(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's special presentation of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Jenni Troutman is here, Director of Products and Services, and Training and Certification at AWS, and Heather Ruden, Director of Education Programs, Training and Certification. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and for the International Women's Day special program. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> So, I'll just get it out of the way. I'm a big fan of what you guys do. I've been shouting at the top of my lungs, "It's free. Get cloud training and you'll have a six figure job." Pretty much. I'm over amplifying. But this is really a big opportunity in the industry, education and the skills gap, and the skill velocities that's changing. New roles are coming on around cloud native, cloud native operators, cybersecurity. There's so much excitement going on around the industry, and all these open positions, and they need new talent. So you can't get a degree for some of these things. So, nope, it doesn't matter what school you went to, everyone's kind of level. This is a really big deal. So, Heather, share with us your thoughts as well on this topic. Jenni, you too. Like, where are you guys at? 'Cause this is a big opportunity for women and anyone to level up in the industry. >> Absolutely. So I'll jump in and then I'll hand it over to Jenni. We're your dream team here. We can talk about both sides of this. So I run a set of programs here at AWS that are really intended to help build the next generation of cloud builders. And we do that with a variety of programs, whether it is targeting young learners from kind of 12 and up. We have AWS GetIT that is designed to get women ambassadors or women mentors in front of girls 12 to 14 and get them curious about a career in STEM. We also have a program that is all digital online. It's available in 11 languages. It's got hundreds of courses. That's called AWS Educate that is designed to do exactly what you just talked about, expose the opportunities and start building cloud skills for learners at age 13 and up. They can go online and register with an email and start learning. We want them to understand not only what the opportunity is for them, but the ways that they can help influence and bring more diversity and more inclusion and into the cloud technology space, and just keep building all those amazing builders that we need here for our customers and partners. And those are the programs that I manage, but Jenni also has an amazing program, a set of programs. And so I'll hand it over to her as you get into the professional side of this things. >> So Jenni, you're on the product side. You've got the keys to the kingdom on all the materials and shaping it. What's your view on this? 'Cause this is a huge opportunity and it's always changing. What's the latest and greatest? >> It is a massive opportunity and to give you a sense, there was a study in '21 where IT executives said that talent availability is the biggest challenge to emerging tech adoption. 64% of IT executives said that up from only 4% the year before. So the challenge is growing really fast, which for everyone that's ready to go out there and learn and try something new is a massive opportunity. And that's really why I'm here. We provide all kinds of learning experiences for people across different cloud technologies to be able to not only gain the knowledge around cloud, but also the confidence to be able to build in the cloud. And so we look across different learner levels, different roles, different opportunities, and we provide those experiences where people can actually get hands-on in a totally risk-free environment and practice building in the cloud so they can go and be ready to get their certifications, their AWS certifications, give them the credentials to be able to show an employer they can do it, and then go out and get these jobs. It's really exciting. And we go kind of end to end from the very beginning. What is cloud? I want to know what it is all the way through to I can prove that I can build in the cloud and I'm ready for a job. >> So Jenni, you nailed that confidence word. I think I want to double click on that. And Heather, you talked about you're the dream team. You guys, you're the go to market, you bring this to the marketplace. Jenni, you get the products. This is the key, but to me the the international women days angle is, is that what I hear over and over again is that, "It's too technical. I'm not qualified." It can be scary. We had a guest on who has two double E degrees in robotics and aerospace and she's hard charging. She almost lost her confidence twice she said in her career. But she was hard charging. It can get scary, but also the ability to level up fast is just as good. So if you can break through that confidence and keep the curiosity and be a builder, talk about that dynamic 'cause you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the industry, how do you handle that? 'Cause I think that's a big thing that comes up over and over again. And confidence is not just women, it's men too. But women can always, that comes up as a theme. >> It is. It is a big challenge. I mean, I've struggled with it personally and I mentor a lot of women and that is the number one challenge that is holding women back from really being able to advance is the confidence to step out there and show what they can do. And what I love about some of the products we've put out recently is we have AWS Skill Builder. You can go online, you can get all kinds of free core training and if you want to go deeper, you can go deeper. And there's a lot of different options on there. But what it does is not only gives you that based knowledge, but you can actually go in. We have something called AWS Labs. You can go in and you can actually practice on the AWS console with the services that people are using in their jobs every day without any risk of doing something that is going to blow up in your face. You're not going to suddenly get this big AWS bill. You're not going to break something that's out there running. You just go in. It's your own little environment that gets wiped when you're done and you can practice. And there's lots of different ways to learn as well. So if you go in there and you're watching a video and to your point you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is too technical. I can't understand it. I don't know what I'm going to go do." You can go another route. There's something called AWS Cloud Quest. It's a game. You go in and it's like you're gaming and it walks you through. You're actually in a virtual world. You're walking through and it's telling you, "Hey, go build this and if you need help, here's hints and here's tips." And it continues to build on itself. So you're learning and you're applying practical skills and it's at your own pace. You don't have to watch somebody else talking that is going at a pace that maybe accelerates beyond what you're ready. You can do it at your own pace, you can redo it, you can try it again until you feel confident that you know it and you're really ready to move on to the next thing. Personally, I find that hugely valuable. I go in and do these myself and I sit there and I have a lot of engineers on my team, very smart people. And I have my own imposter syndrome. I get nervous to go talk to them. Like, are they going to think I'm totally lost? And so I go in and I learn some of this myself by experiment. And then I feel like, okay, now I can go ask them some intelligent questions and they're not going to be like, "Oh gosh, my leader is totally unaware of what we're doing." And so I think that we all struggle with confidence. I think everybody does, but I see it especially in women as I mentor them. And that's what I encourage them to do is go and on your own time, practice a bit, get a little bit of experience and once you feel like you can throw a couple words out there that you know what they mean and suddenly other people look at you like, "Oh, she knows what she's talking about." And you can kind of get past that feeling. >> Well Jenni, you nailed it. Heather, she just mentioned she's in the job and she's going and she's still leveling up. That's the end when you're in, but it's also the barriers to entry are lowering. You guys are doing a good job of getting people in, but also growing fast too. So there's two dynamics at play here. How do people do this? What's the playbook? Because I think that's really key, easy to get in. And then once you're in, you can level up fast at your own pace to ride the wave. And then there's new stuff coming. I mean, every re:Invent there's 5,000 announcements. So it's like zillion new things and AI taught now. >> re:Invent is a perfect example of that ongoing imposter syndrome or confidence check for all of us. I think something that that Jenni said too is we really try and meet learners where they are and make sure that we have the support, whether it's accessibility requirements or we have the content that is built for the age that we're talking to, or we have a workforce development program called re/Start that is for people that have very little tech experience and really want to talk about a career in cloud, but they need a little bit more handholding. They need a combination of instructor-led and digital. But then we have AWS educators, I mentioned. If you want to be more self-directed, all of these tools are intended to work well together and to be complimentary and to take you on a journey as a learner. And the more skills you have, the more you increase your knowledge, the more you can take on more. But meeting folks where they are with a variety of programs, tools, languages, and accessibility really helps ensure that we can do that for learners throughout the world. >> That's awesome. Let's get into it. Let's get into the roadmaps of people and their personas. And you guys can share the programs that you have and where people could fit in. 'Cause this comes up a lot when I talk to folks. There's the young person who's I'm a gamer or whatever, I want to get a job. I'm in high school or an elementary or I want to tinker around or I'm in college or I'm learning, I'm an entry level kind of entry. Then you have the re-skilling. I'm going to change my careers, I'm kind of bored, I want to do something compelling. How do I get into the cloud game? And then the advanced re-skill is I want to get into cyber and AI and then there's other. Could you break down? Did I get that right or did I miss anything? And then what's available for those kind of lanes? So those persona lanes? >> Well, let's see, I could start with maybe the high schooler stuff and then we can bring Jenni in as well. I would say a great place to start for anyone is aws.amazon.com/training. That's going to give them the full suite of options that they could take on. If you're in high school, you can go onto AWS Educate. All you need is an email. And if you're 13 years and older, you can start exploring the types of jobs that are available in the cloud and you could start taking some introductory classes. You can do some of those labs in a safe environment that Jenni mentioned. That's a great place to start. If you are in an environment where you have an educator that is willing to go on this with you, this journey with you, we have this AWS GetIT program that is, again, educator-led. So it's an afterschool or it's an a program where we match mentors and students up with cloud professionals and they do some real-time experimentation. They build an app, they work on things together, and do a presentation at the end. The other thing I would say too is that if you are in a university, I would double check and see if the AWS Academy curriculum is already in your university. And if so, explore some of those classes there. We have instructor-led, educator-ready. course curriculum that we've designed that help people get to those certifications and get closer to those jobs and as well as hopefully then lead people right into skill builder and all the things that Jenni talked about to help them as they start out in a professional environment. >> So is the GetIT, is that an instructor-led that the person has to find someone for? Or is this available for them? >> It is through teachers. It's through educators. We are in, we've reached over 19,000 students. We're available in eight countries. There are ways for educators to lead this, but we want to make sure that we are helping the kids be successful and giving them an educator environment to do that. If they want to do it on their own, then they can absolutely go through AWS Educate or even and to explore where they want to get started. >> So what about someone who's educated in their middle of their career, might want to switch from being a biologist to a cloud cybersecurity guru or a cloud native operator? >> Yeah, so in that case, AWS re/Start is one of the great program for them to explore. We run that program with collaborating organizations in 160 cities in 80 countries throughout the world. That is a multi-week cohort-based program where we do take folks through a very clear path towards certification and job skilling that will help them get into those opportunities. Over 98% of the cohorts, the graduates of those cohorts get an interview and are hopefully on their path to getting a job. So that really has global reach. The partnership with collaborating organizations helps us ensure that we find communities that are often unreached by cloud skills training and we really work to keep a diverse focus on those cohorts and bring those folks into the cloud. >> Okay. Jenni, you've got the Skill Builder action here. What's going on on your side? Because you must have to manage all the change. I mean, AI is hot right now. I'm sure you're cranking away on curriculum and content for SageMaker, large language models, computer vision, cybersecurity. >> We do. There are a lot of options. >> How is your world? Tell us about what people can take out of way from your side. >> Yeah. So a great way to think about it is if they're already out in the workforce or they're entering the workforce, but they are technical, have technical skills is what are the roles that are interesting in the technologies that are interesting. Because the way we put out our training and our certifications is aligned to paths. So if you're look interested in a specific role. If you're interested in architecting a cloud environment or in security as you mentioned, and you want to go deep in security, there are AWS certifications that give you that. If you achieve them, they're very difficult. But if you work to them and achieve them, they give you the credential that you can take to an employer and say, "Look, I can do this job." And they are in very high demand. In fact that's where if you look at some of the publications that have come out, they talk about, what are people making if they have different certifications? What are the most in-demand certifications that are out there? And those are what help people get jobs. And so you identify what is that role or that technology area I want to learn. And then you have multiple options for how you build those skills depending on how you want to learn. And again, that's really our focus, is on providing experiences based on how people learn and making it accessible to them. 'Cause not everybody wants to learn in the same way. And so there is AWS Skill Builder where people can go learn on their own that is really great particularly for people who maybe are already working and have to learn in the evenings, on the weekends. People who like to learn at their own pace, who just want to be hands-on, but are self-starters. And they can get those whole learning plans through there all the way aligned to the certification and then they can go get their certification. There's also classroom training. So a lot of people maybe want to do continuous learning through an online, but want to go really deep with an expert in the room and maybe have a more focused period of time if they can go for a couple days. And so they can do classroom training. We provide a lot of classroom training. We have partners all over the globe who provide classroom training. And so there's that and what we find to be the most powerful is when you couple the two. If you can really get deep, you have an expert, you can ask questions, but first before you go do that, you get some of that foundational that you've kind of learned on your own. And then after you go back and reinforce, you go back online, you try out things that maybe you learned in the classroom, but you didn't quite, you hadn't used it enough yet to quite know how to do it. Now you can go back and actually use it, experiment and play around. And so we really encourage that kind of, figure out what are some areas you're interested in, go learn it and then go get a job and continue to learn because then once you learn that first area, you start to build confidence in it. Suddenly other areas become interesting. 'Cause as you said, cloud is changing fast. And once you learn a space, first of all you have to keep going back to stay up on it as it changes. But you quickly find that there are other areas that are really interesting too. >> I've observed that the training side, it's just like cloud itself, it's very agile. You can get hands-on quickly, you don't need to take a class, and then get in weeks later. You're in it like it's real time. So you're immersed in gamification and all kinds of ways to funnel into the either advanced tracks and certification. So you guys do a great job and I want to give you props for that and a shout out. The question I have for you guys is can you scope the opportunity for these certifications and opportunities for women in particular? What are some of the top jobs pulling down? Scope out the opportunity because I think when people hear that they really fall out of their chair, they go, "Wow, I didn't know I could make $200,000 doing cybersecurity." Well, yeah or maybe more. I just made the number, I don't actually know, but like I know people do make that much in cyber, but there are huge financial opportunities with certifications and education. Can you scope that order of magnitude? Can you share any data? >> Yeah, so in the US they certainly are. Certifications on average aligned to six digit type jobs. And if you go out and do a search, there are research studies out there that are refreshed every year that say what are the top IT industry certifications and how much money do they make? And the reason I don't put a number out there is because it's constantly changing and in fact it keeps going up, >> It's going up, not going down. >> But I would encourage people to do that quick search. What are the top IT industry certifications. Again, based on the country you're in, it makes a difference. But if you're US, there's a lot of data out there for the US and then there is some for other countries as well around how much on average people make. >> Do you list like the higher level certifications, stack rank them in terms of order? Like say, I'm a type A personnel, I want to climb Mount Everest, I want to get the highest level certification. How do I know that? Is it like laddered up or is like how do you guys present that? >> Yeah, so we have different types of certifications. There is a foundational, which we call the cloud practitioner. That one is more about just showing that you know something about cloud. It's not aligned to a specific job role. But then we have what we call associate level certifications, which are aligned to roles. So there's the solutions architect, cloud developer, so developer operations. And so you can tell by the role and associate is kind of that next level. And then the roles often have a professional level, which is even more advanced. And basically that's saying you're kind of an Uber expert at that point. And then there are technology specialties, which are less about a specific role, although some would argue a security technology specialty might align very well to a security role, but they're more about showing the technology. And so typically, it goes foundational, advanced, professional, and then the specialties are more on the side. They're not aligned, but they're deep. They're deep within that area. >> So you can go dig and pick your deep dive and jump into where you're comfortable. Heather, talk about the commitment in terms of dollars. I know Amazon's flaunted some numbers like 30 million or something, people they want to have trained, hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. This is key, obviously, more people trained on cloud, more operators, more cloud usage, obviously. I see the business connection. What's the women relationship to the numbers? Or what the experience is? How do you guys see that? Obviously International Women's Day, get the confidence, got the curiosity. You're a builder, you're in. It's that easy. >> It doesn't always feel that way, I'm sure to everybody, but we'd like to think that it is. Amazon and AWS do invest hundreds of millions of dollars in free training every year that is accessible to everyone out there. I think that sometimes the hardest obstacles to get overcome are getting started and we try and make it as easy as possible to get started with the tools that we've talked about already today. We run into plenty of cohorts of women as part of our re/Start program that are really grateful for the opportunity to see something, see a new way of thinking, see a new opportunity for them. We don't necessarily break out our funding by women versus men. We want to make sure that we are open and diverse for everybody to come in and get the training that they need to. But we definitely want to make sure that we are accessible and available to women and all genders outside of the US and inside the US. >> Well, I know the number's a lot lower than they should be and that's obviously why we're promoting this heavily. There's a lot more interest I see in tech. So digital transformation is gender neutral. I mean, it's like the world eats software and uses software, uses the cloud. So it has to get 50/50 in my opinion. So you guys do a great job. Now that we're done kind of promoting Amazon, which I wanted to do 'cause I think it's super important. Let's talk about you guys. What got you guys involved in tech? What was the inspiration and share some stories about your experiences and advice for folks watching? >> So I've always been in traditionally male dominated roles. I actually started in aviation and then moved to tech. And what I found was I got a mentor early on, a woman who was senior to me and who was kind of who I saw as the smartest person out there. She was incredibly smart, she was incredibly kind, and she was always lifting women up. And I kind of latched onto her and followed her around and she was such an amazing mentor. She brought me from throughout tech, from company to company, job to job, was always positioning me in front of other people as the go-to person. And I realized, "Wow, I want to be like her." And so that's been my focus as well in tech is you can be deeply technical in tech or you can be not deeply technical and be in tech and you can be successful both ways, but the way you're going to be most successful is if you find other people, build them up and help put them out in front. And so I personally love to mentor women and to put them in places where they can feel comfortable being out in front of people. And that's really been my career. I have tried to model her approach as much as I can. >> That's a really interesting observation. It's the pattern we've been seeing in all these interviews for the past two years of doing the International Women's Day is that networking, mentoring and sponsorship are one thing. So it's all one thing. It's not just mentoring. It's like people think, "Oh, just mentoring. What does that mean? Advice?" No, it's sponsorship, it's lifting people up, creating a keiretsu, creating networks. Really important. Heather, what's your experience? >> Yeah, I'm sort of the example of somebody who never thought they'd be in tech, but I happened to graduate from college in the Silicon Valley in the early nineties and next thing you know, it's more than a couple years later and I'm deeply in tech and I think it when we were having the conversation about confidence and willingness to learn and try that really spoke to me as well. I think I had to get out of my own way sometimes and just be willing to not be the smartest person in the room and just be willing to ask a lot of questions. And with every opportunity to ask questions, I think somebody, I ended up with good mentors, male and female, that saw the willingness to ask questions and the willingness to be humble in my approach to learning. And that really helped. I'm also very aware that nobody's journey is the same and I need to create an environment on my team and I need to be a role model within AWS and Amazon for allowing people to show up in the way that they're going to be most successful. And sometimes that will mean giving them learning opportunities. Sometimes that will be hooking them up with a mentor. Sometimes that will be giving them the freedom to do what they need for their family or their personal life. And modeling that behavior regardless of gender has always been how I choose to show up and what I ask my leaders to do. And the more we can do that, I've seen the team been able to grow and flourish in that way and support our entire team. >> I love that story. You also have a great leader, Maureen Lonergan, who I've met many conversations with, but also it starts at the top. Andy Jassy who can come across, he's kind of technical, he's dirty, he's a builder mentality. He has first principles and you're bringing up this first principles concept and whether that's passing it forward, what you've learned, having first principles helps in an organization. Can you guys talk about what that's like at your company? 'Cause everyone's different. And sometimes whether, and I sometimes I worry about what I say, but I also have my first principles. So talk about how principles matter in how you guys interface with others and letting people be their authentic self. >> Yeah, I'll jump in Jenni and then you can. The Amazon leadership principles are super important to how we interact with each other and it really does provide a set of guidelines for how we work with each other and how we work for our customers and with our partners. But most of all it gives us a common language and a common set of expectations. And I will be honest, they're not always easy. When you come from an environment that tends to be less open to feedback and less open to direct conversations than you find at Amazon, it could take a while to get used to that, but for me at least, it was extremely empowering to have those tools and those principles as guidance for how to operate and to gain the confidence in using them. I've also been able to participate in hundreds and hundreds of interviews in the time that I've been here as part of an interview team of bar raisers. I think that really helps us understand whether or not folks are going to be successful at AWS and at Amazon and helps them understand if they're going to be able to be successful. >> Bar raising is an Amazon term and it's gender neutral, right Jenni? >> It is gender neutral. >> Bar is a bar, it raises. >> That's right. And it's funny, we say that our culture here is peculiar. And when I started, I had been in consulting for several years, so I worked with a lot of different companies in tech and so I thought I'd seen everything and I came here and I went, "Hmm." I see what they mean by peculiar. It is very different environment. >> In the fullness of time, it'll all work out. >> That's right, that's right. Well and it's funny because when you first started, it's a lot to figure out to how to operate in an environment where people do use a 16 leadership principles. I've worked at a lot of companies with three or four core values and nobody can state those. We could state all 16 leadership principles and we use them in our regular everyday dialogue. That is an awkward thing when you first come to have people saying, "Oh, I'm going to use bias for action in this situation and I'm going to go move fast. And they're actually used in everyday conversations. But after a couple years suddenly you realize, "Oh, I'm doing that." And maybe even sometimes at the dinner table I'm doing that, which can get to be a bit much. But it creates an environment where we can all be different. We can all think differently. We can all have different ways of doing things, but we have a common overall approach to what we're trying to achieve. And that's really, it gives us a good framework for that. >> Jenni, it's great insight. Heather, thank you so much for sharing your stories. We're going to do this not once a year. We're going to continue this Women in Tech program every quarter. We'll check in with you guys and find out what's new. And thank you for what you do. We appreciate that getting the word out and really is an opportunity for everyone with education and cloud and it's only going to get more opportunities at the edge in AI and so much more tech. Thank you for coming on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks, John. >> Thank you. That's the International Women's Day segment here with leaders from AWS. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat musiC)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music) >> Good morning everyone. Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at MWC '23 in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm going to have a great conversation next with our esteemed CUBE analyst, Dave Nicholson. Dave, great to have you here. Great to be working this event with you. >> Good to be here with you, Lisa. >> So there are, good to be here with you and about 80,000 people. >> Dave: That's right. >> Virtually and and physically. And it's jammed in, and this is the most jammed show I've seen in years. >> Dave: It's crazy. >> So much going on in the telecom industry. What are some of your expectations for what you're going to hear and see at this year's event? >> So, I expect to hear a lot about 5G. Specifically 5G private networks, and the disaggregation of the hardware and software stacks that have driven telecom for decades. So we're at this transition into 5G. From a consumer perspective, we feel like, oh well 5G has been around for years. In terms of where it's actually been deployed, we're just at the beginning stages of that. >> Right, right. Talk about the changing of the stack. You know, the disaggregation. Why now is it too late? And what are the advantages? That it's going to enable telcos to move faster, I imagine? >> Yeah, so it's really analogous to what we see in the general IT industry that we cover so much. The move to cloud, sometimes you're gaining performance. You're always gaining agility and flexibility. A big concern of the legacy telecom providers is going to be maintaining availability, reliability against a backdrop of increasing agility in the direction that they want to go. So that's going to be the conversation. It's going to be the old school folks, who are interested in maintaining primarily availability and performance, excuse me, contrasted with the open source, OpenStack providers, who are going to be saying, hey this is a path to the future. Without that path to the future, things will stagnate. >> Talk about some of those OpenStack providers. I imagine those are some of the folks that we know quite well? >> Sure, sure. Yeah, so someone like Dell, for example. They're perfectly positioned at this sort of crossroads, because Dell has been creating "cloud stacks," that will live sometimes on-premises. And those stacks of infrastructure, based on cots, commercial off-the-shelf components, integrated within an ecosystem can live at the edge, at literally the base of transmitter towers. So when you think about this whole concept of RAN or a radio access network, think of a cellular tower with an antenna and a transmitter. The transmitter might live on that tower, or it might live in pieces at the base of the tower. But there's always at that base of the tower, forget about the acronyms, it's a box of stuff, teleco stuff. All of these things historically have been integrated into single packages. >> Right. >> For good reason. >> Right. >> Think back to a mainframe, where it was utterly, absolutely reliable. We moved, in the general IT space, from the era of the mainframe to the world of client server, through virtualization, containerization. That exact transition is happening in the world of telecom right now. >> Why is it finally happening now? It seems a bit late, given that in our consumer lives, we have this expectation that we could be mobile 24 by seven. >> Right. Well it's because, first of all, we get mad if a call doesn't go through. How often, when you make, when you try to make a cellular call or when you try to send a text, how often does it not work? >> I can count on one hand. >> Right, rarely. >> Right. >> Now, you may be in an area that has spotty coverage. But when you're in an area where you have coverage it just works all of the time. And you expect it to work all of the time. And the miracle of the services that have been delivered to us over the last decade has really kind of blunted the need for next generation stuff. Well, we're at this transition point. And 5G as a technology enables so much more bandwidth. Think of it as, you know, throughput bandwidth latency. It allows the kind of performance characteristics so that things can be delivered that couldn't be delivered in the past. Virtual reality, augmented reality. We're already seeing you know 4K data streams to our phones. So, it's sort of lagged because of our expectations for absolute, rock solid, reliability. >> Yeah. >> The technology is ahead of that area now. And so this question is how do you navigate from utter reliability to awesome openness without sacrificing performance and reliability? >> Well, and also from a stack perspective, from looking at desegregation, and the opportunities there are for the telcos, but also the public cloud providers, are they friends, are they foes? What's the relationship like? >> They're going to be frenemies. >> Lisa: Frenemies? >> Yeah, coopetition is going to be the word of the day again. Yeah because when you think of a cloud, most people automatically think off-premises. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Maybe they even think automatically you know, hyper scale or Azure, GCP, AWS. In this case, it really is a question of cloud as an operating model. Cloud facilitating agility, cloud adopting cloud native architecture from a software perspective, so that you can rapidly deploy net new capabilities into an environment. You can't do that with proprietary closed systems that might use a waterfall development process and take years to develop. You and I have covered the Kubernetes world pretty closely. And what's the big thing that we hear constantly? The hunger, the thirst for human resources, >> Right. >> people who can actually work in this world of containerization. >> Yes, yes. >> Well guess what? In the macroeconomic environment, a lot of folks in the IT space have recently been disrupted. This is a place to look, if you have that skillset. Look at the telecom space, because they need people who are forward thinking in the era of cloud. But this concept of cloud is really, it's going to be, the telcos are both competing and partnering with what we think of as the traditional, hyper scale public cloud providers. >> And what do you think, one of the things that we know at MWC '23 is virtually every industry is represented here. Every vertical is here, whether it's a sports arena, or a retail outlet, or a manufacturer. Every organization, every industry needs to have networks that deliver what they need to do but also enable them to move faster and deliver what the end user wants. What are some of the industries that you think are really ripe for this disruption? And the ability to use private 5G networks, for example? >> Well, so it's interesting, you mentioned private 5G networks. I think a good example of the transition that's underway is this, the move to 4K video. So, you get a high definition television. The first time you see a 720p TV, it's like oh my gosh, amazing. Then we get 1080p, then it's 4K. People get 4K TVs, they bring them home, and there's no content. >> No. >> The first content, was it from your cable provider? No. >> Yeah. >> Was it over the air? ABC, NBC, CBS? No, it was YouTube. YouTube delivered the first reliable 4K content, over the internet. Similarly, everything comes to us now to our mobile devices. So we're not accessing the world around us so much from a desktop or even a laptop. It's mobile. So if you want to communicate with a customer, it's mobile. If you're creating a private 5G network, you now are standing something up that is net new in a greenfield environment. And you can deploy agility and functionality that the large scale telecom providers can't, because of the massive investment they might need. So the irony is, you have a factory that sits on 20 acres and you have folks traveling around, if you create a private 5G network, it might become, it might be more feature rich than what your employees are used to being able to access through their personal mobile devices. >> Wow. >> Yeah, because you're starting net new, you have the luxury of starting greenfield, as opposed to the responsibility and legacy for supporting a massive system that exists already. >> So then, what's in it for the existing incumbent telcos from an advantage opportunity perspective? Because you mentioned frenemies, coopetition. >> Right. >> There's irony there, as you talked about. >> Right, well you could look at it as either opportunity or headache. And it's both. Because they have very, very real SLAs that they need to meet. >> Right. >> Very, very real expectations that have been set in terms of reliability, availability, and performance. So they can't slip off of that. Making that transition is, I think going to be driven by economics, because the idea of having things be open means that there's competition for every part of the stack. There will be a critical role for integration vendors. Folks like Dell, and the ecosystems that they're creating around this will be critical, because often you would prefer to have one back to pat or one throat to choke instead of many. So, you still want to have that centralized entity to go to when something goes wrong. >> Right. >> Or when you want to implement something new. So, for the incumbents, it's a classic example of what you do in the face of disruption. How do you leverage technology? In my role as adjunct faculty at the Wharton CTO Academy, we talk about the CTO mindset. And the idea that your role is to leverage technology, in the service of your organization's mission, whatever that organization and mission is. So from a telecom provider perspective, they need to stay on top of this. >> Yes. >> Or they will be disrupted. >> Right. >> It's fascinating to think of how this disruption's taking place. >> Lisa: They have no choice, if they want to survive. >> No, yeah they have no choice. >> Lisa: In the next few years. >> They have no choice, but they'll come along, kicking and screaming. I'm sure if you had someone sitting here in the industry, they'd say, well, no, no, no, no, no. >> Yeah, of course. >> We love it! It's like, yeah, well but you're going to have to make some painful changes to adopt these things. >> What are some of the opportunities for those folks like Dell that you mentioned, in terms of coming in, being able to disrupt that stack, open things up? Great opportunities for the Dells, and other similar organizations to really start gaining a bigger foothold in the telecom industry, I imagine. >> Well, I look at it through the lens of sort of traditional IT and the transitions that we've been watching for the last couple of decades. It's exactly the same. I mean you, there is a parallel. It is like coming out of the mainframe era to the client server era. So, you know, we went in that transition, it was mainframe operating systems, very, very closed systems to more slightly opened. You know, the worlds of SUN and SGI and HP, and the likes, transitioned to kind of Microsoft based software running with like Dell hardware. >> Yeah. >> And, that stack is now getting deployed into one of the remaining legacy environments which is the telco space. So, the opportunity for Dell is pretty massive because on some fronts they're competing with the move to proper off-premises public cloud. >> Right. >> In this case, they are the future for telecom as opposed to sort of representing legacy, compared to some of the other cloud opportunities that are out there. >> So ultimately, what does a modern telecom network look like? I imagine, cloud native? Distributed? >> Yeah, yeah. So, traditionally, like I said, you've got the tower and the transmitters and the computer hardware that's running it. Those are then networked together. So you can sort of think of it as leaves on a twig, on a branch, on a tree. Eventually it gets into a core network, where there is terrestrial line communication and or communication up to satellites. And that's all been humming along just fine, making the transition from 3G to 4G to 5G. But, the real transition from a cloud perspective is this idea that you're taking these proprietary systems, disaggrevating, disaggrevating them and disaggregating them, carving them up into pieces where now you're introducing virtualization. So there's a VMware play here. Some things are virtualized using that stack. I think more often we're going to be talking about containerized and truly cloud native stacks. So instead of having the proprietary stack, where all the hardware and software is designed together. Now you're going to have Dell servers running some execution layer, orchestration layer, for cloud native, containerized applications and microservices. And that's the way things are going to be developed. >> And who, from a stakeholder perspective is involved here? 'Cause one of the things that I'm hearing is with this disaggregation of the staff, which is a huge change, what you're articulated, that's already happened at enterprise IT, change management is a hard thing to do. If they want to be successful, and well not just survive, they want to thrive. I'm just imagining, who are the stakeholders that are involved in having to push those incumbents to make these decisions, to move faster, to become agile, to compete. >> So, I remember when VMware had the problem that anytime they suggested introducing a hypervisor to to virtualize a physical machine and then run software on top or an operating system on top, and then applications, the big question the customer would have was, well is Microsoft going to support that? What if I can't get support from Microsoft? I dunno if I can do this. Within about a year of those conversations taking place, the question was, can I run this in my production environment? So it was, can I get support in my test environment too? Can I please run this in production? >> Yeah. >> And so, there are folks in the kind of legacy telecom world who are going to be afraid. It's, whatever the dynamic is, there is a no one ever got fired for buying from fill in the blank >> Exactly, yep. >> in the telecom space. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Because they would buy a consolidated, aggregated stack. >> Right. >> And, if something went wrong they could say, boom, blame you. And yeah, that stack doesn't lend itself to the kind of pace of change. >> Right. >> So it doesn't necessarily need the same kind of change management. Or at least it's very, very centralized. >> Okay. Okay. >> We're getting into the brave new world of things where if you let them spin out of control, you can have big problems. And that's where the folks like Dell come in, to make sure that yes, disaggregated, yes best of commercial off-the-shelf stuff, but also the best in terms of performance and reliability and availability. >> Yeah. >> So, that's the execution part, you must execute flawlessly. >> It sounds like from a thematic perspective, the theme of MWC '23 is velocity. But it seems like an underlying theme under that, or maybe an overlying theme is disruption. It's going to be so interesting, we're only on day one. We just started our coverage. Four days of wall to wall coverage on theCUBE. Excited to hear what you're excited about, what you learn over the next few days. We get to host some segments together. >> Yeah. >> But it seems like disruption is the overall theme. And it's going to be so interesting to see how this industry evolves, what the opportunities are, what the coopetition opportunities are. We're going to be learning a lot this week. I'm excited. >> Yeah, and what's fascinating to me about this whole thing is we talk about this, all of this tumultuous, disruptive stuff that's happening. For the average consumer, they're never going to be aware of it. >> Nope. >> Dave: They're just going to see services piled on top of services. >> Which is what we want. >> There are billions of people with mobile devices and the hundreds of billions, I don't know, trillions I guess at some point of connected devices at the edge. >> Lisa: Yes, yes. >> The whole concept of the internet of things. We'll sort of be blissfully unaware of what's happening at the middle. But there's a lot of action there. So we're going to be focusing on that action that's going on. In, you know, in in the middle of it. >> Yeah. >> But there's also some cool consumer stuff out here. >> There is. >> I know I'm going to be checking out the augmented reality and virtual reality stuff. >> Yeah, yeah. Well it's all about that customer experience. We expect things right away, 24/7, wherever we are in the world. And it's enabling that to make that happen. >> Yeah. >> Dave, thank you so much for really sharing what you think you're excited about for the event and some of the trends in telecom. It sounds like it's such an interesting time to be unpacking this. >> It's going to be a great week. >> It is going to be a great week. All right, for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, covering day one of MWC '23. Stick around. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. The Cube Live. Si finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite. 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave Cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers. And we could to >>Do that. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. Really understand. You know, what I like to do is sort of when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. Yeah. So let's >>Do it. We're gonna unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you >>And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting, but talk to us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme parks is part of >>This. Yeah, so Village Road show's Australia's largest cinema exhibitor in conjunction with our partners at event. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers movie World, wet and Wild. SeaWorld Top Golf in Australia is, is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios, so Aquaman, parts of the Caribbean. We're, we're filming our movie studios Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. Quite diverse group. >>Yeah, you guys have won a lot of awards. I mean, I don't know, academy Awards, golden Globe, all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. Congratulations. Yeah. >>Thank you. >>Cool stuff. I wanna also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a chief transformation officer. How long have you been in that role? What does it encompass and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah, >>So the, the, the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on, on one side. And then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and, and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk, both financially and and other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role in particularly a chief transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I, I dive right down and I'm actually hands in, hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I tried to drive profit revenue and profitability across the divisions and does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiative, then I will, I will lead those. >>The transformation, you know, a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud and transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, we'll tell you, look, you gotta change the operating model. You can't just, you know, lift and shift in the cloud. That's, you know, that's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now it's, I'm my question is, is did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or, or was it, you know, deeper than that? >>Yeah, so what in my role have both digital and business transformation, some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a, a significant and long lasting effect on society, not just on, on business. So I think if you think about how work work used to be a, a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before the, before COVID versus now where, you know, previously, you know, within the enterprise you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March, 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home and a person working from home as a branch office of one. So, so we ended up with another thousand branches literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SASS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or communica employee communication or work Jam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within, within our enterprise. It's all external. >>So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that, but still a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How, how did you guys respond to that? And, and you had a rush to do it. Yeah. And so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? >>Well we had, we had two major triggers for our, our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself, and then the second beam, we had a, a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially our network was designed for a near, that no longer exists for when, for when p like I said, when people, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. So, and we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end of life. So initially we started off with an SD WAN at the SD WAN layer and an SD WAN implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we that to a full sassy WAN implementation. >>Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you, you had, you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about a consolidation a lot the last couple days. Yeah. How did, what did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? >>So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Cube Networks. Yeah. That we worked with great >>Names. Yeah, right. >>So we, so we, we worked for Cube. We ran a, a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with, you know, Prisma access and Global Global Protect was the only, the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme part, we want to send out a hotdog cart or an ice cream cart, and that becomes, all of a sudden you got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I wanna spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that, that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that, that exists that, that actually provided the, the, all those capabilities. >>And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? >>Yeah, so we actually, we actually consolidated down to, to, to a, to a single vendor. And in my previous role I had, I had implemented SD WAN before and you know, interoperability is a, is a major issue in the IT industry. I think there's, it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of certainly that where we, we ship products that aren't ready. They're not of all the features, they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're their plans. They were releasing patches, releasing additional features every, every couple of months. So, you know, if you, if if Ford sold the card, I said, Hey, you're gonna give you backseats in a couple of months, they'd be uproar. But, but we do that all the time in, in it. So I had, when I previously implemented an Sdwan transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors, they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly, clearly those guys. So, so there's a lot to be said for having a, you know, a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. >>They've been talking a lot the last couple days about integration and it, and I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their m and a strategy is very, it seems to be very clear and there's purpose on that backend integration instead of leaving it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. >>Yeah, I mean I've been hearing to same mess, but actually we've, we've lived in a >>You're living it. That's what I wanted to >>Know. So, so, you know, we had a choice of, you know, do you try and purchase so-called best of breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't, I don't wanna be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers. Memories that last a lifetime. And you know, when kids grow up in Australia, they, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what, that's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software and it may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we are left carrying the cannon and holding the >>Baby. So what was the before and after, can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre that consolidation versus post? >>Yeah, so our, our, our infrastructure, say our infrastructure was designed for, you know, the, you know, old ways of working where we had you knowm routers that were, you know, not designed for cloud, for modern traffic, including cloud Destin traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to back haul all the traffic from, from our branches back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, we could run advanced inspection services on that. So if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, then it would, we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne. We would apply advanced inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud out back across the country. Traffic would come back, come down to us, back out to our branch. >>So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now with, with our sasi sdwan transformation just pops out to the cloud now straight away. And the, the difference in performance for our, for our team and for our customers, it, it's phenomenal. So you'll talk about saving minutes, you know, on a log on and, and seconds then and on, on an average transaction and second zone sound like a lot. But when you, it's every click up, they're saving a second and add up. You're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. >>If near Zuke were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change your life. Yeah, >>There's two things. One, one of which I think they're all, they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself. It's around the autonomous digital experience management. So I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got, when they've got a problem, I don't know, is it, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that p were working on a, an A solution that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually know you're sitting in your kitchen and your routes in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the route. So there, there they, that's one thing. And the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human training. A lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network and security side or of potentially underdelivered on a security side. So having AI to, you know, assess all of those millions and probably billions of, you know, transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, Hey, you could optimize it more if you, if you dial this down or dial this up. >>So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, you know they're ready. So based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you got a at least decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability? Realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? >>I think I, I think, like I said, the the rate and nature of change is, is, I think it's accelerating. The halflife of degree is short. I think when I left university, what I, what I learned in first year was, was obsolete within five years, I'd say now it's probably obsolete of you. What'd you learn in first year? It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. >>Six months. Yeah, >>It's true. So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and that and how they're coming together to, to solve, to jointly solve these problems is I think we will see this within 12 months. >>Who, who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds >>Or We got multiple clouds. Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run in Azure as well. We, we don't really have much in GCP or, or, or some of the other >>Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. >>Ah, we, we run, we run SAP that's we hosted in, in Azure and our cinema ticketing system is, is was run in Azure. It's, it was only available in, in in Azure the time we're mo we are mostly an AWS >>Shop. And what do you do with aws? I mean, pretty much everything else is >>Much every, everything else, anything that's customer facing our websites, they give us great stability. Great, great availability, great performance, you know, we've had and, and, and, and a very variable as well. So, we'll, you know, our, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically, you know, fairly flat except when, you know, there's a launch of a, of a new movie. So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, you know, at 9:00 AM when, you know, spider-Man went on sale last year, I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the forest, 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale look beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic scale up. We're at only any intervention and then scale back down >>Taylor Swift needs that she does need that. So yeah. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto networks security infrastructure have be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you, are you working toward that? Yeah, >>We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, our end, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. They won't be >>Able to unless it breaks. >>Unless it breaks. Yeah. They wanna be able to go to see a movie. Do you wanna be able to get on a rollercoaster? They wanna be able to go, you know, play around around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration of working across cloud network security now for most of our team, they, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I, I frankly don't want them to know and be, be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience to our guests? How do we give long lasting lifetime memories to, to the people who come visit our parks? >>That's what they want. They want that experience. Right. I'd love to get your final thoughts on, we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation officer. You own digital transformation, you want business transformation. What advice would you give to either other treat chief transformation officers, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs about partnering, what's the right partner to really improve your security posture? >>I think there's, there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're outta date. Yeah. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean, I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of, I actually think it's probably five 50 years worth of change in, in Australia in terms of working habits. So one, you need to do something. Yeah. Need to, you need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a, it's a wonderful, innovative company. Very agile. So the, like the, the concept of gold class cinema, so, you know, big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept that, that was invented by village in 1997. Thank you. And we had thanks finally came to the states so decade later, I mean we would've had the CEO of every major cinema chain in the world come to come to Melbourne and have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah, we're gonna export that back around around the world. It's probably one of, one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so, so partnering. So we've got a great innovation history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who are, have a similar thought process and, and managed to an outcome and not to a contract Yeah. Is, is important for us. >>It's all about outcomes. And you've had some great outcomes, Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in reclining chair, I'm gonna think about you and village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights, your time. Thank you. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube. Our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks. Ignite comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging emerging tech coverage next year. >>Yeah.

