(gentle music playing) >> For centuries, we've been captivated by the concept of machines doing the job of humans. And over the past decade or so, we've really focused on AI and the possibility of intelligent machines that can perform cognitive tasks. Now in the past few years, with the popularity of machine learning models ranging from recent ChatGPT to Bert, we're starting to see how AI is changing the way we interact with the world. How is AI transforming the way we do business? And what does the future hold for us there. At theCube, we've covered Oracle's AI and ML strategy for years, which has really been used to drive automation into Oracle's autonomous database. We've talked a lot about MySQL HeatWave in database machine learning, and AI pushed into Oracle's business apps. Oracle, it tends to lead in AI, but not competing as a direct AI player per se, but rather embedding AI and machine learning into its portfolio to enhance its existing products, and bring new services and offerings to the market. Now, last October at Cloud World in Las Vegas, Oracle partnered with Nvidia, which is the go-to AI silicon provider for vendors. And they announced an investment, a pretty significant investment to deploy tens of thousands more Nvidia GPUs to OCI, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and build out Oracle's infrastructure for enterprise scale AI. Now, Oracle CEO, Safra Catz said something to the effect of this alliance is going to help customers across industries from healthcare, manufacturing, telecoms, and financial services to overcome the multitude of challenges they face. Presumably she was talking about just driving more automation and more productivity. Now, to learn more about Oracle's plans for AI, we'd like to welcome in Elad Ziklik, who's the vice president of AI services at Oracle. Elad, great to see you. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So first let's talk about Oracle's path to AI. I mean, it's the hottest topic going for years you've been incorporating machine learning into your products and services, you know, could you tell us what you've been working on, how you got here? >> So great question. So as you mentioned, I think most of the original four-way into AI was on embedding AI and using AI to make our applications, and databases better. So inside mySQL HeatWave, inside our autonomous database in power, we've been driving AI, all of course are SaaS apps. So Fusion, our large enterprise business suite for HR applications and CRM and ELP, and whatnot has built in AI inside it. Most recently, NetSuite, our small medium business SaaS suite started using AI for things like automated invoice processing and whatnot. And most recently, over the last, I would say two years, we've started exposing and bringing these capabilities into the broader OCI Oracle Cloud infrastructure. So the developers, and ISVs and customers can start using our AI capabilities to make their apps better and their experiences and business workflow better, and not just consume these as embedded inside Oracle. And this recent partnership that you mentioned with Nvidia is another step in bringing the best AI infrastructure capabilities into this platform so you can actually build any type of machine learning workflow or AI model that you want on Oracle Cloud. >> So when I look at the market, I see companies out there like DataRobot or C3 AI, there's maybe a half dozen that sort of pop up on my radar anyway. And my premise has always been that most customers, they don't want to become AI experts, they want to buy applications and have AI embedded or they want AI to manage their infrastructure. So my question to you is, how does Oracle help its OCI customers support their business with AI? >> So it's a great question. So I think what most customers want is business AI. They want AI that works for the business. They want AI that works for the enterprise. I call it the last mile of AI. And they want this thing to work. The majority of them don't want to hire a large and expensive data science teams to go and build everything from scratch. They just want the business problem solved by applying AI to it. My best analogy is Lego. So if you think of Lego, Lego has these millions Lego blocks that you can use to build anything that you want. But the majority of people like me or like my kids, they want the Lego death style kit or the Lego Eiffel Tower thing. They want a thing that just works, and it's very easy to use. And still Lego blocks, you still need to build some things together, which just works for the scenario that you're looking for. So that's our focus. Our focus is making it easy for customers to apply AI where they need to, in the right business context. So whether it's embedding it inside the business applications, like adding forecasting capabilities to your supply chain management or financial planning software, whether it's adding chat bots into the line of business applications, integrating these things into your analytics dashboard, even all the way to, we have a new platform piece we call ML applications that allows you to take a machine learning model, and scale it for the thousands of tenants that you would be. 'Cause this is a big problem for most of the ML use cases. It's very easy to build something for a proof of concept or a pilot or a demo. But then if you need to take this and then deploy it across your thousands of customers or your thousands of regions or facilities, then it becomes messy. So this is where we spend our time making it easy to take these things into production in the context of your business application or your business use case that you're interested in right now. >> So you mentioned chat bots, and I want to talk about ChatGPT, but my question here is different, we'll talk about that in a minute. So when you think about these chat bots, the ones that are conversational, my experience anyway is they're just meh, they're not that great. But the ones that actually work pretty well, they have a conditioned response. Now they're limited, but they say, which of the following is your problem? And then if that's one of the following is your problem, you can maybe solve your problem. But this is clearly a trend and it helps the line of business. How does Oracle think about these use cases for your customers? >> Yeah, so I think the key here is exactly what you said. It's about task completion. The general purpose bots are interesting, but as you said, like are still limited. They're getting much better, I'm sure we'll talk about ChatGPT. But I think what most enterprises want is around task completion. I want to automate my expense report processing. So today inside Oracle we have a chat bot where I submit my expenses the bot ask a couple of question, I answer them, and then I'm done. Like I don't need to go to our fancy application, and manually submit an expense report. I do this via Slack. And the key is around managing the right expectations of what this thing is capable of doing. Like, I have a story from I think five, six years ago when technology was much inferior than it is today. Well, one of the telco providers I was working with wanted to roll a chat bot that does realtime translation. So it was for a support center for of the call centers. And what they wanted do is, Hey, we have English speaking employees, whatever, 24/7, if somebody's calling, and the native tongue is different like Hebrew in my case, or Chinese or whatnot, then we'll give them a chat bot that they will interact with and will translate this on the fly and everything would work. And when they rolled it out, the feedback from customers was horrendous. Customers said, the technology sucks. It's not good. I hate it, I hate your company, I hate your support. And what they've done is they've changed the narrative. Instead of, you go to a support center, and you assume you're going to talk to a human, and instead you get a crappy chat bot, they're like, Hey, if you want to talk to a Hebrew speaking person, there's a four hour wait, please leave your phone and we'll call you back. Or you can try a new amazing Hebrew speaking AI powered bot and it may help your use case. Do you want to try it out? And some people said, yeah, let's try it out. Plus one to try it out. And the feedback, even though it was the exact same technology was amazing. People were like, oh my God, this is so innovative, this is great. Even though it was the exact same experience that they hated a few weeks earlier on. So I think the key lesson that I picked from this experience is it's all about setting the right expectations, and working around the right use case. If you are replacing a human, the level is different than if you are just helping or augmenting something that otherwise would take a lot of time. And I think this is the focus that we are doing, picking up the tasks that people want to accomplish or that enterprise want to accomplish for the customers, for the employees. And using chat bots to make those specific ones better rather than, hey, this is going to replace all humans everywhere, and just be better than that. >> Yeah, I mean, to the point you mentioned expense reports. I'm in a Twitter thread and one guy says, my favorite part of business travel is filling out expense reports. It's an hour of excitement to figure out which receipts won't scan. We can all relate to that. It's just the worst. When you think about companies that are building custom AI driven apps, what can they do on OCI? What are the best options for them? Do they need to hire an army of machine intelligence experts and AI specialists? Help us understand your point of view there. >> So over the last, I would say the two or three years we've developed a full suite of machine learning and AI services for, I would say probably much every use case that you would expect right now from applying natural language processing to understanding customer support tickets or social media, or whatnot to computer vision platforms or computer vision services that can understand and detect objects, and count objects on shelves or detect cracks in the pipe or defecting parts, all the way to speech services. It can actually transcribe human speech. And most recently we've launched a new document AI service. That can actually look at unstructured documents like receipts or invoices or government IDs or even proprietary documents, loan application, student application forms, patient ingestion and whatnot and completely automate them using AI. So if you want to do one of the things that are, I would say common bread and butter for any industry, whether it's financial services or healthcare or manufacturing, we have a suite of services that any developer can go, and use easily customized with their own data. You don't need to be an expert in deep learning or large language models. You could just use our automobile capabilities, and build your own version of the models. Just go ahead and use them. And if you do have proprietary complex scenarios that you need customer from scratch, we actually have the most cost effective platform for that. So we have the OCI data science as well as built-in machine learning platform inside the databases inside the Oracle database, and mySQL HeatWave that allow data scientists, python welding people that actually like to build and tweak and control and improve, have everything that they need to go and build the machine learning models from scratch, deploy them, monitor and manage them at scale in production environment. And most of it is brand new. So we did not have these technologies four or five years ago and we've started building them and they're now at enterprise scale over the last couple of years. >> So what are some of the state-of-the-art tools, that AI specialists and data scientists need if they're going to go out and develop these new models? >> So I think it's on three layers. I think there's an infrastructure layer where the Nvidia's of the world come into play. For some of these things, you want massively efficient, massively scaled infrastructure place. So we are the most cost effective and performant large scale GPU training environment today. We're going to be first to onboard the new Nvidia H100s. These are the new super powerful GPU's for large language model training. So we have that covered for you in case you need this 'cause you want to build these ginormous things. You need a data science platform, a platform where you can open a Python notebook, and just use all these fancy open source frameworks and create the models that you want, and then click on a button and deploy it. And it infinitely scales wherever you need it. And in many cases you just need the, what I call the applied AI services. You need the Lego sets, the Lego death style, Lego Eiffel Tower. So we have a suite of these sets for typical scenarios, whether it's cognitive services of like, again, understanding images, or documents all the way to solving particular business problems. So an anomaly detection service, demand focusing service that will be the equivalent of these Lego sets. So if this is the business problem that you're looking to solve, we have services out there where we can bring your data, call an API, train a model, get the model and use it in your production environment. So wherever you want to play, all the way into embedding this thing, inside this applications, obviously, wherever you want to play, we have the tools for you to go and engage from infrastructure to SaaS at the top, and everything in the middle. >> So when you think about the data pipeline, and the data life cycle, and the specialized roles that came out of kind of the (indistinct) era if you will. I want to focus on two developers and data scientists. So the developers, they hate dealing with infrastructure and they got to deal with infrastructure. Now they're being asked to secure the infrastructure, they just want to write code. And a data scientist, they're spending all their time trying to figure out, okay, what's the data quality? And they're wrangling data and they don't spend enough time doing what they want to do. So there's been a lack of collaboration. Have you seen that change, are these approaches allowing collaboration between data scientists and developers on a single platform? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, that is a great question. One of the biggest set of scars that I have on my back from for building these platforms in other companies is exactly that. Every persona had a set of tools, and these tools didn't talk to each other and the handoff was painful. And most of the machine learning things evaporate or die on the floor because of this problem. It's very rarely that they are unsuccessful because the algorithm wasn't good enough. In most cases it's somebody builds something, and then you can't take it to production, you can't integrate it into your business application. You can't take the data out, train, create an endpoint and integrate it back like it's too painful. So the way we are approaching this is focused on this problem exactly. We have a single set of tools that if you publish a model as a data scientist and developers, and even business analysts that are seeing a inside of business application could be able to consume it. We have a single model store, a single feature store, a single management experience across the various personas that need to play in this. And we spend a lot of time building, and borrowing a word that cellular folks used, and I really liked it, building inside highways to make it easier to bring these insights into where you need them inside applications, both inside our applications, inside our SaaS applications, but also inside custom third party and even first party applications. And this is where a lot of our focus goes to just because we have dealt with so much pain doing this inside our own SaaS that we now have built the tools, and we're making them available for others to make this process of building a machine learning outcome driven insight in your app easier. And it's not just the model development, and it's not just the deployment, it's the entire journey of taking the data, building the model, training it, deploying it, looking at the real data that comes from the app, and creating this feedback loop in a more efficient way. And that's our focus area. Exactly this problem. >> Well thank you for that. So, last week we had our super cloud two event, and I had Juan Loza on and he spent a lot of time talking about how open Oracle is in its philosophy, and I got a lot of feedback. They were like, Oracle open, I don't really think, but the truth is if you think about database Oracle database, it never met a hardware platform that it didn't like. So in that sense it's open. So, but my point is, a big part of of machine learning and AI is driven by open source tools, frameworks, what's your open source strategy? What do you support from an open source standpoint? >> So I'm a strong believer that you don't actually know, nobody knows where the next slip fog or the next industry shifting innovation in AI is going to come from. If you look six months ago, nobody foreseen Dali, the magical text to image generation and the exploding brought into just art and design type of experiences. If you look six weeks ago, I don't think anybody's seen ChatGPT, and what it can do for a whole bunch of industries. So to me, assuming that a customer or partner or developer would want to lock themselves into only the tools that a specific vendor can produce is ridiculous. 'Cause nobody knows, if anybody claims that they know where the innovation is going to come from in a year or two, let alone in five or 10, they're just wrong or lying. So our strategy for Oracle is to, I call this the Netflix of AI. So if you think about Netflix, they produced a bunch of high quality shows on their own. A few years ago it was House of Cards. Last month my wife and I binge watched Ginny and Georgie, but they also curated a lot of shows that they found around the world and bought them to their customers. So it started with things like Seinfeld or Friends and most recently it was Squid games and those are famous Israeli TV series called Founder that Netflix bought in, and they bought it as is and they gave it the Netflix value. So you have captioning and you have the ability to speed the movie and you have it inside your app, and you can download it and watch it offline and everything, but nobody Netflix was involved in the production of these first seasons. Now if these things hunt and they're great, then the third season or the fourth season will get the full Netflix production value, high value budget, high value location shooting or whatever. But you as a customer, you don't care whether the producer and director, and screenplay writing is a Netflix employee or is somebody else's employee. It is fulfilled by Netflix. I believe that we will become, or we are looking to become the Netflix of AI. We are building a bunch of AI in a bunch of places where we think it's important and we have some competitive advantage like healthcare with Acellular partnership or whatnot. But I want to bring the best AI software and hardware to OCI and do a fulfillment by Oracle on that. So you'll get the Oracle security and identity and single bill and everything you'd expect from a company like Oracle. But we don't have to be building the data science, and the models for everything. So this means both open source recently announced a partnership with Anaconda, the leading provider of Python distribution in the data science ecosystem where we are are doing a joint strategic partnership of bringing all the goodness into Oracle customers as well as in the process of doing the same with Nvidia, and all those software libraries, not just the Hubble, both for other stuff like Triton, but also for healthcare specific stuff as well as other ISVs, other AI leading ISVs that we are in the process of partnering with to get their stuff into OCI and into Oracle so that you can truly consume the best AI hardware, and the best AI software in the world on Oracle. 'Cause that is what I believe our customers would want the ability to choose from any open source engine, and honestly from any ISV type of solution that is AI powered and they want to use it in their experiences. >> So you mentioned ChatGPT, I want to talk about some of the innovations that are coming. As an AI expert, you see ChatGPT on the one hand, I'm sure you weren't surprised. On the other hand, maybe the reaction in the market, and the hype is somewhat surprising. You know, they say that we tend to under or over-hype things in the early stages and under hype them long term, you kind of use the internet as example. What's your take on that premise? >> So. I think that this type of technology is going to be an inflection point in how software is being developed. I truly believe this. I think this is an internet style moment, and the way software interfaces, software applications are being developed will dramatically change over the next year two or three because of this type of technologies. I think there will be industries that will be shifted. I think education is a good example. I saw this thing opened on my son's laptop. So I think education is going to be transformed. Design industry like images or whatever, it's already been transformed. But I think that for mass adoption, like beyond the hype, beyond the peak of inflected expectations, if I'm using Gartner terminology, I think certain things need to go and happen. One is this thing needs to become more reliable. So right now it is a complete black box that sometimes produce magic, and sometimes produce just nonsense. And it needs to have better explainability and better lineage to, how did you get to this answer? 'Cause I think enterprises are going to really care about the things that they surface with the customers or use internally. So I think that is one thing that's going to come out. And the other thing that's going to come out is I think it's going to come industry specific large language models or industry specific ChatGPTs. Something like how OpenAI did co-pilot for writing code. I think we will start seeing this type of apps solving for specific business problems, understanding contracts, understanding healthcare, writing doctor's notes on behalf of doctors so they don't have to spend time manually recording and analyzing conversations. And I think that would become the sweet spot of this thing. There will be companies, whether it's OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or hopefully Oracle that will use this type of technology to solve for specific very high value business needs. And I think this will change how interfaces happen. So going back to your expense report, the world of, I'm going to go into an app, and I'm going to click on seven buttons in order to get some job done like this world is gone. Like I'm going to say, hey, please do this and that. And I expect an answer to come out. I've seen a recent demo about, marketing in sales. So a customer sends an email that is interested in something and then a ChatGPT powered thing just produces the answer. I think this is how the world is going to evolve. Like yes, there's a ton of hype, yes, it looks like magic and right now it is magic, but it's not yet productive for most enterprise scenarios. But in the next 6, 12, 24 months, this will start getting more dependable, and it's going to change how these industries are being managed. Like I think it's an internet level revolution. That's my take. >> It's very interesting. And it's going to change the way in which we have. Instead of accessing the data center through APIs, we're going to access it through natural language processing and that opens up technology to a huge audience. Last question, is a two part question. And the first part is what you guys are working on from the futures, but the second part of the question is, we got data scientists and developers in our audience. They love the new shiny toy. So give us a little glimpse of what you're working on in the future, and what would you say to them to persuade them to check out Oracle's AI services? >> Yep. So I think there's two main things that we're doing, one is around healthcare. With a new recent acquisition, we are spending a significant effort around revolutionizing healthcare with AI. Of course many scenarios from patient care using computer vision and cameras through automating, and making better insurance claims to research and pharma. We are making the best models from leading organizations, and internal available for hospitals and researchers, and insurance providers everywhere. And we truly are looking to become the leader in AI for healthcare. So I think that's a huge focus area. And the second part is, again, going back to the enterprise AI angle. Like we want to, if you have a business problem that you want to apply here to solve, we want to be your platform. Like you could use others if you want to build everything complicated and whatnot. We have a platform for that as well. But like, if you want to apply AI to solve a business problem, we want to be your platform. We want to be the, again, the Netflix of AI kind of a thing where we are the place for the greatest AI innovations accessible to any developer, any business analyst, any user, any data scientist on Oracle Cloud. And we're making a significant effort on these two fronts as well as developing a lot of the missing pieces, and building blocks that we see are needed in this space to make truly like a great experience for developers and data scientists. And what would I recommend? Get started, try it out. We actually have a shameless sales plug here. We have a free deal for all of our AI services. So it typically cost you nothing. I would highly recommend to just go, and try these things out. Go play with it. If you are a python welding developer, and you want to try a little bit of auto mail, go down that path. If you're not even there and you're just like, hey, I have these customer feedback things and I want to try out, if I can understand them and apply AI and visualize, and do some cool stuff, we have services for that. My recommendation is, and I think ChatGPT got us 'cause I see people that have nothing to do with AI, and can't even spell AI going and trying it out. I think this is the time. Go play with these things, go play with these technologies and find what AI can do to you or for you. And I think Oracle is a great place to start playing with these things. >> Elad, thank you. Appreciate you sharing your vision of making Oracle the Netflix of AI. Love that and really appreciate your time. >> Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> Okay. Thanks for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music playing)

