from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation as we've been reporting the Koba 19 pandemic has created a bifurcated IT spending picture and over the last several weeks we've reported both on the macro and even some come at it from from a vendor and a sector view I mean for example we've reported on some of the companies that have really continued to thrive we look at the NASDAQ and its you know near at all-time highs companies like oh and in CrowdStrike we've reported on snowflake uipath the sectors are PA some of the analytic databases around AI maybe even to a lesser extent cloud but still has a lot of tailwind relative to some of those on-prem infrastructure plays even companies like Cisco bifurcated in and of themselves where you see this Meraki side of the house you know doing quite well the work from home stuff but maybe some of the traditional networking not as much well now what if you flip that to really try to understand what's going on with the shape of the recovery which is the main narrative right now is it a v-shape does it a u-shape what is what's that what do people expect and now you understand that you really have to look at different industries because different industries are going to come back at a different pace with me again is Sagar khadiyah who's the director of research at EGR Sagar you guys are all over this as usual timely information it's great to see you again hope all is well in New York City thanks so much David it's a pleasure to be back on again yeah so where are we in the cycle we give dividend a great job and very timely ETR was the first to really put out data on the koban impact with the survey that ran from mid-march to to mid-april and now everybody's attention sagar is focused on okay we're starting to come back stores are starting to open people are beginning to to go out again and everybody wants to know what the shape of the recovery looks like so where are we actually in that research cycle for you guys yeah no problem so like you said you know in that kind of march/april timeframe we really want to go out there and get an idea of what we're doing the budget impacts you know as it relates to IT because of kovat 19 right so we kind of ended off there around a decline of 5% and coming into the year the consensus was of growth of 4 or 5% right so we saw about a 900,000 basis points wing you know to the negative side and the public covered in March and April were you know which sectors and vendors were going to benefit as a result of work from home and so now as we kind of fast forward to the research cycle as we kind of go more into May and into the summer rather than asking those exact same question to get again because it's just been you know maybe 40 or 50 days we really want Singh on the recovery type as well as kind of more emerging private vendors right we want to understand what's gonna be the impact on on these vendors that typically rely on you know larger conferences more in-person meetings because these are younger technologies there's not a lot of information about them and so last Thursday we launched our biannual emerging technology study it covers roughly 300 private emerging technologies across maybe 60 sectors of technology and in tandem we've launched a co-ed flash poll right what we wanted to do was kind of twofold one really understand from CIOs the recovery type they had in mind as well as if they were seeing any any kind of permanent changes in their IT stacks IT spend because of koban 19 and so if we kind of look at the first chart here and kind of get more into that first question around recovery type what we asked CIOs and this kind of COBIT flash poll again we did it last Thursday was what type of recovery are you expecting is it v-shaped so kind of a brief decline you know maybe one quarter and then you're gonna start seeing growth in 2 to H 20 is it you shaped so two to three quarters of a decline or deceleration revenue and you're kind of forecasting that growth in revenue as an organization to come back in 2021 is it l-shaped right so maybe three four five quarters of a decline or deceleration and then you know very minimal to moderate growth or none of the above you know your organization is actually benefiting from from from koban 19 as you know we've seen some many reports so those are kind of the options that we gave CIOs and you kind of see it on that first chart here interesting and this is a survey a flash service 700 CIOs or approximately and the interesting thing I really want to point out here is this you know the koban pandemic was it didn't suppress you know all companies you know and in the return it's not going to be a rising tide lifts all ships you really got to do your research you have to understand the different sectors really try to peel back the onion skin and understand why there's certain momentum how certain organizations are accommodating the work from home we heard you know several weeks ago how there's a major change in in networking mindsets we're talking about how security is changing we're going to talk about some of the permanence but it's really really important to try to understand these different trends by different industries which you're going to talk about in a minute but if you take a look at this slide I mean obviously most people expect this u-shaped decline I mean a you know a u-shaped recovery rather so it's two or three quarters followed by some growth next year but as we'll see some of these industries are gonna really go deeper with an l-shape recovery and then it's really interesting that a pretty large and substantial portion see this as a tailwind presumably those with you know strong SAS models some annual recurring revenue models your thoughts if we kind of star on this kind of aggregate chart you know you're looking at about forty four percent of CIOs anticipated u-shaped recovery right that's the largest bucket and then you can see another 15 percent and to say an l-shape recovery 14 on the v-shaped and then 16 percent to your point that are kind of seeing this this tailwind but if we kind of focus on that largest bucket that you shaped you know one of the thing to remember and again when we asked is two CIOs within the within this kind of coded flash poll we also asked can you give us some commentary and so one of the things that or one of the themes that are kind of coming along with this u-shaped recovery is you know CIOs are cautiously optimistic about this u-shaped recovery you know they believe that they can get back on to a growth cycle into 2021 as long as there's a vaccine available we don't go into a second wave of lockdowns economic activity picks up a lot of the government actions you know become effective so there are some kind of let's call it qualifiers with this bucket of CIOs that are anticipating a u-shape recovery what they're saying is that look we are expecting these things to happen we're not expecting that our lock down we are expecting a vaccine and if that takes place then we do expect an uptick in growth or going back to kind of pre coded levels in in 2021 but you know I think it's fair to assume that if one or more of these are apps and and things do get worse as all these states are opening up maybe the recovery cycle gets pushed along so kind of at the aggregate this is where we are right now yeah so as I was saying and you really have to understand the different not only different sectors and all the different vendors but you got to look into the