(upbeat music) >> The market for enterprise servers is large and it generates well north of $100 billion in annual revenue, and it's growing consistently in the mid to high single digit range. Right now, like many segments, the market for servers is, it's like slingshotting, right? Organizations, they've been replenishing their install bases and upgrading, especially at HQs coming out of the isolation economy. But the macro headwinds, as we've reported, are impacting all segments of the market. CIOs, you know, they're tapping the brakes a little bit, sometimes quite a bit and being cautious with both capital expenditures and discretionary opex, particularly in the cloud. They're dialing it down and just being a little bit more, you know, cautious. The market for enterprise servers, it's dominated as you know, by x86 based systems with an increasingly large contribution coming from alternatives like ARM and NVIDIA. Intel, of course, is the largest supplier, but AMD has been incredibly successful competing with Intel because of its focus, it's got an outsourced manufacturing model and its innovation and very solid execution. Intel's frequent delays with its next generation Sapphire Rapid CPUs, now slated for January 2023 have created an opportunity for AMD, specifically AMD's next generation EPYC CPUs codenamed Genoa will offer as many as 96 Zen 4 cores per CPU when it launches later on this month. Observers can expect really three classes of Genoa. There's a standard Zen 4 compute platform for general purpose workloads, there's a compute density optimized Zen 4 package and then a cache optimized version for data intensive workloads. Indeed, the makers of enterprise servers are responding to customer requirements for more diversity and server platforms to handle different workloads, especially those high performance data-oriented workloads that are being driven by AI and machine learning and high performance computing, HPC needs. OEMs like Dell, they're going to be tapping these innovations and try to get to the market early. Dell, in particular, will be using these systems as the basis for its next generation Gen 16 servers, which are going to bring new capabilities to the market. Now, of course, Dell is not alone, there's got other OEM, you've got HPE, Lenovo, you've got ODMs, you've got the cloud players, they're all going to be looking to keep pace with the market. Now, the other big trend that we've seen in the market is the way customers are thinking about or should be thinking about performance. No longer is the clock speed of the CPU the soul and most indicative performance metric. There's much more emphasis in innovation around all those supporting components in a system, specifically the parts of the system that take advantage, for example, of faster bus speeds. We're talking about things like network interface cards and RAID controllers and memories and other peripheral devices that in combination with microprocessors, determine how well systems can perform and those kind of things around compute operations, IO and other critical tasks. Now, the combinatorial factors ultimately determine the overall performance of the system and how well suited a particular server is to handling different workloads. So we're seeing OEMs like Dell, they're building flexibility into their offerings and putting out products in their portfolios that can meet the changing needs of their customers. Welcome to our ongoing series where we investigate the critical question, does hardware matter? My name is Dave Vellante, and with me today to discuss these trends and the things that you should know about for the next generation of server architectures is former CTO from Oracle and EMC and adjunct faculty and Wharton CTO Academy, David Nicholson. Dave, always great to have you on "theCUBE." Thanks for making some time with me. >> Yeah, of course, Dave, great to be here. >> All right, so you heard my little spiel in the intro, that summary, >> Yeah. >> Was it accurate? What would you add? What do people need to know? >> Yeah, no, no, no, 100% accurate, but you know, I'm a resident nerd, so just, you know, some kind of clarification. If we think of things like microprocessor release cycles, it's always going to be characterized as rolling thunder. I think 2023 in particular is going to be this constant release cycle that we're going to see. You mentioned the, (clears throat) excuse me, general processors with 96 cores, shortly after the 96 core release, we'll see that 128 core release that you referenced in terms of compute density. And then, we can talk about what it means in terms of, you know, nanometers and performance per core and everything else. But yeah, no, that's the main thing I would say, is just people shouldn't look at this like a new car's being released on Saturday. This is going to happen over the next 18 months, really. >> All right, so to that point, you think about Dell's next generation systems, they're going to be featuring these new AMD processes, but to your point, when you think about performance claims, in this industry, it's a moving target. It's that, you call it a rolling thunder. So what does that game of hopscotch, if you will, look like? How do you see it unfolding over the next 12 to 18 months? >> So out of the gate, you know, slated as of right now for a November 10th release, AMD's going to be first to market with, you know, everyone will argue, but first to market with five nanometer technology in production systems, 96 cores. What's important though is, those microprocessors are going to be resident on motherboards from Dell that feature things like PCIe 5.0 technology. So everything surrounding the microprocessor complex is faster. Again, going back to this idea of rolling thunder, we expect the Gen 16 PowerEdge servers from Dell to similarly be rolled out in stages with initial releases that will address certain specific kinds of workloads and follow on releases with a variety of systems configured in a variety of ways. >> So I appreciate you painting a picture. Let's kind of stay inside under the hood, if we can, >> Sure. >> And share with us what we should know about these kind of next generation CPUs. How are companies like Dell going to be configuring them? How important are clock speeds and core counts in these new systems? And what about, you mentioned motherboards, what about next gen motherboards? You mentioned PCIe Gen 5, where does that fit in? So take us inside deeper into the system, please. >> Yeah, so if you will, you know, if you will join me for a moment, let's crack open the box and look inside. It's not just microprocessors. Like I said, they're plugged into a bus architecture that interconnect. How quickly that interconnect performs is critical. Now, I'm going to give you a statistic that doesn't require a PhD to understand. When we go from PCIe Gen 4 to Gen 5, which is going to be featured in all of these systems, we double the performance. So just, you can write that down, two, 2X. The performance is doubled, but the numbers are pretty staggering in terms of giga transactions per second, 128 gigabytes per second of aggregate bandwidth on the motherboard. Again, doubling when going from 4th Gen to 5th Gen. But the reality is, most users of these systems are still on PCIe Gen 3 based systems. So for them, just from a bus architecture perspective, you're doing a 4X or 8X leap in performance, and then all of the peripherals that plug into that faster bus are faster, whether it's RAID control cards from RAID controllers or storage controllers or network interface cards. Companies like Broadcom come to mind. All of their components are leapfrogging their prior generation to fit into this ecosystem. >> So I wonder if we could stay with PCIe for a moment and, you know, just understand what Gen 5 brings. You said, you know, 2X, I think we're talking bandwidth here. Is there a latency impact? You know, why does this matter? And just, you know, this premise that these other components increasingly matter more, Which components of the system are we talking about that can actually take advantage of PCIe Gen 5? >> Pretty much all of them, Dave. So whether it's memory plugged in or network interface cards, so communication to the outside world, which computer servers tend to want to do in 2022, controllers that are attached to internal and external storage devices. All of them benefit from this enhancement and performance. And it's, you know, PCI express performance is measured in essentially bandwidth and throughput in the sense of the numbers of transactions per second that you can do. It's mind numbing, I want to say it's 32 giga transfers per second. And then in terms of bandwidth, again, across the lanes that are available, 128 gigabytes per second. I'm going to have to check if it's gigabits or gigabytes. It's a massive number. And again, it's double what PCIe 4 is before. So what does that mean? Just like the advances in microprocessor technology, you can consolidate massive amounts of work into a much smaller footprint. That's critical because everything in that server is consuming power. So when you look at next generation hardware that's driven by things like AMD Genoa or you know, the EPYC processors, the Zen with the Z4 microprocessors, for every dollar that you're spending on power and equipment and everything else, you're getting far greater return on your investment. Now, I need to say that we anticipate that these individual servers, if you're out shopping for a server, and that's a very nebulous term because they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, I think there's going to be a little bit of sticker shock at first until you run the numbers. People will look at an individual server and they'll say, wow, this is expensive and the peripherals, the things that are going into those slots are more expensive, but you're getting more bang for your buck. You're getting much more consolidation, lower power usage and for every dollar, you're getting a greater amount of performance and transactions, which translates up the stack through the application layer and, you know, out to the end user's desire to get work done. >> So I want to come back to that, but let me stay on performance for a minute. You know, we all used to be, when you'd go buy a new PC, you'd be like, what's the clock speed of that? And so, when you think about performance of a system today and how measurements are changing, how should customers think about performance in these next gen systems? And where does that, again, where does that supporting ecosystem play? >> So if you are really into the speeds and feeds and what's under the covers, from an academic perspective, you can go in and you can look at the die size that was used to create the microprocessors, the clock speeds, how many cores there are, but really, the answer is look at the benchmarks that are created through testing, especially from third party organizations that test these things for workloads that you intend to use these servers for. So if you are looking to support something like a high performance environment for artificial intelligence or machine learning, look at the benchmarks as they're recorded, as they're delivered by the entire system. So it's not just about the core. So yeah, it's interesting to look at clock speeds to kind of compare where we are with regards to Moore's Law. Have we been able to continue to track along that path? We know there are physical limitations to Moore's Law from an individual microprocessor perspective, but none of that really matters. What really matters is what can this system that I'm buying deliver in terms of application performance and user requirement performance? So that's what I'd say you want to look for. >> So I presume we're going to see these benchmarks at some point, I'm hoping we can, I'm hoping we can have you back on to talk about them. Is that something that we can expect in the future? >> Yeah, 100%, 100%. Dell, and I'm sure other companies, are furiously working away to demonstrate the advantages of this next gen architecture. If I had to guess, I would say that we are going to see quite a few world records set because of the combination of things, like faster network interface cards, faster storage cards, faster memory, more memory, faster cache, more cache, along with the enhanced microprocessors that are going to be delivered. And you mentioned this is, you know, AMD is sort of starting off this season of rolling thunder and in a few months, we'll start getting the initial entries from Intel also, and we'll be able to compare where they fit in with what AMD is offering. I'd expect OEMs like Dell to have, you know, a portfolio of products that highlight the advantages of each processor's set. >> Yeah, I talked in my open Dave about the diversity of workloads. What are some of those emerging workloads and how will companies like Dell address them in your view? >> So a lot of the applications that are going to be supported are what we think of as legacy application environments. A lot of Oracle databases, workloads associated with ERP, all of those things are just going to get better bang for their buck from a compute perspective. But what we're going to be hearing a lot about and what the future really holds for us that's exciting is this arena of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These next gen platforms offer performance that allows us to do things in areas like natural language processing that we just couldn't do before cost effectively. So I think the next few years are going to see a lot of advances in AI and ML that will be debated in the larger culture and that will excite a lot of computer scientists. So that's it, AI/ML are going to be the big buzzwords moving forward. >> So Dave, you talked earlier about this, some people might have sticker shocks. So some of the infrastructure pros that are watching this might be, oh, okay, I'm going to have to pitch this, especially in this, you know, tough macro environment. I'm going to have to sell this to my CIO, my CFO. So what does this all mean? You know, if they're going to have to pay more, how is it going to affect TCO? How would you pitch that to your management? >> As long as you stay away from per unit cost, you're fine. And again, we don't have necessarily, or I don't have necessarily insider access to street pricing on next gen servers yet, but what I do know from examining what the component suppliers tell us is that, these systems are going to be significantly more expensive on a per unit basis. But what does that mean? If the server that you're used to buying for five bucks is now 10 bucks, but it's doing five times as much work, it's a great deal, and anyone who looks at it and says, 10 bucks? It used to only be five bucks, well, the ROI and the TCO, that's where all of this really needs to be measured and a huge part of that is going to be power consumption. And along with the performance tests that we expect to see coming out imminently, we should also be expecting to see some of those ROI metrics, especially around power consumption. So I don't think it's going to be a problem moving forward, but there will be some sticker shock. I imagine you're going to be able to go in and configure a very, very expensive, fully loaded system on some of these configurators online over the next year. >> So it's consolidation, which means you could do more with less. It's going to be, or more with the same, it's going to be lower power, less cooling, less floor space and lower management overhead, which is kind of now you get into staff, so you're going to have to sort of identify how the staff can be productive in other areas. You're probably not going to fire people hopefully. But yeah, it sounds like it's going to be a really consolidation play. I talked at the open about Intel and AMD and Intel coming out with Sapphire Rapids, you know, of course it's been well documented, it's late but they're now scheduled for January. Pat Gelsinger's talked about this, and of course they're going to try to leapfrog AMD and then AMD is going to respond, you talked about this earlier, so that game is going to continue. How long do you think this cycle will last? >> Forever. (laughs) It's just that, there will be periods of excitement like we're going to experience over at least the next year and then there will be a lull and then there will be a period of excitement. But along the way, we've got lurkers who are trying to disrupt this market completely. You know, specifically you think about ARM where the original design point was, okay, you're powered by a battery, you have to fit in someone's pocket. You can't catch on fire and burn their leg. That's sort of the requirement, as opposed to the, you know, the x86 model, which is okay, you have a data center with a raised floor and you have a nuclear power plant down the street. So don't worry about it. As long as an 18-wheeler can get it to where it needs to be, we'll be okay. And so, you would think that over time, ARM is going to creep up as all destructive technologies do, and we've seen that, we've definitely seen that. But I would argue that we haven't seen it happen as quickly as maybe some of us expected. And then you've got NVIDIA kind of off to the side starting out, you know, heavy in the GPU space saying, hey, you know what, you can use the stuff we build for a whole lot of really cool new stuff. So they're running in a different direction, sort of gnawing at the traditional x86 vendors certainly. >> Yes, so I'm glad- >> That's going to be forever. >> I'm glad you brought up ARM and NVIDIA, I think, but you know, maybe it hasn't happened as quickly as many thought, although there's clearly pockets and examples where it is taking shape. But this to me, Dave, talks to the supporting cast. It's not just about the microprocessor unit anymore, specifically, you know, generally, but specifically the x86. It's the supporting, it's the CPU, the NPU, the XPU, if you will, but also all those surrounding components that, to your earlier point, are taking advantage of the faster bus speeds. >> Yeah, no, 100%. You know, look at it this way. A server used to be measured, well, they still are, you know, how many U of rack space does it take up? You had pizza box servers with a physical enclosure. Increasingly, you have the concept of a server in quotes being the aggregation of components that are all plugged together that share maybe a bus architecture. But those things are all connected internally and externally, especially externally, whether it's external storage, certainly networks. You talk about HPC, it's just not one server. It's hundreds or thousands of servers. So you could argue that we are in the era of connectivity and the real critical changes that we're going to see with these next generation server platforms are really centered on the bus architecture, PCIe 5, and the things that get plugged into those slots. So if you're looking at 25 gig or 100 gig NICs and what that means from a performance and/or consolidation perspective, or things like RDMA over Converged Ethernet, what that means for connecting systems, those factors will be at least as important as the microprocessor complexes. I imagine IT professionals going out and making the decision, okay, we're going to buy these systems with these microprocessors, with this number of cores in memory. Okay, great. But the real work starts when you start talking about connecting all of them together. What does that look like? So yeah, the definition of what constitutes a server and what's critically important I think has definitely changed. >> Dave, let's wrap. What can our audience expect in the future? You talked earlier about you're going to be able to get benchmarks, so that we can quantify these innovations that we've been talking about, bring us home. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to taking a solid look at some of the performance benchmarking that's going to come out, these legitimate attempts to set world records and those questions about ROI and TCO. I want solid information about what my dollar is getting me. I think it helps the server vendors to be able to express that in a concrete way because our understanding is these things on a per unit basis are going to be more expensive and you're going to have to justify them. So that's really what, it's the details that are going to come the day of the launch and in subsequent weeks. So I think we're going to be busy for the next year focusing on a lot of hardware that, yes, does matter. So, you know, hang on, it's going to be a fun ride. >> All right, Dave, we're going to leave it there. Thanks you so much, my friend. Appreciate you coming on. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and don't forget to check out the special website that we've set up for this ongoing series. Go to doeshardwarematter.com and you'll see commentary from industry leaders, we got analysts on there, technical experts from all over the world. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Detroit guys and girls. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We've been on the floor at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America for about two days now. We've been breaking news, we would have a great conversations, John. We love talking with CUBE alumni whose companies are just taking off. And we get to do that next again. >> Well, this next segment's awesome. We have former CUBE host, Brian Gracely, here who's an executive in this company. And then the entrepreneur who we're going to talk with. She was on theCUBE when it just started now they're extremely successful. It's going to be a great conversation. >> It is, Idit Levine is here, the founder and CEO of solo.io. And as John mentioned, Brian Gracely. You know Brian. He's the VP of Product Marketing and Product Strategy now at solo.io. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, great to have you here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Idit: Thank so much for having us. >> Talk about what's going on. This is a rocket ship that you're riding. I was looking at your webpage, you have some amazing customers. T-Mobile, BMW, Amex, for a marketing guy it must be like, this is just- >> Brian: Yeah, you can't beat it. >> Kid in a candy store. >> Brian: Can't beat it. >> You can't beat it. >> For giant companies like that, giant brands, global, to trust a company of our size it's trust, it's great engineering, it's trust, it's fantastic. >> Idit, talk about the fast trajectory of this company and how you've been able to garner trust with such mass organizations in such a short time period. >> Yes, I think that mainly is just being the best. Honestly, that's the best approach I can say. The team that we build, honestly, and this is a great example of one of them, right? And we're basically getting the best people in the industry. So that's helpful a lot. We are very, very active on the open source community. So basically it building it, anyway, and by doing this they see us everywhere. They see our success. You're starting with a few customers, they're extremely successful and then you're just creating this amazing partnership with them. So we have a very, very unique way we're working with them. >> So hard work, good code. >> Yes. >> Smart people, experience. >> That's all you need. >> It's simple, why doesn't everyone do it? >> It's really easy. (all laughing) >> All good, congratulations. It's been fun to watch you guys grow. Brian, great to see you kicking butt in this great company. I got to ask about the landscape because I love the ServiceMeshCon you guys had on a co-located event on day zero here as part of that program, pretty packed house. >> Brian: Yep. >> A lot of great feedback. This whole ServiceMesh and where it fits in. You got Kubernetes. What's the update? Because everything's kind of coming together- >> Brian: Right. >> It's like jello in the refrigerator it kind of comes together at the same time. Where are we? >> I think the easiest way to think about it is, and it kind of mirrors this event perfectly. So the last four or five years, all about Kubernetes, built Kubernetes. So every one of our customers are the ones who have said, look, for the last two or three years, we've been building Kubernetes, we've had a certain amount of success with it, they're building applications faster, they're deploying and then that success leads to new challenges, right? So we sort of call that first Kubernetes part sort of CloudNative 1.0, this and this show is really CloudNative 2.0. What happens after Kubernetes service mesh? Is that what happens after Kubernetes? And for us, Istio now being part of the CNCF, huge, standardized, people are excited about it. And then we think we are the best at doing Istio from a service mesh perspective. So it's kind of perfect, perfect equation. >> Well, I'll turn it on, listen to your great Cloud cast podcast, plug there for you. You always say what is it and what isn't it? >> Brian: Yeah. >> What is your product and what isn't it? >> Yeah, so our product is, from a purely product perspective it's service mesh and API gateway. We integrate them in a way that nobody else does. So we make it easier to deploy, easier to manage, easier to secure. I mean, those two things ultimately are, if it's an internal API or it's an external API, we secure it, we route it, we can observe it. So if anybody's, you're building modern applications, you need this stuff in order to be able to go to market, deploy at scale all those sort of things. >> Idit, talk about some of your customer conversations. What are the big barriers that they've had, or the challenges, that solo.io comes in and just wipes off the table? >> Yeah, so I think that a lot of them, as Brian described it, very, rarely they had a success with Kubernetes, maybe a few clusters, but then they basically started to on-ramp more application on those clusters. They need more cluster maybe they want multi-class, multi-cloud. And they mainly wanted to enable the team, right? This is why we all here, right? What we wanted to eventually is to take a piece of the infrastructure and delegate it to our customers which is basically the application team. So I think that that's where they started to see the problem because it's one thing to take some open source project and deploy it very little bit but the scale, it's all about the scale. How do you enable all those millions of developers basically working on your platform? How do you scale multi-cloud? What's going on if one of them is down, how do you fill over? So that's exactly the problem that they have >> Lisa: Which is critical for- >> As bad as COVID was as a global thing, it was an amazing enabler for us because so many companies had to say... If you're a retail company, your front door was closed, but you still wanted to do business. So you had to figure out, how do I do mobile? How do I be agile? If you were a company that was dealing with like used cars your number of hits were through the roof because regular cars weren't available. So we have all these examples of companies who literally overnight, COVID was their digital transformation enabler. >> Lisa: Yes. Yes. >> And the scale that they had to deal with, the agility they had to deal with, and we sort of fit perfectly in that. They re-looked at what's our infrastructure look like? What's our security look like? We just happened to be right place in the right time. >> And they had skillset issues- >> Skillsets. >> Yeah. >> And the remote work- >> Right, right. >> Combined with- >> Exactly. >> Modern upgrade gun-to-the-head, almost, kind of mentality. >> And we're really an interesting company. Most of the interactions we do with customers is through Slack, obviously it was remote. We would probably be a great Slack case study in terms of how to do business because our customers engage with us, with engineers all over the world, they look like one team. But we can get them up and running in a POC, in a demo, get them through their things really, really fast. It's almost like going to the public cloud, but at whatever complexity they want. >> John: Nice workflow. >> So a lot of momentum for you guys silver linings during COVID, which is awesome we do hear a lot of those stories of positive things, the acceleration of digital transformation, and how much, as consumers, we've all benefited from that. Do you have one example, Brian, as the VP of product marketing, of a customer that you really think in the last two years just is solo.io's value proposition on a platter? >> I'll give you one that I think everybody can understand. So most people, at least in the United States, you've heard of Chick-fil-A, retail, everybody likes the chicken. 2,600 stores in the US, they all shut down and their business model, it's good food but great personal customer experience. That customer experience went away literally overnight. So they went from barely anybody using the mobile application, and hence APIs in the backend, half their business now goes through that to the point where, A, they shifted their business, they shifted their customer experience, and they physically rebuilt 2,600 stores. They have two drive-throughs now that instead of one, because now they have an entire one dedicated to that mobile experience. So something like that happening overnight, you could never do the ROI for it, but it's changed who they are. >> Lisa: Absolutely transformative. >> So, things like that, that's an example I think everybody can kind of relate to. Stuff like that happened. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's also what's special is, honestly, you're probably using a product every day. You just don't know that, right? When you're swiping your credit card or when you are ordering food, or when you using your phone, honestly the amount of customer they were having, the space, it's like so, every industry- >> John: How many customers do you have? >> I think close to 200 right now. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> How many employees, can you gimme some stats? Funding, employees? What's the latest statistics? >> We recently found a year ago $135 million for a billion dollar valuation. >> Nice. >> So we are a unicorn. I think when you took it we were around like 50 ish people. Right now we probably around 180, and we are growing, we probably be 200 really, really quick. And I think that what's really, really special as I said the interaction that we're doing with our customers, we're basically extending their team. So for each customer is basically a Slack channel. And then there is a lot of people, we are totally global. So we have people in APAC, in Australia, New Zealand, in Singapore we have in AMEA, in UK and in Spain and Paris, and other places, and of course all over US. >> So your use case on how to run a startup, scale up, during the pandemic, complete clean sheet of paper. >> Idit: We had to. >> And what happens, you got Slack channels as your customer service collaboration slash productivity. What else did you guys do differently that you could point to that's, I would call, a modern technique for an entrepreneurial scale? >> So I think that there's a few things that we are doing different. So first of all, in Solo, honestly, there is a few things that differentiated from, in my opinion, most of the companies here. Number one is look, you see this, this is a lot, a lot of new technology and one of the things that the customer is nervous the most is choosing the wrong one because we saw what happened, right? I don't know the orchestration world, right? >> John: So choosing and also integrating multiple things at the same time. >> Idit: Exactly. >> It's hard. >> And this is, I think, where Solo is expeditious coming to place. So I mean we have one team that is dedicated like open source contribution and working with all the open source community and I think we're really good at picking the right product and basically we're usually right, which is great. So if you're looking at Kubernetes, we went there for the beginning. If you're looking at something like service mesh Istio, we were all envoy proxy and out of process. So I think that by choosing these things, and now Cilium is something that we're also focusing on. I think that by using the right technology, first of all you know that it's very expensive to migrate from one to the other if you get it wrong. So I think that's one thing that is always really good at. But then once we actually getting those portal we basically very good at going and leading those community. So we are basically bringing the customers to the community itself. So we are leading this by being in the TOC members, right? The Technical Oversight Committee. And we are leading by actually contributing a lot. So if the customer needs something immediately, we will patch it for him and walk upstream. So that's kind of like the second thing. And the third one is innovation. And that's really important to us. So we pushing the boundaries. Ambient, that we announced a month ago with Google- >> And STO, the book that's out. >> Yes, the Ambient, it's basically a modern STO which is the future of SDL. We worked on it with Google and their NDA and we were listed last month. This is exactly an example of us basically saying we can do it better. We learn from our customers, which is huge. And now we know that we can do better. So this is the third thing, and the last one is the partnership. I mean honestly we are the extension team of the customer. We are there on Slack if they need something. Honestly, there is a reason why our renewal rate is 98.9 and our net extension is 135%. I mean customers are very, very happy. >> You deploy it, you make it right. >> Idit: Exactly, exactly. >> The other thing we did, and again this was during COVID, we didn't want to be a shell-for company. We didn't want to drop stuff off and you didn't know what to do with it. We trained nearly 10,000 people. We have something called Solo Academy, which is free, online workshops, they run all the time, people can come and get hands on training. So we're building an army of people that are those specialists that have that skill set. So we don't have to walk into shops and go like, well okay, I hope six months from now you guys can figure this stuff out. They're like, they've been doing that. >> And if their friends sees their friend, sees their friend. >> The other thing, and I got to figure out as a marketing person how to do this, we have more than a few handfuls of people that they've got promoted, they got promoted, they got promoted. We keep seeing people who deploy our technologies, who, because of this stuff they're doing- >> John: That's a good sign. They're doing it at at scale, >> John: That promoter score. >> They keep getting promoted. >> Yeah, that's amazing. >> That's a powerful sort of side benefit. >> Absolutely, that's a great thing to have for marketing. Last question before we ran out of time. You and I, Idit, were talking before we went live, your sessions here are overflowing. What's your overall sentiment of KubeCon 2022 and what feedback have you gotten from all the customers bursting at the seam to come talk to you guys? >> I think first of all, there was the pre-event which we had and it was a lot of fun. We talked to a lot of customer, most of them is 500, global successful company. So I think that people definitely... I will say that much. We definitely have the market feed, people interested in this. Brian described very well what we see here which is people try to figure out the CloudNative 2.0. So that's number one. The second thing is that there is a consolidation, which I like, I mean STO becoming right now a CNCF project I think it's a huge, huge thing for all the community. I mean, we're talking about all the big tweak cloud, we partner with them. I mean I think this is a big sign of we agree which I think is extremely important in this community. >> Congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you so much. >> And where can customers go to get their hands on this, solo.io? >> Solo.io? Yeah, absolutely. >> Awesome guys, this has been great. Congratulations on the momentum. >> Thank you. >> The rocket ship that you're riding. We know you got to get to the airport we're going to let you go. But we appreciate your insights and your time so much, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> A pleasure. >> Thanks. >> For our guests and John Furrier, This is Lisa Martin live in Detroit, had to think about that for a second, at KubeCon 2022 CloudNativeCon. We'll be right back with our final guests of the day and then the show wraps, so stick around. (gentle music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back at UI path forward to five. This is Dave Ante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Mu is here. He's automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you, by the way, for, you know, all you guys do, and thank you Dave for having in the, in the, in the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the cube. He's the director at cgi. Guys, good to see you again. >>Good to see you. Thank >>You. So Merrick, Wow, it's been quite a few years for you guys. Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? >>Well, Dave, I mean as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like Gabriel Antiviral Pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But, you know, is during these can last few years that, you know, we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey, you know, so just like the theme of this conference we're we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. >>Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. >>Sure. No, it's, it's definitely not. So cgi, we're a global consultancy about 90,000 folks across the world. We're a, we're both a product company and a services company. So we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government EER P platform. And so outside of that, we, my team does automation and so we wrap automation around R IP and deliver that to our clients. >>So you guys are automation pros, implementation partners, right? So, so let's go back. Yep. Derek said four years I think. Yep. Right, You're in. So take us through what was the catalyst, how did you get started? Obviously it was pre pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the Catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path, >>Right. So I, I would say it started pretty niche in our company. Started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking in technology evaluating different companies, Blue Prism, ui P. Ultimately we chose UI p did it on-prem to start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work. That's when the team, the COE continued to scale up, especially during pandemic. We were trying to automate more and more processes given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they reprocesses. How, how do you do events? You know, part of our livelihood is, is meeting with engaging with customers. Customers in this case is, are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, you know, you know, a lot of the face to face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital, digital way. And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. >>You, you, I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. Yep. So, so describe your approach to implementing automation. It's, that sounds like when you say center, it sounds like something is centralized as, as opposed to a bunch of what we've been hearing a lot about citizen developers. What does that interaction >>Look like? We do have both. I would say in the beginning was more decentralized, but over time we, over the few years as, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between four to 500 bots. We now have sort of internal to the company functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function. So there's, there's a team building engaging with the animal health business to build animal health box. There's human health, which is what I work on as well as hr, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business. Then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. >>So you started in finance common story, right? I'm sure you hear this a lot Belt, How did you decide what to target? Was it, was it process driven decision? Was it, was it data oriented? Like some kind of combination? How did you decide, Do you remember? Or do you, could you take >>Us back to Oh yeah. So for, for cgi how we started to engage with MER is, you know, we, we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work on all their different business lines and we, we understand the business process. So we, we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and, and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there the journey just continued to expand, you know, looking for those use cases that, that, you know, fit the mold for, for, for RPA to start. And now the evolution is to go to broader hyper automation. >>And, and was it CFO led into the finance department and then, or was it sort of more bottoms >>Up? Yeah, so, so I think it started in, in finance and, and, but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory clinical, that's, that's where we, we have the life science expertise that are embedded. And so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say submission archiving. So when, when submissions come back from the fda, they need to be archived into, you know, the, their system of record. So that's, those are the types of use cases that, that we helped automate. >>Okay. Cause you're saying a human had to sort physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay. And you started with software robots, obviously rpa and now you're expanding into, we we're hearing from UI this the platform message. How does that coincide Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are, are you adding? >>Yeah, no, I mean we are, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform, but some of the cool things we just had, another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things we're, we're doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, that that, you know, cuz these bots only in some cases run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're, we're soon of doing all on demand, you know, start up a server, run the bot when it's finished, you know, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole >>Lot of money. Serverless bots. So you, but you're doing that OnPrem, so you >>No, >>No, but >>That's >>Cloud. We, >>We, we we're doing it OnPrem, but our, our bot machines that actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs it finish, Let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. >>Okay. So you mentioned SAP earlier you mentioned Blue Prism when you probably looked at other competitors too. You pull the Gartner Magic quadrant, blah, blah, you know, with the way people, you know, evaluate technology, but SAP's got a product. Why UI path mean? Is it that a company like SAP two narrow for their only sap you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then four years ago they probably weren't. Right? But I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. >>Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. You know, SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to, to workday, to service Now. It's, it cuts across every function that we have in the company as well as you're the most mature. I mean, you're the market leader, right? So Right. Definitely you, you continue to build upon those capabilities and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. >>And what do you see Bill in the marketplace? Are you, are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of all in on? I >>Would say we are, we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of a, as an automation practice lead, you know, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are gonna benefit them as a whole. So looking at UI path, you know, that this platform is, it covers the end to end spectrum of, of automation. So I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that, that delivers value. And so that's, that's where I see the value in UI path and that's why CGI is, is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched probably SALT in the, in the market last week, expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI, Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients whole UI path infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them and they just get the value outta >>Automation. Nice, nice. Love >>It. Derek, you mentioned, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Yeah. Sounds like it's also ethereal possibility possibly you're saying, you, you're saying you have processes that are running on premises, right? But then you reach out to have an automation process run that's happening off pre and you're, and you're sort of, >>It's on the cloud, so, so yeah, so we have a in-house orchestrator, so we don't, we're not using your sort of on the cloud orchestrator. So, so we brought it in-house for security reasons. Okay. But we use, you know, so inside the vpn, you know, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So, so that's, that's the ephemeral side of the, of the >>Infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, are you, is it a, is it a pay by the drink or by the, by the CPU >>Hours, if you can imagine like we, you know, like I mentioned where somewhere between four to 500 bots and every bot has a time slot to run and takes a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we in the old days have to have to buy and procure and, you know, staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all, all of bots this in ephemeral infrastructure, right? So these, okay, these machines, these bot machines are, you know, spun up. They run the, they, they run their automation and then they spin >>Down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is in your >>Purview and they spun up on aws. Yeah. Okay. And then they spin down. Okay, got >>It. Got it. Interesting. Four >>To 500 bots. You know, Daniel one point play out this vision of a bot chicken in every pot, I called it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world, not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How, how are you thinking about that? >>That's a good question. So obviously the, the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bonds versus attended bonds, right? That, that we also have a citizen developer, sort of a group team. We support that as well from a coe. So, you know, we see the future as a mix. There's, there's a spectrum of, we are the professional development team. There's also, we support and nurture the personal automation and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help, you know, reduce the, you know, the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But you know, for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transfer transformational automations that really drive process efficiencies and, and savings. >>And what's the, what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings and maybe there's other sort of productivity. How do you measure the benefit, the ROI and, and >>Quantify that we, you know, I, I don't, I don't profess I don't think we have all the right answers, but yeah, simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement sort of in like an nps, internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. But we definitely see automation demand coming from our, our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's, it's continued to be a hot area and hopefully we, we can, you know, like, like what the key message and theme of this, of this conference. Essentially we want to take and build upon the, the good work that we've done in terms of rpa and we want to drive it more towards digital transformation. >>So Bill, what are you seeing across the, your customer base in terms of, of, of roi? I'm not looking for percentages there. I'm sure they're off the charts, but in terms of, you know, you can optimize for fast payback, you know, maybe lower the denominator, you know, or you can optimize for, you know, net benefit over time, right? You know, what are you seeing? What are customers after they want fast payback and little quick hits? Or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise wide impact? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they, you know, they want an roi and just depending upon the use case, that's gonna vary in terms of the, the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in in life sciences it may be around, you know, compliance like GXP compliance is huge. And so that may may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're, they're running their processes and they're being compliant with, you know, federal standards. So that's, that's one aspect to it. But you know, to, you know, a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and and so on. But yeah, I think, I think the other, the other part of it is, you know, impacting broader business processes. So taking that top down approach versus kind of bottom up, you know, doing ta you know, the ones you choose the tasks is not as impactful as looking at broader across the entire business process and seeing how we can impact >>It. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm gonna go write a, you know, software robot. I'm gonna go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw her to the defense? You guys, you guys send me a video on how to do it. Hold my hand. How's that work? >>Yeah, I mean, good question. So, so we obviously direct them to the UI path Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We, we go through, we have writeups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials, and then ultimately how do we deploy bot inside the MER ecosystem. But I, I, maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. Yeah. I'll also say because we're, we're a pharmaceutical company. I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if, if, if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a, a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to, to our patients and, and healthcare professionals. And that's, that, that's immeasurable benefit. >>Yeah, I bet if you compress that ELAP time of, of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've gotta go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank >>You so much. Appreciate it. You're welcome. >>Appreciate it. All right. Thank you for watching this Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson, The cubes coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward, five. We'll be right back right after the short break. Awesome. >>Great.

(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women In Tech, International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I have two guests from AWS here with me. Carolina Pina joins us, the head of Enterprise Enablement for LATAM and Laura Alvarez Modernel is here as well, Public Sector Programs Manager at AWS. Ladies, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Carolina, let's start with you. Talk to me a little bit about your role, what it is that you're doing there. >> So my role in AWS is to actually create mechanisms of massive training to try to close the talent gap that we have in the region. And when I mentioned talent gap, I'm talking about obviously digital and cloud-computing skills. So that's, that's, in a nutshell what my role entails. >> Lisa: Got it. How long have you been in that role? Just curious. >> So I've been at AWS a little bit over, over two years. I was actually in the public sector team when I joined, leading the education vertical for Latin American Canada. And I recently joined the commercial sector now leading these massive training efforts for the region for LATAM. >> And Laura, you're in public sector. Talk to me a little bit about your role. >> Yes, I'm in public sector. I'm also based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So yeah, I'm from Latin America, and I lead educational and community impact programs in the Southern cone of Latin America. I also lead diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and I'm part of the Women at Amazon global board. That's our affinity group to make sure we make efforts towards building a more equal world. And on a personal note I'm really passionate about the topic of gender equality because I truly think it affects us all as women and as Latins. So that's something that I'm always interested in collaborating with. >> Lisa: Excellent. Carolina back to you. If we think about from an enablement perspective how is AWS partnering with its customers and its partners to train and employ women particularly in technology? >> Oh, sure. Lisa, so it's not a surprise. We, like I mentioned, you know we have a big cloud skills, talent gap in the region. In fact, you know, 69% of companies have reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring. So, and this represents a 15 year high. So, many of these companies are actually, you know, our own commercial customers. So they approach us saying, you know, asking for for support training and developing their talent. So like I mentioned, in my role I create massive training efforts and initiatives. So we always take into consideration women, minorities, underrepresented community, and not just for the current talent, meaning like the people that are currently employed, but also to ensure that we are proactively implementing initiatives to develop a talent of younger you know, a younger generation and a talent. So we can, you know, to inspire them and, and ensure that they, that we're seeing them represented in companies like AWS, you know and our customers, and in our partners. And obviously we, when we sit down with customers to craft these massive trainings you know, leveraging their ecosystems and communities, we actually try to use all our AWS training and certification portfolio which includes, you know, in live in class with live in structures, in classroom trainings. We also have our AWS Skill Builder platform which is the platform that allows us to, you know to reach a broader audience because it has, you know over 500 free and on-demand classes. And we also have a lot of different other programs that touches in different audiences. You know, we have AWS re/Start for underrepresented, and underemployed minorities. We also have AWS Academy, which is the program that we have for higher education institutions. And we have AWS, you know, Educate which also touches, you know, cloud beginners. So in every single of these programs, we ensure that we are encompassing and really speaking to women and developing training and developing women. >> Lisa: That's a great focus there. Laura, talk to me about upskilling. I know AWS is very much about promoting from within. What are some of the things that it's doing to help women in Latin America develop those tech skills and upskill from where, maybe where they are now? >> Well, Lisa, I think that is super interesting because there's definitely a skills gap problem, right? We have all heard about. And what's funny is also that we have this huge opportunity in Latin America to train people and to help further develop the countries. And we have the companies that need the talent. So why is there still a gap, right? And I think that's because there's no magic solution to solving this problem. No, like epic Hollywood movie scene that it's going to show how we close the gap. And it takes stepping out of our comfort zone. And as Carolina mentioned, collaborating. So, we at AWS have a commitment to help 29 million people globally to grow their technical skills with free cloud-computing skills training by 2025. I know that sounds a lot through educational programs but we do have as Carolina mentioned, a Skill Builder you can go into the website for free, enter, choose your path, get trained. We have Academy that we implement with universities. Re/Start that is a program that's already available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica. So there are a lot of opportunities, but you also mentioned something else that I would like to dive a bit deeper that is Latin American women. And yesterday we had the opportunity to record a panel about intersectionality with three amazing Latin women. And what we have to learn from that is that these are two minorities that intersect, right. We're talking about females that are minority. Latinas are minority. And in tech, that is also something that is even bigger minority. So there are more difficulties there and we need to make sure that we are meeting that talent that is there that is in Latin America, that exists. We know for sure we have unicorns in Latin America that are even AWS customers like Mercado Libre, and we have to meet them with the opportunities. And that's why we created a program that came from identifying how this problem evolves in Latin America, that there is a lack of confidence in women also that they don't feel prepared or equipped. There is a cultural component why we don't choose tech careers. And we partner with universities, more than 12 universities in Latin America with the International American Development Bank as well to create tech skills that's a free five weeks program in order to get students and get female in Latin America, into the tech world. And we also have them with mentorship. So I think that is an opportunity to truly collaborate because we as AWS are not going to solve these by ourselves, right? We need everyone pitching in on that. >> Lisa: Right. It's absolutely a team effort. You mentioned something important in terms of helping women, and especially minorities get out of their comfort zone. Carolina, I'm curious when you're talking with women and getting them into the program and sharing with them all of the enablement programs that you have, how do you help them be confident to get out of that comfort zone? That's a hard thing to do. >> Yeah, no, for sure. For sure, Lisa, well, I, you know, a lot of times actually I use myself as an example because, you know, I studied engineering and industrial systems engineering many years ago. And you know, a lot of my career has been in in higher education and innovation and startups. And as I mentioned in the intro I've been at AWS for a little bit over two years. So I, my career has not been in cloud and I recently joined the cloud. So I actually had to go through our own trainings and get our own certifications. So I, that's, you know a lot of times I actually, I use my own example, so people understand that you don't have to come from tech, you don't have to come, you can actually be a non-tech person and, and also see the the benefits of the cloud. And you don't have to only, you know, learn cloud if you're in the IT department or in an IT team. So sometimes, I also emphasize that the cloud and the future is absolutely the cloud. In fact, the world economic foreign, you know teaches us that cloud-computing is that the technology that's going to be mostly adopted by 2025. So that's why we need to ensure that every single person, women and others are really knowledgeable in the cloud. So that's why, you know, technical and untechnical. But I, you know, I use myself as an example for them to say, you know, you can actually do it. And obviously also I collaborate with Laura and a lot of the women at Amazon Latin America Group to also you know, ensure that we're doing webinars and panels. So we show them ourselves as role model like, Laura is an incredible role model for our community. And so it's also to to show examples of what the possibilities are. And that's what we do. >> Lisa: I love that you're sharing >> And can I make a note there also? >> Please, yes. >> To add to that. I think it also requires the companies and the, and the private sector to get out of their comfort zone, right? Because we are not going to find solutions doing what we are already doing. We truly need to go and get near these persons with a new message. Their