge sales tax can be really challenging and time-consuming and costly, long term or short term. So what we're doing, whether it's a subscription customer or not, is making that really easy for them to scale. So you think about a subscription customer, they want a scale, they want to a scale fast, the last thing they want to have to do is worry about how are they going to implement their tax policy. We take that away, so they can concentrate on growing their subscription base. >> Simon, I think you got great job security. (laughter) >> Death and taxes, right? >> Alright, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Alright, he's Simon, I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube, from Zuora Subscribe. Thanks for watching.

(computer mouse clicking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at Zuora Subscribe in downtown San Francisco talking about the subscription economy. What's different about the subscription economy? Why is it taking off? And how does it really change the relationship between the provider and their customer? Or in this case, a club member. So, we're excited to have somebody that's been doing this for a while, Sebastian Gnagnarella, he's the SVP Tech in IT for Inspirato. Did I get that right, Inspirato? >> Yeah, you got that right. >> Awesome, so first off, welcome Sebastian. >> Thanks, Jeff. Glad to be here. >> So what is Inspirato? >> So, Inspirato's a private luxury destination club. We try to provide the affluent consumer a single trusted source for all their travel needs. >> So it's private, it's luxury, and it's destination. >> Exactly. >> But the big thing, it's also a club. >> It's a club. >> And you said it's been a club since the beginning. >> It's a club. >> So what makes a club a club versus having a regular kind of client/customer relationship? >> Well, absolutely. We think that traveling with the club gives the customer a more intimate experience. People are used to buy vacations one by one. With us, they salvage their relation with their personal vacation advisor. When they join the club, they get a personal vacation advisor that knows everything about them, everything about their family, and everything around their travel patterns. And we also give them curation. We give them certainty when you travel with us. And we also give them an extremely great care team. >> Can you share any numbers in terms of number of destinations? Is it your own private destinations? Do you just help them arrange to go to destinations that anyone can go to? How does that work? And give us a little bit of the size and scale of the company. How many trips, members, whatever you can share. >> Absolutely, so, we have 15,000 members right now. When you join the club, you get access to different things. One of them is you get access to our 290+ members-only properties. Properties that we fully manage and control and they're only accessible by our members. You get access to our portfolio of hotels. We have curated deals with different hotels around the world. And you also get access to what we call Bespoke Experiences, which are tailored experiences only for our members. Imagine if you wanted to go on that safari to Africa, you come to us and we take care for you. >> So, then you'll put it together? Or do you usually have a safari to Africa? Or you'll put a custom package together? >> We put it together either with partners, our network of partners, or in some cases, we have member-only trips already in the schedule. Like last year, we did a members-only cruise to Antarctica with I think it was like -- we took like 200 members to Antarctica on that trip. >> So, do people use the service more frequently as a club member? How does it actually change your engagement with them? >> So, I do think they use it more frequently, right. They have that personal relation with their vacation advisors, with their personal vacation advisors. So, we give them extremely good service around where to go, when to go, tips on when is the best time to visit a place, and what is a great occasion to visit a place. We also try to think of ourself as a lifestyle club, not just as a destination club, so we try to be present 52 weeks of the year with local events. So, you are a member, you get access to Superbowl tickets, you get access to backstage tickets for a concert in town, or you get access to members-only cooking classes. >> That's interesting. So not just the big destination vacation. But you've maintained an on-going relationship with a number of smaller events as well. >> Exactly, exactly. >> So, that begs a question, which I think is really interesting one here, about having a relationship with someone through a subscription, or as you say, a club, as opposed to a transactional deal. Because it's not really -- there's transactions within the subscription, but the transactions don't define the relationship. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I said this during the panel few hours ago, is that for us, a subscription has two components, right? One component is the company component. The subscription give us and allowed us to forecast and to scale and build that platform to give more to our members. On the members' side, the membership is their commitment to spend time with the loved ones, right? For us, subscription is that ongoing power that help us help our members to spend time with their loved ones. >> And do you guys promote that? That's a great concept. >> Absolutely, absolutely. It's like for us there's nothing more important than our members spending time with the people they love. >> Right, right. And they're probably very busy, or they couldn't afford the service. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You're exactly right. >> (laughing) That's great. So it is a defined commitment, and that's very different relationship than just buying a vacation package. >> Totally, totally. >> Very cool. Alright so you've been at this for a while. Why Zuora? How long have you been a customer of Zuora? You've been in the club space forever, but why Zuora? >> So, Zuora, we've been customers since 2016. Since last year. Since April last year. And we were managing our subscription charges through a home-grown system. And that worked good, right? When we had 5,000 members, when we had 7,000 members. We knew that the day that climbed to 50,000 members in the future we needed something else. So, we started searching different solutions and we knew we wanted something cloud, we knew we wanted something with strong APIs, so the strong foundation. And we also knew we wanted someone that was strapped into business, because that's how we felt about ourselves, right? We feel that we are strapped in the travel business, and we wanted to partnership with a likewise company, and that's how we picked Zuora. >> Alright, Sebastian, great story. I love it. >> Alright, well thank you so much. >> Absolutely, so show your commitment to your family by signing up with Inspirato. That shows that you're going to take them on really nice vacations. Alright, thanks a lot Sebastian. >> Thanks Jeff, thank you so much. >> I'm Jeff Frick, he's Sebastian, you're watching theCUBE from Zuora Subscribe 2017 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (computer mouse clicking)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody! Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Zuora Subscribe at downtown San Francisco, and every time we go out to conferences, there's a pretty high probability we're going to run into this Cube alumni. Sure enough, here he is, Ray Wang. He's the founder and principal of Constellation Research. Ray, always great to see you. >> Hey Jeff, this is awesome, thanks for having me. >> And close to your hometown, what a thrill! >> This is, it's a local conference! What else can I ask for? >> So what do you think? Subscription economy, these guys have been at it for a while, 1200 people here, I'm a big Spotify fan, Amazon Prime, go back to Costco if you want to go back that far. But it seems to really be taking off. >> It is. About three years ago, digital transformation became a hot topic. And because it became a hot topic, it's really about how do I get products to be more like services. How do I get services to get into insights, and how do I make insights more like experiences and outcomes? And that natural transition as companies make a shift in business models is what's driving and fueling the subscription economy. >> It's interesting. Do you think they had to put the two and two together, that once the products become services now you can tap into that service, you can pull all kinds of data after that thing, you can have analytics, as opposed to shipping that product out the door it goes and maybe you see it every 15,000 miles for a checkup? >> You know what it is? It's basically, about three years ago, people started to realize this. Tien's been talking about this for ages, right? He's been talking about everything's a subscription economy, everything is going to be SAS-ified. And in tech world, everybody got that. But it was when companies like GE, which we saw together, a Caterpillar or a Ford, started to realize, "Hey we can do remote monitoring and sensing "with IOT on our cars, "and I can now figure out what's going on "and monitor them or give an upgrade, "or give a company an upgrade on their appliance, "or give an upgrade on their vehicle, "or do safety and compliance." Then people started realizing, "Oh, wow. "We're not just selling products. "We're in the services business." >> Right. It's funny, if you read the Elon Musk book, how the model years of Teslas, there's no such thing as a model year. It's what firmware version are you on, and then they upgrade. >> Oh, no, that's what we do all the time. You click on a little T, and it's like, boom, firmware. Oh, I get a new upgrade. Only the other day, you touch your head seat, there's like a lumbar support thing, the software popped up for headrest! I never knew I could change the headrest! It literally showed up two months ago. It's unbelievable. >> So, the cool thing, I think, that doesn't get enough play is the difference in the relationship when now you have a subscription-based relationship. That's a monthly recurring or annual recurring, you got to keep delivering value. You got to keep surprising you every morning, when you come out and get in your car, as opposed to that one time purchase. "Adios, we'll see you in however many years "until you get your next vehicle." >> Oh, that's a great example. And the Tesla, we got the Easter eggs over Christmas, right? So the Christmas holiday thing with the Model X that actually did Trans-Siberian Express to the Bellagio fountains with the doors that popped up. You're like, "Hey, what is this thing?" It's just an upgrade that shows up. You're like, "Okay." But you do. You do have to delight customers, you're always capturing their