industries and then even within industries so if we pull up the next chart we have the industry to the breakdown and sort of the responses by the industries v-shape you shape or shape I had a conversation with a CIO of a major resort just the other day and even he was saying what was actually I'll tell you it was Windham Resorts public company I mean and obviously that business got a good crush they had their earnings call the other day they talked about how they cut their capex in half but the stock sagar since the March lows is more than doubled yeah and you know that's amazing and now but even there within that sector they're peeling that on you're saying well certain parts are going to come back sooner or certain parts are going to longer depending on you know what type of resort what type of hotel so it really is a complicated situation so take us through what you're seeing by industry sure so let's start with kind of the IT telco retail consumer space Dave to your point there's gonna be a tremendous amount of bifurcation within both of those verticals look if we start on the IT telco side you know you're seeing a very large bucket of individuals right over twenty percent that indicated they're seeing a tail with our additional revenue because of covin 19 and you know Dave we spoke about this all the way back in March right all these work from home vendors you know CIOs were doubling down on cloud and SAS and we've seen how some of these events have reported in April you know with this very good reports all the major cloud vendors right select security vendors and so that's why you're seeing on the kind of telco side definitely more positivity right as it relates to recovery type right some of them are not even going through recovery they're they're seeing an acceleration same thing on the retail consumer side you're seeing another large bucket of people who are indicating what we've benefited and again there's going to be a lot of bifurcation here there's been a lot of retail consumers you just mentioned with the hotel lines that are definitely hurting but you know if you have a good online presence as a retailer and you know you had essential goods or groceries you benefited and and those are the organizations that we're seeing you know really indicate that they saw an acceleration due to Koga 19 so I thought those two those two verticals between kind of the IT and retail side there was a big bucket or you know of people who indicated positivity so I thought that was kind of the first kind of you know I was talking about kind of peeling this onion back you know that was really interesting you know tech continues to power on and I think you know a lot of people try I think that somebody was saying that the record of the time in which we've developed a fit of vaccine previously was like mumps or something and it was I mean it was just like years but now today 2020 we've got a I we've got all this data you've got these great companies all working on this and so you know wow if we can compress that that's going to change the equation a couple other things sagar that jump out at me here in this chart I want to ask you about I mean the education you know colleges are really you know kind of freaking out right now some are coming back I know like for instance my daughter University Arizona they're coming back in the fall evidently others are saying and no you can clearly see the airlines and transportation as the biggest sort of l-shape which is the most negative I'm sure restaurants and hospitality are kind of similar and then you see energy you know which got crushed we had you know oil you know negative people paying it big barrels of oil but now look at that you know expectation of a pretty strong you know you shape recovery as people start driving again and the economy picks up so maybe you could give us some thoughts on on some of those sort of outliers yeah so I kind of bucket you know the the next two outliers as from an l-shaped in a u-shaped so on the l-shaped side like like you said education airlines transportation and probably to a little bit lesser extent industrials materials manufacturing services consulting these verticals are indicating the highest percentages from an l-shaped recovery right so three plus orders of revenue declines and deceleration followed by kind of you know minimal to moderate growth and look there's no surprise here those are the verticals that have been impacted the most by less demand from consumers and and businesses and then as you mentioned on the energy utility side and then I would probably bucket maybe healthcare Pharma those have some of the largest percentages of u-shaped recovery and it's funny like I read a lot of commentary from some of the energy in the healthcare CIOs and they were said they were very optimistic about a u-shaped type of recovery and so it kind of you know maybe with those two issues then you could even kind of lump them into you know probably to a lesser extent but you could probably open into the prior one with the airlines and the education and services consulting and IMM where you know these are definitely the verticals that are going to see the longest longest recoveries it's probably a little bit more uniform versus what we've kind of talked about a few minutes ago with you know IT and and retail consumer where it's definitely very bifurcated you know there's definitely winners and losers there yeah and again it's a very complicated situation a lot of people that I've talked to are saying look you know we really don't have a clear picture that's why all these companies have are not giving guidance many people however are optimistic not only for a vet a vaccine but but but also they're thinking as young people with disposable income they're gonna kind of say dorm damn the torpedoes I'm not really going to be exposed and you know they can come back much stronger you know there seems to be pent up demand for some of the things like elective surgery or even the weather is sort of more important health care needs so that obviously could be a snap back so you know obviously we're really closely looking at this one thing though is is certain is that people are expecting a permanent change and you've got data that really shows that on the on the next chart that's right so one of the one of the last questions that we asked on this you know quick coded flash poll was do you anticipate permanent changes to your kind of IT stack IT spend based on the last few months you know as everyone has been working remotely and you know rarely do you see results point this much in one direction but 92% of CIOs and and kind of IT you know high level ITN users indicated yes there are going to be permanent changes and you know one of the things we talked about in March and look we were really the first ones you know you know in our discussion where we were talking about work from home spend kind of negating or balancing out all these declines right we were saying look yes we are seeing a lot of budgets come down but surprisingly we're seeing 2030 percent of organizations accelerate spent and even the ones that are spending less they even then you know some of their some of their budgets are kind of being negated by this work from home spend right when you think about collaboration tool is an additional VPN and networking bandwidth in laptops and then security all that stuff CIOs now continue to spend on because what what CIO is now understand as productivity has