interest is there in these programs we have reached more than 3,000 women already in Latin America with tech skills. So it's not that women are not interested. It's like, how do we reach them with a message that resounds with them, right? Like how we can explain the power of technology to transform the world and to actually improve their communities. I think there's something there also that we need to think further of. >> It's so important. You know, we say often when we're talking about women in tech, that she needs to see what she can be or if she can't see it, she can't be it. So having those role models and those mentors and sponsors is absolutely critical for women to get, I call it getting comfortably uncomfortable out of that comfort zone and recognizing there's so many opportunities. Carolina, to your point, you know, these days every company is a tech company, a data company whether you're talking about a car dealer, a grocery market. So your point about, you know, and obviously the future being cloud there's so much opportunity that that opens up, for everybody really, but that's an important thing for people to recognize how they can be a part of that get out of their comfort zone and try something that they maybe hadn't considered before. >> Yes. And, actually, Lisa I would love to share an example. So we have a group, O Boticário, which is one of our customers one of the, the lead retails in Brazil. And they've been a customer of AWS since 2013 when they realized that, you know the urgency and the importance of embracing state of the art technology, to your point, like, you know this is a retail company that understands that needs to be, you know embrace digital transformation, especially because, you know they get very busy during mother's days and other holidays during the year. So they realized that they, instead of outsourcing their IT requirements to technology experts they decided to actually start developing and bringing the talent, you know within itself, within, you know, technology in-house. So they decided to start training within. And that's when we, obviously we partnered with them to also create a very comprehensive training and certification plan that started with, you know a lot of the infrastructure and security teams but then it was actually then implemented in the rest of the company. So going back to the point like everybody really needs to know. And what we also love about O Boticário is they they really care about the diversion and inclusion aspect of this equation. And we actually collaborated with them as well through this program called Desenvolve with the Brazilian government. And Desenvolve means developing Portuguese and they this program really ensures that we are also closing that gender and that race gap and ensuring that they're actually, you know, developing talent in cloud for Brazil. So we, you know, obviously have been very successful with them and we will continue to do even more things with them particular for this topic. >> Lisa: I've always known how customer focused AWS is every time we get to go to re:Invent or some of the events but it's so nice to hear these the educational programs that you're doing with customers to help them improve DEI to help them enable their own women in their organizations to learn skills. I didn't realize that. I think that's fantastic very much a symbiotic part of AWS. If we think about the theme for this year's International Women's Day, Breaking The Bias I want to get both of your opinions and Laura we'll start with you, what that means to you, and where do you think we are in Latin America with breaking the bias? >> Well, I think breaking the bias is the first step to truly being who we are every day and being able to bring that to our work as well. I think we are in a learning curve of that. The companies are changing culturally, as Carolina mentioned we have customers that are aware of the importance of having women. And as we say at AWS not only because there is a good business reason because there is, because there are studies that show that we can increase the country's CPD, but also because it's important and it's the right thing to do. So in terms of breaking the bias I think we are learning and we have a long way to go. I talked a bit earlier about intersectionality and that is something that is also important to highlight, right? Because we are talking about females but we are also talking about another minorities. We're talking about underrepresented communities, Indigenous People, Latins. So when these overlap, we face even bigger challenges to get where we want to get, right? And to get to decision making places because technology is transforming the ways we take decisions, we live, and we need someone like us taking those decisions. So I think it's important at first to be aware and to see that you can get there and eventually to start the conversation going and to build the conversation, not to just leave it but to make sure we hear people and their input and what they're going through. >> Lisa: Yes. We definitely need to hear them. Carolina, what's your take on breaking the bias and where do you from your experience, where do you think we are with it? >> Yeah, no, I'm as passionate as Laura on this topic. And that's why we, you know we're collaborating in the Women at Amazon Latin America Chapter, because we're both very, I think breaking the bias starts with us and ourselves. And we are very proactive within AWS and externally. And I feel it's also, I mean, Lisa, what we've been doing is not only, obviously gathering you know, the troops and really making sure that, that we have very aggressive goals internally, but also bringing you know, bringing our male counterparts, and other, you know, other members of the other communities, because the change, we're not going to make it alone. Like the change where it is not women only talking to women is going to make the change. We actually need to make sure the male and other groups are represented. And the dialogue that they're that we're very conscious about that. And I feel like we're seeing more and more that the topic is becoming more of a priority not only within AWS and Amazon but we also see it because now that I meet with when I meet with customers around the region they really want to see how we can collaborate in these diversion and inclusion initiatives. So I think we are breaking the bias because now this topic is more top of mind. And then we are being more proactively addressing it and and training people and educating people. And I feel we're really in a pivoted point where the change that we've really been wanting to we will see in the next you know, few years which is very exciting. >> Lisa: Excellent, and we'll see that with the help of women like you guys. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what you're doing, how you're helping organizations across AWS's ecosystem, customers, partners, and helping, of course, folks from within you, right. It's a holistic effort, but we are on our way to breaking that bias and again, I thank you both for your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa, for the opportunity. >> My pleasure. For Carolina Pina and Laura Alvarez Modernel, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech, International Women's Day 2022. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:invent 2021. I'm here with my co-host John Furrier and we're running one of the largest, most significant technology events in the history of 2021. Two live sets here in Las Vegas, along with our two studios. And we are absolutely delighted. We're incredibly delighted to welcome a returning alumni. It's not enough to just say that you're an alumni because you have been such a fixture of theCUBE for so many years. Annie Weinberger. And Annie is head of product marketing for applications at AWS. Annie, welcome. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be back. >> It's wonderful to have you back. Let's dive right into it. >> Okay. >> Talk to us about Connect. What does that mean when I say Connect? >> Yes, well, I think if we talk about Amazon Connect, we have to go back to the beginning of the origin story. So, over 10 years ago, when Amazon retail was looking for a solution to manage their customer service and their contact center, we went out and we looked at different solutions and nothing really met our needs. Nothing could kind of provide the scale that we needed at Amazon, or could really be as flexible as we needed to ensure that we're our customer obsession could come through in our customer service. So we built our own solution. And over the years, customers were coming to us and asking, you know, what do you use for your customer service technology? And so we launched Amazon Connect, our omni-channel cloud contact center solution just over four years ago. And it is the one of the fastest growing services at AWS. We have tens of thousands of customers using it today, like Capital One into it, Bank of Omaha, Mutual of Omaha, Best Western, you know, I can go on and on. And they're using it to have over 10 million interactions with customers every day. So it's, you know, growing phenomenally and we just couldn't be more proud to help our customers with their customer service. >> So, yeah. Talk about some of the components that go into that. What are the sort of puzzle pieces that make up AWS Connect? Because obviously connecting with a customer can take a whole bunch of different forms with email, text, voice. >> Yeah >> What's included in that? >> So it's an omni-channel cloud contact center. It provides, you know, any way you want to talk to your customers. There's traditional methods of voice. There's automated ways to connect. So IVRs or interactive voice responses where you call with voice prompts, there's chat, you know. We have Lex Bots that use the same technology that powers Alexa for natural language understanding. And I think customers really like it for a few reasons. One is that unlike kind of other contact center solutions, you can set it up in minutes. You know, American Preparatory Academy had to set up a contact center, they did it in two days. And then it's very, very easy to customize and use. So another example is, you know, when Priceline was going through COVID and they realized their call volume went up 300% overnight, and everybody was just sitting near the queue waiting to talk to an agent. So in 20 minutes, we were able to go in and very easily with a drag and drop interface, customize the ad flow so that people who had a reservation in the next 72 hours were prioritized. So very, very easily. >> You just jumped the gun on me. I was going to ask this because we never boarding that Connect during the pandemic was a huge success. >> Annie: Yes. >> It was many, many examples where people were just located, disrupted by the pandemic. And you guys had tons of traction from government public sector to commercial across the board. Adam Solecki told me in person a couple weeks ago that it was on fire, Connect was on fire. So again, a tailwind, one of those examples with the pandemic, but it highlights this idea or purpose built, ready to go. >> Pre-built the applications. >> Pre-built application. This is a phenomenon. >> It's moving up the stack for AWS. It's very exciting. I think, yeah, we had over 5,000 new contact centers stood up in March and April of 2020 alone. >> Dave: Wow. >> Give it some scale, just go back to the scale piece. Cause this is like, like amazing to stand up a call center like hours, days. Like this is like incredible to, give us some stats on some examples of how fast people were standing up Connect. >> Yeah, I mean, you could stand it up overnight. American Preparatory Academy, as I mentioned did it in two days, we had, you know, this county of Los Angeles did theirs I think at a day. You could go and right now you don't need any technical expertise, even though you have some. >> theCUBE call center, we don't need people calling. >> We had everyone from a Mexican restaurant needed to take to go orders. Cause now it's COVID and they don't have a call. They've been able to set that up, grab a phone number and start taking takeout orders all the way to like capital one, you know, with 40,000 agents that need to move remote overnight. And I think that it's because of that ease to set up, but also the scale and the way that we charge. So, you know, it's AWS consumption-based pricing. You only pay for the interactions with customers. So the barrier to entry is really, really low. You don't have to migrate everything over and buy a bunch of new licenses. You can just stand it up and you're only charged for the interactions with customers. And then if you want to scale down like into it, obviously tax season they're bringing on a lot more agents to handle calls, when those agents aren't really needed for that busy time, you're not paying for those seats. >> You're flex. Take me through the, okay, that's a win, I get that. So home run, great success. Now, the machine learning story is interesting too, because you have the purpose-built platform. There's some customizations that can happen on top of it. So it's not just, here's a general purpose piece of software. People are using some customizations. Take us through the other things. >> Well, the exciting thing is they're not even real customizations because we're AWS, we can leverage the AML services and built pre-built purpose-built features. So there it's embedded and you know, Amazon Connect has been cloud native and AI born since the very beginning. So we've taken a lot of the AI services and built them into you don't need any knowledge. You don't have to know anything about AIML. You can just go in and start leveraging it. And it has huge powerful effects for our customers. We launched three new features this year. One was Amazon Wisdom. That's part of Amazon Connect. And what that does is, you know, if you're an agent and you're on the phone and customer's asking questions, today what they have to do is go in and search across all these different knowledge repositories to find the answer or, you know, how do I issue a refund? You know, we're hearing about this feature that's broken on our product. We're listening behind the scenes to that call and then just automatically providing the knowledge articles as they're on the call saying, this is what you should do, giving them recommendations so we can help the customer much more quickly. >> I love them moving up the stack. Again, a huge fan of Connect. We've highlighting in all of our stories. It's a phenomenon that's translating to other areas, but I want to tie back in where it goes next cause on these keynotes, Adam Solecki's and today was Swami, the conversations about a horizontal data plane. And so as customers would say, use Connect, I might want, if I'm a big customer I want to integrate that into my data because it's voice data, it's call centers, customer data, but I have other databases. So how do you guys look at that integration layer snapping it together with say, a time series database, or maybe a CRM system or retail e-commerce because again, it's all data but it's connected call center. Some may think it's silo, but it's not really siloed. So, I'm a customer. How do I integrate call center? >> Yeah and it's, you know, we have a very strong partner with Salesforce. They're actually a reseller of Connect. So we work with them very, very closely. We have out of the box integrations with Salesforce, with your other, you know, analytics databases with Marketo with other services that you need. I think again, it's one of the benefits of being AWS, it's very extensible, very flexible, and really easy to bring in and share the data that we have with other systems. >> John: So it's not an issue then. >> One of the conversation points that's come up is the, this idea that a large majority of IT Spend is still on premises today. In other words, the AWS total addressable market hasn't been tapped yet. And, you imagine going through the pandemic, someone using AWS Connect to create a virtual call center, now as we hopefully come out and people some return to the office, but now they have the tools to be able to stay at home and be more flexible. Those people, maybe they weren't in the cloud that much before. But to John's point, now you start talking about connecting all of those other data sources. Well, where do those data sources belong? They belong in AWS. So, from your perspective, on the surface it looks like, well, wait, you have these products, but really those are gateways to everything else that AWS does. Is that a fair statement? >> I think it's very, yeah. Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> The big thing I want to get into is okay, we're, I mean, we don't have a lot of people calling for theCUBE but I mean, we wouldn't use the call center, but there's audio involved. Are people more going back to the old school phones for support now with the pandemic? Cause you've mentioned that earlier about the price line, having more- >> I think it's, you know, when we talk to our customers too, it's about letting, letting any customer contact you the way they want to. You know, we, you know, I was talking to Delta, spoke with us yesterday in the business application leadership session. And she said, you know, when someone has a flight issue, I'm sure you can attest to this. I did the same thing. They call, you know, if your, if your flight got canceled or it's looking like it's going to keep pushing, you don't necessarily want to go, you know, use a chat bot or send an email or a text, but there's other use cases where you just want a quick answer, you know, if you contact, I haven't received my product yet, you know, it said it was shipped, I didn't get it. I don't necessarily want to talk to someone, but so, it's just about making that available. >> On the voice side, is it other apps are integrating voice? So what's the interface to call center? Is it, can I integrate like an app voice integrated through the app or it's all phone? >> Because for the agents, there's an agent UI. So they'll see kind of calls that they have in their queue coming up, they'll see the tasks that they have to issue or refund. They'll see the kind of analytics that they have. The knowledge works. There's a supervisor view, so they could go see, you know, we with contact lens for Amazon Connect, we had a launch this, you know, this week, every event around contact lens, it lets you see the trends and sentiment of what's going on the call. It gives them like those training moments. If people aren't using the standard sign-off or the standard greeting on the call, it's a training moment and they can kind of see what's happening and get real-time alerts. If two keywords of a customer saying they cancel into the call, that can get a flag and they can go in and help the agent if necessary. So. >> All kinds of metadata extraction going on in real time. >> Yeah. >> How do you, how would AWS to go through the process of determining what should be bespoke solution hearing versus something that can be productized? And we know there are 475 different kinds of instances. However, you can come up with a package solution where people could pick features and get up and running really quickly. How is that decision making process? >> Well, I mean, you know, 90% at least of what we do build, it comes from what our customers ask for. So we don't, it's the onus is not on us. We listen to our customers, they tell us what they want us to build. Contact center solutions are their line of business applications are purchased by business decision makers and they're used to doing more buying than building. So they wanted to be more out of the box, more like pre-built, but we still are AWS. We make it very, very extensible, very easy to customize, like pull in other data sources. But when we look at how we are going to move up the stack and other areas, we just continue to listen to our customers. >> What's the biggest thing you learned in the pandemic from the team? What's the learnings coming out of the pandemic as hybrid world is upon us? >> I mean, I think a few things with, you know, starting, as you mentioned with the cloud, that the kind of idea of a contact center being a massive building, usually in the middle of America where, you know, people go and they sit and they have conversations. If that was really turned on its head and you can have very secure and accessible solutions through the cloud so that you can work from anywhere. So that was really fantastic to see. >> That's going to be interesting to see moving forward. How that paradigm shifts some centralized call centers, but a lot of this aggregated work that can be done. >> I mean, who knows the, you know, gig economy could be in the contact center, you know. >> Yeah, absolutely >> Yeah >> Maybe get some CUBE hosts, give us theCUBE Connect. We get some CUBE hosts remote. >> That's important work, yeah. >> We need, we need to talk. I got to got my phone number in that list. Annie, it's been fantastic to have you. >> Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. >> For John Furrier, this is Dave Nicholson telling you, thank you for joining our continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. Stick with theCUBE for the best in hybrid event coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation with 40 net. I'm your host. Lisa Martin, Derek Minky is back. He's the chief security insights and global threat alliances at 40 minutes, 40 guard labs, Derek. Welcome back to the program. >>Likewise, we've talked a lot this year. And of course, when I saw that there are, uh, you guys have predictions from 40 guard labs, global threat intelligence and research team about the cyber threat landscape for 2022. I thought it was going to be a lot to talk about with Derek here. So let's go ahead and dig. Right in. First of all, one of the things that caught my attention was the title of the press release about the predictions that was just revealed. The press release says 40 guard labs, predict cyber attacks aimed at everything from crypto wallets to satellite internet, nothing. There is no surface that is safe anymore. Talk to me about some of the key challenges that organizations in every industry are facing. >>Yeah, absolutely. So this is a, as you said, you, you had the keyword there surface, right? That, and that attack surface is, is open for attack. That's the attack surface that we talk about it is literally be pushed out from the edge to space, like a lot of these places that had no connection before, particularly in OT environments off grid, we're talking about, uh, you know, um, uh, critical infrastructure, oil and gas, as an example, there's a lot of these remote units that were living out there that relied on field engineers to go in and, uh, you know, plug into them. They were air gapped, those such low. Those are the things that are going to be accessible by Elio's low earth orbit satellites. And there are 4,000 of those out there right now. There's going to be over 30,000. We're talking Starlink, we're talking at least four or five other competitors entering this space, no pun intended. And, um, and that's a big deal because that it's a gateway. It opens the door for cyber criminals to be able to have accessibility to these networks. And so security has to come, you know, from, uh, friends of mine there, right. >>It absolutely does. We've got this fragmented perimeter tools that are siloed, the expand and very expanded attack surface, as you just mentioned, but some of the other targets, the 5g enabled edge, the core network, of course, the home environment where many of us still are. >>Yeah, yeah, definitely. So that home environment like the edge, it is a, uh, it's, it's the smart edge, right? So we have things called edge access Trojans. These are Trojans that will actually impact and infect edge devices. And if you think about these edge devices, we're talking things that have machine learning and, and auto automation built into them a lot of privilege because they're actually processing commands and acting on those commands in a lot of cases, right? Everything from smart office, smart home option, even until the OT environment that we're talking about. And that is a juicy target for attackers, right? Because these devices naturally have more privileged. They have APIs and connectivity to a lot of these things where they could definitely do some serious damage and be used as these pivot within the network from the edge. Right. And that's, that's a key point there. >>Let's talk about the digital wallet that we all walk around with. You know, we think out so easy, we can do quick, simple transactions with apple wallet, Google smart tab, Venmo, what have you, but that's another growing source of that, where we need to be concerned, right? >>Yeah. So I, I I've, I've worn my cyber security hat for over 20 years and 10 years ago, even we were talking all about online banking Trojans. That was a big threat, right? Because a lot of financial institutions, they hadn't late ruled out things like multifactor authentication. It was fairly easy to get someone's bank credentials go in siphoned fans out of an account. That's a lot harder nowadays. And so cyber criminals are shifting tactics to go after the low hanging fruit, which are these digital wallets and often cryptocurrency, right? We've actually seen this already in 40 guard labs. Some of this is already starting to happen right now. I expect this to happen a lot more in 20, 22 and beyond. And it's because, you know, these wallets are, um, hold a lot of whole lot of value right now, right. With the crypto. And they can be transferred easily without having to do a, like a, you know, EFT is a Meijer transfers and all those sorts of things that includes actually a lot of paperwork from the financial institutions. And, you know, we saw something where they were actually hijacking these wallets, right. Just intercepting a copy and paste command because it takes, you know, it's a 54 character address people aren't typing that in all the time. So when they're sending or receiving funds, they're asking what we've actually seen in malware today is they're taking that, intercepting it and replacing it with the attackers. Well, it's simple as that bypassing all the, you know, authentication measures and so forth. >>And is that happening for the rest of us that don't have a crypto wallet. So is that happening for folks with apple wallets? And is that a growing threat concern that people need to be? It is >>Absolutely. Yeah. So crypto wallets is, is the majority of overseeing, but yeah, no, no digital wallet is it's unpatched here. Absolutely. These are all valid targets and we are starting to see activity in. I am, >>I'm sure going after those stored credentials, that's probably low-hanging fruit for the attackers. Another thing that was interesting that the 2022 predictions threat landscape, uh, highlighted was the e-sports industry and the vulnerabilities there. Talk to me about that. That was something that I found surprising. I didn't realize it was a billion dollar revenue, a year industry, a lot of money, >>A lot of money, a lot of money. And these are our full-blown platforms that have been developed. This is a business, this isn't, you know, again, going back to what we've seen and we still do see the online gaming itself. We've seen Trojans written for that. And oftentimes it's just trying to get into, and user's gaming account so that they can steal virtual equipment and current, you know, there there's virtual currencies as well. So there was some monetization happening, but not on a grand scale. This is about a shift attackers going after a business, just like any organization, big business, right. To be able to hold that hostage effectively in terms of DDoSs threats, in terms of vulnerabilities, in terms of also, you know, crippling these systems with ransomware, like we've already seen starting to hit OT, this is just another big target. Right. Um, and if you think about it, these are live platforms that rely on low latency. So very quick connections, anything that interrupts that think about the Olympics, right on sports environment, it's a big deal to them. And there's a lot of revenue that could be lost in cybercriminals fully realizes. And this is why, you know, we're predicting that e-sports is going to be a, um, a big target for them moving forward. >>Got it. And tell, let's talk about what's going on with brands. So when you and I spoke a few months ago, I think it was ransomware was up nearly 11 X in the first half of a calendar year, 2021. What are you seeing from an evolution perspective, uh, in the actual ransomware, um, actions themselves as well as what the, what the cyber criminals are evolving to. >>Yeah. So to where it's aggressive, destructive, not good words, right. But, but this is what we're seeing with ransomware. Now, again, they're not just going after data as the currency, we're seeing, um, destructive capabilities put into ransomware, including wiper malware. So this used to be just in the realm of, uh, APTT nation state attacks. We saw that with should moon. We saw that with dark soil back in 2013, so destructive threats, but in the world of apt and nation state, now we're seeing this in cyber crime. We're seeing it with ransomware and this, I expect to be a full-blown tactic for cyber criminals simply because they have the, the threat, right. They've already leveraged a lot of extortion and double extortion schemes. We've talked about that. Now they're going to be onboarding this as a new threat, basically planting these time bombs. He's ticking time bombs, holding systems for, for, for ransom saying, and probably crippling a couple of, to show that they mean business and saying, unless you pay us within a day or two, we're going to take all of these systems offline. We're not just going to take them offline. We're going to destroy them, right. That's a big incentive for people to, to, to pay up. So they're really playing on that fear element. That's what I mean about aggressive, right? They're going to be really shifting tactics, >>Aggressive and destructive, or two things you don't want in a cybersecurity environment or to be called by your employer. Just wanted to point that out. Talk to me about wiper malware. Is this new emerging, or is this something that's seeing a resurgence because this came up at the Olympics in the summer, right? >>Absolutely. So a resurgence in, in a sort of