(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon North America 2023. Obviously, CUBE's coverage with our CUBE Center Report. We're not there on the ground, but we have folks and our CUBE Alumni there. We have entrepreneurs there. Of course, we want to be there in person, but we're remote. We've got Ben Hirschberg, CTO and Co-Founder of Armo, a cloud native security startup, well positioned in this industry. He's there in Seattle. Ben, thank you for coming on and sharing what's going on with theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, John. >> So we had written on you guys up on SiliconANGLE. Congratulations on your momentum and traction. But let's first get into what's going on there on the ground? What are some of the key trends? What's the most important story being told there? What is the vibe? What's the most important story right now? >> So I think, I would like to start here with the I think the most important thing was that I think the event is very successful. Usually, the Cloud Native Security Day usually was part of KubeCon in the previous years and now it became its own conference of its own and really kudos to all the organizers who brought this up in, actually in a short time. And it wasn't really clear how many people will turn up, but at the end, we see a really nice turn up and really great talks and keynotes around here. I think that one of the biggest trends, which haven't started like in this conference, but already we're talking for a while is supply chain. Supply chain is security. I think it's, right now, the biggest trend in the talks, in the keynotes. And I think that we start to see companies, big companies, who are adopting themselves into this direction. There is a clear industry need. There is a clear problem and I think that the cloud native security teams are coming up with tooling around it. I think for right now we see more tools than adoption, but the adoption is always following the tooling. And I think it already proves itself. So we have just a very interesting talk this morning about the OpenSSL vulnerability, which was I think around Halloween, which came out and everyone thought that it's going to be a critical issue for the whole cloud native and internet infrastructure and at the end it turned out to be a lesser problem, but the reason why I think it was understood that to be a lesser problem real soon was that because people started to use (indistinct) store software composition information in the environment so security teams could look into, look up in their systems okay, what, where they're using OpenSSL, which version they are using. It became really soon real clear that this version is not adopted by a wide array of software out there so the tech surface is relatively small and I think it already proved itself that the direction if everyone is talking about. >> Yeah, we agree, we're very bullish on this move from the Cloud Native Foundation CNCF that do the security conference. Amazon Web Services has re:Invent. That's their big show, but they also have re:Inforce, the security show, so clearly they work together. I like the decoupling, very cohesive. But you guys have Kubescape of Kubernetes security. Talk about the conversations that are there and that you're hearing around why there's different event what's different around KubeCon and CloudNativeCon than this Cloud Native SecurityCon. It's not called KubeSucSecCon, it's called Cloud Native SecurityCon. What's the difference? Are people confused? Is it clear? What's the difference between the two shows? What are you hearing? >> So I think that, you know, there is a good question. Okay, where is Cloud Native Computing Foundation came from? Obviously everyone knows that it was somewhat coupled with the adoption of Kubernetes. It was a clear understanding in the industry that there are different efforts where the industry needs to come together without looking be very vendor-specific and try to sort out a lot of issues in order to enable adoption and bring great value and I think that the main difference here between KubeCon and the Cloud Native Security Conference is really the focus, and not just on Kubernetes, but the whole ecosystem behind that. The way we are delivering software, the way we are monitoring software, and all where Kubernetes is only just, you know, maybe the biggest clog in the system, but, you know, just one of the others and it gives great overview of what you have in the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think it's a good call. I would add that what I'm hearing too is that security is so critical to the business model of every company. It's so mainstream. The hackers have a great business model. They make money, their costs are lower than the revenue. So the business of hacking in breaches, ransomware all over the place is so successful that they're playing offense, everyone's playing defense, so it's about time we can get focus to really be faster and more nimble and agile on solving some of these security challenges in open source. So I think that to me is a great focus and so I give total props to the CNC. I call it the event operating system. You got the security group over here decoupled from the main kernel, but they work together. Good call and so this brings back up to some of the things that are going on so I have to ask you, as your startup as a CTO, you guys have the Kubescape platform, how do you guys fit into the landscape and what's different from your tools for Kubernetes environments versus what's out there? >> So I think that our journey is really interesting in the solution space because I think that our mode really tries to understand where security can meet the actual adoption because as you just said, somehow we have to sort out together how security is going to be automated and integrated in its best way. So Kubescape project started as a Kubernetes security posture tool. Just, you know, when people are really early in their adoption of Kubernetes systems, they want to understand whether the installation is is secure, whether the basic configurations are look okay, and giving them instant feedback on that, both in live systems and in the CICD, this is where Kubescape came from. We started as an open source project because we are big believers of open source, of the power of open source security, and I can, you know I think maybe this is my first interview when I can say that Kubescape was accepted to be a CNCF Sandbox project so Armo was actually donating the project to the CNCF, I think, which is a huge milestone and a great way to further the adoption of Kubernetes security and from now on we want to see where the users in Armo and Kubescape project want to see where the users are going, their Kubernetes security journey and help them to automatize, help them to to implement security more fast in the way the developers are using it working. >> Okay, if you don't mind, I want to just get clarification. What's the difference between the Armo platform and Kubescape because you have Kubescape Sandbox project and Armo platform. Could you talk about the differences and interaction? >> Sure, Kubescape is an open source project and Armo platform is actually a managed platform which runs Kubescape in the cloud for you because Kubescape is part, it has several parts. One part is, which is running inside the Kubernetes cluster in the CICD processes of the user, and there is another part which we call the backend where the results are stored and can be analyzed further. So Armo platform gives you managed way to run the backend, but I can tell you that backend is also, will be available within a month or two also for everyone to install on their premises as well, because again, we are an open source company and we are, we want to enable users, so the difference is that Armo platform is a managed platform behind Kubescape. >> How does Kubescape differ from closed proprietary sourced solutions? >> So I can tell you that there are closed proprietary solutions which are very good security solutions, but I think that the main difference, if I had to pick beyond the very specific technicalities is the worldview. The way we see that our user is not the CISO. Our user is not necessarily the security team. From our perspective, the user is the DevOps and the developers who are working on the Kubernetes cluster day to day and we want to enable them to improve their security. So actually our approach is more developer-friendly, if I would need to define it very shortly. >> What does this risk calculation score you guys have in Kubscape? That's come up and we cover that in our story. Can you explain to the folks how that fits in? Is it Kubescape is the platform and what's the benefit, what's the purpose? >> So the risk calculation is actually a score we are giving to clusters in order for the users to understand where they are standing in the general population, how they are faring against a perfect hardened cluster. It is based on the number of different tests we are making. And I don't want to go into, you know, the very specifics of the mathematical functions, but in general it takes into account how many functions are failing, security tests are failing inside your cluster. How many nodes you are having, how many workloads are having, and creating this number which enables you to understand where you are standing in the global, in the world. >> What's the customer value that you guys pitching? What's the pitch for the Armo platform? When you go and talk to a customer, are they like, "We need you." Do they come to you? Is it word of mouth? You guys have a strategy? What's the pitch? What's so appealing to the customers? Why are they enthusiastic about you guys? >> So John, I can tell you, maybe it's not so easy to to say the words, but I nearly 20 years in the industry and though I've been always around cyber and the defense industry and I can tell you that I never had this journey where before where I could say that the the customers are coming to us and not we are pitching to customers. Simply because people want to, this is very easy tool, very very easy to use, very understandable and it very helps the engineers to improve security posture. And they're coming to us and they're saying, "Well, awesome, okay, how we can like use it. Do you have a graphical interface?" And we are pointing them to the Armor platform and they are falling in love and coming to us even more and we can tell you that we have a big number of active users behind the platform itself. >> You know, one of the things that comes up every time at KubeCon and Cloud NativeCon when we're there, and we'll be in Amsterdam, so folks watching, you know, we'll see onsite, developer productivity is like the number one thing everyone talks about and security is so important. It's become by default a blocker or anchor or a drag on productivity. This is big, the things that you're mentioning, easy to use, engineering supporting it, developer adoption, you know we've always said on theCUBE, developers will be the de facto standards bodies by their choices 'cause developers make all the decisions. So if I can go faster and I can have security kind of programmed in, I'm not shifting left, it's just I'm just having security kind of in there. That's the dream state. Is that what you guys are trying to do here? Because that's the nirvana, everyone wants to do that. >> Yeah, I think your definition is like perfect because really we had like this, for a very long time we had this world where we decoupled security teams from developers and even for sometimes from engineering at all and I think for multiple reasons, we are more seeing a big convergence. Security teams are becoming part of the engineering and the engineering becoming part of the security and as you're saying, okay, the day-to-day world of developers are becoming very tangled up in the good way with security, so the think about it that today, one of my developers at Armo is creating a pull request. He's already, code is already scanned by security scanners for to test for different security problems. It's already, you know, before he already gets feedback on his first time where he's sharing his code and if there is an issue, he already can solve it and this is just solving issues much faster, much cheaper, and also you asked me about, you know, the wipe in the conference and we know no one can deny the current economic wipe we have and this also relates to security teams and security teams has to be much more efficient. And one of the things that everyone is talking, okay, we need more automation, we need more, better tooling and I think we are really fitting into this. >> Yeah, and I talked to venture capitalists yesterday and today, an angel investor. Best time for startup is right now and again, open source is driving a lot of value. Ben, it's been great to have you on and sharing with us what's going on on the ground there as well as talking about some of the traction you have. Just final question, how old's the company? How much funding do you have? Where you guys located? Put a plug in for the company. You guys looking to hire? Tell us about the company. Were you guys located? How much capital do you have? >> So, okay, the company's here for three years. We've passed a round last March with Tiger and Hyperwise capitals. We are located, most of the company's located today in Israel in Tel Aviv, but we have like great team also in Ukraine and also great guys are in Europe and right now also Craig Box joined us as an open source VP and he's like right now located in New Zealand, so we are a really global team, which I think it's really helps us to strengthen ourselves. >> Yeah, and I think this is the entrepreneurial equation for the future. It's really great to see that global. We heard that in Priyanka Sharma's keynote. It's a global culture, global community. >> Right. >> And so really, really props you guys. Congratulations on Armo and thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing insights and expertise and also what's happening on the ground. Appreciate it, Ben, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, cheers. Okay, this is CUB coverage here of the Cloud Native SecurityCon in North America 2023. I'm John Furrier for Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We're back with more of wrap up of the event after this short break. (gentle upbeat music)

(energetic music plays) >> Lisa: Hey everyone, we're so glad you're here with us. theCUBE is covering Cloud Native Security Con 23. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is our second day of coverage of the event. We've had some great conversations with a lot of intellectual, exciting folks, as you know cuz you've been watching. John and I are very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to theCUBE Taylor Dolezal joins us the head of ecosystem at CNCF. Taylor, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. >> Taylor: Hey everybody, great to see you again. >> Lisa: So you are on the ground in Seattle. We're jealous. We've got fomo as John would say. Talk to us about, this is a inaugural event. We were watching Priyanka keynote yesterday. Seemed like a lot of folks there, 72 sessions a lot of content, a lot of discussions. What's the buzz, what's the reception of this inaugural event from your perspective? >> Taylor: So it's been really fantastic. I think the number one thing that has come out of this conference so far is that it's a wonderful chance to come together and for people to see one another. It's, it's been a long time that we've kind of had that opportunity to be able to interact with folks or you know, it's just a couple months since last Cube Con. But this is truly a different vibe and it's nice to have that focus on security. We're seeing a lot of folks within different organizations work through different problems and then finally have a vendor neutral space in which to talk about all of those contexts and really raise everybody up with all this new knowledge and new talking points, topics, and different facets of knowledge. >> John: Taylor, we were joking on our yesterday's summary of the keynotes, Dave Vellante and I, and the guests, Lisa and I, about the CNCF having an event operating system, you know, very decoupled highly cohesive events, strung together beautifully through the Linux Foundation, you know, kind of tongue in cheek but it was kind of fun to play on words because it's a very technical community. But the business model of, of hackers is booming. The reality of businesses booming and Cloud Native is the preferred developer environment for the future application. So the emphasis, it's very clear that this is a good move to do and targeting the community around security's a solid move. Amazon's done it with reinforce and reinvent. We see that Nice segmentation. What's the goal? Because this is really where it connects to Cube Con and Cloud Native Con as well because this shift left there too. But here it's very much about hardcore Cloud Native security. What's your positioning on this? Am I getting it right or is there is that how you guys see it? >> Taylor: Yeah, so, so that's what we've see that's what we were talking about as well as we were thinking on breaking this event out. So originally this event was a co-located event during the Cube Con windows in both Europe and North America. And then it just was so consistently popular clearly a topic that people wanted to talk, which is good that people want to talk of security. And so when we saw this massive continued kind of engagement, we wanted to break this off into its own conference. When we were going through that process internally, like you had mentioned the events team is just phenomenal to work with and they, I love how easy that they make it for us to be able to do these kinds of events too though we wanted to talk through how we differentiate this event from others and really what's changed for us and kind of how we see this space is that we didn't really see any developer-centric open source kinds of conferences. Ones that were really favoring of the developer and focus on APIs and ways in which to implement these things across all of your workloads within your organization. So that's truly what we're looking to go for here during these, all of these sessions. And that's how it's been playing out so far which has been really great to see. >> John: Taylor, I want to ask you on the ecosystem obviously the built-in ecosystem at CNCF.IO with Cube Cons Cloud Cons there, this is a new ecosystem opportunity to add more people that are security focused. Is their new entrance coming into the fold and what's been the reaction? >> Taylor: So short answer is yes we've seen a huge uptick across our vendor members and those are people that are creating Cloud offerings and selling those and working with others to implement them as well as our end users. So people consuming Cloud Native projects and using them to power core parts of their business. We have gotten a lot of data from groups like IBM and security, IBM security and put 'em on institute. They gave us a cost of data breach report that Priyanka mentioned and talked about 43% of those organizations haven't started or in the early stages of updating security practices of their cloud environments and then here on the ground, you know, talking through some best practices and really sharing those out as well. So it's, I've gotten to hear pieces and parts of different conversations and and I'm certain we'll hear more about those soon but it's just really been great to, to hear everybody with that main focus of, hey, there's more that we can do within the security space and you know, let's let's help one another out on that front just because it is such a vast landscape especially in the security space. >> Lisa: It's a huge landscape. And to your point earlier, Taylor it's everyone has the feeling that it's just so great to be back together again getting folks out of the silos that they've been operating in for such a long time. But I'd love to get some of your, whatever you can share in terms of some of the Cloud Native security projects that you've heard about over the last day or so. Anything exciting that you think is really demonstrating the value already and this inaugural event? >> Taylor: Yes, so I I've been really excited to hear a lot of, personally I've really liked the talks around EBPF. There are a whole bunch of projects utilizing that as far as runtime security goes and actually getting visibility into your workloads and being able to see things that you do expect and things that you don't expect and how to remediate those. And then I keep hearing a lot of talks about open policy agents and projects like Caverno around you know, how do we actually automate different policies or within regulated industries, how do we actually start to solve those problems? So I've heard even more around CNCF projects and other contexts that have come up but truly most of them have been around the telemetry space EBPF and, and quite a few others. So really great to, to see all those projects choosing something to bind to and making it that much more accessible for folks to implement or build on top of as well. >> John: I love the reference you guys had just the ChatGPT that was mentioned in the keynote yesterday and also the reference to Dan Kaminsky who was mentioned on the reference to DNS and Bind, lot of root level security going on. It seems like this is like a Tiger team event where all the top alpha security gurus come together, Priyanka said, experts bottoms up, developer first practitioners, that's the vibe. Is that kind of how you guys want it to be more practitioners hardcore? >> Taylor: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that when it comes to security, we really want to help. It's definitely a grassroots movement. It's great to have the people that have such a deep understanding of certain security, just bits of knowledge really when it comes to EBPF. You know, we have high surveillance here that we're talking things through. Falco is here with Sysdig and so it it's great to have all of these people here, though I have seen a good spread of folks that are, you know, most people have started their security journey but they're not where they want to be. And so people that are starting at a 2 0 1, 3 0 1, 4 0 1 level of understanding definitely seeing a good spread of knowledge on that front. But it's really, it's been great to have folks from all varying experiences, but then to have the expertise of the folks that are writing these specifications and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with security to to ensure that we're all okay and updated on that front too, I think was most notable yesterday. Like you had said >> Lisa: Sorry Taylor, when we think of security, again this is an issue that, that organizations in every industry face, nobody is immune to this. We can talk about the value in it for the hackers in terms of ransomware alone for example. But you mentioned a stat that there's a good amount of organizations that are really either early in their security journeys or haven't started yet which kind of sounds a bit scary given the landscape and how much has changed in the last couple of years. But it sounds like on the good news front it isn't too late for organizations. Talk a little bit about some of the recommendations and best practices for those organizations who are behind the curve knowing that the next attack is going to happen. >> Taylor: Absolutely. So fantastic question. I think that when it comes to understanding the fact that people need to implement security and abide by best practices, it's like I I'm sure that many of us can agree on that front, you know, hopefully all of us. But when it comes to actually implementing that, that's I agree with you completely. That's where it's really difficult to find where where do I start, where do I actually look at? And there are a couple of answers on that front. So within the CNTF ecosystem we have a technical action group security, so tag security and they have a whole bunch of working groups that cover different facets of the Cloud Native experience. So if you, for example, are concerned about runtime security or application delivery concerns within there, those are some really good places to find people knowledgeable about, that even when the conference isn't going on to get a sense of what's going on. And then TAG security has also published recently version two of their security report which is free accessible online. They can actually look through that, see what some of the recent topics are and points of focus and of interest are within our community. There are also other organizations like Open SSF which is taking a deeper dive into security. You know, initially kind of having a little bit more of an academic focus on that space and then now getting further into things around software bill materials or SBOMs supply chain security and other topics as well. >> John: Well we love you guys doing this. We think it's very big deal. We think it's important. We're starting to see events post COVID take a certain formation, you know joking aside about the event operating systems smaller events are happening, but they're tied together. And so this is key. And of course the critical need is our businesses are under siege with threats, ransomware, security challenges, that's IT moves to Cloud Native, not everyone's moved over yet. So that's in progress. So there's a huge business imperative and the hackers have a business model. So this isn't like pie in the sky, this is urgent. So, that being said, how do you see this developing from who should attend the next one or who are you looking for to be involved to get input from you guys are open arms and very diverse and great great culture there, but who are you looking for? What's the makeup persona that you hope to attract and nurture and grow? >> Taylor: Absolutely. I, think that when it comes to trying the folks that we're looking for the correct answer is it varies you know, from, you know, you're asking Priyanka or our executive director or Chris Aniszczyk our CTO, I work mostly with the end users, so for me personally I really want to see folks that are operating within our ecosystem and actually pulling these down, these projects down and using them and sharing those stories. Because there are people creating these projects and contributing to them might not always have an idea of how they're used or how they can be exploited too. A lot of these groups that I work with like Mercedes or Intuit for example, they're out there in the world using these, these projects and getting a sense for, you know, what can come up. And by sharing that knowledge I think that's what's most important across the board. So really looking for those stories to be told and novel ways in which people are trying to exploit security and attacking the supply chain, or building applications, or just things we haven't thought about. So truly that that developer archetype is really helpful to have the consumers, the end users, the folks that are actually using these. And then, yeah, and I'm truly anywhere knowledgeable about security or that wants to learn more >> John: Super important, we're here to help you scale those stories up whatever you need, send them our way. We're looking forward to getting those. This is a super important movement getting the end users who are on the front lines bringing it back into the open, building, more software, making it secure and verified, all super important. We really appreciate the mission you guys are on and again we're here to help. So send those stories our way. >> Taylor: Cool, cool. We couldn't do it without you. Yeah, just everyone contributing, everyone sharing the news. This is it's people, people is the is the true operating system of our ecosystem. So really great to, really great to share. >> Lisa: That's such a great point Taylor. It is all about people. You talked about this event having a different vibe. I wanted to learn a little bit more about that as we, as we wrap up because there's so much cultural change that's required for organizations to evolve their security practices. And so people of course are at the center of culture. Talk a little bit about why that vibe is different and do you think that yeah, it's finally time. Everyone's getting on the same page here we're understanding, we're learning from each other. >> Taylor: Yes. So, so to kind of answer that, I think it's really a focus on, there's this term shift left and shift right. And talking about where do we actually put security in the mix as it comes to people adopting this and and figuring out where things go. And if you keep shifting at left, that meaning that the developers should care more deeply about this and a deeper understanding of all of these, you know, even if it's, even if they don't understand how to put it together, maybe understand a little bit about it or how these topics and, and facets of knowledge work. But you know, like with anything, if you shift everything off to one side or the other that's also not going to be efficient. You know, you want a steady stream of knowledge flowing throughout your whole organization. So I think that that's been something that has been a really interesting topic and, and hearing people kind of navigate and try to get through, especially groups that have had, you know, deployed an app and it's going to be around for 40 years as well. So I think that those are some really interesting and unique areas of focus that I've come up on the floor and then in a couple of the sessions here >> Lisa: There's got to be that, that balance there. Last question as we wrap the last 30 seconds or so what are you excited about given the success and the momentum of day one? What excites you about what's ahead for us on day two? >> Taylor: So on day two, I'm really, it's, there's just so many sessions. I think that it was very difficult for me to, you know pick which one I was actually going to go see. There are a lot of favorites that I had kind of doubled up at each of the time so I'm honestly going to be in a lot of the sessions today. So really excited about that. Supply chain security is definitely one that's close to my heart as well but I'm really curious to see what new topics, concepts or novel ideas people have to kind of exploit things. Like one for example is a package is out there it's called Browser Test but somebody came up with one called Bowser Test. Just a very simple misname and then when you go and run that it does a fake kind of like, hey you've been exploited and just even these incorrect name attacks. That's something that is really close and dear to me as well. Kind of hearing about all these wild things people wouldn't think about in terms of exploitation. So really, really excited to hear more stories on that front and better protect myself both at home and within the Cloud Community as I stand these things up. >> Lisa: Absolutely you need to clone yourself so that you can, there's so many different sessions. There needs to be multiple versions of Taylor that you can attend and then you can all get together and talk about and learn. But that's actually a really good problem to have as we mentioned when we started 72 sessions yesterday and today. Lots of great content. Taylor, we thank you for your participation. We thank you for bringing the vibe and the buzz of the event to us and we look forward as well to hearing and seeing what day two brings us today. Thank you so much for your time Taylor. >> Taylor: Thank you for having me. >> John: All right >> Lisa: Right, for our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube's Day two coverage of Cloud Native Security Con 23. (energetic music plays)