remained at very high levels right in March CIOs were very with the catastrophe and productivity that has not come true so on the margin CIOs and organizations are probably much more positive on that front and so now because there is no vaccine where you know CIOs and just in general the population we don't know when one is coming and so remote work seems to be the new norm moving forward especially that productivity you know levels are are pretty good with people working from home so from that perspective everything that looked like it was maybe going to be temporary just for the next few months as people work from home that's how organizations are now moving forward well and we saw Twitter basically said we're gonna make work from home permanent that's probably cuz their CEO wants to you know live in Africa Google I think is going to the end of the year I think many companies are going to look at a hybrid and give employees a choice say look if you want to work from home and you can be productive you get your stuff done you know we're cool with that I think the other point is you know everybody talks about these digital transformations you know leading into Kovan and I got to tell you I think a lot of companies were sort of complacent they talked the talk but they weren't walking the walk meaning they really weren't becoming digital businesses they really weren't putting data at the core and I think now it's really becoming an imperative there's no question that that what we've been talking about and forecasting has been pulled forward and you you're either going to have to step up your digital game or you're going to be in big trouble and the other thing that's I'm really interested in is will companies sub optimize profitability in the near term in order to put better business resiliency in place and better flexibility will they make those investments and I think if they do you know longer term they're going to be in better shape you know if they don't they could maybe be okay in the near term but I'm gonna put a caution sign a little longer term no look I think everything that's been done in the last few months you know in terms of having those continuation plans because you know do two pandemics all that stuff that is now it look you got to have that in your playbook right and so to your point you know this is where CIOs are going and if you're not transforming yourself or you didn't or you know lesson learned because now you're probably having to move twice as fast to support all your employees so I think you know this pandemic really kind of sped up you know digital transformation initiatives which is why you know you're seeing some companies desks and cloud related companies with very good earnings reports that are guiding well and then you're seeing other companies that are pulling their guidance because of uncertainty but it's it's likely more on the side of they're just not seeing the same levels of spend because if they haven't oriented themselves on that digital transformation side so I think you know events like this they typically you know Showcase winners and losers then you know when when things are going well and you know everything is kind of going up well I think that - there's a big you know discussion around is the ESPY overvalued right now I won't make that call but I will say this then there's a lot of data out there there's data and earnings reports there's data about this pandemic which change continues to change maybe not so much daily but you're getting new information multiple times a week so you got to look to that data you got to make your call pick your spot so you talk about a stock pickers market I think it's very much true here there are some some gonna be really strong companies emerging out of this you know don't gamble but do your research and I think you'll you'll find some you know some Dems out there you know maybe Warren Buffett can't find them okay but the guys at Main Street I think you know the I am I'm optimistic I wonder how you feel about about the recovery I I think we may be tainted by tech you know I'm very much concerned about certain industries but I think the tech industry which is our business is gonna come out of this pretty strong yeah we look at the one thing we we should we should have stated this earlier the majority of organizations are not expecting a v-shaped recovery and yet I still think there's part of the consensus is expecting a v-shaped recovery you can see as we demonstrate in some of the earlier charts the you know almost the majority of organizations are expecting a u-shaped recovery and even then as we mentioned right that you shape there is some cautious up around there and I have it you probably have it where yes if everything goes well it looks like 2021 we can really get back on track but there's so much unknown and so yes that does give I think everyone pause when it comes from an investment perspective and even just bringing on technologies and into your organization right which ones are gonna work which ones are it so I'm definitely on the boat of this is a more u-shaped in a v-shaped recovery I think the data backs that up I think you know when it comes to cloud and SAS players those areas and I think you've seen this on the investment side a lot of money has come out of all these other sectors that we mentioned that are having these l-shaped recoveries a lot of it has gone into the tech space I imagine that will continue and so that might be kind of you know it's tough to sometimes balance what's going on on the investor in the stock market side with you know how organizations are recovering I think people are really looking out in two to three quarters and saying look you know to your point where you set up earlier is there a lot of that pent up demand are things gonna get right back to normal because I think you know a lot of people are anticipating that and if we don't see that I think you know the next time we do some of these kind of coded flash bolts you know I'm interested to see whether or not you know maybe towards the end of the summer these recovery cycles are actually longer because maybe we didn't see some of that stuff so there's still a lot of unknowns but what we do know right now is it's not a v-shaped recovery agree especially on the unknowns there's monetary policy there's fiscal policy there's an election coming up there's a third there's escalating tensions with China there's your thoughts on the efficacy of the vaccine what about therapeutics you know do people who have this yet immunity how many people actually have it what about testing so the point I'm making here is it's very very important that you update your forecast regularly that's why it's so great that I have this partnership with you guys because we you know you're constantly updating the numbers it's not just a one-shot deal so suck it you know thanks so much for coming on looking forward to having you on in in the coming weeks really appreciate it absolutely yeah well I will really start kind of digging into how a lot of these emerging technologies are faring because of kovat 19 so that's I'm actually interested to start thinking through the data myself so yeah well we'll do some reporting in the coming weeks about that as well well thanks everybody for watching this episode of the cube insights powered by ETR I'm Dave Volante for sauger kuraki check out ETR dot plus that's where all the ETR data lives i published weekly on wiki bon calm and silicon angle calm and reach me at evil on Tay we'll see you next time [Music]