attention, and the fact is, hey, I might buy a toaster. And in that toaster, I might get an upgrade two to three years out. Or maybe, I just buy toasters, and I subscribe to them. And every three years, I get a new toaster. And I can choose between a model L or I can go upsell, get a different color, or I can change out a different set of features, but we're starting to see that. Or maybe, I get a hotel room or a vacation. And that hotel room is at level X, and if I get a couple more members of my family, I get to level Z, and I get to another level, where I lose all the kids, I go back to level A. But the point being is I'm buying a subscription to having an awesome vacation. And that is the type of things that we're talking about here. It's that freedom that Tien was talking about. >> Because he talked about the freedom from obsolescence, freedom from maintenance. There's a whole bunch of benefits that aren't necessarily surfaced when you consume stuff as a service versus consuming it as a product. >> It does. And sometimes it may cost more, but you're trading the convenience, you're trading the velocity of innovation, right? For some people, they just want to own the same thing, they're not going to make the move, but for other people, it's about getting the newest thing, getting delighted, having a new feature. And in some cases, it's about safety, right? This is regulatory compliant or I'm actually doing rev rec correctly, as they were talking about, ASC606. >> Alright, so you're getting out on the road a lot, it's June 6, and I won't tell anyone on air how many miles you already have, because Tamara is probably watching, and she'll be jealous, but biggest surprise is you see here or recently as this digital transformation just continues to gain speed. I'm doing a little research now, and maybe you can help me out. Looking back at digital photography, because it's like, "No, no, no, no, no." for the film, and then it's like, boom. I think these really steep inflection points, or up if you're on the right side, are coming. >> Let's stick to digital photography, that was a great one. There was the point, remember, where we actually had all those disposable cameras at parties that'd get developed, one hour developing. Then we get to back to the point where you just showed up at Costco, dropped something off, you'd get the disk and the photo. Then we had O-Photo, and now we have nothing. Everything just went away because of the phones. These things changed everything, right? I mean, they changed the way we look at photography to the point where, do we even have an album? I was breaking out albums basically three weeks ago, showing my kids, like "Hey, this is what a photo album looks like." And they were completely mystified. "Oh, you print these, how do they get printed?" I mean, they're asking the basic questions. That transformation is what we're having right now. "You own a car?" "You actually buy a PC?" I'm buying compute power. Kilowatts per hour for artificial intelligence in the next year. It's not going to be, I bought the server, I loaded it up, I got it tuned, I got it ready. So yeah, we are in the middle of that shift. But it's the fact that companies are willing to change their business models, and they're willing to break free in the post ERP era. A lot of this is just, my old ERP does not do billing, it doesn't understand the smallest unit of something I sell, and I've got to fix that. And more importantly, my customers, they want to buy it today. The want to buy it in pieces. They want to buy it even smaller pieces. They might buy it every other week, they might buy it-- we have no idea. Yeah, I've got to make sure I can do that. >> It's just interesting too that this is happening now. We're talking about autonomous cars. We see the Waymo cars all the time. The guy from Caterpillar, he's got to a whole autonomous fleet of mining vehicles that are operating today. >> 500,000! He's got 500,000 little trucks. Well, they're not little trucks, they can't fit in this building. >> They're big trucks. Apparently, they tried. >> But they're trying to get these trucks in. We used to think about, like "Hey, these are agricultural vehicles that can be remotely controlled by GPS, they also work for tanks." These are things that are actually doing runs. Now, it's a great reason. Think Australia. Out in Perth, it's about $150,000 to hire a driver. Just to go back and forth. So they figured, "This is just getting ridiculous. "We don't have enough people out here. "We can't convince enough people "to come drive these trucks. "Let's go automate that." That's a lot of the story of where a lot of this came from. >> Or he had a bad night, or broke up with his girlfriend, or distracted about this or that. The whole autonomous vehicle versus regular people driver-- all you've got to do is ride around on your bicycle in your neighborhood, and watch how many people stop at stop signs. Should we answer that question real fast? >> Oh, I do that in California. That's kind of bad, actually. >> Alright Ray. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes. I'm glad you get a weekend at home. Where you off to next, I should ask? >> Oh, it's going to be a crazy next few weeks. I'm going to be in London and Paris and Boston all next week. >> Oh, you're going to eat well. >> I'll try. >> Alright, he's Ray Wang. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube from Zuora Subscribe. Thanks for watching.

