>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of MIT, Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the seventh year of theCubes coverage of the MIT, Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. We love getting to talk to these chief data officers and the people in this ecosystem, the importance of data, driving data-driven cultures, and really happy to welcome to the program, first time guests Eileen Vitrine, Eileen is the Chief Data Officer for the United States Air Force, Eileen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu really excited about being here today. >> All right, so the United States Air Force, I believe had it first CDO office in 2017, you were put in the CDO role in June of 2018. If you could, bring us back, give us how that was formed inside the Air force and how you came to be in that role. >> Well, Stu I like to say that we are a startup organization and a really mature organization, so it's really about culture change and it began by bringing a group of amazing citizen airman reservists back to the Air Force to bring their skills from industry and bring them into the Air Force. So, I like to say that we're a total force because we have active and reservists working with civilians on a daily basis and one of the first things we did in June was we stood up a data lab, that's based in the Jones building on Andrews Air Force Base. And there, we actually take small use cases that have enterprise focus, and we really try to dig deep to try to drive data insights, to inform senior leaders across the department on really important, what I would call enterprise focused challenges, it's pretty exciting. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating when we've dug into this ecosystem, of course while the data itself is very sensitive and I'm sure for the Air Force, there are some very highest level of security, the practices that are done as to how to leverage data, the line between public and private blurs, because you have people that have come from industry that go into government and people that are from government that have leveraged their experiences there. So, if you could give us a little bit of your background and what it is that your charter has been and what you're looking to build out, as you mentioned that culture of change. >> Well, I like to say I began my data leadership journey as an active duty soldier in the army, and I was originally a transportation officer, today we would use the title condition based maintenance, but back then, it was really about running the numbers so that I could optimize my truck fleet on the road each and every day, so that my soldiers were driving safely. Data has always been part of my leadership journey and so I like to say that one of our challenges is really to make sure that data is part of every airmans core DNA, so that they're using the right data at the right level to drive insights, whether it's tactical, operational or strategic. And so it's really about empowering each and every airman, which I think is pretty exciting. >> There's so many pieces of that data, you talk about data quality, there's obviously the data life cycle. I know your presentation that you're given here at the CDO, IQ talks about the data platform that your team has built, could you explain that? What are the key tenants and what maybe differentiates it from what other organizations might have done? >> So, when we first took the challenge to build our data lab, we really wanted to really come up. Our goal was to have a cross domain solution where we could solve data problems at the appropriate classification level. And so we built the VAULT data platform, VAULT stands for visible, accessible, understandable, linked, and trustworthy. And if you look at the DOD data strategy, they will also add the tenants of interoperability and secure. So, the first steps that we have really focused on is making data visible and accessible to airmen, to empower them, to drive insights from available data to solve their problems. So, it's really about that data empowerment, we like to use the hashtag built by airmen because it's really about each and every airman being part of the solution. And I think it's really an exciting time to be in the Air Force because any airman can solve a really hard challenge and it can very quickly wrap it up rapidly, escalate up with great velocity to senior leadership, to be an enterprise solution. >> Is there some basic training that goes on from a data standpoint? For any of those that have lived in data, oftentimes you can get lost in numbers, you have to have context, you need to understand how do I separate good from bad data, or when is data still valid? So, how does someone in the Air Force get some of that beta data competency? >> Well, we have taken a multitenant approach because each and every airman has different needs. So, we have quite a few pathfinders across the Air Force today, to help what I call, upscale our total force. And so I developed a partnership with the Air Force Institute of Technology and they now have a online graduate level data science certificate program. So, individuals studying at AFIT or remotely have the opportunity to really focus on building up their data touchpoints. Just recently, we have been working on a pathfinder to allow our data officers to get their ICCP Federal Data Sector Governance Certificate Program. So, we've been running what I would call short boot camps to prep data officers to be ready for that. And I think the one that I'm most excited about is that this year, this fall, new cadets at the U.S Air Force Academy will be able to have an undergraduate degree in data science and so it's not about a one prong approach, it's about having short courses as well as academe solutions to up skill our total force moving forward. >> Well, information absolutely is such an important differentiator(laughs) in general business and absolutely the military aspects are there. You mentioned the DOD talks about interoperability in their platform, can you speak a little bit to how you make sure that data is secure? Yet, I'm sure there's opportunities for other organizations, for there to be collaboration between them. >> Well, I like to say, that we don't fight alone. So, I work on a daily basis with my peers, Tom Cecila at the Department of Navy and Greg Garcia at the Department of Army, as well as Mr. David Berg in the DOD level. It's really important that we have an integrated approach moving forward and in the DOD we partner with our security experts, so it's not about us doing security individually, it's really about, in the Air Force we use a term called digital air force, and it's about optimizing and building a trusted partnership with our CIO colleagues, as well as our chief management colleagues because it's really about that trusted partnership to make sure that we're working collaboratively across the enterprise and whatever we do in the department, we also have to reach across our services so that we're all working together. >> Eileen, I'm curious if there's been much impact from the global pandemic. When I talk to enterprise companies, that they had to rapidly make sure that while they needed to protect data, when it was in their four walls and maybe for VPN, now everyone is accessing data, much more work from home and the like. I have to imagine some of those security measures you've already taken, but have there anything along those lines or anything else that this shift in where people are, and a little bit more dispersed has impacted your work? >> Well, the story that I like to say is, that this has given us velocity. So, prior to COVID, we built our VAULT data platform as a multitenancy platform that is also cross-domain solution, so it allows people to develop and do their problem solving in an appropriate classification level. And it allows us to connect or pushup if we need to into higher classification levels. The other thing that it has helped us really work smart because we do as much as we can in that unclassified environment and then using our cloud based solution in our gateways, it allows us to bring people in at a very scheduled component so that we maximize, or we optimize their time on site. And so I really think that it's really given us great velocity because it has really allowed people to work on the right problem set, on the right class of patient level at a specific time. And plus the other pieces, we look at what we're doing is that the problem set that we've had has really allowed people to become more data focused. I think that it's personal for folks moving forward, so it has increased understanding in terms of the need for data insights, as we move forward to drive decision making. It's not that data makes the decision, but it's using the insight to make the decision. >> And one of the interesting conversations we've been having about how to get to those data insights is the use of things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, anything you can share about, how you're looking at that journey, where you are along that discovery. >> Well, I love to say that in order to do AI and machine learning, you have to have great volumes of high quality data. And so really step one was visible, accessible data, but we in the Department of the Air Force stood up an accelerator at MIT. And so we have a group of amazing airmen that are actually working with MIT on a daily basis to solve some of those, what I would call opportunities for us to move forward. My office collaborates with them on a consistent basis, because they're doing additional use cases in that academic environment, which I'm pretty excited about because I think it gives us access to some of the smartest minds. >> All right, Eileen also I understand it's your first year doing the event. Unfortunately, we don't get, all come together in Cambridge, walking those hallways and being able to listen to some of those conversations and follow up is something we've very much enjoyed over the years. What excites you about being interact with your peers and participating in the event this year? >> Well, I really think it's about helping each other leverage the amazing lessons learned. I think that if we look collaboratively, both across industry and in the federal sector, there have been amazing lessons learned and it gives us a great forum for us to really share and leverage those lessons learned as we move forward so that we're not hitting the reboot button, but we actually are starting faster. So, it comes back to the velocity component, it all helps us go faster and at a higher quality level and I think that's really exciting. >> So, final question I have for you, we've talked for years about digital transformation, we've really said that having that data strategy and that culture of leveraging data is one of the most critical pieces of having gone through that transformation. For people that are maybe early on their journey, any advice that you'd give them, having worked through a couple of years of this and the experience you've had with your peers. >> I think that the first thing is that you have to really start with a blank slate and really look at the art of the possible. Don't think about what you've always done, think about where you want to go because there are many different paths to get there. And if you look at what the target goal is, it's really about making sure that you do that backward tracking to get to that goal. And the other piece that I tell my colleagues is celebrate the wins. My team of airmen, they are amazing, it's an honor to serve them and the reality is that they are doing great things and sometimes you want more. And it's really important to celebrate the victories because it's a very long journey and we keep moving the goalposts because we're always striving for excellence. >> Absolutely, it is always a journey that we're on, it's not about the destination. Eileen, thank you so much for sharing all that you've learned and glad you could participate. >> Thank you, STU, I appreciate being included today. Have a great day. >> Thanks and thank you for watching theCube. I'm Stu Miniman stay tuned for more from the MIT, CDO IQ event. (lively upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's TheCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Always excited when we get to talk to some of the users. And joining me this segment is Adam Furtado, who is the Chief of Product with Kessel Run at US Air Force. Adam, you were saying you're not a big Star Wars guy, but was the name come from the derivation of the famous Millennium Falcon Kessel Run? Yes, I am a Star Wars geek, you know. >> It certainly was and the rest of our team are Star Wars nuts, so I've had to pick up things along the way so I like to joke that we're delivering capability to our users in 12 parsecs or quicker. >> Yeah, and if you're not a, whether you are or aren't a Star Wars fan, you look at it and say, parsecs is a measure of distance, not time. That's still infuriating for us to watch. Adam, tell us a little bit about your background and what your group does that the US Air Force that we don't need to explain the US Air Force. >> Sure, so my background is actually an intelligence professional as a warfighter enlisted in the Air Force for ten years. From there, I started working in IT systems and I got out of the Air Force and really was on the acquisition side of the house where we were the provider for capabilities for our warfighters. So, over that time, I learned a lot about how we struggle with getting capability to our users with any kind of speed or quality. Kessel Run is an effort to revolutionize the way that we build and deliver software to our warfighters and we are well on our way. >> That sounds like an awesome project. Can you give us just roughly how do you get your arms around how big this is, how many applications or people are involved in it or, you know, the scope of what you're doing. >> Sure. We set out to modernize the Air and Space Operation Center so we have AOCs all around the world that basically are where all the planning for air warfare takes place. So it's a large legacy system that is under a lens. So, they've really struggled in modernizing that baseline system. We've been designing a brand new system to modernize for about ten years and we just haven't been able to get it to the field for a ton of DoD bureaucratic and acquisitions reasons. So basically, Congress told us to figure something new out. So we had a small team that was tired of working this way and tired of not being able to provide this capability to the warfighters. We got together and we looked at industry to be quite frank. And found that the other bureaucratic regulated industries were able to take steps to move closer towards our digital transformation. So we kind of followed along and took some practices that we learned from them and tried to apply it to the government. >> Yeah, fascinating space. Governments' big focus this week at the show, there was the announcement about Cloud.gov. There is a whole track on government here. But, I want you to talk about your Cloud Foundry usage. Button General? How's the thinking of modernization, digitalization, there was a big Cloud First initiative from the federal government for a while. How do those forces play together? >> Sure, yeah, there's a ton of innovation type of activities taking place throughout the government and the DoD. With Cloud Foundry, we just found that because of our, we frankly have a lack of software development and engineering talent that's inherent to the Air Force. We have actually a career field for software developers that's been dwindling over the years. So being able to find that talent's been really hard. So with our Cloud Foundry commercial platform, being able to abstract the technical complexity that it does allows us to grow our software developers in a different way, focusing on identifying the character traits, the empathy and learning mindset that we can take and grow them by having that platform as a backbone to kind of be our foundation, I guess, is really was the emphasis of us going in this direction. It's really worked out so far. >> Yeah, just going through my head are all these discussions that we've had for years about how we need to go from monolithic, hierarchical to distributive architectures and that's been happening in the military a lot too. >> Very much so, yeah. What we're trying to replace is that massive monolithic system that takes us ten years to design and develop with no meaningful user input and at the end of the day, if we even get it out to the field, it's not the right thing. 96% of federal IT projects are over budget or over schedule and 40% of them never see a user at all, never get fielded. There's a lot of room for improvement in this space. We've been able to kind of tackle some of the, some of the easier things, but also tackle some more complex things. Similar to technology. But the policy, the testing of the security behind it as well that we've been kind of focusing on to move the entire DoD and entire Air Force forward. >> Yeah. So, security, I would think, is a major concern. How does that fit in to your thinking and how does security fit in to your architecture? >> We're always thinking about security. Cyber security is obviously really important to the DoD and our space. We feel that with, being able to automate more of the security with utilizing a platform and the pipelines that we have gets to a better place and we're more secure today than we were yesterday. We're always learning too, right? So, we're more secure today than we were literally yesterday. And we're going to be more secure tomorrow by learning how to move forward and learn more about cyber security. That's always something on our mind and we feel like we're in a good place. >> The majority of Cloud Foundry users are doing, they're a private or private hosted environment. Can you share, do you leverage public clouds at all? Or is it all kind of in-house data centers? How does that fit into the mix? >> So our unclassified developments is the AWS gov cloud and then we have hybrid solutions that we use on other networks. >> Okay, yeah. AWS just launched that, I believe it's their secret region, too, so that they're capable, but I guess your team or you can't talk about it, isn't leveraging it yet. >> Yeah, I'd rather not go there. (laughs) >> No worries. So, you're speaking at this show. What's your experience, what kind of things are you sharing and working on? >> We're really heavily relying on culture. So we had a couple of our team members speak this morning, giving more of an overview of our efforts and what we've been able to achieve so far. I'm focusing on how we can overcome some of the challenges that are inherent to the DoD. I mentioned earlier, native engineering development and talent. How we can change the way that we do organizational management. Our traditional hierarchal top down way of organizing doesn't breed innovation normally, right? So we're looking at different ways to organize our own team. So one of those reasons, all of our dev teams work in a balanced team concept with no uniforms, all on a first name basis. So we're basically taking, uniforms are really to strip the individualism away from people, but we kind of need that for creativity and to be able to solve conflicts, problems, and things like that. So we're really focusing on lifting the psychological safety needed to be creative and have our lowest ranking people feel as comfortable as our highest ranking people and IDA and coming up with ways to do things. >> That's fascinating actually. We've been talking a lot about relationships between the groups and the devs and the operators, but you start putting rank in there, which any company has some of that inherently, but the military very much is physical when you see them all the time. >> Absolutely. It's actually, our airmen have really adapted to it and they love it. It's one of those things where it's interesting, maybe a little bit different than commercial industry in that our airmen are our developers and our airmen are also our users so there's invested interest in improving things for the better for their fellow airmen. It's been really great to see and people have really dove in and embraced it. Developers are doing really well. >> What kind of lessons learned would you share? That you're sharing in your speech and talking to your peers. What kind of things would you share with them? >> I think the biggest thing I'm talking about today is to avoid getting in this trap of trying to find the perfect person with the right technical acumen. I think having a foundation is important, but more important is finding people who have empathy for users and learning mindsets and are able to get out of their comfort zone and learn new things. Building cloud innovative applications and 12 factor applications are inherently new to the DoD effectively. It's funny, we talk about how dev options, you know, innovative in our world when the commercial industry probably scoffs at that, but innovation is defined as the instruction of something new. It really is innovative in the DoD space to work in this way. We're seeing a lot of momentum throughout the services, and the DoD and we're really heading in the right direction. >> It's great to hear. Innovation and government can happen. We've done lots of interviews over the last few years to talk about it. Anything you'd like to share about ways that your organization or peer organizations are moving things forward that people might be surprised to hear about? >> I'd say the most important thing is finding the right people. A lot of the times, we've found that our most senior leadership in the government is very much interested in innovating and moving things forward in the right way and there's this innovation ecosystem below that is driving things. So it's basically the education that needs to happen at the middle level of that frozen middle. That sometimes can thwart innovation by a lack of that knowledge, I guess, or the lack of understanding of what we're doing. We've got what feels like a parade of education and trying to share the things we've learned with other people in the government. It helps us remove some of those bureaucratic barriers and then it's like really progress where we need to. >> Alright, Adam, last question I have for you. Something we're all struggling with, the pace of change these days. Seems every time you get on a new technology, the next one's there. You mentioned, you know, like, well, dev ops, we've been talking about for years but you're getting on. How does your organization look at that? How do you keep up with what's happening in the world? >> So I think, Cloud Foundry is an example of how these commercial solutions have helped us do that. Now, we say like, speed is the new security, we're able to be truly agile in that we're able to change and adapt to things as we need to. I think in the old model, it took us so long to adapt and get things out into the field that change was almost impossible. Whereas in this way of working, we're able to learn things every single day, keep our learning loops very short, and then react to them. So I think it's been a great way to take some of the things we've learned and implement them. >> Adam Furtado, I really appreciate you sharing your story from the US Air Force. Fascinating stuff. We'll be back with more coverage here at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (bouncy music)