(upbeat music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> As we've been reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a bifurcated IT spending picture. And over the last several weeks, we've reported both in the macro and even some come at it from a vendor and a sector view. I mean, for example, we've reported on some of the companies that have really continued to thrive, we look at the NASDAQ and its near a toll-time hard. Companies like Okta and CrowdStrike, we've reported on Snowflake, UiPath. The sectors, RPA, some of the analytic databases around AI, maybe even to a lesser extent Cloud but still has a lot tailwinds relative to some of those on-prem infrastructure plays. Even companies like Cisco, bifurcated in and of themselves, where you see this more rocky side of the house doing quite well. The work-from-home stuff but maybe some of the traditional networking not as much. Well, now what if you flip that to really try to understand what's going on with the shape of the recovery which is the main narrative right now. Is it a V shape? Is it a U shape? What do people expect? And now to understand that, you really have to look at different industries because different industries are going to come back at a different pace. With me again is Sagar Kadakia, who's the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, you guys are all over this, as usual timely information, it's great to see you again. Hope all is well in New York City. >> Thanks so much David, it's a pleasure to be back on again. >> Yeah, so where are we in the cycle? You've done a great job and very timely, ETR was the first to really put out data on the Covid impact with the server that ran from mid March to mid April. And now everybody's attention Sagar, is focused on, okay, we've started to come back, stores are starting to open, people are beginning to go out again and everybody wants to know what the shape of the recovery looks like. So, where are we actually in that research cycle for you guys? >> Yeah, no problem. So, like you said, in that kind of March, April timeframe, we really want to go out there and get an idea of what are going to be the budget impacts as it relates to IT because of COVID-19, right? So, we kind of ended off there around a decline of 5%. And coming into the year, the consensus was a growth of 4% or 5%, right? So, we saw about a 900 or 1000 base point swing, to the negative side. And then (murmurs) topic we covered in March and April were which sectors of vendors were going to benefit as a result of work-from-home. And so, now as we kind of fast forward to the research cycle as we kind of go more into May and into the summer, rather than asking those exact same question again, because it's just been maybe 40 or 50 days. We really want to (murmurs) on the recovery type as well as well as kind of more emerging private vendors, right? We want it to understand what's going to be the impact on these vendors that typically rely on larger conferences, more in person meetings, because these are younger technologies. There's not a lot of information about them. And so, last Thursday we launched our biannual emerging technology study. It covers roughly 300 private emerging technologies across maybe 60 sectors of technology. And in tandem, we've launched a COVID Flash Poll, right? What we want to do was kind of twofold. One really understand from CIOs the recovery type they had in mind, as well as if they were seeing any kind of permanent changes in their IT, stacks IT spend because of COVID-19. And so, if we kind of look at the first chart here, and kind of get more into that first question around recovery type, what we asked CIOs in this kind of COVID Flash Poll, again, we did it last Thursday was, what type of recovery are you expecting? Is it V-shaped so kind of of a brief decline, maybe 1/4, and then you're going to start seeing growth into 2 each 20. Is it U-shaped? So two to 3/4 of a decline or deceleration revenue, and you're kind of forecasting that growth in revenue as an organization to come back in 2021. Is it L-shaped, right? So, maybe three, four or 5/4 of a decline or deceleration. And very minimal to moderate growth or none of the above, your organization is actually benefiting from COVID-19, as we've seen some many reports. So, those are kind of the options that we gave CIOs and you kind of see them at first chart here. >> Well, interesting. And this is a survey, a flash of survey, 700 CIOs or approximately. And the interesting thing I really want to point out here is, the COVID pandemic, it didn't suppress all companies, and the return is it's not going to be a rising tide that lifts all ships. You really got to do your research. You have to understand the different sectors, really try to peel back the onion skin and understand why there are certain momentum, how certain organizations are accommodating the work from home. We heard several weeks ago, how there's a major change in networking mindsets we're talking about how security is changing. We're going to talk about some of the permanents, but it's really, really important to try to understand these different trends by different industries, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But if you take a look at this slide, I mean, obviously most people expect this U-shape decline. I mean, U-shape recovery rather. So it's two or 3/4 followed by some growth next year. But as we'll see, some of these industries are going to really go deeper with an L-shape recovery. And then it's really interesting that a pretty large and substantial portion see this as a tailwind, presumably those with strong SAS models, annual recurring revenue models, your thoughts? >> If we kind of start on this kind of aggregate chart, you're looking at about 44% of CEO's anticipate a U-shaped recovery, right? That's the largest bucket. Then you can see another 15% anticipate an L-shape recovery 14 on the V-shaped, and then 16% to your point that are kind of seeing this tailwind. But if we kind of focus on that largest bucket that U-shaped, one of the things to remember and again, when we asked this to CIOs within this kind of COVID Flash Poll, we also asked, can you give us some commentary? And so, one of the things that, or one of the themes that are kind of coming along with this U-shape recovery is CIOs are cautiously optimistic about this U-shape recovery. They believe that they can get back onto a growth cycle, into 2021, as long as there's a vaccine available. We don't go into a second wave of lockdowns. Economic activity picks up, a lot of the government actions become effective. So there are some kind of let's call it qualifiers, with this bucket of CIOs that are anticipating a U-shape recovery. What they're saying is that, "look, we are expecting these things to happen, "we're not expecting a lockdown, "we are expecting a vaccine. "And if that takes place, "then we do expect an uptake in growth, "or going back to kind of pre COVID levels in 2021." But I think it's fair to assume that if one or more of these are ups and things do get worse as all these States are opening up, maybe the recovery cycle gets pushed along. So kind of at the aggregate, this is where we are right now. >> Yeah. So as I was saying, you really have to understand the different, not only different sectors not only the different vendors, but you can really get to look into the industries, and then even within