>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at Zuora Subscribed in downtown San Francisco. I think it's like 1200, 1500 people talking about the subscription economy. They've been doing it for six years but it really seems to be getting a little more critical path growth. We're excited to be here. And we've got a company you've seen on theCUBE time and time again, we're going back to their event in DC in a couple weeks. I'm happy to have Raj Bandarinath, did I get it right? >> Close enough. >> Close enough. >> He is the head of Corporate Communications for Nutanix, Raj great to see you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me. >> So you guys are enterprise play, you're cloud play. What are you doing here? At Zuora Subscribed, we think of you know Spotify and all these other kind of subscription type of interactions. It's not your guys' space at all. >> Well that's what you'd think at first glance, wouldn't you, but the reality is that you know, Zuora is a vendor, so we are a customer of Zuora's. >> Jeff: Okay. >> And funnily enough, what we're seeing in our market is a huge shift. It's not only about capex, it's also about opex, and it's about providing a continuum of consumption models, if you will, and what Nutanix does is really try to provide all kinds of ways that customers can purchase software from us, and what we are looking at Zuora to do is to be the billing and monetization engine as we embark on this interesting new journey, and it takes us into new wordicals, like internal of things, extending the data center from a central cloud to all the way to drones and edge computing, and that's why we're here. >> So really like you say it's about choice. It always kind of comes back to choice. People don't what to buy it, Ford is here joking about buy any color you want as long as it's black from back in the day, but really you need to offer customers choice, and there's a lot of different consumption models that you need to support. >> Absolutely right, and you know, this is an evolution for us as an industry, right. Look, our CEO said it best, a couple of days ago, and he said it's all about how IT is changing, and is getting colored. The overhang is about the public cloud. Now, we have a lot of other larger players as you know, in the infrastructure space, who are not changing us fast. Who are not essentially giving the range of choices that you need to match with the public cloud. So what Nutanix is here saying is look, not only are we going to give you the delivery models, right of the public cloud, we're going to give to you with a user friendly way of consuming this, and essentially bringing the same economics of the public cloud into the private cloud paradigm, and that's through choice. It's a choice of consumption models, it's a choice of delivery models, and it's a choice of business models. We hit the trifecta. >> It's funny, cause people often think of cloud as an example as just a delivery mechanism, but it's really so much more than that. It's the delivery mechanism that then opens up a completely different way to do business, a way to think about it, a way to consume it differently, and ways to purchase is part of that equation. >> It absolutely is. >> You've got to have it covered. >> It absolutely is, so you know we are you know frankly the only independent lender right now. You've seen a lot of consolidation in our space. I don't want to enumerate that at this point, you guys know this, but we are trying to be is to be kind of the Switzerland for the IT infrastructure industry, and we want to give you the most amount of choices, we want to give you the cutting edge technology, and we just want to be where customers want us to be. >> Right, and you're selling yourself short, that you said they invited you guys here to be part of their digital disrupter. >> That's right. >> You've been doing nothing if you haven't been disrupting for the last couple of years. >> You've said it Jeff, I think we are honored to be invited by Zuora. We think very highly of a company like Zuora, which not only pioneered a new space, put a wonderful, memorable theme around it called subscription economy, and is able to progress and grow so well, and for us the parallels are actually quite remarkable. We pioneered a new space in hyper-convergence. We have grown the space significantly, into what we call invisible infrastructure, and we are at what our leader calls the act two phase, right. The reality is, what he said awhile ago is absolutely true. Every billion is like a new zero. So we have to start over. We can't rest on our laurels. We got to figure out how do we continue invest, how do you continue innovate. We've got to be in places that you least expect us, but we're all the time, talking about solving higher order bits of IT. We're talking about solving what does IOT mean, what does artificial intelligence, and machine learning, how do these concepts come together. How do you have a single cloud operating system that can extend from the data center to the drone. Why should our IT customers have to worry about all of these. Why shouldn't they just be focused on what they do best, which is coming up with new pricing models, new packaging, and so on, and the infrastructure just works. >> Jeff: Right. >> That's we're we want to be. >> Right, which is what the customers want. >> Exactly, right. So, before I let you , I'll give you a little plug, Cube is coming back, Nutanix next, I think it's, I don't even know, second or third year. We've got to European show, a U.S. show. >> That's right. >> So, for the people that don't know, give 'em a little plug for what's happening in D.C. in a few weeks. >> Yeah, I would love to have you guys join us in Washington D.C. We're having Dartnex from June 28th to the 30th, and this is going to be the largest show that we're going to have. Last year we're about 2,400 people. We're going to aim to double that this year, and we have a terrific set of news, a terrific set of speakers. Of course, theCUBE, you guys are going to be there. >> We'll be there. >> We look forward to having to having all the interviews. So we'd love to welcome you to Washington D.C., all do it personally, I'm going to be there. >> Alright excellent, and I'll give you guys a shout out for supporting Girls and Tech Catalysts. It's a show we've covered in the past. We love what Adriana and the team are doing over there, so good move by you guys. That's a good community effort. >> Absolutely, it's critical to us. It's all part of our .heart initiative, and you know, we continue to invest in every way we can. >> Alright well, great to see you Raj. >> Same here Jeff, thank you very much for having me. >> Alright that's Raj, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE From Zuora Subscribed in San Francisco, thanks for watching.