(upbeat music) >> Live in Washington, DC. This is day two of two days of coverage. I'm John Furr, your host. We're in person face-to-face event it's kicking off day two. Dave Levy's here, Vice President of US government Nonprofit and healthcare businesses for AWS Public Sector. Dave, great to see you again, welcome back. >> Dave: Great to see you, John. >> So, great time last time we were in person, 2019, looks like the event, the last year was virtual, what's new? >> Well, first of all, I think it's just exciting. I mean, I'm excited to be back and in-person and so much has happened in our personal lives in our communities and so I'm really glad that we can all be together and it's been great so far. >> I was talking yesterday with some folks and I saw people doing some networking. I heard someone, "Hey, I'm want to hire someone." So, the face-to-face is back, we're also streaming. Max Peterson told me they're pushing it everywhere on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, everywhere, Twitch, so free content, but still a lot of registrations here in person, good stuff. >> Yeah, great registrations. We're thrilled with the support from partners and customers. And also too, like you said, the connections that people are making, so it does feel good that things are flowing and people are having conversations and- >> Well, you got healthcare, nonprofits, US government, healthcare has been a big focus so far in this show. A lot of action, local governments, governments and healthcare seem to be like pandemic enabled to change. What's the update? What's the highlights so far for you? >> Well, I think the highlights are in those areas that, what we've been able to help our customers with is the ability to respond and that's what Cloud is all about and their ability to react and to respond to things that they don't necessarily know is going to happen and the big thing that none of us knew was going to happen was the pandemic. And so that ability and agility and preparedness to respond has really been great to see from a lot of those customers. >> You know, Max Peterson had the CIO from the Air Force up on stage and she's known for her comments about data and data's our data, the US Air Force and so data's big part of it. They are having a transformation and the how's that project going? What's the update there? What's your impression on that? >> Yeah, well, it was great to see the Air Force on stage and great to see Laura up there and we're really proud to support the DOD and the Air Force. And the Air Force has a lot to be proud of in their transformation journey and what they're doing with Cloud One is pretty substantial and amazing transformation for them. And then they've got 35 applications running on AWS. And so we think their progress is really good and they're thinking the right way in terms of their software factories and other types of projects. >> What's interesting is it's watching like who's adopting, it's like you look at like the pandemic has really opened up the view of the projects, which ones are doing well. And how do I say this politely? The projects that were being blocked or hidden, or the KPIs camouflaging the value were exposed because I mean, once that pulled back the curtain, people realized, "Oh my God, we're stuck," Or "we're inadequate, we are antiquated. We need to change," because now the pressure to deliver shifted to digital. I mean, this literally exposed the good, bad, and the ugly. >> It did and some were more prepared than others. There are great examples. We worked with the SBA to help expand the portal for the payroll protection program to get more lenders access faster. And that was a great project. They were able to respond really quickly and we were able to support them in that. Others, not so much. I think it you're right, it did expose that there's an opportunity. There's an opportunity to accelerate some of the things that they were doing already in terms of digital transformation. >> How about the GovCloud and the federal customers that you have, what's the traction point? How has that going? Is there a new generation here? >> GovCloud has been a great success. GovCloud it's our- >> John: 10-year anniversary. >> It's our 10-year anniversary, so we're thrilled to celebrate that. I can't believe it's 2011. >> EC2 is 15. Is that 315? I guess 15, too is SQS, the original building blocks. >> So, we've got a lot of great success through GovCloud and GovCloud was really something that was born out of what customers wanted, primarily federal customers. But we've also seen over the last few years, real adoption from regulated industry, real adoption from partners that are going into GovCloud that really want to take advantage of the security and compliance that federal customers need and the larger defense industrial base organizations need. So, GovCloud's been a fabulous success and expect I expect a lot of growth going forward. >> Yeah, is there a cultural shift in the federal government now? I can imagine some countries have been exploring this. I did talk briefly about it with Ms. Shannon Kellogg and John Wood, about how, if you're under the age of 40 and you work in the federal government, you got to be like, "Why aren't we doing this?" Like there seems to be like a cultural shift, younger generation coming in and be like, looking at the old way and be like, "Why are we still doing that?" >> Well, I think look bipartisan support for digital transformation, for making sure that we have the competitive edge for generations and generations to come in the US both in business and in defense and national security, I think is an imperative. I mean nobody I've talked to disagrees that we need to do this. And I think that younger workforce coming in behind I'm jealous of the 40-year olds, I wish I was under 40, but none of workforce really sees the obstacles that maybe previous generation saw these emerging technologies are becoming, the basic unit of computer's getting smaller, the cost to do these things is coming way down and I think that younger workforce says, "Why aren't we doing this?" >> Yeah and I think the Air Force projects are interesting too because that shows us not just about the CIA or the DOD that you have, they're leaning into production workloads, and the mission critical workloads too, the DOD is also now continuing to adopt. What else are you guys doing with the DOD? >> Well, we're partnering with GDIT on milCloud and that's going to give DOD mission owners access to a whole suite of AWS services. So, we're really excited about that. And those are available now. We're the only Cloud provider that's making that accessible to them on milCloud. And so this is going to open up the opportunity for them to start doing that mission work that you described. A good example of that are programs like ABMS, Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System. It's part of their effort around JADC2 and a great set of capabilities that they're delivering there. We're happy to have participated. We did some testing and some show intel, if you will at Ramstein Air Force Base and we're really proud to support that effort and we're excited about what the Air Force is doing. >> You know, I've always been impressed with the DOD when the tactical edge concept came out, that was very impressive because they're really using the data properly and I know Amazon has been doing well in this area because you've got things like Outpost, Wavelength, Snowball products. How's that edge piece developing? Do you see that becoming more critical now? >> It's absolutely critical. It's not becoming critical, it is critical and I think if you look at what the DOD and all of their partners are trying to accomplish, it's really moving all of that data around from the very edge in theater, back home to where it needs to be analyzed, doing it fast, doing it secure, being able to deliver on their missions and that's what this is all about. So, we see huge, huge opportunities to really innovate around the edge. >> Yeah, the data equation really is fascinating to me. Just when you think about things like words, highly available versus high availability means something 'cause you're going to want real time, not just on available data, you got to have it real time so the pressure around these projects are high. And so technically, you've got to have low latency on all this stuff. >> That's true, that's true. You've got to either have near real time or real-time availability and in many cases there's high stakes. So, the ability the DOD to pull this off is really, really important and we're a big supporter of that. >> Dave, I want to get your perspective because you've been in the industry, you've seen that the ways, we talked before cameras about the '90s and data centers and stuff. 10 years of GovCloud, look at public sector, just to look at the 10 years, interesting evolution. I mean, you couldn't give Cloud a wait 15 years ago. They weren't moving, glacier speed of adoption, now, massive adoption, uptakes there, the transformations are happening, migrations are huge, healthcare, which is like silo the data, HIPAA compliance lock everything down, everything's opening up. This is causing a lot of change. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, my reaction to that is I think customers are starting to connect what their outcomes are, whether it's a business outcome or a mission outcome or both to what Cloud can actually do. And I think that's freeing them up to make decisions about enabling Cloud in their environment, enabling experimentation, because that's what you want. You don't know what you're going to be faced with. We don't know what the threats are. We don't know if there's going to be another major pandemic. We hope there's not, but we don't know and if you set goals around your outcomes for mission and tie those, Cloud becomes such an enabler for that. And I see customers embracing that. Customers across the spectrum, nonprofit, healthcare providers, everybody, Homeland Security, VA, they're all thinking about, "What are the mission outcomes we're trying to drive?" >> Yeah, what's interesting too on that is that, just to point out is that the applications now aren't as complex to build relatively to the speed. In other words, you can get the time to value. So, the pandemic showed people that if you were in the Cloud and had that agility or optionality to be agile, you could write software 'cause software is the key in this, and not let's do the waterfall, 12-weeks assessment, 10-month rollout. Now people are doing it in 10 days, new applications. >> Sure, sure. Well, I tell customers a lot, "Think about McDonald's during the pandemic and think about customers like that who had to react to a new environment of delivery and your fast food fresh and how quickly companies like that are able to roll out capabilities." And I don't know that federal customers will be able to do it in a week or two weeks, but it's certainly possible. And it certainly will shorten that lead time that they have now in their software development. >> Well, great to see you, Dave. Is there any customers you want to highlight and you want to talk about, get a plug in for? >> Yeah, a lot of great customers here representing today and we're really appreciative also just want to say it was really great to see Max on stage for his first summit and think it was great to see Laura and others as well too. We've got some great customers coming here, The Veteran's affairs is going to be here as well as the Navy presenting on a lot of their capabilities today. So, I'm really excited about that. >> Yeah, a lot of action and education, healthcare, really blooming, really changing and modernizing. Big-wave migration, modernization, all kinds of the big wave. >> Yeah, it is. Yeah, big things coming and some of these systems are ready, so these systems are 40 and 50 years old and we're here to help these customers deliver on the agility and the extensibility of these systems to really serve citizens. >> What's your outlook for next year? What are you seeing next year so happening? How do you see everything unfolding? So you mentioned the pandemic, we're still in it, Delta Virus, who knows what's going to happen next, the world stage is changing, the global economy, space. >> I see customers really leaning in and starting to see the benefits of moving their data to the Cloud, number one, and then also to getting the insights using AI and ML to really drive the insights that they need to make the decisions on that data and I see more and more customers doing that. I did a panel this week, moderated a panel with some great customers around that and getting started is probably the biggest thing that I see and we're going to have more and more customers getting started. >> Yeah, getting into the Cloud. Congratulations to milCloud by the way, too. That was a good call out. All right, thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> John: Yeah, thanks, Sean. >> Okay, keep coverage here. The Public Sector Summit, live in Washington, D.C. in-person event also hybrid we're streaming out. We're doing remote interviews and Amazon is streaming all the keynotes and key sessions for the digital folks out there. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special presentation with Cal Poly hosting the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE here in our Palo Alto studios with our remote guests. We couldn't be there in person, but we're going to be here remote. We got a great session and a panel for one hour, topic preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Got a great lineup. Bill Britton, Lieutenant Colonel from the US Air Force, retired vice president for information technology and CIO and the director of the California Cybersecurity Institute for Cal Poly. Bill, thanks for joining us. Dr. Amy Fleischer, who's the dean of the College of Engineering at Cal Poly, and Trung Pham, professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. Folks, thanks for joining me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Got a great- >> Great to be here. >> Great panel. This is one of my favorite topics. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Preparing students for the next generation, the jobs for today and tomorrow. We got an hour. I'd love you guys to start with an opening statement to kick things off. Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm really pleased to be, to start on this as the director for the Cybersecurity Institute and the CIO at Cal Poly, it's really a fun, exciting job, because as a polytechnic, technology has such a forefront in what we're doing, and we've had a wonderful opportunity being 40 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base to really look at the nexus of space and cybersecurity. And if you add into that both commercial, government, and civil space and cybersecurity, this is an expanding wide open time for cyber and space. In that role that we have with the Cybersecurity Institute, we partner with elements of the state and the university, and we try to really add value above our academic level, which is some of the highest in the nation, and to really merge down and go a little lower and start younger. So we actually are running the week prior to this showing a cybersecurity competition for high schools and middle schools in the state of California. That competition this year is based on a scenario around hacking of a commercial satellite and the forensics of the payload that was hacked and the networks associated with it. This is going to be done using products like Wireshark, Autopsy, and other tools that will give those high school students what we hope is a huge desire to follow up and go into cyber and cyberspace and space and follow that career path and either come to Cal Poly or some other institution that's going to let them really expand their horizons in cybersecurity and space for the future of our nation. >> Bill, thanks for that intro. By the way, I just want to give you props for an amazing team and job you guys are doing at Cal Poly, the DxHub and the efforts you guys are having with your challenge. Congratulations on that great work. >> Thank you. It's a rock star team. It's absolutely amazing to find that much talent at one location. And I think Amy's going to tell you, she's got the same amount of talent in her staff, so it's a great place to be. >> Dr. Amy Fleischer. You guys have a great organization down there, amazing curriculum, amazing people, great community. Your opening statement. >> Hello everybody. It's really great to be a part of this panel on behalf of the Cal Poly College of Engineering. Here at Cal Poly, we really take preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow completely seriously, and we can claim that our students really graduate so they're ready day one for their first real job. But that means that in getting them to that point, we have to help them get valuable and meaningful job experience before they graduate, both through our curriculum and through multiple internship or summer research opportunities. So we focus our curriculum on what we call a learn by doing philosophy. And this means that we have a combination of practical experience and learn by doing both in and out of the classroom. And we find that to be really critical for preparing students for the workforce. Here at Cal Poly, we have more than 6,000 engineering students. We're one of the largest undergraduate engineering schools in the country. And US News ranks us the eighth best undergraduate engineering program in the country and the top ranked state school. We're really, really proud that we offer this impactful hands-on engineering education that really exceeds that of virtually all private universities while reaching a wider audience of students. We offer 14 degree programs, and really, we're talking today about cyber and space, and I think most of those degree programs can really make an impact in the space and cybersecurity economy. And this includes not only things like aero and cyber directly, but also electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, materials engineering, even manufacturing, civil, and biomedical engineering, as there's a lot of infrastructure needs that go into supporting launch capabilities. Our aerospace program graduates hundreds of aerospace engineers and most of them are working right here in California with many of our corporate partners, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, JPL, and so many other places where we have Cal Poly engineers impacting the space economy. Our cybersecurity focus is found mainly in our computer science and software engineering programs, and it's really a rapidly growing interest among our students. Computer science is our most popular major, and industry interests and partnerships are integrated into our cyber curriculum, and we do that oftentimes through support from industry. So we have partnerships with Northrop Grumman for professorship in a cyber lab and from PG&E for critical infrastructure cybersecurity lab and professorship. And we think that industry partnerships like these are really critical to preparing students for the future as the field is evolving so quickly and making sure we adapt our facilities and our curriculum to stay in line with what we're seeing in industry is incredibly important. In our aerospace program, we have an educational partnership with the Air Force Research Labs that's allowing us to install new high-performance computing capabilities and a space environments lab that's going to enhance our satellite design capabilities. And if we talk about satellite design, Cal Poly is the founding home of the CubeSat program, which pioneered small satellite capabilities, And we remain the worldwide leader in maintaining the CubeSat standard, and our student program has launched more CubeSats than any other program. So here again we have this learn by doing experience every year for dozens of aerospace, electrical, computer science, mechanical engineering students, and other student activities that we think are just as important include ethical hacking through our white hat club, Cal Poly Space Systems, which does really, really big rocket launches, and our support program for women in both of these fields, like WISH, which is Women In Software and Hardware. Now, you know, really trying to bring in a wide variety of people into these fields is incredibly important, and outreach and support to those demographics traditionally underrepresented in these fields is going to be really critical to future success. So by drawing on the lived experiences by people with different types of backgrounds will we develop the type of culture and environment where all of us can get to the best solution. So in terms of bringing people into the field, we see that research shows we need to reach kids when they're in late elementary and middle schools to really overcome that cultural bias that works against diversity in our fields. And you heard Bill talking about the California Cybersecurity Institute's yearly cyber challenge, and there's a lot of other people who are working to bring in a wider variety of people into the field, like Girl Scouts, which has introduced dozens of new badges over the past few years, including a whole cybersecurity series of badges in concert with Palo Alto Networks. So we have our work cut out for us, but we know what we need to do, and if we're really committed to properly preparing the workforce for today and tomorrow, I think our future is going to be bright. I'm looking forward to our discussion today. >> Thank you, Dr. Fleischer, for a great comment, opening statement, and congratulations. You got the right formula down there, the right mindset, and you got a lot of talent, and community, as well. Thank you for that opening statement. Next up, from Colorado Springs, Trung Pham, who's a professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. He's doing a lot of research around the areas that are most important for the intersection of space and technology. Trung. >> Good afternoon. First I'd like to thank Cal Poly for the opportunity. And today I want to go briefly about cybersecurity in space application. Whenever we talk about cybersecurity, the impression is that it's a new field that is really highly complex involving a lot of technical area. But in reality, in my personal opinion, it is indeed a complex field because it involves many disciplines. The first thing we think about is computer engineering and computer networking, but it's also involving communication, sociology, law practice. And this practice of cybersecurity doesn't only involve computer expert, but it's also involve everybody else who has a computing device that is connected to the internet, and this participation is obviously everybody in today's environment. When we think about the internet, we know that it's a good source of information but come with the convenience of information that we can access, we are constantly facing danger from the internet. Some of them we might be aware of. Some of them we might not be aware of. For example, when we search on the internet, a lot of time our browser will be saying that this site is not trusted, so we will be more careful. But what about the sites that we trusted? We know that those are legitimate sites, but they're not 100% bulletproof. What happen if those site are attacked by a hacker and then they will be a silent source of danger that we might not be aware of. So in the reality, we need to be more practicing the cybersecurity from our civil point of view and not from a technical point of view. When we talk about space application, we should know that all the hardware are computer-based or controlled by by computer system, and therefore the hardware and the software must go through some certification process so that they can be rated as airworthy or flightworthy. When we know that in the certification process is focusing on the functionality of the hardware and software, but one aspect that is explicitly and implicitly required is the security of those components. And we know that those components have to be connected with the ground control station, and the communication is through the air, through the radio