(upbeat music beginning) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words, if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say, with some degree of certainty, whether the prediction came true or not, with evidence to back that up. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we aim to do just that, with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, lots to talk about there, generative AI, cloud, and of course supercloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks, snowflake, and other key players, automation, events, and we may even have some bonus predictions around quantum computing, and perhaps some other areas. To make all this happen, we welcome back, for the third year in a row, my colleague and friend Eric Bradley from ETR. Eric, thanks for all you do for the community, and thanks for being part of this program. Again. >> I wouldn't miss it for the world. I always enjoy this one. Dave, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let me bring up this next slide and show you, actually come back to me if you would. I got to show the audience this. These are the inbounds that we got from PR firms starting in October around predictions. They know we do prediction posts. And so they'll send literally thousands and thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts in the industry, technologists, consultants, et cetera. And if you bring up the slide I can show you sort of the pattern that developed here. 40% of these thousands of predictions were from cyber. You had AI and data. If you combine those, it's still not close to cyber. Cost optimization was a big thing. Of course, cloud, some on DevOps, and software. Digital... Digital transformation got, you know, some lip service and SaaS. And then there was other, it's kind of around 2%. So quite remarkable, when you think about the focus on cyber, Eric. >> Yeah, there's two reasons why I think it makes sense, though. One, the cybersecurity companies have a lot of cash, so therefore the PR firms might be working a little bit harder for them than some of their other clients. (laughs) And then secondly, as you know, for multiple years now, when we do our macro survey, we ask, "What's your number one spending priority?" And again, it's security. It just isn't going anywhere. It just stays at the top. So I'm actually not that surprised by that little pie chart there, but I was shocked that SaaS was only 5%. You know, going back 10 years ago, that would've been the only thing anyone was talking about. >> Yeah. So true. All right, let's get into it. First prediction, we always start with kind of tech spending. Number one is tech spending increases between four and 5%. ETR has currently got it at 4.6% coming into 2023. This has been a consistently downward trend all year. We started, you know, much, much higher as we've been reporting. Bottom line is the fed is still in control. They're going to ease up on tightening, is the expectation, they're going to shoot for a soft landing. But you know, my feeling is this slingshot economy is going to continue, and it's going to continue to confound, whether it's supply chains or spending. The, the interesting thing about the ETR data, Eric, and I want you to comment on this, the largest companies are the most aggressive to cut. They're laying off, smaller firms are spending faster. They're actually growing at a much larger, faster rate as are companies in EMEA. And that's a surprise. That's outpacing the US and APAC. Chime in on this, Eric. >> Yeah, I was surprised on all of that. First on the higher level spending, we are definitely seeing it coming down, but the interesting thing here is headlines are making it worse. The huge research shop recently said 0% growth. We're coming in at 4.6%. And just so everyone knows, this is not us guessing, we asked 1,525 IT decision-makers what their budget growth will be, and they came in at 4.6%. Now there's a huge disparity, as you mentioned. The Fortune 500, global 2000, barely at 2% growth, but small, it's at 7%. So we're at a situation right now where the smaller companies are still playing a little bit of catch up on digital transformation, and they're spending money. The largest companies that have the most to lose from a recession are being more trepidatious, obviously. So they're playing a "Wait and see." And I hope we don't talk ourselves into a recession. Certainly the headlines and some of their research shops are helping it along. But another interesting comment here is, you know, energy and utilities used to be called an orphan and widow stock group, right? They are spending more than anyone, more than financials insurance, more than retail consumer. So right now it's being driven by mid, small, and energy and utilities. They're all spending like gangbusters, like nothing's happening. And it's the rest of everyone else that's being very cautious. >> Yeah, so very unpredictable right now. All right, let's go to number two. Cost optimization remains a major theme in 2023. We've been reporting on this. You've, we've shown a chart here. What's the primary method that your organization plans to use? You asked this question of those individuals that cited that they were going to reduce their spend and- >> Mhm. >> consolidating redundant vendors, you know, still leads the way, you know, far behind, cloud optimization is second, but it, but cloud continues to outpace legacy on-prem spending, no doubt. Somebody, it was, the guy's name was Alexander Feiglstorfer from Storyblok, sent in a prediction, said "All in one becomes extinct." Now, generally I would say I disagree with that because, you know, as we know over the years, suites tend to win out over, you know, individual, you know, point products. But I think what's going to happen is all in one is going to remain the norm for these larger companies that are cutting back. They want to consolidate redundant vendors, and the smaller companies are going to stick with that best of breed and be more aggressive and try to compete more effectively. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I'm seeing much more consolidation in vendors, but also consolidation in functionality. We're seeing people building out new functionality, whether it's, we're going to talk about this later, so I don't want to steal too much of our thunder right now, but data and security also, we're seeing a functionality creep. So I think there's further consolidation happening here. I think niche solutions are going to be less likely, and platform solutions are going to be more likely in a spending environment where you want to reduce your vendors. You want to have one bill to pay, not 10. Another thing on this slide, real quick if I can before I move on, is we had a bunch of people write in and some of the answer options that aren't on this graph but did get cited a lot, unfortunately, is the obvious reduction in staff, hiring freezes, and delaying hardware, were three of the top write-ins. And another one was offshore outsourcing. So in addition to what we're seeing here, there were a lot of write-in options, and I just thought it would be important to state that, but essentially the cost optimization is by and far the highest one, and it's growing. So it's actually increased in our citations over the last year. >> And yeah, specifically consolidating redundant vendors. And so I actually thank you for bringing that other up, 'cause I had asked you, Eric, is there any evidence that repatriation is going on and we don't see it in the numbers, we don't see it even in the other, there was, I think very little or no mention of cloud repatriation, even though it might be happening in this in a smattering. >> Not a single mention, not one single mention. I went through it for you. Yep. Not one write-in. >> All right, let's move on. Number three, security leads M&A in 2023. Now you might say, "Oh, well that's a layup," but let me set this up Eric, because I didn't really do a great job with the slide. I hid the, what you've done, because you basically took, this is from the emerging technology survey with 1,181 responses from November. And what we did is we took Palo Alto and looked at the overlap in Palo Alto Networks accounts with these vendors that were showing on this chart. And Eric, I'm going to ask you to explain why we put a circle around OneTrust, but let me just set it up, and then have you comment on the slide and take, give us more detail. We're seeing private company valuations are off, you know, 10 to 40%. We saw a sneak, do a down round, but pretty good actually only down 12%. We've seen much higher down rounds. Palo Alto Networks we think is going to get busy. Again, they're an inquisitive company, they've been sort of quiet lately, and we think CrowdStrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Zscaler, we're predicting all of those will make some acquisitions and we're thinking that the targets are somewhere in this mess of security taxonomy. Other thing we're predicting AI meets cyber big time in 2023, we're going to probably going to see some acquisitions of those companies that are leaning into AI. We've seen some of that with Palo Alto. And then, you know, your comment to me, Eric, was "The RSA conference is going to be insane, hopping mad, "crazy this April," (Eric laughing) but give us your take on this data, and why the red circle around OneTrust? Take us back to that slide if you would, Alex. >> Sure. There's a few things here. First, let me explain what we're looking at. So because we separate the public companies and the private companies into two separate surveys, this allows us the ability to cross-reference that data. So what we're doing here is in our public survey, the tesis, everyone who cited some spending with Palo Alto, meaning they're a Palo Alto customer, we then cross-reference that with the private tech companies. Who also are they spending with? So what you're seeing here is an overlap. These companies that we have circled are doing the best in Palo Alto's accounts. Now, Palo Alto went and bought Twistlock a few years ago, which this data slide predicted, to be quite honest. And so I don't know if they necessarily are going to go after Snyk. Snyk, sorry. They already have something in that space. What they do need, however, is more on the authentication space. So I'm looking at OneTrust, with a 45% overlap in their overall net sentiment. That is a company that's already existing in their accounts and could be very synergistic to them. BeyondTrust as well, authentication identity. This is something that Palo needs to do to move more down that zero trust path. Now why did I pick Palo first? Because usually they're very inquisitive. They've been a little quiet lately. Secondly, if you look at the backdrop in the markets, the IPO freeze isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later, the IPO markets are going to open up, and some of these private companies are going to tap into public equity. In the meantime, however, cash funding on the private side is drying up. If they need another round, they're not going to get it, and they're certainly not going to get it at the valuations they were getting. So we're seeing valuations maybe come down where they're a touch more attractive, and Palo knows this isn't going to last forever. Cisco knows that, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all these companies that are trying to make a push to become that vendor that you're consolidating in, around, they have a chance now, they have a window where they need to go make some acquisitions. And that's why I believe leading up to RSA, we're going to see some movement. I think it's going to pretty, a really exciting time in security right now. >> Awesome. Thank you. Great explanation. All right, let's go on the next one. Number four is, it relates to security. Let's stay there. Zero trust moves from hype to reality in 2023. Now again, you might say, "Oh yeah, that's a layup." A lot of these inbounds that we got are very, you know, kind of self-serving, but we always try to put some meat in the bone. So first thing we do is we pull out some commentary from, Eric, your roundtable, your insights roundtable. And we have a CISO from a global hospitality firm says, "For me that's the highest priority." He's talking about zero trust because it's the best ROI, it's the most forward-looking, and it enables a lot of the business transformation activities that we want to do. CISOs tell me that they actually can drive forward transformation projects that have zero trust, and because they can accelerate them, because they don't have to go through the hurdle of, you know, getting, making sure that it's secure. Second comment, zero trust closes that last mile where once you're authenticated, they open up the resource to you in a zero trust way. That's a CISO of a, and a managing director of a cyber risk services enterprise. Your thoughts on this? >> I can be here all day, so I'm going to try to be quick on this one. This is not a fluff piece on this one. There's a couple of other reasons this is happening. One, the board finally gets it. Zero trust at first was just a marketing hype term. Now the board understands it, and that's why CISOs are able to push through it. And what they finally did was redefine what it means. Zero trust simply means moving away from hardware security, moving towards software-defined security, with authentication as its base. The board finally gets that, and now they understand that this is necessary and it's being moved forward. The other reason it's happening now is hybrid work is here to stay. We weren't really sure at first, large companies were still trying to push people back to the office, and it's going to happen. The pendulum will swing back, but hybrid work's not going anywhere. By basically on our own data, we're seeing that 69% of companies expect remote and hybrid to be permanent, with only 30% permanent in office. Zero trust works for a hybrid environment. So all of that is the reason why this is happening right now. And going back to our previous prediction, this is why we're picking Palo, this is why we're picking Zscaler to make these acquisitions. Palo Alto needs to be better on the authentication side, and so does Zscaler. They're both fantastic on zero trust network access, but they need the authentication software defined aspect, and that's why we think this is going to happen. One last thing, in that CISO round table, I also had somebody say, "Listen, Zscaler is incredible. "They're doing incredibly well pervading the enterprise, "but their pricing's getting a little high," and they actually think Palo Alto is well-suited to start taking some of that share, if Palo can make one move. >> Yeah, Palo Alto's consolidation story is very strong. Here's my question and challenge. Do you and me, so I'm always hardcore about, okay, you've got to have evidence. I want to look back at these things a year from now and say, "Did we get it right? Yes or no?" If we got it wrong, we'll tell you we got it wrong. So how are we going to measure this? I'd say a couple things, and you can chime in. One is just the number of vendors talking about it. That's, but the marketing always leads the reality. So the second part of that is we got to get evidence from the buying community. Can you help us with that? >> (laughs) Luckily, that's what I do. I have a data company that asks thousands of IT decision-makers what they're adopting and what they're increasing spend on, as well as what they're decreasing spend on and what they're replacing. So I have snapshots in time over the last 11 years where I can go ahead and compare and contrast whether this adoption is happening or not. So come back to me in 12 months and I'll let you know. >> Now, you know, I will. Okay, let's bring up the next one. Number five, generative AI hits where the Metaverse missed. Of course everybody's talking about ChatGPT, we just wrote last week in a breaking analysis with John Furrier and Sarjeet Joha our take on that. We think 2023 does mark a pivot point as natural language processing really infiltrates enterprise tech just as Amazon turned the data center into an API. We think going forward, you're going to be interacting with technology through natural language, through English commands or other, you know, foreign language commands, and investors are lining up, all the VCs are getting excited about creating something competitive to ChatGPT, according to (indistinct) a hundred million dollars gets you a seat at the table, gets you into the game. (laughing) That's before you have to start doing promotion. But he thinks that's what it takes to actually create a clone or something equivalent. We've seen stuff from, you know, the head of Facebook's, you know, AI saying, "Oh, it's really not that sophisticated, ChatGPT, "it's kind of like IBM Watson, it's great engineering, "but you know, we've got more advanced technology." We know Google's working on some really interesting stuff. But here's the thing. ETR just launched this survey for the February survey. It's in the field now. We circle open AI in this category. They weren't even in the survey, Eric, last quarter. So 52% of the ETR survey respondents indicated a positive sentiment toward open AI. I added up all the sort of different bars, we could double click on that. And then I got this inbound from Scott Stevenson of Deep Graham. He said "AI is recession-proof." I don't know if that's the case, but it's a good quote. So bring this back up and take us through this. Explain this chart for us, if you would. >> First of all, I like Scott's quote better than the Facebook one. I think that's some sour grapes. Meta just spent an insane amount of money on the Metaverse and that's a dud. Microsoft just spent money on open AI and it is hot, undoubtedly hot. We've only been in the field with our current ETS survey for a week. So my caveat is it's preliminary data, but I don't care if it's preliminary data. (laughing) We're getting a sneak peek here at what is the number one net sentiment and mindshare leader in the entire machine-learning AI sector within a week. It's beating Data- >> 600. 600 in. >> It's beating Databricks. And we all know Databricks is a huge established enterprise company, not only in machine-learning AI, but it's in the top 10 in the entire survey. We have over 400 vendors in this survey. It's number eight overall, already. In a week. This is not hype. This is real. And I could go on the NLP stuff for a while. Not only here are we seeing it in open AI and machine-learning and AI, but we're seeing NLP in security. It's huge in email security. It's completely transforming that area. It's one of the reasons I thought Palo might take Abnormal out. They're doing such a great job with NLP in this email side, and also in the data prep tools. NLP is going to take out data prep tools. If we have time, I'll discuss that later. But yeah, this is, to me this is a no-brainer, and we're already seeing it in the data. >> Yeah, John Furrier called, you know, the ChatGPT introduction. He said it reminded him of the Netscape moment, when we all first saw Netscape Navigator and went, "Wow, it really could be transformative." All right, number six, the cloud expands to supercloud as edge computing accelerates and CloudFlare is a big winner in 2023. We've reported obviously on cloud, multi-cloud, supercloud and CloudFlare, basically saying what multi-cloud should have been. We pulled this quote from Atif Kahn, who is the founder and CTO of Alkira, thanks, one of the inbounds, thank you. "In 2023, highly distributed IT environments "will become more the norm "as organizations increasingly deploy hybrid cloud, "multi-cloud and edge settings..." Eric, from one of your round tables, "If my sources from edge computing are coming "from the cloud, that means I have my workloads "running in the cloud. "There is no one better than CloudFlare," That's a senior director of IT architecture at a huge financial firm. And then your analysis shows CloudFlare really growing in pervasion, that sort of market presence in the dataset, dramatically, to near 20%, leading, I think you had told me that they're even ahead of Google Cloud in terms of momentum right now. >> That was probably the biggest shock to me in our January 2023 tesis, which covers the public companies in the cloud computing sector. CloudFlare has now overtaken GCP in overall spending, and I was shocked by that. It's already extremely pervasive in networking, of course, for the edge networking side, and also in security. This is the number one leader in SaaSi, web access firewall, DDoS, bot protection, by your definition of supercloud, which we just did a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed that by the way Dave, I think CloudFlare is the one that fits your definition best, because it's bringing all of these aspects together, and most importantly, it's cloud agnostic. It does not need to rely on Azure or AWS to do this. It has its own cloud. So I just think it's, when we look at your definition of supercloud, CloudFlare is the poster child. >> You know, what's interesting about that too, is a lot of people are poo-pooing CloudFlare, "Ah, it's, you know, really kind of not that sophisticated." "You don't have as many tools," but to your point, you're can have those tools in the cloud, Cloudflare's doing serverless on steroids, trying to keep things really simple, doing a phenomenal job at, you know, various locations around the world. And they're definitely one to watch. Somebody put them on my radar (laughing) a while ago and said, "Dave, you got to do a breaking analysis on CloudFlare." And so I want to thank that person. I can't really name them, 'cause they work inside of a giant hyperscaler. But- (Eric laughing) (Dave chuckling) >> Real quickly, if I can from a competitive perspective too, who else is there? They've already taken share from Akamai, and Fastly is their really only other direct comp, and they're not there. And these guys are in poll position and they're the only game in town right now. I just, I don't see it slowing down. >> I thought one of your comments from your roundtable I was reading, one of the folks said, you know, CloudFlare, if my workloads are in the cloud, they are, you know, dominant, they said not as strong with on-prem. And so Akamai is doing better there. I'm like, "Okay, where would you want to be?" (laughing) >> Yeah, which one of those two would you rather be? >> Right? Anyway, all right, let's move on. Number seven, blockchain continues to look for a home in the enterprise, but devs will slowly begin to adopt in 2023. You know, blockchains have got a lot of buzz, obviously crypto is, you know, the killer app for blockchain. Senior IT architect in financial services from your, one of your insight roundtables said quote, "For enterprises to adopt a new technology, "there have to be proven turnkey solutions. "My experience in talking with my peers are, "blockchain is still an open-source component "where you have to build around it." Now I want to thank Ravi Mayuram, who's the CTO of Couchbase sent in, you know, one of the predictions, he said, "DevOps will adopt blockchain, specifically Ethereum." And he referenced actually in his email to me, Solidity, which is the programming language for Ethereum, "will be in every DevOps pro's playbook, "mirroring the boom in machine-learning. "Newer programming languages like Solidity "will enter the toolkits of devs." His point there, you know, Solidity for those of you don't know, you know, Bitcoin is not programmable. Solidity, you know, came out and that was their whole shtick, and they've been improving that, and so forth. But it, Eric, it's true, it really hasn't found its home despite, you know, the potential for smart contracts. IBM's pushing it, VMware has had announcements, and others, really hasn't found its way in the enterprise yet. >> Yeah, and I got to be honest, I don't think it's going to, either. So when we did our top trends series, this was basically chosen as an anti-prediction, I would guess, that it just continues to not gain hold. And the reason why was that first comment, right? It's very much a niche solution that requires a ton of custom work around it. You can't just plug and play it. And at the end of the day, let's be very real what this technology is, it's a database ledger, and we already have database ledgers in the enterprise. So why is this a priority to move to a different database ledger? It's going to be very niche cases. I like the CTO comment from Couchbase about it being adopted by DevOps. I agree with that, but it has to be a DevOps in a very specific use case, and a very sophisticated use case in financial services, most likely. And that's not across the entire enterprise. So I just think it's still going to struggle to get its foothold for a little bit longer, if ever. >> Great, thanks. Okay, let's move on. Number eight, AWS Databricks, Google Snowflake lead the data charge with Microsoft. Keeping it simple. So let's unpack this a little bit. This is the shared accounts peer position for, I pulled data platforms in for analytics, machine-learning and AI and database. So I could grab all these accounts or these vendors and see how they compare in those three sectors. Analytics, machine-learning and database. Snowflake and Databricks, you know, they're on a crash course, as you and I have talked about. They're battling to be the single source of truth in analytics. They're, there's going to be a big focus. They're already started. It's going to be accelerated in 2023 on open formats. Iceberg, Python, you know, they're all the rage. We heard about Iceberg at Snowflake Summit, last summer or last June. Not a lot of people had heard of it, but of course the Databricks crowd, who knows it well. A lot of other open source tooling. There's a company called DBT Labs, which you're going to talk about in a minute. George Gilbert put them on our radar. We just had Tristan Handy, the CEO of DBT labs, on at supercloud last week. They are a new disruptor in data that's, they're essentially making, they're API-ifying, if you will, KPIs inside the data warehouse and dramatically simplifying that whole data pipeline. So really, you know, the ETL guys should be shaking in their boots with them. Coming back to the slide. Google really remains focused on BigQuery adoption. Customers have complained to me that they would like to use Snowflake with Google's AI tools, but they're being forced to go to BigQuery. I got to ask Google about that. AWS continues to stitch together its bespoke data stores, that's gone down that "Right tool for the right job" path. David Foyer two years ago said, "AWS absolutely is going to have to solve that problem." We saw them start to do it in, at Reinvent, bringing together NoETL between Aurora and Redshift, and really trying to simplify those worlds. There's going to be more of that. And then Microsoft, they're just making it cheap and easy to use their stuff, you know, despite some of the complaints that we hear in the community, you know, about things like Cosmos, but Eric, your take? >> Yeah, my concern here is that Snowflake and Databricks are fighting each other, and it's allowing AWS and Microsoft to kind of catch up against them, and I don't know if that's the right move for either of those two companies individually, Azure and AWS are building out functionality. Are they as good? No they're not. The other thing to remember too is that AWS and Azure get paid anyway, because both Databricks and Snowflake run on top of 'em. So (laughing) they're basically collecting their toll, while these two fight it out with each other, and they build out functionality. I think they need to stop focusing on each other, a little bit, and think about the overall strategy. Now for Databricks, we know they came out first as a machine-learning AI tool. They were known better for that spot, and now they're really trying to play catch-up on that data storage compute spot, and inversely for Snowflake, they were killing it with the compute separation from storage, and now they're trying to get into the MLAI spot. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see them make some sort of acquisition. Frank Slootman has been a little bit quiet, in my opinion there. The other thing to mention is your comment about DBT Labs. If we look at our emerging technology survey, last survey when this came out, DBT labs, number one leader in that data integration space, I'm going to just pull it up real quickly. It looks like they had a 33% overall net sentiment to lead data analytics integration. So they are clearly growing, it's fourth straight survey consecutively that they've grown. The other name we're seeing there a little bit is Cribl, but DBT labs is by far the number one player in this space. >> All right. Okay, cool. Moving on, let's go to number nine. With Automation mixer resurgence in 2023, we're showing again data. The x axis is overlap or presence in the dataset, and the vertical axis is shared net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. As always, you've seen UI path and Microsoft Power Automate up until the right, that red line, that 40% line is generally considered elevated. UI path is really separating, creating some distance from Automation Anywhere, they, you know, previous quarters they were much closer. Microsoft Power Automate came on the scene in a big way, they loom large with this "Good enough" approach. I will say this, I, somebody sent me a results of a (indistinct) survey, which showed UiPath actually had more mentions than Power Automate, which was surprising, but I think that's not been the case in the ETR data set. We're definitely seeing a shift from back office to front soft office kind of workloads. Having said that, software testing is emerging as a mainstream use case, we're seeing ML and AI become embedded in end-to-end automations, and low-code is serving the line of business. And so this, we think, is going to increasingly have appeal to organizations in the coming year, who want to automate as much as possible and not necessarily, we've seen a lot of layoffs in tech, and people... You're going to have to fill the gaps with automation. That's a trend that's going to continue. >> Yep, agreed. At first that comment about Microsoft Power Automate having less citations than UiPath, that's shocking to me. I'm looking at my chart right here where Microsoft Power Automate was cited by over 60% of our entire survey takers, and UiPath at around 38%. Now don't get me wrong, 38% pervasion's fantastic, but you know you're not going to beat an entrenched Microsoft. So I don't really know where that comment came from. So UiPath, looking at it alone, it's doing incredibly well. It had a huge rebound in its net score this last survey. It had dropped going through the back half of 2022, but we saw a big spike in the last one. So it's got a net score of over 55%. A lot of people citing adoption and increasing. So that's really what you want to see for a name like this. The problem is that just Microsoft is doing its playbook. At the end of the day, I'm going to do a POC, why am I going to pay more for UiPath, or even take on another separate bill, when we know everyone's consolidating vendors, if my license already includes Microsoft Power Automate? It might not be perfect, it might not be as good, but what I'm hearing all the time is it's good enough, and I really don't want another invoice. >> Right. So how does UiPath, you know, and Automation Anywhere, how do they compete with that? Well, the way they compete with it is they got to have a better product. They got a product that's 10 times better. You know, they- >> Right. >> they're not going to compete based on where the lowest cost, Microsoft's got that locked up, or where the easiest to, you know, Microsoft basically give it away for free, and that's their playbook. So that's, you know, up to UiPath. UiPath brought on Rob Ensslin, I've interviewed him. Very, very capable individual, is now Co-CEO. So he's kind of bringing that adult supervision in, and really tightening up the go to market. So, you know, we know this company has been a rocket ship, and so getting some control on that and really getting focused like a laser, you know, could be good things ahead there for that company. Okay. >> One of the problems, if I could real quick Dave, is what the use cases are. When we first came out with RPA, everyone was super excited about like, "No, UiPath is going to be great for super powerful "projects, use cases." That's not what RPA is being used for. As you mentioned, it's being used for mundane tasks, so it's not automating complex things, which I think UiPath was built for. So if you were going to get UiPath, and choose that over Microsoft, it's going to be 'cause you're doing it for more powerful use case, where it is better. But the problem is that's not where the enterprise is using it. The enterprise are using this for base rote tasks, and simply, Microsoft Power Automate can do that. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I've had people on theCube that are both Microsoft Power Automate customers and UiPath customers, and I've asked them, "Well you know, "how do you differentiate between the two?" And they've said to me, "Look, our users and personal productivity users, "they like Power Automate, "they can use it themselves, and you know, "it doesn't take a lot of, you know, support on our end." The flip side is you could do that with UiPath, but like you said, there's more of a focus now on end-to-end enterprise automation and building out those capabilities. So it's increasingly a value play, and that's going to be obviously the challenge going forward. Okay, my last one, and then I think you've got some bonus ones. Number 10, hybrid events are the new category. Look it, if I can get a thousand inbounds that are largely self-serving, I can do my own here, 'cause we're in the events business. (Eric chuckling) Here's the prediction though, and this is a trend we're seeing, the number of physical events is going to dramatically increase. That might surprise people, but most of the big giant events are going to get smaller. The exception is AWS with Reinvent, I think Snowflake's going to continue to grow. So there are examples of physical events that are growing, but generally, most of the big ones are getting smaller, and there's going to be many more smaller intimate regional events and road shows. These micro-events, they're going to be stitched together. Digital is becoming a first class citizen, so people really got to get their digital acts together, and brands are prioritizing earned media, and they're beginning to build their own news networks, going direct to their customers. And so that's a trend we see, and I, you know, we're right in the middle of it, Eric, so you know we're going to, you mentioned RSA, I think that's perhaps going to be one of those crazy ones that continues to grow. It's shrunk, and then it, you know, 'cause last year- >> Yeah, it did shrink. >> right, it was the last one before the pandemic, and then they sort of made another run at it last year. It was smaller but it was very vibrant, and I think this year's going to be huge. Global World Congress is another one, we're going to be there end of Feb. That's obviously a big big show, but in general, the brands and the technology vendors, even Oracle is going to scale down. I don't know about Salesforce. We'll see. You had a couple of bonus predictions. Quantum and maybe some others? Bring us home. >> Yeah, sure. I got a few more. I think we touched upon one, but I definitely think the data prep tools are facing extinction, unfortunately, you know, the Talons Informatica is some of those names. The problem there is that the BI tools are kind of including data prep into it already. You know, an example of that is Tableau Prep Builder, and then in addition, Advanced NLP is being worked in as well. ThoughtSpot, Intelius, both often say that as their selling point, Tableau has Ask Data, Click has Insight Bot, so you don't have to really be intelligent on data prep anymore. A regular business user can just self-query, using either the search bar, or even just speaking into what it needs, and these tools are kind of doing the data prep for it. I don't think that's a, you know, an out in left field type of prediction, but it's the time is nigh. The other one I would also state is that I think knowledge graphs are going to break through this year. Neo4j in our survey is growing in pervasion in Mindshare. So more and more people are citing it, AWS Neptune's getting its act together, and we're seeing that spending intentions are growing there. Tiger Graph is also growing in our survey sample. I just think that the time is now for knowledge graphs to break through, and if I had to do one more, I'd say real-time streaming analytics moves from the very, very rich big enterprises to downstream, to more people are actually going to be moving towards real-time streaming, again, because the data prep tools and the data pipelines have gotten easier to use, and I think the ROI on real-time streaming is obviously there. So those are three that didn't make the cut, but I thought deserved an honorable mention. >> Yeah, I'm glad you did. Several weeks ago, we did an analyst prediction roundtable, if you will, a cube session power panel with a number of data analysts and that, you know, streaming, real-time streaming was top of mind. So glad you brought that up. Eric, as always, thank you very much. I appreciate the time you put in beforehand. I know it's been crazy, because you guys are wrapping up, you know, the last quarter survey in- >> Been a nuts three weeks for us. (laughing) >> job. I love the fact that you're doing, you know, the ETS survey now, I think it's quarterly now, right? Is that right? >> Yep. >> Yep. So that's phenomenal. >> Four times a year. I'll be happy to jump on with you when we get that done. I know you were really impressed with that last time. >> It's unbelievable. This is so much data at ETR. Okay. Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks again. >> Take care Dave. Good seeing you. >> All right, many thanks to our team here, Alex Myerson as production, he manages the podcast force. Ken Schiffman as well is a critical component of our East Coast studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoof is our editor-in-chief. He's at siliconangle.com. He's just a great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes that are available as podcasts, wherever you listen, podcast is doing great. Just search "Breaking analysis podcast." Really appreciate you guys listening. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. That's how I got all these. I really appreciate it. I went through every single one with a yellow highlighter. It took some time, (laughing) but I appreciate it. You could DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post and please check out etr.ai. Its data is amazing. Best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music beginning) (upbeat music ending)