>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Zuora Subscribe 2017 in San Francisco. You know, I go to these events a lot. We love to talk to customers and clients and there's just some customers that are a little bit more personal than others. And this is one here. We're really excited to have Ken Cornick on. He's the co-founder, president and CFO, a busy guy, of Clear or affectionately known as ClearMe. >> ClearMe >> In the twitter-sphere. >> ClearMe.com, that's right. >> Jeff: Ken, great to meet you in person. >> Nice to meet you as well, thanks for your support as a customer. >> As you say, I'm an unabashed happy customer. >> That's great. >> Except when you get the nasty looks from people when they escort you past them all in the security line. >> Well, everybody can be a Clear member if they want. >> Exactly. >> And we give free trials, so they don't have to pay. >> How can you miss? So, where'd you come up with the idea? Just give us a little bit of the history for people that aren't familiar with Clear. >> Actually we don't have a not-invented-here mentality. We actually bought the business out of bankruptcy. >> Oh that's right >> 'Cause it was completely shut down. >> I actually ran into someone the other day at the airport, she said, "I had Clear before and then it went away." And then she was so happy you brought it back. >> Right and for our, we call them, legacy members that were members of the old company, we give their time back for free. So, I shouldn't say free because they paid for it. So, if you had a year remaining when the old company went under, we'll honor that year and you can use Clear for a year without paying and then hopefully you'll continue to pay us as an ongoing customer. >> And what people maybe don't know or are not as familiar with, is it's not just for airports anymore. I was so thrilled, not that long ago, I went to a Giants game at AT&T and I see the ClearMe sign. >> That's right. So we're in eight stadiums across the country with more to come. I live in New York so we have Yankees and Mets which makes me happy. I'm a Yankee fan, my kids are Mets fans so we're covered there. But we're looking to increase the number of places you can use Clear and to increase value, add to our members. So the more you use it, the happier you'll be, and the longer you'll stay with us. >> Right and how do you describe the service? Is it identity as a service? Which is something that just popped into my mind. How do you describe what Clear is all about? >> Funny enough, we do talk about identity as a service not relative to the airport business. The airport business is what we're known for. But really, we bought the business out of bankruptcy and we started it to become a biometric identity platform. Our view is, we want to remove friction. Wherever identity is important, up until now, any time you want to increase security, it diminishes the consumer experience. >> Right. >> So we think, our technology can change all that. We can increase security while making better consumer experiences as you witnessed at the Giants game. >> Or the Orlando airport which is my favorite Clear airport. >> So we are expanding in the airport but we are also looking to expand outside of the airport, even beyond stadiums. So things like, payment applications or it could be healthcare applications, we're building a biometric ecosystem. You've enrolled in Clear once, you can use that enrollment wherever we are. >> God, I can imagine you could integrate with building access points? All these types of things. >> That's exactly right. So there's smart cities, smart cars, all of those applications have biometric angles to them. >> So, good space to be in, good move. >> We think so. >> But we're here at Zuora Subscribe. So you guys chose to have a subscription relationship with your customers. So, why and what are some of the things that have come out of that that you've learned both kind of surprises as well as validations? >> Well, we're big believers in the subscription economy which is the sort of buzz word here. But for us, we want Clear members to not have to think about it. Part of the draw of Clear, is obviously you are saving time in the airport, but it's also the mentality of no stress going to the airport. So I flew out of JFK the other day at a seven AM flight. I live downtown. And I woke up at 5:15 for a seven AM flight, knowing that I could get through JFK, through the Clear lane in five minutes or less. That change in behavior is the true value add, that once our members experience that they love the service. And so, I don't want you to have to think about, well, it's a monthly, am I active am I not active? It's an annual, once a year subscription. You pay it, you don't worry about it again until you renew the year later. >> Yeah that's funny too that you put it in kind of an experience point of view. Because it is the experience. We just had the No-Stress Guy put a thing on the back of your head. Get the Clear