signal, so anybody who has access to those communication radio signal will be able to control the space system that we put up there. And we certainly do not want our system to be hijacked by a third party. Another aspect of cybersecurity is that we try to design the space system in a very strong manner so it's almost impossible to hack in. But what about some other weak system that might be connected to the strong system? For example, the space system will be connected to the ground control station, and on the ground control station, we have the human controller, and those people have cell phone. They are allowed to use cell phone for communication. But at the same time, they are connected to the internet through the cell phone, and their cell phone might be connected to the computer that control the flight software and hardware. So what I want to say is we try to build strong system and we've protected them, but there will be some weaker system that we could not intended but exists to be connected to our strong system, and those are the points the hacker will be trying to attack. If we know how to control the access to those weak points, we will be having a much better system for the space system. And when we see the cybersecurity that is requiring the participation everywhere it's important to notice that there is a source of opportunity for students who enter the workforce to consider. Obviously students in engineering can focus their knowledge and expertise to provide technological solution to protect the system that we view. But we also have students in business who can focus their expertise to write business plan so that they can provide a pathway for the engineering advances to reach the market. We also have student in law who can focus their expertise in policy governing the internet, governing the cybersecurity practice. And we also have student in education who can focus their expertise to design how to teach cybersecurity practice, and student in every other discipline can focus their effort to implement security measure to protect the system that they are using in their field. So it's obvious that cybersecurity is everywhere and it implies job opportunity everywhere for everybody in every discipline of study. Thank you. >> Thank you, Trung, for those great comments. Great technology opportunities. But interesting, as well, is the theme that we're seeing across the entire symposium and in the virtual hallways that we're hearing conversations, and you pointed out some of them. Dr. Fleischer did, as well. And Bill, you mentioned it. It's not one thing. It's not just technology. It's different skills. And Amy, you mentioned that computer science is the hottest degree, but you have the hottest aerospace program in the world. I mean, so all this is kind of balancing. It's interdisciplinary. It's a structural change. Before we get into some of the, how they prepare the students, can you guys talk about some of the structural changes that are modern now in preparing in these opportunities, because societal impact is a, law potentially impact, it's how we educate. There's now cross-discipline skill sets. It's not just get the degree, see you out in the field. Bill, you want to start? >> Well, what's really fun about this job is that in the Air Force, I worked in the space and missile business, and what we saw was a heavy reliance on checklist format, security procedures, analog systems, and what we're seeing now in our world, both in the government and the commercial side, is a move to a digital environment, and the digital environment is a very quick and adaptive environment, and it's going to require a digital understanding. Matter of fact, the undersecretary of Air Force for acquisition recently referenced the need to understand the digital environment and how that's affecting acquisition. So as both Amy and Trung said, even business students are now in the cybersecurity business. And so again, what we're seeing is the change. Now, another phenomenon that we're seeing in the space world is there's just so much data. One of the ways that we addressed that in the past was to look at high-performance computing. There was a lot stricter control over how that worked. But now what we're seeing is adaptation of cloud, cloud technologies in space support, space data, command and control. And so what we see is a modern space engineer who has to understand digital, has to understand cloud, and has to understand the context of all those with a cyber environment. That's really changing the forefront of what is a space engineer, what is a digital engineer, and what is a future engineer, both commercial or government. So I think the opportunity for all of these things is really good, particularly for a polytechnic, Air Force Academy, and others that are focusing on a more widened experiential level of cloud and engineering and other capabilities. And I'll tell you the part that as the CIO I have to remind everybody, all this stuff works with the IT stuff. So you've got to understand how your IT infrastructures are tied and working together. As we noted earlier, one of the things is that these are all relays from point to point, and that architecture is part of your cybersecurity architecture. So again, every component has now become a cyber aware, cyber knowledgeable, and what we like to call as a cyber cognizant citizen where they have to understand the context. (speaking on mute) >> (indistinct) software Dr. Fleischer, talk about your perspective, 'cause you mentioned some of the things about computer science. I remember in the '80s when I got my computer science degree, they called us software engineers and then you became software developers. And then, so again, engineering is the theme. If you're engineering a system, there's now software involved, and there's also business engineering, business models. So talk about some of your comments, 'cause you mentioned computer science is hot. You got the aerospace. You got these multi-disciplines. You got definitely diversity, as well, brings more perspectives in, as well. Your thoughts on these structural interdisciplinary things? >> I think this is really key to making sure that students are prepared to work in the workforce is looking at the blurring between fields. No longer are you just a computer scientist. No longer are you just an aerospace engineer. You really have to have an expertise where you can work with people across disciplines. All of these fields are just working with each other in ways we haven't seen before. And Bill brought up data. You know, data science is something that's cross-cutting across all of our fields. So we want engineers that have the disciplinary expertise that they can go deep into these fields, but we want them to be able to communicate with each other and to be able to communicate across disciplines and to be able to work in teams that are across disciplines. You can no longer just work with other computer scientists or just work with other aerospace engineers. There's no part of engineering that is siloed anymore. So that's how we're changing. You have to be able to work across those disciplines. And as you, as Trung pointed out, ethics has to come into this. So you can no longer try to fully separate what we would traditionally have called the liberal arts and say, well, that's over there in general education. No, ethics is an important part of what we're doing and how we integrate that into our curriculum. So is communication. So is working on public policy and seeing where all these different aspects tie together to make the impact that we want to have in the world. So you no longer can work solo in these fields. >> That's great point. And Bill also mentioned the cloud. One thing about the cloud that's showed us is horizontal scalability has created a lot of value, and certainly data is now horizontal. Trung, you mentioned some of the things about cryptography for the kids out there, I mean, you can look at the pathway for career. You can do a lot of tech, but you don't have to go deep sometimes. You can as deep as you want, but there's so much more there. What technology do you see that's going to help students, in your opinion? >> Well, I'm a professor in computer science, so I like to talk a little bit about computer programming. Now we are working in complex projects. So most of the time we don't design a system from scratch. We build it from different components, and the components that we have, either we get it from vendors or sometimes we get it from the internet in the open source environment. It's fun to get the source code and then make it work to our own application. So now when we are looking at cryptology, when we talk about encryption, for example, we can easily get the source code from the internet. And the question, is it safe to use those source code? And my question is maybe not. So I always encourage my students to learn how to write source code the traditional way that I learned a long time ago before I allow them to use the open source environment. And one of the things that they have to be careful especially with encryption is the code that might be hidden in the source that they downloaded. Some of the source might be harmful. It might open up back gate for a hacker to get in later. We've heard about these back gates back then when Microsoft designed the operating system with the protection of encryption, and it is true that is existing. So while open source code is a wonderful place to develop complex system, but it's also a dangerous place that we have to be aware of. >> Great point. Before we get into the comments, one quick thing for each of you I'd like to get your comments on. There's been a big movement on growth mindset, which has been a great big believer in having a growth mindset and learning and all that good stuff. But now when you talk about some of these things we're mentioning about systems, there's a new trend around a systems mindset, because if everything's now a system, distributed systems now you have space and cybersecurity, you have to understand the consequences of changes. And you mention some of that, Trung, in changes in the source code. Could you guys share your quick opinions on the of systems thinking? Is that a mindset that people should be looking at? Because it used to be just one thing. Oh, you're a systems guy or gal. There you go. You're done. Now it seems to be in social media and data, everything seems to be systems. What's your take? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you. >> I'd say it's another way of looking at not being just so deep in your discipline. You have to understand what the impact of the decisions that you're making have on a much broader system. And so I think it's important for all of our students to get some exposure to that systems level thinking and looking at the greater impact of the decision that they're making. Now, the issue is where do you set the systems boundary, right? And you can set the systems boundary very close in and concentrate on an aspect of a design, or you can continually move that system boundary out and see where do you hit the intersections of engineering and science along with ethics and public policy and the greater society. And I think that's where some of the interesting work is going to be. And I think at least exposing students and letting them know that they're going to have to make some of these considerations as they move throughout their career is going to be vital as we move into the future. >> Bill, what's your thoughts? >> I absolutely agree with Amy. And I think there's a context here that reverse engineering and forensics analysis and forensics engineering are becoming more critical than ever. The ability to look at what you have designed in a system and then tear it apart and look at it for gaps and holes and problem sets. Or when you're given some software that's already been pre-developed, checking it to make sure it is really going to do what it says it's going to do. That forensics ability becomes more and more a skillset that also you need the verbal skills to explain what it is you're doing and what you found. So the communication side, the systems analysis side, the forensics analysis side, these are all things that are part of system approach that I think you could spend hours on and we still haven't really done a great job on it. So it's one of my fortes is really the whole analysis side of forensics and reverse engineering. >> Trung, real quick, systems thinking, your thoughts. >> Well, I'd like to share with you my experience when I worked in the space station program at NASA. We had two different approaches. One is a compound approach where we design it from the system general point of view where we put components together to be a complex system. But at the same time, we have the (indistinct) approach where we have an engineer who spent time and effort building individual component and they have to be expert in those tiny component that general component they deliver. And in the space station program, we bring together the (indistinct) engineer who designed everything in detail and the system manager who managed the system design from the top down, and we meet in the middle, and together we compromised a lot of differences and we delivered the space station that we are operating today. >> Great insight. And that's the whole teamwork collaboration that Dr. Fleischer was mentioning. Thanks so much for that insight. I wanted to get that out there because I know myself as a parent, I'm always trying to think about what's best for my kids and their friends as they grow up into the workforce. I know educators and leaders in industry would love to know some of the best practices around some of the structural changes. So thanks for that insight. But this topic's about students and helping them prepare. So we heard be multiple discipline, broaden your horizons, think like systems, top down, bottom up, work together as a team, and follow the data. So I got to ask you guys, there's a huge amount of job openings in cybersecurity. It's well-documented. And certainly with the intersection of space and cyber, it's only going to get bigger, right? You're going to see more and more demand for new types of jobs. How do we get high school and college students interested in security as a career? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you on this one. I would say really one of the best ways to get students interested in a career is to show them the impact that it's going to have. There's definitely always going to be students who are going to want to do the technology for the technology's sake, but that will limit you to a narrow set of students, and by showing the greater impact that these types of careers are going to have on the types of problems that you're going to be able to solve and the impact you're going to be able to have on the world around you, that's the word that we really need to get out. And a wide variety of students really respond to these messages. So I think it's really kind of reaching out at the elementary, the middle school level, and really kind of getting this idea that you can make a big difference, a big positive difference in the field with some of these careers, is going to be really critical. >> Real question to follow up. What do you think is the best entry point? You mentioned middle. I didn't hear elementary school. There's a lot of discussions around pipelining, and we're going to get into women in tech and underrepresented minorities later. But is it too early, or what's your feeling on this? >> My feeling is the earlier we can normalize it, the better. If you can normalize an interest in computers and technology and building in elementary school, that's absolutely critical. But the drop-off point that we're seeing is between what I would call late elementary and early middle school. And just kind of as an anecdote, I for years ran an outreach program for Girl Scouts in grades four and five and grade six, seven, and eight. And we had 100 slots in each program. And every year the program would sell out for girls in grades four and five, and every year we'd have spots remaining in grades six, seven, and eight. And that's literally where the drop-off is occurring between that late elementary and that middle school range. So that's the area that we need to target to make sure we keep those young women involved and interested as we move forward. >> Bill, how are we going to get these kids interested in security? You mentioned a few programs you got. >> Yeah. >> I mean, who wouldn't want to be a white hat hacker? I mean, that sounds exciting. >> So yeah, great questions. Let's start with some basic principles, though, is let me ask you a question, John. Name for me one white hat, good person hacker, the name, who works in the space industry and is an exemplar for students to look up to. >> You? >> Oh man, I'm feeling really... >> I'm only, I can't imagine a figure- >> (indistinct) the answer because the answer we normally get is the cricket sound. So we don't have individuals we've identified in those areas for them to look up to. >> I was going to be snarky and say most white hackers won't even use their real name, but... >> Right, so there's an aura around their anonymity here. So again, the real question is how do we get them engaged and keep them engaged? And that's what Amy was pointing out to exactly, the engagement and sticking with it. So one of the things that we're trying to do through our competition on the state level and other elements is providing connections. We call them ambassadors. These are people in the business who can contact the students that are in the game or in that challenge environment and let 'em interact and let 'em talk about what they do and what they're doing in life. But give them a challenging game format. A lot of computer-based training, capture the flag stuff is great, but if you can make it hands-on, if you can make it a learn by doing experiment, if you can make it personally involved and see the benefit as a result of doing that challenge and then talk to the people who do that on a daily basis, that's how you get them involved. The second part is part of what we're doing is we're involving partnership companies in the development of the teams. So this year's competition that we're running has 82 teams from across the state of California. Of those 82 teams at six students a team, middle school, high school, and many of those have company partners, and these are practitioners in cybersecurity who are working with those students to participate. It's that adult connectivity. It's that visualization. So at the competition this year, we have the founder of Defcon Red Flag is a participant to talk to the students. We have Vint Cerf, who is, of course, very well-known for something called the internet, to participate. It's really getting the students to understand who's in this, who can I look up to, and how do I stay engaged with them? >> There's definitely a celebrity aspect of it, I will agree. I mean, the influencer aspect here with knowledge is key. Can you talk about these ambassadors, and how far along are you on that program? First of all, the challenge stuff is, anything gamification-wise, we've seen that with hackathons, it just really works well. Creates bonding. People who create together can get sticky and get very high community aspect to it. Talk about this ambassador thing. What is that, industry, is that academic? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What is this ambassador thing? >> Industry partners that we've identified, some of which, and I won't hit all of 'em, so I'm sure I'll short change this, but Palo Alto, Cisco, Splunk, many of the companies in California, and what we've done is identified schools to participate in the challenge that may not have a strong STEM program or have any cyber program. And the idea of the company is they look for their employees who are in those school districts to partner with the schools to help provide outreach. It could be as simple as a couple hours a week, or it's a team support captain or it's providing computers and other devices to use. And so again, it's really about a constant connectivity and trying to help where some schools may not have the staff or support units in an area to really provide them what they need for connectivity. What that does is it gives us an opportunity to not just focus on it once a year, but throughout the year. So for the competition, all the teams that are participating have been receiving training and educational opportunities in the gamification side since they signed up to participate. So there's a website, there's learning materials, there's materials provided by certain vendor companies like Wireshark and others. So it's a continuum of opportunity for the students. >> You know, I've seen, just randomly, just got a random thought. Robotics clubs are moving then closer into that middle school area, Dr. Fleischer, and in certainly in high schools, it's almost like a varsity sport. E-sports is another one. My son just called me. "I made the JV at the college team." It's big and serious, right? And it's fun. This is the aspect of fun. It's hands-on. This is part of the culture down there. Learn by doing. Is there, like, a group? Is it, like, a club? I mean, how do you guys organize these bottoms-up organically interest topics? >> So here in the college of engineering, when we talk about learn by doing, we have learned by doing both in the classroom and out of the classroom. And if we look at these types of out of the classroom activities, we have over 80 clubs working on all different aspects, and many of these are bottom-up. The students have decided what they want to work on and have organized themselves around that. And then they get the leadership opportunities. The more experienced students train the less experienced students. And it continues to build from year after year after year with them even doing aspects of strategic planning from year to year for some of these competitions. Yeah, it's an absolutely great experience. And we don't define for them how their learn by doing experiences should be. We want them to define it. And I think the really cool thing about that is they have the ownership and they have the interest and they can come up with new clubs year after year to see which direction they want to take it, and we will help support those clubs as old clubs fade out and new clubs come in. >> Trung, real quick, before we go on the next talk track, what do you recommend for middle school, high school, or even elementary? A little bit of coding, Minecraft? I mean, how do you get 'em hooked on the fun and the dopamine of technology and cybersecurity? What's your take on that? >> On this aspect, I'd like to share with you my experience as a junior high and high school student in Texas. The university of Texas in Austin organized a competition for every high school in Texas in every field from poetry to mathematics to science, computer engineering. But it's not about the University of Texas. The University of Texas is only serving as a center for the final competition. They divide the competition to district and then regional and then state. At each level, we have local university and colleges volunteering to host the competition and make it fun for the student to participate. And also they connected the students with private enterprises to raise fund for scholarship. So student who see the competition is a fun event for them, they get exposed to different university hosting the event so that they can see different option for them to consider college. They also get a promise that if they participate, they will be considered for scholarship when they attend university and college. So I think the combination of fun and competition and the scholarship aspect will be a good thing to entice the student to commit to the area of cybersecurity. >> Got the engagement, the aspiration, scholarship, and you mentioned a volunteer. I think one of the things I'll observe is you guys are kind of hitting this as community. I mean, the story of Steve Jobs and Woz building the Mac, they called Bill Hewlett up in Palo Alto. He was in the phone book. And they scoured some parts from him. That's community. This is kind of what you're getting at. So this is kind of the formula we're seeing. So the next question I really want to get into is the women in technology, STEM, underrepresented minorities, how do we get them on cybersecurity career path? Is there a best practices there? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I think it's really interesting. First thing I want to add is, if I could, just a clarification. What's really cool, the competition that we have and we're running, it's run by students from Cal Poly. So Amy referenced the clubs and other activities. So many of the organizers and developers of the competition that we're running are the students, but not just from engineering. So we actually have theater and liberal arts majors and technology for liberal arts majors who are part of the competition, and we use their areas of expertise, set design and other things, visualization, virtualization. Those are all part of how we then teach and educate cyber in our gamification and other areas. So they're all involved and they're learning, as well. So we have our students teaching other students. So we're really excited about that. And I think that's part of what leads to a mentoring aspect of what we're providing where our students are mentoring the other students. And I think it's also something that's really important in the game. The first year we held the game, we had several all-girl teams, and it was really interesting because A, they didn't really know if they could compete. I mean, this is their reference point. We don't know if. They did better than anybody. I mean, they just, they knocked the ball out of the park. The second part, then, is building that confidence level that can, going back and telling their cohorts that, hey, it's not this obtuse thing you can't do. It's something real that you can compete and win. And so again, it's building that camaraderie, that spirit, that knowledge that they can succeed. And I think that goes a long way. And Amy's programs and the reach out and the reach out that Cal Poly does to schools to develop, I think that's what it really is going to take. It is going to take that village approach to really increase diversity and inclusivity for the community. >> Dr. Fleischer, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned your outreach program and the drop-off, some of those data. You're deeply involved in this. You're passionate about it. What's your thoughts on this career path opportunity for STEM? >> Yeah, I think STEM is an incredible career path opportunity for so many people. There's so many interesting problems that we can solve, particularly in cyber and in space systems. And I think we have to meet the kids where they are and kind of show them what the exciting part is about it, right? But Bill was alluding to this when he was talking about trying to name somebody that you can point to. And I think having those visible people where you can see yourself in that is absolutely critical, and those mentors and that mentorship program. So we use a lot of our students going out into California middle schools and elementary schools. And you want to see somebody that's like you, somebody that came from your background and was able to do this. So a lot of times we have students from our National Society of Black Engineers or our Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers or our Society of Women Engineers, which we have over 1,000 members, 1,000 student members in our Society of Women Engineers who are doing these outreach programs. But like I also said, it's hitting them at the lower levels, too, and Girl Scouts is actually distinguishing themselves as one of the leading STEM advocates in the country. And like I said, they developed all these cybersecurity badges starting in kindergarten. There's a cybersecurity badge for kindergartener and first graders. And it goes all the way up through late high school. The same thing with space systems. And they did the space systems in partnership with NASA. They did the cybersecurity in partnership with Palo Alto Networks. And what you do is you want to build these skills that the girls are developing, and like Bill said, work in girl-led teams where they can do it, and if they're doing it from kindergarten on, it just becomes normal, and they never think, well, this is not for me. And they see the older girls who are doing it and they see a very clear path leading them into these careers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you used the word normalization earlier. That's exactly what it is. It's life, you get life skills and a new kind of badge. Why wouldn't you learn how to be a white hat hacker or have some fun or learn some skills? >> Amy: Absolutely. >> Just in the grind of your fun day. Super exciting. Okay, Trung, your thoughts on this. I mean, you have a diverse, diversity brings perspective to the table in cybersecurity because you have to think like the other guy, the adversary. You got to be the white hat. You can't be a white hat unless you know how black hat thinks. So there's a lot of needs here for more points of view. How are we going to get people trained on this from underrepresented minorities and women? What's your thoughts? >> Well, as a member of the IEEE Professional Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, every year we participate in the engineering week. We deploy our members to local junior high school and high school to talk about our project to promote the study of engineering. But at the same time, we also participate in the science fair that the state of Texas is organizing. Our engineer will be mentoring students, number one, to help them with the project, but number two, to help us identify talent so that we can recruit them further into the field of STEM. One of the participation that we did was the competition of the, what they call Future City, where students will be building a city on a computer simulation. And in recent year, we promote the theme of smart city where city will be connected the individual houses and together into the internet. And we want to bring awareness of cybersecurity into that competition. So we deploy engineer to supervise the people, the students who participate in the competition. We bring awareness not in the technical detail level, but in what we've call the compound level so student will be able to know what required to provide cybersecurity for the smart city that they are building. And at the same time, we were able to identify talent, especially talent in the minority and in the woman, so that we can recruit them more actively. And we also raise money for scholarship. We believe that scholarship is the best way to entice student to continue education at the college level. So with scholarship, it's very easy to recruit them to the field and then push them to go further into the cybersecurity area. >> Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of the parents like, oh, my kid's going to go join the soccer team, we get private lessons, and maybe they'll get a scholarship someday. Well, they only do half scholarships. Anyway. I mean, if they spent that time doing these other things, it's just, again, this is a new life skill, like the Girl Scouts. And this is where I want to get into this whole silo breaking down, because Amy, you brought this up, and Bill, you were talking about it, as well. You got multiple stakeholders here with this event. You've got public, you've got private, and you've got educators. It's the intersection of all of them. It's, again, if those silos break down, the confluence of those three stakeholders have to work together. So let's talk about that. Educators. You guys are educating young minds. You're interfacing with private institutions and now the public. What about educators? What can they do to make cyber better? 'Cause there's no real manual. I mean, it's not like this court is a body of work of how to educate cybersecurity. Maybe it's more recent. There's cutting edge best practices. But still, it's an evolving playbook. What's your thoughts for educators? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm going to turn to Amy and let her go first. >> Let you go. >> That's fine. >> I would say as educators, it's really important for us to stay on top of how the field is evolving, right? So what we want to do is we want to promote these tight connections between educators and our faculty and applied research in industry and with industry partnerships. And I think that's how we're going to make sure that we're educating students in the best way. And you're talking about that inner, that confluence of the three different areas. And I think you have to keep those communication lines open to make sure that the information on where the field is going and what we need to concentrate on is flowing down into our educational process. And that works in both ways, that we can talk as educators and we can be telling industry what we're working on and what types of skills our students have and working with them to get the opportunities for our students to work in industry and develop those skills along the way, as well. And I think it's just all part of this really looking at what's going to be happening and how do we get people talking to each other? And the same thing with looking at public policy and bringing that into our education and into these real hands-on experiences. And that's how you really cement this type of knowledge with students, not by talking to them and not by showing them, but letting them do it. It's this learn by doing and building the resiliency that it takes when you learn by doing. And sometimes you learn by failing, but you just pick up and you keep going. And these are important skills that you develop along the way. >> You mentioned sharing, too. That's the key. Collaborating and sharing knowledge. It's an open world and everyone's collaborating. Bill, private-public partnerships. I mean, there's a real, private companies, you mentioned Palo Alto Networks and others. There's a real intersection there. They're motivated. They could, there's scholarship opportunities. Trung points to that. What is the public-private educator view there? How do companies get involved and what's the benefit for them? >> Well, that's what a lot of the universities are doing is to bring in as part of either their cyber centers or institutes people who are really focused on developing and furthering those public-private partnerships. That's really what my role is in all these things is to take us to a different level in those areas, not to take away from the academic side, but to add additional opportunities for both sides. Remember, in a public-private partnership, all entities have to have some gain in the process. Now, what I think is really interesting is the timing on particularly this subject, space and cybersecurity. This has been an absolute banner year for space. The standup of Space Force, the launch of commercial partnership, you know, commercial platforms delivering astronauts to the space station, recovering them, and bringing them back. The ability of a commercial satellite platform to be launched. Commercial platforms that not only launch but return back to where they're launched from. These are things that are stirring the hearts of the American citizens, the kids, again, they're getting interested. They're seeing this and getting enthused. So we have to seize upon that and we have to find a way to connect that. Public-private partnerships is the answer for that. It's not one segment that can handle it all. It's all of them combined together. If you look at space, space is going to be about commercial. It's going to be about civil. Moving from one side of the Earth to the other via space. And it's about government. And what's really cool for us, all those things are in our backyard. That's where that public-private comes together. The government's involved. The private sector's involved. The educators are involved. And we're all looking at the same things and trying to figure out, like this forum, what works best to go to the future. >> You know, if people are bored and they want to look for an exciting challenge, you couldn't have laid it out any clearer. It's the most exciting discipline. It's everything. I mean, we just talk about space. GPS is, everything we do is involved, has to do with satellites. (laughs) >> I have to tell you a story on that right? We have a very unique GPS story right in our backyard. So our sheriff is the son of the father of GPS for the Air Force. So you can't get better than that when it comes to being connected to all those platforms. So we really want to say, you know, this is so exciting for all of us because it gives everybody a job for a long time. >> You know, the kids that think TikTok's exciting, wait till they see what's going on here with you guys, this program. Trung, final word on this from the public side. You're at the Air Force. You're doing research. Are you guys opening it up? Are you integrating into the private and educational sectors? How do you see that formula playing out? And what's the best practice for students and preparing them? >> I think it's the same in every university in the engineering program will require our students to do the final project before graduation. And in this kind of project, we send them out to work in the private industry, the private company that sponsor them. They get the benefit of having an intern working for them and they get the benefit of reviewing the students as the prospective employee in the future. So it's good for the student to gain practical experience working in this program. Sometimes we call that a co-op program. Sometimes we call that a capstone program. And the company will accept the student on a trial basis, giving them some assignment and then pay them a little bit of money. So it's good for the student to earn some extra money, to have some experience that they can put on their resume when they apply for the final, for the job. So the collaboration between university and private sector is really important. When I join a faculty normally there already exist that connection. It came from normally, again, from the dean of engineering, who would wine and dine with companies, build up relationship, and sign up agreement. But it's us professor who have to do the (indistinct) approach to do a good performance so that we can build up credibility to continue the relationship with those company and the student that we selected to send to those company. We have to make sure that they will represent the university well, they will do a good job, and they will make a good impression. >> Thank you very much for a great insight, Trung, Bill, Amy. Amazing topic. I'd like to end this session with each of you to make a statement on the importance of cybersecurity to space. We'll go Trung, Bill, and Amy. Trung, the importance of cybersecurity to space, brief statement. >> The importance of cybersecurity, we know that it's affecting every component that we are using and we are connecting to, and those component, normally we use them for personal purpose, but when we enter the workforce, sometimes we connect them to the important system that the government or the company are investing to be put into space. So it's really important to practice cybersecurity, and a lot of time, it's very easy to know the concept. We have to be careful. But in reality, we tend to forget to to practice it the way we forget how to drive a car safely. And with driving a car, we have a program called defensive driving that requires us to go through training every two or three years so that we can get discount. Every organization we are providing the annual cybersecurity practice not to tell people about the technology, but to remind them about the danger of not practicing cybersecurity and it's a requirement for every one of us. >> Bill, the importance of cybersecurity to space. >> It's not just about young people. It's about all of us. As we grow and we change, as I referenced it, we're changing from an analog world to a digital world. Those of us who have been in the business and have hair that looks like mine, we need to be just as cognizant about cybersecurity practice as the young people. We need to understand how it affects our lives, and particularly in space, because we're going to be talking about people, moving people to space, moving payloads, data transfer, all of those things. And so there's a whole workforce that needs to be retrained or upskilled in cyber that's out there. So the opportunity is ever expansive for all of us. >> Amy, the importance of cybersecurity in space. >> I mean the emphasis of cybersecurity is space just simply can't be over emphasized. There are so many aspects that are going to have to be considered as systems get ever more complex. And as we pointed out, we're putting people's lives at stake here. This is incredibly, incredibly complicated and incredibly impactful, and actually really exciting, the opportunities that are here for students and the workforce of the future to really make an enormous impact on the world around us. And I hope we're able to get that message out to students and to children today, that these are really interesting fields that you need to consider. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and the importance of cybersecurity and space is the future of the world's all going to happen in and around space with technology, people, and society. Thank you to Cal Poly, and thank you for watching the Cybersecurity and Space Symposium 2020. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering space in cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 hosted by Cal Poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE here in California. I want to welcome our featured guest, Lieutenant General, John F. Thompson with the United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. That's the topic of this session. And of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in Los Angeles Air Force Base. Also heading up Space Force. General, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate to you kicking this off. Welcome to the symposium. >> Hey, so thank you very much, John, for that very kind introduction. Also very much thank you to Cal Poly for this opportunity to speak to this audience today. Also a special shout out to one of the organizers, Dustin Debrun, for all of his work, helping get us to this point. Ladies and gentlemen as a John mentioned, I'm JT Thompson. I lead the 6,000 men and women of the United States Space Force's Space and Missile System Center, which is headquartered here at Los Angeles Air Force Base and El Segundo. If you're not quite sure where that's at, it's about a mile and a half from LAX. This is our main operating location, but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country. We're about 500 people at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and an about another 500 people on the front range of the Rockies between Colorado Springs and Denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide. We're responsible for acquiring, developing and sustaining the United States Space Force's, critical space assets. That includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites. And we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the US Space Force and a number of our critical mission partners across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do, if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustain the 31 satellite GPS constellation that satellite constellation, while originally intended to help with global navigation, those GPS signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy over the past three decades. GPS is everywhere. I think everybody realizes that. Agriculture, banking, the stock market, the airline industry, separate and distinct navigation systems. It's really pervasive across both capabilities for our Department of Defense and capabilities for our economy and individuals, billions of individuals across our country and the planet. Some of the other work we do for instance, in the communications sector, secure communications satellites that we designed and build that link America's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real time support and comms for our deployed forces. And those of our allies. We also acquire infrared missile warning satellites that monitor the planet for missile launches that provide advanced warning to the US Homeland and to our allies in case some of those missile launches are nefarious. On a note, that's probably a lot closer to home, maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of California. In 2018, SMC jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy to partner with the US Forest Service during two of the largest wildfires in the state's history, the Camp and Woolsey fires in Northern California. As those fires spread out of control, we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites. Those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet. And we collaborated with the US Forest Service so that firefighters on the ground could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading, thereby saving lives and property by identifying hotspots and flareups for firefighters. That data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the US Forest Service and authorities here in California, was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders, the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters. It was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread. We've continued that involvement in recent years, using multiple systems to support firefighters across the Western US this fall, as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue. Working together with the US Forest Service and with other partners we'd like to think that we've made a difference here, but there's still a lot more work to go. And I think that we should always be asking ourselves what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to stakeholders so that they can use it for purposes of good, if you will. How else can we protect our nation? How else can we protect our friends and allies? I think a major component of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly. Just over the past few years, John and I were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have space programs. Nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet. If you just look at one mission area that the Department of Defense is interested in, and that's small launch, there are currently over 100 different small launch companies within the US industrial base vying for commercial DoD and civil payload capabilities, mostly to lower earth orbit. It's truly a remarkable time. If you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, where we're revolutionizing really, the ways that we generate process and use data. It's really remarkable. In 2016, so if you think about this four years ago, NASA estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day. And that was four years ago. Obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience in this conference, we need to work with big thinkers, like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data. We need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge theories of data mining, cyber behaviorism, and Internet of Things 2.0, it's just truly a remarkable time to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the