different way. Right. So, as I said, we have seen it before, but it's been not too prevalent. It's been very, uh, it's, it's been a niche area for them, right. It's specifically for these very highly targeted attack. So yes, the Olympics, in fact, two times at the Olympics in Tokyo, but also in the last summer Olympics as well. We also saw it with, as I mentioned in South Korea at dark school in 2013, we saw it an OT environment with the moon as an example, but we're talking handfuls here. Uh, unfortunately we have blogged about three of these in the last month to month and a half. Right. And that, and you know, this is starting to be married with ransomware, which is particularly a very dangerous cause it's not just my wiper malware, but couple that with the ransom tactics. >>And that's what we're starting to see is this new, this resurgent. Yes. But a completely new form that's taking place. Uh, even to the point I think in the future that it could, it could severely a great, now what we're seeing is it's not too critical in a sense that it's not completely destroying the system. You can recover the system still we're talking to master boot records, those sorts of things, but in the future, I think they're going to be going after the formal firmware themselves, essentially turning some of these devices into paperweights and that's going to be a very big problem. >>Wow. That's a very scary thought that getting to the firmware and turning those devices into paperweights. One of the things also that the report talked about that that was really interesting. Was that more attacks against the supply chain and Linux, particularly talk to us about that. What did you find there? What does it mean? What's the threat for organizations? >>Yeah. So we're seeing a diversification in terms of the platforms that cyber criminals are going after. Again, it's that attack surface, um, lower hanging fruit in a sense, uh, because they've, you know, for a fully patched versions of windows, 10 windows 11, it's harder, right. For cyber criminals than it was five or 10 years ago to get into those systems. If we look at the, uh, just the prevalence, the amount of devices that are out there in IOT and OT environments, these are running on Linux, a lot of different flavors and forms of Linux, therefore this different security holes that come up with that. And that's, that's a big patch management issue as an example too. And so this is what we, you know, we've already seen it with them or I bought net and this was in our threat landscape report, or I was the number one threat that we saw. And that's a Linux-based bot net. Now, uh, Microsoft has rolled out something called WSL, which is a windows subsystem for Linux and windows 10 and windows 11, meaning that windows supports Linux now. So that all the code that's being written for botnets, for malware, all that stuff is able to run on, on new windows platforms effectively. So this is how they're trying to expand their, uh, attack surface. And, um, that ultimately gets into the supply chain because again, a lot of these devices in manufacturing and operational technology environments rely quite heavily actually on Linux. >>Well, and with all the supply chain issues that we've been facing during the pandemic, how can organizations protect themselves against this? >>Yeah. So this, this is a big thing, right? And we talked about also the weaponization of artificial intelligence, automation and all of these, there's a lot going on as you know, right from the threats a lot to get visibility on a lot, to be able to act quickly on that's a big key metric. There is how quick you can detect these and respond to them for that. You need good threat intelligence, of course, but you also truly need to enable, uh, uh, automation, things like SD wan, a mesh architecture as well, or having a security fabric that can actually integrate devices that talk to each other and can detect these threats and respond to them quickly. That's a very important piece because if you don't stop these attacks well, they're in that movement through the attack chain. So the kill chain concept we talk about, um, the risk is very high nowadays where, you know, everything we just talked about from a ransomware and destructive capabilities. So having those approaches is very important. Also having, um, you know, education and a workforce trained up is, is equally as important to, to be, you know, um, uh, to, to be aware of these threats. >>I'm glad you brought up that education piece and the training, and that's something that 49 is very dedicated to doing, but also brings up the cybersecurity skills gap. I know when I talked with Kenzie, uh, just a couple months ago at the, um, PGA tournament, it was talking about, you know, big investments in what 40 guard, 40, 40 net is doing to help reduce that gap. But the gap is still there. How do I teach teams not get overloaded with the expanding service? It seems like the surface, the surface has just, there is no limit anymore. So how does, how does it teams that are lean and small help themselves in the fact that the threat is landscape is, is expanding. The criminals are getting smarter or using AI intelligent automation, what our it teams do >>Like fire with fire. You got to use two of the same tools that they're using on their side, and you need to be able to use in your toolkit. We're talking about a security operation center perspective to have tools like, again, this comes to the threat intelligence to get visibility on these things. We're talking Simmons, sor uh, we have, you know, 40 AI out now, uh, deception products, all these sorts of things. These are all tools that need that, that, uh, can help, um, those people. So you don't have to have a, you know, uh, hire 40 or 50 people in your sock, right? It's more about how you can work together with the tools and technology to get, have escalation paths to do more people, process procedure, as we talk about to be able to educate and train on those, to be able to have incident response planning. >>So what do you do like, because inevitably you're going to be targeted, probably interacts where attack, what do you do? Um, playing out those scenarios, doing breach and attack simulation, all of those things that comes down to the skills gaps. So it's a lot about that education and awareness, not having to do that. The stuff that can be handled by automation and AI and, and training is you're absolutely right. We've dedicated a lot with our NSC program at 49. We also have our 40 net security academy. Uh, you know, we're integrating with those secondary so we can have the skillsets ready, uh, for, for new graduates. As an example, there's a lot of progress being made towards that. We've even created a new powered by 40 guard labs. There is a 40 guard labs play in our NSC seven as an example, it's, uh, you know, for, um, uh, threat hunting and offensive security as an example, understanding really how attackers are launching their, their campaigns and, um, all those things come together. But that's the good news actually, is that we've come a long way. We actually did our first machine learning and AI models over 10 years ago, Lisa, this isn't something new to us. So the technology has gone a long way. It's just a matter of how we can collaborate and obviously integrate with that for the, on the skills gap. >>And one more question on the actual threat landscape, were there any industries that came up in particular, as we talked about e-sports we talked about OT and any industries that came up in particular as, as really big hotspots that companies and organizations really need to be aware of. >>Yeah. So also, uh, this is part of OT about ICS critical infrastructure. That's a big one. Uh, absolutely there we're seeing, uh, also cyber-criminals offering more crime services now on dark web. So CAS, which is crime as a service, because it used to be a, again, a very specialized area that maybe only a handful of organized criminal organizations could actually, um, you know, launch attacks and, and impact to those targets where they're going after those targets. Now they're offering services right on to other coming cyber criminals, to be able to try to monetize that as well. Again, we're seeing this, we actually call it advanced persistent cybercrime APC instead of an apt, because they're trying to take cyber crime to these targets like ICS, critical infrastructure, um, healthcare as well is another one, again, usually in the realm of APMT, but now being targeted more by cybercriminals in ransomware, >>I've heard of ransomware as a service, is that a subcategory of crime as a service? >>Absolutely. Yeah. It is phishing as a service ransomware as, and service DDoSs as a service, but not as, as many of these subcategories, but a ransomware as a service. That's a, another big problem as well, because this is an affiliate model, right. Where they hire partners and pay them commission, uh, if they actually get payments of ransom, right? So they have literally a middle layer in this network that they're pushing out to scale their attacks, >>You know, and I think that's the last time we talked about ransomware, we talked about it's a matter of, and I talk to customers all the time who say, yes, it's a matter of when, not, if, is, is this the same sentiment? And you think for crime as a service in general, the attacks on e-sports on home networks, on, uh, internet satellites in space, is this just a matter of when, not if across the board? >>Well, yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, but the good news is it doesn't have to be a, you know, when it happens, it doesn't have to be a catastrophic situation. Again, that's the whole point about preparedness and planning and all the things I talked about, the filling the skills gap in education and having the proper, proper tools in place that will mitigate that risk. Right. And that's, and that's perfectly acceptable. And that's the way we should handle this from the industry, because we process we've talked about this, people are over a hundred billion threats a day in 40 guard labs. The volume is just going to continue to grow. It's very noisy out there. And there's a lot of automated threats, a lot of attempts knocking on organizations, doors, and networks, and, you know, um, phishing emails being sent out and all that. So it's something that we just need to be prepared for just like you do for a natural disaster planning and all these sorts of other things in the physical world. >>That's a good point. It doesn't have to be aggressive and destructive, but last question for you, how can, how is 4d guard helping companies in every industry get aggressive and disruptive against the threats? >>Yeah. Great, great, great question. So this is something I'm very passionate about, uh, as you know, uh, where, you know, we, we don't stop just with customer protection. Of course, that is as a security vendor, that's our, our primary and foremost objective is to protect and mitigate risk to the customers. That's how we're doing. You know, this is why we have 24 7, 365 operations at 40 guy labs. Then we're helping to find the latest and greatest on threat intelligence and hunting, but we don't stop there. We're actually working in the industry. Um, so I mentioned this before the cyber threat Alliance to, to collaborate and share intelligence on threats all the way down to disrupt cybercrime. This is what big target of ours is, how we can work together to disrupt cyber crime. Because unfortunately they've made a lot of money, a lot of profits, and we need to reduce that. We need to send a message back and fight that aggressiveness and we're we're on it, right? So we're working with Interpol or project gateway with the world economic forum, the partnership against cyber crime. It's a lot of initiatives with other, uh, you know, uh, the, uh, the who's who of cyber security in the industry to work together and tackle this collaboratively. Um, the good news is there's been some steps of success to that. There's a lot more, we're doing the scale of the efforts. >>Excellent. Well, Derek as always great and very informative conversation with you. I always look forward to these seeing what's going on with the threat landscape, the challenges, the increasing challenges, but also the good news, the opportunities in it, and what 40 guard is doing 40 left 40 net, excuse me, I can't speak today to help customers address that. And we always appreciate your insights and your time we look forward to talking to you and unveiling the next predictions in 2022. >>All right. Sounds good. Thanks, Lisa. >>My pleasure for Derek manky. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation with 40 net. Thanks for watching.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>It's the Q we are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante, we're covering UI path forward for this is our second day of coverage. We've had a lot of great conversations with customers at UI path partners, their senior leaders. And next up, we're going to be talking to, I'm going to say the queen of citizen developer nests. We're not just going to create that title for you. Sydney, Madison Prescott. She's the global head of intelligent automation at Spotify Sydney. Welcome to the program. I >>Am so excited >>To be here. We're excited to have you. So one of my, as we were talking before we went live, we both are big fans of Spotify. I don't know what we would do without it in our personal lives. But talk to me a little bit about Spotify automation, UI path. And I don't want to get into you your book, what you've done for citizen developers. >>Perfect. So Spotify is on a very interesting journey. Uh, we began the journey during the pandemic and we were speaking about this a little bit earlier. And so our journey began with trying to understand how we would tackle, uh, still wanting to upskill our employees, despite the fact that we were in the middle of this kind of global crisis. And so through that endeavor, we decided to actually split out our different, uh, automation capabilities into citizen developer and unattended automation. And we did all of this through a center of excellence. So a centralized, uh, COE, which would facilitate the growth of the automations, uh, whether on the citizen developer side or the unattended side. And through this programs, we set up, uh, several different trainings where we could facilitate the growth of the citizen developer community through five day, what we call bot boot camps and the bot boot camp is in essence, um, five day training, about four and a half, five hours a day, where we take anyone at Spotify who would like to upskill in this type of automation. And we teach them everything from the basics of robotic process automation, all the way to, you know, what are all of the Spotify specific things that you have to do in order to maintain a robust, uh, citizen developer footprint within your team. And so through that, uh, that entire journey, it's been quite amazing. We started with a very small footprint in our accounting team, and we have scaled now to over 100 citizen developers, uh, in a variety of functions within Spotify. >>And what was the role that you came to Spotify to do? Cause you came there, went there right before the everything happened. >>Yes. So I was actually, uh, brought into Spotify to stand up and scale out our intelligent automation center of excellence. >>So the center of excellence is, is sort of the main spring of knowledge, training innovation. And then the, the citizen developer piece, it sounds like you're pushing out distributing that knowledge. Right. And so I'm interested in that sort of architecture of automation is that you've got a combination of centralized expertise and decentralized innovation. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. So it's very interesting actually. So we facilitate the citizen developer program through the center of excellence. So you can think of the center of excellence as the foundation of that knowledge. And our goal is to democratize that knowledge throughout the enterprise. And the way we do that is through the training. Uh, we facilitate the governance of the program. So making sure that all of the infrastructure is properly set up, uh, enabling the citizens, if they need support, just talking about ideation, uh, even so far as up-skilling as well. So upskilling all the way to a power user, uh, whereby those users could become true innovators and facilitate a wide variety of automations within their teams. And was it >>The events of the last 18 months? It really catalyzed this and kind of led you to really become a big advocate for citizen led development. >>It did. So we initially were starting with just the center of excellence and an unintended footprint, and we quickly pivoted and realized that we needed to in order to scale, uh, significantly given the, the situation working virtually, uh, we are a distributed team around the world that it was critical for our success that we could, uh, really distribute to this workout. And we felt that the best way to do that was through standing up a citizen developer program. >>The things that I'm trying to understand is the relationship between automation and data. And I look at Spotify in many respects is a data company, at least a company who really understands data. And I see you building all these awesome data products. I'm a subscriber as well, but you know, you've added podcasts, you've got contributors to those podcasts. You've obviously got artists and you know, these people obviously have to be paid. You have this sort of interesting ecosystem and these are all data products, if you will, that you guys build. And it's very cool sort of business model. What's the relationship between data and automation? >>Well, it is a big relationship. I would actually say it is probably the pivotal relationship because in order to tell that compelling story of digital transformation, we have to understand the data behind all of the automations that we're generating. Um, and this is whether it says in developer or COE built. Um, and so for us, it's, it's a critical component of our success that we can pinpoint those key metrics that we are looking at and tracking, you know, what does success mean for our center of excellence? What does it mean for our citizen led program? And this is everything from, you know, increased data quality to risk mitigation of different internal regulatory risk. Uh, it could be something as simple as our saved on automation. So it's, uh, a wide variety of attributes that we're looking at to really pinpoint where the successes are coming from and where we can improve maybe where we need to improve our automation footprint in a given business. >>Why did you write this book? >>Great question. So I believe in citizen development, I think it is a very unique approach to spreading out the way that you can transform your business. And so I saw a lot of struggles as I've gone through I'm in the industry with understanding citizen development, uh, the premise of it, and also understanding the technology behind it. Um, I am a big fan of studio X. And so the book specifically focuses on studio X. Um, it really introducing users to what is studio X and how really teaching individuals, how to upskill themselves, um, just through the use of the book, very intuitive and hopefully taking away some of the fear that the users may have about walking through a platform like studio S >>So what do I have to know to actually, can I read your book and then start coding? Is it by >>That is the goal. Yes. So the goal for the book is very hands-on. So it is, it is a book for, um, the novice business user, uh, someone who is not familiar with RPA, someone who may not even be familiar with UI path, they would be able to pick up this book, go through the set of exercises. It's very robust out over 400 pages. So it really packed a lot of knowledge in there, but the goal would be by the time you walk through every single exercise and complete the book, you would not only understand RPA. You would also understand UI path as a, as a service provider platform. You'd also understand the nuances of studio X. >>So in theory, someone like myself could get your book, download the community edition, start building automations, right? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. >>You have to Google a few things, but yeah. >>Yes. And it comes with a very robust code code set up. They're able to actually look at the code and review, uh, examples of the code, uh, in a source code repository. So again, it's very novice users it's meant for, to help facilitate just the learning of someone who is maybe curious about RPA, curious about UI path, or just curious about studio app. >>I already have the use case. >>You do have these guys I'm interested in doing it too. I mean, I can tell that it's a passion project of yours that you fundamentally believe in. You know, we saw this morning data from IDC and we've seen lots of different data sources that talk about, oh, automation taking jobs, people being fearful, organizations, not being ready at the same time. We've had such a tumultuous last 18 months that organizations that weren't digital are probably gone and organizations that aren't, how did there was this massive uptake in automation because suddenly you couldn't get bodies into buildings. So tell me about how this book is a facility, first of all, tell us the name of it. And then as a facilitator of those employees who might be worried about their jobs being taken by bots, >>That is a great question. So the, the name of the book is robotic process automation, a citizen developers guide to hyper automation using UI path studio X. And I would say I've heard a lot of the conversation surrounding the loss of jobs, the potential fear, uh, we all we know as humans, we are generally unfortunately, a little resistant to change and, you know, the, I'll say the digital revolution that we're going through, uh, within the workforce, whether it is hybrid work, whether it is completely virtual work, it is a bit daunting. And I understand that fear, I think in alignment with the conversation that we had heard about earlier at forward there, RPA has the ability to generate a massive amount of not only improvements within different industries, but jobs as well. Right? And for someone who is looking at this kind of ever changing landscape, and they're wondering, where do I fit in? >>Am I going to get pushed out of a, of a general, you know, uh, industry? I would say that that fear turned that into power, turned that into ambition. Um, the level of upskilling that you can do on your own, whether it's using UiPath academy, whether it's reaching out to your center of excellence, it's incredible. Um, there's a wide variety of different ways that you can upskill yourself. And in essence, you become, um, a powerful player in your environment because not only do you have the business acumen, you now have the technical acumen, and that is everything. I mean, when we talk about transformation, we talk about where our industry's going. Um, there's a saying that, you know, every company now must be a technology company, right? And so this is the key, even as workers, even as employees, we all must be technologists. And so the real question is, think of yourself and think of this concept. I like to call human augmentation. How can you augment yourself through UI path, through the use of RPA to become that up-skilled worker, that next level worker who will be integral to the success of any company moving from, >>We talk a lot about upscaling. Now, of course, part of that upskilling I presume is learning how to use robotic process automation and the tooling, but it seems that there's more to it than that. And, and you just strike me as a person that's creative, you have a power persona. So what are these sort of intangible skills that, that I need to succeed in this new world? And can I learn them? >>That's a great question. I think one of the biggest skills, being able to think outside of the box, that is huge. Uh, and again, this goes back to at least question about what does it take and what should you, you should really think outside of the box about your own career, about your team, about your company, um, how you can improve upon what is already there, um, or how can you build something completely new that has never been thought of before. And so I think that's the biggest skill. The ability to, um, innovate, think, think innovatively and think outside of the box. Um, I believe it's, it's something that is maybe a little intuitive to some individuals, but you can also learn, you can learn to, um, get out of your own way, so to speak, uh, so that you can actually start to come up with these really creative ways to address, uh, whether it's complex business problems, uh, whether it's at an industry level or even just within your internal enterprise. >>And creativity is actually one of the attributes. And I guess it might not be in your DNA, but if you, you know, it's like humor, humor, right? If you hang out with funny people, you know, if you hang out with creative people, you can, you can learn about apply. >>That's right. That's right. But in the beginning of the pandemic, you know, one of the things that I think we all want, you seem to have a ton of motivation and ambition as Dave was saying. And, and I'm someone that normally has that too, but in the first year of pandemic, that was hard. It's hard to get motivated. It was hard to know where do I fit in? How do you advise? And now of course, when you publish the book six months ago, we're about a year into the pandemic. Things are looking better because here we are in Las Vegas at an in-person event with humans. But how do you, how do you see, how do you recommend to folks that are, that don't have technology backgrounds like you don't, I don't to motivate themselves to go, you can take the control, take it. And everybody don't, we all want control as people and take control of your career path. There are a lot of opportunities out there. How do you advise people navigating this challenging sort of mental state with there's so many opportunities sitting right here? Yes >>That's so I think it, it goes back to the getting out of your own way. It also goes back to really taking a look at assess assessing your own skillset, um, assessing your own personal drivers. What motivates you, uh, whether that is in your personal life, whether that is in your professional life, and then taking a look also at those motivators, how can I look at those and what use can I get out of those to help me to transform my own personal skill set and really grow out, uh, my, my capabilities, right, as a professional it's, it's all about really thinking through, uh, your, I'll say your professional background or role as ever-changing ever-growing. And as long as you approach it with a mindset of constantly growing constantly upskilling, I mean, honestly, the sky is truly the limit. >>I a weird question. If, if, if, if mastering word is a one and let's say learning, um, learning how to use Excel, macros is let's call it a three. Uh, all in the spectrum goes out to a, be a building, a complex, uh, you know, uh, AI model, data science kind of ML model. If that's a 10, where does learning how to code RPA as a citizen developer fit on that spectrum? Good question. >>Oh, that's a great question. I would say somewhere between, Hmm. I would say somewhere between maybe three and four around there, because you there. So again, we, we have so many tools that we can use to help upscale the set of sense at this point that we can really walk them through the nuances, uh, at a pace that is conducive to really retaining the knowledge. So I don't think it's, it's definitely not the level of, let's say, building out a complex, like machine learning model or something of that nature. It may be a little bit more in alignment with, um, if someone is up-skilled and macros, or you may be up-skilled in some other type of scripting, uh, language similar to that, I might even say sometimes a little bit, maybe a little bit less difficult than that, uh, depending on what you're trying to automate, right. The process you're trying to automate the company, >>But inside of a day, I can do something fairly simple, right? Yeah. >>Yes. So we actually, the, the training that we have at Spotify, we train our users from novice. Absolutely no understanding, no knowledge of RPA to building able, being able to build a bot in five days. And those are five half days sessions that the citizen developers attend. And by the morning of the fifth day, they actually have built a bot. And so it's, and it's very powerful, uh, being able to, to upskill someone and show them, I can take you from, you know, absolutely no understanding of RPA to actually having something, a bot that you can showcase that you can run within as little as five half days. I mean, it's very compelling to any business user, right? >>The business impact. Soon as you guys are too young to remember, but there's this thing called Lotus 1, 2, 3, we used to have to go to Lotus class slash file retrieve for you folks who remember this was all keyboard based, but it was game changing in terms of your personal productivity. And it sounds like there's a similar but much, much larger impact with RPA >>Impact. Talk to me about the impact of the program, especially in the last, this year, here we are in October, you mentioned started small, and now there's about a hundred folks. Talk to me about the appetite of that as we've seen this massive acceleration and the need to automate for everyday things that we expect as consumers, whether we're ordering food or buying something online. >>Hmm. So it really is a different mindset in terms of thinking through the way that we work differently. And so we really approached it with, if you're an accountant, think of what is the future role and responsibility of an accountant in this new digital, uh, I'll say environment. And through that, we have been able to really push this idea or this concept of up-skilling as a key element of personal professional success and also team success. Um, and that has been a game changer. So there's a lot of value that comes out of the cohesiveness between the personal desire to upskill and continue to, uh, be a, you know, a consummate professional in whatever role you're in, but also to help your team right, to be, to be, you know, a standout, uh, team player in terms of the skills that you're bringing to the table as both an accountant and someone that has now the power of automation within your skillset. Okay. >>And ask you one more question. And that is something that Dave brought up yesterday as we were, he was sitting on a panel with, and he was the only male, which is not common in our industry. How have you seen the role of females in technology changing? And I'm imagine you do work in stem. Imagine you're a motivational speaker you should be if you're not. Um, but how have you seen the role of females in technology changing in since there's so much opportunity there? >>Yes. That is a great question. I believe that RPA specifically, uh, is an incredible driver of women and influencing more women to enter into stem fields, primarily because it is such an innovative technology. There are so many roles he said that are open, just opening up. Uh, probably I've heard different numbers in terms of acceleration of growth over the next five to 10 years. So we're looking at a plethora of opportunities and these are brand new roles that women who are curious about stem, curious about being a technologist can dive right into from wherever they are. So whether they are a tax professional today, whether they are working within, you know, uh, counting, whether they're working with an internal audit, they have the opportunity now to test the waters. Um, and quite often it is such a, it's such a fascinating field. And as I said, there's so much potential around it and for growth and just for changing, uh, different industries, that it's a great driver for women to actually enter into, uh, stem technology, uh, and really drive change, facilitate change, and have more women at the table, so to speak. Okay. >>And you didn't, you didn't start in tech, in stem, right? I did not. Do you have a law degree or no, you have a Ms. >>So yes, little studies and then I actually, I'm a philosopher. So I started by my degree is in philosophy. I love >>This logic. Yes. I love how you've applied that to >>Yeah. Yes. I was not initially in stem and it was actually through an internship at a technology firm, uh, while I was in college that I don't first open to technology. And it just immediately captivated me just in terms of working, you know, that the speed, the pace, uh, just being able to solve these complex business problems at scale around the world. It was absolutely fascinating to me, obviously still is, but I think testing the waters in that way, um, as I was just talking before, it helped me to understand, I had never envisioned a career in technology, but having an opportunity to test the waters really enabled me to see that, wow, this is something where I have a skillset and it brings out a passion within me that I didn't know that I had. So it was a, it was a win-win. >>That's awesome. No worries. Last question. Where can folks go to get your book? >>Yes. So anywhere books are sold, uh, definitely on Amazon. Uh, we, if you are here at forward, we also are, have a book signing, so you can come find me. I'll be on the patio signing books and, uh, yeah, it's, it's everywhere. And I would love to hear feedback. And we're thinking about a second one. So please let us know how you like the, uh, the activities that are in there. >>Thank you. Congratulations. And Dave's going to pick one up so he can start. >>Yeah. The use case. I'm dying to dig >>In, do a breathing analysis on it, and he was great to have you on the program. Your energy is fantastic. You really open up opportunities for people. I hope that more people will watch this and understand that while the really the sky is really the limit. And, uh, thank you for your time. Absolutely. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live in Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for you right back with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alum with me next. Ajay Patel is here, the SVP and GM of Modern Apps and Management at VMware. Ajay, welcome back to the program, it's great to see you. >> Well thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> Glad that you're doing well. I want to dig into your role as SVP and GM with Modern Apps and Management. Talk to me about some of the dynamics of your role and then we'll get into the vision and the strategy that VMware has. >> Makes sense. VMware has created a business group called Modern Apps and Management, with the single mission of helping our customers accelerate their digital transformation through software. And we're finding them leveraging both the edge and the multiple clouds they deploy on. So our mission here is helping, them be the cloud diagnostic manager for application development and management through our portfolio of Tazu and VRealize solutions allowing customers to both build and operate applications at speed across these edge data center and cloud deployments And the big thing we hear is all the day two challenges, right of managing costs, risks, security, performance. That's really the essence of what the business group is about. How do we speed idea to production and allow you to operate at scale. >> When we think of speed, we can't help, but think of the acceleration that we've seen in the last 18 months, businesses transforming digitally to first survive the dynamics of the market. But talk to me about how the, the pandemic has influenced catalyzed VMware's vision here. >> You can see in every industry, this need for speed has really accelerated. What used to be weeks and months of planning and execution has materialized into getting something out in production in days. One of great example I can remember is one of my financial services customer that was responsible for getting all the COVID payments out to the small businesses and being able to get that application from idea to production matter of 10 days, it was just truly impressive to see the teams come together, to come up with the idea, put the software together and getting production so that we could start delivering the financial funds the companies needed, to keep them viable. So great social impact and great results in matter of days. >> And again, that acceleration that we've seen there, there's been a lot of silver linings, I think, but I want to get in next to some of the industry trends that are influencing app modernization. What are you seeing in the customer environment? What are some of those key trends that are driving adoption? >> I mean, this move to cloud is here to stay and most of customers have a cloud first strategy, and we rebranded this from VMware the cloud smart strategy, but it's not just about one particular flavor of cloud. We're putting the best workload on the best cloud. But the reality is when I speak to many of the customers is they're way behind on the bar of digital plats. And it's, that's because the simple idea of, you know, lift and shift or completely rewrite. So there's no one fits all and they're struggling with hardware capability, their the development teams, their IT assets, the applications are modernized across these three things. So we see modernization kind of fall in three categories, infrastructure modernization, the practice of development or devops modernization, and the application transform itself. And we are starting to find out that customers are struggling with all three. Well, they want to leverage the best of cloud. They just don't have the skills or the expertise to do that effectively. >> And how does VMware help address that skills gap. >> Yeah, so the way we've looked at it is we put a lot of effort around education. So on the everyone knows containers and Kubernetes is the future. They're looking to build these modern microservices, architectures and applications. A lot of investment in just kind of putting the effort to help customers learn these new tools, techniques, and create best practices. So theCUBE academy and the effort and the investment putting in just enabling the ecosystem now with the skills and capabilities is one big effort that VMware is putting. But more importantly, on the product side, we're delivering solutions that help customers both build design, deliver and operate these applications on Kubernetes across the cloud of choice. I'm most excited about our announcement around this product. We're just launching called Tanzu application platform. It is what we call an application aware platform. It's about making it easy for developers to take the ideas and get into production. It kind of bridging that gap that exists between development and operations. We hear a lot about dev ops, as you know, how do you bring that to life? How do you make that real? That's what Tanzu application platform is about. >> I'm curious of your customer conversations, how they've changed in the last year or so in terms of, app modernization, things like security being board level conversations, are you noticing that that is rising up the chain that app modernization is now a business critical initiative for our businesses? >> So it's what I'm finding is it's the means. It's not that if you think about the board level conversations about digital transformation you know, I'm a financial services company. I need to provide mobile FinTech. I'm competing with this new age application and you're delivering the same service that they offered digitally now, right. Like from a retail bank. I can't go to the store, the retail branch anymore, right. I need to provide the same capability for payments processing all online through my mobile phone. So it's really the digitalization of the traditional processes that we're finding most exciting. In order to do that, we're finding that no applications are in cloud right. They had to take the existing financial applications and put a mobile frontend to it, or put some new business logic or drive some transformation there. So it's really a transformation around existing application to deliver a business outcome. And we're focusing it through our Tanzu lab services, our capabilities of Tanzu application platform, all the way to the operations and management of getting these products in production or these applications in production. So it's the full life cycle from idea to production is what customers are looking for. They're looking to compress the cycle time as you and I spoke about, through this agility they're looking for. >> Right, definitely a compressed cycle time. Talk to me about some of the other announcements that are being made at VMworld with respect to Tanzu and helping customers on the app modernization front, and that aligned to the vision and mission that you talked about. >> Wonderful, I would say they're kind of, I put them in three buckets. One is what are we doing to help developers get access to the new technology. Back to the skills learning part of it, most excited about Tanzu of community edition and Tanzu mission control starter pack. This is really about getting Kubernetes stood up in your favorite deployment of choice and get started building your application very quickly. We're also announcing Tanzu application platform that I spoke about, we're going to beta 2 for that platform, which makes it really easy for developers to get access to Kubernetes capability. It makes development easy. We're also announcing marketplace enhancements, allowing us to take the best of breed IC solutions and making them available to help you build applications faster. So one set of announcements around building applications, delivering value, getting them down to market very quickly. On the management side, we're really excited about the broad portfolio management we've assembled. We're probably in the customer's a way to build a cloud operating model. And in the cloud operating model, it's about how do I do VMs and containers? How do I provide a consistent management control plane so I can deliver applications on the cloud of my choice? How do I provide intrinsic observability, intrinsic security so I can operate at scale. So this combination of development tooling, platform operations, and day two operations, along with enhancements in our cost management solution with CloudHealth or being able to take our universal capabilities for consumption, driving insight and observity that really makes it a powerful story for customers, either on the build or develop or deploy side of the equation. >> You mentioned a couple of things are interesting. Consistency being key from a management perspective, especially given this accelerated time in which we're living, but also you mentioned security. We've seen so much movement on the security front in the last year and a half with the massive rise in ransomware attacks, ransomware now becoming a household word. Talk to me about the security factor and how you're helping customers from a risk mitigation perspective, because now it's not, if we get attacked, it's when. >> And I think it's really starts with, we have this notion of a secure software supply chain. We think of software as a production factory from idea to production. And if you don't start with known good hard attacks to start with, trying to wire in security after attack is just too difficult. So we started with secure content, curated images content catalogs that customers are setting up as best practices. We started with application accelerators. These are best practice that codifies with the right guard rails in place. And then we automate that supply chain so that you have checks in every process, every step of the way, whether it's in the build process and the deploy process or in runtime production. And you had to do this at the application layer because there is no kind of firewall or edge you can protect the application is highly distributed. So things like application security and API security, another area we announced a new offering at VM world around API security, but everything starts with an API endpoint when you have a security. So security is kind of woven in into the design build, deploy and in the runtime operation. And we're kind of wire this in intrinsically to the platform with best of breed security partners now extending in evolving their solution on top of us. >> What's been some of the customer feedback from some of the new technologies that you announced. I'm curious, I imagine knowing how VMware is very customer centric, customers were essential in the development and iteration of the technologies, but just give me some of the idea on customer feedback of this direction that you're going. >> Yeah, there's a great, exciting example where we're working with the army to create a software factory. you would've never imagined right, The US army being a software digital enterprise, we're partnering with what we call the US army futures command in a joint effort to help them build the first ever software development factory where army personnel are actually becoming true cloud native developers, where you're putting the soldiers to do cloud native development, everything in the terms of practice of building software, but also using the Tanzu portfolio in delivering best-in-class capability. This is going to rival some of the top tech companies in Silicon valley. This is a five-year prototype project in which we're picking cohorts of soldiers, making them software developers and helping them build great capability through both combination of classroom based training, but also strong technical foundation and expertise provided by our lab. So this is an example where, you know, the industry is working with the customer to co-innovate, how we build software, but also driving the expertise of these personnel hierarchs. As a soldier, you know, what you need, what if you could start delivering solutions for rest of your members in a productive way. So very exciting, It's an example where we've leapfrogging and delivering the kind of the Silicon valley type innovation to our standard practice. It's traditionally been a procurement driven model. We're trying to speed that and drive it into a more agile delivery factory concept as well. So one of the most exciting projects that I've run into the last six months. >> The army software factory, I love that my dad was an army medic and combat medic in Vietnam. And I'm sure probably wouldn't have been apt to become a software developer. But tell me a little bit about, it's a very cool project and so essential. Talk to me a little bit about the impetus of the army software factory. How did that come about? >> You know, this came back with strong sponsorship from the top. I had an opportunity to be at the opening of the campus in partnership with the local Austin college. And as General Milley and team spoke about it, they just said the next battleground is going to be a digital backup power hub. It's something we're going to have to put our troops in place and have modernized, not just the army, but modernize the way we deliver it through software. It's it speaks so much to the digital transformation we're talking about right. At the very heart of it is about using software to enable whether it's medics, whether it's supplies, either in a real time intelligence on the battlefield to know what's happening. And we're starting to see user technology is going to drive dramatically hopefully the next war, we don't have to fight it more of a defensive mode, but that capability alone is going to be significant. So it's really exciting to see how technology has become pervasive in all aspects, in every format including the US army. And this partnership is a great example of thought leadership from the army command to deliver software as the innovation factory, for the army itself. >> Right, and for the army to rival Silicon valley tech companies, that's pretty impressive. >> Pretty ambitious right. In partnership with one of the local colleges. So that's also starting to show in terms of how to bring new talent out, that shortage of skills we talked about. It's a critical way to kind of invest in the future in our people, right? As we, as we build out this capability. >> That's excellent that investment in the future and helping fill those skills gaps across industries is so needed. Talk to me about some of the things that you're excited about this year's VMworld is again virtual, but what are some of the things that you think are really fantastic for customers and prospects to learn? >> I think as Raghu said, we're in the third act of VM-ware, but more interestingly, but the third act of where the cloud is, the cloud has matured cloud 2.0 was really about shifting and using a public cloud for the IS capabilities. Cloud 3.0 is about to use the cloud of choice for the best application. We are going to increasingly see this distributed nature of application. I asked most customers, where does your application run? It's hard to answer that, right? It's on your mobile device, it's in your storefront, it's in your data center, it's in a particular cloud. And so an application is a collection of services. So what I'm most excited about is all business capables being published as an API, had an opportunity to be part of a company called Sonos and then Apogee. And we talked about API management years ago. I see increasingly this need for being able to expose a business capability as an API, being able to compose these new applications rapidly, being able to secure them, being able to observe what's going on in production and then adjust and automate, you can scale up scale down or deploy the application where it's most needed in minutes. That's a dynamic future that we see, and we're excited that VM was right at the heart of it. Where that in our cloud agnostic software player, that can help you, whether it's your development challenges, your deployment challenges, or your management challenges, in the future of multi-cloud, that's what I'm most excited about, we're set up to help our customers on this cloud journey, regardless of where they're going and what solution they're looking to build. >> Ajay, what are some of the key business outcomes that the cloud is going to deliver across industries as things progress forward? >> I think we're finding the consistent message I hear from our customers is leverage the power of cloud to transform my business. So it's about business outcomes. It's less about technology. It's what outcomes we're driving. Second it's about speed and agility. How do I respond, adjust kind of dynamic contiuness. How do I innovate continuously? How do I adjust to what the business needs? And third thing we're seeing more and more is I need to be able to management costs and I get some predictability and able to optimize how I run my business. what they're finding with the cloud is the costs are running out of control, they need a way, a better way of knowing the value that they're getting and using the best cloud for the right technology. Whether may be a private cloud in some cases, a public cloud or an edge cloud. So they want to able to going to select and move and have that portability. Being able to make those choices optimization is something they're demanding from us. And so we're most excited about this need to have a flexible infrastructure and a cloud agnostic infrastructure that helps them deliver these kinds of business outcomes. >> You mentioned a couple of customer examples and financial services. You mentioned the army software factory. In terms of looking at where we are in 2021. Are there any industries in particular, maybe essential services that you think are really prime targets for the technologies, the new announcements that you're making at VM world. >> You know, what we are trying to see is this is a broad change that's happening. If you're in retail, you know, you're kind of running a hybrid world of digital and physical. So we're seeing this blending of physical and digital reality coming together. You know, FedEx is a great customer of ours and you see them as spoken as example of it, you know, they're continue to both drive operational change in terms of being delivering the packages to you on time at a lower cost, but on the other side, they're also competing with their primary partners and retailers and in some cases, right, from a distribution perspective for Amazon, with Amazon prime. So in every industry, you're starting to see the lines are blurring between traditional partners and competitors. And in doing so, they're looking for a way to innovate, innovate at speed and leverage technology. So I don't think there is a specific industry that's not being disrupted whether it's FinTech, whether it's retail, whether it's transportation logistics, or healthcare telemedicine, right? The way you do pharmaceutical, how you deliver medicine, it's all changing. It's all being driven by data. And so we see a broad application of our technology, but financial services, healthcare, telco, government tend to be a kind of traditional industries that are with us but I think the reaches are pretty broad. >> Yeah, it is all changing. Everything is becoming more and more data-driven and many businesses are becoming data companies or if they're not, they need to otherwise their competition, as you mentioned, is going to be right in the rear view mirror, ready to take their place. But that's something that we see that isn't being talked about. I don't think enough, as some of the great innovations coming as a result of the situation that we're in. We're seeing big transformations in industries where we're all benefiting. I think we need to get that, that word out there a little bit more so we can start showing more of those silver linings. >> Sure. And I think what's happening here is it's about connecting the people to the services at the end of the day, these applications are means for delivering value. And so how do we connect us as consumers or us employees or us as partners to the business to the operator with both digitally and in a physical way. And we bring that in a seamless experience. So we're seeing more and more experience matters, you know, service quality and delivery matter. It's less about the technologies back again to the outcomes. And so very much focused in building that the platform that our customers can use to leverage the best of the cloud, the best of their people, the best of the innovation they have within the organization. >> You're right. It's all about outcomes. Ajay, thank you for joining me today, talking about some of the new things that the mission of your organization, the vision, some of the new products and technologies that are being announced at VM world, we appreciate your time and hopefully next year we'll see you in person. >> Thank you again and look forward to the next VMWorld in person. >> Likewise for Ajay Patel. You're very welcome for Ajay Patel. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBEs coverage of VMWorld of 2021. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at the Fortinet Championship, the PGA Tour Kickoff to the 2021-2022 FedEx Regular Season Cup. And this is so exciting to be here with Fortinet, to be at an in-person event, and to be talking about a very important topic of cybersecurity. One of our alumni is back with me, Sandra Wheatley is here, the SVP of Marketing, Threat Intelligence, and Influencer Communications at Fortinet. Sandra, it's great to see you. >> You too, Lisa. Thank you for having me. >> This is a great event. >> Yeah, it's awesome, yeah. >> Great to be outdoors, great to see people again, and great for Fortinet for being one of the first to come back to in-person events. One of the things I would love to understand is here we are at the PGA tour, what's the relationship with Fortinet and the PGA Tour? >> Well, first of all, I think the PGA tour is an amazing brand. You just have to look around here and it's extremely exciting, but beyond the brand, there's a lot of synergies between the PGA tour and Fortinet CSR initiatives, particularly around STEM, diversity inclusion, as well as veterans rescaling. And so some of the proceeds from the Fortinet Championship will go to benefit local nonprofits and the local community. So that's something we're very excited about overall. >> Lisa: Is this a new partnership? >> It is a new partnership and we will be the Fortinet Championship sponsor for about the next five years. So we're looking forward to developing this partnership and this relationship, and benefiting a lot of nonprofits in the future. >> Excellent, that's a great cause. One of the things, when you and I last saw each other by Zoom earlier in the summer, we were talking about the cybersecurity skills gap. And it's in its fifth consecutive year, and you had said some good news on the front was that data show that instead of needing four million professionals to fill that gap, it's down to three, and now there's even better news coming from Fortinet. Talk to me about the pledge that you just announced to train one million people in the next five years. >> Absolutely, we're very excited about this. You know, Fortinet has been focused on reducing the skills gap for many years now. It continues to be one of the biggest issues for cybersecurity leaders if you think about it. You know, we still need about 3.1 million professionals to come into the industry. We have made progress, but the need is growing at about 400,000 a year. So it's something that public and private partnerships need to tackle. So last week we did announce that we are committed to training a million professionals over the next five years. We're very excited about that. We're tackling this problem in many, many ways. And this really helps our customers and our partners. If you really think about it, in addition to the lack of skills, they're really tackling cybersecurity surface that's constantly changing. In our most recent FortiGuard's threat report, we saw that ransomware alone went up 10 times over the last year. So it's something that we all have to focus on going forward. And this is our way of helping the industry overall. >> It's a huge opportunity. I had the opportunity several times to speak with Derek Manky and John Maddison over the summer, and just looking at what happened in the first half, the threat landscape, we spoke last year, looking at the second half, and ransomware as a service, the amount of money that's involved in that. The fact that we are in this, as Fortinet says, this work from anywhere environment, which is probably going to be somewhat persistent with the attack surface expanding, devices on corporate networks out of the home, there's a huge opportunity for people to get educated, trained, and have a great job in cybersecurity. >> Absolutely, I like to say there's no job security like cybersecurity, and it is. I mean, I've only been in this industry about, I'm coming up on six years, and it's definitely the most dynamic industry of all of the IT areas that I've worked in. The opportunities are endless, which is why it's a little bit frustrating to see this big gap in skills, particularly around the area of women and minorities. Women make up about 20%, and minorities are even less, maybe about 3%. And so this is a huge focus of ours. And so through our Training Advancement Agenda, our TAA initiative, we have several different pillars to attack this problem. And at the core of that is our Network Security Expert Training or NSC training and certification program. We made that freely available to everybody at the beginning of COVID. It was so successful, at one point we we're seeing someone register every five minutes. And that was so successful, we extended that indefinitely. And so to date, we've had about almost 700,000 certifications. So it's just an amazing program. The other pillars are Security Academy Program, where we partner with nonprofits and academia to train young students. And we have something like 419 academies in 88 countries. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then the other area that's very important to us is our Veterans Program. You know, we have about 250,000 veterans every year, transfer out of the service, looking for other jobs in the private sector. And so not only do we provide our training free, but we do resume building, mentoring, all of these types of initiatives. And we've trained about 2,000 veterans and spouses, and about 350 of those have successfully got jobs. So that's something we'll continue to focus on. >> That's such a great effort. As the daughter of a Vietnam combat veteran, that really just hits me right in the heart. But it's something that you guys have been dedicated for. This isn't something new, this isn't something that is coming out of a result of the recent executive order from the Biden administration. Fortinet has been focused on training and helping to close that gap for a while. >> That's exactly true. While we made the commitment to train a million people on the heels of the Biden administration at Cybersecurity Summit about two weeks ago, we have been focused on this for many years. And actually, a lot of the global companies that were part of that summit happened to be partners on this initiative with us. For example, we work with the World Economic Forum, IBM, and Salesforce offer our NSC training on their training platforms. And this is an area that we think it's really important and we'll continue to partner with larger organizations over time. We're also working with a lot of universities, both in the Bay Area, local like Berkeley, and Stanford and others to train more people. So it's definitely a big commitment for us and has been for many years. >> It'll be exciting to see over the next few years, the results of this program, which I'm sure will be successful. Talk to me a little bit about this event here. Fortinet is 100% partner driven company, more than 300 or so partners and customers here. Tell me a little bit about what some of the interesting topics are that are going to be discussed today. >> Sure, yeah, so we're delighted to bring our partners and customers together. They will be discussing some of the latest innovations in cybersecurity, as well as some of the challenges and opportunities. We are seeing, you know, during COVID we saw a lot of change with regards to cybersecurity, especially with remote working. So we'll discuss our partnership with LYNX that we just announced. We'll also be talking about some of the emerging technologies like CTNA, 5G, SASE, cloud, and really understanding how we can best help protect our customers and our partners. So it's very exciting. In addition to our Technology Summit, we have a technology exhibition here with many of our big sponsors and partners. So it's definitely going to be a lot of dynamic conversation over the next few days. >> We've seen so much change in the last year and a half. That's just an understatement. But one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago, and we're all feeling this is is when we all had to shift to work from home. And here we are using corporate devices on home networks. We're using more devices, the edge is expanding, and that became a huge security challenge for enterprises to figure out how do we secure this. Because for some percentage, and I think John Maddison mentioned a few months ago to me, at least 25% will probably stay remote. Enterprises have to figure out how to keep their data secure as people are often the weakest link. Tell me about what you guys announced with LYNX that will help facilitate that. >> Well, we're announcing an enterprise grade security offering for people who are working remotely. And the nice thing about this offering is it's very easy to set up and implement, so consumers and others can easily set this up. It also provides a dashboard for the enterprise, IT organization to, they can see who's on the network, devices, everything else. So this should really help because we did see a big increase in attacks, really targeting remote workers. As cyber criminals try to use their home as a foothold into the enterprise. So we're very excited about this partnership, and definitely see big demand for this going forward. >> Well, can you tell me about the go-to market for that and where can enterprises and people get it? >> Well, we're still working through that. I know you'll talk with John later on, he'll have more details on that. But definitely, we'll be targeting both of our different sets of customers and the channel for this. And I definitely think this is something that will, it's something that enterprises are definitely looking for, and there'll be more to come on this over the next few months. >> It's so needed. The threat landscape just exploded last year, and it's in a- >> Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. >> Suddenly your home. Maybe your kids are home, your spouse is working, you're distracted, ransomware, phishing emails, so legitimate. >> Sandra: They do. >> Lisa: But the need for what you're doing with LYNX is absolutely essential these days. >> Sandra: Yeah, these threats are so sophisticated. They're really difficult. And the other thing we did in addition to LYNX was as we got into COVID, we saw that, or the most successful organizations were really using this as an opportunity to invest for the longterm in cybersecurity. We also saw that, and this continues to be the case that, the insider threat continues to be one of the biggest challenges, where an employee will accidentally hit on a phishing email. So we did roll out an infosec awareness training, and we made that free for all of our customers and partners. So we're trying to do everything we can to really help our customers through this demanding time. >> Lisa: Right, what are some of the feedback that you're hearing from customers? I'm sure they're very appreciative of the education, the training, the focus effort from Fortinet. >> Sandra: Absolutely, it's definitely huge. And more and more we're seeing partners who want to work with us and collaborate with us on these initiatives. We've had a really positive response from some of the companies that I mentioned earlier, some of the big global names. And we're very excited about that. So we feel like we have some key initiatives on pillars, and we'll continue to expand on those and bring more partners to work with us over time. >> Lisa: Expansion as the business is growing amazingly well. Tell me a little bit about that. >> Sandra: Yeah, I think, in our last quarter we announced our largest billings growth for many, many years. And so, Fortinet, we're been very fortunate over the last few years, has continued to grow faster than the market. We now have half a million customers, and I think our platform approach to security is really being adopted heavily. And we continue to see a lot of momentum, especially around our solutions like SD-WAN. I think we're the only vendor who provides security in SD-WAN appliance. And so that's been a key differentiator for us. The other thing that's increasingly important, especially with the rollout of 5G is performance. And, you know, Fortinet, from the very beginning, created its own customized ASX or SPU, which really provides the best performance in security compute ratings in the industry. So all of this is really helping us with our growth, and we're very excited about the opportunities ahead. >> Lisa: And last question, on that front, what are some of the things that you're excited about as we wrap up 2021 calendar year and go into 2022? >> Sandra: Well, this been very exciting year for Fortinet. And I think we're in a great position to take advantage of many of the different growth areas we're seeing in this new and changing space. And, you know, we're all on board and ready to take advantage of those opportunities, and really fire ahead. >> Lisa: Fire ahead, I like that. Sandra, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about the commitment, the long standing commitment that Fortinet has to training everybody from all ages, academia, veterans, to help close that cybersecurity skills gap. And such an interesting time that we've had. There's so much opportunity, and it's great to see how committed you are to helping provide those opportunities to people of all ages, races, you name it. >> Sandra: Thank you, Lisa, I really appreciate it. >> Lisa: Ah, likewise. For Sandra Wheatley, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube at the Fortinet Championship Security Summit. (soft bright music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> People hate to be sold, but they love to buy. We become what we think about, think, and grow rich. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive. The world is replete with time-tested advice and motivational ideas for aspiring salespeople, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, and many others have all published classics with guidance that when followed closely, almost always leads to success. More modern personalities have emerged in the internet era, like Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and Angela Duckworth. But for the most part, they've continued to rely on book publishing, seminars, and high value consulting to peddle their insights and inspire action. Welcome to this video exclusive on theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Mark Roberge, who is one of the Managing Directors at Stage 2 Capital, and Paul Fifield, who's the CEO and Co-Founder of Sales Impact Academy. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to see you. >> You too Dave and thanks. >> All right, let's get right into it. Paul, you guys are announcing today a $4 million financing round. It comprises $3 million in a seed round led by Stage 2 and a million dollar in debt financing. So, first of all, congratulations. Paul, why did you start Sales Impact Academy? >> Cool, well, I think my background is sort of two times CRO, so I've built two reasonably successful companies. Built a hundred plus person teams. And so I've got kind of this firsthand experience of having to learn literally everything on the job whilst delivering these very kind of rapid, like achieving these very rapid growth targets. And so when I came out of those two journeys, I literally just started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London where I now live. I spend a bunch of time over in New York, and literally started this because I wanted to sort of kind of give back, but just really wanted to start helping people who were just really, really struggling in high pressure environments. And that's both leadership from sense of revenue leadership people, right down to sort of frontline SDRs. And I think as I started just doing this voluntary teaching, I kind of realized that actually the sort of global education system has done is a massive, massive disservice, right? I actually call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years, where higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. And the knock-on consequences of that have been absolutely disastrous for our profession. Partly that the profession is seen as a bit sort of embarrassing to be a part of. You kind of like go get a sales job if you can't get a degree. But more than that, the core fundamental within revenue teams and within sales people is now completely lacking 'cause there's no structured formal kind of like learning out there. So that's really the problem we're trying to solve on the kind of like the skill side. >> Great. Okay. And mark, always good to have you on, and I got to ask you. So even though, I know this is the wheelhouse for you and your partners, and of course, you've got a deep bench of LPs, but lay out the investment thesis here. What's the core problem that you saw and how are you looking at the market? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. So this one was a special one for me. We've spoken in the past. I mean, just personally I've always had a similar passion to Paul that it's amazing how important sales execution is to all companies, nevermind just the startup ecosystem. And I've always personally been motivated by anything that can help the startup ecosystem increase their success. Part of why I teach at Harvard and try to change some of the stuff that Paul's talking about, which is like, it's amazing how little education is done around sales. But in this particular one, not only personally was I excited about, but from a fun perspective, we've got to look at the economic outcomes. And we've been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack. It's evolved a ton in the last couple of decades. We've gone from the late '90s where every sales VP was just, they had a thing called the CRM that none of their reps even used, right? And we've come so far in 20 years, we've got all these amazing tools that help us cold call, that help us send emails efficiently and automatically and track everything, but nothing's really happened on the education side. And that's really the enormous gap that we've seen is, these organizations being much more proactive around adopting technology that can prove sales execution, but nothing on the education side. And the other piece that we saw is, it's almost like all these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen sales people to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach salespeople sales 101. Like how to find a champion, how to develop a budget, how to develop sense of urgency. And what Paul and team can do in the first phase of essay, is can sort of centralize that, so that all of these organizations can benefit from the best content and the best instructors for their team. >> So Paul, exactly, thank you, mark. Exactly what do you guys do? What do you sell? I'm curious, is this sort of, I'm thinking in my head, is this E-learning, is it really part of the sales stack? Maybe you could help us understand that better. >> Well, I think this problem of having to upscale teams has been around like forever. And kind of going back to the kind of education problem, it's what's wild is that we would never accept this of our lawyers, our accountants, or HR professionals. Imagine like someone in your finance team arriving on day one and they're searching YouTube to try and work out how to like put a balance sheet together. So it's a chronic, chronic problem. And so the way that we're addressing this, and I think the problem is well understood, but there's always been a terrible market, sort of product market fit for how the problem gets solved. So as mark was saying, typically it's in-house revenue leaders who themselves have got massive gaps in their knowledge, hack together some internal learning that is just pretty poor, 'cause it's not really their skillset. The other alternative is bringing in really expensive consultants, but they're consultants with a very single worldview and the complexity of a modern revenue organization is very, very high these days. And so one consultant is not going to really kind of like cover every topic you need. And then there's the kind of like fairly old fashioned sales training companies that just come in, one big hit, super expensive and then sort of leave again. So the sort of product market fit to solve, has always been a bit pretty bad. So what we've done is we've created a subscription model. We've essentially productized skills development. The way that we've done that is we teach live instruction. So one of the big challenges Andreessen Horowitz put a post out around this so quite recently, one of the big problems of online learning is that this kind of huge repository of online learning, which puts all the onus on the learner to have the discipline to go through these courses and consume them in an on-demand way is actually they're pretty ineffective. We see sort of completion rates of like 7 to 8%. So we've always gone from a live instruction model. So the sort of ingredients are the absolute very best people in the world in their very specific skill teaching live classes just two hours per week. So we're not overwhelming the learners who are already in work, and they have targets, and they've got a lot of pressure. And we have courses that last maybe four to like 12 hours over two to sort of six to seven weeks. So highly practical live instruction. We have 70, 80, sometimes even 90% completion rates of the sort of live class experience, and then teams then rapidly put that best practice into practice and see amazing results in things like top of funnel, or conversion, or retention. >> So live is compulsory and I presume on-demand? If you want to refresh you have an on demand option? >> Yeah, everything's recorded, so you can kind of catch up on a class if you've missed it, But that live instruction is powerful because it's kind of in your calendar, right? So you show up. But the really powerful thing, actually, is that entire teams within companies can actually learn at exactly the same pace. So we teach it eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM in the UK, and 5:00 PM Europe. So your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert, like a Mark, or like a Kevin Dorsey, or like Greg Holmes from Zoom. And you're learning from these incredible people. Class finishes, teams can come back together, talk about this incredible best practice they've just learned, and then immediately put it into practice. And that's where we're seeing these incredible, kind of almost instant impact on performance at real scale. >> So, Mark, in thinking about your investment, you must've been thinking about, okay, how do we scale this thing? You've got an instructor component, you've got this live piece. How are you thinking about that at scale? >> Yeah, there's a lot of different business model options there. And I actually think multiple of them are achievable in the longer term. That's something we've been working with Paul quite a bit, is like, they're all quite compelling. So just trying to think about which two to start with. But I think you've seen a lot of this in education models today. Is a mixture of on-demand with prerecorded. And so I think that will be the starting point. And I think from a scalability standpoint, we were also, we don't always try to do this with our investments, but clearly our LP base or limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient to at least the first cycle of this business. You know, our VC firm's backed by over 250 CRO CMOs heads of customer success, all of which are prospective instructors, prospective content developers, and prospective customers. So that was a little nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one. >> And what's in it for them? I mean, they get paid. Obviously, you have a stake in the game, but what's in it for the instructors. They get paid on a sort of a per course basis? How does that model work? >> Yeah, we have a development fee for each kind of hour of teaching that gets created So we've mapped out a pretty significant curriculum. And we have about 250 hours of life teaching now already written. We actually think it's going to be about 3000 hours of learning before you get even close to a complete curriculum for every aspect of a revenue organization from revenue operations, to customer success, to marketing, to sales, to leadership, and management. But we have a development fee per class, and we have a teaching fee as well. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think you guys, it's really an underserved market, and then when you think about it, most organizations, they just don't invest in training. And so, I mean, I would think you'd want to take it, I don't know what the right number is, 5, 10% of your sales budget and actually put it on this and the return would be enormous. How do you guys think about the market size? Like I said before, is it E-learning, is it part of the CRM stack? How do you size this market? >> Well, I think for us it's service to people. A highly skilled sales rep with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet would do really well, okay? You don't need this world-class tech stack to do well in sales. You need the skills to be able to do the job. But the reverse, that's not true, right? An unskilled person with a world-class tech stack won't do well. And so fundamentally, the skill level of your team is the number one most important thing to get right to be successful in revenue. But as I said before, the product market for it to solve that problem, has been pretty terrible. So we see ourselves 100%. And so if you're looking at like a com, you look at Gong, who we've just signed as a customer, which is fantastic. Gong has a technology that helps salespeople do better through call recording. You have Outreach, who is also a customer. They have technologies that help SDRs be more efficient in outreach. And now you have Sales Impact Academy, and we help with skills development of your team, of the entirety of your revenue function. So we absolutely see ourselves as a key part of that stack. In terms of the TAM, 60 million people in sales are on, according to LinkedIn. You're probably talking 150 million people in go to market to include all of the different roles. 50% of the world's companies are B2B. The TAM is huge. But what blows my mind, and this kind of goes back to this why the global education system has overlooked this because essentially if half the world's companies are B2B, that's probably a proxy for the half of the world's GDP, Half of the world's economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world's companies, and they don't really know what they're doing, (laughs) which is absolutely staggering. And if we can solve that in a meaningfully meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous. >> So, Mark, no lack of TAM. I know that you guys at Stage 2, you're also very much focused on the metrics. You have a fundamental philosophy that your product market fit and retention should come before hyper growth. So what were the metrics that enticed you to make this investment? >> Yeah, it's a good question, Dave, 'cause that's where we always look first, which I think is a little different than most early stage investors. There's a big, I guess, meme, triple, triple, double, double that's popular in Silicon Valley these days, which refers to triple your revenue in year one, triple your revenue in year two, double in year three, and four, and five. And that type of a hyper growth is critical, but it's often jumped too quickly in our opinion. That there's a premature victory called on product market fit, which kills a larger percentage of businesses than is necessary. And so with all our investments, we look very heavily first at user engagement, any early indicators of user retention. And the numbers were just off the charts for SIA in terms of the customers, in terms of the NPS scores that they were getting on their sessions, in terms of the completion rate on their courses, in terms of the customers that started with a couple of seats and expanded to more seats once they got a taste of the program. So that's where we look first as a strong foundation to build a scalable business, and it was off the charts positive for SIA. >> So how about the competition? If I Google sales training software, I'll get like dozens of companies. Lessonly, and MindTickle, or Brainshark will come up, that's not really a fit. So how do you think about the competition? How are you different? >> Yeah, well, one thing we try and avoid is any reference to sales training, 'cause that really sort of speaks to this very old kind of fashioned way of doing this. And I actually think that from a pure pedagogy perspective, so from a pure learning design perspective, the old fashioned way of doing sales training was pull a whole team off site, usually in a really terrible hotel with no windows for a day or two. And that's it, that's your learning experience. And that's not how human beings learn, right? So just even if the content was fantastic, the learning experience was so terrible, it was just very kind of ineffective. So we sort of avoid kind of like sales training, The likes of MindTickle, we're actually talking to them at the moment about a partnership there. They're a platform play, and we're certainly building a platform, but we're very much about the live instruction and creating the biggest curriculum and the broadest curriculum on the internet, in the world, basically, for revenue teams. So the competition is kind of interesting 'cause there is not really a direct subscription-based live like learning offering out there. There's some similar ish companies. I honestly think at the moment it's kind of status quo. We're genuinely creating a new category of in-work learning for revenue teams. And so we're in this kind of semi and sort of evangelical sort of phase. So really, status quo is one of the biggest sort of competitors. But if you think about some of those old, old fashioned sort of Miller Heimans, and then perhaps even like Sandlers, there's an analogy perhaps here, which is kind of interesting, which is a little bit like Siebel and Salesforce in the sort of late '90s, where in Siebel you have this kind of old way of doing things. It was a little bit ineffective. It was really expensive. Not accessible to a huge space of the market. And Salesforce came along and said, "Hey, we're going to create this cool thing. It's going to be through the browser, it's going to be accessible to everyone, and it's going to be really, really effective." And so there's some really kind of interesting parallels almost between like Siebel and Salesforce and what we're doing to completely kind of upend the sort of the old fashioned way of delivering sort of sales training, if you like. >> And your target customer profile is, you're selling to teams, right? B2B teams, right? It's not for individuals. Is that correct, Paul? >> Currently. Yeah, yeah. So currently we've got a big foothold in series A to series B. So broadly speaking out, our target market currently is really fast growth technology companies. That's the sector that we're really focusing on. We've got a very good strong foothold in series A series B companies. We've now won some much larger later stage companies. We've actually even won a couple of corporates, I can't say names yet, but names that are very, very, very familiar and we're incredibly excited by them, which could end up being thousand plus seat deals 'cause we do this on a per seat basis. But yeah, very much at the moment it's fast growth tech companies, and we're sort of moving up the chain towards enterprise. >> And how do you deal with the sort of maturity curve, if you will, of your students? You've got some that are brand new, just fresh out of school. You've got others that are more seasoned. What do you do, pop them into different points of the curriculum? How do you handle it? >> Yeah we have, I'll say we have about 30 courses right now. We have about another 15 in development where post this fundraise, we want to be able to get to around about 20 courses that we're developing every quarter and getting out to market. So we're literally, we've sort of identified about 20 to 25 key roles across everything within revenue. That's, let's say revenue ops, customer success, account management, sales, engineering, all these different kinds of roles. And we are literally plotting the sort of skills development for these individuals over multiple, multiple years. And I think what we've never ceases to amaze me is actually the breadth of learning in revenue is absolutely enormous. And what kind of just makes you laugh is, this is all of this knowledge that we're now creating it's what companies just hope that their teams somehow acquire through osmosis, through blogs, through events. And it's just kind of crazy that there is... It's absolutely insane that we don't already exist, basically. >> And if I understand it correctly, just from looking at your website, you've got the entry level package. I think it's up to 15 seats, and then you scale up from there, correct? Is it sort of as a seat-based license model? >> Yeah, it's a seat-based model, as Mark mentioned. In some cases we sell, let's say 20 or $30,000 deal out the gate and that's most of the team. That will be maybe a series A, series B deal, but then we've got these land and expand models that are working tremendously well. We have seven, eight customers in Q1 that have doubled their spend Q2. That's the impact that they're seeing. And our net revenue retention number for Q2 is looking like it's going to be 177% to think exceeds companies like Snowflakes. Well, our underlying retention metrics, because people are seeing this incredible impact on teams and performance, is really, really strong. >> That's a nice metric compare with Snowflake (Paul laughs) It's all right. (Dave and Paul laugh) >> So, Mark, this is a larger investment for Stage 2 You guys have been growing and sort of upping your game. And maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we're in the middle of Fund II right now. So, Fund I was in 2018. We were doing smaller checks. It was our first time out of the gate. The mission has really taken of, our LP base has really taken off. And so this deal looks a lot like more like our second fund. We'll actually make an announcement in a few weeks now that we've closed that out. But it's a much larger fund and our first investments should be in that 2 to $3 million range. >> Hey, Paul, what are you going to do with the money? What are the use of funds? >> Put it on black, (chuckles) we're going to like- (Dave laughs) >> Saratoga is open. (laughs) (Mark laughs) >> We're going to, look, the curriculum development for us is absolutely everything, but we're also going to be investing in building our own technology platform as well. And there are some other really important aspects to the kind of overall offering. We're looking at building an assessment tool so we can actually kind of like start to assess skills across teams. We certify every course has an exam, so we want to get more robust around the certification as well, because we're hoping that our certification becomes the global standard in understanding for the first time in the industry what individual competencies and skills people have, which will be huge. So we have a broad range of things that we want to start initiating now. But I just wanted to quickly say Stage 2 has been nothing short of incredible in every kind of which way. Of course, this investment, the fit is kind of insane, but the LPs have been extraordinary in helping. We've got a huge number of them are now customers very quickly. Mark and the team are helping enormously on our own kind of like go to market and metrics. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've raised over 100 million myself in venture capital. I've never known a venture capital firm with such value add like ever, or even heard of other people getting the kind of value add that we're getting. So I just wanted to a quick shout out for Stage 2. >> Quite a testimony of you guys. Definitely Stage 2 punches above its weight. Guys, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on. Good luck and we'll be watching. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.