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> If it weren't for Pat Gelsinger, Intel's future would be a disaster. Even with his clear vision, fantastic leadership, deep technical and business acumen, and amazing positivity, the company's future is in serious jeopardy. It's the same story we've been telling for years. Volume is king in the semiconductor industry, and Intel no longer is the volume leader. Despite Intel's efforts to change that dynamic With several recent moves, including making another go at its Foundry business, the company is years away from reversing its lagging position relative to today's leading foundries and design shops. Intel's best chance to survive as a leader in our view, will come from a combination of a massive market, continued supply constraints, government money, and luck, perhaps in the form of a deal with apple in the midterm. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR." In this "Breaking Analysis," we'll update you on our latest assessment of Intel's competitive position and unpack nuggets from the company's February investor conference. Let's go back in history a bit and review what we said in the early 2010s. If you've followed this program, you know that our David Floyer sounded the alarm for Intel as far back as 2012, the year after PC volumes peaked. Yes, they've ticked up a bit in the past couple of years but they pale in comparison to the volumes that the ARM ecosystem is producing. The world has changed from people entering data into machines, and now it's machines that are driving all the data. Data volumes in Web 1.0 were largely driven by keystrokes and clicks. Web 3.0 is going to be driven by machines entering data into sensors, cameras. Other edge devices are going to drive enormous data volumes and processing power to boot. Every windmill, every factory device, every consumer device, every car, will require processing at the edge to run AI, facial recognition, inference, and data intensive workloads. And the volume of this space compared to PCs and even the iPhone itself is about to be dwarfed with an explosion of devices. Intel is not well positioned for this new world in our view. Intel has to catch up on the process, Intel has to catch up on architecture, Intel has to play catch up on security, Intel has to play catch up on volume. The ARM ecosystem has cumulatively shipped 200 billion chips to date, and is shipping 10x Intel's wafer volume. Intel has to have an architecture that accommodates much more diversity. And while it's working on that, it's years behind. All that said, Pat Gelsinger is doing everything he can and more to close the gap. Here's a partial list of the moves that Pat is making. A year ago, he announced IDM 2.0, a new integrated device manufacturing strategy that opened up its world to partners for manufacturing and other innovation. Intel has restructured, reorganized, and many executives have boomeranged back in, many previous Intel execs. They understand the business and have a deep passion to help the company regain its prominence. As part of the IDM 2.0 announcement, Intel created, recreated if you will, a Foundry division and recently acquired Tower Semiconductor an Israeli firm, that is going to help it in that mission. It's opening up partnerships with alternative processor manufacturers and designers. And the company has announced major investments in CAPEX to build out Foundry capacity. Intel is going to spin out Mobileye, a company it had acquired for 15 billion in 2017. Or does it try and get a $50 billion valuation? Mobileye is about $1.4 billion in revenue, and is likely going to be worth more around 25 to 30 billion, we'll see. But Intel is going to maybe get $10 billion in cash from that, that spin out that IPO and it can use that to fund more FABS and more equipment. Intel is leveraging its 19,000 software engineers to move up the stack and sell more subscriptions and high margin software. He got to sell what he got. And finally Pat is playing politics beautifully. Announcing for example, FAB investments in Ohio, which he dubbed Silicon Heartland. Brilliant! Again, there's no doubt that Pat is moving fast and doing the right things. Here's Pat at his investor event in a T-shirt that says, "torrid, bringing back the torrid pace and discipline that Intel is used to." And on the right is Pat at the State of the Union address, looking sharp in shirt and tie and suit. And he has said, "a bet on Intel is a hedge against geopolitical instability in the world." That's just so good. To that statement, he showed this chart at his investor meeting. Basically it shows that whereas semiconductor manufacturing capacity has gone from 80% of the world's volume to 20%, he wants to get it back to 50% by 2030, and reset supply chains in a market that has become important as oil. Again, just brilliant positioning and pushing all the right hot buttons. And here's a slide underscoring that commitment, showing manufacturing facilities around the world with new capacity coming online in the next few years in Ohio and the EU. Mentioning the CHIPS Act in his presentation in The US and Europe as part of a public private partnership, no doubt, he's going to need all the help he can get. Now, we couldn't resist the chart on the left here shows wafer starts and transistor capacity growth. For Intel, overtime speaks to its volume aspirations. But we couldn't help notice that the shape of the curve is somewhat misleading because it shows a two-year (mumbles) and then widens the aperture to three years to make the curve look steeper. Fun with numbers. Okay, maybe a little nitpick, but these are some of the telling nuggets we pulled from the investor day, and they're important. Another nitpick is in our view, wafers would be a better measure of volume than transistors. It's like a company saying we shipped 20% more exabytes or MIPS this year than last year. Of course you did, and your revenue shrank. Anyway, Pat went through a detailed analysis of the various Intel businesses and promised mid to high double digit growth by 2026, half of which will come from Intel's traditional PC they center in network edge businesses and the rest from advanced graphics HPC, Mobileye and Foundry. Okay, that sounds pretty good. But it has to be taken into context that the balance of the semiconductor industry, yeah, this would be a pretty competitive growth rate, in our view, especially for a 70 plus billion dollar company. So kudos to Pat for sticking his neck out on this one. But again, the promise is several years away, at least four years away. Now we want to focus on Foundry because that's the only way Intel is going to get back into the volume game and the volume necessary for the company to compete. Pat built this slide showing the baby blue for today's Foundry business just under a billion dollars and adding in another $1.5 billion for Tower Semiconductor, the Israeli firm that it just acquired. So a few billion dollars in the near term future for the Foundry business. And then by 2026, this really fuzzy blue bar. Now remember, TSM is the new volume leader, and is a $50 billion company growing. So there's definitely a market there that it can go after. And adding in ARM processors to the mix, and, you know, opening up and partnering with the ecosystems out there can only help volume if Intel can win that business, which you know, it should be able to, given the likelihood of long term supply constraints. But we remain skeptical. This is another chart Pat showed, which makes the case that Foundry and IDM 2.0 will allow expensive assets to have a longer useful life. Okay, that's cool. It will also solve the cumulative output problem highlighted in the bottom right. We've talked at length about Wright's Law. That is, for every cumulative doubling of units manufactured, cost will fall by a constant percentage. You know, let's say around 15% in semiconductor world, which is vitally important to accommodate next generation chips, which are always more expensive at the start of the cycle. So you need that 15% cost buffer to jump curves and make any money. So let's unpack this a bit. You know, does this chart at the bottom right address our Wright's Law concerns, i.e. that Intel can't take advantage of Wright's Law because it can't double cumulative output fast enough? Now note the decline in wafer starts and then the slight uptick, and then the flattening. It's hard to tell what years we're talking about here. Intel is not going to share the sausage making because it's probably not pretty, But you can see on the bottom left, the flattening of the cumulative output curve in IDM 1.0 otherwise known as the death spiral. Okay, back to the power of Wright's Law. Now, assume for a second that wafer density doesn't grow. It does, but just work with us for a second. Let's say you produce 50 million units per year, just making a number up. That gets you cumulative output to $100 million in, sorry, 100 million units in the second year to take you two years to get to that 100 million. So in other words, it takes two years to lower your manufacturing cost by, let's say, roughly 15%. Now, assuming you can get wafer volumes to be flat, which that chart showed, with good yields, you're at 150 now in year three, 200 in year four, 250 in year five, 300 in year six, now, that's four years before you can take advantage of Wright's Law. You keep going at that flat wafer start, and that simplifying assumption we made at the start and 50 million units a year, and well, you get to the point. You get the point, it's now eight years before you can get the Wright's Law to kick in, and you know, by then you're cooked. But now you can grow the density of transistors on a chip, right? Yes, of course. So let's come back to Moore's Law. The graphic on the left says that all the growth is in the new stuff. Totally agree with that. Huge term that Pat presented. Now he also said that until we exhaust the periodic table of elements, Moore's Law is alive and well, and Intel is the steward of Moore's Law. Okay, that's cool. The chart on the right shows Intel going from 100 billion transistors today to a trillion by 2030. Hold that thought. So Intel is assuming that we'll keep up with Moore's Law, meaning a doubling of transistors every let's say two years, and I believe it. So bring that back to Wright's Law, in the previous chart, it means with IDM 2.0, Intel can get back to enjoying the benefits of Wright's Law every two years, let's say, versus IDM 1.0 where they were failing to keep up. Okay, so Intel is saved, yeah? Well, let's bring into this discussion one of our favorite examples, Apple's M1 ARM-based chip. The M1 Ultra is a new architecture. And you can see the stats here, 114 billion transistors on a five nanometer process and all the other stats. The M1 Ultra has two chips. They're bonded together. And Apple put an interposer between the two chips. An interposer is a pathway that allows electrical signals to pass through it onto another chip. It's a super fast connection. You can see 2.5 terabytes per second. But the brilliance is the two chips act as a single chip. So you don't have to change the software at all. The way Intel's architecture works is it takes two different chips on a substrate, and then each has its own memory. The memory is not shared. Apple shares the memory for the CPU, the NPU, the GPU. All of it is shared, meaning it needs no change in software unlike Intel. Now Intel is working on a new architecture, but Apple and others are way ahead. Now let's make this really straightforward. The original Apple M1 had 16 billion transistors per chip. And you could see in that diagram, the recently launched M1 Ultra has $114 billion per chip. Now if you take into account the size of the chips, which are increasing, and the increase in the number of transistors per chip, that transistor density, that's a factor of around 6x growth in transistor density per chip in 18 months. Remember Intel, assuming the results in the two previous charts that we showed, assuming they were achievable, is running at 2x every two years, versus 6x for the competition. And AMD and Nvidia are close to that as well because they can take advantage of TSM's learning curve. So in the previous chart with Moore's Law, alive and well, Intel gets to a trillion transistors by 2030. The Apple ARM and Nvidia ecosystems will arrive at that point years ahead of Intel. That means lower costs and significantly better competitive advantage. Okay, so where does that leave Intel? The story is really not resonating with investors and hasn't for a while. On February 18th, the day after its investor meeting, the stock was off. It's rebound a little bit but investors are, you know, they're probably prudent to wait unless they have really a long term view. And you can see Intel's performance relative to some of the major competitors. You know, Pat talked about five nodes in for years. He made a big deal out of that, and he shared proof points with Alder Lake and Meteor Lake and other nodes, but Intel just delayed granite rapids last month that pushed it out from 2023 to 2024. And it told investors that we're going to have to boost spending to turn this ship around, which is absolutely the case. And that delay in chips I feel like the first disappointment won't be the last. But as we've said many times, it's very difficult, actually, it's impossible to quickly catch up in semiconductors, and Intel will never catch up without volume. So we'll leave you by iterating our scenario that could save Intel, and that's if its Foundry business can eventually win back Apple to supercharge its volume story. It's going to be tough to wrestle that business away from TSM especially as TSM is setting up shop in Arizona, with US manufacturing that's going to placate The US government. But look, maybe the government cuts a deal with Apple, says, hey, maybe we'll back off with the DOJ and FTC and as part of the CHIPS Act, you'll have to throw some business at Intel. Would that be enough when combined with other Foundry opportunities Intel could theoretically produce? Maybe. But from this vantage point, it's very unlikely Intel will gain back its true number one leadership position. If it were really paranoid back when David Floyer sounded the alarm 10 years ago, yeah, that might have made a pretty big difference. But honestly, the best we can hope for is Intel's strategy and execution allows it to get competitive volumes by the end of the decade, and this national treasure survives to fight for its leadership position in the 2030s. Because it would take a miracle for that to happen in the 2020s. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to David Floyer for his contributions to this research. Always a pleasure working with David. Stephanie Chan helps me do much of the background research for "Breaking Analysis," and works with our CUBE editorial team. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to get the word out. And thanks to SiliconANGLE's editor in chief Rob Hof, who comes up with a lot of the great titles that we have for "Breaking Analysis" and gets the word out to the SiliconANGLE audience. Thanks, guys. Great teamwork. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast wherever you listen. Just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast." You'll want to check out ETR's website @etr.ai. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You could always get in touch with me on email, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante, and comment on my LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE Insights, Powered by ETR." Have a great week. Stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual; I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great power panel here from Kyndryl whose great company has spun out of IBM. IT services great, technology, great conversation. Scott Kinane, director of worldwide automation, Anand Gopalakrishnan, chief automation architect, love the title, from Kyndryl, and Lisa Chavez, automations architect from Kyndryl. Guys, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Looking forward to it. >> Thanks John glad to be here. >> Thank you. >> Scott, we covered you guys at IBM Think 2021, the new name, everything's happening. The extreme focus, the tactical execution has been pretty much on cloud, cloud native automation. This is the conversation. Knowing how much has gone behind the new name, can you just take a minute to share, give us an update on who Kyndryl is and how that's going? >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, as Kyndryl, we really have the privilege of being responsible for designing, building, managing, and modernizing, you know, the mission critical systems that the world depends on every day, you know? When our thousands of clients span every industry and are leaders in their industries, right? You run the mission critical application environments for, you know, seven of the 10 largest airlines, 28 of the top 50 banks, right? All the largest mobile providers. You know, most of the largest retailers out there, and so on and so forth, right? That these companies really trust us to ensure that their business operations are really flawlessly being run. And operating our scale, and with the quality that these clients demand, is only possible by doing enterprise strength automation. Right? It's only, you know, it's not only about reactive automation, but using intelligent automation so we can predict and prevent issues before they really become a problem. Right? And because of our intelligent approach to automation, our clients have a... you know, they get tremendous business benefits for it, right? Retailers can open stores faster because systems and services are deployed more efficiently, right? Banks ATM's right, we all depend on those day to day, you know. They're working when you need them with our automation behind the scenes. You know, healthcare systems are more robust and responsive because we monitor for potential breaks and prevent them before they occur, right. Data processing systems, right. We hear about breaches all the time, right? Our clients are more secure because their environments are checked into, are checked to ensure that security exposures are quickly discovered and intermediated, right? So like automation, orchestration, intelligence, driving the world's digital economy, right. If you ask what Kyndryl is it, you know, that's our DNA. And it's really what we do well. >> Yeah, what's interesting, I want to get you to just quick followup on that because the name implies kind of a fresh perspective, working together. There's a lot of shared experiences and that. And the new normal now is honestly with hybrid and virtual continuing, people are doing things differently. And I would like you, if you don't mind taking a minute to share about the automation environment that you guys are operating in, because it's a different approach, but the game is still the same. Right? (John and Scott laugh) You got to make sure that these things are scaling and people are working again. So it's a combination of people and technology, in a new equation. Take a minute to talk about that. >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, and you're right, right; the game is really changing. And automation is really ingrained into, needs to be ingrained in the way everybody's approaching what they do day to day. And if you talk about automation, in a way it's really included in what we do in our BAU delivery operations, right. And we do it at a tremendous scale, right. Where we have, you know, millions of infrastructure components and applications managed with automation, right. We're going to talk a little bit about CACF here in a few minutes, right? We've got over half a million devices themselves boarded onto that, and we're running over 11 million automations on a month to month basis through that, through the, the Red Hat technology that that's built on, right. We've got RPA as a key part of our environment, running millions of transactions through that on a yearly basis, right. And our automation's really covering the entire stack, right? It's not just about traditional IT, but we cover public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, you know, network components, applications and business processes, right? You talked about people, right. Help desk, right. We cover automation to automate a lot of the help desk processes are happening behind the scenes; security and resiliency. And it's really about driving all that through, you know, not just prescriptive reactions, but you know, us using our experience; insights we have from our data lakes, and intel, and AI ops technologies, and really making proactive based decisions based on that to really help drive the value back for our clients and to ensure that they're operating the way they need to. >> Yeah, that systems mindset, outcome driven focus is unique. That's awesome, congratulations. And onto Lisa, we're going to get into the architect side of it, because you're seeing more and more automation at the center of all the conversation. Reminds me of the machine learning AI vibe a couple of years ago. It's like, oh yeah, everything's MLAI. Automation, now everything's automation. Anand, your title is chief automation architect, love that title. What do you do? Like, I mean, you're architecting more automation, are you? Could you take a minute to explain your role? I love the title. And automation is really the technology driving a lot of the change. What do you do? >> Thank you, John. So let me first thank you for allowing us to come and speak to you and inform here about what we have done using Ansible and the other Red Hat products. So Ansible is one of the many products that we have used within Red Hat to support the solution that we have deployed, Paul, as our automation community framework, right? So, Scott touched upon it a few minutes earlier in terms of what are we doing for our clients? How do we make sure that our client's environment is secure? How do we make sure that our client environment is available all the time? So that... Are the infrastructure services that we're providing for our clients has a direct impact for their clients. So this is where the implementation of automation using the products that we have from Red Hat has helped us achieve. And we'll continue, we will continue to expand on supporting that, right. So let me break this into two parts. One is from an infrastructure standpoint, how we have implemented the solution and scaled it in such a way that we can support the number of devices that Scott was referring to earlier, And also the number of clients that we have touched on. And the second part, I'll let my colleague Lisa talk about the application architecture and the application scalability that we have, right? So firstly, we touch on infrastructure. So if you look at the way we needed to establish a capability to provide support for our clients, we wanted to make sure our infrastructure is available all the time, right? That's very important. So, before we even basically say, hey, we're going to make sure that our client's infrastructure is available all the time or our client's infrastructure is secure. And also we provide, we are able to provide the automation services for the infrastructure service that we're providing, right? So the stack that we built was to support our solution to be truly cloud native. So we began with of course, using OCP, which is the OpenShift cloud platform that we have. We relied on Red Hat CoreOS, which is basically enabling the automation platform to be deployed as a true cloud native application; that can be scalable to not just within one country, but multiple countries. Supporting data privacy that we need to have, supporting the compliance parts of that we need to support, and scalable to support the half a billion devices that we are supporting today. Right? So essentially, if you look at what we have, is a capability enabled on the entire stack of the Red Hat products that we have. And we are able to focus on ensuring that we are able to provide the automation by gaining efficiencies, right? If you look at a lot of automations that we have it's about biggest in complexities, right? So just think about the amount of risk that we are removing, and the quality that we are assuring from the qualified and standardized changes that we are basically implementing. Or, just, the amount of risk that we are able to eliminate by removing thousands of manual labor hours as well. So if you look at the automation need, it's not just about efficiency of the removal of labor hours, but efficiency of providing standards and efficiency of providing the capabilities that support our clients, who their needs; i.e. making sure that their infrastructure is compliant, their infrastructure is secure, and their infrastructure is highly available all the time. So it just basically making sure that we are able to address what we call as day one and day two activities, while we are able to support their day two infrastructure services activities; i.e. right from ground up. Building the server, which is provisioning, doing some provisioning activities, and deploying applications, and basically supporting the applications once they are deployed. So look at the scale, we have quite a bit there. >> So, you got the cloud native platform... >> Hey, careful Anand... >> You've got the cloud native platform, right? Let me just summarize that; cloud native platform for scale. So that means you're aligning, and targeting, and working with people who will want to do cloud native applications. >> Absolutely. >> And they want fast speed. (John laughing) >> Yes, and they want... >> They want everything to go faster. And by the way, the compliance piece is super important because if you can take that away from them, for waiting for the answers from the compliance department or security department, then that's the flywheel. Is that what you're getting at? This is the trend? >> Absolutely. So I'm going to turn it over to Lisa, who's going to help us. >> Yeah >> Go ahead Lisa >> Lisa, weigh in on the flywheel here. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. So, so one of the things that CACF allows us to do, right, and it's again, as Anand described, `it's a very robust, powerful infrastructure. Supports many, many clients as we run a lot of applications through this infrastructure. And we do things like run security health checks on all our client's servers, and process the data real time and get that data out to our teams to address issues almost immediately, right? Scott touched on the fact that we are monitoring incident data real time and taking automated actions to correct problems in the environment. These are just really, really powerful capabilities that we're able to offer. We also have other use cases, we do a lot of identity management, primary and secondary controls through the CACF infrastructure. So we're able to have one point of connectivity into our client's environments. It's agentless, right, so you set up one connection to their servers and we can do a whole lot of management of various things through this single automation platform. So... >> So I, so that just to call this up, this is actually very powerful. And first of all, you mentioned the CACF that's the cloud automation community framework. >> Yes, correct. >> Right. >> Okay, so that's the platform. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yes >> Okay, so now the platforms' there; and now talk about the advantages. Because the power here is this truly highlights the transformation of DevOps, infrastructure as code, and microservices, coming around the corner where the developer; And I know developers want to build security into the applications from day one and take advantage of new services as they come online. That is now one. That puts the pressure on the old IT teams, the old security teams, who have been the NoOps. No, you can't do or slow, are slower. This is a trend, this is actually happening. And this culture shift is happening. Could you guys weigh in on that because this is a really important part of this story. >> Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you go back, circa 2019 or so, right. You know, we were back then and we were recognized as a leader in the automation space by a lot of the analysts. But we kind of look at that culture change you were just talking about and look at, you know, how do we become more agile? How do we go faster and what we're doing, right. And then I'm working with Jason McKerr and the Red Hat's Ansible automation platform team. We kind of define this platform that Lisa and Anand are talking to, right. Wrapping together, the OpenShift and Ansible, and 3scale with, you know, our services platform with Watson, and, and, you know, it really gave us the ability to leverage two of our core capabilities, right? The first, you know, in order for us to go faster, was our community model, right? Our community experience, right? So we've got a large delivery community that's out there really experts in a lot of, experts in a lot of technologies and industries. And, and by putting this in place, it gave us a way to really leverage them more in that community model development, so they could create, and we can harvest more of the automation playbooks. A lot of the different use cases that Lisa was talking incident remediation, patch scanning and deployment, security compliance, checking and enforcement. You know, basically anything that needs to get done as part of our what we'd call day one or day two operations we do for a client, right. And Steve's approach really to, to do a lot of high quality automation and get to the point where we could get thousands of automation modules that our clients could, that we could use as a part of our, a part of our services we delivered to the client environments. And, you know, that type of speed and agility, and being able to kind of leverage that was something that wasn't there previously. It also gave us a way to leverage, I guess they are one of our other core capabilities, right; which is a systems integrator, right? So we were able to focus more, by having that core engine in place, we were able to form focus more on our integrator experience and integrate, you know, IBM technologies, ServiceNow, ScienceLogic, VMware, and many more, right to the engine itself. So you know, basically, you know, all the applications out there that the, the clients then depend on for their business environments integrate directly with them; so we could more seamlessly bring the automation to their, to their environments, right. So it really gave us both the, the ability to change our culture, have a community model in place that we didn't before and really leveraged that services integrator expertise that we bring to the table, and act really fast on behalf of our clients out there. >> That's great stuff. Lisa, Lisa if you don't mind, could you share your thoughts on what's different about the community platform, and because automation has been around for a while, you do a couple of times, you do something repetitive, you automate it. Automate it out of way, and that's efficiency. Anand was the one saying that. >> Yeah but within Kyndryl, we have a very strong community and we have very strong security guidelines around what the community produces and what we deliver to our clients, right? So, we give our teams a lot of flexibility, but we also make sure that the content is very secure; we do a lot of testing. We have very strong security teams that do actual physical, penetration testing, right. They actually could try and come in and break things. So, you know, we really feel good about, you know, not only do we give our teams the flexibility, but we also, you know, make sure that it's safe for our clients. >> How's the relationship with Ansible evolving? Because as Ansible continues to do well with automation; automations now, like in automation as code, if things are discoverable, reuse is a big topic in the community model. How is Ansible factoring into your success? >> So... So firstly, I want to break this again into two discussions, right? One is the product itself. And second is how we have collaborated very closely with our colleagues at Red Hat, right? So essentially it's the feedback that we get from our clients, which is then fed into our solution, and then from our solution, we basically say, does it meet what our client's requirements are? If it doesn't, then we work with our Red Hat colleagues and say, hey, you know, we need some enhancements to be made. And we've been, we've been lucky enough to work with our colleagues at Red Hat, very closely, where we have been able to make some core product changes to support our clients requirements, right. And that's very, very important in terms of the collaboration from, with Red Hat, from a, you know, from a client standpoint. That's number one. Number two, from a product standpoint, Ansible, and the use of Ansible itself, right? Or Ansible Tower as the automation hub that we've been using. So we began this with a very base product capability, which was through what we call event automation. That was our first. Then we said, no, I think we can certainly look at expanding this to beyond event automation. I.e. can we do, when we say event that is very typically BAU activities, day two activities. But then we said, can we, can we do day one, day two infrastructure services automation? We said yes, why not? And then we worked again with our colleagues at Red Hat, identifying opportunities to improve on those. And we basically enhanced the framework to support those additional use cases that we basically identified. And as a matter of fact, we are continually looking at improving as well. In terms of not just hey, using the base product as is, but also receiving that feedback, giving that feedback to our Red Hat colleagues, and then implementing it as we go. So that's the, that's the approach we have taken. >> And what's the other half of the subject? Split it in two, What's the other half? >> Yep. But the other half is the actual implementation itself. So we like, which is basically expanding the use cases to go from beyond event automation to back from building the server, to also patching compliance. And now we're actually looking at even what we call service requests automation. By this is we basically want to be able to say hey user, we want a specific action to be performed on a particular end point. Can we take it to that next level as well? So that's where we are basically looking at as we progress. So we're not done. I would say we're still at the beginning of expansion. >> Yeah. >> Well no, I totally agree. I think it's early days, and I think a lot of it's, you mentioned day two operations; I love that. Day zero, day one, day two. Does anyone want to take a stab at defining what day two operations is? (John laughing) >> Do you want to go? >> Well, I got the experts here. It's good to get the definitions out there. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause day one you're provisioned, right? >> Day zero, you provision. >> Day zero you provision. >> So day zero they look at... Yeah, so day zero you look at what is the infrastructure, what's the hardware that's there. And then day one you do what we call post provisioning activities, configuring everything that we need to do, like deploying the middleware applications, making sure the applications are configured properly, making sure that our, you know, the operating systems that we need to have. Whether it is a base operating system or operating systems for supporting the containers that are basically going to be enabled, all those will need to be looked at, right? So that's day one. Then day two is business as usual. >> Everything breaks on day two. (everyone laughs) >> Although I... >> Day one's fun, everything's good, we got everything up and running. We stood it up, and day two it breaks; And like, you know it's his fault. >> Exactly. >> Who's fault is it? (everyone laughing) So if you look at the approach that we took was, we said, let's start with the day two, then get to day zero, right. So which time where we have lots of lessons learned as we go through. And that's the expansion of how we are looking at Ansible. >> Well this is, all fun aside. First of all, it's all fun to have, to have to have jokes like that; but the reality is that the hardened operational discipline required to go beyond day one is critical, right? So this is where we start getting into the ops side where security downtime, disruptive operations, it's got to be programmable. And by the way, automation is in there too. So which means that it's not humans it's software running. Right? So, edge is going to complicate the hell out of that too. So, day two becomes super important from an architecture standpoint. You guys are the architects; what's the strategy, what should people be doing? What, what, how should, because day one is fun. You get it up, stand it up. But then it starts getting benefit; people start paying attention. >> Yep. _ And then you need to scale it and harden it. What's the strategy? What should people do? >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about automation, right? It's not... oh, I should, I meant to say John, you know, if it breaks, it's always Anand's fault, always Anand's. (John, Lisa, and Anand laugh) Don't ask any of that. >> I agree. >> Exactly. Thank you, Lisa. (everyone laughing) But, but automate, you know, you know, automation in a lot of conversations, people talk about it as gaining efficiency. And you know, it's not just that, you know, Automation is about de-risking complexities. Right? Think about all the risk that's removed, you know, and quality assured from the codified and standardized changes, right. Think about all the risk removed from eliminating, you know, tens of thousands of manual labor hours that have to be done. And those various things, right, that get done. So, for, we talk about day two operations, what we're doing, getting more automation in there, you know, our focus is definitely how do we de-risk changes? How do we make it safer for the clients? How do we make it more secure for the clients? And how do we ensure that their business operations, you know, are operating at their peak efficiencies? >> Yeah. And as I mentioned, we really go above and beyond on the security. We have much, much, much automated testing. And we also have the penetration testing I was talking about, so. We take security very seriously. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I think what's interesting about what you guys are doing with the platform is, it's cloud native. You start to see not just the replatforming, but the fun parts. When you start thinking about refactoring applications and benefits start to come out of nowhere; I go new benefits, new net, new use cases. So I think the outcomes side of this is interesting. A lot of people talk about, okay let's focus on the cost, but there's now net new positive, potentially revenue impact for your customers. This is kind of where the game changes a lot. What do you guys think about that; 'cuz that's, you know, you always have this argument with folks who are very cost centric, repatriated for getting off the cloud, or let's look at the net new opportunities that are going to be enabled by rapid programming, identifying new workflows, automating them, and creating value. >> Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, you're talking about the future where we're going, things that we do, you know, obviously getting more closer to, and being directly aligned with the DevSecOps teams that are out there. You talk about day two, you know, the closer we are to those guys, the better for, for us and everybody else that's going there, going forward. You know, and as you know, businesses keep returning to their pre COVID level levels, you know, automation gives the possibility and that ones that we were doing gives possibility for hopefully the clients to do more of that revenue capture, right. Being able to, you know, be ahead a little bit earlier, being able to stand up retail stores faster, right. Being able to deploy business-based applications that are, generating revenue for the clients at a you know, you know, at a moment's notice. Things like that are really possible with automation, and possible with the way we've done this solution with Red Hat and our clients, right. And I think we've got tons of benefits there. We're seeing, you know, we've got almost 900 clients supported on it today, right. You know Anand hit on, we've got half a million plus devices that are connected to this, right. And we're seeing things where, you know, the clients are, are, that are on this are, are getting results, you know, Something such as 61% of all tickets being resolved with no human intervention, you know, 84% of their entire service base server base is being checked automatically for security and compliance daily. And, and, you know, we could go through lots of those different metrics, but the, you know, the fact we can do that for our clients gives, gives through automation, gives, you know, our engineers, our delivery community, the ability to closely more closely work with the client to do those revenue generation activities; to help them capture more, more revenue in the market. >> We'll just put that in context, the scale and speed of what's happening with those numbers; I mean, it's significant. It's not like it's a small little test. That's like large scale. Scale's the advantage of cloud. Cloud is a scale game. The advantage is scaling and handling that scale. What's your thoughts? >> Absolutely. So if you basically, again, when we started this, we started small, right. In terms of the use cases that we wanted to tackle, the number of devices that we said we could basically handle, right. But then once we saw the benefits, the initial benefits of how quickly we were able to fix some of the problems from a day one day, two standpoint; or address some of the compliance and patching issues that we needed to look at, right. We, we quickly saw opportunities and said, how fast can we go? And in terms of, well, it's not just how fast can we go in terms of setting up our own infrastructure by you know, saying, hey, we are cloud native. I can just spin up another container and, you know, make sure that I can have another a hundred servers onboarded to support, or a hundred that network devices to be onboarded to support and so on, right. So it was also the scale from a automation standpoint, where we needed to make sure that our resources were skilled, to develop the automations as well. So the scale is not in terms of just the infrastructure, but the scale is also in terms of people that can do the automation in terms of, you know, providing the services for our infrastructure, right. So that's how we approached it. People and then an application and infrastructure. So that included providing education in, in Kyndryl today rose to about 11,000 people that we have trained on Ansible, the use of Ansible, and the use of Ansible Tower, and just even doing development of the playbooks using Ansible. That's a theme. if you look at, if you look at, it's not just infrastructure scale. It's infrastructure scale, application to be able to scale to that infrastructure, and people to be able to scale to what we're trying to do to support our clients as well. >> I think the people think is huge because you have a side benefit here as harmony, and the teams. You got cohesiveness that breeds peace, not war. (everyone laughs) >> Absolutely. >> That's between teams. >> If you look at the, you know, the words that we said; cloud automation, community framework. If you really break it down, right, it's a framework, but for who? It's for the community. >> Yeah. >> But, what are they doing? They're building automation. >> Yeah >> And that is what >> The Security team wants to, >> the cloud is about, right? >> The security team wants to, make the apps go faster, The apps want to be fast, they don't want to be waiting. Everything's about going faster; Pass, shoot, score, as they say in sports. But, but, okay, I love this conversation. I think it's going to be the beginning of a big wave. How do people engage and how do I get involved if I want to use the cloud automation community framework? What's the consumption side for, how do you guys push this out there, and how do people engage with you? >> Scott do you want to take that one? >> Yeah. I mean the, the easiest way is, you know, Kyndryl, you know, we're, we're out there. We're, coming forward with our company, a spin off from IBM, come engage with our sales reps, come engage with our, our outsourcing, our social risk management service delivery organizations, and, and, you know, happy to get them engaged, get them on board, and get them using the automation framework we've got in place. >> That's awesome. Great. Well, great stuff. Love the automation conversation. Automation and hybrid are the big, big trends that are never going to stop. It's going to be a hybrid world we live in. And the edge is exciting. It's got, you mentioned the edge; it's just more and more action. It's a distributed computing paradigm. I mean, it really the same. We've seen this movie before Anand. Yeah, in tech. So now it's automation. So great stuff. Lisa, thank you for coming on; I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you, John. We have coverage for Ansible Fest 2021. Power panel breaking down automation with Kyndryl. The importance of community, the importance of cohesiveness with teams, but more importantly, the outcome, the speed of development and security. I'm John for theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to this cube conversation, on cube on cloud startups. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're wrapping up the closing keynote fireside chat of the AWS showcase, the hottest startups in data and cloud. We've got some great guests here to eluminate what's happened and why it's important. And Michael Skok who's the founding partner, Michael Skok founding partner of Underscore VC, Mike Feinstein, principal business development manager, and the best Ben Haynes CIO advisor Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this closing keynote for the AWS showcase. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, first of all-- >> Happy to be here >> Guys, do you guys have a unique background from startup funding, growing companies, managing these partners at AWS and being a practitioner with Ben here. The first question I have is, what is the real market opportunity? We've heard from McKinsey that there's a trillion dollars of unlocked value in cloud and that really is going to come from all enterprises big and small. So the question is that that's what every wants to know. What's the secret answer key to the to the test if you are a business. 'Cause you don't want to be on the wrong side of cloud history here. There is a playbook, there's some formation of patterns and there's some playbook things happening out there. How do you guys see this? >> Well, I can try to take a crack at that. First of all I think, there's not only one playbook, you know, only one recipe. If it's a trillion dollar opportunity, that's in the aggregate. There's many different types of opportunities. I think you could have existing companies that are maybe older line companies that need to change the way they're doing things. You can have the younger companies that are trying to take advantage of all the data they've already collected and try to get more value out of it. There could be some radically different types of opportunities with newer technology. I think, you know, for each company just like each of the companies here at the showcase today, they are targeting some, you know, segment of this. Each of those segments is already large. And I think you're going to see a wide range of solutions taking hold here. >> Yeah, cloud drives a lot of value. Michael, I want to get your thoughts. You know, you've seen the software revolution you know, over the years. This time it seems to be accelerated, the time to value, if you're a startup. I mean, you couldn't ask for the perfect storm for our innovation if you're coming out of MIT, Stanford, any college. If you're not even going to school you can get in cloud, do anything. Starting software now is not as hard as it was or its different. What's your perspective because you know, these companies are adding treated value and they're going into an enterprise market that wants scale, they want the reliability. How do you see this evolving? >> You know, the very first time I saw Bezos get on stage and pitch AWS he said one thing which is, "We take away all the hard stuff about starting a software business and let you focus on the innovation." And I think that's still applies. So you're dead right John. And honestly, most founders don't want to spend any time on anything other than unique piece of innovation that they're going to deliver for their customers. So, I think that is fabulous news. I'm going to joke for a second, so I think we're all under shooting on this number. I mean, the reality is that every part of compute infrastructure that we talk about today was built from an infrastructure that's you know, decades old. By which I mean 30 to 50 decades in some 30 to 50 years in some cases. And we look forward in 30 to 50 years, we won't be talking about cloud or everything else. We'll be just talking about computing or whatever it is that we want to talk about at the edge. Or the application of data that you know, in a car and an ARVR heads up display that's helping surgeons work across the world. The fact is the only way this is really going to work is on the cloud. So I think it's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, we're just taking a snapshot of it right now. And we're in an interesting point because of course digital transformation has been rapidly accelerated. I mean, there's all these jokes about you know, we've had five years of transformation in five months. I don't really care what the number is but what is obvious is that we couldn't have gone off to work and to play and to teach and all these other things without the cloud. And we just took it for granted but a year ago, that's what we all did and look, they're thriving. This whole thing is that, you know, a live broadcast that we're doing on the cloud. So yeah, I think it's a very big opportunity and whatever sector I think to Mike's point, that you look at and all the companies that you've seen this morning prove that, if you want to innovate today, you start on the cloud. Your cloud native as I would say. And as you grow, you will be a cloud assumed. It will be the basis on which everybody wants to access your products and services. So I'm excited about the future if you can't tell. >> I totally subscribe to that. Ben, I want to get your take as the CIO, now advisor to companies. If you're going to look at what Michael's laying out, which is born in the cloud native, they have an advantage, an inherent advantage right out of the gate. They have speed agility and scale. If you're an existing business you say, "Wait a minute I'm going to be competed against these hot startups." There's some serious fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed, right? I mean, you might go out of business. So this is the real threat. This is not just talked about, there's real examples now playing out. So as a practitioner, thinking about re-architecting or rejuvenating or pivoting or just being competitive. It's really the pressure's there. How do you see this? >> Yeah I know it really is. And every enterprise company and through every decade is it's a buyer versus build conversation. And with the cloud opportunities, you can actually build a lot quicker or you can leverage companies that can even go quicker than you that have a focus on innovation. 'Cause sometimes enterprise companies, it's hard to focus on the really cool stuff and that's going to bring value but maybe it won't. So if you can partner with someone and some of these companies that you just showcase, start doing some amazing things. That can actually help accelerate your own internal innovation a lot quicker than trying to spool up your own team. >> We heard some companies talking about day two operations lift and shift, not a layup either. I mean, lift and shift if not done properly as it's well discussed. And McKinsey actually puts that in their report as there's other point outs. It's not a no brainer. I mean, it's a no brainer to go to the cloud but if you lift and shift without really thinking it through or remediating anything, it could be, it could cost more. And you got the CAPEX and OPEX dynamics. So, certainly cloud is happening and this kind of gives a great segue into our next topic that I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on. And that is the business model, the business structure, business organization. Michael you brought up some interesting topics around, some of the new ideas that could be, you know, decentralized or just different consumption capabilities on both sides of the equation. So, the market's there, trillions and trillions of dollars are shifting and the spoils will go to the ones who are smart and agile and fast. But the business model, you could have it, you could be in the right market, but the wrong business model. Who wants to take the first cut at that? >> Mike do you want to go? >> Sure, I'd be happy to. I think that, you know, I mean again, there's not there only going to be one answer but I think one of the things that really make sense is that the business models can be much more consumption-based. You're certainly not going to see annual software licenses that you saw in the old world. Things are going to be much more consumption-based obviously software is a service type of models. And you're going to see, I think lots of different innovations. I've also seen a lot of companies that are starting up kind of based on open source as like a first foray. So there's an open source project that really catches hold. And then a company comes up behind it to both enhance it and to also provide support and to make it a real enterprise offering. But they get there early quick adoption of the frontline engineers by starting off with an open source project. And that's a model that I've seen work quite well. And I think it's a very interesting one. So, you know, the most important thing is that the business model has to be one that's as flexible as what the solutions are that you're trying to get the customers to adopt. The old way of everything being kind of locked in and rigid isn't going to work in this world 'cause you have to just really be agile. >> I want to come back to you Mike in a second on this 'cause I know Amazon's got some innovative go to market stuff. Michael you've written about this, I've read many blog posts on your side about SaaS piece. What's your take on business structure. I mean, obviously with remote, it's clear people are recognizing virtual companies are available. You mentioned you know, edge and compute, and these new app, these emerging technologies. Does the business structure and models shift? Do you have to be on certain side of this business model innovation? How do you view? 'Cause you're seeing the startups who are usually crazy at first, but then they become correct at the end of the day. What's your take? >> Well first of all, I love this debate because it's over. We used to have things that were not successful that would become shelfware. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. There is no shelfware. You're either live and being used or you're dead. So the great news about this is, it's very visible. You know, you can measure every person's connection to you for how long and what they're doing. And so the people that are smart, don't start with this question, the business model. They start with what am I actually doing for my user that's in value them? So I'll give you some examples like build on Mike's team. So, you know, I backed a company called Acquia. But it was based on an open source project called Drupal. Which was initially used for content management. Great, but people started building on it and over time, it became used for everything from the Olympics and hosting, you know, theirs to the Grammy's, to you know, pick your favorite consumer brand that was using it to host all of their different brands and being very particular about giving people the experiences. So, it's now a digital experience platform. But the reason that it grew successfully as a company is because on top of the open source project, we could see what people were doing. And so we built what in effect was the basis for them to get comfortable. By the way, Amazon is very fundamental partner in this was, became an investor extremely helpful. And again, took away all the heavy lifting so we could focus on the innovation. And so that's an example of what's going on. And the model there is very simple. People are paying for what they use to put that digital experience of that, to create a great customer journey. And for people to have the experience that obviously you know, makes the brand look good or makes the audience feel great if it's the Grammy's or whatever it is. So I think that's one example, but I'll give you two others because they are totally different. And one of the most recent investments we made is in a company called Coder. Which is a doc spelled backwards. and it's a new kind of doc that enables people to collaborate and to bring data and graphics and workflow and everything else, all into the simplicity of what's like opening up a doc. And they don't actually charge anybody who uses their docs. They just charge for people who make their docs. So its a make a best pricing, which is very interesting. They've got phenomenal metrics. I mean they're like over 140% net dollar retention, which is astoundingly good. And they grew over three and a half times last year. So that's another model, but it's consumer and it's, you know, as I said, make a price. And then, you know, another company we've been involved with if I look at it way back was Demand Web. It was the first e-commerce on demand company. We didn't charge for the software at all. We didn't charge for anything in fact. what we did was to take a percentage of the sales that went through the platform. And of course everybody loved that because, you know, if we were selling more or getting better uplift then everybody started to do very well. So, you know, the world's biggest brands moved online and started using our platform because they didn't want to create all that infrastructure. Another totally different model. And I could go on but the point is, if you start from the customer viewpoint like what are you doing for the customer? Are you helping them sell more? Or are you helping them build more effective business processes or better experiences? I think you've got a fantastic opportunity to build a great model in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a great point. I think that's a great highlight also call out for expectations become the experience, as the old saying goes. If a customer sees value in something, you don't have to be tied to old ways of selling or pricing. And this brings up, Ben, I want to tie in you in here and maybe bring Mike back in. As an enterprise, it used to be the old adage of, well startups are unreliable, blah, blah, blah, you know, they got to get certified and enterprise usually do things more complicated than say consumer businesses. But now Amazon has all kinds of go to market. They have the marketplace, they have all kinds of the partner networks. This certification integration is a huge part of this. So back to, you know, Michael's point of, if you're dead you're dead or knows it, but if you're alive you usually have some momentum it's usually well understood, but then you have to integrate. So it has to be consumable for the enterprise. So Ben, how do you see that? Because at the end of the day, there's this desire for the better product and the better use case. That can, how do I procure it? Integration? These used to be really hard problems. Seems to be getting easier or are they? What's your take? >> Not 100%. I mean, even five years ago you would have to ask a lot of startups for a single sign on and as table stakes now. So the smart ones are understanding the enterprise principles that we need and a lot of it is around security. And then, they're building that from the start, from the start of their products. And so if you get out of that security hurdle, the stability so far is a lot more improved because they are, you know, a lot more focused and moving in a really, really quick way which can help companies, you know, move quickly. So definitely seen an improvement and there's still, the major entry point is credit card, small user base, small pricing, so you're not dealing with procurement. And building your way up into the big purchase model, right? And that model hasn't changed except the start is a lot lot quicker and a lot easier to get going. >> You know, I remember the story of the Amazon web stores, how they won the CIA contract is someone put a test on a credit card and IBM had the deal in their back pocket. They had the Ivory Tower sales call, Michael, you know the playbook on enterprise sales, you know, you got the oracles and you guys call it the top golf tournament smoothing and then you got the middle and then you got the bottoms up you got the, you know, the data dogs of the world who can just come in with freemium. So there's different approaches. How do you guys see that? Michael and Mike, I'd love for you to weigh in on this because this is really where there's no one answer, but depending upon the use case, there's certain motions that work better. Can you elaborate on which companies should pay attention to what and how customers should understand how they're buying? >> Yeah, I can go first on that. I think that first of all, with every customer it's going to be a little different situation, depends on the scale of the solution. But I find that, these very large kind of, you know, make a huge decision and buy some really big thing all at once. That's not happening very much anymore. As you said John, people are kind of building up it's either a grassroots adoption that then becomes an enterprise sale, or there is some trials or smaller deployments that then build up at enterprise sales. Companies can't make those huge mistake. So if they're going to make a big commitment it's based on confidence, that's come from earlier success. And one of the things that we do at AWS in addition to kind of helping enterprises choose the right technology partners, such as many of the companies here today. We also have solutions partners that can help them analyze the market and make the choice and help them implement it. So depending on the level of help that they need, there's lots of different resources that are going to be available to help them make the right choice the first time. >> Michael, your thoughts on this, because ecosystems are a part of the entire thing and partnering with Amazon or any cloud player, you need to be secure. You need to have all the certifications. But the end of the day, if it works, it works. And you can consume it whatever way you can. I mean, you can buy download through the marketplace. You can go direct, it's free. What do you see as the best mix of go to market from a cloud standpoint? Given that there's a variety of different use cases. >> Well, I'm going to play off Ben and Mike on this one