card and that'll lower your stress on the way to the airport. >> Absolutely. >> Quite a bit because you just never know what's waiting for you at those security lines. >> You never know and it could be five minutes. It could be 30 minutes. And that uncertainty causes you to carve out a bunch of your time ahead of getting to the airport. You know that you can look at Waze and see what the traffic is. You know you can check online to see what kind of delays there are for your flight. But you just don't know what's going to happen at the security checkpoint. >> Right, right. >> It's the last frontier. >> So, any special, exciting new places that you want to highlight before we have to go? >> Sure so, we started in 2010 with two airports. Denver and Orlando were our first two airports back. We've been growing fairly rapidly. And we're about to open our 22nd airport in about a week to 10 days and that's Los Angeles which is a huge airport. >> Male: Oh, you're not at Los Angeles. >> We are not at Los Angeles yet. So that is a big piece of the network for us and especially if your in Bay Area base, really, really important. >> Right, how many terminals do you have to go? 'Cause you guys do it kind of terminal by terminal right? >> Yeah, we're going to be ubiquitous in L.A., besides the international terminal, we're going to be in seven check-points I believe. It's a very big operation, a big undertaking. >> Alright, well Ken like I say, I'm an unabashed fan so I won't pretend to be bias at all. Love the service. >> Great, thank you so much. >> And congratulations and again, great opportunities to go way beyond the airport. >> Thanks for hosting me. >> Alright my pleasure, Ken Cornick, I'm Jeff Frick. He's from ClearMe, I'm from theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>> Hey welcome back here everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Zuora Subscribe Conference 2017, downtown on San Francisco. 1,000, 2,000 people talking about the subscription economy. I think it's like the sixth year they've been doing the show. First time we've been here. We're excited to be here. But we're joined by a company that we spent a lot of time talking about IOT and the industrial internet, and that's GE, but a new guest, Gytis Barzdukas, he is the head of Predix Product Management for GE Digital. Welcome. >> Thanks Jeff, thanks for having me here. >> So you guys, I mean, we were there in 2013 when Beth and Bill launched the industrial internet initiative at the Jewish History Museum just across the street. So you guys have been in this space for a while, the GE Predix Cloud, industrial internet cloud, you guys have been doing a lot of stuff there. So give us a kind of update, where are you? Obviously picked to highlight one of the key stories here. People probably don't think of GE as necessarily a subscription economy type of play, but, >> So why are we here? >> Jeff: Yeah, so why are you here? >> Well we're here because we are a subscription economy. What we're really focusing on with Predix is building a platform that allows third-parties and first-party applications to be built around the industrial space, and so a lot of what we're hearing from our customers is that they want to subscribe to those services. They want to subscribe to either the production of the services, but more importantly maybe the different elements that bring together a solution. So think about the concept like a digital twin, a virtual representation of a physical asset. A lot of times what people want to do is they want to build twins specific to a specific asset. But they want to bring together the analytics, and the data associated with that, and maybe some environmental factors that they subscribe to from a third-party, bring those all together, do an analysis, And then basically give that stuff back. So they want to subscribe to things like analytics. They want to subscribe to data and the inputs, so that's why we're here. We've been using Zuora as part of our subscription service since we kicked off GE Predix last year. We went GA in February, and it's proven to be a very flexible solution for us. >> So the part that I don't think gets enough talk, and there really wasn't a lot of talk in the keynote, is how a subscription relationship changes the way that you engage with the customer. 