space business are truly, truly daunting and important to all of us. Integrating cyber security into our space systems, both commercial and government is a mandate. it's no longer just a nice to have as the US Space Force and Department of the Air Force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years, space is becoming congested and contested. And that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on cybersecurity day in and day out. The value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer, from the ground control segments associated with it. And this value is not just military, it's also economic and it's not just American, it's also a value for the entire world, particularly our allies, as we all depend upon space and space systems. Your neighbors and friends here in California that are employed at the space and missile system center work with network defenders. We work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers, our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global comments of space free and open for exploration and for commerce as John and I were talking earlier, before we came online, there's an aspect of cybersecurity for space systems, especially for some of our legacy systems, that's more, how do we bolt this on? Cause we fielded those space systems a number of years ago, and the challenges of cybersecurity in the space domain have grown. So we have a part that we have to worry about, bolting it on, but then we have to worry about building it in as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that realizes that the cyber threat or the cybersecurity landscape will evolve over time. It's not just going to be stagnant. There will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we all have to look at. Look, as Secretary Barrett, who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most Americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning. The American way of life really depends on space. And as part of the United States Space Force, we work with defense leaders, our Congress joint, and international military teammates and industry to ensure American leadership in space. I really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today, John, and thanks so much to Cal Poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event. I've really looked forward to this for several months. And so with that, I look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here. >> General, thank you very much for those awesome introductory statement. For the folks watching on the stream, Brigadier General Carthan's going to be in the chat, answering any questions, feel free to chat away. He's the vice commander of Space and Missile System Center, he'll be available. A couple of comments from your keynote before I get to my questions. Cause it just jumped into my head. You mentioned the benefits of say space with the fires in California. We're living that here. That's really realtime. That's a benefit. You also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space. I'm only imagined Moore's law smaller, faster, cheaper applies to rockets too. So I'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned. So is it going to be more rules around that? This is an interesting question cause it's exciting Space Force, but for all the good there is potentially bad out there. >> Yeah. So John, I think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested, is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space? What kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps de orbit themselves? What kind of basic protections should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space? I think those are all fantastic questions. And I know that US and many allied policy makers are looking very, very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we field, and field as the military term. But how we populate using civil or commercial terms that space layer at different altitudes, lower earth orbit, mid earth orbit, geosynchronous earth orbit, different kinds of orbits, what the kind of mission areas we accomplished from space. That's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as the place gets a little bit, not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out. >> I'm super excited for Space Force. I know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging, changing great space. The focus here at this conference is space and cybersecurity, the intersection. I'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that a space force is taking to cybersecurity and how it impacts our national goals here in the United States. >> Yeah. So that's a great question John, let me talk about it in two basic ways. At number one is an and I know some people in the audience, this might make them a little bit uncomfortable, but I have to talk about the threat. And then relative to that threat, I really have to talk about the importance of cyber and specifically cyber security, as it relates to that threat. The threats that we face really represented a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber. We've seen a lot of action in recent months from certain countries, notably China and Russia that have threatened what I referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space. For example, it threw many unclassified sources and media sources. Everybody should understand that the Russians have been testing on orbit anti-satellite capabilities. It's been very clear if you were following just the week before last, the Department of Defense released its 2020 military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China. And it was very clear that China is developing ASATs, electronic jammers, directed energy weapons, and most relevant to today's discussion, offensive cyber capabilities. There are kinetic threats that are very, very easy to see, but a cyber attack against a critical command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of GPS and important to note that that GPS system also impacts many civilians who are dependent on those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services, a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to assist them to mislead operators so that they sent emergency services personnel to the wrong address. Attacks on spacecraft on orbit, whether directly via a network intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the system's production while we're building the satellite can cripple or corrupt the data. Denial-of-service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control. If GPS went down, I hesitate to say it this way, cause we might elicit some screams from the audience. But if GPS went down a Starbucks, wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order, Uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you. And Domino's certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less. So with a little bit of tongue in cheek there from a military operations perspective, it's dead serious. We have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like ransomware and malware. And those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems. However, what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled, if you will, to use against our national security space systems day in and day out. As I said, during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber, the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity. If commanders in the field, firefighters in California or baristas in Starbucks, can't trust the data they're receiving, then that really harms their decision making capabilities. One of the big trends we've recently seen is the move towards proliferated LEO constellations, obviously Space X's Starlink on the commercial side and on the military side, the work that DARPA and my organization SMC are doing on Blackjack and Casino, as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really, really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionaries how we plan and field war fighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems. But they're also heavily reliant on cybersecurity. We've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage. Loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from a satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective. Another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning, onboard spacecraft are at the edge. Our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector, they're basically flying boxes full of software. And we need to ensure that data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms, governing the right actions and that those systems are impervious to the extent possible to nefarious modifications. So in summation, cybersecurity is a vital element of everything in our national security space goals. And I would argue for our national goals, writ large, including economic and information dimensions, the Space Force leadership at all levels from some of the brand new second lieutenants that general Raymond swore in to the space force this morning, ceremonially from the air force associations, airspace and cyberspace conference to the various highest levels, General Raymond, General DT Thompson, myself, and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise. We've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems cause they absolutely depend on it. >> You mentioned hardware, software threats, opportunities, challenges. I want to ask you because you got me thinking of the minute they're around infrastructure. We've heard critical infrastructure, grids here on earth. You're talking about critical infrastructure, a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is, an extension of what we have. So I'd love to get your thoughts about Space Force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors, because the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyberspace. Oh you have threat vectors. They're always increasing the surface area. If the surface area is from space, it's an unlimited service area. So you got different vectors. So you've got new critical infrastructure developing real time, really fast. And you got an expanded threat vector landscape. Putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues. How would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things? >> So I tell you, just like, I'm sure people in the security side or the cybersecurity side of the business in the banking industry feel, they feel like it's all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system, to the financial sector. On the Department of Defense side, we've got to have sort of the same mindset. That threat vector from, to, and through space against critical space systems, ground segments, the launch enterprise, or transportation to orbit and the various different domains within space itself. Like I mentioned before, LEO, MEO and GEO based satellites with different orbits, all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that I mentioned earlier, some that I did mention like a weather tactical or wide band communications, various new features of space control. All of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security threat perspective. And it's a daunting challenge right now. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things we've been falling on the hardware side on the ground is the supply chain. We've seen, malware being, really put in a really obscure hardware. Who manufactures it? Is it being outsourced? Obviously government has restrictions, but with the private sector, you mentioned China and the US kind of working together across these peaceful areas. But you got to look at the supply chain. How does the supply chain in the security aspect impact the mission of the US space Force? >> Yeah. Yeah. So how about another, just in terms of an example, another kind of California based historical example. The very first US Satellite, Explorer 1, was built by the jet propulsion laboratory folks, not far from here in El Segundo, up in Pasadena, that satellite, when it was first built in the late 50s weighing a little bit, over 30 pounds. And I'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by US companies. Fast forward to today. The global supply chain is so tightly coupled, and frankly many industries are so specialized, almost specialized regionally around the planet. We focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them, but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the heritage, if you will, of some of the parts that are used, the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized. The space industry, especially national security space sector is relatively small compared to other commercial industries. And we're moving towards using more and more parts from non US companies. Cybersecurity and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily understand 100% like an Explorer one, the lineage of that particular part. The environmental difficulties in space are well known. The radiation environment, the temperature extremes, the vacuum, those require specialized component. And the US military is not the only customer in that space. In fact, we're definitely not the dominant customer in space anymore. All those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains, from a quality perspective, a security perspective and availability. There's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of compromised patches, if you will. And our adversaries are aware of these techniques. As I mentioned earlier, with other forms of attack, considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries. So we have to take that threat seriously. Between the government and industry sectors here in the US. We're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities. Last fall, we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at Space and Missile System Center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio. And it sounds really kind of businessy geeky, if you will. Hey, we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cybersecurity as dynamically as we possibly could. And so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts, to require system developers, to implement some more advanced protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment. So that data handling and supply chain protections from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account. Cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now. Performance of the system, It's as important as cost, it's as important as schedule, because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost, it can perform that missile warning or that communications mission perfectly, but it's not cyber secure. If it's doesn't have cyber protections built into it, or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber threats, then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the CA the war fighter or the nation any good. Supply chain risk management is a major challenge for us. We're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners. We're all facing it head on to try and build secure and trusted components that keep our confidence as leaders, firefighters, and baristas as the case may be. But it is a challenge. And we're trying to rise to that challenge. >> This is so exciting this new area, because it really touches everything. Talk about geeking out on the tech, the hardware, the systems but also you put your kind of MBA hat on you go, what's the ROI of extra development and how things get built. Because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like, if you're building cool stuff, it's exciting, but you still have to build. And cybersecurity has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture. So you're still building things, which means you got to acquire things, you got to acquire parts, you got acquire build software and sustain it. How is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space? >> Yeah. From initial development, through planning for the acquisition, design, development, our production fielding and sustainment, it impacts all aspects of the life cycle, John. We simply, especially from the concept of baking in cybersecurity, we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure. So we've moved way further towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cybersecurity from the very beginning of a systems development, cyber security, and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute. As I mentioned earlier, equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance. We like to talk in the space world about mission assurance and mission assurance has always sort of taken us as we technically geek out. Mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space. Can it work in a vacuum? Can it work in as it transfers through the Van Allen radiation belt or through the Southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly? Will it work out in space? And now from a resiliency perspective, yeah, it has to work in space. It's got to be functional in space, but it's also got to be resistant to these cybersecurity threats. It's not just, I think a General D.T Thompson quoted this term. It's not just widget assurance anymore. It's mission assurance. How does that satellite operator that ground control segment operate while under attack? So let me break your question a little bit, just for purposes of discussion into really two parts, cybersecurity, for systems that are new and cybersecurity for systems that are in sustainment are kind of old and legacy. Obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threatened both, and we really have to employ different strategies for defensive of each one. For new systems. We're desperately trying to implement across the Department of Defense and particularly in the space world, a kind of a dev sec ops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems. Here at SMC, we have a program called enterprise ground services, which is a toolkit, basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems, EGS as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities. Network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of a bad behavior, malicious behavior, if you will, it's rudimentary at this point, but because we're using DevSecOps and that incremental development approach, as we scale it, it just becomes more and more capable. Every product increment that we feel. Here at LA Air Force Base, we have the United Space Force's West Coast Software Factory, which we've dubbed the Kobayashi Maru. They're using those agile DevOps software development practices to deliver a space awareness software to the combined space operations center. Affectionately called the CSpock that CSpock is just on the road from Cal Poly there in San Luis Obispo at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They've so securely linked the sea Spock with other space operation centers around the planet, our allies, Australia, Canada, and the UK. We're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations. So lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development capabilities for our space systems. But as I mentioned earlier, we've got large constellations of satellites on orbit right now. Some of them are well in excess of a decade or more or old on orbit. And so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old. But we still have to worry about them cause they're critical to our space capabilities. We've been working with an air force material command organization called CROWS, which stands for the Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapon Systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to live through this increasingly cybersecurity concerned era that we currently live in. Our industry partners have been critical to both of those different avenues. Both new systems and legacy systems. We're working closely with them to defend and upgrade national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with new national assets coming online. The vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threatened the way we've done business in the past, both militarily and in the case of GPS economically. The impacts of that cybersecurity risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes, but I've got to tell you, as the threat vectors change, as the vulnerabilities change, we've got to be nimble enough, agile enough, to be able to bounce back and forth. We can't just say, many people in the audience are probably familiar with the RMF or the Risk Management Framework approach to reviewing the cyber security of a system. We can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an RMF on a system. And then, hey, high five, we're all good. It's a journey, not a destination, that's cybersecurity. And it's a constant battle rhythm through our weapon systems lifecycle, not just a single event. >> I want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question. But before I go there, you mentioned agile. And I see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles, you've got to be faster. And we saw this in the computer industry, mainframes, mini computers, and then we started getting beyond maybe when the internet hit and PCs came out, you saw the big enterprises, the banks and government start to work with startups. And it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that, there's no way if you are a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise. Now that used to be for public sector and certainly for you guys. So as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved, I'm sure would love to have a contract with Space Force. There's an ROI calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view and it's software, you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups. Could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you, whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile, but they might not be that big company. >> John, that's a fantastic question. We're desperately trying to reach out to those new space advocates, to those startups, to those what we sometimes refer to, within the Department of Defense, those non traditional defense contractors. A couple of things just for thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight. Three years ago, we created here at Space and Missile System Center, the Space Enterprise Consortium to provide a platform, a contractual vehicle, really to enable us to rapidly prototype, development of space systems and to collaborate between the US Space Force, traditional defense contractors, non traditional vendors like startups, and even some academic institutions. SPEC, as we call it, Space Enterprise Consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts awarded quickly. Many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements. And that's what SPEC is based on. And so far in just three years, SPEC has awarded 75 different prototyping contracts worth over $800 million with a 36% reduction in time to award. And because it's a consortium based competition for these kinds of prototyping efforts, the barrier to entry for small and nontraditional, for startups, even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototyping has really lowered. These types of partnerships that we've been working through on spec have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security for their systems, both our developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build. We want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together in support kind of mutually beneficial relationships between all. Recently at the Annual Air Force Association conference that I mentioned earlier, I moderated a panel with several space industry leaders, all from big traditional defense contractors, by the