and say, you know, there's a perfect example of what Ben brought up, which is single sign on. For some companies, if you don't have that you just can't get in the door. And at the other extreme to what Mike is saying, you know, there are reasons why people want to try stuff before they buy it. And so, you've got to find some way in between these two things to either partner with the right people that have the whole product solution to work with you. So, you know, if you don't have single sign on, you know, go work with Okta. And if you don't have all the certification that's needed well, work with AWS and you know, take it on that side of cash and have better security than anybody. So there's all sorts of ways to do this. But the bottom line is I think you got to be able to share value before you charge. And I'll give you two examples that are extreme in our portfolio, because I think it will show the sort of the edge with these two things. You know, the first one is a company called Popcart. It's been featured a lot in the press because when COVID hit, nobody could find whatever it was, that TP or you know, the latest supplies that they wanted. And so Popcart basically made it possible for people to say, "Okay, go track all the favorite suppliers." Whether it's your Walmarts or your Targets or your Amazons, et cetera. And they would come back and show you the best price and (indistinct) it cost you nothing. Once you started buying of course they were getting (indistinct) fees and they're transferring obviously values so everybody's doing well. It's a win-win, doesn't cost the consumer anything. So we love those strategies because, you know, whenever you can make value for people without costing them anything, that is great. The second one is the complete opposite. And again, it's an interesting example, you know, to Ben's point about how you have to work with existing solutions in some cases, or in some cases across more things to the cloud. So it's a company called Cloud Serum. It's also one we've partnered with AWS on. They basically help you save money as you use AWS. And it turns out that's important on the way in because you need to know how much it's going to cost to run what you're already doing off premises, sorry off the cloud, into the cloud. And secondly, when you move it there to optimize that spend so you don't suddenly find yourself in a situation where you can't afford to run the product or service. So simply put, you know, this is the future. We have to find ways to specifically make it easy again from the customer standpoint. The get value as quickly as possible and not to push them into anything that feels like, Oh my God, that's a big elephant of a risk that I don't obviously want to take on. >> Well, I'd like to ask the next question to Michael and Ben. This is about risk management from an enterprise perspective. And the reason Michael we just want to get you in here 'cause you do risk for living. You take risks, you venture out and put bets on horses if you will. You bet on the startups and the growing companies. So if I'm a customer and this is a thing that I'm seeing both in the public and private sector where partnerships are super critical. Especially in public right now. Public private partnerships, cybersecurity and data, huge initiatives. I saw General Keith Alexander talking about this, about his company and a variety of reliance on the private problem. No one winning formula anymore. Now as an enterprise, how do they up level their skill? How do you speak to enterprises who are watching and learning as they're taking the steps to be cloud native. They're training their people, they're trying to get their IT staff to be superpowers. They got to do all these. They got to rejuvenate, they got to innovate. So one of the things that they got to take in is new partnerships. How can an enterprise look at these 10 companies and others as partners? And how should the startups that are growing, become partners for the enterprise? Because if they can crack that code, some say that's the magical formula. Can you guys weigh in on that? (overlapping chatter) >> Look, the unfortunate starting point is that they need to have a serious commitment to wanting to change. And you're seeing a lot of that 'cause it is popping up now and they're all nodding their heads. But this needs people, it needs investment, and it needs to be super important, not just to prior, right? And some urgency. And with that behind you, you can find the right companies and start partnering to move things forward. A lot of companies don't understand their risk profile and we're still stuck in this you know, the old days of global network yet infiltrated, right? And that's sort of that its like, "Oh my God, we're done." And it's a lot more complicated now. And there needs to be a lot of education about the value of privacy and trust to our consumers. And once the executive team understands that then the investments follow. The challenge there is everyone's waiting, hoping that nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong, oh, we better address that, right? And so how do we get ahead of that? And you need a very proactive CSO and CIO and CTO and all three if you have them really pushing this agenda and explaining what these risks are. >> Michael, your thoughts. Startups can be a great enabler for companies to change. They have their, you know, they're faster. They bring in new tech to the scenario scene. What's your analysis? >> Again, I'll use an example to speak to some of the things that Ben's talking about. Which is, let's say you decide you want to have all of your data analysis in the cloud. It turns out Amazon's got a phenomenal set of services that you can use. Do everything from ingest and then wrangle your data and get it cleaned up, and then build one of the apps to gain insight on it and use AI and ML to make that whole thing work. But even Amazon will be the first to tell you that if you have all their services, you need a team understand the development, the operations and the security, DevSecOps, it's typically what it's referred to. And most people don't have that. If you're sure and then say you're fortune 1000, you'll build that team. You'll have, you know, a hundred people doing that. But once you get below that, even in the mid tier, even in a few billion dollar companies, it's actually very hard to have those skills and keep them up to date. So companies are actually getting built that do all of that for you, that effectively, you know, make your services into a product that can be run end to end. And we've invested in one and again we partnered with Amazon on gold Kazina. They effectively make the data lake as a service. And they're effectively building on top of all the Amazon services in orchestrating and managing all that DevSecOps for you. So you don't need that team. And they do it in, you know, days or weeks, not months or years. And so I think that the point that Ben made is a really good one. Which is, you know, you've got to make it a priority and invest in it. And it doesn't just happen. It's a new set of skills, they're different. They require obviously everything from the very earliest stage of development in the cloud, all the way through to the sort of managing and running a bit. And of course maintaining it all securely and unscalable, et cetera. (overlapping chatter) >> It's interesting you bring up that Amazon's got great security. You mentioned that earlier. Mike, I wanted to bring you in because you guys it's graduating a lot of startups, graduating, it's not like they're in school or anything, but they're really, you're building on top of AWS which is already, you know, all the SOC report, all the infrastructure's there. You guys have a high bar on security. So coming out of the AWS ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. I mean, you got to kind of go through and I've heard from many startups that you know, that's a grueling process. And this is, should be good news for the enterprise. How are you guys seeing that partnership? What's the pattern recognition that we can share with enterprises adopting startups coming on the cloud? What can they expect? What are some best practices? What are the things to look for in adopting startup technologies? >> Yeah, so as you know we have a shared security model where we do the security for the physical infrastructure that we're operating, and then we try to share best practices to our partners who really own the security for their applications. Well, one of the benefits we have particularly with the AWS partner network is that, we will help vet these companies, we will review their security architecture, we'll make recommendations. We have a lot of great building blocks of services they can use to build their applications, so that they have a much better chance of really delivering a more secure total application to the enterprise customer. Now of course the enterprise customers still should be checking this and making sure that all of these products meet their needs because that is their ultimate responsibility. But by leveraging the ecosystem we have, the infrastructure we have and the strength of our partners, they can start off with a much more secure application or use case than they would if they were trying to build it from scratch. >> All right. Also, I want to get these guys out of the way in on this last question, before we jump into the wrap up. products and technologies, what is the most important thing enterprises should be focused on? It could be a list of three or four or five that they should be focused on from emerging technologies or a technology secret sauce perspective. Meaning, I'm going to leverage some new things we're going to build and do or buy from cloud scale. What are the most important product technology issues they need to be paying attention to? >> I think I'll run with that first. There's a major, major opportunity with data. We've gone through this whole cycle of creating data lakes that tended to data's forms and big data was going to solve everything. Enterprises are sitting on an amazing amount of information. And anything that can be done to, I actually get insights out of that, and I don't mean dashboards, PI tools, they're like a dime a dozen. How can we leverage AI and ML to really start getting some insights a lot quicker and a lot more value to the company from the data they owns. Anything around that, to me is a major opportunity. >> Now I'm going to go just a little bit deeper on that 'cause I would agree with all those points that Ben made. I think one of the real key points is to make sure that they're really leveraging the data that they have in kind of in place. Pulling in data from all their disparate apps, not trying to generate some new set of data, but really trying to leverage what they have so they can get live information from the disparate apps. Whether it's Salesforce or other systems they might have. I also think it's important to give users the tools to do a lot of their own analytics. So I think definitely, you know, kind of dashboards are a dime a dozen as Ben said, but the more you can do to make it really easy for users to do their own thing, so they're not relying on some central department to create some kind of report for them, but they can innovate on their own and do their own analytics of the data. I think its really critical to help companies move faster. >> Michael? >> I'll just build on that with an example because I think Ben and Mike gave two very good things, you know, data and making it self service to the users et cetera So, an example is one of our companies called Salsify, which is B2B commerce. So they're enabling brands to get their products out into the various different channels the day that people buy them on. Which by the way, an incredible number of channels have been created, whether it's, you know, Instagram at one extreme or of course you know, traditional commerce sites is another. And it's actually impossible to get all of the different capabilities of your product fully explained in the right format in each of those channels humanly. You actually have to use a computer. So that highlights the first thing I was thinking is very important is, what could you not do before that you can now do in the cloud? And you know, do in a distributed fashion. So that's a good example. The second thing is, and Mike said it very well, you know, if you can give people the data that Ben was referring to in a way that they line a business user, in this case, a brand manager, or for example the merchandiser can actually use, they'll quickly tell you, "Oh, these three channels are really not worth us spending a lot of money on. We need waste promotion on them. But look at this one, this one's really taking up. This TikTok thing is actually worth paying attention to. Why don't we enable people to buy, you know, products there?" And then focus in on it. And Salsify, by the way, is you know, I can give you stats with every different customer they've got, but they've got huge brands. The sort of Nestlés, the L'Oreals et cetera. Where they're measuring in terms of hundreds of percent of sales increase, because of using the data of Ben's point and making itself service to Mike's point. >> Awesome. Thought exercise for this little toss up question, for anyone who wants to grab it. If you had unlimited budget for R&D, and you wanted to play the long game and you wanted to take some territory down in the future. What technology and what area would you start carving out and protecting and owning or thinking about or digging into. There's a variety of great stuff out there and you know, being prepared for potentially any wildcards, what would it be? >> Well, I don't mind jumping in. That's a tough question. Whatever I did, I would start with machine learning. I think we're still just starting to see the benefits of what this can do across all of different applications. You know, if you look at what AWS has been doing, we, you know, we recently, many of our new service offerings are integrating machine learning in order to optimize automatically, to find the right solution automatically, to find errors in code automatically. And I think you're going to see more and more machine learning built into all types of line of business applications. Sales, marketing, finance, customer service. You know, you already see some of it but I think it's going to happen more and more. So if I was going to bet on one core thing, it would be that. >> I'll jump on that just because I-- >> You're VC, do you think about this as an easy one for you. >> Well, yes or no (indistinct) that I've been a VC now for too long. I was you know (indistinct) for 21 years. I could have answered that question pretty well but in the last 19 of becoming a VC, I've become ruined by just capital being put behind things. But in all seriousness, I think Mike is right. I think every single application is going to get not just reinvented completely reimagined by ML. Because there's so much of what we do that there is indeed managing the data to try to understand how to improve the business process. And when you can do that in an automated fashion and with a continuous close loop that improves it, it takes away all the drudgery and things like humans or the other extreme, you know, manufacturing. And in-between anything that goes from border to cash faster is going to be good for business. And that's going to require ML. So it's an exciting time ahead. That's where we're putting our money. >> Ben, are you going to go off the board here or you're going to stay with machine learning and dating, go wild card here. Blockchain? AR? VR? (overlapping chatter) >> Well I'd have to say ML and AI applying to privacy and trust. Privacy and trust is going to be a currency that a lot of companies need to deal with for a long time coming. And anything you can do to speed that up and honestly remove the human element, and like Michael said, there's a lot of, before there's a lot of services on AWS that are very creative. There's a lot of security built-in But it's that one S3 bucket that someone left open on the internet, that causes the breach. So how are we automating that? Like how do we take the humans out of this process? So we don't make human errors to really get some security happening. >> I think trust is an interesting one. Trust is kind of data as well. I mean, communities are, misinformation, we saw that with elections, huge. Again, that's back to data. We're back to data again. >> You know, John if I may, I'd like to add to that though. It's a good example of something that none of us can predict. Which is, what will be a fundamentally new way of doing this that we haven't really thought of? And, you know, the blockchain is effectively created a means for people to do distributed computing and also, you know, sharing of data, et cetera. Without the human being in the middle and getting rid of many of the intermediaries that we thought were necessary. So, I don't know whether it's the next blockchain or there's blockchain itself, but I have a feeling that this whole issue of trust will become very different when we have new infrastructure. >> I think I agree with everyone here. The data's key. I come back down to data whether you're telling the sovereignty misinformation, the data is there. Okay. Final, final question before we wrap up. This has been amazing on a more serious note for the enterprise folks out there and people in general and around the world. If you guys could give a color commentary answer to, what the post COVID world will look like. With respect to technology adoption, societal impact and technology for potentially good and aura for business. Now that we're coming closer to vaccines and real life again, what is the post COVID world going to look like? What do we learn from it? And how does that translate into everyday in real life benefits? >> Well, I think one of the things that we've seen is that people have realized you can do a lot of work without being in the office. You could be anywhere as long as you can access the data and make the insights from it that you need to. And so I think there's going to be an expectation on the part of users, that there'll be able to do that all the time. They'll be able to do analytics on their phone. They'll be able to do it from wherever they are. They'll be able to do it quickly and they'll be able to get access to the information that they need. And that's going to force companies to continue to be responsive to the expectations and the needs of their users, so that they can keep people productive and have happy employees. Otherwise they're going to go work somewhere else. >> Michael, any thoughts? Post COVID, what do we learn? What happens next? >> You said one key thing Mike, expectations. And I think we're going to live in a very difficult world because expectations are completely unclear. And you might think it's based on age, or you might think it's based on industry or geography, etc. The reality is people have such wildly different expectations and you know, we've tried to do surveys and to try and understand, you know, whether there are some patterns here. I think it's going to be one word, hybrid. And how we deal with hybrid is going to be a major leadership challenge. Because it's impossible to predict what people will do and how they will behave and how they want to for example, go to school or to you know, go to work or play, et cetera. And so I think the third word that I would use is flexibility. You know, we just have to be agile and flexible until we figure out, you know, how this is going to settle out, to get the best of both worlds, because there's so much that we've learned that has been to your point, really beneficial. The more productivity taking out the community. But there's also a lot of things that people really want to get back to such as social interaction, you know, connecting with their friends and living their lives. >> Ben, final word. >> So I'll just drill in on that a little bit deeper. The war on talent, if we talk about tech, if we talk a lot about data, AI, ML. That it's going to be a big differentiator for the companies that are willing to maintain a work from home and your top level resources are going to be dictating where they're working from. And they've seen our work now. And you know, if you're not flexible with how you're running your organization, you will start to lose talent. And companies are going to have to get their head around that as we move forward. >> Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. That's a great wrap up to this cube on cloud, the AWS startup showcase. Thank you very much on behalf of Dave Vellante, myself, the entire cube team and Amazon web services. Thank you very much for closing out the keynote. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you John and thanks Amazon for a great day. >> Yeah, thank you John. >> Okay, that's a wrap for today. Amazing event. Great keynote, great commentary, 10 amazing companies out there growing, great traction. Cloud startup, cloud scale, cloud value for the enterprise. I'm John Furrier on behalf of theCUBE and Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual Coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person. This year because of the pandemic, we're doing it remote. We're Cube Virtual covering AWS re:Invent Virtual. I'm John for your host. We are theCUBE Virtual, two great guests here Linda Tong a general manager, AppDynamics and Dave McCann vice-president of AWS migration, marketplace and control services. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Good to see you again John. >> Linda we were talking to some AppDynamics folks and some of your customers, obviously we've been following the growth of the marketplace for many years. The confluence of the tailwinds of the innovation going on with COVID and post COVID strategies is about helping customers where they are and they're not in the office anymore. They got to get the job done. This is really important on this cloud migration of getting software in the hands of people to write these modern apps. It's a big theme. What's your perspective on this right now, because you guys are partnered with Amazon, share your vision. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you nailed it. It's with COVID-19 our customers like IT organizations are finding this need to accelerate their migration to the cloud. And what's more important is they're finding that more and more of their customers are engaging through digital experiences and with the influx of people leaning on those digital experiences during COVID, performance issues are becoming more and more apparent. And so we're helping our customers as they migrate to the cloud. And specifically to AWS, it's a big partnership for us because we need to understand how our customers and how they manage performance through these transitions can stay flawless so that they can manage those experiences for their end users. >> Yeah, Dave, I've been watching this discovery observation space, observability, service meshes, Kubernetes, cloud native higher level services have really gotten popularity have gone mainstream. So there's more and more demand for I won't call it point products. That's an old term, but in the cloud, these are just higher level services that people are adopting more of. You're seeing huge pickup in the marketplace of companies who are selling through there and engaging but it's not just selling, you're integrating. What's your vision for all of this? >> So, John, you're absolutely right. Our customers as they migrate more and more applications to the cloud and in some regulated industries they still have applications running on premise. They're really actually standing up a new operating model where they not only want observability of what's going on but I feel what we would call service management framework or a set of tools to manage the application portfolio. And companies around the world are putting together new common instance of AWS native services, such as CloudWatch CloudTrail, Service Catalog, AWS Config, Control Tower with best in class vendors like Cisco AppDynamics. And each company is building their own collection of tools into management framework that allows them to optimally modernize and manage their application portfolio. And it's a rising topic around the world. >> Linda, I want to get back to you on AppDynamics you're the leader of the team as general manager, congratulations. You know a little bit about software in the cloud and CloudScale and your career going back to Google now at AppDynamics you've seen a lot of the changes. What specifically value do you see AppDynamics and Amazon bringing to the market today? Because the world's changed. It's still large scale, there's faster speed but you can't just buy things like anymore, I've got to go in send a ticket request, go to procurement, developers want to integrate immediately. They need to integrate when they see a problem they got to integrate technology. This seems to be a trend. What's your, where is AppDynamics bringing the value of AWS to the market? >> Absolutely I think it's threefold. One it's for a lot of these developers, as they start to migrate their applications and modernize them with AWS and all the great services that are available we can partner to help them with that modernization effort while giving them visibility into the performance of those applications to make sure that they don't miss a beat as they deploy those on these new sets of services over AWS. The second thing is, for those customers that are leveraging AWS for that migration, we have a seamless integration between AppDynamics and AWS. So you can buy our service directly through AWS marketplace. So that becomes a really easy procurement. And then on top of that, as, a lot of developers have to manage hybrid employments, so new modern applications has done AWS as well as some of their traditional applications that are talking to each other. They can get that full end to end visibility leveraging AppDynamics so that they can understand what's going on across the entirety of their business as they start to lead these transformations across our organization. >> Dave, just comment on if you can, 'cause I know a little bit about some of the things you put in place, the enterprise I forget development or sales program where at the prices can be more friendly. I think this is kind of a use case where this is proving enterprises can get what they need in the marketplace that not only is it successful but you have traction with this. What's you take on... >> There's a number of motions that we're doing there John, to help large companies around the world who may have, dozens, hundreds and in comes cases with fortune 100 they're thousands of applications. And so you actually have to solve multiple challenges that the company has. On the procurement side, we're obviously working with AppDynamics to publish as a service right in AWS marketplace. And we have over 300,000 customers worldwide only AWS marketplace who are subscribing to software and provisioning out to hundreds and thousands of developers, all of whom are using their own AWS accounts. So on that provisioning and subscription experience we work deeply with the AppDynamics team to meet that a really seamless experience from discovery to provision to meter and billing. On the interoperability front, as Linda mentioned, our customers want these best in class tools like AppDynamics to work well with the other AWS services so that they can really have a very modern DevOps pipeline for those applications that are moving to more of a CICD model. And for people who are still running in a bit more of an Intel, ITSM model, they've still got to manage and monitor applications that haven't quite got there in the full modernization stack. So this is actually happening not just with the customer, the enterprise or with the ISV AppDynamics, this transitions' also working with all the consulting firms. And a lot of the large software resellers around the world, the computer centers of Europe the right spaces, the presidios of North America. The DXEs of Asia Pacific. These consulting partners are also using tools such as AppDynamics so to become a managed service provider. And in some cases on that journey to the cloud no join the customer saying I'm really busy I'm modernizing applications. Hey consulting partner, can you manage some part of my infrastructure, some part of my stack? And tools like AppDynamics and Kubernetes and AWS become really central tool kits to the new emerging managed service providers that are all around the world. >> Yeah, and I talked about this years ago with Andy Jassy and I think we were riffing on this run this new set of category creations of services and companies. Linda this appears to be one of those cases where, there's a category with existing spend and existing customers. So what he just said is interesting. And I want to get your thoughts because these are these points of these new areas where AppDynamics can potentially help enterprises. What are some of the areas that you see AppDynamics helping enterprises in their cloud adoption journey 'cause they want some cloud native we see Hybrid and all the announcements, Outpost, now Edge it's a distributed computer. You need to have software at every piece of the puzzle. So what's your, what areas can you share specifically? >> Absolutely and so, like Dave was just saying it's, as these organizations start to make these major cloud migrations, one, their applications are getting actually significantly more complex than they've ever been. And they're now spanning a much broader ecosystem than they've ever spanned before. So that the kind of coverage that IT organizations and DevOps needs to cover not only is seeing this explosion of data but it's also now spanning areas of control that some of these folks have never had to think about before. And so the value of AppDynamics is our ability to be able to ingest data from your cloud native applications your traditional applications, all different sources of domain data that you want to get including things like security data. So we can start to correlate that in a meaningful way and then tie that back to business insights. And so the way that AppDynamics is actually bringing value to the table is not only helping our customers get visibility across the entire stack, but actually only surfacing the most meaningful insights to help them act on that those performance issues that they might see and more meaningfully manage their businesses. >> Linda I think you guys are onto something really big not just on the wave and just the positioning but one of the trends that we're reporting and we're going to be teasing out all week three weeks here is automation is great but that's just baseline. Everything is a service really speaks to some of the things that you guys have to put in place 'cause the mandate is everything should be a service. Now, I mean, I'm overgeneralizing but that's generally the ivory tower C suite message. Make it as a service cloud scale is beautiful, but then you when you pass it down to the teams, that's like that's not easy boss. It's not easy to do. That's really kind of what you're getting at here. It's not just automation and DevOps. It's the business model. >> Absolutely it's the intelligence it's once you create thousands and thousands of services, how do you manage them effectively and know what matters and what doesn't? >> Dave your final word here on on this point is when you think about that if you believe that to be true, then I'm just going to be downloading services whenever I need them. So it's almost like quasi self service managed services kind of coming together in real time or with my off base there. What's your take on that? >> No, we're actually working together with that dynamic and so all these kinds of things. So as we proliferate services, John and, AWS has got over 175 services and application is made up of many components. So how do you actually correlate an associate all the resources that make up that application? And if you think about dynamics name is the application and dynamics what's going on with the application. So we actually just launched today service catalog application registry, which is a new API surface for the AWS service catalog that allows you to define NGS on all the AWS resources from a cloud formation stack set all the way down into an easy to instance and associate that's an application known. And so the higher level of abstraction is what we talked about is management of the application. And what customers want to do, CIO's want to manage the application all the resources associated through the application whether the application is running well, is it secure? Is it on budget? Whether it's actually running? So application management is kind of where people are going even though their application is made up of dozens of associated services. So this is the next frontier. >> Well you guys are just great to have on world-class partnership two leaders, AppDynamics, story history they continue to do well. And even now with the world going on, Dave congratulations on your success. Final question for both of you is, where's the partnership go from here? I think it's a great success story. What's in the store for the future? >> Linda. >> Yeah to the moon. It's look AWS is an amazing partner. And Dave is a great guy to work with and where we are going is to help our customers build world-class applications and be able to manage them and modernize those effectively. And there's no way we could do that without partners at AWS. So it's a, there's a long-term relationship here. >> Well, congratulations, Linda Tong general manager AppDynamics. Thanks for coming on, and virtually at least we'll see you on the Interwebs during the next couple of weeks here, Virtual re:Invent Dave McCann. Of course, we'll see you again and great to watch you continue to grow. Is there any new title is going to add to your thing marketplace now it's migration, control services come on. >> With innovation culture we keep innovating. >> Great to have you guys on. Thanks for, thanks for sharing, appreciate it. >> John, Linda thank you very much. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for that great insight. Really appreciate it. I'm John from theCUBE you're watching coverage of re:Invent 2020. This is theCUBE virtual. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS "re:Invent" 2020. Sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS "re:Invent" virtual 2020. It's not an in-person event this year. It's remote, it's virtual, "theCUBE" is virtual and our guests and our interviewers will be remote as well. And so we're here covering the event for the next three weeks, throughout the next three cause we're weaving in commentary from "theCUBE", check out the cube.net and all of our coverage. And here at AWS we have special feature programming, we got a great segment here talking about big data in the cloud, governance, data lakes, all that good stuff. Rik Tamm-Daniels, vice-president strategic ecosystems and technology for Informatica, and Rick Turnock, head of enterprise data services, Invesco, customer of Informatica. Welcome to the cube. >> Hey John, thanks for having us. >> So Rik, with a K from Informatica, I want to ask you first, we've been covering the company journey for many, many years. Always been impressed with the focus on data and specifically cloud and all the things that you guys have been announcing over the years, have been spot on the mark. You know, AI with CLAIRE, you know, making things, cloud native, all that's kind of playing out now with the pandemic, "re:Invent", that's the story here. Building blocks with high level services, cloud native, but data is the critical piece again. More machine learning, more AI, more data management. What's your take on this year's "re:Invent". >> Absolutely John and again, we're always excited to be here at "re:Invent", we've been here since the very first one. You know, it's a deep talk to a couple of key trends there, especially the era of the global pandemic here. There's so many challenges that so many enterprises are experiencing. I think the big surprise has been, that has actually translated into a tremendous amount of demand for digital transformation, and cloud modernization in particular. So we've seen a huge uptake in our cloud relationships with AWS when it comes to transformational architecture solutions around data and analytics, and using data as a fundamental asset for digital transformation. And so some of those solution areas are things like data warehouse, modernization of the cloud, or end-to-end data governance. That's a huge topic as well for many enterprises today. >> Before coming into "re:Invent", I had a chance to sit down an exclusive interview with Andy Jassy. I just spoke with Matt Garman who's now heading up sales and marketing, who ran EC too. Rick, you're a customer of Informatica. Their big talking point to me and validation to the trends is, there's no excuse to go slow anymore because there's a reason to go fast cause there's consequences and the pandemic has highlighted that you got to move faster otherwise, you know, you're going to be on the wrong side of history and necessity is the mother of all invention. Okay, great. I buy that by the way. So I have no complaints on talking point there from Amazon Web Services. The problem is, you got to manage the data. (John chuckles) To go fast. The gas in the tank is data, and if it's screwed up, it's not going to go well, all right? So it's like putting gas in a car. So, this is where I see the data lake coming into the cloud and all the benefits and look at the successes of companies. The cloud is a real enabler. What's your take on this? The importance of data governance, because cloud scale is here, people want to go faster, data is like the key thing. >> Yeah. The data governance was a critical component when we started our enterprise data platform and looking at, you know, how can we build a modern-day architecture with scale, bringing our enterprise data, but doing it in a governed fashion. So, when we did it, we kind of looked at, you know, what are critical partners? How can we apply data governance and the full catalog capabilities of knowing what data's coming in, identifying it, and then really controlling the quality of it to meet the needs of the organization. It was a critical component for us because typically it's been difficult to get access to that right data. And as we look in the future and even current needs, we really need to understand our data and bring the right data in and make it easily accessible and governance, and quality of that is a critical component of it. >> I want to just follow up with that if you don't mind cause you know, I've done so many of these interviews, I've been on the block now 30 years in the industry, I've seen the waves come and go, and you see a lot of these mandates, you know, "Data governance, we're adding data governance." From the Ivory tower, or you hear, "Everything got to be a service." But when you peel back and look under the hood to make that happen, it's complicated. You've got to have put things in place and it's got to be set up properly, you got to do your work. How important it is to have... And well what's under the covers to this? Cause governance, yeah, it's a talking point, I get that. But to make it actually happen well, it's hard. >> We started really with the operating models from the start. So I kind of took over data governance seven years ago and had a governing global architecture that's been around for 40 years, and it was hard. So this was really our shot and time to get it right. So we did an operating model, a governance model, and it really ingrained it through the whole build and execution process. And so it was part with technology and it was foundational to the process to really deliver it. So it wasn't governance from a governance saying, it was really part of our operating model and process to build this out and really succeed at it. >> Rik, on the Informatica side, I got to get your take on the new solution you guys announced, "The Governed Data Lake", I think it was solution. Does this tie into that? Take a minute to explain the announcement, and how does this tie in? >> Yeah, absolutely John. So I think you take a step back, look at... We talked about some of the drivers of why companies are investing in cloud data lakes. And I think what comes down to is, when you think about that core foundation of data analytics, you know, they're really looking at, you know, how do we go ahead and create a tremendous leap forward in terms of their ability to leverage data as an asset. And again, as we talked about, one of the biggest challenges is trust around the data. And what the solution does though, is it really looks to say, "Okay, first and foremost, "let's create that foundation of trust "not just for the cloud data lake, "but for the entire enterprise. "To ensure that when we start to build this "new architecture, one, we understand the data assets "that are coming in at the very get-go." Right? It's much harder to add data governance after the fact, but you put it in upfront, you understand your existing data landscape. And once that data is there, you make sure you understand the quality of the information, you cleanse the data, you also make sure you put it under the right data management policies. So many policies that enterprises are subject to now like CCPA and GDPR. They have to be concerned about consumer privacy and being able as part of your governance foundational layer, to make sure that you're in compliance as data moves through your new architectures. It's fundamental having that end trust and confidence to be able to use that data downstream. So our solution looks to do that end-to-end across a cloud environment, and again, not just the cloud environment, but the full enterprise as well. One thing I do want to touch on if you don't mind is on the AI side of things and the tooling side of things. Because I think data governance has been around a while, as you said, it's not that it's a new concept. But how do you do it efficiently in today's world? >> John: Yeah. >> And this is where Informatica is focused on a concept of data 4.0. Which is the use of metadata and AI and machine learning and intelligence, to make this process much, much more efficient. >> Yeah that's a good point, Rik, from these two Rickes, I got to go, one's with a K, one with a C, and CK. So Rick, CK and from Invesco customer, I want to just check that with you because I was your customer of Informatica, by they brought up a good point about governance. And I saw this movie before, we've all seen this before, people just slap on solutions or tooling to a pre-existing architecture. You see that with security, you know, now it's, you can't have a conversation without saying, "Oh security's got to be baked in from the beginning." Okay cool, I get that. There's no debate there. Governance, same kind of thing, you know, you're hearing this over and over again, if you don't bake governance into the beginning of everything, you're going to be screwed. Okay? So how important is that foundation of trust for this peace. (Rick mumbling) >> It's critical and to do it at beginning, right? So you're profiling the data, you're defining entitlements and who has access to it, you're defining data quality rules that you can validate that, you define the policies, is there a PII data, all of that, as you do that from the start, then you have a well-governed and documented data catalog and taxonomy that has the policies and the controls in place to allow that to use. If you do it after the fact, then you're always going to be catching up. So a part of our process and policies and where the really Informatica tools delivered for us is to make it part of that process. And to use that as we continue to build out our data platform with the quality controls and all the governance processes built in. >> I got to ask on your journey, that's seven years ago, you took over the practice. You were probably right in the middle of the sea change when everyone kind of woke up and said, "Hey, you know, Amazon, you go back seven years, "look at Amazon where they were to where they are today." Okay? Significantly strong then, total bellwether now in terms of value opportunity. So, how did you look at the cloud migration? How do you think about the cloud architecture? Because I'm sure, and I'd love to get your story here about how you thought about cloud, in the midst of architecting the data foundational platform there. >> Yeah, we're a global company that had architecture, we grew it by acquisition. So a lot of our data architecture was on-prem, difficult really to pull that enterprise data together to meet the business needs. So when we started this, we really wanted to leverage cloud technology. We wanted a modern stack. We wanted scale, flexibility, agility, security, all the things that the cloud brought us too. So we did a search, and looking at that, and looked at competitors, but really landed on to Amazon just bought by core capabilities and scale they have innovation and just the services to bring a lot what we're looking at and really deliver on what we wanted from a platform. >> Why Informatica and AWS, why the combination? Can you share some of the reasons why you went with Informatica with AWS? >> Yeah, again, when we started this off, we looked at the competitors, right? And we were using IVQ. So we had an Informatica product on-prem, but we looked at a lot of the different governance competitors, and really the integrated platform that Informatica brings to us, what was the key deliverer, right? So we can really have the technical metadata with EDC and enterprise data client, catalog, scan our sources, our file, understanding the data and lineage of what it is. And we can tie that into axon and the governance tools to really define business costs returns. We were very critical of defining all our key data elements business glossary, and then we can see where that is by linking that to the technical metadata. So we know where our PII data, where are all our data and how it flows, both tactically and from a business process. And then the IDQ. So when we've defined and understand the data, we want to bring in the delight and how we want to conform it, to make it easily accessible, we can define data quality rules within the governance tool, and then execute that with IDQ, and really have a well-defined data quality process that really takes it from governance in theory to governance in really execution. >> That's awesome. Hey, you are using the data, you're using the cloud, you're getting everything you need out of it. That's the whole idea, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> That's good stuff, Rik at Informatica, tell us about what's going on, you mentioned data 4.0, I think people should pay attention to some of the interviews I've done with your team. They're online also, it's part of that next-gen, next level thinking. Here at "re:Invent", what should customers pay attention to, that you guys are doing? Great customer example here of cloud scale. What's the story for "re:Invent" this year for Informatica. >> But what John, it comes down to when customers think about their cloud journey, right? And the difference, especially with their data centric workloads and priorities and initiatives, all the different hurdles that they need to overcome. I think Informatica we're uniquely positioned to help customers address all those different challenges and you heard Rick speak about a whole bunch of those along the way. And I think particularly at "re:Invent", first of all, I just welcome folks to... They want to learn more about our data governance solution. Please come by our virtual booth. We also have a great interactive experience that encouraged folks to check out. One of the key components of our solution is our enterprise data catalog. And attendees at "re:Invent" can actually get hands on with our data catalog through the demo jam, the AWS demo jam as part of "re:invent". So I'd encourage folks to check that out as well, just to see what we're talking about yet actually. >> Awesome. Final question for you guys, as "re:Invent" is going on, a lot app stores are popping up, you seeing obviously the same trends, machine learning and you know, outpost is booming, so a cloud operations is clearly here, Rick from Invesco, what do you think the most important story is for your peers as they're here? It's a learning conference and you guys have seven years in the cloud working together with Informatica, in your opinion, what should people be paying attention to as they looked at this pandemic and what they got to get through? And then coming out of it with the growth strategy, it's all got to be more about the data, there's more data coming in, more sources, IoT data, certainly the work at home is causing these workloads, workplace, workflows, everything's changed, the future of work. What's your advice to peers out there on what to pay attention to and what to think about? >> We really started with a top-down strategy, right? To really the vision and the future. What do we want to get out of our data? Data is just data, right? But it's the information, it's the analytics, it's really delivering value for our clients, shareholders, and employees to really do their job, simplify our architecture. So really defining that vision of what you want and approach, and then executing on it, right? So how do you build it in a way to make it flexible and scalable, and how do you build an operating and governance model really to deliver on it because, you know, garbage in is garbage out, and you really got to have those processes, I think to really get the full value of what you're building. >> Get the data out there at the right place, at the right time and the right quality data. That's a lot more involved now and you need to be agile. And I think agile data is a way to go. Rick Turnock... >> And then with channels and capabilities that makes it easier, right? It makes it doable. And I think that's what cloud and the Informatica tools, right? Where in the past, you know, it was people hard coding and doing it right? The capability of that cloud and these tools give us makes it really achievable. >> You know, we have an old saying here in our CUBE team, you know, "If there's a problem, "you got to see if it's important, "and then look at the consequences "of not solving that problem, quantify the value of "solving or not solving that problem, "and then look and deploy solutions to do it." I think now with the data, you can actually do that and say, "This ain't quite the consequences of not doing this "or doing this, have a quantifiable value." I just loved that because it brings the whole ROI back to the table. And, you know, it's a dark art, it used to be, you mentioned the old days, you know, you got to do all this custom work, it was like a dark art. Oh yeah, the ROI calculation, payback. I mean, it was a moving train. That's the way it used to be. Not anymore. >> You got to do it to survive, really, if you're not doing it, you know, I don't know. >> Necessity is the mother of all inventions I think, now more than ever, data's going to be the key. Rik final word from Informatica. What should people pay attention to? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as you mentioned there, data is obviously a critical asset, right? And, and to your point with cloud, you can not only realize ROI quickly, but, you can actually iterate so much more quickly, where you can get that ROI immediately or you can validate that ROI, you can adjust your approach. But again, from an Informatica standpoint, we are seeing such a huge uptake in demand for customers who want to go to the cloud, who are modernizing. Every day we're investing heavily and how do we make sure that customers can get there quickly? They can maximize the ROI from their data assets, and we're doing it with all things, data management, from traditional data integration, all the way to the data governance, all the capabilities we talked about today. >> Yeah. Congratulations. That's the benefit of investing in a platform and having a set of out of the box tooling with SaaS, platform as a service, really it can enable success. And I think the pandemic is pretty obvious who's taking advantage of it, so congratulations and continued success. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Rick Turnock, head of data service, enterprise data services at Invesco, customer of Informatica sharing his insight. Great insight there. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, baking it in from the beginning data governance foundational, it's not a bolt on, that's the message. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Hi everyone, this is Dave Vellante and I want to welcome you to our celebration of Exascale Day. A community event with support from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, Exascale Day is October 18th, that's 10, 18 as in 10 to the power of 18. And on that day we celebrate the scientists, and researchers, who make breakthrough discoveries, with the assistance, of some of the most sophisticated supercomputers in the world. Ones that can run and Exascale. Now in this program, we're going to kick off the weekend and discuss the significance of Exascale computing, how we got here, why it's so challenging to get to the point where we're at now where we can perform almost, 10 to the 18th floating point operations per second. Or an exaFLOP. We should be there by 2021. And importantly, what innovations and possibilities Exascale computing will unlock. So today, we got a great program for you. We're not only going to dig into a bit of the history of supercomputing, we're going to talk with experts, folks like Dr. Ben Bennett, who's doing and some work with the UK government. And he's going to talk about some of the breakthroughs that we can expect with Exascale. You'll also hear from experts like, Professor Mark Parsons of the University of Edinburgh, who cut his teeth at CERN, in Geneva. And Dr. Brian Pigeon Nuskey of Purdue University, who's studying buyer diversity. We're going to also hear about supercomputers in space as we get as a great action going on with supercomputers up at the International Space Station. Let me think about that, powerful high performance water-cooled supercomputers, running on solar, and mounted overhead, that's right. Even though at the altitude at the International Space Station, there's 90% of the Earth's gravity. Objects, including humans they're essentially in a state of free fall. At 400 kilometers above earth, there no air. You're in a vacuum. Like have you ever been on the Tower of Terror at Disney? In that free fall ride, or a nosedive in an airplane, I have. And if you have binoculars around your neck, they would float. So the supercomputers can actually go into the ceiling, crazy right? And that's not all. We're going to hear from experts on what the exascale era. will usher in for not only space exploration, but things like weather forecasting, life sciences, complex modeling, and all types of scientific endeavors. So stay right there for all the great content. You can use the #ExascaleDay on Twitter, and, enjoy the program. Thanks everybody for watching.

(melodic music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey, welcome back. Get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, it's virtual this year. But we've had a lot of great interviews and just coming off the keynotes, want to invite John Furrier in, he's been doing a lot of the keynotes and attending this thing for years. So John, first off, get your impressions of AnsibleFest 2020. >> Hey Jeff, great to cover this event. It's too bad we're not in person, we're virtual, theCUBE virtual AnsibleFest is virtual. Last year was in person, it's a really intimate event last year. And again with that theme, a similar vibe here for 2020 again, not face-to-face, but the content has that same kind of community vibe. Just some notable things just of the Keynote and some of the news is obviously last year they launched the Ansible Automation Platform. They've grown their collections community from five supported platforms to 50. And they launched the automation services catalog. So, you starting to see from the Keynotes, the positioning of Red Hat and Ansible. Just a series of announcements at AnsibleFest that include a lot integrations. Okay, and I think that's the key thing, obviously Kubernetes we heard at VMworld continued to take center stage in cloud native and CI/CD Pipeline. So yeah, with that, that's the vibe collections, collections, collections, and some new terminology, which could be confused depending on where you come from, but the word 'content' means something here and content is code and there's a collaboration aspect. And so, overall you seeing that positioning of agile, DevOps, security network automation and obviously community, a big part of Red Hat and Ansible is the core community and this future development environment of easy to consume, easy to code, easy to troubleshoot and built-in security and make it collaborative. That's the open-source ethos. And that's really the focus of AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. >> Yeah, I thought it was interesting. Richard Henshaw you know came out with, and it really reinforced the theme that automate and connect. And it's pretty interesting 'cause he talks about Ansible being the language of collaboration and how important collaboration is. And as we know with COVID and everybody working from home, now kind of the traditional methods of development teams getting together and a DevOps culture and doing daily stand-ups and having this kind of co-mingling of people isn't available anymore really as an option. So the pressure to collaborate is harder than ever before. So really an interesting twist for Ansible taking that tack that they are the language of collaboration. >> I liked his philosophy and some of his narrative around, he used to be a developer. They had a different group from their network-op brethren and they had different kind of siloed bill work together, it's all IT back in the day. But as things have become more cloud native, they have to integrate more and work together. And so this notion of collections is a big deal at Ansible. It's the idea of having these, these playbooks and having people be responsible for their playbooks and share those playbooks. They have a thing called content, which is how you can share these playbooks as content to be consumed and also collaborated and built on and with. But ultimately the theme around Ansible has always been a tool for automation. And now as a platform, the focus is making that automation platform wide across multiple environments, not just public cloud or on premises, it's edge, it's multicloud. So this idea of network automation has moved resources across the environments. And security is a big part of it. The automation platform for instance has a new 2.10 release, which brings back a huge amount of change releases where you don't have to be tied to the local host where you have this module updates are not directly tied to release cycles. Now this means that there's more availability of code. So network automation and updates, synchronous updates are huge. They talked about the VMware collection, IBM Z collections, all these things point to integrations. And that's really the focus of this integrate, this cloud native is, can I play well with others? This is again an extension to the community theme of open source. And if you're not integrating well in cloud native, you probably not going to be around longer. And that's a good theme for them. >> Yeah. So John, I wonder if you can unpack it a little bit, Robyn Bergeron and her Keynote went through this concept of the collection that I'm checking my notes here. They actually have three different types, they've got playbooks, roles, modules, PES, docks and plugins. And she talked about this is a way to basically aggregate information and share it in a bundle that other people can take full advantage of. >> Yeah, and