industries. So if we pull up the next chart, we have the industry sort of break down, and sort of the responses by the industry's V-shape, U-shape or L-shape. I had a conversation with a CIO of a major resort, just the other day. And even he was saying, well, it was actually, I'll tell you it was Wyndham Resorts, public company. I mean, and obviously that business got crushed. They had their earnings call the other day. They talked about how they cut their capex in half. But the stock, Sagar, since the March loss is more than doubled. >> Yeah. >> It was just amazing. And now, but even there, within that sector, they're appealing that on you are doing well, certain parts are going to come back sooner, certain parts are going to take longer, depending on, what type of resort, what type of hotel. So, it really is a complicated situation. So, take us through what you're seeing by industry. >> Yeah, sure. So let's start with kind of the IT-Telco, retail, consumer space. Dave to your point, there's going to be a tremendous amount of bifurcation within both of those verticals. Look, if we start on the IT-Telco side, you're seeing a very large bucket of individuals, right over 20%? That indicated they're seeing a tailwind or additional revenue because of COVID-19 and Dave, we spoke about this all the way back in March, right? All these work from home vendors. CIOs were doubling down on Cloud and SAS and we've seen how some of these vendors have reported in April, with very good reports, all the major Cloud vendors, right? Like Select Security vendors. And so, that's why you're seeing on the kind of Telco side, definitely more positivity, right? As you relates to recovery type, right? Some of them are not even going through recovery. They're seeing an acceleration, same thing on the retail consumer side. You're seeing another large bucket of people who are indicating, "look, we've benefited." And again, there's going to be a lot of bifurcation, there's been a lot of retail consumers. You just mentioned with the hotel lines, that are definitely hurting. But if you have a good online presence as a retailer, and you had essential goods or groceries, you benefited. And those are the organizations that we're seeing really indicate that they saw an acceleration due to COVID-19. So, I thought those two verticals between kind of the IT and retail side, there was a big bucket of people who indicated positivity. So I thought that was kind of the first kind of as we talked about kind of feeling this onion back. That was really interesting. >> Tech continues to power on, and I think a lot of people try, I think somebody was saying that the record time in which we've developed a vaccine previously was like mumps or something. I mean, it was just like years. But now today, 2020, we've got AI, we've got all this data, you've got these great companies all working on this. And so, wow, if we can compress that, that's going to change the equation. A couple of other things Sagar that jump out at me here in this chart that I want to ask you about. I mean, the education, the colleges, are really kind of freaking out right now, some are coming back. I know, like for instance, my daughter at University of Arizona, they're coming back in the fall indefinitely, others are saying, no. You can clearly see the airlines and transportation, has the biggest sort of L-shape, which is the most negative. I'm sure restaurants and hospitality are kind of similar. And then you see energy which got crushed. We had oil (laughs) negative people paying it, big barrels of oil. But now look at that, expectation of a pretty strong, U-shape recovery as people start driving again, and the economy picks up. So, maybe you could give us some thoughts on some of those sort of outliers. >> Yeah. So I kind of bucket the next two outliers as from an L-shaped and a U-shaped. So on the L-shaped side, like you said, education airlines, transportation, and probably to a little bit lesser extent, industrials materials, manufacturing services consulting. These verticals are indicating the highest percentages from an L-shaped recovery, right? So, three plus 1/4 of revenue declines in deceleration, followed by kind of minimal to moderate growth. And look, there's no surprise here. Those are the verticals that have been impacted the most, by less demand from consumers and businesses. And then as you mentioned on the energy utility side, and then I would probably bucket maybe healthcare, pharma, those have some of the largest, percentages of U-shaped recovery. And it's funny, like I read a lot of commentary from some of the energy and the healthcare CIOs, and they were saying they were very optimistic (laughs) about a U-shaped type of recovery. And so it kind of, maybe with those two issues that we could even kind of lump them into, probably to a lesser extent, but you could probably lump it into the prior one with the airlines and the education and services consulting, and IMM, where these are definitely the verticals that are going to see the longest, longest recoveries. And it's probably a little bit more uniform, versus what we've kind of talked about a few minutes ago with IT and retail consumer where it's definitely very bifurcated. There's definitely winners and losers there. >> Yeah. And again, it's a very complicated situation. A lot of people that I've talked to are saying, "look, we really don't have a clear picture, "that's why all these companies are not giving guidance." Many people, however, are optimistic only for a vaccine, but also their thinking is young people with disposable income, they're going to kind of say,"Damn the torpedoes, "I'm not really going to be exposed." >> And they could come back much stronger, there seems to be pent up demand for some of the things like elective surgery, or even some other sort of more important, healthcare needs. So, that obviously could be a snapback. So, obviously we're really closely looking at this, one thing though is certain, is that people are expecting a permanent change, and you've got data that really shows that on the next chart. >> That's right. So, one of the last questions that we ask kind of this quick COVID Flash Poll was, do you anticipate permanent changes to your kind of IT stack, IT spend, based on the last few months? As everyone has been working remotely, and rarely do you see results point this much in one direction, but 92% of CIOs and kind of high level IT end users indicated yes, there are all going to be permanent changes. And one of the things we talked about in March, and look, we were really the first ones, in our discussion, where we were talking about work from home spend, kind of negating or bouncing out all these declines, right? We were saying, look, yes, we are seeing a lot of budgets come down, but surprisingly, we're seeing 20,30% of organizations accelerate spend. And even the ones that are spending less, even them, some of their budgets are kind of being negated by this work from home spend, right? When you think about collaboration tools and additional VPN and networking bandwidth, and laptops and then security, all that stuff. CIOs now continue to spend on, because what CIOs now understand is productivity has remained at very high levels, right? In March CIOs were very concerned with the catastrophe and productivity that has not come true. So on the margin CIOs and organizations are probably much more positive on that front. And so now, because there is no vaccine, where we know CIOs and