(vibrant electronic music) >> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. You know, this event, and the Super Cloud initiative in general, it's an open industry-wide collaboration. Last August at SuperCloud22, we really honed in on the definition, which of course we've published. And there's this shared doc, which folks are still adding to and refining, in fact, just recently, Dr. Nelu Mihai added some critical points that really advanced some of the community's initial principles, and today at SuperCloud2, we're digging further into the topic with input from real world practitioners, and we're exploring that intersection of data, data mesh, and cloud, and importantly, the realities and challenges of deploying technology to drive new business capability, and I'm pleased to welcome Ash Naseer to the program. He's a Senior Director of Data Engineering at Warner Bros. Discovery. Ash, great to see you again, thanks so much for taking time with us. >> It's great to be back, these conversations are always very fun. >> I was so excited when we met last spring, I guess, so before we get started I wanted to play a clip from that conversation, it was June, it was at the Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas. And it's a comment that you made about your company but also data mesh. Guys, roll the clip. >> Yeah, so, when people think of Warner Bros., you always think of the movie studio. But we're more than that, right, I mean, you think of HBO, you think of TNT, you think of CNN. We have 30 plus brands in our portfolio, and each have their own needs. So the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company, so that CNN can work at their own pace, you know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data. And they don't have to bump up against, as an example, HBO, if Game of Thrones is goin' on. >> So-- Okay, so that's pretty interesting, so you've got these sort of different groups that have different data requirements inside of your organization. Now data mesh, it's a relatively new concept, so you're kind of ahead of the curve. So Ash, my question is, when you think about getting value from data, and how that's changed over the past decade, you've had pre-Hadoop, Hadoop, what do you see that's changed, now you got the cloud coming in, what's changed? What had to be sort of fixed? What's working now, and where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so I feel like in the last decade, we've gone through quite a maturity curve. I actually like to say that we're in the golden age of data, because the tools and technology in the data space, particularly and then broadly in the cloud, they allow us to do things that we couldn't do way back when, like you suggested, back in the Hadoop era or even before that. So there's certainly a lot of maturity, and a lot of technology that has come about. So in terms of the good, bad, and ugly, so let me kind of start with the good, right? In terms of bringing value from the data, I really feel like we're in this place where the folks that are charged with unlocking that value from the data, they're actually spending the majority of their time actually doing that. And what do I mean by that? If you think about it, 10 years ago, the data scientist was the person that was going to sort of solve all of the data problems in a company. But what happened was, companies asked these data scientists to come in and do a multitude of things. And what these data scientists found out was, they were spending most of their time on, really, data wrangling, and less on actually getting the value out of the data. And in the last decade or so, I feel like we've made the shift, and we realize that data engineering, data management, data governance, those are as important practices as data science, which is sort of getting the value out of the data. And so what that has done is, it has freed up the data scientist and the business analyst and the data analyst, and the BI expert, to really focus on how to get value out of the data, and spend less time wrangling data. So I really think that that's the good. In terms of the bad, I feel like, there's a lot of legacy data platforms out there, and I feel like there's going to be a time where we'll be in that hybrid mode. And then the ugly, I feel like, with all the data and all the technology, creates another problem of itself. Because most companies don't have arms around their data, and making sure that they know who's using the data, what they're using for, and how can the company leverage the collective intelligence. That is a bigger problem to solve today than 10 years ago. And that's where technologies like the data mesh come in. >> Yeah, so when I think of data mesh, and I say, you're an early practitioner of data mesh, you mentioned legacy technology, so the concept of data mesh is inclusive. In theory anyway, you're supposed to be including the legacy technologies. Whether it's a data lake or data warehouse or Oracle or Snowflake or whatever it is. And when you think about Jamak Dagani's principles, it's domain-centric ownership, data as product. And that creates challenges around self-serve infrastructure and automated governance, and then when you start to combine these different technologies. You got legacy, you got cloud. Everything's different. And so you have to figure out how to deal with that, so my question is, how have you dealt with that, and what role has the cloud played in solving those problems, in particular, that self-serve infrastructure, and that automated governance, and where are we in terms of solving that problem from a practitioner's standpoint? >> Yeah, I always like to say that data is a team sport, and we should sort of think of it as such, and that's, I feel like, the key of the data mesh concept, is treating it as a team sport. A lot of people ask me, they're like, "Oh hey, Ash, I've heard about this thing called data mesh. "Where can I buy one?" or, "what's the technology that I use to get a data mesh? And the reality is that there isn't one technology, you can't really buy a data mesh. It's really a way of life, it's how organizations decide to approach data, like I said, back to a team sport analogy, making sure that everyone has the seat on the table, making sure that we embrace the fact that we have a lot of data, we have a lot of data problems to solve. And the way we'll be successful is to make everyone inclusive. You know, you think about the old days, Data silos or shadow IT, some might call it. That's been around for decades. And what hasn't changed was this notion that, hey, everything needs to be sort of managed centrally. But with the cloud and with the technologies that we have today, we have the right technology and the tooling to democratize that data, and democratize not only just the access, but also sort of building building blocks and sort of taking building blocks which are relevant to your product or your business. And adding to the overall data mesh. We've got all that technology. The challenge is for us to really embrace it, and make sure that we implement it from an organizational standpoint. >> So, thinking about super cloud, there's a layer that lives above the clouds and adds value. And you think about your brands you got 30 brands, you mentioned shadow IT. If, let's say, one of those brands, HBO or TNT, whatever. They want to go, "Hey, we really like Google's analytics tools," and they maybe go off and build something, I don't know if that's even allowed, maybe it's not. But then you build this data mesh. My question is around multi-cloud, cross cloud, super cloud if you will. Is that a advantage for you as a practitioner, or does that just make things more complicated? >> I really love the idea of a multi-cloud. I think it's great, I think that it should have been the norm, not the exception, I feel like people talk about it as if it's the exception. That should have been the case. I will say, though, I feel like multi-cloud should evolve organically, so back to your point about some of these different brands, and, you know, different brands or different business units. Or even in a merger and acquisitions situation, where two different companies or multiple different companies come together with different technology stacks. You know, I feel like that's an organic evolution, and making sure that we use the concepts and the technologies around the multi-cloud to bring everyone together. That's where we need to be, and again, it talks to the fact that each of those business units and each of those groups have their own unique needs, and we need to make sure that we embrace that and we enable that, rather than stifling everything. Now where I have a little bit of a challenge with the multi-cloud is when technology leaders try to build it by design. So there's a notion there that, "Hey, you need to sort of diversify "and don't put all your eggs in one basket." And so we need to have this multi-cloud thing. I feel like that is just sort of creating more complexity where it doesn't need to be, we can all sort of simplify our lives, but where it evolves organically, absolutely, I think that's the right way to go. >> But, so Ash, if it evolves organically don't you need some kind of cloud interpreter, to create a common experience across clouds, does that exist today? What are your thoughts on that? >> There is a lot of technology that exists today, and that helps go between these different clouds, a lot of these sort of cloud agnostic technologies that you talked about, the Snowflakes and the Databricks and so forth of the world, they operate in multiple clouds, they operate in multiple regions, within a given cloud and multiple clouds. So they span all of that, and they have the tools and technology, so, I feel like the tooling is there. There does need to be more of an evolution around the tooling and I think the market's need are going to dictate that, I feel like the market is there, they're asking for it, so, there's definitely going to be that evolution, but the technology is there, I think just making sure that we embrace that and we sort of embrace that as a challenge and not try to sort of shut all of that down and box everything into one. >> What's the biggest challenge, is it governance or security? Or is it more like you're saying, adoption, cultural? >> I think it's a combination of cultural as well as governance. And so, the cultural side I've talked about, right, just making sure that we give these different teams a seat at the table, and they actually bring that technology into the mix. And we use the modern tools and technologies to make sure that everybody sort of plays nice together. That is definitely, we have ways to go there. But then, in terms of governance, that is another big problem that most companies are just starting to wrestle with. Because like I said, I mean, the data silos and shadow IT, that's been around there, right? The only difference is that we're now sort of bringing everything together in a cloud environment, the collective organization has access to that. And now we just realized, oh we have quite a data problem at our hands, so how do we sort of organize this data, make sure that the quality is there, the trust is there. When people look at that data, a lot of those questions are now coming to the forefront because everything is sort of so transparent with the cloud, right? And so I feel like, again, putting in the right processes, and the right tooling to address that is going to be critical in the next years to come. >> Is sharing data across clouds, something that is valuable to you, or even within a single cloud, being able to share data. And my question is, not just within your organization, but even outside your organization, is that something that has sort of hit your radar or is it mature or is that something that really would add value to your business? >> Data sharing is huge, and again, this is another one of those things which isn't new. You know, I remember back in the '90s, when we had to share data externally, with our partners or our vendors, they used to physically send us stacks of these tapes, or physical media on some truck. And we've evolved since then, right, I mean, it went from that to sharing files online and so forth. But data sharing as a concept and as a concept which is now very frictionless, through these different technologies that we have today, that is very new. And that is something, like I said, it's always been going on. But that needs to be really embraced more as well. We as a company heavily leverage data sharing between our own different brands and business units, that helps us make that data mesh, so that when CNN, as an example, builds their own data model based on election data and the kinds of data that they need, compare that with other data in the rest of the company, sports, entertainment, and so forth and so on. Everyone has their unique data, but that data sharing capability brings it together wherever there is a need. So you think about having a Tiger Woods documentary, as an example, on HBO Max and making sure that you reach the audiences that are interested in golf and interested in sports and so forth, right? That all comes through the magic of data sharing, so, it's really critical, internally, for us. And then externally as well, because just understanding how our products are doing on our partners' networks and different distribution channels, that's important, and then just understanding how our consumers are consuming it off properties, right, I mean, we have brands that transcend just the screen, right? We have a lot of physical merchandise that you can buy in the store. So again, understanding who's buying the Batman action figures after the Batman movie was released, that's another critical insight. So it all gets enabled through data sharing, and something we rely heavily on. >> So I wanted to get your perspective on this. So I feel like the nirvana of data mesh is if I want to use Google BigQuery, an Oracle database, or a Microsoft database, or Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon, whatever. That that's a node on the mesh. And in the perfect world, you can share that data, it can be governed, I don't think we're quite there today, so. But within a platform, maybe it's within Google or within Amazon or within Snowflake or Databricks. If you're in that world, maybe even Oracle. You actually can do some levels of data sharing, maybe greater with some than others. Do you mandate as an organization that you have to use this particular data platform, or are you saying "Hey, we are architecting a data mesh for the future "where we believe the technology will support that," or maybe you've invented some technology that supports that today, can you help us understand that? >> Yeah, I always feel like mandate is a strong area, and it breeds the shadow IT and the data silos. So we don't mandate, we do make sure that there's a consistent set of governance rules, policies, and tooling that's there, so that everyone is on the same page. However, at the same time our focus is really operating in a federated way, that's been our solution, right? Is to make sure that we work within a common set of tooling, which may be different technologies, which in some cases may be different clouds. Although we're not that multi-cloud. So what we're trying to do is making sure that everyone who has that technology already built, as long as it sort of follows certain standards, it's modern, it has the capabilities that will eventually allow us to be successful and eventually allow for that data sharing, amongst those different nodes, as you put it. As long as that's the case, and as long as there's a governance layer, a master governance layer, where we know where all that data is and who has access to what and we can sort of be really confident about the quality of the data, as long as that case, our approach to that is really that federated approach. >> Sorry, did I hear you correctly, you're not multi-cloud today? >> Yeah, that's correct. There are certain spots where we use that, but by and large, we rely on a particular cloud, and that's just been, like I said, it's been the evolution, it was our evolution. We decided early on to focus on a single cloud, and that's the direction we've been going in. >> So, do you want to go to a multi-cloud, or, you mentioned organic before, if a business unit wants to go there, as long as they're adhering to those standards that you put out, maybe recommendations, that that's okay? I guess my question is, does that bring benefit to your business that you'd like to tap, or do you feel like it's not necessary? >> I'll go back to the point of, if it happens organically, we're going to be open about it. Obviously we'll have to look at every situations, not all clouds are created equal as well, so there's a number of different considerations. But by and large, when it happens organically, the key is time to value, right? How do you quickly bring those technologies in, as long as you could share the data, they're interconnected, they're secured, they're governed, we are confident on the quality, as long as those principles are met, we could definitely go in that direction. But by and large, we're sort of evolving in a singular direction, but even within a singular cloud, we're a global company. And we have audiences around the world, so making sure that even within a single cloud, those different regions interoperate as one, that's a bigger challenge that we're having to solve as well. >> Last question is kind of to the future of data and cloud and how it's going to evolve, do you see a day when companies like yours are increasingly going to be offering data, their software, services, and becoming more of a technology company, sort of pointing your tooling and your proprietary knowledge at the external world, as an opportunity, as a business opportunity? >> That's a very interesting concept, and I know companies have done that, and some of them have been extremely successful, I mean, Amazon is the biggest example that comes to mind, right-- >> Yeah. >> When they launched AWS, something that they had that expertise they had internally, and they offered it to the world as a product. But by and large, I think it's going to be far and few between, especially, it's going to be focused on companies that have technology as their DNA, or almost like in the technology sector, building technology. Most other companies have different markets that they are addressing. And in my opinion, a lot of these companies, what they're trying to do is really focus on the problems that we can solve for ourselves, I think there are more problems than we have people and expertise. So my guess is that most large companies, they're going to focus on solving their own problems. A few, like I said, more tech-focused companies, that would want to be in that business, would probably branch out, but by and large, I think companies will continue to focus on serving their customers and serving their own business. >> Alright, Ash, we're going to leave it there, Ash Naseer. Thank you so much for your perspectives, it was great to see you, I'm sure we'll see you face-to-face later on this year. >> This is great, thank you for having me. >> Ah, you're welcome, alright. Keep it right there for more great content from SuperCloud2. We'll be right back. (gentle percussive music)

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John fur, host of the cube here at our headquarters on the west coast in Palo Alto, California. Got a great news guest here. Matt McGill, Wayne managing director of Madrona venture group is here with me on the big news and drone raising their record 690 million fund and partnering with their innovative founders. Matt, thanks for coming on and, and talking about the news and congratulations on the dry powder. >>Well, Hey, thanks so much, John. Appreciate you having me on the show. >>Well, great news here. Oley validation. We're in a new market. Everyone's talking about the new normal, we're talking about a recession inflation, but yet we've been reporting that this is kind of the first generation that cloud hyperscale economic scale and technical benefits have kind of hit any kind of economic downturn. If you go back to to 2008, our last downturn, the cloud really hasn't hit that tipping point. Now the innovation, as we've been reporting with our startup showcases and looking at the results from the hyperscalers, this funding news is kind of validation that the tech society intersection is working. You guys just get to the news 430 million in the Madrona fund nine and 200. And I think 60 million acceleration fund three, which means you're gonna go stay with your roots with seed early stage and then have some rocket fuel for kind of the accelerated expansion growth side of it. Not like late stage growth, but like scaling growth. This is kind of the news. Is that right? >>That's right. You know, we, we've had a long time strategy over 25 years here in Seattle of being early, early stage. You know, it's like our friends at Amazon like to say is, well, we're there at day one and we wanna help build companies for the long run for over 25 years. We've been doing that in Seattle. And I think one of the things we've realized, I mean, this is, these funds are the largest funds ever raised by a Seattle based venture capital firm and that's notable in and of itself. But we think that's the reason is because Seattle has continued to innovate in areas like consumer internet software cloud, of course, where the cloud capital of the world and increasingly the applications of machine learning. And so with all that combination, we believe there's a ton more companies to be built here in the Pacific Northwest and in Seattle in particular. And then through our acceleration fund where we're investing in companies anywhere in the country, in fact, anywhere in the world, those are the kinds of companies that want to have the Seattle point of view. They don't understand how to work with Amazon and AWS. They don't understand how to work with Microsoft and we have some unique relationships in those places and we think we can help them succeed in doing that. >>You know, it's notable that you guys in particular have been very close with Jeff Bayo Andy Jesse, and the success of ABUS as well as Microsoft. So, you know, Seattle has become cloud city. Everyone kind of knows that from a cloud perspective, obviously Microsoft's roots have been there for a long, long time. You go back, I mean, August capital, early days, funding Microsoft. You remember those days not to date myself, but you know, Microsoft kind of went up there and kind of established it a Amazon there as well. Now you got Google here, you got Facebook in the valley. You guys are now also coming down. This funding comes on the heels of you appointing a new managing director here in Palo Alto. This is now the migration of Madrona coming into the valley. Is that right? Is that what we're seeing? >>Well, I think what we're trying to do is bring the things that we know uniquely from Seattle and the companies here down to Silicon valley. We've got a terrific partner in Karama Hend, Andrew he's somebody that we have worked together with over the years, co-investing in companies. So we knew him really well. It was a bit opportunistic for us, but what we're hearing over and over again is a lot of these companies based in the valley, based in other parts of the country, they don't know really how to best work with the Microsoft and Amazons are understand the services that they offer. And, you know, we have that capability. We have those relationships. We wanna bring that to bear and helping build great companies. >>What is your expectation on the Silicon valley presence here? You can kind of give a hint here kind of a gateway to Seattle, but you got a lot of developers here. We just reported this morning that MEA just open source pie, torch to the Linux foundation again, and Mary material kind of trend we are seeing open source now has become there's no debate anymore has become the software industry. There's no more issue around that. This is real. I >>Think that's right. I mean, you know, once, you know, Satya became CEO, Microsoft, and they started embracing open source, you know, that was gonna be the last big tech holdout. We think open source is very interesting in terms of what it can produce and create in terms of next generation, innovative innovation. It's great to see companies like Facebook like Uber and others that have had a long track record of open source capabilities. But what we're also seeing is you need to build businesses around that, that a lot of enterprises don't wanna buy just the open source and stitch it together themselves. They want somebody to do it with them. And whether that's the way that, you know, companies like MongoDB have built that out over time or that's, you know, or elastic or, you know, companies like opt ML and our portfolio, or even the big cloud, you know, hyperscalers, you know, they are increasingly embracing open source and building finished services, managed services on top of it. So that's a big wave that we've been investing in for a number of years now and are highly confident gonna >>Continue. You know, I've been a big fan of Pacific Northwest for a while. You know, love going up there and talking to the folks at Microsoft and Amazon and AWS, but there's been a big trend in venture capital where a lot of the, the later stage folks, including private equity have come in, you seen tiger global even tiger global alumni, that the Cubs they call them, you know, they're coming down and playing in the early state and the results haven't been that good. You guys have had a track record in your success. Again, a hundred percent of your institutional investors have honed up with you on this two fund strategy of close to 700 million. What's this formula says, why aren't they winning what's is it, they don't have the ecosystem? Is it they're spraying and praying without a lot of discipline? What's the dynamic between the folks like Madrona, the Neas of the world who kind of come in and Sequoia who kind of do it right, right. Come in. And they get it done in the right way. The early stage. I just say the private equity folks, >>You know, I think that early stage venture is a local business. It is a geographically proximate business when you're helping incredible founders, try to really dial in that early founder market fit. This is before you even get to product market fit. And, and so the, the team building that goes on the talking to potential customers, the ITER iterating on business strategy, this is a roll up your sleeves kind of thing. It's not a financial transaction. And so what you're trying to do is have a presence and an understanding, a prepared mind of one of the big themes and the kinds of founders that with, you know, our encouragement and our help can go build lasting companies. Now, when you get to a, a, a later stage, you know, you get to that growth stage. It is generally more of a financial, you know, kind of engineering sort of proposition. And there's some folks that are great at that. What we do is we support these companies all the way through. We reserve enough capital to be with them at the seed stage, the series B stage the, you know, the crossover round before you go public, all of those sorts of things. And we love partnering with some of these other people, but there's a lot of heavy lifting at the early, early stages of a business. And it's, it's not, I think a model that everybody's architected to do >>Well, you know, trust becomes a big factor in all this. You kind of, when you talk about like that, I hear you speaking. It makes me think of like trusted advisor meets money, not so much telling people what to do. You guys have had a good track record and, and being added value, not values from track. And sometimes that values from track is getting in the way of the entrepreneur by, you know, running the certain meetings, driving board meetings and driving the agenda that you see to see that trend where people try too hard and that a force function, the entrepreneur we're living in a world now where everyone's talking to each other, you got, you know, there's no more glass door it's everyone's on Twitter, right? So you can see some move, someone trying to control the supply chain of talent by term sheet, overvaluing them. >>You guys are, have a different strategy. You guys have a network I've noticed that Madrona has attracted them high end talent coming outta Microsoft outta AWS season, season, senior talent. I won't say, you know, senior citizens, but you know, people have done things scaled up businesses, as well as attract young talent. Can you share with our audience that dynamic of the, the seasoned veterans, the systems thinkers, the ones who have been there done that built software, built teams to the new young entrepreneurs coming in, what's the dynamic, like, how do you guys look at at those networks? How do you nurture them? Could you share your, your strategy on how you're gonna pull all this together, going forward? >>You know, we, we think a lot about building the innovation ecosystem, like a phrase around here that you hear a lot is the bigger pie theory. How do we build the bigger pie? If we're focusing on building the bigger pie, there'll be plenty of that pie for Madrona Madrona companies. And in that mindset says, okay, how are we gonna invest in the innovation ecosystem? And then actually to use a term, you know, one of our founders who unfortunately passed away this year, Tom Aber, he had just written a book called flywheel. And I think it embodies this mindset that we have of how do you create that flywheel within a community? And of course, interestingly enough, I think Tom both learned and contributed to that. He was on the board of Amazon for almost 20 years in helping build some of the flywheels at Amazon. >>So that's what we carry forward. And we know that there's a lot of value in experiential learning. And so we've been fortunate to have some folks, you know, that have worked at some of those, you know, kind iconic companies, join us and find that they really love this company building journey. We've also got some terrific younger folks that have, you know, some very fresh perspectives and a lot of, a lot of creativity. And they're bringing that together with our team overall. And you know, what we really are trying to do at the end of the day is find incredible founders who wanna build something lasting, insignificant, and provide our kind of our time, our best ideas, our, our perspective. And of course our capital to help them be >>Successful. I love the ecosystem play. I think that's a human capital game too. I like the way you guys are thinking about that. I do wanna get your reaction, cause I know you're close to Amazon and Microsoft, but mainly Jeff Bezos as well. You mentioned your, your partner who passed away was on the board. A lot of great props on and tributes online. I saw that, I know I didn't know him at all. So I really can't comment, but I did notice that Bezos and, and jazz in particular were complimentary. And recently I just saw Bezos comment on Twitter about the, you know, the Lord of the rings movie. They're putting out the series and he says, you gotta have a team. That's kinda like rebels. I'm paraphrasing, cuz these folks never done a movie like this before. So they're, they're getting good props and reviews in this new world order where entrepreneurs gotta do things different. >>What's the one thing that you think entrepreneurs need to do different to make this next startup journey different and successful because the world is different. There's not a lot of press to relate to Andy Jassey even on stage last week in, in, in LA was kind of, he's not really revealing. He's on his talking points, message, the press aren't out there and big numbers anymore. And you got a lot of different go-to market strategies, omnichannel, social different ways to communicate to customers. Yeah. So product market fit is becomes big. So how do you see this new flywheel emerging for those entrepreneurs have to go out there, roll up their sleeves and make it happen. And what kind of resources do you think they need to be successful? What are you guys advocating? >>Well, you know, what's really interesting about that question is I've heard Jeff say many times that when people ask him, what's gotta be different. He, he reminds them to think about what's not gonna change. And he usually starts to then talk about things like price, convenience, and selection. Customer's never gonna want a higher price, less convenience, smaller selection. And so when you build on some of those principles of, what's not gonna change, it's easier for you to understand what could be changing as it relates to the differences. One of the biggest differences, I don't think any of us have fully figured out yet is what does it mean to be productive in a hybrid work mode? We happen to believe that it's still gonna have a kernel of people that are geographically close, that are part of the founding and building in the early stages of a company. >>And, and it's an and equation that they're going to also have people that are distributed around the country, perhaps around the world that are some of the best talent that they attract to their team. The other thing that I think coming back to what remains the same is being hyper focused on a certain customer and a certain problem that you're passionate about solving. And that's really what we look for when we look for this founder market fit. And it can be a lot of different things from the next generation water bottle to a better way to handle deep learning models and get 'em deployed in the cloud. If you've got that passion and you've got some inkling of the skill of how to build a better solution, that's never gonna go away. That's gonna be enduring, but exactly how you do that as a team in a hybrid world, I think that's gonna be different. >>Yeah. One thing that's not changing is that your investor, makeup's not changing a hundred percent of your existing institutional investors have signed back on with you guys and your oversubscribed, lot of demand. What is your flywheel success formula? Why is Tron is so successful? Can you share some feedback from your investors? What are they saying? Why are they re-upping share some inside baseball or anecdotal praise? >>Well, I think it's very kind to you to frame it that way. I mean, you know, it does for investors come back to performance. You know, these are university endowments and foundations that have a responsibility to, to generate great returns. And we understand that and we're very aligned with that. I think to be specific in the last couple years, they appreciated that we were also not holding onto our, our stocks forever, that we actually made some thoughtful decisions to sell some shares of companies like Smartsheet and snowflake and accolade in others, and actually distribute capital back to them when things were looking really, really good. But I think the thing, other thing that's very important here is that we've created a flywheel with our core strategy being Seattle based and then going out from there to try to find the best founders, build great companies with them, roll up our sleeves in a productive way and help them for the long term, which now leads to multiple generations of people, you know, at those companies. And beyond that we wanna be, you know, partner with and back again. And so you create this flywheel by having success with people in doing it in a respectful. And as you said earlier, a trusted way, >>What's the message for the Silicon valley crowd, obviously bay area, Silicon valley, Palo Alto office, and the center of it. Obviously you got them hybrid workforce hybrid venture model developing what's the goals. What's the message for Silicon valley? >>Well, our message for folks in Silicon valley is the same. It's always been, we we're excited to partner with them largely up here again, cause this is still our home base, but there'll be a, you know, select number of opportunities where we'll get a chance to partner together down in Silicon valley. And we think we bring something different with that deep understanding of cloud computing, that deep understanding of applied machine learning. And of course, some of our unique relationships up here that can be additive to what the they've already done. And some of them are just great partners and have built, you know, help build some really incredible companies over >>The years. Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview, given them big news. I guess the question on everyone's mind, certainly the entrepreneur's mind is how do I get some of that cash you have and put it into work for my opportunity. One what's the investment thesis can take a minute to put the plug in for the firm. What are you looking to invest in? What's the thesis? What kind of entrepreneurs you're looking for? I know fund one is seed fund nine is seed to, to a and B and the second one is beyond B and beyond for growth. What's the pitch. What's the pitch. >>Yeah. Well you can, you can think of us as you know, any stage from pre-seed to series seed. You know, we'll make a new investment in companies in all of those stages. You know, I think that, you know, the, the core pitch, you know, to us is, you know, your passion for the, for the problem that you're trying to, trying to get solved. And we're of course, very excited about that. And you know, at, at, at the end of the day, you know, if you want somebody that has a distinct point of view on the market that is based up here and can roll up their sleeves and work alongside you. We're, we're, we're the ones that are more than happy to do that. Proven track record of doing that for 25 plus years. And there's so much innovation ahead. There's so many opportunities to disrupt to pioneer, and we're excited to be a part of working with great founders to do that. >>Well, great stuff. We'll see you ATS reinvent coming up shortly and your annual get together. You always have your crew down there and, and team engaging with some of the cloud players as well. And looking forward to seeing how the Palo Alto team expands out. And Matt, thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks very much, John. Appreciate you having me look forward to seeing you at reinvent. >>Okay. Matt, Matt here with Madrona venture group, he's the partner managing partner Madrona group raises 690 million to fund nine and, and, and again, and big funds for accelerated growth fund. Three lot of dry powder. Again, entrepreneurship in technology is scaling. It's not going down. It's continuing to accelerate into this next generation super cloud multi-cloud hybrid cloud world steady state. This is the cubes coverage. I'm John for Silicon angle and host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE studios of Palo Alto California for RSA conference keynote coverage and conference coverage. I'm Sean for your host of theCUBE. We're breaking down the keynote of RSA day one kickoff. We had Mark Nunnikhoven, who's the distinguished cloud strategist at Lacework. Mark former cube alumni and expert and security has been on many times before, Mark great to see you. Thanks for coming on and helping me break down RSA conference 2021 virtual this year. Thanks for joining. >> Happy to be here. Thanks for having me John. >> You know, one of the things Mark about these security conferences is that interesting, RSA was the last conference we actually did interviews physically face to face and then the pandemic went down and it was a huge shutdown. So we're still virtual coming back to real life. So and they're virtual this year, so kind of a turn of events, but that was kind of the theme this year in the keynote. Changing the game on security, the script has been flipped, connectivity everywhere, security from day one being reinvented. Some people were holding onto the old way some people trying to get on there, on the future wave. Clearly you got the laggards and you've got the innovators all trying to kind of, you know, find their position. This has been obvious in this keynote. What's your take? >> Yeah and that was exactly it. They use that situation of being that last physical security conference, somewhat to their advantage to weave this theme of resiliency. And it's a message that we heard throughout the keynote. It's a message we're going to hear throughout the week. There's a number of talks that are tying back to this and it really hits at the core of what security aims to do. And I think aims is really the right word for it because we're not quite there yet. But it's about making sure that our technology is flexible that it expands and adapts to the situations because as we all know this year, you know basically upended everything we assumed about how our businesses were running, how our communities and society was running and we've all had to adapt. And that's what we saw at the keynote today was they acknowledged that and then woven into the message to drive that home for security providers. >> Yeah and to me one of the most notable backdrops to the entire thing was the fact that the RSA continues to operate from the sell out when Dell sold them for alright $2 billion to a consortium, private privately private equity company, Symphony Technology Group. So there they're operating now on their own. They're out in the wild, as you said, cybersecurity threats are ever increasing, the surface area has changed with cloud native. Basically RSA is a 3000 person startup basically now. So they've got secure ID, the old token business we all have anyone's had those IDs you know it's pretty solid, but now they've got to kind of put this event back together and mobile world Congress is right around the corner. They're going to try to actually have a physical event. So you have this pandemic problem of trying to get the word out and it's weird. It's kind of, I found it. It's hard to get your hands around all the news. >> It is. And it's, you know, we're definitely missing that element. You know, we've seen that throughout the year people have tried to adapt these events into a virtual format. We're missing those elements of those sorts of happenstance run-ins I know we've run into each other at a number of events just sort of in the hall, you get to catch up, but you know as part of those interactions, they're not just social but you also get a little more insight into the conference. Hey, you know, did you catch this great talk or are you going to go catch this thing later? And we're definitely missing that. And I don't think anyone's really nailed this virtual format yet. It's very difficult to wrap your head around like you said, I saw a tweet online from one InfoSec analyst today. It was pointed out, you know, there were 17 talks happening at the same time, which you know, in a physical thing you'd pick one and go to it in a virtual there's that temptation to kind of click across the channels. So even if you know what's going on it's hard to focus in these events. >> Yeah the one conference has got a really good I think virtual platform is Docker con, they have 48 panels, a lot of great stuff there. So that's one of more watching closest coming up on May 27. Check that one out. Let's get into this, let's get into the analysis. I really want to get your thoughts on this because you know, I thought the keynote was very upbeat. Clearly the realities are presenting it. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco there and you had a bunch of industry legends in there. So let's start with, let's start with what you thought of Rowan's keynote and then we'll jump into what Chuck Robbins was saying. >> Sure yeah. And I thought, Rohit, you know, at first I questioned cause he brought up and he said, I'm going to talk about tigers, airplanes and sewing machines. And you know, as a speaker myself, I said, okay, this is either really going to work out well or it's not going to work out at all. Unfortunately, you know, Rohit head is a professional he's a great speaker and it worked out. And so he tied these three examples. So it was tiger king for Netflix, at World War II, analyzing airplane damage and a great organization in India that pivoted from sewing into creating masks and other supplies for the pandemic. He wove those three examples through with resiliency and showed adaptation. And I thought it was really really well done first of all. But as a cloud guy, I was really excited as well that that first example was Netflix. And he was referencing a chaos monkey, which is a chaos engineering tool, which I don't think a lot of security people are exposed to. So we use it very often in cloud building where essentially this tool will purposely blow up things in your environment. So it will down services. It will cut your communications off because the idea is you need to figure out how to react to these things before they happen for real. And so getting keynote time for a tool like that a very modern cloud tool, I thought was absolutely fantastic. Even if that's, you know, not so well known or not a secret in the cloud world anymore, it's very commonly understood, but getting a security audience exposure to that was great. And so you know, Rohit is a pro and it was a good kickoff and yeah, very upbeat, a lot of high energy which was great for virtual keynote. Cause sometimes that's what's really missing is that energy. >> Yeah, we like Rohit too. He's got some, he's got charisma. He also has his hand on the pulse. I think the chaos monkey point you're making is as a great call out because it's been around the DevOps community. But what that really shows I think and puts an exclamation point around this industry right now is that DevSecOps is here and it's never going away and cloud native and certainly the pandemic has shown that cloud scale speed data and now distributed computing with the edge, 5G has been mentioned, as you said, this is a real deal. So this is DevOps. This is infrastructure as code and security is being reinvented in it. This is a killer theme and it's kind of a wake-up call. What's your reaction to that? what's your take? >> Yeah, it absolutely is a wake-up call and it actually blended really well into a Rohit second point, which was around using data. And I think, you know, having these messages put out to the, you know, what is the security conference for the year always, is really important because the rest of the business has moved forward and security teams have been a little hesitant there, we're a little behind the times compared to the rest of the business who are taking advantage of these cloud services, taking advantage of data being everywhere. So for security professionals to realize like hey there are tools that can make us better at our jobs and make us, you know, keep or help us keep pace with the business is absolutely critical because like you said, as much as you know I always cringe when I hear the term DevSecOps, it's important because security needs to be there. The reason I cringe is because I think security should be built into everything. But the challenge we have is that security teams are still a lot of us are still stuck in the past to sort of put our arms around something. And you know, if it's in that box, I'm good with it. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. We have better tools, we have better data. And that was really Rohit's key message was those tools and that data can help you be resilient, can help your organization be resilient and whether that's the situation like a pandemic or a major cyber attack, you need to be flexible. You need to be able to bounce back. >> You know, when we actually have infrastructure as code and no one ever talks about DevOps or DevSecOps you know, we've, it's over, it's in the right place, but I want to get your thoughts and seeing if you heard anything about automation because one of the things that you bring up about not liking the word DevSecOps is really around, having this new team formation, how people are organizing their developers and their operations teams. And it really is becoming programmable and that's kind of the word, but automation scales it. So that's been a big theme this year. What are you hearing? What did you hear on the keynote? Any signs of reality around automation, machine learning you mentioned data, did they dig into automation? >> Automation was on the periphery. So a lot of what they're talking about only works with automation. So, you know, the Netflix shout out for chaos monkey absolutely as an automated tool to take advantage of this data, you absolutely need to be automated but the keynote mainly focused on sort of the connectivity and the differences in how we view an organization over the last year versus moving forward. And I think that was actually a bit of a miss because as you rightfully point out, John, you need automation. The thing that baffles me as a builder, as a security guy, is that cyber criminals have been automated for years. That's how they scale. That's how they make their money. Yet we still primarily defend manually. And I don't know if you've ever tried to beat, you know the robots that are everything or really complicated video games. We don't tend to win well when we're fighting automation. So security absolutely needs to step up. The good news is looking at the agenda for the week, taking in some talks today, while it was a bit of a miss and the keynote, there is a good theme of automation throughout some of the deeper dive sessions. So it is a topic that people are aware of and moving forward. But again, I always want to see us move fast. >> Was there a reason Chuck Robbins headlines or is that simply because there are a big 800 pound gorilla in the networking space? You know, why Cisco? Are they relevant security? Is that signaling that networking is more important? As of 5G at the edge, but is Cisco the player? >> Obviously Cisco has a massive business and they are a huge player in the security industry but I think they're also representative of, you know and this was definitely Chuck's message. They were representative of this idea that security needs to be built in at every layer. So even though, you know I live on primarily the cloud technologies dealing with organizations that are built in the cloud, there is, you know, the reality of that we are all connected through a multitude of networks. And we've seen that with work from home which is a huge theme this year at the conference and the improvements in mobility with 5G and other connectivity areas like Edge and WiFi six. So having a big network player and security player like Cisco in the keynote I think is important just because their message was not just about inclusion and diversity for skills which was a theme we saw repeated in the keynote actually but it was about building security in from the start to the finish throughout. And I think that's a really important message. We can't just pick one place and say this is where we're going to build security. It needs to be built throughout all of our systems. >> If you were a Cicso listening today what was your take on that? Were you impressed? Were you blown away? Did you fall out of your chair or was it just right down the middle? >> I mean, you might fall out of your chair just cause you're sitting in it for so long taken in a virtual event. And I mean, I know that's the big downside of virtual is that your step counter is way down compared to where it should be for these conferences but there was nothing revolutionary in the opening parts of the keynote. It was just, you know sort of beating the drum that has been talked about, has been simmering in the background from sort of the more progressive side of security. So if you've been focusing on primarily traditional techniques and the on-premise world, then perhaps this was a little a bit of an eye-opener and something where you go, wow, there's, you know there's something else out here and we can move things forward. For people who are, you know, more cloud native or more into that automation space, that data space this is really just sort of a head nodding going, yeap, I agree with this. This makes sense. This is where we all should be at this point. But as we know, you know there's a very long tail insecurity and insecurity organizations. So to have that message, you know repeated from a large stage like the keynote I think was very important. >> Well you know, we're going to be, theCUBE will be onsite and virtual with our virtual platform for Amazon web services reinforced coming up in Houston. So that's going to be interesting to see and you compare contrast like an AWS reinforce which is kind of the I there I think they had the first conference two years ago so it's kind of a new conference. And then you got the old kind of RSA conference. The question I have for you, is it a just a position of almost two conferences, right? You got the cloud native AWS, which is really about, oh shared responsibility, et cetera, et cetera a lot more action happening there. And you got this conference here seem come the old school legacy players. So I want to get your thoughts on that. And I want to get your take on just just the cryptographers panel, because, you know, as I'm not saying this as a state-of-the-art that the old guys saying get off my lawn, you know crypto, we're the crypto purists, they were trashing NFTs which as you know, is all the rage. So I, and Ron rivers who wrote new co-create RSA public key technology, which is isn't everything these days. Is this a sign of just get off my lawn? Or is it a sign of the times trashing the NFTs? What's your take? >> Yeah, well, so let's tackle the NFTs then we'll do the contrast between the two conferences. But I thought the NFT, you know Ron and Addie both had really interesting ways of explaining what an NFT was, because that's most of the discussion around the NFT is exactly what are we buying or what are we investing in? And so I think it was Addie who said, you know it was basically you have a tulip then you could have a picture of a tulip and then you could have something explaining the picture of the tulip and that's what an NFT is. So I think, you know, but at the same time he recognized the value of potential for artists. So I think there was some definitely, you know get off my lawn, but also sort of the the cryptographer panels is always sort of very pragmatic, very evidence-based as shown today when they actually were talking about a paper by Schnorr who debates, whether RSA or if he has new math that he thinks can debunk RSA or at least break the algorithm. And so they had a very logical and intelligent discussion about that. But the cryptographers panel in contrast to the rest of the keynote, it's not about the hype. It's not about what's going on in the industry. It's really is truly a cryptographers panel talking about the math, talking about the fundamental underpinnings of our security things as a big nerd, I'm a huge fan but a lot of people watch that and just kind of go, okay now's a great time to grab a snack and maybe move those legs a little bit. But if you're interested in the more technical deeper dive side, it's definitely worth taking in. >> Super fascinating and I think, you know, it's funny, they said it's not even a picture of a tulip it's s pointer to a picture of a tulip. Which is technically it. >> That was it. >> It's interesting how, again, this is all fun. NFTs are, I mean, you can't help, but get an Amber by decentralization. And that, that wave is coming. It's very interesting how you got a decentralization wave coming, yet a lot of people want to hang on to the centralized view. Okay, this is an architectural conflict. Is there a balance in your mind as a techie, we look at security, certainly as the perimeter is gone that's not even debate anymore, but as we have much more of a distributed computing environment, is there a need for some sensuality and or is it going to be all decentralized in your opinion? >> Yeah that's actually a really interesting question. It's a great set up to connect both of these points of sort of the cryptographers panel and that contrast between newer conferences and RSA because the cryptographers panel brought up the fact that you can't have resilient systems unless you're going for a distributed systems, unless you're spreading things out because otherwise you're creating a central point of failure, even if it's at hyper-scale which is not resilient by definition. So that was a very interesting and very valid point. I think the reality is it's a combination of the two is that we want resilient systems that are distributed that scale up independently of other factors. You know, so if you're sitting in the cloud you're going multi-region or maybe even multicloud, you know you want this distributed area just for that as Verner from AWS calls it, you know, the reduced blast radius. So if something breaks, not everything does but then the challenge from a security and from an operational point of view, is you need that central visibility. And I think this is where automation, where machine learning and really viewing security as a data problem, comes into play. If you have the systems distributed but you can provide visibility centrally which is something we can achieve with modern cloud technologies, you kind of hit that sweet spot. You've got resilient underpinnings in your systems but you as a team can actually understand what's going on because that was a, yet another point from Carmela and from Ross on the cryptographers panel when it comes to AI and machine learning, we're at the point where we don't really understand a lot of what's going on in the algorithm we kind of understand the output and the input. So again, it tied back to that resiliency. So I think that key is distributed systems are great but you need that central visibility and you only get there through viewing things as a data problem, heavy automation and modern tooling. >> Great great insight, Mark. Great, great call out there. And great point tied in there. Let me ask you a question on your take on the keynote in the conference in general as first day gets going. Do you see this evolving from the classic enterprise kind of buyer supplier relationship to much more of a CSO driven or CXO driven? I need to start building about my teams. I got to start hiring developers, not so much in operation side. I mean, I see InfoSec is these industries are not going away. People are still buying tools and stacking up the tool shed but there's been a big trend towards platforms and shifting left from a developer CICB pipeline standpoint which speaks to scale on the cloud native side and that distributed side. So is this conference hitting that Mark, or you still think there are more hardware and service systems people? What's the makeup? What's the take? >> I think we're definitely starting to a shift. So a great example of that is the CSA. The Cloud Security Alliance always runs a day one or day zero summit at RSA. And this year it was a CSO executive summit. And whereas in previous years it's been practitioners. So that is a good sign I think, that's a positive sign to start to look at a long ignored area of security, which is how do we train the next generation of security professionals. We've always taken this traditional view. We've, you know, people go through the standard you get your CISSP, you hold onto it forever. You know, you do your time on the firewall, you go through the standard thing but I think we really need to adjust and look for people with that automation capability, with development, with better business skills and definitely better communication skills, because really as we integrate as we leave our sort of protected little cave of security, we need to be better business people and better team players. >> Well Mark, I really appreciate you coming on here. A cube alumni and a trusted resource and verified, trusted contributor. Thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts on the RSA conference and breaking down the keynote analysis, the RSA conference. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Well, what we got you here to take a minute to plug what you're doing at Lacework, what you're excited about. What's going on over there? >> Sure, I appreciate that. So I just joined Lacework, I'm a weekend. So I'm drinking from the fire hose of knowledge and what I've found so far, fantastic platform, fantastic teams. It's got me wrapped up and excited again because we're approaching, you know security from the data point of view. We're really, we're born in the cloud, built for the cloud and we're trying to help teams really gather context. And the thing that appealed to me about that was that it's not just targeting the security team. It's targeting builders, it's targeting the business, it's giving them that visibility into what's going on so that they can make informed decision. And for me, that's really what security is all about. >> Well, I appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for sharing. >> Thank you. >> Okay CUBE coverage of RSA conference here with Lacework, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here in 2021 as we get through the pandemic and vaccine on the horizon all around the world. It's great to welcome Sandy Carter, Vice President of Partners and Programs with Amazon Web Services. Sandy, great to see you. I wanted to check in with you for a couple of reasons. One is just get a take on the landscape of the marketplace as well as you've got some always good programs going on. You're in the middle of all the action. Great to see you. >> Nice to see you too, John. Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things that's come out of this COVID and as we get ready to come out of the pandemic you starting to see some patterns emerging, and that is cloud and cloud-native technologies and SAS and the new platforming and refactoring using cloud has created an opportunity for companies. Your partner group within public sector and beyond is just completely exploding and value creation. Changing the world's society is now accelerated. We've covered that in the past, certainly in detail last year at re:Invent. Now more than ever it's more important. You're doing some pretty cutting things. What's your update here for us? >> Well, John, we're really excited because you know the heartbeat of countries of the United States globally are small and medium businesses. So today we're really excited to launch Think Big for Small Business. It's a program that helps accelerate public sector serving small and diverse partners. So you know that these small and medium businesses are just the engine for inclusive growth and strategy. We talked about some stats today, but according to the World Bank, smaller medium business accounts for 98% of all companies, they contribute a 50% of the GDP, two-thirds of the employment opportunities, and the fastest growing areas are in minority owned businesses, women, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned, aborigine, ethnic minorities who are just vital to the economic role. And so today this program enables us as AWS to support this partner group to overcome the challenges that they're seeing today in their business with some benefits specifically targeted for them from AWS. >> Can I ask you what was the driver behind this? Obviously, we're seeing the pandemic and you can't look at on the TV or in the news without seeing the impact that small businesses had. So I can almost imagine that might be some motivation, but what is some of the conversations that you're having? Why this program? Why think Big for Small Business pilot experience that you're launch? >> Well, it's really interesting. The COVID obviously plays a role here because COVID hit small and medium businesses harder, but we also, you know, part of Amazon is working backwards from the customers. So we collected feedback from small businesses on their experience in working with us. They all want to work with us. And essentially they told us that they need a little bit more help, a little bit more push around programmatic benefits. So we listened to them to see what was happening. In addition, AWS grew up with a startup community. That's how we grew up. And so we wanted to also reflect our heritage and our commitment to these partners who represent such a heartbeat of many different economies. That was really the main driver. And today we had, John, one of our follow the sun. So we're doing sessions in Latin America, Canada, the US, APJ, Europe. And if you had heard these partners today it was just such a great story of how we were able to help them and help them grow. >> One of the cultural changes that we've been reporting on SiliconANGLE, you're seeing it all over the world is the shift in who's adopting, who's starting businesses. And you're seeing, you mentioned minority owned businesses but it goes beyond that. Now you have complete diverse set entrepreneurial activity. And cloud has generated this democratization wave. You starting to see businesses highly accelerated. I mean, more than ever, I've never seen in the entrepreneurial equation the ability to start, get started and get to success, get to some measurable MVP, minimal viable product, and then ultimately to success faster than ever before. This has opened up the doors to anyone to be an entrepreneur. And so this brings up the conversation of equality in entrepreneurship. I know this is close to your heart. Share your thoughts on this big trend. >> Yeah, and that's why this program it's not just a great I think achievement for AWS, but it's very personal to the entire public sector team. If you look at entrepreneurs like, Lisa Burnett, she's the President and Managing Director of DLZP. They are a female owned minority owned business from Texas. And as you listen to her story about equity, she has this amazing business, migrating Oracle workloads over to AWS, but as she started growing she needed help understanding a little bit more about what AWS could bring to the table, how we could help her, what go to market strategies we could bring, and so that equalizer was this program. She was part of our pilot. We also had John Wieler on. He is the Vice President of Biz Dev from IMT out of Canada. And he is focused on government for Canada. And as a small business, he said today something that was so impactful, he goes, "Amazon never asked me if I'm a small business. They now treat me like I'm big. I feel like I'm one of the big guys and that enables me grow even bigger." And we also talked today to Juan Pablo De Rosa. He's the CEO of Technogi. And it's a small business in Mexico. And what do they do? They do migrations. They just migrate legacy workloads over. And again, back to that equality point you made, how cool was it that here's this company in Mexico, and they're doing all these migrations and we can help them even be more successful and to drive more