'Cause if you just sell 'em something, here's the transaction, you know, go off, go run your jet engine, run your turbine, but if you have a subscription, and it's an ongoing value delivery to pay for that ongoing money that they're giving you, it's a much kind of deeper relationship than kind of a single transaction relationship. >> It can develop to be a much deeper relationship. I think the thing that it allows you to do is, it allows you to experiment a little bit, try a couple things, figure out what works best for you as a customer and then invest in those areas. You don't have to make a big purchase order. You don't have to go off and spend a lot of money on a bunch of software that may eventually go away. You can almost try, before you buy, or try as you buy is probably a better way of putting it. And so what we're seeing is we give people the ability to experiment. I think, we talk within GE about productivity and the impact we can make in our own productivity. To me Predix is as much about innovation. It's giving people the ability to try different things, to try and see what happens when you bring in environmental factors or usage data, or operational data, or we talk about jet engines a lot. Looking at the different pilots, how do they operate the engines? So there's all these scenarios you can sort of experiment with on a subscription model, find out what works and then go deep as necessary. >> And it's interesting, Tien in the keynote talked about how what's different now is that you can buy, you can upgrade, you can cancel, you can downgrade, so again this interaction as you just described, allows for a bunch of different types of engagement, not just the big bang. >> Yep, yeah. >> And the other thing that's consistent with who you're over and overwrite is the democratization. Democratization of the data, democratization of the tools so that if somebody does have a hypothesis, we've been looking at obviously a plane operating in the southwest United States is going to have different characteristics as one operating in Alaska. But as you just said maybe we should look at pilot characteristics. Maybe we should look at back ends, so when you open up that innovation platform, now you have so many more people coming up with hypothesis, testing hypothesis, and you open up the resources to your company to do so much better. >> Well, and you have little innovation, so we have a partner based in Israel, Plataine, who's doing some stuff in the manufacturing space with GE as we start thinking about additive manufacturing. You want to start thinking about the composites and the materials that actually go into the engine, and sort of how have those held up over time? So you can build a much more longitudinal view of that, and again, it can be a subscription service where you start experimenting, you start understanding, especially with additive being sort of a mechanism to decentralize a lot of the manufacturing. You don't need to make a huge investment to doing those analytics. You put some software alongside the additive systems, and you've got the ability to innovate and understand better what composites work better. You talk about the operation of the engine, but how about the manufacturing of the engine? Are there optimal environments where you want to build those engines? And I think we've done great work as an industrial company and understand how to optimize systems and probably even like what the environmental factors are to build an engine effectively, but when you start distributing that, you really want to gauge that real time to understand what the impact could be. >> All right, so we're on short time leash here, unfortunately, but I want to give you the last word, give a plug for the Predix Transform Show coming up as part of Minds and Machines. We went for the first year last year. It was 2,000 developers, pretty great turnout for really a development platform for an industrial internet cloud. >> Yeah, so what we've done this year is we're bringing together Transform, which is the event for our developer community with Minds and Machines which is more targeted towards the business leaders or some of the IT leaders in their organization and bringing them all under one roof. It'll be here in San Francisco mid-October. I don't have the exact dates. I probably should, but I think it's like-- >> I can look it up on the internet. That's why we have the internet. >> But we're bringing those together. So we can have a dialogue that spans the complete spectrum. It's the people that are building, and we'll have hackathons, we'll have places where people can actually work on that. We'll judge those different solutions that are being hacked together. And then we'll be presenting sort of the business value and the impact we're seeing with a lot of the industrial customers. Again, many of them are GE's existing customers. But we've got customers in the auto industry, elevator, escalator industry, fixtures, manufacturing, spaces that we haven't traditionally played, and so we'll be talking about all of the benefits. We're bringing in those customers plus some new product introductions which I can't talk about now. >> All right great event, IT meets OT. We went last year. Jeff was there, Beth was there, >> They will be there. >> Jeff: Bill was there, all the players. A great show. >> okay, Jeff. >> Jeff: Congratulations on your success with Zuora and we look forward to seeing you at Minds and Machines. >> Okay, thanks Jeff. >> All right, he's Gytis, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Zuora Subscribe 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.