just in general, the population, we don't know when one is coming. And so remote work seems to be the new norm moving forward, especially that productivity levels are pretty good with people working from home. So, from that perspective, everything that looked like it was maybe going to be temporary, just for the next few months, as people work from home, that's how organizations are now moving forward. >> Well, and we saw Twitter, basically said, "we're going to make work from home permanent." That's probably because their CEO wants to live in Africa. Google, I think, is going to the end of the year. >> I think many companies are going to look at a hybrid, and give employees a choice, say, "look, if you want to work from home "and you can be productive, you get your stuff done, we're cool with that." I think the other point is, everybody talks about these digital transformations leading into COVID. I got to tell you, I think a lot of companies were sort of complacent. They talk the talk, but they weren't walking the walk, meaning they really weren't becoming digital businesses. They really weren't putting data at the core. And I think now it's really becoming an imperative. And there's no question that what we've been talking about and forecasting has been pulled forward, and you're either going to have to step up your digital game or you're going to be in big trouble. And the other thing I'm really interested in is will companies sub-optimize profitability in the near term, in order to put better business resiliency in place, and better flexibility, will they make those investments? And I think if they do, longer term, they're going to be in better shape. If they don't, they could maybe be okay in the near term, but I'm going to put up a caution sign, although the longer term. >> Now look, I think everything that's been done in the last few months, in terms of having those continuation plans, due to pandemics and all that stuff, look, you got to have that in your playbook, right? And so to your point, this is where CIOs are going and if you're not transforming yourself or you didn't before, lesson learned, because now you're probably having to move twice as fast to support all your employees. So I think this pandemic really kind of sped up digital transformation initiatives, which is why, you're seeing some companies, SAS and Cloud related companies, with very good earnings reports that are guiding well. And then you're seeing other companies that are pulling their guidance because of uncertainty, but it's likely more on the side if they're just not seeing the same levels of spend, because if they haven't oriented themselves, on that digital transformation side. So I think events like this, they typically showcase winners and losers than when things are going well. and everything's kind of going up. >> Well, I think that too, there's a big discussion around is the S&P over valued right now. I won't make that call, but I will say this, that there's a lot of data out there. There's data in earnings reports, there's data about this pandemic, which it continues to change. Maybe not so much daily, but we're getting new information, multiple times a week. So you got to look to that data. You got to make your call, pick your spots, earlier you talk about a stock pickers market. I think it's very much true here. There are some going to be really strong companies. emerging out of this, don't gamble but do your research. And I think you'll find some gems out there, maybe Warren buffet can't find them okay. (laughs) But the guys at main street. I'm optimistic, I wonder how you feel about the recovery. I think I maybe tainted by tech. (laughs). I'm very much concerned about certain industries, but I think the tech industry, which is our business's, going to come out of this pretty strong? >> Yeah. Look, the one thing we should have stated this earlier, the majority of organizations are not expecting a V-shaped recovery. And yet I still think there's part of the consensus is expecting a V-shaped recovery. You can see as we demonstrate in some of the earlier charts, That U-shaped, there is some cautious optimism around there, almost the majority of organizations are expecting a U-shape recovery. And even then, as we mentioned, right? That U-shape, there is some cautious optimism around there, and I have it, you probably have it where. Yes, if everything goes well, it looks like 2021 we can really get back on track. But there's so much unknown. And so yes, that does give I think everyone pause when it comes from an investment perspective, and even just bringing on technologies. into your organization, right? Which ones are going to work, which ones aren't? So, I'm definitely on the boat of, this is a more U-shaped in a V-shape recovery. I think the data backs that up. I think when it comes to Cloud and SAS players, those areas, and I think you've seen this on the investment side, a lot of money has come out of all these other sectors that we mentioned that are having these L-shaped recoveries. A lot of it has gone into the text-based. I imagine that will continue. And so that might be kind of, it's tough to sometimes balance what's going on, on the investment that stock market side, with how organizations are recovering. I think people are really looking out into two, 3/4 and saying, look to your point where you said that earlier, is there a lot of that pent up demand, are things going to get right back to normal? Because I think a lot of people are anticipating that. And if we don't see that, I think the next time we do some of these kind of COVID Flash Polls I'm interested to see whether or not, maybe towards the end of the summer, these recovery cycles are actually longer because maybe we didn't see some of that stuff. So there's still a lot of unknowns. But what we do know right now is it's not a V-shaped recovery. >> I agree, especially on the unknowns, there's monetary policy, there's fiscal policy, there's an election coming up. >> That's fine. >> There's escalating tensions with China. There's your thoughts on the efficacy of the vaccine? what about therapeutics? Do people who've had this get immunity? How many people actually have it? What about testing? So the point I'm making here is it's very, very important that you update your forecast regularly That's why it's so great to have this partnership with you guys, because you're constantly updating the numbers. It's not just a one shot deal. So Sagar, thanks so much for coming on. I'm looking forward to having you on in the coming weeks. Really appreciate it. >> Absolutely. Yeah, we'll really start kind of digging into how a lot of these emerging technologies are fairing because of COVID-19. So, I'm actually interested to start digging through the data myself. So yeah, we'll do some reporting in the coming weeks about that as well. >> Well, thanks everybody for watching this episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. I'm Dave Vellante for Sagar Kadakia, check out etr.plus, that's where all the ETR data lives, I publish weekly on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And you can reach me @dvellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music).

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical music)