jobs in the region. It's a very equalizing program and something that we're very proud of. >> You know what I love about your job and I love talking to you about this (Sandy laughs) because it's so much fun. You have a global perspective. It's not just United States. There's a global perspective. This event you're having this morning that you kicked off with is not just in the US, it's a follow the sun kind of a community. You got quite the global community developing there, Sandy. Can you share some insight behind the curtain, behind AWS, how this is developing? How you're handling it? What you're doing to nurture and grow that community that really wants to engage with you because you are making them feel big because (laughs) that's what cloud does. It makes them punch above their weight class and innovate. >> Yeah, that's very correct. >> This is the core thesis of Amazon. So you've got a community developing, how are you handling it? How are you building it? How are you nurturing it? What are your thoughts? >> You know what, John? You're so insightful because that's actually the goal of this program. We want to help these partners. We want to help them grow. But our ultimate goal is to build that small and medium business community that is based on AWS. In fact, at re:Invent this year, we were able to talk about MST which is based out of Malaysia, as well as cloud prime based out of Korea. And just by talking about it, those two CEOs reached out to each other from Korea and Malaysia and started talking. And then we today introduced folks from Mexico, and Canada, and the US, and Bulgaria. And so, we really pride ourselves on facilitating that community. Our dream here, our vision here is that we would build that small business community to be much more scalable but starting out by making those connections, having that mentoring that will be built in together, doing community meetings that advisory meetings together. We piloted this program in 2020. We already have 37 partners. And they told me as I met with them, they already feel like this small and medium business community or family. Family was the word they used, I think, moving forward. So you nailed it. That's the goal here is to create that community where people can share their thoughts and mentor each other. >> And it's on the ground floor too. It's just beginning. I think it's going to be so much larger. And to piggyback off that I want to also point out and highlight and get your reaction to is the success that you've been having and Amazon Web Services in general but mainly in the public sector side with the public private partnership. You're seeing this theme emerge really been a big way. I've been enclose to it and hosting and being interviewing a lot of folks at that, your customers whether it's cybersecurity in space, the Mars partnership that you guys just got on Mars with partnerships. So it's a global and interstellar soon to be huge everywhere. But this is a big discussion because as from cybersecurity, geopolitical to space, you have this partnership with public private because you can't do it alone. The public markets, the public sector cannot do it alone. And it pretty much everyone's agreeing to that. So this dynamic of public sector and partnering private public is a pretty big deal. Unpack that for us real quickly. >> Yeah, it really is a big deal. And in fact, we've worked with several companies. I'll just use one sector. Public Safety and Disaster Response. We just announced the competency at re:Invent for our tech partners. And what we found is that when communities are facing a disaster, it really is government or the public sector plus the private sector. We had many solutions where citizens are providing data that helps the government manage a disaster or manage or help in a public safety scenario to things like simple things you would think, but in one country they were looking at bicycle routes and discovered that certain bicycle routes there were more crashes. And so one of our partners decided to have the community provide the data. And so as they were collecting that data, putting in the data lake in AWS, the community or the private sector was providing the data that enabled the application, our Public Sector Partner application to identify places where bicycle accidents happen most often. And I love the story, John, because the CEO of the partner told me that they measured their results in terms of ELO, I'm sorry, ROL, Return on Lives not ROI, because they save so many lives just from that simple application. >> Yeah, and the data's all there. You just saw on the news, Tiger Woods got into a car accident and survived. And as it turns out to your point that's a curve in the road where a lot of accidents happen. And if that data was available that could have been telegraphed right into the car itself and slow down, kind of like almost a prevention. So he just an example of just all the innovation possibilities that are abound out there. >> And that's why we love our small businesses and startups too, John. They are driving that innovation. The startups are driving that innovation and we're able to then open access to that innovation to governments, agencies, healthcare providers, space. You mentioned Mars. One of our partners MAXR helped them with the robotics. So it's just a really cool experience where you can open up that innovation, help create new jobs through these small businesses and help them be successful. There's really nothing, nothing better. >> Can I ask you- >> Small, small is beautiful. >> Can I asked you a personal question on this been Mars thing? >> Yeah. >> What's it like at Amazon Web Services now because that was such a cool mission. I saw Teresa Carlson, had a post on the internet and LinkedIn as well as her blog post. You had posted a picture of me and you had thumbs were taking an old picture from in real life. Space is cool, Mars in particular, everyone's fixated on it. Pretty big accomplishment. What's it like at Amazon? People high five in each other pretty giddy, what's happening? >> Oh yeah. The thing about Amazon is people come here to change the world. That's what we want to do. We want to have an impact on history. We want to help make history. And we do it all on behalf of our customers. We're innovating on behalf of our customers. And so, I think we get excited when our customers are successful, when our partners are successful, which is why I'm so excited right now, John, because we did that session this morning, and as I listened to Juan Pablo Dela Rosa, and just all the partners, Lisa, John, and just to hear them say, "You helped us," that's what makes us giddy. And that's what makes us excited. So it could be something as big as Mars. We went to Mars but it's also doing something for small businesses as well. It runs the spectrum that really drives us and fuels that energy. And of course, we've got great leadership as you know, because you get to talk to Andy. Andy is such a great leader. He motivates and he inspires us as well to do more on behalf of our customer. >> Yeah, you guys are very customer focused and innovative which is really the kind of the secret sauce. I love the fact that small medium sized business can also be part of the solutions. And I truly believe that, and why I wanted us to promote and amplify what you're working on today is because the small medium size enterprise and business is the heart of the recovery on a global scale. So important and having the resources to do that, and doing it easily and consuming the cloud so that they can apply the value. It's going to change lives. I think the thing that people aren't really talking much about right now, is that the small medium size businesses will be the road to recovery. >> I agree with you. And I love this program because it does promote diversity, something that Amazon is very much focused on. It's global, so it has that global reach and it supports small business, and therefore the recovery that you talked about. So it is I think an amazing emphasis on all the things that really matter now. During COVID, John, we learned about what really matters, and this program focuses on those things and helping others. >> Well, great to see you. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming on and sharing the update, and certainly talking about the small mid size business program. I'm sure you're busy getting ready to give the awards out to the winners this year. Looking forward to seeing that come up soon. >> Great. Thank you, John. And don't forget if you are a small and medium business partner 'cause this program is specifically for partners, check out Think Big for Small Business. >> Think Big for Small Business. Sandy Carter, here on theCube, sharing our insight, of course all the updates from the worldwide public sector partner program, doing great things. I'm John Furrier for theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of a new era and database management brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back. I'm still minimum and we're covering Nutanix Is New Era database launch Of course, we had to do instead of conversation with Monica Ambala talking about era to Dato and to dig into it a little bit further. We have some new tennis guests as well as what? One of their close partners. So going across the channel, first of all, happy to welcome to the program. Uh, the new kid UPA she is the gsc strategy and go to market with Nutanix sitting in the middle chair we have on and Akila whose product marketing leader with Nutanix and then from HCL happy to welcome to the program Tasing who is the senior vice president with HCL Technologies. I mentioned all three of you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Glad to be here, >>right? Uh they knew What? Why don't we start with you? You handle the relationship between Nutanix and HCL. As I said, some exciting announcements database services help us understand how Ah partner like HCL takes the technology and what will help bring it to market. >>Let me start by thanking used to for this opportunity. Head Seal is a very significant partner for Nutanix and we've had this partnership for a long time now. It's one of our long standing partnership. Over the five years we've closed over 100 accounts across all three theaters. Trained professionals both on the Nutanix side on the outside, on built a 3 60 relationships so we can deliver the best experience around solutions to our partners. In the very recent announcement, we're looking to build a database as a service offering. With that CL we want Thio leverage are intelligent technology that allows us to simplify off and increase operating efficiency. Andi Couple it with head seals ability to offer world class services on it. It's a scale to reach the go to market needs needed right. We're very confident that the solution is going to drive significant incremental business for both our companies. >>Excellent taste. We would love to hear from your standpoint. What is it that excites you? We we know HCL knows the data space real well. So I think you've got some customers that air looking to take advantage of some of these new offerings. >>Yeah, So if you look at where the focus has been so far, most of the focus is on taking applications to cloud and moving them from VM two probably containers one of the most. Uh, I won't say, uh, neglected, but the space that needs to change now is the entire database space on. If you look at how customers are managing databases today, they have taken hardware on a KPIX model. They have the operating system and the database licenses on L. A model from the E. M s on. Then they have, ah, teams which are siloed depending upon the database technology that is there in the environment and managing that I think that whole model is has to change, enabling customers to transform Onda accelerate the digital transformation journey on. That is where our offering off database as a service ises very unique because it offers a full stack off services which includes right from hardware and all the way to operations on a completely utility model powered by the Nutanix era. >>Yeah, on it might make sense if you could give us a little bit of a broader context for your users. Some of the data that you have around this offering, >>yeah, you know, attend effect. All the solution, our joint solutions. Our customers, uh, they are trying to deliver the best individual experience, right? That's at the heart of it. What they're trying to do, I'll give you a couple of customer examples. For example, Arbil Bank in India. You know, they deployed their database solutions and applications, and Nutanix got 16 fasters application response. That means like they used to take 180 seconds. Uh, Thio logging into the application. And now it's, uh, 20 seconds, 36 times faster. Another example I could give. I can give many examples, but when this one is really interesting, Delaware Valley community held, you know, at the time of Kobe they went remote. They started working from home and they had medical systems applications. EMR electronic medical record applications and used to take even before they were working from home, is take like 171 seconds to log into medical systems before they could, you know, talk to their patients and look at their, you know, health results and everything and that from 171 seconds, it went to 19 seconds. So these are some of the values that customers seeing when it comes to delivering the individual experience to their customers. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've seen police stage go ahead. >>Yeah, and I just had to What men? Who said that? It's also the ability tohave self service with dynamic provisioning capability that really brings the value toe the to the I T teams and to the application teams who are consuming these services. So we have cases where customers were waiting for about a week, 10 days for the environments to be provisioned to them. And now it's a matter of seconds or minutes where they can have a full fledged environments leading to develop a productivity. And that also really adds the whole acceleration that we just spoke about. >>Yeah, we we've absolutely seen such a transformation in database for the longest time. It was, you know, a database. It didn't change too much. That's what everything run on Now there's a lot of flexibility. Open source is a big piece of what's going on there. I'd like to come back to you and you know, they know. I know you're gonna want to chime in here. You know, HCL doesn't just, you know, take this off the shelf and, you know, resell it, help us understand. You know what is unique about the offering that that HCL brings market? Uh, with with >>Nutanix. Right. So one is that we have standardized reference architectures, which really x ray the time to consume the offering. We're not building anything from from from ground up. Three Nutanix is also part off our velocity framework, which helps customers deploy software defined infrastructure as the as a foundation element for their for their private cloud. Now, what is unique is also the ability toe not only provide operations on different databases that are there in the environment on a completely utility model, but also help customers, you know, move to cloud and adopt the database clouded of databases and then manage the whole show seamlessly using using the BP platform and that really, you know, if you look at the trend that is there, there's a short term impact on the long term impact off transformation. In the short term, there's hardly an industry which is not touched by by covert on most of our customers are either looking at cost or initiatives or are looking at ah platform, which will help them in a weight or find new business model to to sail through. In the long term, we strongly believe that the customers will be in a hybrid, multi cloud world where they will still have the heritage environments. The article and the Sequels on a lot off cloud native data business will also start coming into picture. How do you manage is also seamlessly is what will be the next challenge for for most of the customers. And that's where we come in, along with Nutanix, to solve the problem. >>Well, very simply put right, we have different categories of customers. One off them refers to buy the ingredients and make their own meal on some really large customers, and global customers prefer to buy the meal and pay for it on on as consumer basis. What that seal does is take era, which simplifies a lot of the database operations, puts it into a full stack solution and gives the customer the full stack solution. Everything from assessing that environment to deploying, to making sure that the designers I accurate and then of course, the day and through they do through and, uh, uh, environment, right. So literally the customer can Now I'll offload any off their data center, our database management and operation to hit cl from my perspective on do rest assured, run their projects toe, etc. Also, excel becomes their extended arm, the beauty off. It is also like working with dead C. Elgar now able to offer the entire solution on a pay as you go model or pay as you use model, which is very relevant to the existing times where everybody is trying to cut their Catholics costs and and optimized on the utilization. >>Well, great. Great to hear about that. You've mentioned that this partnership has been for many years, so I know you've got plenty of joint customers. Anything specifically could share about these new offerings on. And I know you've got a lot of the customer stories there. Maybe you could start would look love, freedom. The rest of you, >>Thio, I'll start what? You know, Like I talked about a couple of customers. But recently I'm really excited about. And this is something that to be a announcing today as well. Ah, study that we did with Forrester called Forrester T I study, which is what it means total economic impact study. And what they do is that they topped with customers, uh, interviewed them, four of them. And based on their experience, uh, you know what? They observe what kind of benefit they got, what challenges they had, what was cause they built an economic model. And based on that economic model, they found that customers were rolled all off them were able to get their payback within six months. So Bala talked about it earlier that, you know, like all the great experience, all the great value that we offer, but at a very, very good cost. So the six less than six months payback was used and the r y for the three years period and again, this is ah, model based on four enterprises was 2 91 100% almost like three times mawr. So whatever they invested, I think on an average day the cost was 2.3 million and the benefit was nine million or so so huge value customers have observed already. And with this new launch, I believe that it will just go to the next level. All the things about provisioning copy data saving that the stories All of that adds to the R Y that I'm talking about and our joint customers with SCL or otherwise, who are customers who are running their applications, their business critical applications on you can X Platform managed by era an era is built out off a bunch off best practices that over time that we have done. I talked about custom performance earlier, and a lot of the performance comes from fine tuning. You do that like a lot of tea tuning and to get to the right kind of performance. Uh, era comes with that, those best practices. So when your provisioning an application, you know, it gives you you don't have to do all that tuning. So that's the value customers are experiencing. And I'm really excited about the joint customers what they could experience and benefit out off the new expanded solution. >>Great Tiger. Any other customer examples that you'd like to share? >>Well, we got a lot of go ahead page, >>but it's okay. >>No, I was just saying that we've had a lot of success with Head cl across the board anywhere from data center organization Thio v. D. I. We had a very large manufacturing company in America where we partner together. They have a huge number of sub brands. We partnered together to go evaluate that environment and then also even that is a B infrastructure with databases. It's a relatively new offering we're announcing today. But we're leveraging the expertise that SCL has in the market, uh, to go to go deeper into that market with cl eso. I will leave it to page to give us the NCL examples. >>So one thing that is happening is the very definition off infrastructure and infrastructure operation itself is changing. So a couple of years ago, for many of our customers, it was about operating system management, hardware management, network management and all the use. Uh, the concept that you're going back to customer is about platform operations. That means everything to do with application operations. Downward is going to be done by one integrated unit. Now, with Nutanix, we can we can really bring a lot of change, and we're bringing a lot of change in our in the operations model for for lot off a large customers where earlier you had siloed teams around Compute network storage, offering system databases both at the Level two and level three, and you had a level one, which was basically command center. Now, we're saying is that with the artificial intelligence and machine learning driven OBS, you can practically eliminate the need for command center on the level two layer because the platform enables you toe be multi skilled. You need not have siloed engineers looking after databases separately on and operating system separately. You can have the same sort of people who are cross train, multi skilled, looking at the entire state. On at level three. You may want to keep people who are deep into databases as a separate team, then from people who are managing the Nutanix platform, which is a combination off compute storage and and and and the SCN. So that's the change that we're bringing. A lot of our customers were going about infrastructure, platform modernization, Azaz, the public cloud or hybrid clubs. >>Well, I think you're really articulated well, that modernization journey we've seen so many companies going through. The thing I've been saying with Nutanix for years is modernize the platform, then you can modernize everything that runs on top of it. All the applications on, of course, did databases a major piece of this on. And that brings up a point I want to get your take on. We haven't talked about developers, you know, the DEV ops trend. Something we've seen, you know, huge growth for for a number of years. So what >>does this >>mean from developers? This something that you know, mostly the infrastructure team's gonna handle. Or how do you bridge that gap to the people that really are? You know, building and building and building the APS. >>Yeah. And in this digital world, you know the cycle time from idea to production. Everyone is trying to reduce that. What that means is that things are moving left. People are trying to develop and test early in the life cycle when it is easy to find a problem and easy to and cheaper to fix. Right. So for that, you need a your application environment, your application and database available to test and develop in, uh, you know, like in volume. And that's where databases the service era helps developers and develops professionals to provision in the whole infrastructure for testing and involvement in hundreds and thousands of them at the same time without, you know, worrying about the storage back back and how much story it is consuming. So it is. It helps developers to to really expedite their development and testing left lifecycle ultimately resulting in excellent and unique experience. >>Yeah, absolutely way no. Of just moving faster. Being able to respond to the business so critically important. Uh, they know Tasia wanna let you have the final word Talk about the partnership and what we should expect, you know, in the coming months and quarters. >>So, uh, I'll go first. And then we can come in, uh, a salon and Nutanix you to share the same values where we believe that we need to provide a very innovative platform for our customers to accelerate their digital transformation journey. No matter what it is right, we share common values and way have a 3 60 degree relationship. It started way back in 2015 and we have come a long way since then. A C also does engineering services for for Nutanix, and we have closed about 850 r plus people who has prayed and 35 on Nutanix Solutions. Providing manage services to our customers on Nutanix is also part off our software defined infrastructure portfolio on we're taking it to our customers as part of our entire infrastructure platform modernization that, I suppose talk about earlier three recent announcement off Nutanix clusters running on AWS. I think it's a significant announcement and it will provide a lot off options to our customers. And as an S, I, uh, you know, we are able to bring a lot of value to our customers. We're looking at adopting cloud the database as a service offering. I think we're very excited about it. I I think we have about 300 plus customers, and many of them are still stuck with the way they are managing databases the old way. And we can bring in a lot of value to those customers, whether it is about reducing cars or increasing agility or helping them modern ice, The platform one ended up hybrid multi club >>business critical lapse are growing, are still growing, and data is pretty much gold in these scenarios, right? It's it's doubling every two years, if not more with every transaction being remote today with zeal. We actually look forward to addressing that market and optimizing the environment for our customers. Both of our companies believe in partnership crossed and the customer first mindset. And when you have that belief, trust comes with delivering the best experience to our customers. So we're looking forward to this partnership and you're looking forward to growing our joint revenue and modernizing our customers platforms with this often? >>Well, I wanna thank all three of you for for sharing the exciting news. Absolutely. It looks like a strong partnership. Lots of potential there for the future. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for >>having thank you. Mhm. >>All right, when I think the audience were watching this lot with Nutanix, the new era in database management personally, a big thank you to the Nutanix community has been a pleasure being able to host these interviews with Nutanix for for many years. So I'm still minimum and thank you as always for watching the Cube

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio today, the COVID thing is continuing to go, and one of the huge impacts, right, is obviously in the conference business, our world. Those things have all been canceled or made virtual, and everyone's still trying to figure out, what does a virtual event look like, what are the characteristics of it, and we're really excited to have one of our favorite CUBE alumni, guest host extraordinaire, Keith Townsend. You know him as the CTO advisor joining us, Keith jumped in with both feet, right when this thing went down, and said "I'm going to have my own CTO Advisor "virtual conference," so first off, Keith, I miss you, great to see you, we haven't run into each other at the Sands in an awfully long time, so great to see you, how are you doing? >> Good to see you, if it's only virtual, good to see you too, Jeff. >> So tell us about your decision to jump in with both feet, and go ahead and test the waters on this virtual conference concept. >> So I talked about this a little bit on a random, just a YouTube update, but roughly 30, 35% of my revenue comes from in-person events. And plus my brand, The CTO Advisor, is tied to people seeing me on theCUBE, seeing me at the shows, creating the content, kind of on the ground, guerrilla style, kind of like how John started out early on. So we needed a practical solution for most things, one, we feed off the energy of the community, so we need to be on the ground as much as possible, so that we can create content and get you guys the stories and the data that you need to make purchasing decisions, and two, we needed the practical problem of solving our own revenue problems, so we jumped in, head in, to say "Let's do a virtual event." I don't know if I would've done it if I wasn't as naive as I was back then, but we jumped in. >> So before we jump into the processes, make sure, give us a full-on plug, when is it, where should people go, registration I assume is still open, want to just get that out there for the folks. >> So even if you see this after registration closes, quote unquote closes, it's April 21st, >> 10: 30 AM central to 3:30 PM central, that's US time. You can register at CTOAdvisorVirtualConference.com. >> Excellent, so let's talk about some of the interesting things about virtual. One of the things as you said in a physical event, you've got people, you've got time and space and geography that we all come together in that space, and there's a lot of advantages to everybody being at the same place at the same time. A virtual event, almost by definition, is now you've broken up the segments of content capture, if you will, and creation, which can or cannot be on that date. The actual display, or the publishing of that content, if you will, and then the consumption of that content, which may or may not happen on the 21st. How have you worked with this expanded palette, if you will, to be able to work in an asynchronous world, and how are you finding it in terms of actually day to day execution? >> So you guys have done plenty of remote content at this point. When you're in theCUBE studio, you have commercial internet, it's fairly reliable when you're on premises, maybe a little bit less reliable from the sense that it's conference-centered, but it's still enterprise class internet access, so you can do real-time video on theCUBE fine. We can go to Cube.tv, Cube.net, and see what you guys are doing real-time, and it's pretty much without blip. In the virtual conference world, what we're dealing with where I'm coming in, remote to you, while my video and audio looks fine now, it may blip. So we embrace two things. We embrace the fact that this is a virtual event, so in a background, you'll see that we're in Keith Townsend's basement, the other thing that you'll see is that we won't produce live content, because there's not much value in it being live, if I can't interact with you. One of the great things about theCUBE, is that it's live, but there's this element that people are on the ground, they're watching it live, they're interacting with it live, we're tweeting about it, so how do you reproduce, if not that exact feeling of it being live and you're being part of it, but the conversation around the content, and that's what we focused on, creating high quality video content, that you can consume, kind of as a watch party, so on Twitter, in the platform that we're using, we're having conversations real-time, so that you can enjoy the community, and the speakers who are presenting, you can interact with them because they're not presenting real-time, they're in the chat room, they're on Twitter, they're running as their session is running, and they're able to interact with you, so we've embraced the medium, and then after the fact of course we can do all kinds of things to run asynchronous content after the fact, 'cause the majority of people will watch it after the video's done. >> All right, and I'm just curious, how many sessions are you going to have, approximately? >> So we have I think 21 sessions, in a five hour period, so we're running three separate tracks, two super techy, geeky tracks, then a sponsored track is kind of by itself, and we're not expecting everyone to consume it all at one time. >> Right, you know it's just so interesting to me, talking about your tracks. If you were to go rent a venue, that had the capacity to run 21 tracks over five hours, it'd be a pretty decent-sized venue, it'd be expensive, and then you would have to pick your sessions and your tracks based on the limitations of the budget that you had and the window that you had of rooms that you could put these people in, and who could do it now, when, there, the other thing, and so it's really interesting that now this opens up the amount of sessions, is really a function of what you can manage, or what the community can kind of self-organize, you're not really limited by how many rooms are in the Sands Convention Center, and the other thing that you brought up, which I think people completely miss is that if the content is recorded in advance and puts in the can, to your point, the presenter can actually participate in the conversation while the session is happening, which they can't do in a physical event, because they're actually presenting, so, we had a guy in the other day, Ben Nelson, he talked about a car is not a mechanical horse, it's not the same, digital's not the same as physical, and there are some things that aren't as cool, but there's a whole lot of things that you can do in the digital space that you can't do in the physical space. >> Yeah, a lot of my presenters were kind of put off by the idea of, "Wait, hold on, I'm not going to present live? "How will I interact with webinars now?" And I think this is the other end of the spectrum, Jeff, I think you guys have probably found this too, it's not a in-person event, and it's also not a webinar, so don't treat it as a webinar. You don't have to have these canned, phony questions that some people have behind the scenes, it is a real, authentic thing. Oddly enough, I discovered this as part of helping my church put on their worship service. I was watching the service, I'll look off the screen a little bit to the left, I was watching the service, and the minister's delivering his sermon, and in the Zoom meeting, there he is, playing with his little two year old daughter, while he's giving the talk, and I just opened chat at him, and next thing I know there's an explosion of conversation around just life and the topic at hand, so it is a really unique experience. >> Yeah, I think that's a really important point, it's not only what is a digital event, but what is it not, and it can't be a webinar, and when we were first going through this kind of shake-up, and we were really trying to identify some of those things, and we specifically did not want a digital event to be a webinar, 'cause what's a webinar, it's generally a one way communication of information for the vast majority of the session that you're sitting there, and they only open it up to Q&A at the very end, and it's only a moderated Q&A that very few people get a chance to get their question in, and you don't know how they're picking, and it only goes to the hosts, so, really having an open, live engagement around an engaged group of people, with a piece of content as kind of the coalescing of those people, really, it's not a webinar, it's a very different kind of experience, and sounds like you're really embracing that. >> Yeah, it'll never replace a live event, live has, again we talked about the energy, the, people are like "Do you really "want to smell the Sands, Keith?" You know what, it's all part of the energy, it's instant reminders to "Oh, I remember when I interviewed Pat Gelsinger here," and you have these instant cues that we as humans love, we don't get that, but I think it is something that's going to be with us to stay and it'll augment, I'd love to hear how you guys are thinking about how being able to have this capability will augment theCUBE once we return to physical events. >> Yeah, I mean I think this behavior that we're now been forced to engage in, in terms of increased working from home, and kind of increased use of videoconferencing, and that is a different communication mode, I think those behaviors are going to stick quite a bit, actually, I think if you look at what a conference is, there's a couple different tracks, as you said, there's the expression going around, kind of the rally moment, right, the keynote, we want, we have a strong message, the CEO wants to get something out, and I think that's of tremendous value, but then you look at all the breakout sessions and the information flow and the community engagement, those quite frankly can be done online much more efficiently and with much less cost, so will the new conference be kind of this, the celebration and basically a customer appreciation event, they want to have a party, but really that, I don't think it will be quite the information flow, 'cause why should product group A wait until the conference date, if they're ready to release their information, and wait for product group B or C or D, so this kind of forced aggregation of the communication into this very small window of three days in Vegas, I don't think it makes any sense, you know, it's Waterfall versus DevOps, and if this group's got stuff and they're ready to go, again, why hold the information back, it really doesn't make sense, and decouple the customer celebration, the rally moment, if you will, and the education, they don't necessarily have to be this contiguous big unit for three days in Vegas. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to first quarter 2021, usually January, February, first half of March, really slow news channel product teams release stuff and they really want some big stage to release it, I think this will really make the dissemination of information coming from product teams super interesting as folks like theCUBE, The CTO Advisor, we're able to put on independent events virtually that have a sense of gravitas to it, that our partners will come and embrace. >> Yeah, the other thing, Keith, and I wonder, as you've been collecting your content for your show next week is that, the pressure on the quality of the content has escalated dramatically, right? If you're stuck in a huge conference hall, surrounded by 10,000 people, in the middle of a keynote that's not that exciting, it's kind of hard to get up and walk out. But if you're sitting at your desk with the entire world an alt-tab away, not to mention pesky things like email and Slack and everything else that we have as a distraction, it's really going to come in on the content provider and the engaged community to deliver, or else you're going to lose the audience, and I think it's going to be really interesting, people that overly have relied on the 100 foot video screen and the electronic violin music in the morning, and some of these tips and tricks, aren't going to carry the weight, because if it's just you sitting in front of a screen and you got to deliver the message, it's got to be crisp, it's got to be powerful, and it's got to be engaging, or people are just going to step away. >> And more importantly, how do you bring people back? So, you know how, when I take a break at a conference, I'm kind of captured. Eventually I'm going to walk back to the conference center, I might go back out to take a call, et cetera, but getting people to come back, even if the content has been awesome and engaging and great, how do you get 'em to come back, they don't have to come back that day, or even real time, but they have to come back to the portal, so we're working on kind of the next 30 days after the event, this is the thing that's really funny about putting on a virtual event, there's kind of the exhale after the day of the event, a virtual event, you know what, you've got a third of your audience that first day, a third of the audience the next week, and then the rest of the audience creeps in over the next three or four weeks, and how do you engage them, how do you get them to come back, and ultimately consume your content and your message? It's something that I haven't, I don't know if I've cracked the formula for it yet, but it is going to be a very interesting challenge. >> Yeah, but I think we have, right, in the way, how do you consume video today, how do you find information, right, you go to YouTube or to Google and you search, right, and right now the biggest phenom in pop media is the Tiger King, right, so when do people watch the Tiger King, how do they hear about the Tiger King, when do they actually sit down and watch it, has nothing to do with when you watch it unless we decide to trade messages, I say "Hey, Keith, have you seen the new episode?" So when you look at consumption patterns, to me it's really interesting, it's kind of bifurcated, you either binge watch, and just really get into something that you're into, and you just go go go for hours and hours and hours, or you're getting snippets, you're getting little quick hits, quick hits, quick hits, and I think it's this kind of ugly middle, where you don't have enough content or richness or engagement to have people hang, but you're a little bit longer than a quick hit just to get your message out, and I think it's really going to kind of bifurcate, and the beauty of digital is you can consume it in lots of different ways, and piece parts, and you don't have to necessarily kind of sit through kind of a straight row consumption as a captive audience, I think the opportunity's really really good, if the content is up to snuff, properly tagged, search terms, all those types of things of course as well. >> So yeah, John talks about the value of community a lot, and one of our co-hosts on theCUBE, and also a CUBE alum is Corey Quinn, and he does a really great job of this with curating content after it's been consumed live. He'll to his audience say "You know what, I'm going to live tweet this session "from three months ago," and that refreshes the conversation, it's not about when the content was created, it's about the conversation, as long as it's relevant, and finding mediums to help amplify that message. >> Yeah, I think it's just a great opportunity, you know, we used to do some work with Live Nation in another lifetime, right, and Live Nation around concerts, they had that particular event when you go to the show, and a lot of their efforts on the marketing side were what they call extending the glow, right, extending the glow after, and also kind of building the excitement before, and moving that window of that event to more than just the night that the show played, and I think we've got the same opportunity here, that's why again if you get good quality content, it's not speeds and feeds, but it's evergreen themes that have legs, you can go back to that well and you can stir that thing up, and you can get it back out there again, and then again hopefully people stumble upon it, whether it's via community or whatever. The other thing I think that's really interesting is you talked about community, and you talked about QuinnyPig, @QuinnyPig I think is his Twitter handle, is this whole idea of collaboration, and I think that's another thing that we can take from the internet, I know you do a lot of that, so working with other influencers if you will, or other people in the communities, and introducing each other's community to one another, I think it's a really big part of what makes a lot of the big YouTubers famous is that they do things together and they kind of cross-pollinate their communities, and if there's some overlap there then they both have kind of a win-win, and again I think in digital, where you don't have destruction, you don't have single use, you can use stuff more than once, it really opens up this opportunity for much more win-win, let's work together, and build community together, cross leverage, versus it's either yours or mine, and it's really more of a competitive thing. >> And I've been collaborating a lot with some of my European peers, and you bring up a really interesting concept. Our friends at VMware's going to be putting on VMworld in the next few months, and they usually had a US conference and a European conference, were both pretty sizable conferences. It's basically going to run concurrently as one conference. So if it's going to run as one conference, why do I have to limit the live experience to the US timezone? Why can't I cater this, and why is it just a fixed hour, I don't know if it will be, but it shouldn't just be a fixed hour event, it's going to be a all-out hour event that's going to happen across Asia, Europe, and the US, and tailoring the content to each continent and time zone, and cross-pollinating, so that content that I would not have typically have gotten at the US event, or in the Europe event, I can now get that experience and cross-cultural flavor as a natural part of digital, so there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot to miss about in-person events, but I think there's opportunities that are just massively untapped. >> Yeah, yeah, and I'm just going to get one more concept, which I don't think is getting enough action, get your take on it, but if you think of the value to the company, let's just stick with VMware for a minute, we're great fans of Pat and Sanjay, there is a information transfer when Pat gets up and does his keynote as from one to many tens of thousands, and there's value there, and again we talked about this rallying moment, but think of turning that on its head, which is really what digital provides, now there's an opportunity for Pat and Sanjay and the entire VMware senior team and junior team and product managers to now flip that information flow. So if you think of the user experience from the attendees' point of view, is it better for Sanjay to talk to 10,000 people in an audience, or would Sanjay rather hear from 10,000 people, and have that flow of information going back in? So if you think of it as a community event versus a one way communication of here's our exciting news, I think the value to the sponsor goes up dramatically, 'cause there's so much institutional knowledge and tribal knowledge and experience within all those people that are just sitting passively listening to that keynote. If this is a way to better suck that information back into the company, I don't think they'll ever go back to the other way it was. >> Yeah, two points, two data points on that. One, again, from the worship side of the house, at our Easter service, our church enabled every member who cared to to kind of do a five, eight second "Hey, this is the Townsend family, "happy Easter," and then 15 minutes before the live church service started, they just ran a video of family after family after family that I recognize, saying "Hi, happy Easter," so you have that moment, and how do you capture that online? VMware's social media team already does this well, they amplify end user content, there was a guy that did a video on how to install VMware Cloud Foundation in three hours, went viral. You have these opportunities, again, to hear from sources and have conversations that's really not practical from a typical conference perspective. I think I heard it best the other day, one of my attendees and presenters said "You know what, Keith, the virtual conference "is such a democratizing event because "it enables me, whether I could not afford "to go to a conference before, "or I couldn't travel, or whatever reasons "I could not attend a conference before," the virtual conference gives opportunities for collaborations that could not have taken place otherwise. >> Yeah, it's great, so again, Keith, thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your thoughts, and again, for everybody, April 21st 2020, next week, >> 10: 30 AM central time, join the CTO virtual conference. Keith, always great to catch up, man. >> You too, Jeff, thanks a lot. >> All right, take care. He's Keith, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching, I'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston Massachusetts, it's "The Cube." (groovy techno music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone. The rise of open source is really powering the digital economy. And in a world where every company is essentially under pressure to become a software firm, open source software really becomes the linchpin of digital services for both incumbents and, of course, digital natives. Here's the challenge, is when developers tap and apply open source, they're often bringing in hundreds, or even thousands of lines of code that reside in open sourced packages and libraries. And these code bases, they have dependencies, and essentially hidden traps. Now typically, security vulnerabilities in code, they're attacked after the software's developed. Or maybe thrown over the fence to the sec-ops team and SNYK is a company that set out to solve this problem within the application development life cycle, not after the fact as a built-on. Now, with us to talk about this mega-trend is Peter McKay, a friend of The Cube and CEO of SNYK. Peter, great to see you again. >> Good to see you, dude. >> So I got to start with the name. SNYK, what does it mean? >> SNYK, So Now You Know. You know, people it's sneakers sneak. And they tend to use the snick. So it's SNYK or snick. But it is SNYK and it stands for So Now You Know. Kind of a security, so now you know a lot more about your applications than you ever did before. So it's kind of a fitting name. >> So you heard my narrative upfront. Maybe you can add a little color to that and provide some additional background. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a, you know, when you think of the larger trends that are going on in the market, you know, every company is going through this digital transformation. You know, and every CEO, it's the number one priority. We've got to change our business from, you know, financial services, healthcare, insurance company, whatever, are all switching to digital, you know, more of a software company. And with that, more software equals more software risk and cybersecurity continues to be, you know, a major. I think 72% of CEOs worry about cybersecurity as a top issue in protecting companies' data. And so for us, we've been in the software in the security space for the four and a half years. I've been in the security space since, you know, Watchfire 20 years ago. And right now, with more and more, as you said, open source and containers, the challenge of being able to address the cybersecurity issues that have never been more challenging. And so especially when you add the gap between the need for security professionals and what they have. I think it's four million open positions for security people. So you know, with all this added risk, more and more open source, more and more digitization, it's created this opportunity in the market where you're traditional approaches to addressing security don't work today, you know? Like you said, throwing it over the fence and having someone in security, you know, check and make sure and finding all these vulnerabilities, and throw it back to developers to fix is very slow and something at this point is not driving to success. >> So talk a little bit more about what attracted you to SNYK early. I mean, you've been with the company, you're at least involved in the company for a couple years now. What were the trends that you saw, and what was it about SNYK that, you know, led you to become an investor and ultimately, CEO? >> Yeah, so four years involved in the business. So you know, I've always loved the security space. I've been in it for a number, almost 20 years. So I enjoy the space. You know, I've watched it. The founder, Guy Podjarny, one of the founders of SNYK, has been a friend of mine for 16 years from back in the Watchfire days. So we've always stayed connected. I've always worked well together with him. And so when you started, and I was on the board, the first board member of the company, so I could see what was going on, and it was this, you know, changing, kind of the right place at the right time in terms of developer first security. Really taking all the things that are going on in the security space that impacts a developer or can be addressed by the developer, and embedding it into the software into that developer community, in a way that developers use, the tools that they use. So it's a developer-first mindset with security expertise built-in. And so when you look at the market, the number of open source container evolution, you know, it's a huge market opportunity. Then you look at the business momentum, just took off over the past, you know, four years. That it was something that I was getting more and more involved in. And then when Guy asked me to join as the CEO, it was like, "Sure, what took you so long?" (Dave laughing) >> We had Guy on at Node JS Summit. I want to say it was a couple years ago now. And what he was describing is when you package, take the example of Node. When you package code in Node, you bring in all these dependencies, kind of what I was talking about there, but the challenge that he sort of described was really making it seamless as part of the development workflow. It seems like that's unique to SNYK. Maybe you could talk about-- >> Yeah, it is. And you know, we've built it from the ground up. You know, it's very difficult. If it was a security tool for security people, and then say, "Oh, let's adapt it for the developer," that is almost impossible. Why I think we've been so successful from the 400,000 developers in the community using Freemium to paid, was we built it from the ground up for developer, embedded into the application-development life cycle. Into their process, the look and feel, easy for them to use, easy for them to try it, and then we focused on just developer adoption. A great experience, developers will continue to use it and expand with it. And most of our opportunities that we've been successful at, the customers, we have over 400 customers. That had been this try, you know, start it with the community. They used the Freemium, they tried it for their new application, then they tried it for all their new, and then they go back and replace the old. So it was kind of this Freemium, land and expand has been a great way for developers to try it, use it. Does it work, yes, buy more. And that's the way we work. >> We're really happy, Peter, that you came on because you've got some news today that you're choosing to share with us in our Cube community. So it's around financing, bring us up to date. What's the news? >> Yeah so you know, I'd say four months ago, five months ago, we raised a $70 million round from great investors. And that was really led by one of our existing investors, who kind of knew us the best and it was you know, Excel Venture, and then Excel Growth came in and led the $70 million round. And part of that was a few new investors that came in and Stripes, which is you know a very large growth equity investor were part of that $70 million round said you know, preempted it and said, "Look it, we know you don't need the money, but we want to," you know, "We want to preempt. We believe your customer momentum," here we did, you know, five or six really large deals. You know, one, 700, seven million, 7.4 million, one's 3.5 million. So we started getting these bigger deals and we doubled since the $70 million round. And so we said, "Okay, we want to make money not the issue." So they led the next round, which is $150 million round, at a valuation of over a billion. That really allows us now to, with the number of other really top tier, (mumbles) and Tiger and Trend and others, who have been part of watching the space and understand the market. And are really helping us grow this business internationally. So it's an exciting time. So you know, again, we weren't looking to raise. This was something that kind of came to us and you know, when people are that excited about it like we are and they know us the best because they've been part of our board of directors since their round, it allows us to do the things that we want to do faster. >> So $150 million raise this round, brings you up to the 250, is that correct? >> Yes, 250. >> And obviously, an up-round. So congratulations, that's great. >> Yeah, you know, I think a big part of that is you know, we're not, I mean, we've always been very fiscally responsible. I mean, yes we have the money and most of it's still in the bank. We're growing at the pace that we think is right for us and right for the market. You know, we continue to invest product, product, product, is making sure we continue our product-led organization. You know, from that bottoms up, which is something we continue to do. This allows us to accelerate that more aggressively, but also the community, which is a big part of what makes that, you know, when you have a bottoms up, you need to have that community. And we've grown that and we're going to continue to invest aggressively and build in that community. And lastly, go to market. Not only invest, invest aggressively in the North America, but also Europe and APJ, which, you know, a lot of the things we've learned from my Veeam experience, you know how to grow fast, go big or go home. You know, are things that we're going to do but we're going to do it in the right way. >> So the Golden Rule is product and sales, right? >> Yes, you're either building it or selling it. >> Right, that's kind of where you're going to put your money. You know, you talk a lot about people, companies will do IPOs to get seen, but companies today, I mean, even software companies, which is a capital-efficient industry, they raise a lot of dough and they put it towards promotion to compete. What are your thoughts on that? >> You know, we've had, the model is very straightforward. It's bottoms up, you know? Developers, you know, there's 28 million developers in the world, you know? What we want is every one of those 28 million to be using our product. Whether it's free or paid, I want SNYK used in every application-development life cycle. If you're one developer, or you're a sales force with standardized on 12,000 developers, we want them using SNYK. So for us, it's get it in the hands. And that, you know, it's not like-- developers aren't going to look at Super Bowl ads, they're not going to be looking. It's you know, it's finding the ways, like the conference. We bought the DevSecCon, you know, the conference for developer security. Another way to promote kind of our, you know, security for developers and grow that developer community. That's not to say that there isn't a security part. Because, you know, what we do is help security organizations with visibility and finding a much more scalable way that gets them out of the, you know, the slows-down, the speed bump to the moving apps more aggressively into production. And so this is very much about helping security people. A lot of times the budgets do come from security or dev-ops. But it's because of our focus on the developer and the success of fixing, finding, fixing, and auto-remediating that developer environment is what makes us special. >> And it's sounds like a key to your success is you're not asking developer to context switch into a new environment, right? It's part of their existing workflow. >> It has to be, right? Don't change how they do their job, right? I mean, their job is to develop incredible applications that are better than the competitors, get them to market faster than they can, than they've ever been able to do before and faster than the competitor, but do it securely. Our goal is to do the third, but not sacrifice on one and two, right? Help you drive it, help you get your applications to market, help you beat your competition, but do it in a secure fashion. So don't slow them down. >> Well, the other thing I like about you guys is the emphasis is on fixing. It's not just alerting people that there's a problem. I mean, for instance, a company like Red Hat, is that they're going to put a lot of fixes in. But you, of course, have to go implement them. What you're doing is saying, "Hey, we're going to do that for you. Push the button and then we'll do it," right? So that, to me, that's important because it enables automation, it enables scale. >> Exactly, and I think this has been one of the challenges for kind of more of the traditional legacy, is they find a whole bunch of vulnerabilities, right? And we feel as though just that alone, we're the best in the world at. Finding vulnerabilities in applications in open source container. And so the other part of it is, okay, you find all them, but prioritizing what it is that I should fix first? And that's become really big issue because the vulnerabilities, as you can imagine, continue to grow. But focusing on hey, fix this top 10%, then the next, and to the extent you can, auto-fix. Auto-remediate those problems, that's ultimately, we're measured by how many vulnerabilities do we fix, right? I mean, finding them, that's one thing. But fixing them is how we judge a successful customer. And now it's possible. Before, it was like, "Oh, okay, you're just going to show me more things." No, when you talk about Google and Salesforce and Intuit, and all of our customers, they're actually getting far better. They're seeing what they have in terms of their exposure, and they're fixing the problems. And that's ultimately what we're focused on. >> So some of those big whales that you just mentioned, it seems to me that the value proposition for those guys, Peter, is the quality of the code that they can develop and obviously, the time that it takes to do that. But if you think about it more of a traditional enterprise, which I'm sure is part of your (mumbles), they'll tell you, the (mumbles) will tell you our biggest problem is we don't have enough people with the skills. Does this help? >> It absolutely-- >> And how so? >> Yeah, I mean, there's a massive gap in security expertise. And the current approach, the tools, are, you know, like you said at the very beginning, it's I'm doing too late in the process. I need to do it upstream. So you've got to leverage the 28 million developers that are developing the applications. It's the only way to solve the problem of, you know, this application security challenge. We call it Cloud Dative Application Security, which all these applications usually are new apps that they're moving into the Cloud. And so to really fix it, to solve the problem, you got to embed it, make it really easy for developers to leverage SNYK in their whole, we call it, you know, it's that concept of shift left, you know? Our view is that it needs to be embedded within the development process. And that's how you fix the problem. >> And talk about the business model again. You said it's Freemium model, you just talked about a big seven figure deals that you're doing and that starts with a Freemium, and then what? I upgrade to a subscription and then it's a land and expand? Describe that. >> Yeah we call it, it's you know, it's the community. Let's get every developer in a community. 28 million, we want to get into our community. From there, you know, leverage our Freemium, use it. You know, we encourage you to use it. Everybody to use our Freemium. And it's full functionality. It's not restricted in anyway. You can use it. And there's a subset of those that are ready to say, "Look it, I want to use the paid version," which allows me to get more visibility across more developers. So as you get larger organization, you want to leverage the power of kind of a bigger, managing multiple developers, like a lot of, in different teams. And so that kind of gets that shift to that paid. Then it goes into that Freemium, land, expand, we call it explode. Sales force, kind of explode. And then renew. That's been our model. Get in the door, get them using Freemium, we have a great experience, go to paid. And that's usually for an application, then it goes to 10 applications, and then 300 developers and then the way we price is by developer. So the more developers who use, the better your developer adoption, the bigger the ultimate opportunity is for us. >> There's a subscription service right? >> All subscription. >> Okay and then you guys have experts that are identifying vulnerabilities, right? You put them into a database, presumably, and then you sort of operationalize that into your software and your service. >> Yeah, we have 15 people in our security team that do nothing everyday but looking for the next vulnerability. That's our vulnerability database, in a large case, is a lot of our big companies start with the database. Because you think of like Netflix and you think of Facebook, all of these companies have large security organizations that are looking for issues, looking for vulnerabilities. And they're saying, "Well okay, if I can get that feed from you, why do I have my own?" And so a lot of companies start just with the database feed and say, "Look, I'll get rid of mine, and use yours." And then eventually, we'll use this scanning and we'll evolve down the process. But there's no doubt in the market people who use our solution or other solution will say our known the database of known vulnerabilities, is far better than anybody else in the market. >> And who do you sell to, again? Who are the constituencies? Is it sec-ops, is it, you know, software engineering? Is it developers, dev-ops? >> Users are always developers. In some cases dev-ops, or dev-sec. Apps-sec, you're starting to see kind of the world, the developer security becoming bigger. You know, as you get larger, you're definitely security becomes a bigger part of the journey and some of the budget comes from the security teams. Or the risk or dev-ops. But I think if we were to, you know, with the user and some of the influencers from developers, dev-ops, and security are kind of the key people in the equation. >> Is your, you have a lot of experience in the enterprise. How do you see your go to market in this world different, given that it's really a developer constituency that you're targeting? I mean, normally, you'd go out, hire a bunch of expensive sales guys, go to market, is that the model or is it a little different here because of the target? >> Yeah, you know, to be honest, a lot of the momentum that we've had at this point has been inbound. Like most of the opportunities that come in, come to us from the community, from this ground up. And so we have a very large inside sales team that just kind of follows up on the inbound interest. And that's still, you know, 65, 70% of the opportunities that come to us both here and Europe and APJ, are coming from the community inbound. Okay, I'm using 10 licenses of SNYK, you know, I want to get the enterprise version of it. And so that's been how we've grown. Very much of a very cost-effective inside sales. Now, when you get to the Googles and Salesforces and Nordstroms of the world, and they have already 500 licenses us, either paid or free, then we usually have more of a, you know, senior sales person that will be involved in those deals. >> To sort of mine those accounts. But it's really all about driving the efficiency of that inbound, and then at some point driving more inbound and sort of getting that flywheel effect. >> Developer adoption, developer adoption. That's the number one driver for everybody in our company. We have a customer success team, developer adoption. You know, just make the developer successful and good things happen to all the other parts of the organization. >> Okay, so that's a key performance indicator. What are the, let's wrap kind of the milestones and the things that you want to accomplish in the next, let's call it 12 months, 18 months? What should we be watching? >> Yeah, so I mean it continues to be the community, right? The community, recruiting more developers around the globe. We're expanding, you know, APJ's becoming a bigger part. And a lot of it is through just our efforts and just building out this community. We now have 20 people, their sole job is to build out, is to continue to build our developer community. Which is, you know, content, you know, information, how to learn, you know, webinars, all these things that are very separate and apart from the commercial side of the business and the community side of the business. So community adoption is a critical measurement for us, you know, yeah, you look at Freemium adoption. And then, you know, new customers. How are we adding new customers and retaining our existing customers? And you know, we have a 95% retention rate. So it's very sticky because you're getting the data feed, is a daily data feed. So it's like, you know, it's not one that you're going to hook on and then stop at any time soon. So you know, those are the measurements. You look at your community, you look at your Freemium, you look at your customer growth, your retention rates, those are all the things that we measure our business by. >> And your big pockets of brain power here, obviously in Boston, kind of CEO's prerogative, you got a big presence in London, right? And also in Israel, is that correct? >> Yeah, I would say we have four hubs and then we have a lot of remote employees. So, you know, Tel Aviv, where a lot of our security expertise is, in London, a lot of engineering. So between London and Tel Aviv is kind of the security teams, the developers are all in the community is kind of there. You know, Boston, is kind of more go to market side of things, and then we have Ottawa, which is kind of where Watchfire started, so a lot of good security experience there. And then, you know, we've, like a lot of modern companies, we hired the best people wherever we can find them. You know, we have some in Sydney, we've got some all around the world. Especially security, where finding really good security talent is a challenge. And so we're always looking for the best and brightest wherever they are. >> Well, Peter, congratulations on the raise, the new role, really, thank you for coming in and sharing with The Cube community. Really appreciate it. >> Well, it's great to be here. Always enjoy the conversations, especially the Patriots, Red Sox, kind of banter back and forth. It's always good. >> Well, how do you feel about that? >> Which one? >> Well, the Patriots, you know, sort of strange that they're not deep into the playoffs, I mean, for us. But how about the Red Sox now? Is it a team of shame? All my friends who were sort of jealous of Boston sports are saying you should be embarrassed, what are your thoughts? >> It's all about Houston, you know? Alex Cora, was one of the assistant coaches at Houston where all the issues are, I'm not sure those issues apply to Boston, but we'll see, TBD. TBD, I am optimistic as usual. I'm a Boston fan making sure that there isn't any spillover from the Houston world. >> Well we just got our Sox tickets, so you know, hopefully, they'll recover quickly, you know, from this. >> They will, they got to get a coach first. >> Yeah, they got to get a coach first. >> We need something to distract us from the Patriots. >> So you're not ready to attach an asterisk yet to 2018? >> No, no. No, no, no. >> All right, I like the optimism. Maybe you made the right call on Tom Brady. >> Did I? >> Yeah a couple years ago. >> Still since we talked what, two in one. And they won one. >> So they were in two, won one, and he threw for what, 600 yards in the first one so you can't, it wasn't his fault. >> And they'll sign him again, he'll be back. >> Is that your prediction? I hope so. >> I do, I do. >> All right, Peter. Always a pleasure, man. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you so much, and thank you for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (groovy techno music)