way. And they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrance. And that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups, as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those larger contractors that we rely on day in and day out. Advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that I think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations. As I mentioned earlier, the SPEC has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values. And it's just going to get better. There's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium, 80% of them are non traditional kinds of vendors. And we just love working with them. Another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators, if you will, and innovators that include cyber security experts is our space pitch day events. So we held our first event last November in San Francisco, where we awarded over a two day period about $46 million to 30 different companies that had potentially game changing ideas. These were phase two small business innovative research efforts that we awarded with cash on the spot. We're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. We're planning on doing it right here in Los Angeles, COVID-19 environment permitting. And we think that these are fantastic venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups, and small businesses who are interested in really, truly partnering with the US Air Force. It's, as I said before, it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business. And working with the innovation economy is something that the Department of Defense really needs to do in that the innovation that we used to think was ours. That 80% of the industrial base innovation that came from the Department of Defense, the script has been flipped there. And so now more than 70%, particularly in space innovation comes from the commercial sector, not from the defense business itself. And so that's a tsunami of investment and a tsunami of a capability. And I need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it, you know what I mean? >> Yeah, It's one of those things where the script has been flipped, but it's exciting because it's impacting everything. When you're talking about systems architecture? You're talking about software, you're talking about a business model. You're talking about dev sec opsx from a technical perspective, but now you have a business model innovation. All the theaters are exploding in innovation, technical, business, personnel. This brings up the workforce challenge. You've got the cyber needs for the US Space Force, It's probably great ROI model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts. That's a entrepreneurial innovation, you've got the business model theater, you've got the personnel. How does the industry adopt and change? You guys are clearly driving this. How does the industry adjust to you? >> Yeah. So I think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the US Space Force from an acquisition perspective, and in this particular case from a cybersecurity perspective. As I mentioned earlier, it's the most exciting time to be in space programs, really since the days of Apollo. Just to put it in terms that maybe have an impact with the audience. From 1957 until today, approximately 9,000 satellites have been launched from the various space varying countries around the planet. Less than 2000 of those 9,000 are still up on orbit and operational. And yet in the new space regime players like Space X have plans to launch, 12,000 satellites for some of their constellations alone. It really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities, whether they're commercial, civil, or defense are going to require appropriate cybersecurity protections. It's just a really exciting time to be working in stuff like this. And so folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cybersecurity are just the kind of people that we want to work with. Cause we need to make sure our systems are secure and resilient. We need folks that have technical and computing expertise, engineering skills to be able to design cyber secure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks. But we also, as you alluded to, we need people that have that business and business acumen, human networking background, so that we can launch the startups and work with the non traditional businesses. Help to bring them on board help, to secure both their data and our data and make sure our processes and systems are free as much as possible from attack. For preparation, for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this trade space, you got to be smart on digital networking. You got to understand basic internet protocols, concepts, programming languages, database design. Learn what you can for penetration or vulnerability testing and a risk assessment. I will tell you this, and I don't think he will, I know he will not mind me telling you this, but you got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago, I'm at home evening and I get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss, the commander of Air Force Space command, General, J. Raymond, who is now currently the Chief of Space Operations. And he is on temporary duty, flying overseas. He lands where he's going and first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes JT, while I was traveling, I noticed that there were eBooks available on the commercial airliner I was traveling on and there was an ebook on something called scrumming and agile DevSecOps. And I read it, have you read it? And I said, no, sir. But if you tell me what the title of the book is, I will read it. And so I got to go to my staff meeting, the very next week, the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the staff meeting, hey, if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming, then I'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our GS13s, All of our government employees can get smart on the scrumming development process. And interestingly as another side, I had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays, where he was trying to take some leave. And I said, sir, what are you up to today? Are you making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever. And the Chief of Space Operations told me no, I'm trying to teach myself Python. I'm at lesson two, and it's not going so well, but I'm going to figure this out. And so that kind of thing, if the chief of staff or the Chief of Space Operations can prioritize scrumming and Python language and innovation in his daily schedule, then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that. And we'll just say, lower levels of rank throughout our entire space force enterprise. Look, we don't need people that can code a satellite from scratch, but we need to know, we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cybersecurity requirements. And that can turn those things into meaningful actions, obviously in the space domain, things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important spaces, not an intuitive domain. So under understanding how things survive on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions. And I know there's probably a lot, because of this conference. I know there's probably a whole lot of high speed cybersecurity experts out in the audience. And I need those people in the US Space Force. The country is counting on it, but I wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy. I have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers, and they don't have to be high end cybersecurity experts, but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections into our space systems. So the skill set is really, really broad. Our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into designing and fielding offensive and destructive space, cybersecurity weapons. They repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit. And the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that. As I mentioned before, peaceful global comments of space, we really need all hands on deck. If you're interested in helping in uniform, if you're interested in helping, not in uniform, but as a government employee, a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important or more able to be developed for our space systems. And we'd really love to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems. >> Lieutenant General John Thompson, great insight. Thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too, and motivation for the young next generation. The United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. Really amazing talk, thank you for your time. Final parting question is, as you look out and you have your magic wand, what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish? It's a super exciting time. What do you hope for? >> So first of all, John, thanks to you and thanks to Cal Poly for the invitation and thanks to everybody for their interest in cybersecurity, especially as it relates to space systems, that's here at the conference. There's a quote, and I'll read it here from Bernard Schriever, who was the founder, if you will, a legend in a DoD space, the founder of the Western development division, which was a predecessor organization to Space and Missile System Center, General Schriever, I think captures the essence of how we see the next couple of years. "The world has an ample supply of people "who can always come up with a dozen good reasons "why new ideas will not work and should not be tried, "but the people who produce progress are breed apart. "They have the imagination, "the courage and the persistence to find solutions." And so I think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cybersecurity innovation are going to be upon a pony ride at the County fair, then perhaps you should look for another line of work, because I think the next few years in space and cybersecurity innovation are going to be more like a rodeo and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes. It is an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem. It's really an honor for me to be able to play some small role in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it while I'm trying to improve the chances of the United States of America in a space war fighting environment. And so I thank all of you for participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you. Thank you. >> Sir, thank you for your leadership and thank you for the time for this awesome event, Space and Cyber Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, I'm John Furrier on behalf of Cal Poly, thanks for watching. (mellow music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of enterprise data automation, an event Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe, >>my buddy, We're back. And this is Dave Volante, and we're covering the whole notion of automating data in the Enterprise. And I'm really excited to have Paul Damico here. She's a senior vice president of enterprise data Architecture at Webster Bank. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Nice to see you, too. Yes. >>So let's let's start with Let's start with Webster Bank. You guys are kind of a regional. I think New York, New England, uh, leave headquartered out of Connecticut, but tell us a little bit about the bank. >>Yeah, Um, Webster Bank >>is regional Boston And that again, and New York, Um, very focused on in Westchester and Fairfield County. Um, they're a really highly rated saying regional bank for this area. They, um, hold, um, quite a few awards for the area for being supportive for the community and, um, are really moving forward. Technology lives. They really want to be a data driven bank, and they want to move into a more robust Bruce. >>Well, we got a lot to talk about. So data driven that is an interesting topic. And your role as data architect. The architecture is really senior vice president data architecture. So you got a big responsibility as it relates to It's kind of transitioning to this digital data driven bank. But tell us a little bit about your role in your organization, >>right? Um, currently, >>today we have, ah, a small group that is just working toward moving into a more futuristic, more data driven data warehouse. That's our first item. And then the other item is to drive new revenue by anticipating what customers do when they go to the bank or when they log into there to be able to give them the best offer. The only way to do that is you >>have uh huh. >>Timely, accurate, complete data on the customer and what's really a great value on off something to offer that or a new product or to help them continue to grow their savings or do and grow their investment. >>Okay. And I really want to get into that. But before we do and I know you're sort of part way through your journey, you got a lot of what they do. But I want to ask you about Cove. It how you guys you're handling that? I mean, you had the government coming down and small business loans and P p p. And huge volume of business and sort of data was at the heart of that. How did you manage through that? >>But we were extremely successful because we have a big, dedicated team that understands where their data is and was able to switch much faster than a larger bank to be able to offer. The TPP longs at to our customers within lightning speeds. And part of that was is we adapted to Salesforce very, for we've had salesforce in house for over 15 years. Um, you know, pretty much, uh, that was the driving vehicle to get our CPP is loans in on and then developing logic quickly. But it was a 24 7 development role in get the data moving, helping our customers fill out the forms. And a lot of that was manual. But it was a It was a large community effort. >>Well, think about that. Think about that too. Is the volume was probably much, much higher the volume of loans to small businesses that you're used to granting. But and then also, the initial guidelines were very opaque. You really didn't know what the rules were, but you were expected to enforce them. And then finally, you got more clarity. So you had to essentially code that logic into the system in real time, right? >>I wasn't >>directly involved, but part of my data movement Team Waas, and we had to change the logic overnight. So it was on a Friday night was released. We've pushed our first set of loans through and then the logic change, Um, from, you know, coming from the government and changed. And we had to re develop our our data movement piece is again and we design them and send them back. So it was It was definitely kind of scary, but we were completely successful. We hit a very high peak and I don't know the exact number, but it was in the thousands of loans from, you know, little loans to very large loans, and not one customer who buy it's not yet what they needed for. Um, you know, that was the right process and filled out the rate and pace. >>That's an amazing story and really great support for the region. New York, Connecticut, the Boston area. So that's that's fantastic. I want to get into the rest of your story. Now let's start with some of the business drivers in banking. I mean, obviously online. I mean, a lot of people have sort of joked that many of the older people who kind of shunned online banking would love to go into the branch and see their friendly teller had no choice, You know, during this pandemic to go to online. So that's obviously a big trend you mentioned. So you know the data driven data warehouse? I wanna understand that. But well, at the top level, what were some of what are some of the key business drivers there catalyzing your desire for change? >>Um, the ability to give the customer what they need at the time when they need it. And what I mean by that is that we have, um, customer interactions in multiple ways, right? >>And I want >>to be able for the customer, too. Walk into a bank, um, or online and see the same the same format and being able to have the same feel, the same look, and also to be able to offer them the next best offer for them. But they're you know, if they want looking for a new a mortgage or looking to refinance or look, you know, whatever it iss, um, that they have that data, we have the data and that they feel comfortable using it. And that's a untethered banker. Um, attitude is, you know, whatever my banker is holding and whatever the person is holding in their phone, that that is the same. And it's comfortable, so they don't feel that they've, you know, walked into the bank and they have to do a lot of different paperwork comparative filling out paperwork on, you know, just doing it on their phone. >>So you actually want the experience to be better. I mean, and it is in many cases now, you weren't able to do this with your existing against mainframe based Enterprise data warehouse. Is is that right? Maybe talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah, we were >>definitely able to do it with what we have today. The technology we're using, but one of the issues is that it's not timely, Um, and and you need a timely process to be able to get the customers to understand what's happening. Um, you want you need a timely process so we can enhance our risk management. We can apply for fraud issues and things like that. >>Yeah, so you're trying to get more real time in the traditional e g W. It's it's sort of a science project. There's a few experts that know how to get it. You consider line up. The demand is tremendous, and often times by the time you get the answer, you know it's outdated. So you're trying to address that problem. So So part of it is really the cycle time, the end end cycle, time that you're pressing. And then there's if I understand it, residual benefits that are pretty substantial from a revenue opportunity. Other other offers that you can you can make to the right customer, Um, that that you, you maybe know through your data. Is that right? >>Exactly. It's drive new customers, Teoh new opportunities. It's enhanced the risk, and it's to optimize the banking process and then obviously, to create new business. Um, and the only way we're going to be able to do that is that we have the ability to look at the data right when the customer walks in the door or right when they open up their app. And, um, by doing, creating more to New York time near real time data for the data warehouse team that's giving the lines of business the ability to to work on the next best offer for that customer. >>Paulo, we're inundated with data sources these days. Are there their data sources that you maybe maybe had access to before? But perhaps the backlog of ingesting and cleaning and cataloging and you know of analyzing. Maybe the backlog was so great that you couldn't perhaps tap some of those data sources. You see the potential to increase the data sources and hence the quality of the data, Or is that sort of premature? >>Oh, no. Um, >>exactly. Right. So right now we ingest a lot of flat files and from our mainframe type of Brennan system that we've had for quite a few years. But now that we're moving to the cloud and off Prem and on France, you know, moving off Prem into like an s three bucket. Where That data king, We can process that data and get that data faster by using real time tools to move that data into a place where, like, snowflake could utilize that data or we can give it out to our market. >>Okay, so we're >>about the way we do. We're in batch mode. Still, so we're doing 24 hours. >>Okay, So when I think about the data pipeline and the people involved, I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit about the organization. I mean, you've got I know you have data. Scientists or statisticians? I'm sure you do. Ah, you got data architects, data engineers, quality engineers, you know, developers, etcetera, etcetera. And oftentimes, practitioners like yourself will will stress about pay. The data's in silos of the data quality is not where we want it to be. We have to manually categorize the data. These are all sort of common data pipeline problems, if you will. Sometimes we use the term data ops, which is kind of a play on Dev Ops applied to the data pipeline. I did. You just sort of described your situation in that context. >>Yeah. Yes. So we have a very large data ops team and everyone that who is working on the data part of Webster's Bay has been there 13 14 years. So they get the data, they understand that they understand the lines of business. Um, so it's right now, um, we could we have data quality issues, just like everybody else does. We have. We have places in him where that gets clans, Um, and we're moving toward. And there was very much silo data. The data scientists are out in the lines of business right now, which is great, cause I think that's where data science belongs. We should give them on. And that's what we're working towards now is giving them more self service, giving them the ability to access the data, um, in a more robust way. And it's a single source of truth. So they're not pulling the data down into their own like tableau dashboards and then pushing the data back out. Um, so they're going to more not, I don't want to say a central repository, but a more of a robust repository that's controlled across multiple avenues where multiple lines of business can access. That said, how >>got it? Yes, and I think that one of the key things that I'm taking away from your last comment is the cultural aspects of this bite having the data. Scientists in the line of business, the line of lines of business, will feel ownership of that data as opposed to pointing fingers, criticizing the data quality they really own that that problem, as opposed to saying, Well, it's it's It's Paulus problem, >>right? Well, I have. My problem >>is, I have a date. Engineers, data architects, they database administrators, right, Um, and then data traditional data forwarding people. Um, and because some customers that I have that our business customers lines of business, they want to just subscribe to a report. They don't want to go out and do any data science work. Um, and we still have to provide that. So we still want to provide them some kind of regimen that they wake up in the morning and they open up their email. And there's the report that they just drive, um, which is great. And it works out really well. And one of the things is why we purchase I o waas. I would have the ability to give the lines of business the ability to do search within the data. And we read the data flows and data redundancy and things like that help me cleanup the data and also, um, to give it to the data. Analysts who say All right, they just asked me. They want this certain report, and it used to take Okay, well, we're gonna four weeks, we're going to go. We're gonna look at the data, and then we'll come back and tell you what we dio. But now with Iot Tahoe, they're able to look at the data and then, in one or two days of being able to go back and say, yes, we have data. This is where it is. This is where we found that this is the data flows that we've found also, which is that what I call it is the birth of a column. It's where the calm was created and where it went live as a teenager. And then it went to, you know, die very archive. Yeah, it's this, you know, cycle of life for a column. And Iot Tahoe helps us do that, and we do. Data lineage has done all the time. Um, and it's just takes a very long time. And that's why we're using something that has AI and machine learning. Um, it's it's accurate. It does it the same way over and over again. If an analyst leads, you're able to utilize talked something like, Oh, to be able to do that work for you. I get that. >>Yes. Oh, got it. So So a couple things there is in in, In researching Iot Tahoe, it seems like one of the strengths of their platform is the ability to visualize data the data structure and actually dig into it. But also see