(clicks) >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco with Zuora Subscribe. About 2,000 people all focused on the subscription economy. And we're looking at some really cool products. We've had GE on, we're going to have Caterpillar on, but this is something new. You know, kind of these medical devices. Fitbit on steroids. I don't know how you describe it. Dr Sumon Pal. He is the cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer for Thync. Welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. So give us a little bit of background on Thync, and then we'll jump into the device. >> Absolutely. So we're the first subscription service for wellness and better mental health. >> Okay. >> And the way it works is that there's hardware which is a neuromodulator, and they interface with your skin which is some pads and basically you put this on the back of your neck. There's software, there are programs that come along in the app and what these are are algorithms that have been developed to stimulate certain nerves in the right way. Those nerves in turn connect with your brain stem and that is the center for stress, for sleep cycles, for mood in general. And over the last five years we've developed a way to safely stimulate those nerves, such that you can sleep better, your mood is improved and you can de-stress. >> Okay, so let's back, back way up. You covered like a, you went the whole enchilada there. So you basically did some research. You guys figured out that nerve can stimulation can give better wellness. >> Right. >> And is that just during sleeping hours, during waking hours, all the above, kind of? >> Yeah, so it's both. I mean a session lasts about 10 to 15 minutes. >> Okay. >> In that time, what's happening is that it's dampening the stress response in your body. >> Jeff: Okay >> So if you do this on a daily basis or you do this in the evenings when you come home from work, you are kind of detaching from that stress that's built up during the day. >> Jeff: Without drinking a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. >> Absolutely. Without really any toxicity, without any side effects, without any addiction. Without any of the issues that come along with pills and substances. >> All those other things. Okay so then you put this thing on. >> That's right. >> So you put it on like right after you get home from work, or? >> Sure. >> Or when you go to sleep? Does it make a difference? >> Or if you just had a bad meeting. You had a rough morning. If there's kind of an acute occasion where you're anxious or highly stressed then you can use it then, too. >> Okay, so it's kind of yoga in a box. If I would be so presumptuous. >> Without any effort, right. >> No damage to the knees. >> Right, right. >> All right, super. So, a little bit in terms of the history of the company, so you said this is version two that you just came out with >> Right. Yeah, we've been developing the product, the technology in general for about five years. We've done three published studies. We've tested thousands of subjects. The first product has over two million minutes of use without any adverse side effects or, you know, we know that it's a really safe and powerful method to help people. >> Okay, and what does it retail for? >> So the hardware costs 149. >> Okay. >> And then there's the subscription. And the subscription is because there's a consumable involved, which are these pads. Which are actually a proprietary formulation so that this is absolutely painless, absolutely comfortable. And we have algorithms, so you're actually streaming these programs and those programs are highly complex, changing over time and constantly being updated. So for the software, service, and for the pads you pay either $29.99 a month or you pay $19.99 a month depending on a longer commitment. >> Okay. And when you decided to go with the subscription pricing, versus just selling it and if I need more pads, I order a 12-pack of pads or whatever. What were some of the things you thought about and then what are some of the outcomes that you have found? Both kind of expected and unexpected in having a subscription relationship with your customers. >> Yeah, it's a great question. So, one of the things that's really important about, so stress leads to a huge number of health issues. Everything from cardiovascular issues to being linked with diabetes, to being linked with premature aging. And so it's important to chronically reduce your stress levels. And you want to have all the components around when you need it. It's not one of those things where you've had a terrible day, you're extremely anxious. You know, you want everything to be there. You don't want to go and then order some pads online, order what you need online. >> Right, right. >> So that's one aspect, and the second is that you want access to the programs that are being updated all of the time. And what we find is that when people are on a subscription service, that kind of constant use which is so critical for your health, mental health, general well-being, is maintained in a better way than if you're kind of having to reorder these things or buy them. So really it's about supporting and promoting this kind of continuous regular use and routines. >> And I would presume that then you also get the benefit too 'cause you're getting all those data. >> Absolutely. >> Points that are feeding your algorithms. >> Absolutely. >> So you can make changes to the application, changes to the algorithm. >> That's right and also we have a library, about a thousand programs. And it's also about, we can, for any customer switch out the programs that they have if it's not working for whatever reason. So to kind of rescue people, it's also important to get that data of, what is happening month to month. >> So is a program the sequence of, of, I don't want to say charges but stimulations or whatever. >> Yeah, that's right. >> That set a different pattern, a different frequency and that creates like a program. >> That's right. >> And you experiment to find out what works best for you? >> That's right, it's a lot like music. It's a stimulation pattern that's built in blocks and those blocks change over time. And that is one of the things that we figured out how to do, that no one really had done before. >> Alright, well, pretty exciting stuff. >> Thank you. >> I look forward to watching you guys grow and see how things continue to progress. >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Alright, thanks for stopping by theCUBE. Alright, he's Dr. Sumon Pal, I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from Zuora Subscribe. Thanks for watching. (clicks)