(upbeat music) [Reporter] - Live from San Diego, California it's theCUBE covering Goodcloud and Cloud- Native cloud. Brought to you by Red Hat the Cloud-Native computing foundation. and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, we're here at Kubecon Cloud-Native con 2019 in San Diego, I'm Stu Miniman. We've got over 12,000 in attendance here and we have a three guest lineup of Kubecon veterans here. To my right is Loris Degioanni who's the CTO and founder of Sysdig. To his right, representing the Tiger is Amit Gupta who's vice president of business development and Product Management at Tigera, and also Knox Anderson who's Director of Product Management. We know from the Octopus, Amit, that also means that he's with Sysdig. So gentlemen, thank you all for joining. [Loris]- Octopus and Tiger >> Octopus and Tiger, bringing it all together on the tube. We have a menagerie as it were. So Loris, let's start as they said, you know all veterans, you've been here, you've almost been to every single one, something about a you know, a child being born made you miss one. [Loris] - The very first one. >> So, why don't you bring us in kind of what's so important about this ecosystem, why it's growing so fast and Sysdig's relationship with the community? >> Yeah, I mean, you can just look around, right? Kubecon is growing year after year, it's becoming bigger and bigger and this just a reflection of the community getting bigger and bigger every year, right? It's really looks like we are, you know, here with this community creating the next step, you know? For computing, for cloud computing, and really, you know, Kubernetes is becoming the operating system powering, you know, the cloud and the old CNC ecosystem around it is really becoming, essentially the ecosystem around it. And the beauty of it is it's completely open this time, right? For the first time in history. >> All right, so since you are the founder, I need to ask, give me the why? So we've been saying you know, we've been starting this program almost 10 years ago and the big challenge of our time is you know building software for distributed systems. Cloud's doing that, Edge is taking that even further. Bring us back to that moment of the birth of Sysdig and how that plays into all the open source and that growth you're talking about. >> Yeah, I mean, Sysdig was born, so first of all, a little bit of background of me. I've been working in open source and networking for my whole career. My previous company was the business behind washer, then it took on a live service, so, a huge open source community and working with enterprises all around the world, essentially to bring visibility over their neighbors. And then I started realizing the stack was changing radically, right? With the event of cloud computing. With the event of containers and Docker. With the event of Kubernetes. It, legacy ways of approaching the problem were just not working. Were not working the technical level because, you need to create something completely new for the new stack but they were also not working at the approach level. Every thing was proprietary. Every thing was in silos, right? So the approach now is much more, like inclusive and community first, and that's why I decided to start Sysdig. >> All right. so Amit, we know things are changing all the time. One thing that does not ever change is security is paramount. I really say, I go back 10 or 15 years you know, they've got a lot of lip service around security. Today, it's a board level discussion. Money, development, especially here in the Cloud-Native space it's really important so, talk about Tigera relationship with Sysdig and very much focused on the Kubernetes ecosystems. >> Absolutely. So I couldn't agree with you more, Stu. I mean, security is super critical and more so now as folks are deploying more and more mission critical applications on the Kubernetes based platform. So, Sysdig is a great partner for us. Tigera provides networking and network security aspects of that Kubernetes deployment. And if you think about it how modern applications are built today, you've taken a big large model and decomposed into hundreds of micro services so there's procedural cause that were happening inside the code and now API calls on the network so you've got a much bigger network with that service a highly distributed environment. So the traditional architectures where you manage the security typically with the firewall or a gateway, it's not sufficient. It's important, it's needed and that's really where, as people design their architecture, they have to think about how do you design security across that entire infrastructure in a distributed fashion or done in the early stages of your projects. >> Knox, help us understand the relationship here, how it fits into Sysdig's product with Tigera. >> Yeah, so we're great partners with Tigera. Tigera lives at the network security level. Sysdig's secure in that the product we built extends the instrumentation that Loris started off with our open source tool, to provide security across the entire container lifecycle. So at build time, making sure your images are properly configured, free of vulnerabilities at run time, looking at all the activity that's happening and then the big challenge in the Kubernetes space is around incident response and audit. So if something happens in that pod, Kubernetes is going to kill it before anyone can investigate and Sysdig helps you with those work flows. >> Maybe it would help, we all throw around those terms, Cloud-Native a lot and it's a term I've heard for a number of years. But the definition like cloud itself is one that you know matures over time and when we get there so, maybe if we focus in a little bit on Cloud-Native security. You know, what is it we're hearing from customers, what does it mean to really build Cloud-Native Security. What makes that different from the security we've been building in our data centers, in clouds for years? >> Well I thought Cloud-Native was just a buzzword. Does it actually mean something? (laughs) >> Well hopefully it's more than just a buzzword and that's what I'm hoping you could explain. >> Yeah, so again, the way I see it is the real change that you are witnessing is how software is being written. And we're touching a little bit on it at this point. Software intended to be architected as big monoliths now is being splayed into smaller components. And this is just a reflection of software development teams in a general way being much more efficient when you can essentially, break the problem into sub-problems and break the responsibilities into sub-responsibilities. This is perhaps something that is extremely beneficial especially in terms of productivity. But also, sort of revolutionizes the way you write software, you run software, you maintain software, CICD, you know continues development, continues integration, pipelines, the reliance on GIT and suppository to store everything. And this also means that, securing, monitoring, troubleshooting infrastructures becomes much different. And one of things we are seeing is legacy two's don't work anymore and the new approaches like Calico Networking or like Falco and runtime security or like Sysdig secure, for the lifecycle and security of containers are something bubbling up as alternatives to the old way of doing things. >> I would add to that I agree with you. I would add that if you're defining a Cloud-Native security the Cloud-Native means it's a distributed architecture. So your security architecture has got to be distributed as well, absolutely got a plan for that. And then to your point, you have to automate the security as part of the various aspects of your lifecycle. Security can not be an afterthought you have to design for that right from the beginning and then one last thing I would add is just like your applications are being deployed in an automated fashion your security has to be done in that fashion so, policy is good, infrastructure is good and the security is just baked in as part of that process. It's critical you design that way to get the best outcomes. >> Yeah, and I'd say the asset landscape has completely changed. Before you needed to surface finding against a host or an IP. Now you need to surface vulnerabilities and findings against clusters, name spaces, deployments, pods, services and that huge explosion of assets is making it much harder for teams to triage events, vulnerabilities and it's really changing the process in how the sock works. >> And I think that the landscape of the essence is changing also is reflected on the fact that the persona landscape is changing. So, the separation between attempts and operation people is becoming thinner and thinner and more and more security becomes a responsibility of the operation team, which is the team in charge of essentially owning the infrastructure and taking care of it, not only for the operational point of view but also from the security. >> Yeah, I think I've heard the point that you've made a many times. Security can't be a bolt on or an afterthought. It's really something fundamental, we talk about DevOps is, it needs to be just baked into the process, >> Yeah. >> It's, as I've heard chanted at some conferences, you know, security is everyone's responsibility, >> Correct. >> make sure you step up. We're talking a lot about open source here. There's a couple of projects you mentioned, Falco and Calico, you're partners with Red hat. I remember going to the Red Hat show years ago and they'd run these studies and be like, people are worried that open source and security couldn't go side by side, but no, no you could actually, you know open source is secure but taking the next step and talking about building security products with open source give us, where that stands today and how customers are you know embracing that? And how can it actually keep up with the ever expanding threat surfaces and attacks that are coming out? >> Yeah. First of all as we know open source is actually more secure and we're getting proof of that you know, pretty much on a daily basis including you know, the fact that tools like Kubernetes are regularly scrutinized by the security ecosystem and the vulnerabilities are found early on and disclosed. In particular, Sysdig is the original creator of Falco which is an open source, CNCF phased anomaly detection system that is based on collecting high granular data from a running Kubernetes environment. For example, through the capture of the system calls and understanding the activity of the containers and being able to alert about the anomalous behavior. For example, somebody being able to break into your container, extricating data or modifying binaries, or you know perpetrating an attack or stuff like that. We decided to go with an approach that is open source first because, first of all, of course, we believe into participating with the community and giving something as an inclusive player to the community. But also we believe that you really achieve better security by being integrated in the stack, right? It's very hard , for example, to have, I don't know, security in AWS that is deeply integrated with the cloud stack upon us, alright? Because this it's propietary. Why would Kubernetes solutions like Falco or even like Calico, we can really work with the rest of the community to have them really tightly coupled and so much more effective than we could do in the past. >> You know, I mean I would make one additional point to your question. It's not only that users are adopting open source security. It's actually very critical that security solutions are available as an open source, because, I mean, look around us here this is a community of open source people, they're building and distributing infrastructure platform from that is all open source so we're doing this service if we don't offer a good set of security tools to them, not an open source. So that's really our fundamental model that's why Calico provides two key problems networking and network security for our users, you deploy your clusters, your infrastructures, and you have all the bells and whistles you need to be able to run a highly secure, highly performing cluster in your environment and I believe that's very critical for this community. >> Yeah, and I'd say that and now with open source, prevention has moved into the platform. So, with network policy and things like Calico or in our 3.0 launch we incorporated the ability to automate tests and apply pod security policies. And those types of prevention mechanisms weren't available on your platforms before. >> Okay, I often find if you've got any customer examples, talk about, you know, how they're running this production kind of the key, when they use your solutions you know, the benefits that they're having? >> Yeah, I'll take a few examples. I mean, today it is probably fair to say Calico from the partial phone home data we get a 100,000 plus customers across the globe, some of the, I can't take the actual names of the customers but, so the largest banks are using Calico for their enterprise networking scenarios and essentially, the policies, the segmentation inside the clusters should be able to manage the security for those workloads inside their environments. So that's how I would say. >> Yeah, and Sysdig, we, have an open core base with Falco, and then we offer a commercial product called Sysdig secure, in particular, last week we release version 3.0 of our commercial product which is another interesting dynamic because if we can offer the open core essentially to the community but then offer additional features with our commercial product. And Falco is installed in many, many thousands extension of platforms. and Sysdig secure you know secures, and offers visibility to the biggest enterprises in the world. We have deployments that are at a huge scale with the biggest banks, insurance companies, media companies, and we tend to fall to cover the full life cycle of applications because as the application and as the software moves in the CICD pipeline so security needs to essentially accompany the application through the different stages. >> All right, well thank you all three of you for providing the update. Really appreciate you joining us in the program and have a great rest of the week >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with more coverage here from Kubecon, Cloud-Nativecon. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, good afternoon. And welcome back to San Francisco. Where Mosconi north along with David Dante, John Wall's You're watching our coverage here. Live on the Cuba Veum world. 2019 days. I've been over on the other set. I know you've been busy on this side as well. Show going. All right for you >> so far. Yeah, A lot of action going on over here. We had a pact Hellsing on this morning, Michael Dell, with this VM wear hat, we get Sanjay Putin downtown later. >> Yeah, yeah. Good light up. And that lineup continues. Great. Use the CEO Veritas. >> Great to be here. Very John, >> actually, just outside the Veritas Meadow here. Sponsored the this area. This is the meadow set. That >> nice to be here? Yeah, I didn't know >> that. All right, just first off, just give me your your idea of the vibe here. What you are. You're feeling >> what? I think there's a tremendous amount of energy. It's been a lot of fun to be here Obviously VM was talking about this hybrid multi cloud world, and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision. We work with all the major cloud service providers, you know, eight of us. Google. Microsoft is or we share thousands of customers with the M, where some of the biggest customers, the most complicated customers in the world, where we provide availability and protection and insights for those customers has always >> been the ethos of veritas. When you go back to the early days of Veritas, essentially, it was the storage management, you know, the no hardware agenda, the sort of independent storage company, but pure software. >> That sounds. You >> know, years ago there was no cloud, but there were different platforms, and so that that that that culture has really migrated now into this multi cloud work world. Your thoughts on that >> absolutely look, you know, I'll give an example of a customer that we worked with closely with VM wear on, and that is Renault. America's Renault is Ah, big joint venture. They've got a huge ASAP installation 8000 users 40 terabytes, Big Net backup customer. They also use their products in for a scale and V. R P for availability and D r. And they work with us because we are hardware agnostic. They looked at us against the other competitors, and we're hardware agnostic. And because of that where we came in its 60% lower TCO than those other providers. So we that hardware agnostic approach works really well. You were >> Just touch it on this great little bit when you said, You know whether Tiger, whether it's multi, whether it's private, whatever it is, you know we're here to provide solutions. The fact that this stuff is hard to figure out and really kind of boggle the mind a bit, it's very complex. Um, how much of an inhibitor is that? In terms of what you're hearing from clients and in terms of their progress and and their decision making >> well, let me explain where we sit. And we are the leader in enterprise data protection, availability and insights. We work with the largest, most complex, most high route, highly regulated and most demanding customers on the planet. 99 of the Fortune 100 are customers of Veritas. 10 of the top 10 tell coast 10 of the top 10 healthcare companies and 10 of the top 10 financial institutions. I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers, so we learn a lot. And here the four big challenges they're facing first is the explosion of data. Data is just growing so fast, Gardner estimates will be 175 Zita bytes of data in 2025. If you cram that in, iPhones will take 2.6 trillion iPhones and go to the sun and back, right? It's an enormous amount of data. Second, they're worried about Ransomware. It's not a question off if you'll be attacked. It's when you'll be attacked. Look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that. What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure. You wanna be terrible to restore from a really good backup copy of data. Third, they want the hybrid multi cloud world, just like Pak Gil Singer has been talking about. That's what customers want, but they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is, make it highly available and get insights in the data wherever it's located. And then finally, they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy. I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments. Another customer was saying the California Privacy Act will be the death of him. And he's based in St Louis, right? So our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges. And that's why we introduce the enterprise. Data Service is platform, and that's why we're here. VM world Talking >> about Greg. Let's unpack some of those, Asai said. Veritas kind of created a market way back when and now you see come full circle, you got multi cloud. You have a lot of new entrance talking about data management. That's it's always been your play, but you came to the king of the Hell's. Everybody wants a piece of your hide, so that's kind of interesting, But but data growth. So let's let's start there. So it used to be data was, ah, liability. Now it's becoming an asset. So what? What your customers saying about sort of data is something that needs to be managed, needs to be done cost effectively and efficiently versus getting more value on data. And what's Veritas is sort of perspective. >> They're really trying to get insights in their data. Okay. And, uh, that's why we acquired a company called Apt Are. So when I This is my second time of Veritas. I was here from 2003 to 2010 rejoined the company of 2018. I talked to a lot of customers. I've found that their infrastructure was so complex that storage infrastructure so complex the companies were having a hard time figuring out anything about their data. So they're having the hardest time just answering some fundamental questions that boards were asking. Boards are saying because of the ransomware threat. Is all our data protected? Is it backed up? Are all our applications backed up and protected and customers could not answer that question. On the other hand, they also were backing up some data 678 times wasting storage. What apt are does, and it's really amazing. I recommend seeing a demo of that. If you get a chance, it pulls information from Santa raise network file systems, virtual machines, uh, san networking and all data protection applications to get a complete picture of what's happening with your data. And that is one example off what customers really want. >> Okay, so then that kind of leads to the second point, which is ransomware now. Part of part of that is analytics and understanding what's going on in the system as well. So but it's a relatively new concept, right? And ransom. Where is the last couple of years? We've really started to see it escalate. How does Veritas help address that problem? And does apt our play a role there? >> Well, Veritas, it just helps it. Cos address that problem because veritas helps create a resilient infrastructure. Okay, the bad guys are going to get in spear. Phishing works. You know, you you are going to find some employees were gonna click on a link, and the malware is going to get in so all you can do to protect you ultimately have tohave a good backup copies so you can restore at scale and quickly. And so there's been a lot of focus from these large enterprises on restoring at scale very quickly after ransom or attack, it's you're not beholden. You can't be extorted by the ransom or >> the third piece was hybrid. And of course, that leads to a kind of hybrid multi cloud. Let's let's put that category out there now. I've been kind of skeptical on hybrid multi cloud from an application perspective in other words, the vision that you can run any app anywhere in the world without having a retest Rica pile. I've been skeptical that, but the one area that I'm not skeptical and the courage with is data protection because I think actually, you can have a consistent data protection model across your on Prem different on prams, different clouds, because you know you're partnering with all the different cloud cos you obviously have expertise in on premise. So so talk about your approach, their philosophy and maybe any offering. >> Well, this is really what sets us apart. We have been around for 25 years, 2000 patents. We protect everything. 500 different sources of data 150 different targets, 60 different cloud service providers, you know, we compete with two categories of players. We compete with the newcomers, and they only they will only protect your most current technology. They don't go back. We've been around for 25 years. We protect everything, right? We also can't compete with the conglomerates, Okay? In their case, they're not focused. They're trying to do everything. All we do is availability, protection and insights. And that's why we've been in Gardner M Q 13 times and where the market share leader also absolutely >> touch me. Someone Dave was saying about the application side of this. I mean, just your thoughts about, you know, the kinds of concerns the day raises. I mean, it is not alone in that respect. I mean, there are general concerns here, right about whether that that'll fly. What do you think? In terms, >> I think the vision is spot on and like, oh, visions, it takes a while to get to. But I think what VM wears done recently in the acquisition, there've been basically trying to make the control plane for compute okay, and their acquisition of carbon, black and pivotal add to that control plane we're gonna be We are the control plane for data protection. I mean, that's that's the way our customers rely on, >> but that makes sense to me. So I think I feel like the multi cloud vision is very aspirational today, and I think it's gonna be really hard to get there without homogeneous infrastructure. And that's why you see things like Outpost to see the Oracle has clouded customer. You've got Azure Stack. So and I think it's gonna be a multi vendor world. However I do think is it relates the data protection you can set a standard and safe. We were going to standardize on Veritas. So one of us So I think that it's it's achievable. So that was my point there. The last one was was regulations. Do you think GDP are will be a sort of a framework globally body of customers seeing there? >> Well, they're dealing with more than GDP are like I talked about that one customer, 27 different regulatory environments and the challenge there is. How do you deal with that when you don't know what you have in terms of data, the 50% of data is what we call dark data. You don't know anything about right, so you need help classifying it, understanding and getting insight into that data, and that's what we can help >> our customers. But howdy, howdy, dildo. In that environment, I mean, I mean, a day raises the point. This is obvious. A swell that mean you cite California right, which is somewhat infamous for its own regulatory mindset. I mean, how do you exist? What? The United States has privacy concerns and Congress can address it, and various federal agencies could do the same Europe. Obviously we talked about now Australia. Now here. Now there you get this Balkan I system that has no consistency, no framework. And so how do you operate on a global scale? >> A. Mentally. It relies on classifying that data right. Understanding what's where and what do you have is a P I. I personally identifiable information. Is it information that's intellectual property? What kind of data you have once you have that insight, which is what we provide, you can layer on top of the regulatory Is that compliance? >> Star I P. Is that Veritas i p. A blender? >> It's a blend of avatar and veritas I p. We have a product called Info Studio that helps toe provide that now Remember one of the things that are net backup product has is a catalogue of data. So we know where the data is primary to secondary storage, and we have all the versions of that data. And then we can run analytics against the secondary storage and not hit the primary systems. Right? So we're out of band to the primary systems, and that turns out to be very valuable in the state's a >> question. The catalog. I can't do this without a catalogue in the enough to geek out here a little bit, but but you've got a little bit when you bring in multi clouds. Other clouds. How do you incorporate you know that knowledge into your catalog? >> Yeah. Art, art, technology work Idol of works across multiple clouds. So we work with 60 different Cloud service providers. There's three big ones represented here today. Microsoft, AWS and Google. We work very closely with all three, and >> that's because you do the engineering at the A P. I level. Our engineering teams work very, very closely together. Okay, um, so let's talk about competition a little bit. The markets heated up. It's great. It's good to see all this VC money floating in. Everybody I said wants a piece of your hide. Why Veritas? >> Well, I explained that, you know, we are the leader in enterprise, data protection, availability and insights. There are some newcomers. They just will support you on your current technology. They don't support the infrastructure you've had for many years. If your large complicated enterprise you have layers of technology, we support all that with VIN amount for 25 years against, the big conglomerates were completely focused. And that's why we're the leader, according to Gartner, in the Leader's Quadrant 13 years >> now. And just as we close up you talked about, you brought up the case in Texas, about 22 municipalities. You do a lot of public sector work states, federal government ever. It's just what is the difference of different animal between public and private and and what you need to do in terms of providing that >> we're struggling with the same challenge. In fact, we work with some of the largest government agencies in the world, and they're struggling with exactly the same challenge. They also want leverage the public cloud. They're worried about ransom where you know they're dealing with data growth. All of these are challenges to them. And that's the, uh So these are common challenges we're addressing. Our strategy is to help our customers with these challenges so they can focus on the value of data >> 18 months in. You seem pumped up. Does having a great time team fired up >> way. Get that right. Great. But you're okay with big geeking out to write a very good thanks for the time You've run out of time. 40 Niners next time. All right. Greg Hughes joining us from Veritas. Back with more Veum, World 2019 right here on the Cube. >> Thank you.