I think that's the key of these collections. And I asked each of them when I was talking to them on camera prior to the event. And I say, what's the big theme for AnsibleFest this year? And they all said, Robyn was like collections, collections, collections. But the idea of writing code in a collection is all about Integry, so the VMware for instance is a great example. IBM Z, which is their mainframe piece. Ansible now part of Red Hat, and now Red Hat's part of IBM, you seeing that they now have more innovation going on with let's say mainframes. So the IBM Z integration allows Ansible to be compatible and bring a modern error to the mainframes. And this speaks to how people are working with these new roles and can leverage code in a new way. So, I think that's a real big thing about providing that last mile innovation and bringing it in other environments. Not just being on Ansible, but really integrating in with others. >> The other piece getting a lot attention John is OpenShift and the rule of OpenShift and the play of OpenShift. So how should people think about how OpenShift fits in this whole puzzle? >> I think OpenShift brings the Red Hat, a hybrid cloud automation piece to it, to Ansible, which is the, where the developers are playing with the CI/CD Pipeline. So the combination of, if you remember back in the days of OpenStack when we covered Red Hat and when OpenShift kind of really hit the scene, that was around private cloud. And then OpenShift adopted Kubernetes and that kind of cloud native vibe. And then since then the growth has been phenomenal. So when you take Red Hat's OpenShift, which is the cloud platform and you bring it to the automation platform of Ansible, it allows customers to have an easy to use capability to do hybrid and multicloud automation. And where this matters is where containers are getting traction. IDC was reporting numbers where only five to 15% of the enterprise, depending upon how you look at it are containerized, which means there's a huge surge of opportunity in these enterprises to bring containers into the cloud model. So for lift and shift and for modern workloads. So the OpenShift provides that path. So it's a nice compliment for the two together to work. So when we heard customers talking about the game system, one customer we talked about using Ansible Tower and the entire cloud, private cloud environment across data centers. So it's a good fit, automation with cloud. And honestly that's where the magic is. >> Right, right. The other piece that we keep hearing about over and over and over, and there's a play here as well as the edge, right. And really moving the compute closer to the place the data is generated and closer to the place that the data is consumed. But where do you see kind of the edge, the edge play here at AnsibleFest? (deep breath) >> Well this kind of ties into the earlier question about OpenShift and Ansible, that kind of automation meets hybrid cloud and addressing this like last mile aspect that Ansible provides in terms of load balancing, configuration, applications, application servers, pushing the apps to the edge. That's a big deal. And as 5G comes out and as edge becomes more, more important, you're going to need to have automation, the surface area of things (chuckles) to automate becomes critical. So the whole discussion is, it's larger scale, more devices, more code being shipped. This is where the engineers got to get involved early, bake security in from the beginning. But also have that automation capability, so it's not context switching between I ship some code, I got to troubleshoot it. They can all do it from within the Ansible platform. (hands rubs together) And that's where the traction with developers is. And this notion, this was the notion of sharing and collections and content become important because you have more people involved. And the betterment of the, of the collections and the crowd and the developers make sense. So edge is real and you got to have a software defined operational model. And you got to have a cloud piece like OpenShift, and you got to have an automation component like Ansible. So, this is a critical, whether you're talking space or 5G or inside an office or on a person, software defined operations will be the key. And that is a big trend that we're seeing right now. >> Yeah, so final question, John, what are you hoping to get out of this show, AnsibleFest 2020? Are there any open questions that you're hoping to get, get kind of answered or closed? Or what are you hoping to walk away with at the end of this event? >> Well, I'm curious to see how they handle the virtual event. Obviously the face to face is a very important intimate part of their community model. So I want to see how that goes. I want to see, I want to hear and look and squint through and connect the dots on the relationship with the Red Hat IBM acquisition, because Ansible is part of Red Hat and Red Hat is now (chuckles) part of IBM. So I think that's going to be a huge lift for Ansible, because once Ansible gets into the slipstream of IBM sales channels, that acceptance is going to be a really important factor for their growth. And then ultimately what's the developer trend? What new things are developers doing with automation that help customers have modern applications so that more, better apps can be deployed coming out of COVID, and as CXO's and the ivory tower of businesses change their business models, what new things are developers doing and how did that scale? So that's my, my key focus. >> All right, well that's great. Well, John, thanks for sharing your thoughts, your insight. And enough of us talking. Let's get to the tech athletes at AnsibleFest 2020. >> Awesome, thanks. >> Alright, he's John I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE with ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (melodic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube. With digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. This is The Cube. Cube Virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with The Cube and Silicon Angle. Two great guests here. Two engineers and architects. Michael McCarthy who is a architect at Delivery Engineering, who's giving a talk with Gamesys and Jurgen Grech who's a technical architect for the platform engineering team at Gamesys. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on. >> Hello. >> Nice to see you. >> Coming in from London, coming in from Malta, you guys are doing a lot of engineering. You're a customer of Ansible, want to get into some of the cool things you're doing obviously Kubernetes automation, platform engineering, this is what everyone's working on right now that's going to be positioned for the future. Before we get started though, tell me a little bit about what Gamesys does and you guys' role. Michael, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so we're a gaming operator, we run multiple bingo-led and casino-led gaming websites, some of them are B2B, some are B2C. I think we've been doing it now for probably 14 or 15 years at least. I've been there for 12 and a half of those. So we essentially run gaming websites where people come and play their favorite games. >> And what's your role there? What do you do? >> So I'm in the operation side of things, I used to be a developer for 12 or so years. We make sure that everything's kind of up and running, we keep the systems running. My team in particular focuses on the speed of delivery for developers so we're constantly looking at, how long has it taken to get things in front of the customers, can we make it faster, can we make it easier, can we put cool stuff out there quicker? So it's a kind of platformy type role that I do, and I enjoy it a lot, so it's good. >> Jurgen you're platform engineering that sounds deep. >> Yes. >> Which is your role? (laughing) >> Well, I've been with Gamesys also for eight and a half years now. I hold the position of technical architect at the moment within this platform engineering group which is mostly tasked with all things ops related. I am responsible for designing, implementing and validating strategies for continuous deployment, whilst always ensuring high availability on both production and pre-production systems. I'm also responsible for the design and implementation of automated dynamic environment to support the needs of the development teams and also collaborating with other architects, especially those on the development floors in order to optimize the deployment and operational strategies for both existing and new types of services alike. >> Awesome, thanks for sharing that. Good, good context. Well, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when you talk about gaming it's uptime and a high availability is critical. You know, having people, being the login you got to have the right data strategies, it can't be down, right. (laughs) It's a critical app. People are not going to enjoy it if they're not at, so I can see how scale's huge. Can you guys talk about how Ansible fits in because automation's been the theme here, you guys have been having a journey with automation. What's been your automation solution with Ansible? >> I'll go Michael. >> Yeah sure. >> So, basically back in July 2014, we started to look at Ansible to replace those commonly used, day to day, best scripts, which our ops team use to execute and which could lead to some human error. That was our main original goal of using Ansible at the time. At the time was our infrastructure looked considerably different. Definitely much, much smaller than the current private cloud footprint. And as I said, as early adopters within the operations team it was imperative for us to automate as much as possible. Those repetitive tasks, which involved the execution of various scripts and were prone to human error. Since then however, aware Ansible usage, it worked quickly. Since 2014, we went through two major infrastructure overhauls and automation using Ansible was always at the heart of each of those overhauls. In fact, our latest private cloud which is based on OpenStack is completely built from the ground up using Ansible code. So this includes the provision and co-visual machines, our entire networking stacks, so switches, routers, firewall, the SDN which OpenStack is built up on, our internal DNS system. Basically all you need to have a fully functional private cloud. At Gamesys we also have some workloads running in two different public clouds. And even in this case, we are running against the build code to set up all the required infrastructure components. Again, since we were fairly new adopters at the time of this technology, without all of those Ansible code, using the original as the case, cover now this has worked considerably and with enhancements of litigated modules polished public cloud, we've made the code look much cleaner, readable and ad approved. >> You made some great progress. Michael, you want to weigh in on this? Any thoughts on? >> Yeah, I think it's kind of, I mean, adding to what Jurgen said I think it's kind of everywhere. So, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned high availability, you mentioned kind of uptime, you know, imagine the people that operate the infra, the people who get called out and they're working 24 seven, you know, a lot of the things that they would do, the kind of run books they would use to, you know, restart something they're Ansible as well. So it's the deployment scripts, it's the kind of scripts that keep things running, it's the stuff that spins up the environments as Jurgen said. I've noticed a lot on the development side where, you know, we look at continuous delivery, people are running their own build servers. A lot of the scripting that people do, which, you know you'd imagine, might be done with say Bash, I think I've seen a lot of Ansible being used there amongst developers, I guess. Yeah, it's got an easy learning curve. It's all of those modules. A lot of the scripting around CD I think is Ansible. It plays quite nicely, you know, URI module and file modules and yeah, I think it's kind of everywhere I think. It's quite pervasive. >> Once again I said, when to get something going. Good, it's awesome. >> Yeah. Automation get great success. So it's been a big theme of Ansible Fest 2020 automation collectors, et cetera. But the question I have for you guys as customers, is how large of an IT estate were you looking to automate and where was the most imperative places to automate first? >> The most imperative items we wanted to automate first as I said, were those operational day to day tasks handled by our network operations team. Our estate is massive. So we are running our infrastructure across five different data centers around the world, thousands of virtual machines, hundreds of network components. So we, we deal with customers all around the world. So our point of presence is spread out around the world as well. And you can't really handle such kind of size without some sort of automation. And Ansible fit the bill perfectly, in my opinion. >> And so your goal is to automate the entire landscape. Are you there now? Where are you on that progress? >> I would say we're at a very advanced stage in that process. Since 2014 we've made huge strides. All of our most recent private cloud setups as I said, have been built from the ground up using Ansible. And I would say a good 90% plus of our operational tasks are handled using some kind of Ansible playbook. >> Yeah, that makes total sense. Michael you brought up the, you start early in people's, it spreads. Those are my words, but you were saying that. What kind of systems do people tend to start with at Ansible? And what's, where's that first sticky moment where it lands and expands and which teams jump on it first? Is it the developers? Is it more the IT? Take us through some of the how this all gets started and how it spreads. >> I think in the, the first time I remember using it was probably I think 2014, 2015. And it was what Jurgen mentioned. I was on the Dev side and we wanted a way to have consistency in how we deployed. We wanted to be able to deploy the exact same way, you know into earlier environments, into Dev environments as we did in staging and production. And, you know, someone kind of found Ansible and then someone in operations kind of saw it and they were happy with it and they felt comfortable using the, kind of getting up to speed. And I think it was hard to know where it really started first, but you sort of looked around and every team, every team kind of had it. So, you know, who actually started I'm not sure, but it's all over the place. >> He did. (laughs) >> Yeah. I think, you know, where people start with it first it probably depends if you're on the ops or the dev side, I think on the dev side you know, we're encouraging people to own their own deployment playbooks you know, you're responsible for the deployment of your system to production. Obviously you've got the network operations the not group sort of doing it for you, but you know, your first exposure is probably going to be writing a playbook to deploy your app or maybe it's around some build tooling, spinning up your own build environment but that's something you'll be doing. I know with Ansible and it's especially around this point of stuff because everything's in git, there's that collaboration which I never saw, obviously I saw people chatting over kind of slack in teams but in terms of being able to sort of raise PR's having developers raise PR's, having operations comment on them the same the other way around, that's been a massive change which I think has come from using Ansible. >> The collaboration piece is huge. And I think it's one of those things early on out of all the Ansible friends that I know that use it and customers and in the company product was just good. It just word of mouth, spreads it around and be like, this is workable, saves a lot of time and it's a pain point remover. Also enables some things to happen with now automation, but now it's mature. Right? So Jurgen I got to ask you in the maturation of all this automation you're talking about scale, you mentioned it. OpenStack, you guys got the private clouds, people use it for public cloud, I now see Red Hat has a angle on that. But when you think about the current modern state of the art today, you can't go anywhere without talking about Kubernetes. >> Yup. >> Kubernetes has really emerged on the scene to manage these clusters but yet it's just getting started. You have a lot of experience with Ansible and Kubernetes. Can you share your journey with Kubernetes and Ansible, and what's your reaction to that? >> Yes, so back in June 2016 Gamesys was developing a new gaming platform which was stood on now Kubernetes. Kubernetes at the time was fairly new to many at an enterprise level with only a handful of production systems online. So we were tasked to assess how we're going to bring Kubernetes into production. So we first, we identified the requirements to set up a production grade cluster and given our experience with Ansible, we embarked on a journey to automate the installation process. Again using Ansible this would ensure that all the required installation and configuration parameters as Michael mentioned, we are committing it, the code is shared with all the respective development teams for ease of collaboration and feedback. And we decided to logically divide our code into two. And we said, we're going to have an installation code in order to provide Kubernetes as a service. So this basically installs Docker onto every worker node. It installs cube lit, all the master playing components of Kubernetes installs core DNS, the container storage interface, and they full blown and cluster monitoring stack. Then we also had our configuration code which basically sets up name spaces, it labels nodes for specific uses at certain security policies according to the cluster use case and creates all the required role based access configurations. This need to split the code in two came about really with the growing adoption of Kubernetes because at the inception stage we only had the one team which had a requirement to use Kubernetes. However, with various teams getting on board each required their own flavor with their particular unique configurations. This is of course well managed quite easily to reduce of different Ansible inventories. And it's all integrated now within Ansible Tower with different unique drop templates to install and configure the Kubernetes clusters. We started as I said with just one pre-production or staging cluster in 2010 16. Today we manage 42 different Kubernetes clusters including six which are in production. >> What problems >> So, as I mentioned earlier >> I got to ask you 'cause Kubernetes certainly when it came out, I mean, that was a big fan boy of that. I was promoting Kubernetes from the beginning. I saw it as a really great opportunity to bring things together with containers. It turns out that developers love it for that reason. What, so getting your hands on is great, but as you moved it in to practice, what problems did it solve for you? >> So using Ansible, definitely solve the problem of ensuring that all of our 42 clusters across all the different data centers are running the same configuration. So they're running the same version. They're running the same security policies. They're running the same name space, according to the type. Each team has a similar deployment token. And it's very, very convenient to roll out changes and upgrades especially when all of our code has been integrated with Ansible Tower through a simple user interface click. >> How's Ansible Tower working for you? Is that going well? Ansible Tower? >> Eh, I would say so, yes. Most of our code now is integrated with Ansible Tower. It's allowed us to also share some of the tasks with a wider group of people. Within Peg we are the guardians of the production environments really. However, we share the responsibility of staging environments with the respective development teams, who primarily those environments. So as such, through the use of Ansible Tower we've managed to also securely and consistently share the same way how they can install and upgrade these clusters themselves without our involvement. >> Thank you. Michael you're giving, oh sorry go ahead. Go ahead Jurgen. >> Sorry is no no. >> Michael, you're giving a presentation breakout session at Ansible Fest. Can you give us a sneak peek >> Yup. >> Of what you're going to talk about? >> Yeah sure. So we, I said we've been using Tower for a long time. We've been using it since 2015 I think. Think we've probably made some mistakes along the way, I guess, or we've learned a lot of stuff from how we started then to now. So what it does is it follows this sort of timeline of how we started, why there was this big move to making an effort to put all of our deployment playbooks in Ansible. Why you would go to Tower over and above Ansible itself. It talks about our early interactions with quite an old version of Tower and now version two, things that we struggled with, then we saw version three came out there was loads and loads of really good stuff in version three. And it's really about kind of how we've used the new features, how it's worked out for us. It's kind of about what Gamesys have done with Tower but I think it's probably applicable to everyone and anyone that uses Tower I think will, they'll probably come across the same things, how do I scale it for multiple teams? How do I give teams the ownership to kind of own their own playbooks? How do I automate Tower itself? It talks about that. Sort of check pointing every few years about where we'd got to and what was going well and what was going less well. So, and a bit of a look forward to, what's going to come next with Tower. So we're constantly keeping up to date and we've got kind of roadmap for where we want to go. >> What's interesting about you guys is you think about look at OpenStack and then how Cloud came on the scene and Private Cloud has emerged with hybrid and obviously public, you guys are right on the wave of all this large scale stuff and your gaming app really kind of highlights that. And you've been through the paces with Ansible. So I guess my question, and you've got a lot of scar tissue and you got success to show for it too, a lot of great stuff. What advice would you give people who are now getting on the new wave, the bigger wave that's coming which is more users, more scale, more features more automation, microservices are coming around the corner. As long as I get more scale. What advice would you give someone who's coming on board with Ansible for the first time? >> I think there was, you were talking before about Kubernetes and it was so where we were, I think we'd got into containers kind of relatively early. And we were deploying Docker and we had some pretty big, kind of scary playbooks and they managed low balances and deployed Docker containers. And it was always interesting thinking how is this all going to change when Kubernetes comes along? And I think that's been really smooth. I think there's a really nice Ansible module that's just called gates. And I think it's really simple actually, it simplified a lot of the playbooks. And I think that the technologies can coexist quite happily. I don't think you have to feel like Kubernetes is going to change all of the investment you've made into Ansible. Even if you go down the route of Kubernetes operators, you can write them in Ansible. So I still think it's a very relevant tool even with Kubernetes being so kind of prevalent. >> Jurgen what's your thoughts on folks getting in now, who want to jump in and take advantage of the automation, all the cool stuff with Ansible? What advice would you give them? >> Yes, I would definitely recommend to look at their infrastructure set ups as they would look at their code. So break it down into small manageable components, start small, build your roles, make sure to build your roles properly for each of that small component. And then definitely look at Ansible Tower as a way to visualize and control the execution of your code. Make sure you're running it with the proper security policies with the proper credentials and all, they're not, of course so break anything which is at the production level. >> Michael McCarthy, Jurgen Grech two great engineers at Gamesys. Congratulations on your success and love to unpack the infrastructure and the scale you have and certainly automation, great success path. And it's going to get easier. I mean, that's what everyone's saying, it's going to get easier. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, welcome >> Thank you, take care. Bye bye. >> I'm John Furrier with The Cube here in Palo Alto California. We're virtual, The Cube virtual for Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to AnsibleFest. I'm Matthew Jones, I'm the architect of the Ansible Automation Platform. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about what we've got coming in 2021, and some of the things that we're working on for the future. Today, I really want to cover some of the work that we're doing on scale and flexibility, and how we're going to focus on that for the next year. I also want to talk about how we're going to help you grow and manage and use your content on the Automation platform. And then finally, I want to look a little bit beyond the automation platform itself. So, last year we introduced Ansible Content Collections. Earlier this year, we introduced the Ansible Automation Hub on Red Hat Cloud. And yesterday you heard Richard mentioned on private automation hub that's coming later this year. And automation hub, Ansible tower, this is really what the automation platform means for us. It's bringing together that content, with the ability to execute and run and manage that content, that's really important. And so what we really want to do, is we want to help you bring Red Hat and partner content that you trust together with community content from galaxy that you may need, and bring this together with content that you develop for yourself, your roles, your collections, the automation that you actually do. And we want to give you control over that content and help you curate that content and build a community around your automation. We want to focus on a seamless experience with this automation from Ansible Tower and from Automation Hub for the automation platform itself, and make it accessible to the automation and infrastructure that you're managing. Now that we've talked about content a little bit, I want to talk about how you run Ansible. Today an Ansible Tower, use virtual environments to manage the actual execution of Ansible, and virtual environments are okay, but they have some drawbacks. Primarily they're not very portable. It's difficult to manage dependencies and the version of Ansible. Sometimes those dependencies conflict with the other systems that are on the infrastructure itself, even Ansible Tower. So what we've done is created a new system that we call execution environments. Execution environments are container-based. And what we're doing is bringing the flexibility and portability of containers to these Ansible execution environments. And the goal really is portability. And we want to be able to leverage the tools that the community develops as well as the tools that Red Hat provides to be able to produce these container images and use them effectively. At Ansible we've developed a tool called Ansible Builder. Ansible builder will let you bring content collections together with the version of Ansible and Red Hats base container image so that you can put together your own images for execution environments. And you'll be able to host these on your own private registry infrastructure. If you don't already have a container registry solution, Automation Hub itself provides that registry. The idea here is that, unlike today where your virtual environments and your production execution environments diverge a little bit from what your developers, your content developers and your automation developers experience, we want to give you the same experience between your production environments and your development environments, all the way through your test and validation workloads. Red Hat's also going to provide some prebuilt execution environments. We want to have some continuity between the experience that you have today on the Ansible tower and what you'll have next year, once we bring execution environments into production. We want you to be able to trust the Ansible, the version of Ansible that's running on your execution environments, and that you have the content that you expect. At the same time, we're going to provide a version of the execution environment, that's just the base execution environment. All it has is Ansible. This will let you take those using Ansible builder, take the collections that you've developed, that you need in your automation and combine them without having to bring in things that you don't need, or that you don't want in your automation and build them together into a very opinionated, container image. If you're interested in execution environments and you want to know how these are built and how you'll use them, we actually have them available for you to use today. Shane McDonald and Adam Miller are giving a talk later with a walk through how to build execution environments and how you'll use them. You can use this to make sure that you're ready for execution environments coming to the automation platform next year. Now that we've talked about how we build execution environments, I want to talk about how execution runs in your infrastructure. So today when you deploy Ansible tower, you're deploying a monolithic web application. Your execution capability is tied up into how you actually deploy Ansible tower. This makes scaling Ansible tower and your automation workloads difficult, and everything has to be co-located together in the same data center. Isolated nodes solve this a little bit, but they bring about their own sort of opinionated challenges in setting up SSH and having direct connectivity between the control