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live, from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, it's The Cube, covering Women in Data Science Conference 2018. Brought to you by Stanford. >> Welcome back to The Cube. We are live at Stanford University at the third annual Women in Data Science Conference. I am Lisa Martin. We've had a really exciting day so far, talking with a lot of female leaders in different parts of STEM fields. And I'm excited to be joined by my next guest, who is a speaker at this year's WIDS 2018 event, Daniela Witten, the Associate Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Daniela, thanks so much for stopping by The Cube. >> Oh, thanks so much for the invitation. >> So here we are at Stanford University. You spent quite a lot of time here. You've got three degrees from Stanford, so it's kind of like coming back home? >> Yeah, I've spent from 2001 to 2010 here. I started with a bachelor's degree in math and biology, and then I did a master's, and finally a PhD in statistics. >> And so now you're up at the University of Washington. Tell us about that. What is your focus there? >> Yeah, so my work is in statistical machine learning, with applications to large scale data coming out of biology. And so the idea is that in the last ten or 20 years, the field of biology has been totally transformed by new technologies that make it possible to measure a person's DNA sequence, or to see the activity in their brain. Really, all different types of measurements that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But unfortunately, we don't yet know really how to make sense of these data statistically. So there's a pretty big gap between the data that we're collecting, or rather, the data that biologists are collecting, and then the scientific conclusions that we can draw from these data. So my work focuses on trying to bridge this gap by developing statistical methods that we can use to make sense of this large scale data. >> That sounds exciting. So, WIDS, this is the third year, and they have grown this event remarkably quickly. So, we had Margot Garritsen on the program a little bit earlier, and she had shared 177 regional WIDS events going on today, this week, in 53 countries. And they're expecting to reach 100,000 people. So, for you, as a speaker, what is it that attracted you to participate in the WIDS movement, and share your topic, which we'll get to in a second, what was it that sort of attracted you to that? >> Well, first of all, it's an honor to be invited to participate in this event, which, as you mentioned, is getting live streamed and so many people are watching. But what's really special for me, of course, as a woman, is that there's so many conferences out there that I speak at, and the vast majority have a couple of female speakers, and it's not because there's a lack of talent. There are plenty of very qualified women who could be speaking at these conferences. But often, the conference organizers just don't think of women right away, or maybe add a couple women as an afterthought to their speaker lineups. And so it's really wonderful to be part of a conference where all of the speakers are women, and so we can really see the broad ways in which women are contributing to data science, both in and out of industry. >> And one of the things that Margot shared was, she had this idea with her co-founders only three years ago in 2015, and they got from concept to their first event in six months. >> Daniela: Women know how to get things done. >> We do, don't we? (laughs) But also what it showed, and even in 2015, and we still have this problem in 2018, is there's a massive demand for this. >> Yeah. >> The statistics, speaking of statistics, the numbers show very few women that are getting degrees in STEM subjects are actually working in their field. I just saw this morning, it's really cool, interactive infographic that someone shared with me on Twitter, thank you very much, that showed that 20 percent of females get degrees in engineering, but only 11 percent of them are working in engineering. And you think, "How have we gone backwards in the last 30 years?" But at least now we've got this movement, this phenomenon that is WIDS to start, even from an awareness perspective, of showing we don't have a lot of thought diversity. We have a great opportunity to increase that, and you've got a great platform in order to share your story. >> Yeah. Well, I think that you raise a good point though, as, even though the number of women majoring in STEM fields, at least in some areas of STEM has increased, the number of women making it higher up in the STEM ladder hasn't, for the most part. And one reason for this is possibly the lack of female role models. So being able to attend a conference like this, for young women who are interested in developing their career in STEM, I'm sure is really inspirational and a great opportunity. So it's wonderful for Margot and the other organizers to have put this together. >> It is. Even on the recruiting side, some of the things that still surprise me are when some, whether it's universities or companies that are going to universities to recruit for STEM roles, they're still bringing mostly men. And if there are females at the events, they're, often times they're handing out swag, they're doing more event coordination, which is great. I'm a marketer. There's a lot of females in marketing. But it still shows the need to start from a visibility standpoint and a messaging standpoint alone. They've got to flip this. >> I completely agree with that, but it also works the other way. So, often a company or an academic department might have a few women in a particular role, and those women get asked to do everything. Because they'll say, "Oh, we're going to Stanford to recruit. We need a woman there. We're having some event, and we don't want it to look totally non-diverse, so we need a woman there too." And the small number of women in STEM get asked to do a lot of things that the men don't get asked to do, and this can also be really problematic. Even though the intent is good, to clearly showcase the fact that there's diversity in STEM and in academia, the end outcome can actually be hurtful to the women involved who are being asked to do more than their fair share. So we need to find a way to balance this. >> Right. That balance is key. So what I want to kind of pivot on next is, just looking at the field of data science, it's so interesting because it's very, I like 'cause it's horizontal. We just had a guest on from Uber, and we talk to on The Cube, people in many different industries, from big tech to baseball teams and things like that. And what it really shows, though, is, there's blurred lines, or maybe even lines that have evaporated between demarcated career A, B, C, D. And data science is so pervasive that it's impacting, people that are working in it, like yourself, have the ability to impact every sector, policy changes, things like that. Do you think that that message is out there enough? That the next generation understands how much impact they can make in data science? >> I think there is a lot of excitement from young people about data science. At U-dub, we have a statistics major, and it's really grown a lot in popularity in the last few years. We have a new master's degree in data science that just was started around the same time that WIDS was started, and we had 800 applicants this year. >> Wow. >> For a single masters program. Truly incredible. But I think that there's an element of it that also maybe people don't realize. So data science, there's a technical skill set that comes with it, and people are studying undergrad in