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Good afternoon, and welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're at Inforum 2018, here live on theCUBE, John Walls with Dave Vellante, and it's a pleasure now to welcome the CEO of Infor, Charles Phillips with us. Charles, good to see ya! >> Good to see you guys again, another year. It's great, it's great. >> Yeah, I tell ya, you are a man of demand aren't you? I mean, tell me about the week so far for you, how it's gone, and just your overall thoughts about the show? >> Yeah, it's been a fun Inforum for 2018 here. Great attendance, and a lot of energy level, and the common feedback we get is you guys just keep innovating and bringing new things, this is great, and that's why they come, they want to see what we're working on and kind of dream the art of the possible. We know what you, what we think you get a couple years ago, but if we don't have someone pushing us and painting a picture of what we could be doing, and we just think we might be missing it, so we want to hear it first hand. So that's what the conference is about, and hopefully they got that. >> Well, certainly thematically, human potential, you talk about that, you see that on the keynote stage, that's been a very consistent theme with our guests here, we've heard that a lot, you hear it down on the show floor. Talk about the theme if you would, a little bit, in terms of it's development, where that came from, and in how you think that's being expressed here this week. >> Well, we're one of the few companies that build mission critical operational systems, be it manufacturing or hospital operations, but we're also in HCM in a big way. And so we were talking to kind of both sides of the house, for some applications you're talking to the line of business manager, but for HCM you're talking to the CHRO, and rarely were those two people talking, and we saw obvious synergies. Don't you want to know how your people are doing, how to allocate people, and how they're performing, how they're changing the outcomes on a manufacturing floor or in a hospital, and a lot of HR directors weren't thinking like that because they think of HR, and they have their own world, they go to HR conferences and that's it. And the manufacturing guys are the same thing, and so we're trying to bring these two worlds together and say "Actually, you're in the same business, it's the same goals, and you actually could help each other a lot." And so by focusing on putting the employee at the center of all these applications and mapping all these operational processes to HR data, it's a different way of thinking about the role of HR. They can actually help drive the business, not just be an administrative function, and so it's resonating with a lot of the CHROs we met with, 'cause they want a seat at the table, they want to be more strategic, and this is a way for them to do that and at the same time the operational people want to know how their people are doing, want to develop talent, and want to know what are the tools out there I could be doing differently, and how am I doing, and which employees are working the best So, I think we can bring both sides together. >> So I first met Infor through AWS, at re:Invent, Pam Murphy came on, and we were like Infor? Back then it was like 2012, 2013 was kind of Infor who? And then we were invited to New Orleans, and then started to learn more about your micro-vertical strategy and a little bit about the platform, it was somewhat opaque to me. And now, fast forward last year and this year it's really starting to come in to view. The OS, the platform vision, the Birst acquisition, and of course Coleman, and I'm a sucker for platform plays especially when there's real R&D behind it that's actually having a business impact. So I wonder if you could talk about that piece of the strategy, I love the stack, was that sort of always your vision and now you're getting aggressive in it, did it sort of come together serendipitously, how'd we get here? >> Having our own stack and a platform was always the vision, but it's a lot harder to do than it sounds like, and it takes time. And so, when we arrived almost eight years ago, there were different applications, all had their own separate stacks and would say "This is not going to work." So, we need, just to be able to scale, to be able to serve multiple industries with different products, we can't have every development organization building their stack as well. So we set about taking that away from the development groups we're going to do this as a shared service, but it takes time, and as we build it you will adopt components of it. So what's changed is we've built out the entire stack, so, starting with ION, with integration, then we added document management, workflow, analytics, now AI and a lot of other services, Mongoose, platform as a service, on and on and on, in collaboration, those things took time, they're all on a single platform, federated security, single siloed across it all, and now it makes the developers job who's developing apps so much simpler. So they have Infor OS for the immediate platform, for cloud services they have AWS, I don't have to worry about any of those things anymore, just go and develop industry functionality. So, it's come together nicely, but the fact that we had the time to do it and the money to do it, and we weren't public, and we told our investors "This is the only way this is going to scale, this is the future, and it'll pay out later, you just got to trust us." And now that we've gotten there, they're seeing the synergy and go "Okay, now we see why you did that." >> So, Michael Dell's been on theCUBE many times, he used to talk about the 90 day shot clock, we obviously see what he's done in terms of transforming; but I want to talk about your business a little bit, because you've had that patient capital, I mean you're a quasi-public company in the sense that you do report so we can see the numbers on the income statement, but the income statement doesn't really tell the whole story It's about three billion in revenue, several hundred billion dollars on the balance sheet, but if you look at the SaaS component of it it looks rather small, maybe about 25% of the business, but from a booking standpoint I'm sure it's much, much larger than that. So how should we interpret the income statement in terms of the momentum in your business, where is all the action? >> So as a percentage of our sales, it's the highest of any of our competitors, so, about 70% of our new sales are on SaaS, we have about a $700 million SaaS business, so it's growing. There's nothing we can do about the maintenance piece of it, if it's related to perpetual, so if you take that out, it's a big percentage of our business. And over time the maintenance will turn into SaaS, so that's one of our big opportunities to look at that maintenance space and say "Move those over to cloud customers." and that's usually a financially lucrative thing for us to do, because we do even more for them, because they usually add on four or five other products when they move, they replace these third party products and so we get a bigger suite of products if they decide to move to the cloud. So that's part of the strategy, that's what UpgradeX is, let's move you from on-premise, so that maintenance revenue will turn into SaaS revenue, but bigger SaaS revenue over time. >> So let me make sure I understand, so it's not the classic case where you see a lot of software companies that are going from a perpetual model to a ratable model, you're goin' from a maintenance model which is ratable to a ratable model which is SaaS, but there's cohorts sales which increase the top line, is that correct? >> Exactly. So usually, because of what we do, we're doing something mission critical. So if you're going to take that, then you should do ACM financials, all the other things around it. So why would I move to core and leave the edge on-premise? So, almost by definition we have to do the whole suite. So when we do that it expands the deal, 'cause on-premise we may have been one vendor with 30 other ones existing, but the whole reason they want to get out of all of that is to move to the cloud and simplify. So we can't take all that with us, so we have to have the full suites, we've built that now. So now we can move them, but, it expands the size of the deal because we're replacing all these other products. >> Okay, and then some of the stats, just correct me if I don't get this right. Your SaaS business grown 50% faster than Oracle's, growing at a rate, I'd say 2X SAP's and a rate comparable to Workday, are those correct figures? >> Those are correct, and profitable. >> Oh, and profitable. >> Throw that in. (all laugh) >> Right, so okay. And then last year Koch Industries invested, so you kind of recap the company, you've made a big deal about that. One of the things that we've noted is you're seeing a tailwind there in terms of guys like Accenture and Capgemini, we've asked them "Do you guys service Koch Industries?" they said "Yep!" they helped us see the opportunity, and they said "Look, look for something substantive, we're not going to try to force you to do something, but we want you to take a look." So that's been helpful. Talk about that and maybe other things Koch has brought to the table? >> It's a, the relationship with the integrators is evolving, it probably was not a plus for us in the first four, five years. More recent years we've won enough deals where they had to say "Okay, we can't keep losin' these deals." And where they wanted to get engaged. Koch helped, because they had relationships and they wanted to run that business, that's why they're implementing our products globally, and so, they're a large customer for all of these guys, and one of the largest for Deloitte for instance, but what's really more-- that helped, but it was more the, what was happening in the market, the fact that we're in a Liberty Steel and replace SAP, or that we're in a Travis Perkins interview with SAP and Microsoft, so, if you're on the wrong side of those deals enough times your manager starts to ask you what's goin' on, and you got all these people on the bench here, okay, we train them for Infor if they're winning in that region, or in that industry. So, we just had to earn our way into it, our initial strategy was not one that, at least on the surface, looked like it was integrator-friendly because we were trying to take all those mods they like to do and put 'em in the product, and that's the whole thesis, let's the take the vertical industry features and let's put it in there once, I don't want everybody customizing my apps, we do that. And so now they've had to move up, okay we can do other things, configuration, changed management, there's AI, there's other things you can do, but you're not going to do that. So now that they've accepted that, there's a basis for us to work together, and, it just had to take time to get there. >> What can you tell us about where you want to go with this? I mean you've presided over public companies before, you know that business well, you were a rockstar analyst, is there an advantage to being a public company, is that something that you eventually want to do? >> I would say there are pluses and minuses, our board is evaluating that, that's going to be their call. The upside is, it would solve probably our biggest challenge which is brand recognition, almost instantly, because would be a top 10 tech IPO. It makes it a little easier to hire people because they can see public currency, they can value more quickly, and it gives you some acquisition currency; so those are the positives. But then you're on the 90 day cycle, and we're kind of on that anyway, 'cause we report publicly and we have publicly traded bonds. So for us it's, in some sense we have the worst of all worlds, right? We have the discipline of being a public company, and the scrutiny, without the capital, (laughs) and the branding, so. I think that's what everybody's evaluating. Every bank on Wall Street's visiting us telling us to go now, the window's great, you have the numbers. >> Oh, of course. (Dave and John laugh) >> And so, so we could do it, I just don't know what their decision's going to be. The advantages to being private as well, you have a little more flexibility obviously, and, we don't need the capital, we have plenty of capital coming from Koch and others who want to invest. >> Well, the flip side of that too, is you get to write your own narrative, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, we're talkin' about the nuances of the income statement, the Street is obviously right now hooked on growth heroin, and if you got the transition in the base it doesn't become a tailwind, so, no rush from that standpoint. I want to pivot to the theme of this event, which is the human potential. My understanding is you sort of were instrumental in coming up with that. HCM this year got a big play on stage, where's that come from? >> Yeah, just as I talk to CEOs who are struggling to find talent, like I mentioned on stage 6.7 million jobs that are unfulfilled. It's not like we don't have people here, we have people here with their own skills, so, you're not going to fill those jobs any other way, we're not doing immigration to any degree and scaling more, that's been shut down. We have an aging population with the baby boomers, so the most logical thing that you would do is train people who are already here who want to work. And, let's take people who have jobs that they probably aren't thrilled about, and give them different skills so they can fill these 6.7 million jobs. So to do that, you have to make these applications easier to use, and I felt like we're probably in the best position to do it because we actually know what they do for a living, 'cause we wrote all those last features in those industries, we understand what they do. And if you're just doin' HR replication or financials, you actually have no idea what they do. So, we had to learn those jobs to automate those jobs, so we can find ways to use our HCM applications to better train people, professional development, coaching, take all these HR skills, and put them as part of the applications in the context of while you're working. >> We had Anne Benedict on just a little bit ago talking about really a test case that you can be for yourself. So how are you putting these things to practice yourself, and how are you working out maybe some kinks before you take them out to somebody else? And so, you can leverage your own success for your own success, and also learn from mistakes too I would think. >> We do. So we have this program called Infor at Infor, where everything we do, we want it to be on an Infor product, which was not the case when we arrived. Like a lot of companies, a mish mash of different things, and so we've implemented not only HR Financials of course, Birst, but the big innovation has really been talent science, that every employee we hire has to take that test, and all the executives have taken it as well. And what we've discovered is, is that, when people hire and go against the talent science recommendation, 68% of the time they end up being wrong. So it's better at judging people than people are sometimes, and you can't use it exclusively, but it'll tell you these are the things you should look into, some questions you might want to ask, here's how they rate on certain skillsets, they're very well meshed for this job, they look like they'd see their best performance in this area, but ask these questions. And so people don't know how to interview and how to think about this, and so, having a guide to go into an interview is actually pretty helpful. We hire much better people now by using that. >> So it's like StrengthsFinder in a way? >> No, it's different from that, this is AI, it's kind of Moneyball for business people. >> Well you're talking about that today, almost there. >> Yeah so it's 39 personality attributes, behavioral attributes we call them, so, empathy, resistance to authority, do you have the ambition or not, and depending on the job, you think all those things are good, depends on the job, so. For some jobs, it's actually better to have low ambition because, a lot of our customers who have low wage, fast food service jobs, people who have ambition are going to leave in four months, right? They're not going to stay, so, okay we're not going to be here long, at least know that going in, and know who wants to get promoted, and other people are fine with it. And so it depends on the mix of skills, just like I said, 39 attributes, and for that job role, you tune it to the people who like that job, they look like this. And, we've also found that it's 60% more diverse when you hire using science, because you don't know that when you're looking at the data, what they look like. >> It must've been super interesting getting those reports. You took it, obviously right? >> Yeah I took it. >> How'd you do? (laughs) >> Uhhh, nobody really likes their profile. (all laugh) >> I was going to say, I imagine I would be really defensive about this, oh I don't know. >> This can't be right! >> That is not me! I am not like that! (all laughing) >> Every person on our executive team said the same thing so. That's what it's for is to, you have certain perceptions even about yourself, and it calls it out, right? And there's no gaming the system because the questions have no right or wrong answer, it just puts you in scenarios that you answer what would you do, how do you feel about this? You're not clear what they're trying to get at, and you only have 27 minutes or 22 minutes to do the test. >> So you can't game it? >> You can't game it. >> Data doesn't lie! >> And we built the science, we know when someones trying to game it, they're taking to long on multiples, and changing their answers too much, so it's-- And we've now, I think we've tested some 200 million people over time, over years, so we have 20 years of data about people. >> That's, I mean, sounds unique, certainly unique of being infused into enterprise software, I've not seen anything like this from another enterprise software company. Can you confirm that, or? >> Yeah, so, we're the only ones that do this at scale, there's a few startups trying to do it, but they're trying to do it all facial recognition which is, we think pretty ridiculous, we're trying to get away from physical attributes not use that. So there's a company out there doing that, depending on your facial movements, but this is, we're eliciting responses about your personality in response to situations that we give you, and have a bunch of scientists that crunch the data and they basically shape it to the job role. And they test your best performance, and you get a DNA profile for your best performance for that job role, and then, that's what you're matching, and it's highly accurate. So we had a company on the Las Vegas Strip use it, because they have to hire in volume a lot, and essentially what they wanted to do was get better blackjack dealers. You need somebody that's good at math, good under pressure, not too emotive, don't give away anything; and so we did that, fine tuned the test, they call us back nine months later and said "We need you to change the test." We said "We did exactly what you wanted, what happened?" He said well, the winnings went up 30%, but everybody's leaving the hotel in 24 hours 'cause they lost all their money, so we don't need them to be that good. (all laugh) >> Dial it down a little bit. >> Which we did. And so that's part of the service is we fine tune it, you tell us what your goals are, and we'll tune to that. >> That's a great story. The other surprise for me this week has been the emphasis on robotic process automation, it's a space that we've kina looked at. And a lot of people are scared about software robots replacing humans, but if you talk to people who are using RPA, they love it. It's taking away these mundane tasks, I didn't realize that you guys had such capabilities there? >> Yeah, so we built that as part of a Coleman RPA platform, and not only can we automate and use RPA for ourselves, but we've built a whole development environment for our customers to build their own, 'cause we can't think of every process that they might want to automate, and we gave that platform to our partners as well, so. We don't want them doing database schema work anymore, and they used to get paid for that, there's other things you can do up the stack in AI, here's what we want you to focus on. So we had that meeting on Monday with the partners, and they all agreed that's what we're going to do. But there's tons of mundane things that people shouldn't be spending time on, and they can be much more productive, it makes them more loyal to the company, they're enjoying their job more, and they're thinking and innovating more. So I don't see it as replacing people, as making people better. And giving that engagement that I talked about during the keynote, they're engaged now, because they can do things that are more value adding now. >> So, back to New Orleans next year? That's the first Inforum that theCUBE was ever at was in N'Orleans, and, jazz, you like jazz, obviously, right? >> I like jazz, I met with the mayor when I was down there, Mitch Landrieu at the time, and he became a customer after that meeting, so the city of New Orleans runs on Infor software, it's another reason to go there; so thank you. >> You've get--nice. >> Yeah, thank you Mitch, so that worked well. And so as a thank you we're going back down there, they're a big customer now, and it's always fun, you know what I mean, you know. >> That's great. >> Just, before you go, you mention, I watched in the keynote this morning, Brooks Koepka. >> Yes. So you're working with him. I do a little bit of work on the golf side as well, so I was just intrigued because, he's not the, well he's not Tiger, right? >> Yeah. >> U.S. Open Champion, twice over. What was the attraction to him, and then can you play in the golf world a little bit, and with those brands, and is that an entry into that world? >> Well, we always like to bet on the scrappy guy, the next up and coming generation guy, and that's kind of our brand that's what we are, the Brooklyn Nets, someone who's not quite there yet, but they're moving up, that's kind of our scrappiness, that's why we like the whole Brooklyn image as well. And we started talkin' to him, like I said, before he won the U.S. Open, because he was ranking pretty high, moving up, but wasn't well known. A quite guy, very personable when you meet him, we thought he'd be good in front of clients, let's bet on his career, and we're going to work with him; and literally three weeks later he wins the U.S. Open, we go "Okay." (all laugh) >> Good grab! >> We'll take it! (laughs) So, we didn't even think it'd happen that quickly, and now he's a rockstar so. We were planning on hosting a CX event with him, and, we're not sure how many people are going to come, but when that happened, now, everybody RSVP'd right away of course. So now it's doing exactly what we wanted. >> Do you play golf? >> I don't play golf, I just started playing, 'cause we were doing these golf tournaments with customers over the last year, but I haven't had enough time to get out there yet. >> I'll bet Brooks would give you a lesson or two. (laughs) >> Yeah, he, a lot of people want to lesson from him. >> Charles thank you >> Alright, thank you guys, >> for the time, great show. >> Good to see ya again. See ya in New Orleans. >> Thank you, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Alright guys, see ya. >> Wonderful week here in Washington, D.C. Back with more live on theCUBE here from D.C. right after this. (bubbly music)

Probably Toronto, Canada. It's the cube covering blockchain futurist conference 2018, brought to you by the queue. Hello and welcome back to you keep live covers here in Toronto for the untraceable blockchain uterus conference two days a wall to wall coverage. We were just seeing it here on the coupon shopper host Dave Vellante, Tony Lane, Cuba last night with culture and we have James Mcdonald, head of strategy of Sentinel. He's also a PGA professional golf professional and a boxer. Extraordinary. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. You ever had in my notes. Funny before camera came on. Super exciting. Even though the market's kind of in a downward trough and by the, you know, do its normal cycle and Crypto, tons of energy. The culture is changing. There's a real energy around focusing on high quality builders, high quality individuals. This is a real dynamic projects for good projects for profit is great engineering going on. What could be better for sure, and we've been through the trod so many times. We've gotten to the point that now I just kind of like. I'm like, well, I mean we're here again. You know what I mean? And now it's time for, we figure out right now who's really in it to win it and who's just playing the game. Tell you know what I love about. You've got great energy, great. Already got great culture. You've been around, you've seen it early, you've been involved in a lot of the iterations of the industry that's just now growing to be a baby and his growing up into it's elementary school years. What are you, what's your take? I mean you look at this, I know you do a lot of retreats and self reflection. What's the industry? Where's it come from? Where is it now? How do you feel about what's happening? So I did in blockchain since 2011 and from a price perspective, there's actually a science fiction story that came out on Reddit in 2014 or 13 by someone named, got underscore Nada and it's called I am from the future. And I am here to stop you from what you were doing in this science fiction story. He outlines this pricing curve that basically shows the first five years of bitcoins existence. If no other market factors happen, no outside influence, no qualitative influenced the first five years, 10 x every year, second five years, every other year, 10 x every other year. And what's crazy is that if we wouldn't have had Mt. Gox and some of these other events like bitcoin was only supposed to go to 10 k last year, which is double. So if we wouldn't have had those external events, that pattern would have actually been it. So what's really easy and simple to remember about bitcoin is that it has a scarce supply. That's, I think that's the easiest way to put any of this. And so this is just a period of time. The market over extended itself and it shouldn't have gone realistically past 10 K it doubled. So yeah, I mean that's a if that's to be expected, right? No, no. In my opinion, I looked at either an exercise about six months with my friend. We look at the Nasdaq during the pre bubble days and we'll exchange of the Nasdaq and that's just a small scale relative to global care crypto. It's actually in line with some of the expansion we've seen in other financial market, so I kinda think it's good to have to do curation going on and calling out some of the dead wood, bring it into the better projects. This is kind of the reality now. Rip Good Times. Well, you know Bradley or yesterday at the cloud and blockchain conference posited that wasn't talking about Bitcoin, he was talking about ether. He said there's just too many damn coins and every ICO is most ics anyway. Tied to the theory. Yes, buy it. Well, I mean you can take this one too, but what I see is a decoupling at some point that has to be some sort of decoupling at the moment. Everything is very correlated and I think as time goes on you will see it's like survival of the fittest. Right? So you've got, you've got a lot of blockchains and you've got a lot of tokens on ethereum that want to come off to theory and it's survival of the fittest. I feel like. Yeah, the best ones will prevail and the ones that aren't trusted or secure. Yeah. So talk about who's in it to win it. What do you look for in the contenders versus the pretenders? What are the attributes that you as deep experts in this field look toward the winters? Well, I see as right now we're kind of like a candy that you love coming out with a new flavor. It's like everyone's like, oh yeah, like remember this candy gotta buy it now, but at the end of the day it's pretty much the same candy and she was like a little different sweetener and so we will experience obviously a sharp correction. Yeah, for sure. But I think what's really beautiful about this is it's actually enabling creative potential jobs of the future are not going to be, oh, I know how to do c plus plus now I have a job forever. It's going to be about reinvention at that is the real economy of the future and chains and huge enabler for that new markets are opening up to. So it's not just the reinvention, which I agree, reimagined the reinvention and new markets. Our change was on earlier saying eight and 80 day tour of 10 countries. New markets are exploding. That's just a new markets is rechanging system, not your grandfather's venture capital model, silicon valley or New York or London. It's with the globe. There are many, many reasons to tokenize the world. The thing that, the thing that stands out to me is, you know, when you look at tokenizing securities, the fact that this opens up the free market to everyone, you know, these things can be traded 24 slash seven, three, six, five from anywhere in the world. Traditionally if you want to buy stocks, will streets open for less time than it's been. It's closed and so it. It just opens up the free market to everyone all over the world and to me that's that journalists, you're a professional golfer. Someone use a golf analogy too, because I'd love Golf Golfer, so excellent Golfer. Not a pro, but he could be. I don't keep score with them many times and he never played. She played like, well, why don't you twice a year consistently shoots. There's a little bit hockey and a happy Gilmore going on golf metaphor, so the world that we know that's the centralized governed world banks, big corporations that are being essential. I consider them like a wooden shaft and the old clubs. Now all of a sudden graphite shafts, youth club heads, new technology. The game doesn't really change fundamental APP, but it changes the performance you by that is that a good analogy? Needed to. Perfect analogy. When you go to the golf clubs, then you've got the older members and they don't buy it. They say that the performance doesn't increase with the new technology, but really we know that old stodgy members, it comes down to that people are naturally averse to change. People don't change something that they don't quite understand. They'd naturally dismissed if they don't want to delve in, felt dismiss that and everyone here today is going down this rabbit hole, but there's a hell of a lot of people out there that I didn't really get it. I don't want to get it. So. And they'll dismiss that and they'll even. They'll even talk it down if it threatens them. At the game changes. No, I mean come on. If you look at the current distribution, over time we've moved from tribalized kings and Queens to nation states. Let's hope that we actually enable a redistribution of wealth. I want to see blockchain create the garden of Eden. We're experiencing now is basically same incentives, slightly less bad people, and I feel that if we really use new technology is an opportunity for change. Change is gonna happen and if we make the integration of new technology about experiencing compassion in action as humanity, we changed human perception, human behavior, your understanding of your own limitations. When we enabled real freedom, not just the illusion of freedom as money on Amazon yesterday, which he's with, he's done an amazing work what he's doing to transform the Caribbean islands with exchange changing a society there digitally connected almost 100 percent penetration of mobile. It's incredible. They can't access some basic services society. A new game changer. You're taking an integrative approach to how you interact with people and it's part of your persona. Maybe I'm pushing the golf analogy to bring it, bring it, watching the end of the PGA this week and they were interviewed. Tiger Woods is back and he's comes in and they were interviewing him and he wants to be on the Ryder Cup team. Now, if you've observed him in the Ryder Cup, not great. This is a team sport. The euro's always killed the Americans when the superstar is right and it's sort of the same thing that you're saying. It's the get the haves and have nots. It's a team sport and it's community driven. Increases viewings like you wouldn't need tigers pain. Everyone tunes in, which is great for the sport, for the Americans because they always lose when he plays. I think it would be, you know, why not put him in the team because it's good for the game. It gets people more engaged. He goes and he's been humbled. You know that your thing is there a lock if you the back, you want them involved but you don't want to dominate it. Alright, so guys, let's take it back to reality. You guys are working together on a project we talking, talking you guys, what are you guys working on know about the projects you guys are involved in right now. What James and I do together is we take these skills, we've learned through my life, you a performing artist in his previous life as a professional athlete and we've really taken what we've learned through our knowledge and our network to help entrepreneurs who are driven with integrity and appear to be a success. So it's really, well we do together is we just really, um, and that's, that's what we do both for fun and for enjoyment. And what I'm working on personally, James is the head of strategy at a company and I'll let him get into that when I'm working on personally is global citizenship and my company culture is actually focused on something really integral to the block chain which is capitalizing the market share on the tradition, the transition out of nation states and into oriented and governance models. So we have one layer that's open source for free for the world, for ever to own your agreements and to own your identity as a self sovereign individual stewarded by your community to give everyone more context on each other. And then our for profit businesses basically facebook connects people to their friends, culture connects people to communities and connects communities to dapps that are services and economists basically. And we build that whole ecosystem. So that's really what I'm up to at culture. And then James and I have our own adventure together and James is also had a strategy at center. Yup. Okay. So sentinel is an interoperable network layer for distributed resources. So let me break that down. What block chain technology allows is for you to monetize access resources like access bandwidth, access, GPU or CPU power. And so our first working product is a decentralized vpn. So you know what a vpn is. Sure. So the sentinel, the VPN is distributed. So what that allows you to do for example, is you could access, you can monetize your excess bandwidth by hosting a note that people can connect to it. And the beauty of the decentralized vpn is that it's probable, so all the code is open source and there's proof that the data is actually being kept private, it's encrypted, um, and there's no, there's no centralized or a body or a company that can be shut down or, or forced to give up data or paid for paid for data. It's distributed. So it's fast and it's secure. So yeah, there's a lot of big companies in the crypto space that are very concerned with data privacy and they didn't, may not trump central vpn, traditional centralized vpn paid. So you host your own node, you get paid. It's a marketplace. So anyone in the world can set up their own node, run their own node, help other people obscure their traffic if they don't want. Like for example, Gdpr, if you don't want every website that you visit to monitor literally everything you do, you might want to consider using a vpn for the sake of preserving your own personal privacy and the integrity of your data which you own and rightfully should actually own the monetization value of. So in the world you can have a few node and you guys can pay, people can pay $5 your whole network and use it. So I can sell my xx compute capacity, network bandwidth, the storage sewer. No touching that. A storage, I mean down the line. So it's for, for, for distributed resources. That sentinel. The first product is the dvps yes. Down the line. Yeah. We're going to come up with much more so others could actually plug into that platform like a live stream in China. I can pop on a vpn. There it is. Run Google apps in China because you can run google. Yes. You know, she'd even China. Let's you. Cool. All right guys. Well thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks. Very inspirational. I think there's a lot of mission driven cultural change coming very fast. This next generation coming up is going to be the stewards of making the change happen. It's our job to set the table and get these services out there. Congratulations. Okay. Cube coverage here live in Toronto at the untraceable blockchain futures conference. Two days is the cube wall to wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, stay with us Dave ones continuing the best gas, the most important people. Bring in the great blockchain crypto world together here in Toronto. We'll be right back.