nodes and the execution nodes themselves. We want to make this more flexible and easier to use. And so one of the things that we've created over the last year and that we've been working on over the last year is something that we call receptor. Receptor is an overlay network that's an Automation Mesh. And the goal here is to separate the execution capability of your Ansible content from the control plane capability, where you manage the web infrastructure, the users, the role-based access control. We want to draw a line between those. We want you to be able to deploy execution environments anywhere. Chris Wright earlier today mentioned Edge. Well Edge Cloud, we want you to be able to manage data centers anywhere in the world, and you can do this with the Automation Mesh,. The Automation Mesh connects your control plane with those execution nodes, anywhere in the world. Another thing that the Automation Mesh brings is, we're going to be able to draw the lines between the control plane themselves and each Automation Mesh node. This means that if you have an outage or a problem on your network and on your infrastructure, if you can draw a line between the control plane itself and the node that needs to execute, the sensible work, the Automation Mesh can route around problems. The Automation Mesh in the way it's deployed, also allows this to fit closer with ingress and egress policies that you have between your infrastructure. It doesn't matter which direction the Automation Mesh itself connects in. Once the connection is established, automation will be able to flow from the control systems to the execution nodes and get responses back. Now, this all works together with automation of the content collections that we mentioned earlier, the execution environments that we were just talking about and your container registries. All of these work together with these Automation Mesh nodes. They're very lightweight and very simple systems. This means you can scale up and scale down execution capacity as your needs increase or decrease. You don't need to keep around a lot of extra capacity just in case you automate more, just because you're not sure when your execution capacity needs will increase and decrease. This fits into an automated system for scaling your infrastructure and scaling your execution capacity. Now that we've talked about the content that you use to manage, and how that execution is performed and where that execution is performed. I want to look a little bit beyond the actual automation platform itself. And specifically, I want to talk about how the automation platform works with OpenShift and Kubernetes. Now we have an existing installer for Ansible tower that we'll deploy to OpenShift Kubernetes, and we support OpenShift and Kubernetes as a first-class system for deploying Ansible tower. But I mentioned automation hub and Ansible tower as this is what the automation platform is for us. So we want to take that installer and replace it with an operator-based full life cycle approach to deploying and managing the automation platform on OpenShift. This operator will be available in OperatorHub. So there's no need to manage complex YAML files that represent the deployment. Since it's available in OperatorHub, you have one place that you can go to manage deployments, upgrades, backup and restore. And all of this work seamlessly with the container groups feature that we introduced last year. But I want to take this a little bit beyond just deploying and upgrading the automation platform from the operator. We want to look at what other capabilities that we can get out of those operators. So beyond just deploying and upgrading, we're also creating a resource operators and CRDs that will allow other systems running in OpenShift or Kubernetes to directly manage resources within the automation platform. Anything from triggering jobs and getting the status of jobs back, we want to enable that capability if you're using OpenShift and Kubernetes. The first place we're starting with this, is Red Hats Advanced Cluster Management system. Advanced Cluster Management brings together the ability to manage OpenShift and Kubernetes clusters to install them and manage them, as well as applications and products in managing the life cycle of those across your clusters. So what we really want to do, is give you the ability to connect traditional and container-based workloads together. You're already using the Ansible automation platform to manage workloads with Ansible. When using Advanced Cluster Management and OpenShift and Kubernetes, now you have a full system. You can manage across clouds across clusters, anywhere in the world. And this sort of brings me back to one of the areas of focuses for us. Our goal is complete end-to-end automation. We want to connect your people, your domains and the processes. We want to help you deliver for you and your customers by expanding the capabilities of the Ansible automation platform. And we want to make this a seamless experience to both curate content, control the content for your organization, and run the content and run Ansible itself using the full suite of the Ansible automation platform. So the Advanced Cluster management team is giving a talk later where you'll actually be able to see Advanced cluster Management and the Ansible automation platform working together. Don't forget to check out Adam and Shane's talk on execution environments, how those are built and how you can use those. Thank you for coming to AnsibleFest, and we'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. I'm your host with theCUBE John Furrier. And we've got two great guests. A CUBE alumni, Robyn Bergeron, senior manager, Ansible community team. Welcome back, she's with Ansible and Red Hat. Good to see you. And Matt Jones, chief architect for the Ansible Automation Platform. Again, both with Red Hat, Ansible was acquired by Red Hat. Robyn used to work for Red Hat, then went to Ansible. Ansible got bought by Red Hat. Robyn, great to see you, Matt, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me back again. It's good to see you. >> We're not in person. It's the virtual event. Thanks for coming on remotely to our CUBE virtual, really appreciate it. I want to talk about the, and I brought that Red Hat kind of journey Robyn. We talked about it last year, but it really is an important point. The roots of Ansible and kind of where it's come from and what it's turned into and where it is today, is an interesting journey because the mission is still the same. I would like to get your perspectives because you know, Red Hat was acquired by IBM, Ansible's under Red Hat, all part of one big happy family. A lot's going on around the platform, Matt, you're the chief architect, Robyn you're on the community team. Collections, collections, collections, is the message, content, content, content, community, a lot going on. So take a minute, both of you explain the Ansible roots, where it is today, and the mission. >> Right, so beginning of Ansible was really, there was a small team of folks and they'd actually been through an iteration before that didn't use SSH called Funk, but you know, it was, let's make a piece of software that is open source that allows people to automate other things. And we knew at the time that, you know, based on a piece of research that we had seen out of Harvard that having a piece of software be architected in a modular fashion wasn't just great for the software, but it was also great for developing pathways and connections for the community to actually contribute stuff. If you have a car, this is always my analogy. If you have a car, you don't have to know how the engine works in order to swap out the windshield wipers or embed new windshield wipers, things like that. The nice thing about modular architectures is that it doesn't just mean that things can plug in. It means you can actually separate them into different spots to enable them to be plugged in. And that's sort of where we are today with collections, right? We've always had this sense of modules, but everything except for a couple of points in time, all of the modules, the ways that you connect Ansible to the vast array of technologies that you can use it with. All of those have always been in the full Ansible repository. Now we've separated out most of, you know, nearly everything that is not absolutely essential to having in a, you know, a very minimal Ansible installation, broken them out into separate repositories, that are usually grouped by function, right? So there's probably like a VMware something and a cloud something, and a IBM, z/OS something, things like that, right? Each in their own individual groups. So now, not only can contributors find what they want to contribute to in much smaller spots that are not a sea of 5,000 plus folks doing work. But now you can also choose to use your Ansible collections, update them, run them independently of just the singular release of Ansible, where you got everything, all the batteries included in one spot. >> Matt, this brings up the point about she's bringing in more advanced functionality, she's talking about collections. This has been kind of the Ansible formula from the beginning in its startup days, ease of use, easy, fast automation. Talk about the, you know, back in 2013 it was a startup. Now it's part of Red Hat. The game is still the same. Can you just share kind of what's the current guiding principles around Ansible this year? Because lots going on, like I said, faster, bigger, a lot going on, share your perspective. You've been there. >> Yeah, you know, what we're working on now is we're taking this great tool that has changed the way that automation works for a lot of people and we want to make it faster and bigger and better. We want it to scale better. We want it to automate more and be easier to automate, automate all the things that people want to do. And so we're really focusing on that scalability and flexibility. Robyn talked about content and collections, right? And what we want to enable is people to bring the content collections, the collections, the roles, the models, and use them in the way that they feel works best for them, leaving aside some of the things that they maybe aren't quite as interested in and put it together in a way that scales for them and scales for a global automation, automation everywhere. >> Yeah, I want to dig into the collections later, Robyn, for sure. And Matt, so let's, we'll put that on pause for a minute. I want to get into the event, the virtual event. Obviously we're not face to face, this year's virtual. You guys are both keynoting. Matt, we'll start with you. If you can each give 60 seconds, kind of a rundown of your keynote talk, give us the quick summary this year on the keynotes, Matt, we'll start with you. >> Yeah. That's, 60 seconds is- >> If you need a minute and a half, we'll give you 90 seconds, Robyn, that's going to be tough. Matt, we'll start with you. >> I'll try. So this year, and I mentioned the focus on scalability and flexibility, we on the product and on the platform, on the Ansible Automation Platform, the goal here is to bring content and flexibility of that content into the platform for you. We focused a lot on how you execute, how you run automation, how you manage your automation, and so bringing that content management automation into the system for you. It's really important to us. But what we're also noticing is that we, people are managing automation at a much larger scale. So we are updating the Ansible Tower, Ansible AWX, the automation platform, we're updating it to be more flexible in how it runs content, and where it can run content. We're making it so that execution of automation doesn't just have to happen in your data center, in one data center, we recognize that automation occurs globally, and we want to expand that automation execution capability to be able to run globally and all report back into your central business. We're also expanding over the next six months, a year, how well Ansible integrates with OpenShift and Kubernetes. This is a huge focus for us. We want that experience for automation to feel the same, whether you're automating at the edge, in devices and virtual machines and data centers, as well as clusters and Kubernetes clusters anywhere in the world. >> That's awesome. That's why I brought that up earlier. I wanted to get that out there because it's worth calling out that the Ansible mission from the beginning was similar scope, easy to do and simplify, but now it's larger scale. Again, it's everywhere, harder to do, hence complexity being extracted away. So thank you for sharing. We'll dig into that in a second. Okay, Robyn, 60 seconds or more, if you need it, your keynote this year at AnsibleFest, give us the quick rundown. >> All right. Well, I think we probably know at this point, one of the main themes this year is called automate to connect and, you know, the purpose of the community keynote is really to highlight the achievements of the community. So, you know, we are talking about, well, we are talking about collections, you know, going through some of the very broad highlights of that, and also how that has contributed, or, not contributed, how that is included as part of the recent release of Ansible 2.10, which was really the first release where we've got it very easy for people to actually start using collections and getting familiar with what that brings to them. A good portion of the keynote is also just about innovation, right? Like how we do things in open source and why we do things in certain ways in open source to accelerate us. And how that compares with the Red Hat, traditional product model, which is, we kind of, we do a lot of innovation upstream. We move quickly so that if something is maybe not the right idea, we can move on. And then in our products, that's sort of the thing that we give to our customers that is tried, tested and true. All of that kind of jazz. We also talk about, or I guess I also talk about the, all of our initiatives that we're doing around diversity and inclusiveness, including some of the code changes that we've made for better, more inclusive language in our projects and our downstream products, our diversity and inclusion working group that we have in the community land, which is, you know, just looking to embrace more and more people. It's a lot about connectivity, right? To one of Matt's points about all the things that we're trying to achieve and how it's similar to the original principles, the third one was, it's always, we need to have it to be easy to contribute to. It doesn't necessarily just mean in our community, right? Like we see in all of these workplaces, which is one of the reasons why we brought in Automation Hub, that folks inside large organizations, companies, government, whatever it is, are using Ansible and there's more and more, and, you know, there's one person, they tell their friend, they tell another friend, and next thing you know, it's the whole department. And then you find people in other departments and then you've got a ton of people doing stuff. And we all know that you can do a bunch of stuff by yourself, but you can accomplish a lot more together. And so, making it easy to contribute inside your organization is not much different than being able to contribute inside the community. So this is just a further recognition, I think, of what we see as just a natural extension of open source. >> I think the community angle is super important 'cause you have the community in terms of people contributing, but you also have multiple vendors now, multiple clouds, multiple integrations, the stakeholders of collaboration have increased. It was just like, "Oh, here's the upstream and et cetera, we're done, and have meetings, do all that stuff." And Matt, that brings me to my next question. Can you talk about some of the recent releases that have changed the content experience for the Ansible users in the upstream and within the automation platform? >> Well, so last year we released collections, and we've really been moving towards that over the 2.9, 2.10 timeframe. And now I think you're starting to see sort of the realization of that, right? This year we've released Automation Hub on cloud.redhat.com so that we can concentrate that vendor and partner content that Red Hat supports and certifies. In AnsibleFest you'll hear us talk about Private Automation Hub. This is bringing that content experience to the customer, to the user of this content, sort of helping you curate and manage that content yourself, like Robyn said, like we want to build communities around the content that you've developed. That's the whole reason that we've done this with collections is we don't want to bind it to Ansible core releases. We don't want to block content releases, all of this great functionality that the community is building. This is what collections mean. You should be free to use the collections that you want when you want it, regardless of when Ansible core itself has released. >> Can you just take a minute real quick and just explain what is collections, for folks out there who are rich? 'Cause that's the big theme here, collections, collections, collections. That's what I'm hearing resonate throughout the virtual hallways, if you will. Twitter and beyond. >> That's a good question. Like what is a collection itself? So we've talked a lot in the past about reusable content for Ansible. We talk a lot about roles and modules and we sort of put those off to the side a little bit and say, "These are your reusable components." You can put 'em anywhere you want. You can put 'em in source control, distribute them through email, it doesn't matter. And then your playbooks, that's what you write. And that's your sort of blessed content. Collections are really about taking the modules and roles and plugins, the things that make automation possible, and bundling those up together in groups of content, groups of modules and roles, or standing by themselves so that you can decide how that's distributed and how you consume that, right? Like you might have the Azure, VMware or Red Hat satellite collection that you're using. And you're happy with that. But you want a new version of Ansible. You're not bound to using one and the same. You can stick with the content that matters to you, the roles, the modules, the plugins that work for you. And you decide when to update those and you know, what the actual modules and plugins you're using are. >> So I got to ask the content question, you know, I'm a content producer. We do videos as content, blog posts content. When you talk about content, it's code, clarify that role for us because you got, you're enabling developers with content and helping them find experts. This is a concept. Robyn, talk about this. And Matt, you can weigh in, too, define what does content mean? It means different things. (indistinct) again, content could be. >> It is one of those words, it's right up there with developers, you know, so many different things that that can mean, especially- >> Explain content and the importance of the semantics of that. Explain it, it's important that people understand the semantics of the word "content" with respect to what's going on with Ansible. >> Yeah, and Matt and I actually had a conversation about the murkiness of this word, I believe that was yesterday. So what I think about our content, you know, and I try to put myself in the mind, my first job was a CIS admin. So I try to put myself in the mind of someone who might be using this content that I'm about to attempt to explain. Like Matt just explained, we've always had these modules, which were included in Ansible. People have pieces of code that show very basic things, right? If I get one of the AWS modules, it would, I am able to do things like "I would like to create a new user." So you might make a role that actually describes the steps in Ansible, that you would have to create a new user that is able to access AWS services at your company. There may be a number of administrators who want to use that piece of stuff, that piece of code over and over and over again, because hopefully most companies are getting bigger and not smaller, right? They want to have more people accessing all sorts of pieces of technology. So making some of these chunks accessible to lots of folks is really important, right? Because what good is automation, if, sure we've taken care of half of it, but if you still have to come up with your own bits of code from scratch every time you want to invoke it, you're still not really leveraging the full power of collaboration. So when we talk about content, to me, it really is things that are constantly reusable, that are accessible, that you tie together with modules that you're getting from collections. And I think it's that bundle, you can keep those pits of reusable content in the collections or keep them separate. But, you know, it's stuff that is baked for you, or that maybe somebody inside your organization bakes, but they only have to bake it once. They don't have to bake it in 25 silos over and over and over again. >> Matt, the reason why we're talking about this is interesting, 'cause you know what this points out, in my opinion, it's my opinion. This points out that we're talking about content as a word means that you guys were on the cutting edge of new paradigms, which is content, it's essentially code, but it's addressable, community it's being shared. Someone wrote the code and it's a whole 'nother level of thinking. This is kind of a platform automation. I get it. So give us your thoughts because this is a critical component because the origination of the content, the code, I mean, I love it. Content is, I've always said content, our content should be code. It's all data, but this is interesting. This is the cutting edge concept. Could you explain what it means from your perspective? >> This is about building communities around that content, right? Like it's that sharing that didn't exist before, like Robyn mentioned, like, you know, you shouldn't have to build the same thing a dozen times or 100 times, you should be able to leverage the capabilities of experts and people who understand that section of automation the best, like I might be an expert in one field or Robyn's an expert in another field, we're automating in the same space. We should be able to bring our own expertise and resources together. And so this is what that content is. Like, I'm an expert in one, you're an expert in another, let's bring them together as part of our automation community and share them so that we can use them iterate on them and build on them and just constantly make them better. >> And the concepts are consumption, there's consumption of the content. There's the collaboration of the content. There's the sharing, all this, and there's reputation, there's expertise. I mean, it's a multi sided marketplace here, isn't it? >> Yeah. I read a article, I don't know, a year or two ago that said, we've always evolved in the technology industry around, if you have access to this, first it was the mainframes. Then it was, whatever, personal computers, the cloud, now it's containers, all of this, but, once everybody buys that mainframe or once everybody levels up their skills to whatever the next thing is that you can just buy, there's not much left that actually can help you to differentiate from your competitors, other than your ability to actually leverage all of those tools. And if you can actually have better collaboration, I think than other folks, then that is one of those points that actually will get you ahead in your digital transformation curve. >> I've been harping on this for a while. I think that cloud native finally has gone, when I say "mainstream" I mean like on everyone's mind, you look at the container uptake, you're looking at containers. We had IDC on, five to 10% of the enterprises are containerizing. That's huge growth opportunity. The IPO of, say, Snowflake's on Amazon. I mean, how does this happen? That's a company that's went public, It's the most valuable IPO in the history of IPOs on Wall Street. And it's built on Amazon, it has its own cloud. So it's like, I mean, this points to the new value that's being created on top of these new cloud native architectures. So I really think you guys are onto something big here. And I think you're starting to see this, new notions of how things are being rethought and reimagined. So let's keep it, while I've got you guys here real quick, Ansible 2.1 community release. Tell us more about the updates there. >> Oh, 2.10, because, yeah. Oh, that's fine. I know I too have had, I'm like, "Why do we do that?" But it's semantic versioning. So I am more accustomed to this now, it's a slightly different world from when I worked on Fedora. You know, I think the big highlight there is really collections. I mean, it's collections, collections, collections. That is all the work that we did, it's under the hood, over the hood, and really, how we went from being all in one repo to breaking things out. It's a big line for, we're advancing both the tool and also advancing the community's ability to actually collaborate together. And, you know, as folks start to actually use it, it's a big change for them potentially in how they can actually work together in their organizations using Ansible. One of the big things we did focus on was ensuring that their ease of use, that their experience did not change. So if they have existing Ansible stuff that they're running, playbooks, mod roles, et cetera, they should be able to use 2.10 and not see any discernible change. That's all the under the hood. That was a lot of surgery, wasn't it, Matt? Serious amounts of work. >> So Matt, 2.10, does that impact the release piece of it for the developers and the customers out there? What does it change? >> It's a good point. Like at least for the longer term, this means that we can focus on the Ansible core experience. And this is the part that we didn't touch on much before now with the collections pieces that now when we're fixing bugs, when we're iterating and making Ansible as an engine of automation better, we can do that without negatively impacting the automation that people actually use. We could focus on the core experience of actually automating itself. >> Execution environments, let's talk about that. What are they, are they being used in the community today? What do you guys react to that? >> We're actually, we're sort of in the middle of building this right now. Like one of the things that we've struggled with is when you, you need to automate, you need this content that we've talked about before. But beyond that, you have the system that sits underneath the version of Linux, the kernel that you're using, going even further, you need Python dependencies, you need library dependencies. These are hard and complicated things, like in the Ansible Tower space, we have virtual environments, which lets you install those things right alongside the Ansible Tower control plane. This can cause a lot of problems. So execution environments, they take those dependencies, the unit that is the environment that you need to run your automation in, and we're going to containerize it. You were just talking about this from the containerization perspective, right? We're going to build more easily isolated, easy to use distinct units of environments that will let you run your automation. This is great. This lets you, the person who's building the content for your organization, he can develop it and test it and send it through the CI process all the way up through production, it's the exact same environment. You could feel confident that the automation that you're running against the libraries and the models, the version of Ansible that you're using, is the same when you're developing the content as when you're running it in production for your business, for your users, for your customers. >> And that's the Nirvana. This is really where you talk about pushing it to new limits. Real quick, just to kind of end it out here for Ansible 2020, AnsibleFest 2020. Obviously we're now virtual, people aren't there in person, which is really an intimate event. Last year was awesome. Had theCUBE set right there, great event, people were intimate. What's going on for what you guys have for people that obviously we got the videos and got the media content. What's the main theme, Robyn and Matt, and what's going on for resources that might be available for folks who want to learn more, what's going on in the community, can you just take a minute each to talk about some of the exciting things that are going on at the event that they should pay attention to, and obviously, it's asynchronous so they can go anywhere anytime they want, it's the internet. Where can they go to hang out? Is there a hang space? Just give the quick two second commercial, Robyn, we'll start with you. >> All right. Well of course you can catch the keynotes early in the morning. I look forward to everybody's super exciting, highly polite comments. 'Cause I hear there's a couple people coming to this event, at least a few. I know within the event platform itself, there are chat rooms for each track. I myself will be probably hanging out in some of the diversity and inclusion spaces, honestly, and I, this is part of my keynote. You know, one of the great things about AnsibleFest is for me, and I was at the original AnsibleFest that had like 20 people in Boston in 2013. And it happened directly across the street from Red Hat Summit, which is why I was able to just ditch my job and go across the street to my future job, so to speak. We were... Well, I just lost my whole train of thought and ruined everything. Jeez. >> We got that you're going to be in the chat rooms for the diversity and community piece, off platform, is there a Slack? Is there like a site? Anything else? 