statistics, and getting master's in data science in order to get that technical skill set. But there's also a non-technical skill set that's incredibly important, because data science isn't done in a vacuum. It's done within the context of interdisciplinary teams with team members from all different areas. So, for example, in my work, I work with biologists. Your previous guest from Uber, I'm sure is working with engineers and all different areas of the company. And in order to be successful in data science, you need to really not only have technical skills, but also the ability to work as a team player and to communicate your ideas. >> Yeah, you're right. Balancing those technical skills with, what some might call soft skills, empathy, collaboration, the ability to communicate, seems to be, we talked about balance earlier, a scale-wise. Would you say they're pretty equivalent, in terms of really, that would give somebody a great foundation as a data scientist? >> I would say that having both of those skill sets would give you a good foundation, yes. The extent to which either one is needed probably depends on the details of your job. >> True. So, I want to talk a little bit more about your background. Something that caught my eye was that your work has been featured in popular media. Forbes, three times, and Elle magazine, which of course, I thought, "What? I've got to talk to you about that!" Tell me a little bit about the opportunities that you've had in Forbes and in Elle magazine to share your story and to be a mentor. >> Yeah. Well, I've just been lucky to be getting involved in the field of statistics at a time when statistics is really growing in importance and interest. So the joke is, that ten years ago, if you went to a cocktail party, and you said that you were a statistician, then nobody would want to talk to you. (Lisa laughs) And now, if you go to a cocktail party and you say you're a statistician, everyone wants to know more and find out if you know of any job openings for them. >> Lisa: That's pretty cool! >> Yeah. So it's a really great time to be doing this kind of work. And there's really an increased appreciation for the fact that it's not enough to have access to a lot of data, but we really need the technical skills to make sense of that data. >> Right. So share with us a little bit about the session that you're doing here: More Data, More Statistical Problems. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe some of the three, what are the three key takeaways that the audience was hearing from you? >> Yeah. So I think the first real takeaway is, sometimes there's a feeling that, when we have a lot of data, we don't really need a deep understanding of statistics, we just need to know how to do machine learning, or how to develop a black box predictor. And so, the first point that I wanted to make is that that's not really right. Actually, the more data you have, often the more opportunity there is for your analysis to go awry, if you don't really have the solid foundations. Another point that I wanted to make is that there's been a lot of excitement about the promise of biology. So, a lot of my work has biomedical applications, and people have been hoping for many years that the new technologies that have come out in recent years in biology, would lead to improve understanding of human health and improve treatment of disease. And, it turns out, that it hasn't, at least not yet. We've got the data, but what we don't know how to do is how to analyze it yet. And so, the real gap between the data that we have and achieving its promise is actually a statistical gap. So there's a lot of opportunity for statisticians to help bridge that gap, in order to improve human health. And finally, the last point that I want to make is that a lot of these issues are really subtle. So we can try to just swing a hammer at our data and hope to get something out of it, but often there's subtle statistical issues that we need to think about, that could very much affect our results. And keeping in mind sort of the effects of our models, and some of these subtle statistical issues is very important. >> So, in terms of your team at University of Washington, or your classes that you teach, you work with undergrads. >> Yeah, I teach undergrads and PhD students, and I work mostly with PhD students. And I've just been lucky to work with incredibly talented students. I did my PhD here at Stanford, and I had a great advisor and really wonderful mentoring from my advisor and from the other faculty in the department. And so it's really great to have the opportunity now, in turn, to mentor grad students at University of Washington. >> What are some of the things that you help them with? Is it, we talk about inspiring women to get into the field, but, as you prepare these grad students to finish their master's or PhD's, and then go out either into academia or in industry, what are some of the other elements that you think is important for them to understand in terms of learning how to be assertive, or make their points in a respectful, professional way? Is that part of what you help them understand and achieve? >> That's definitely part of it. I would say another thing that I try to teach them, so everyone who I work with, all my students, they're incredibly strong technically, because you don't get into a top PhD program in statistics or biostatistics if you're not technically very strong, so what I try to help my students do is figure out not just how to solve problems, because they can solve any problem they set their mind to, but actually how to identify the problems that are likely to be high impact. Because there's so many problems out there that you can try to solve statistically, and, of course, we should all be focusing our efforts on the ones that are likely to have a really big impact on society, or on health, or whatever it is that we're trying to influence. >> Last question for you. If you look back to your education to now, what advice would you give your younger self? >> Gosh, that's a really great question. I think that I'm happy with many of the career decisions I've made. For example, getting a PhD in statistics, I think is a great career move. But, at the same time, maybe I would tell a younger version of me to take more risks, and not be so worried about meeting every requirement on time, and instead, expanding a little bit, taking more courses in other areas, and really broadening instead of just deepening my skill set. >> We've heard that sentiment echoed a number of times today, and one of the themes that I'm hearing a lot is don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone. And it's so hard for us when we're in it, when we're younger, 'cause you don't know that, you don't have any experience there. But it's something that I always appreciate hearing from the women who've kind of led the way for those of us and then, the next generation, is, don't be afraid to get comfortably uncomfortable and as you said, take risks. It's not a bad thing, right? Well, Daniela, thanks so much for carving out some time to visit us on The Cube, and we're happy to have given you the opportunity to reach an even bigger audience with your message, and we wish you continued success at U-dub. >> Oh, thanks so much. >> We want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin live with The Cube at WIDS 2018 from Stanford University. Stick around, I'll be back with my next guest after a short break. (energetic music)