(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)

>> 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)