'Cause you know, when the event's over, they're going to come back and consume on demand, but also the community, is there a Discord? I mean, all kinds of stuff's going on, popping up with these virtual spaces. >> One thing I should highlight is we do have the Ansible Contributor Summit that goes on the day before AnsibleFest and the day after AnsibleFest. Now, normally this is a pretty intimate event with the large outreach that we've gotten with this Fest, which is much bigger than the original one, much, much, much bigger, we've, and signing up for the contributor summit is part of the registration process for AnsibleFest. So we've actually geared our first day of that event to be towards new or aspiring contributors rather than the traditional format that we've had, which is where we have a lot of engineers, and can you remember sit down physically or in a virtual room and really talk about all of the things going on under the hood, which is, you know, can be intimidating for new people. Like "I just wanted to learn about how to contribute, not how to do surgery." So the first day is really geared towards making everything accessible to new people because turns out there's a lot of new people who are very excited about Ansible and we want to make sure that we're giving them the content that they need. >> Think about architects. I mean, SREs are jumping in, Matt, you talked about large scale. You're the chief architect, new blood's coming in. But give us an update on your perspective, what people should pay attention to at the event, after the event, communities they could be involved in, certainly people want to tap into you are an expert and find out what's going on. What's your comment? >> Yeah, you know, we have a whole new session track this year on architects, specifically for SREs and automation architects. We really want to highlight that. We want to give that sort of empowerment to the personas of people who, you know, maybe you're not a developer, maybe you're not, operations or a VP of your company. You're looking at the architecture of automation, how you can make our automation better for you and your organization. Everybody's suffered a lot and struggled with the COVID-19. We're no different, right? We want to show how automation can empower you, empower your organization and your company, just like we've struggled also. And we're excited about the things that we want to deliver in the next six months to a year. We want you to hear about those. We want you to hear about content and collections. We want you to hear about scalability, execution environments, we're really excited about what we're doing. You know, use the tools that we've provided in the AnsibleFest event experience to communicate with us, to talk to us. You can always find us on IRC via email, GitHub. We want people to continue to engage with us, our community, our open source community, to engage with us in the same ways that they have. And now we just want to share the things that we're working on, so that we can all collaborate on it and automate better. >> I'm really glad you said that. I mean, again, people are impacted by COVID-19. I got, it sounds like all channels are open. I got to say of all the communities that are having to work from home and are impacted by digital, developers probably are less impacted. They got more time to gain, they don't have to travel, they could hang out, they're used to some of these tools. So I think I guess the strategy is turn on all the channels and engage in new ways. And that seems to be the message, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Alright, Robyn Bergeron, great to see you again, Matt Jones, great to chat with you, chief architect for Ansible Automation Platform and of course, Robyn senior manager for the community team. Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. It's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here in the studio in Palo Alto. We're virtual. This is theCUBE virtual with AnsibleFest virtual. We're not face to face. Thank you for watching. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is an episode in the Remote Works Citrix Virtual Series. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture San Francisco Innovation Hub on the 33rd floor of the Sales Force Tower in downtown San Francisco. It's 2020, the year we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. And what better way to kick off the year than to have the Accenture Tech Vision reveal, which is happening later tonight, so we're really happy to have one of the authors who's really driving the whole thing. He's Michael Blitz, the managing director of the Accenture Tech Vision 2020, a very special edition. Michael, great to see you. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so you've been doing this for a while. I think we heard earlier, this thing's been going on for 20 years? >> It is. >> You've been involved for at least the last eight. >> Michael: I think a little bit more than that. >> More than that, so what's kind of the big theme before we get into some of the individual items? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think right now, what we're really talking about is that our real big theme is this: We the digital people. And it's that recognition that says that we've fundamentally changed. When you start looking at yourself and your lives, it's that you've gotten to a point where you're letting your cell phone track you. Your car knows where you are probably better than your spouse does. You're handing your key to Amazon and Walmart so they can deliver packages in your house. And more than that is that actually, we're trying to start to revolve our lives around this technology. I look at my own life, and we just sold our second car, specifically because we know that Uber and Lyft exist to fill that void. >> Right, well you don't have to look much further than phone numbers. How many people remember anybody's phone number anymore, right, 'cause you don't really have to. I think it's the 15th anniversary of Google Maps. >> Michael: Yep. >> This year, and to think of a world without Google Maps, without that kind of instant access to knowledge, is really hard to even fathom. But as you said, we're making trade-offs when we use all these services, and now, some of the costs of those things are being maybe more exposed? Maybe more cute or in your face? I don't know, what would you say? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's happening now is that what we're realizing is that it's changed our relationship with companies. Is that suddenly we've actually brought them into our lives. And, on one hand, they're offering and have the ability to offer services that you could never really do before. But on the other hand is that, if I'm going to let somebody in my life, suddenly they don't have to just provide me value and this is useful, is that they actually, people are expecting them to retain their values, too. So, how they protect your data, what they're good for the community, for the environment, for society, whether it's sustainable or not. Is that suddenly, whereas people used to only care about what the product you're getting, now how it's built and how your company's being run is starting, it's just starting to become important, too. >> Right, well it's funny, 'cause you used to talk about kind of triple bottom line, shareholders, customers and your employees. And you talked about, really, this kind of fourth line, which is community and really being involved in the community. People care, suddenly you go to conferences where we spend a lot of time all the utensils are now compostable and the forks are compostable. And a lot of the individual packaging stuff is going away. So people do care. >> They do, and there's a fourth and a fifth. It says that your community cares, but your partners do, too. Is that you can't, I'm going to say, downgrade the idea that your B2B folks care is that suddenly, we're finding ourselves tied to these other companies, and not just in a supply chain, but from everything. And so, you're not in this alone in terms of how you're delivering these things. But now it's becoming a matter that says, Well, man, if my partners are going to get pummeled because they're not doing the right thing or they don't have that broad scope, that's going to reflect on me, too. And so, now you're suddenly in this interesting position where all of the things that we suspected were going to happen around digital connecting everybody is just starting to, and I think that's going to have a lot of positive effects. >> Yeah, so one of the things you talked about earlier today, in an earlier presentation was kind of the shift from kind of buyer and seller, seller and consumer, to provider and collaborator. Really kind of reflecting a very different kind of a relationship between the parties as opposed to this one-shot transactional relationship. >> No, and that's right, and it doesn't matter who you're talking about, is that, if you're hiring folks for skills that you're assuming that they're going to learn, that's going to be different in three years, in five years, you're essentially partnering with them in order to take all of you on a journey. When you start talking about governments, is that you're now partnering with regulators. You look at companies like Tesla, who are working on regulations for electric cars, they're working on regulations around battery technology. And you see that this go-it-alone approach isn't what you're doing. Rather, it's becoming much more holistic. >> Right, so we're in the innovation hub, and I think number five of the five is really about innovation today. >> Michael: It is. >> And you guys are driving innovation. And, rest in peace, Clayton Christensen passed away, Innovator's Dilemma, my all-time favorite book. But the thing I love about that book is that smart people making sound decisions based on business logic and taking care of existing customers will always miss discontinuous change. But you guys are really trying to help big companies be innovative. What are some of the things that they should be thinking about, besides, obviously, engaging with Mary and the team here at Innovation Hub? >> Yeah, no, and that's the really interesting thing is that when we talked about innovation, you know, five or even 10 years ago, you were talking about, just: How do I find a new product or a new service to bring to market? And now, that's the minimum stakes. Like, that's what everybody's doing. And I think what we're realizing as we're seeing tech become such a big part is that we all see how it's affecting the world. And a lot of times that things are good is that there's no reason why you wouldn't look at somebody like a Lyft or Uber and say that it's had a lot of positive effects. But from the same standpoint is that, you ask questions of: Is it good for public transit? It is good for city infrastructure? And those are hard questions to ask. And I think where we're really pushing now is that question that says: We've got an entire generation of not-tech companies, but every company that's about to get into this innovation game, and what we want them to do is to look at this not the way that the tech folks did, that says, here's one service or one technology, but rather, look at it holistically that says: How am I actually going to implement this, and what is the real effects that it's going to have on all of these different aspects? >> Right, Law of Unintended Consequences is always a good one. >> Michael: It is. >> And I remember hearing years ago of this concept of curb management. I'm like, Curb management, who ever thought of that? Well, drive up and down in Manhattan when they're delivering groceries or delivering Amazon packages and FedEx packages and UberEats and delivery dog food now. Where is that stuff being staged now that the warehouse has kind of shifted out into the public space? So, you never kind of really know where these things are going to end up. >> No, and I'm not saying that we're going to be able to predict all of it. I think, rather, it's that starting point that says that we're starting to see a big push that says that these things need to be factored and considered. And then, similarly, it's the, if you're working with them up-front, it becomes less of a fault, on a fight of whose fault it is at the end, and it becomes more of a collaboration that says, How much more can we do if we're working with our cities, if we're working with our employees, if we're working with our customers? >> Right, now another follow up, you guys've been talking about this for years, is every company is a tech company or a digital company, depending on how you want to spin that. But as you were talking about it earlier today, in doing so and in converting from products to service, and converting from an ongoing relationship to a one-time transaction, it's not only at that point of touch with a customer, but you've got to make a bunch of fundamental changes back in your own systems to support kind of this changing business model. >> Now, and that's right, and I think this is going to become the big challenge of the generation, is that we've gotten to a point where just using their existing models for how you interact with your customers or how you protect their data or who owns the data, all of these types of things, is that they were designed back when we were doing single applications, and they were loading up on your Windows PC. And where we're at now is that we're starting to ask questions that says, All right, in this new world, what do I have to fundamentally do differently? And sometimes that can be as simple as asking a question that says, you know, there's a consortium of pharma folks who have created a joint way for them to develop all of their search algorithms for new drugs. But they're using block chain, and so they're not actually sharing the data. So they do all the good things, but they're pushing that up. But fundamentally, that's a different way to think about it. You're now creating an entirely new infrastructure because what you're used to is just handing somebody the data, and what they do with the data afterwards is kind of their issue and not yours. And so now we're asking big, new questions to do it. >> Right, another big thing that keeps coming up over and over is trust. And again, we talked a little earlier. But I find this really ironic situation where people don't necessarily trust the companies in terms of the people running the companies and what they're going to do with their data, but they fundamentally trust the technology coming out of the gate and this expectation of: Of course it works, everything works on my mobile phone. But the two are related, but not equal. >> Michael: No, I mean, they're not, I mean, and it's really pushing this idea that says we've been looking at all these, I'm going to say scary headlines, of people not trusting companies for the last number of years, while at the same time, the adoption for the technology has been huge. So there's this dichotomy that's going on in people, where at one point, they like the tech. You know, I think the last stat I saw is that everybody spends up to six-and-a-half hours a day involved on the internet, in their technology. But from the same standpoint is that they worry about who's using it and how and what is going to be done. And I think where we're at is that interesting piece that says we're not worried about a tech lash. We don't think that people are going to stop using technology. Rather, we think it's really this tech clash that says they're not getting the value that they thought out of it, or they're seeing companies that may be using this technologies that don't share the same values that they do, and really, what we think this becomes, is the next opportunity for the next generations of service providers in order to fill that gap. >> Right, yeah, don't forget there was a Friendster and a MySpace before there was a Facebook. >> Yeah, there was. >> So, nothing lasts forever. So, last question before I let you go, it's a busy night. The first one was the I in experience, and I think kind of the user experience doesn't get enough light as to such a defining thing that does move the market if, again, I love to pick on Uber, but the Uber experience compared to walking outside on a rainy day in Manhattan and hoping to hail down a cab is fundamentally different, and I would argue, that it's that technology put together in this user experience that defined this kind of game-changing event, as opposed to it's a bunch of APIs stitching stuff together in the back. >> No, that's right, and I think where we're at right now is that we're about to see the next leap beyond that. Is that, most of the time when we look at the experiences that we're doing today, they're one way. Is that people assume that, Yeah, I have your data, I'm trying to customize. And whether it's an ad or a buying experience or whatever, but they're pushing it as this one-way street, and when we talk about putting the I back in experience, it's that question of the next step to really get people both more engaged as well as to, I'm going to say improve the experience itself, means that it's going to become a partnership. So you're actually going to start looking for input back and forth, and it's sometimes going to be as simple as saying that that ad that they're pushing out is for a product that I've already bought. Or, you know, maybe even just tell me how you knew that that's what I was looking for. But it's sometimes that little things, the back and forth, is how you take something from, what can be a mediocre experience, even potentially a negative one, and really turn it into something that people like. >> Yeah, well, Michael, I'll let you go. I know you got a busy night, we're going to present this. And really thankful to you and the team, and congratulations for coming up with something that's a little bit more provocative than, Cloud's going to be big, or Mobile's going to be big, or Edge is going to be big. So this is great material, and thanks for having us back. Look forward to tonight. >> No, happy to do it, and next year we'll probably do it again. >> [Jeff\ I don't know, we already know everything, it's 2020, what else is unknown? >> Everything's going to change. >> All right, thanks again. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020, brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're high atop San Francisco on a beautiful day at the Accenture San Francisco Innovation Hub, 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower, for the Accenture Tech Vision 2020 reveal. It's where they come up with four or five themes to really look forward to, a little bit innovative, a little bit different than cloud will be big or mobile will be big. And we're excited to have, really, one of the biggest brains here on the 33rd floor. She's Teresa Tung, the managing director of Accenture Labs. Teresa, great to see you. >> Nice to see you again. >> So I have to tease you because the last time we were here, everyone was bragging on all the patents that you've filed over the years, so congratulations on that. It's almost kind of like a who's who roadmap of what's happening in tech. I looked at a couple of them. You've got a ton of stuff around cloud, a ton of stuff around Edge, but now, you're getting excited about robots and AI. >> That's right. >> That's the new passion. >> That's the new passion. >> All right, so robots, one of the five trends was robots in the wild, so what does that mean, robots in the wild, and why is this something that people should be paying attention to? >> Well, robots have been around for decades, right? So if you think about manufacturing, you think about robots. But as your kid probably knows, robots are now programmable, kids can do it, so why not enterprise? And so, now that robots are programmable, you can buy them and apply them. We're going to unlock a whole bunch of new use cases beyond just those really hardcore manufacturing ones that are very strictly designed in a very structured environment, to things in an unstructured and semi-structured environment. >> So does the definition of robot begin to change? We were just talking before we turned on the cameras about, say, Tesla. Is a Tesla a robot in your definition or does that not quite make the grade? >> I think it is, but we're thinking about robots as physical robots. So sometimes people think about robotics process automation, AI, those are robots, but here, I'm really excited about the physical robots; the mobile units, the gantry units, the arms. This is going to allow us to close that sense-analyze-actuate loop. Now the robot can actually do something based off of the analytics. >> Right, so where will we see robots kind of operating in the wild versus, as we said, the classic manufacturing instance, where they're bolted down, they do a step along the process? Where do you see some of the early adoption is going to, I guess, see them on the streets, right, or wherever we will see them? >> Well, you probably do see them on the streets already. You see them for security use cases, maybe mopping up a store after, where the employees can actually focus on the customers, and the robot's maybe restocking. We see them in the airports, so if you pay attention to modern airports, you see robots bringing out the baggage and doing some of the baggage handling. So really, the opportunities for robots are jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous. These are things that humans don't want to or shouldn't be doing. >> Right, so what's the breakthrough tech that's enabling the robots to take this next step? >> Well, a lot of it is AI, right? So the fact that you don't have to be a data scientist and you can apply these algorithms that do facial recognition, that can actually help you to find your way around, it's actually the automation that's programmable. As I was saying, kids can program these robots, so they're not hard to do. So if a kid can do it, maybe somebody who knows oil and gas, insurance, security, can actually do the same thing. >> Right, so a lot of the AI stuff that people are familiar with is things like photo recognition and Google Photos, so I can search for my kids, I can search for a beach, I can search for things like that, and it'll come back. What are some of the types of AI and algorithms that you're applying with kind of this robot revolution? >> It's definitely things like the image analytics. It's for the routing. So let me give you an example of how easy it is to apply. So anybody who can play a video game, you have a video game type controller, so when your kid's, again, playing games, they're actually training for on the skilled jobs. Right, so you map a scene by using that controller to drive the robot around a factory, around the airport, and then, the AI algorithm is smart enough to create the map. And then, from that, we can actually use the robot just out of the box to be able to navigate and you have a place to, say, going from Teresa, here, and then, I might be able to go into the go get us a beer, right? >> Right, right. >> Maybe we should have that happen. (laughs) >> They're setting up right over there. >> They are setting up right there. >> That's right. So it's kind of like when you think of kind of the revolution of drones, which some people might be more familiar with 'cause they're very visible. >> Yes. >> Where when you operate a DJI drone now, you don't actually fly the drone. You're not controlling pitch and yaw and those things. You're just kind of telling it where you want it to go and it's the actual AI under the covers that's making those adjustments to thrust and power and angle. Is that a good analogy? >> That is a great analogy. >> And so, the work that we would do now is much more about how you string it together for the use case. If a robot were to come up to us now, what should it do, right? So if we're here, do we want the robot to even interact with us to get us that beer? So robots don't usually speak. Should speaking be an option for it? Should maybe it's just gesturing and it has a menu? We would know how to interact with it. So a lot of that human-robot interface is some of the work that we're doing. So that was kind of a silly example, but now, imagine that we were surveying an oil pipeline or we were actually as part of a manufacturing line, so in this case it's not getting us a beer, but it might need to do the same sort of thing. What sort of tool does Theresa need to actually finish her job? >> Yeah, and then, the other one is AI and me. And you just said that AI is getting less complicated to program, these machines are getting less complicated to program, but I think most people still are kind of stuck in the realm of we need a data scientist and there are not a lot of data scientists and they got to be super, super smart. You've got to have tons and tons of data and these types of factors, so how is it becoming AI and me, Jeff who's not necessarily a data scientist. I don't have a PhD in molecular physics, how's that going to happen? >> I think we need more of that democratization for the people who are not data scientists. So data scientists, they need the data, and so, a lot of the hard part is getting the data as to how it should interact, right? So in that example, we were saying how does Teresa and Jeff interact with the robot? The data scientist needs tons, right, thousands, tens of thousands of instances of those data types to actually make an insight. So what if, instead, when we think about AI and me, what about we think about, again, the human, not the, well, data scientists are people too. >> Right, right. >> But let's think about democratizing the rest of the humans to saying, how should I interact with the robot? So a lot of the research that we do is around how do you capture this expert knowledge. So we don't actually need to have tens of thousands of that. We can actually pretty much prescribe we don't want the robot to talk to us. We want him to give us the beer. So why don't we just use things like that? We don't have to start with all the data. >> Right, right, so I'm curious because there's a lot of conversation about machines plus people is better than one or the other, but it seems like it's much more complicated to program a robot to do something with a person as opposed to just giving it a simple task, which is probably historically what we've done more. Here, you go do that task. Now, people are not involved in that task. They don't have to worry about the nuance. They don't have to worry about reacting, reading what I'm trying to communicate. So is it a lot harder to get these things to work with people as opposed to kind of independently and carve off a special job? >> It may be harder, but that's where the value is. So if we think about the AI of, let's say, yesterday, there's a lot of dashboards. So it's with the pure data-driven, the pure AI operating on its own, it's going to look at the data. It's going to give us the insight. At the end of the day, the human's going to need to read, let's say, a static report and make a decision. Sometimes, I look at these reports and I have a hard time even understanding what I'm seeing, right? When they show me all these graphs, I'm supposed to be impressed. >> Right, right. >> I don't know what to do versus if you do. I use TurboTax as an example. When you're filing TurboTax, there's a lot of AI behind the scenes, but it's already looked at my data. As I'm filling in my return, it's telling me maybe you should claim this deduction. It's asking me yes or no questions. That's how I imagine AI at scale being in the future, right? It's not just for TurboTax, but everything we do. So in the robot, in the moment that we were describing, maybe it would see that you and I were talking, and it's not going to interrupt our conversation. But in a different context, if Teresa's by herself, maybe it would come up and say, hey, would you like a beer? >> Right, right. >> I think that's the sort of context that, like a TurboTax, but more sexy of course. >> Right, right, so I'm just curious from your perspective as a technologist, again, looking at your patent history, a lot of stuff on cloud, a lot of stuff on edge, but we've always kind of operated in this kind of new world, which is, if you had infinite compute, infinite storage, and infinite bandwidth, which was taking another. >> Yes. >> Big giant step with 5G, kind of what would you build and how could you build it? You got to just be thrilled as all three of those vectors are just accelerating and giving you, basically, infinite power in terms of tooling to work with. >> It is, I mean, it feels like magic. If you think about, I watch things like "Harry Potter", and you think about they know these spells and they can get things to happen. I think that's exactly where we are now. I get to do all these things that are magic. >> And are people ready for it? What's the biggest challenge on the people side in terms of getting them to think about what they could do, as opposed to what they know today? 'Cause the future could be so different. >> That is the challenge, right, because I think people, even with processes, they think about the process that existed today, where you're going to take AI and even robotics, and just make that process step faster. >> Right. >> But with AI and automation, what if we jumped that whole step, right? If as humans, if I can see everything 'cause I had all the data and then, I had AI telling me these are the important pieces, wouldn't you jump towards the answer? A lot of the processes that we have today are meant so that we actually explore all the conditions that need to be explored, that we do look at all the data that needs to be looked at. So you're still going to look at those things, right? Regulations, rules, that still happens, but what if AI and automation check those for you and all you're doing is actually checking the exceptions? So it's going to really change the way we do work. >> Very cool, well, Teresa, great to catch up and you're sitting right in the catbird seat, so exciting to see what your next patents will be, probably all about robotics as you continue to move this train forward. So thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> All right, she's Teresa, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Tech Vision 2020 Release Party on the 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)