it, um, and that speeds things up and gives everybody additional confidence. And then the other pieces essentially infusing AI or machine intelligence into the data pipeline is really how you're attacking automation, right? And you're saying it's repeatable and and then that helps the data quality, and you have this virtuous cycle. Is there a firm that and add some color? Perhaps >>Exactly. Um, so you're able to let's say that I have I have seven cause lines of business that are asking me questions and one of the questions I'll ask me is. We want to know if this customer is okay to contact, right? And you know, there's different avenues, so you can go online to go. Do not contact me. You can go to the bank and you can say I don't want, um, email, but I'll take tests and I want, you know, phone calls. Um, all that information. So seven different lines of business asked me that question in different ways once said okay to contact the other one says, you know, customer one to pray All these, You know, um, and each project before I got there used to be siloed. So one customer would be 100 hours for them to do that and analytical work, and then another cut. Another analysts would do another 100 hours on the other project. Well, now I can do that all at once, and I can do those type of searches and say, Yes, we already have that documentation. Here it is. And this is where you can find where the customer has said, you know, you don't want I don't want to get access from you by email, or I've subscribed to get emails from you. >>Got it. Okay? Yeah. Okay. And then I want to come back to the cloud a little bit. So you you mentioned those three buckets? So you're moving to the Amazon cloud. At least I'm sure you're gonna get a hybrid situation there. You mentioned Snowflake. Um, you know what was sort of the decision to move to the cloud? Obviously, snowflake is cloud only. There's not an on Prem version there. So what precipitated that? >>Alright, So, from, um, I've been in >>the data I t Information field for the last 35 years. I started in the US Air Force and have moved on from since then. And, um, my experience with off brand waas with Snowflake was working with G McGee capital. And that's where I met up with the team from Iot to house as well. And so it's a proven. So there's a couple of things one is symptomatic of is worldwide. Now to move there, right, Two products, they have the on frame in the offering. Um, I've used the on Prem and off Prem. They're both great and it's very stable and I'm comfortable with other people are very comfortable with this. So we picked. That is our batch data movement. Um, we're moving to her, probably HBR. It's not a decision yet, but we're moving to HP are for real time data which has changed capture data, you know, moves it into the cloud. And then So you're envisioning this right now in Petrit, you're in the S three and you have all the data that you could possibly want. And that's Jason. All that everything is sitting in the S three to be able to move it through into snowflake and snowflake has proven cto have a stability. Um, you only need to learn in train your team with one thing. Um, aws has is completely stable at this 10.2. So all these avenues, if you think about it going through from, um, you know, this is your your data lake, which is I would consider your s three. And even though it's not a traditional data leg like you can touch it like a like a progressive or a dupe and into snowflake and then from snowflake into sandboxes. So your lines of business and your data scientists and just dive right in, Um, that makes a big, big win. and then using Iot. Ta ho! With the data automation and also their search engine, um, I have the ability to give the data scientists and eight analysts the the way of they don't need to talk to i t to get, um, accurate information or completely accurate information from the structure. And we'll be right there. >>Yes, so talking about, you know, snowflake and getting up to speed quickly. I know from talking to customers you get from zero to snowflake, you know, very fast. And then it sounds like the i o Ta ho is sort of the automation cloud for your data pipeline within the cloud. This is is that the right way to think about it? >>I think so. Um, right now I have I o ta >>ho attached to my >>on Prem. And, um, I >>want to attach it to my offering and eventually. So I'm using Iot Tahoe's data automation right now to bring in the data and to start analyzing the data close to make sure that I'm not missing anything and that I'm not bringing over redundant data. Um, the data warehouse that I'm working off is not a It's an on Prem. It's an Oracle database and its 15 years old. So it has extra data in it. It has, um, things that we don't need anymore. And Iot. Tahoe's helping me shake out that, um, extra data that does not need to be moved into my S three. So it's saving me money when I'm moving from offering on Prem. >>And so that was a challenge prior because you couldn't get the lines of business to agree what to delete or what was the issue there. >>Oh, it was more than that. Um, each line of business had their own structure within the warehouse, and then they were copying data between each other and duplicating the data and using that, uh so there might be that could be possibly three tables that have the same data in it. But it's used for different lines of business. And so I had we have identified using Iot Tahoe. I've identified over seven terabytes in the last, um, two months on data that is just been repetitive. Um, it just it's the same exact data just sitting in a different scheme. >>And and that's not >>easy to find. If you only understand one schema that's reporting for that line of business so that >>yeah, more bad news for the storage companies out there. Okay to follow. >>It's HCI. That's what that's what we were telling people you >>don't know and it's true, but you still would rather not waste it. You apply it to, you know, drive more revenue. And and so I guess Let's close on where you see this thing going again. I know you're sort of part way through the journey. May be you could sort of describe, you know, where you see the phase is going and really what you want to get out of this thing, You know, down the road Midterm. Longer term. What's your vision or your your data driven organization? >>Um, I want >>for the bankers to be able to walk around with on iPad in their hands and be able to access data for that customer really fast and be able to give them the best deal that they can get. I want Webster to be right there on top, with being able to add new customers and to be able to serve our existing customers who had bank accounts. Since you were 12 years old there and now our, you know, multi. Whatever. Um, I want them to be able to have the best experience with our our bankers, and >>that's awesome. I mean, that's really what I want is a banking customer. I want my bank to know who I am, anticipate my needs and create a great experience for me. And then let me go on with my life. And so that is a great story. Love your experience, your background and your knowledge. Can't thank you enough for coming on the Cube. >>No, thank you very much. And you guys have a great day. >>Alright, Take care. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. We'll take a short break and be right back. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the Globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Enterprise Data Automation, and event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Everybody, we're back. And this is Dave Vellante, and we're covering the whole notion of Automated Data in the Enterprise. And I'm really excited to have Paula D'Amico here. Senior Vice President of Enterprise Data Architecture at Webster Bank. Paula, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi, nice to see you, too. >> Let's start with Webster bank. You guys are kind of a regional I think New York, New England, believe it's headquartered out of Connecticut. But tell us a little bit about the bank. >> Webster bank is regional Boston, Connecticut, and New York. Very focused on in Westchester and Fairfield County. They are a really highly rated regional bank for this area. They hold quite a few awards for the area for being supportive for the community, and are really moving forward technology wise, they really want to be a data driven bank, and they want to move into a more robust group. >> We got a lot to talk about. So data driven is an interesting topic and your role as Data Architecture, is really Senior Vice President Data Architecture. So you got a big responsibility as it relates to kind of transitioning to this digital data driven bank but tell us a little bit about your role in your Organization. >> Currently, today, we have a small group that is just working toward moving into a more futuristic, more data driven data warehousing. That's our first item. And then the other item is to drive new revenue by anticipating what customers do, when they go to the bank or when they log in to their account, to be able to give them the best offer. And the only way to do that is you have timely, accurate, complete data on the customer and what's really a great value on offer something to offer that, or a new product, or to help them continue to grow their savings, or do and grow their investments. >> Okay, and I really want to get into that. But before we do, and I know you're, sort of partway through your journey, you got a lot to do. But I want to ask you about Covid, how you guys handling that? You had the government coming down and small business loans and PPP, and huge volume of business and sort of data was at the heart of that. How did you manage through that? >> We were extremely successful, because we have a big, dedicated team that understands where their data is and was able to switch much faster than a larger bank, to be able to offer the PPP Long's out to our customers within lightning speed. And part of that was is we adapted to Salesforce very for we've had Salesforce in house for over 15 years. Pretty much that was the driving vehicle to get our PPP loans in, and then developing logic quickly, but it was a 24 seven development role and get the data moving on helping our customers fill out the forms. And a lot of that was manual, but it was a large community effort. >> Think about that too. The volume was probably much higher than the volume of loans to small businesses that you're used to granting and then also the initial guidelines were very opaque. You really didn't know what the rules were, but you were expected to enforce them. And then finally, you got more clarity. So you had to essentially code that logic into the system in real time. >> I wasn't directly involved, but part of my data movement team was, and we had to change the logic overnight. So it was on a Friday night it was released, we pushed our first set of loans through, and then the logic changed from coming from the government, it changed and we had to redevelop our data movement pieces again, and we design them and send them back through. So it was definitely kind of scary, but we were completely successful. We hit a very high peak. Again, I don't know the exact number but it was in the thousands of loans, from little loans to very large loans and not one customer who applied did not get what they needed for, that was the right process and filled out the right amount. >> Well, that is an amazing story and really great support for the region, your Connecticut, the Boston area. So that's fantastic. I want to get into the rest of your story now. Let's start with some of the business drivers in banking. I mean, obviously online. A lot of people have sort of joked that many of the older people, who kind of shunned online banking would love to go into the branch and see their friendly teller had no choice, during this pandemic, to go to online. So that's obviously a big trend you mentioned, the data driven data warehouse, I want to understand that, but what at the top level, what are some of the key business drivers that are catalyzing your desire for change? >> The ability to give a customer, what they need at the time when they need it. And what I mean by that is that we have customer interactions in multiple ways. And I want to be able for the customer to walk into a bank or online and see the same format, and being able to have the same feel the same love, and also to be able to offer them the next best offer for them. But they're if they want looking for a new mortgage or looking to refinance, or whatever it is that they have that data, we have the data and that they feel comfortable using it. And that's an untethered banker. Attitude is, whatever my banker is holding and whatever the person is holding in their phone, that is the same and it's comfortable. So they don't feel that they've walked into the bank and they have to do fill out different paperwork compared to filling out paperwork on just doing it on their phone. >> You actually do want the experience to be better. And it is in many cases. Now you weren't able to do this with your existing I guess mainframe based Enterprise Data Warehouses. Is that right? Maybe talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, we were definitely able to do it with what we have today the technology we're using. But one of the issues is that it's not timely. And you need a timely process to be able to get the customers to understand what's happening. You need a timely process so we can enhance our risk management. We can apply for fraud issues and things like that. >> Yeah, so you're trying to get more real time. The traditional EDW. It's sort of a science project. There's a few experts that know how to get it. You can so line up, the demand is tremendous. And then oftentimes by the time you get the answer, it's outdated. So you're trying to address that problem. So part of it is really the cycle time the end to end cycle time that you're progressing. And then there's, if I understand it residual benefits that are pretty substantial from a revenue opportunity, other offers that you can make to the right customer, that you maybe know, through your data, is that right? >> Exactly. It's drive new customers to new opportunities. It's enhanced the risk, and it's to optimize the banking process, and then obviously, to create new business. And the only way we're going to be able to do that is if we have the ability to look at the data right when the customer walks in the door or right when they open up their app. And by doing creating more to New York times near real time data, or the data warehouse team that's giving the lines of business the ability to work on the next best offer for that customer as well. >> But Paula, we're inundated with data sources these days. Are there other data sources that maybe had access to before, but perhaps the backlog of ingesting and cleaning in cataloging and analyzing maybe the backlog was so great that you couldn't perhaps tap some of those data sources. Do you see the potential to increase the data sources and hence the quality of the data or is that sort of premature? >> Oh, no. Exactly. Right. So right now, we ingest a lot of flat files and from our mainframe type of front end system, that we've had for quite a few years. But now that we're moving to the cloud and off-prem and on-prem, moving off-prem, into like an S3 Bucket, where that data we can process that data and get that data faster by using real time tools to move that data into a place where, like snowflake could utilize that data, or we can give it out to our market. Right now we're about we do work in batch mode still. So we're doing 24 hours. >> Okay. So when I think about the data pipeline, and the people involved, maybe you could talk a little bit about the organization. You've got, I don't know, if you have data scientists or statisticians, I'm sure you do. You got data architects, data engineers, quality engineers, developers, etc. And oftentimes, practitioners like yourself, will stress about, hey, the data is in silos. The data quality is not where we want it to be. We have to manually categorize the data. These are all sort of common data pipeline problems, if you will. Sometimes we use the term data Ops, which is sort of a play on DevOps applied to the data pipeline. Can you just sort of describe your situation in that context? >> Yeah, so we have a very large data ops team. And everyone that who is working on the data part of Webster's Bank, has been there 13 to 14 years. So they get the data, they understand it, they understand the lines of business. So it's right now. We could the we have data quality issues, just like everybody else does. But we have places in them where that gets cleansed. And we're moving toward and there was very much siloed data. The data scientists are out in the lines of business right now, which is great, because I think that's where data science belongs, we should give them and that's what we're working towards now is giving them more self service, giving them the ability to access the data in a more robust way. And it's a single source of truth. So they're not pulling the data down into their own, like Tableau dashboards, and then pushing the data back out. So they're going to more not, I don't want to say, a central repository, but a more of a robust repository, that's controlled across multiple avenues, where multiple lines of business can access that data. Is that help? >> Got it, Yes. And I think that one of the key things that I'm taking away from your last comment, is the cultural aspects of this by having the data scientists in the line of business, the lines of business will feel ownership of that data as opposed to pointing fingers criticizing the data quality. They really own that that problem, as opposed to saying, well, it's Paula's problem. >> Well, I have my problem is I have data engineers, data architects, database administrators, traditional data reporting people. And because some customers that I have that are business customers lines of business, they want to just subscribe to a report, they don't want to go out and do any data science work. And we still have to provide that. So we still want to provide them some kind of regiment that they wake up in the morning, and they open up their email, and there's the report that they subscribe to, which is great, and it works out really well. And one of the things is why we purchased Io-Tahoe was, I would have the ability to give the lines of business, the ability to do search within the data. And we'll read the data flows and data redundancy and things like that, and help me clean up the data. And also, to give it to the data analysts who say, all right, they just asked me they want this certain report. And it used to take okay, four weeks we're going to go and we're going to look at the data and then we'll come back and tell you what we can do. But now with Io-Tahoe, they're able to look at the data, and then in one or two days, they'll be able to go back and say, Yes, we have the data, this is where it is. This is where we found it. This is the data flows that we found also, which is what I call it, is the break of a column. It's where the column was created, and where it went to live as a teenager. (laughs) And then it went to die, where we archive it. And, yeah, it's this cycle of life for a column. And Io-Tahoe helps us do that. And we do data lineage is done all the time. And it's just takes a very long time and that's why we're using something that has AI in it and machine running. It's accurate, it does it the same way over and over again. If an analyst leaves, you're able to utilize something like Io-Tahoe to be able to do that work for you. Is that help? >> Yeah, so got it. So a couple things there, in researching Io-Tahoe, it seems like one of the strengths of their platform is the ability to visualize data, the data structure and actually dig into it, but also see it. And that speeds things up and gives everybody additional confidence. And then the other piece is essentially infusing AI or machine intelligence into the data pipeline, is really how you're attacking automation. And you're saying it repeatable, and then that helps the data quality and you have this virtual cycle. Maybe you could sort of affirm that and add some color, perhaps. >> Exactly. So you're able to let's say that I have seven cars, lines of business that are asking me questions, and one of the questions they'll ask me is, we want to know, if this customer is okay to contact, and there's different avenues so you can go online, do not contact me, you can go to the bank and you can say, I don't want email, but I'll take texts. And I want no phone calls. All that information. So, seven different lines of business asked me that question in different ways. One said, "No okay to contact" the other one says, "Customer 123." All these. In each project before I got there used to be siloed. So one customer would be 100 hours for them to do that analytical work, and then another analyst would do another 100 hours on the other project. Well, now I can do that all at once. And I can do those types of searches and say, Yes, we already have that documentation. Here it is, and this is where you can find where the customer has said, "No, I don't want to get access from you by email or I've subscribed to get emails from you." >> Got it. Okay. Yeah Okay. And then I want to go back to the cloud a little bit. So you mentioned S3 Buckets. So you're moving to the Amazon cloud, at least, I'm sure you're going to get a hybrid situation there. You mentioned snowflake. What was sort of the decision to move to the cloud? Obviously, snowflake is cloud only. There's not an on-prem, version there. So what precipitated that? >> Alright, so from I've been in the data IT information field for the last 35 years. I started in the US Air Force, and have moved on from since then. And my experience with Bob Graham, was with snowflake with working with GE Capital. And that's where I met up with the team from Io-Tahoe as well. And so it's a proven so there's a couple of things one is Informatica, is worldwide known to move data. They have two products, they have the on-prem and the off-prem. I've used the on-prem and off-prem, they're both great. And it's very stable, and I'm comfortable with it. Other people are very comfortable with it. So we picked that as our batch data movement. We're moving toward probably HVR. It's not a total decision yet. But we're moving to HVR for real time data, which is changed capture data, moves it into the cloud. And then, so you're envisioning this right now. In which is you're in the S3, and you have all the data that you could possibly want. And that's JSON, all that everything is sitting in the S3 to be able to move it through into snowflake. And snowflake has proven to have a stability. You only need to learn and train your team with one thing. AWS as is completely stable at this point too. So all these avenues if you think about it, is going through from, this is your data lake, which is I would consider your S3. And even though it's not a traditional data lake like, you can touch it like a Progressive or Hadoop. And then into snowflake and then from snowflake into sandbox and so your lines of business and your data scientists just dive right in. That makes a big win. And then using Io-Tahoe with the data automation, and also their search engine. I have the ability to give the data scientists and data analysts the way of they don't need to talk to IT to get accurate information or completely accurate information from the structure. And we'll be right back. >> Yeah, so talking about snowflake and getting up to speed quickly. I know from talking to customers you can get from zero to snowflake very fast and then it sounds like the Io-Tahoe is sort of the automation cloud for your data pipeline within the cloud. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I think so. Right now I have Io-Tahoe attached to my on-prem. And I want to attach it to my off-prem eventually. So I'm using Io-Tahoe data automation right now, to bring in the data, and to start analyzing the data flows to make sure that I'm not missing anything, and that I'm not bringing over redundant data. The data warehouse that I'm working of, it's an on-prem. It's an Oracle Database, and it's 15 years old. So it has extra data in it. It has things that we don't need anymore, and Io-Tahoe's helping me shake out that extra data that does not need to be moved into my S3. So it's saving me money, when I'm moving from off-prem to on-prem. >> And so that was a challenge prior, because you couldn't get the lines of business to agree what to delete, or what was the issue there? >> Oh, it was more than that. Each line of business had their own structure within the warehouse. And then they were copying data between each other, and duplicating the data and using that. So there could be possibly three tables that have the same data in it, but it's used for different lines of business. We have identified using Io-Tahoe identified over seven terabytes in the last two months on data that has just been repetitive. It's the same exact data just sitting in a different schema. And that's not easy to find, if you only understand one schema, that's reporting for that line of business. >> More bad news for the storage companies out there. (both laughs) So far. >> It's cheap. That's what we were telling people. >> And it's true, but you still would rather not waste it, you'd like to apply it to drive more revenue. And so, I guess, let's close on where you see this thing going. Again, I know you're sort of partway through the journey, maybe you could sort of describe, where you see the phase is going and really what you want to get out of this thing, down the road, mid-term, longer term, what's your vision or your data driven organization. >> I want for the bankers to be able to walk around with an iPad in their hand, and be able to access data for that customer, really fast and be able to give them the best deal that they can get. I want Webster to be right there on top with being able to add new customers, and to be able to serve our existing customers who had bank accounts since they were 12 years old there and now our multi whatever. I want them to be able to have the best experience with our bankers. >> That's awesome. That's really what I want as a banking customer. I want my bank to know who I am, anticipate my needs, and create a great experience for me. And then let me go on with my life. And so that follow. Great story. Love your experience, your background and your knowledge. I can't thank you enough for coming on theCube. >> Now, thank you very much. And you guys have a great day. >> All right, take care. And thank you for watching everybody. Keep right there. We'll take a short break and be right back. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the Globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Enterprise Data Automation, and event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Everybody, we're back. And this is Dave Vellante, and we're covering the whole notion of Automated Data in the Enterprise. And I'm really excited to have Paula D'Amico here. Senior Vice President of Enterprise Data Architecture at Webster Bank. Paula, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi, nice to see you, too. >> Let's start with Webster bank. You guys are kind of a regional I think New York, New England, believe it's headquartered out of Connecticut. But tell us a little bit about the bank. >> Webster bank is regional Boston, Connecticut, and New York. Very focused on in Westchester and Fairfield County. They are a really highly rated regional bank for this area. They hold quite a few awards for the area for being supportive for the community, and are really moving forward technology wise, they really want to be a data driven bank, and they want to move into a more robust group. >> We got a lot to talk about. So data driven is an interesting topic and your role as Data Architecture, is really Senior Vice President Data Architecture. So you got a big responsibility as it relates to kind of transitioning to this digital data driven bank but tell us a little bit about your role in your Organization. >> Currently, today, we have a small group that is just working toward moving into a more futuristic, more data driven data warehousing. That's our first item. And then the other item is to drive new revenue by anticipating what customers do, when they go to the bank or when they log in to their account, to be able to give them the best offer. And the only way to do that is you have timely, accurate, complete data on the customer and what's really a great value on offer something to offer that, or a new product, or to help them continue to grow their savings, or do and grow their investments. >> Okay, and I really want to get into that. But before we do, and I know you're, sort of partway through your journey, you got a lot to do. But I want to ask you about Covid, how you guys handling that? You had the government coming down and small business loans and PPP, and huge volume of business and sort of data was at the heart of that. How did you manage through that? >> We were extremely successful, because we have a big, dedicated team that understands where their data is and was able to switch much faster than a larger bank, to be able to offer the PPP Long's out to our customers within lightning speed. And part of that was is we adapted to Salesforce very for we've had Salesforce in house for over 15 years. Pretty much that was the driving vehicle to get our PPP loans in, and then developing logic quickly, but it was a 24 seven development role and get the data moving on helping our customers fill out the forms. And a lot of that was manual, but it was a large community effort. >> Think about that too. The volume was probably much higher than the volume of loans to small businesses that you're used to granting and then also the initial guidelines were very opaque. You really didn't know what the rules were, but you were expected to enforce them. And then finally, you got more clarity. So you had to essentially code that logic into the system in real time. >> I wasn't directly involved, but part of my data movement team was, and we had to change the logic overnight. So it was on a Friday night it was released, we pushed our first set of loans through, and then the logic changed from coming from the government, it changed and we had to redevelop our data movement pieces again, and we design them and send them back through. So it was definitely kind of scary, but we were completely successful. We hit a very high peak. Again, I don't know the exact number but it was in the thousands of loans, from little loans to very large loans and not one customer who applied did not get what they needed for, that was the right process and filled out the right amount. >> Well, that is an amazing story and really great support for the region, your Connecticut, the Boston area. So that's fantastic. I want to get into the rest of your story now. Let's start with some of the business drivers in banking. I mean, obviously online. A lot of people have sort of joked that many of the older people, who kind of shunned online banking would love to go into the branch and see their friendly teller had no choice, during this pandemic, to go to online. So that's obviously a big trend you mentioned, the data driven data warehouse, I want to understand that, but what at the top level, what are some of the key business drivers that are catalyzing your desire for change? >> The ability to give a customer, what they need at the time when they need it. And what I mean by that is that we have customer interactions in multiple ways. And I want to be able for the customer to walk into a bank or online and see the same format, and being able to have the same feel the same love, and also to be able to offer them the next best offer for them. But they're if they want looking for a new mortgage or looking to refinance, or whatever it is that they have that data, we have the data and that they feel comfortable using it. And that's an untethered banker. Attitude is, whatever my banker is holding and whatever the person is holding in their phone, that is the same and it's comfortable. So they don't feel that they've walked into the bank and they have to do fill out different paperwork compared to filling out paperwork on just doing it on their phone. >> You actually do want the experience to be better. And it is in many cases. Now you weren't able to do this with your existing I guess mainframe based Enterprise Data Warehouses. Is that right? Maybe talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, we were definitely able to do it with what we have today the technology we're using. But one of the issues is that it's not timely. And you need a timely process to be able to get the customers to understand what's happening. You need a timely process so we can enhance our risk management. We can apply for fraud issues and things like that. >> Yeah, so you're trying to get more real time. The traditional EDW. It's sort of a science project. There's a few experts that know how to get it. You can so line up, the demand is tremendous. And then oftentimes by the time you get the answer, it's outdated. So you're trying to address that problem. So part of it is really the cycle time the end to end cycle time that you're progressing. And then there's, if I understand it residual benefits that are pretty substantial from a revenue opportunity, other offers that you can make to the right customer, that you maybe know, through your data, is that right? >> Exactly. It's drive new customers to new opportunities. It's enhanced the risk, and it's to optimize the banking process, and then obviously, to create new business. And the only way we're going to be able to do that is if we have the ability to look at the data right when the customer walks in the door or right when they open up their app. And by doing creating more to New York times near real time data, or the data warehouse team that's giving the lines of business the ability to work on the next best offer for that customer as well. >> But Paula, we're inundated with data sources these days. Are there other data sources that maybe had access to before, but perhaps the backlog of ingesting and cleaning in cataloging and analyzing maybe the backlog was so great that you couldn't perhaps tap some of those data sources. Do you see the potential to increase the data sources and hence the quality of the data or is that sort of premature? >> Oh, no. Exactly. Right. So right now, we ingest a lot of flat files and from our mainframe type of front end system, that we've had for quite a few years. But now that we're moving to the cloud and off-prem and on-prem, moving off-prem, into like an S3 Bucket, where that data we can process that data and get that data faster by using real time tools to move that data into a place where, like snowflake could utilize that data, or we can give it out to our market. Right now we're about we do work in batch mode still. So we're doing 24 hours. >> Okay. So when I think about the data pipeline, and the people involved, maybe you could talk a little bit about the organization. You've got, I don't know, if you have data scientists or statisticians, I'm sure you do. You got data architects, data engineers, quality engineers, developers, etc. And oftentimes, practitioners like yourself, will stress about, hey, the data is in silos. The data quality is not where we want it to be. We have to manually categorize the data. These are all sort of common data pipeline problems, if you will. Sometimes we use the term data Ops, which is sort of a play on DevOps applied to the data pipeline. Can you just sort of describe your situation in that context? >> Yeah, so we have a very large data ops team. And everyone that who is working on the data part of Webster's Bank, has been there 13 to 14 years. So they get the data, they understand it, they understand the lines of business. So it's right now. We could the we have data quality issues, just like everybody else does. But we have places in them where that gets cleansed. And we're moving toward and there was very much siloed data. The data scientists are out in the lines of business right now, which is great, because I think that's where data science belongs, we should give them and that's what we're working towards now is giving them more self service, giving them the ability to access the data in a more robust way. And it's a single source of truth. So they're not pulling the data down into their own, like Tableau dashboards, and then pushing the data back out. So they're going to more not, I don't want to say, a central repository, but a more of a robust repository, that's controlled across multiple avenues, where multiple lines of business can access that data. Is that help? >> Got it, Yes. And I think that one of the key things that I'm taking away from your last comment, is the cultural aspects of this by having the data scientists in the line of business, the lines of business will feel ownership of that data as opposed to pointing fingers criticizing the data quality. They really own that that problem, as opposed to saying, well, it's Paula's problem. >> Well, I have my problem is I have data engineers, data architects, database administrators, traditional data reporting people. And because some customers that I have that are business customers lines of business, they want to just subscribe to a report, they don't want to go out and do any data science work. And we still have to provide that. So we still want to provide them some kind of regiment that they wake up in the morning, and they open up their email, and there's the report that they subscribe to, which is great, and it works out really well. And one of the things is why we purchased Io-Tahoe was, I would have the ability to give the lines of business, the ability to do search within the data. And we'll read the data flows and data redundancy and things like that, and help me clean up the data. And also, to give it to the data analysts who say, all right, they just asked me they want this certain report. And it used to take okay, four weeks we're going to go and we're going to look at the data and then we'll come back and tell you what we can do. But now with Io-Tahoe, they're able to look at the data, and then in one or two days, they'll be able to go back and say, Yes, we have the data, this is where it is. This is where we found it. This is the data flows that we found also, which is what I call it, is the break of a column. It's where the column was created, and where it went to live as a teenager. (laughs) And then it went to die, where we archive it. And, yeah, it's this cycle of life for a column. And Io-Tahoe helps us do that. And we do data lineage is done all the time. And it's just takes a very long time and that's why we're using something that has AI in it and machine running. It's accurate, it does it the same way over and over again. If an analyst leaves, you're able to utilize something like Io-Tahoe to be able to do that work for you. Is that help? >> Yeah, so got it. So a couple things there, in researching Io-Tahoe, it seems like one of the strengths of their platform is the ability to visualize data, the data structure and actually dig into it, but also see it. And that speeds things up and gives everybody additional confidence. And then the other piece is essentially infusing AI or machine intelligence into the data pipeline, is really how you're attacking automation. And you're saying it repeatable, and then that helps the data quality and you have this virtual cycle. Maybe you could sort of affirm that and add some color, perhaps. >> Exactly. So you're able to let's say that I have seven cars, lines of business that are asking me questions, and one of the questions they'll ask me is, we want to know, if this customer is okay to contact, and there's different avenues so you can go online, do not contact me, you can go to the bank and you can say, I don't want email, but I'll take texts. And I want no phone calls. All that information. So, seven different lines of business asked me that question in different ways. One said, "No okay to contact" the other one says, "Customer 123." All these. In each project before I got there used to be siloed. So one customer would be 100 hours for them to do that analytical work, and then another analyst would do another 100 hours on the other project. Well, now I can do that all at once. And I can do those types of searches and say, Yes, we already have that documentation. Here it is, and this is where you can find where the customer has said, "No, I don't want to get access from you by email or I've subscribed to get emails from you." >> Got it. Okay. Yeah Okay. And then I want to go back to the cloud a little bit. So you mentioned S3 Buckets. So you're moving to the Amazon cloud, at least, I'm sure you're going to get a hybrid situation there. You mentioned snowflake. What was sort of the decision to move to the cloud? Obviously, snowflake is cloud only. There's not an on-prem, version there. So what precipitated that? >> Alright, so from I've been in the data IT information field for the last 35 years. I started in the US Air Force, and have moved on from since then. And my experience with Bob Graham, was with snowflake with working with GE Capital. And that's where I met up with the team from Io-Tahoe as well. And so it's a proven so there's a couple of things one is Informatica, is worldwide known to move data. They have two products, they have the on-prem and the off-prem. I've used the on-prem and off-prem, they're both great. And it's very stable, and I'm comfortable with it. Other people are very comfortable with it. So we picked that as our batch data movement. We're moving toward probably HVR. It's not a total decision yet. But we're moving to HVR for real time data, which is changed capture data, moves it into the cloud. And then, so you're envisioning this right now. In which is you're in the S3, and you have all the data that you could possibly want. And that's JSON, all that everything is sitting in the S3 to be able to move it through into snowflake. And snowflake has proven to have a stability. You only need to learn and train your team with one thing. AWS as is completely stable at this point too. So all these avenues if you think about it, is going through from, this is your data lake, which is I would consider your S3. And even though it's not a traditional data lake like, you can touch it like a Progressive or Hadoop. And then into snowflake and then from snowflake into sandbox and so your lines of business and your data scientists just dive right in. That makes a big win. And then using Io-Tahoe with the data automation, and also their search engine. I have the ability to give the data scientists and data analysts the way of they don't need to talk to IT to get accurate information or completely accurate information from the structure. And we'll be right back. >> Yeah, so talking about snowflake and getting up to speed quickly. I know from talking to customers you can get from zero to snowflake very fast and then it sounds like the Io-Tahoe is sort of the automation cloud for your data pipeline within the cloud. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I think so. Right now I have Io-Tahoe attached to my on-prem. And I want to attach it to my off-prem eventually. So I'm using Io-Tahoe data automation right now, to bring in the data, and to start analyzing the data flows to make sure that I'm not missing anything, and that I'm not bringing over redundant data. The data warehouse that I'm working of, it's an on-prem. It's an Oracle Database, and it's 15 years old. So it has extra data in it. It has things that we don't need anymore, and Io-Tahoe's helping me shake out that extra data that does not need to be moved into my S3. So it's saving me money, when I'm moving from off-prem to on-prem. >> And so that was a challenge prior, because you couldn't get the lines of business to agree what to delete, or what was the issue there? >> Oh, it was more than that. Each line of business had their own structure within the warehouse. And then they were copying data between each other, and duplicating the data and using that. So there could be possibly three tables that have the same data in it, but it's used for different lines of business. We have identified using Io-Tahoe identified over seven terabytes in the last two months on data that has just been repetitive. It's the same exact data just sitting in a different schema. And that's not easy to find, if you only understand one schema, that's reporting for that line of business. >> More bad news for the storage companies out there. (both laughs) So far. >> It's cheap. That's what we were telling people. >> And it's true, but you still would rather not waste it, you'd like to apply it to drive more revenue. And so, I guess, let's close on where you see this thing going. Again, I know you're sort of partway through the journey, maybe you could sort of describe, where you see the phase is going and really what you want to get out of this thing, down the road, mid-term, longer term, what's your vision or your data driven organization. >> I want for the bankers to be able to walk around with an iPad in their hand, and be able to access data for that customer, really fast and be able to give them the best deal that they can get. I want Webster to be right there on top with being able to add new customers, and to be able to serve our existing customers who had bank accounts since they were 12 years old there and now our multi whatever. I want them to be able to have the best experience with our bankers. >> That's awesome. That's really what I want as a banking customer. I want my bank to know who I am, anticipate my needs, and create a great experience for me. And then let me go on with my life. And so that follow. Great story. Love your experience, your background and your knowledge. I can't thank you enough for coming on theCube. >> Now, thank you very much. And you guys have a great day. >> All right, take care. And thank you for watching everybody. Keep right there. We'll take a short break and be right back. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE studios, in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation where we go in depth with though leaders driving innovation across tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. The whole concept of self service analytics has been with us decades in the tech industry. Sometimes its been successful, most times it hasn't been. But we're making great progress and have over the last few years as the technologies matures, as the software becomes more potent, but very importantly as the users of analytics become that much more familiar with what's possible and that much more wanting of what they could be doing. But this notion of self service analytics requires some new invention, some new innovation. What are they? How's that going to play out? Well, we're going to have a great conversation today with Stephanie McReynolds, she's Senior Vice President of Marketing, at Alation. Stephanie, thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks for inviting me, it's great to be back. >> So, tell us a little, give us an update on Alation. >> So as you know, Alation was one of the first companies to bring a data catalog to the market. And that market category has now been cemented and defined depending on the industry analyst you talk to. There could be 40 or 50 vendors now who are providing data catalogs to the market. So this has become one of the hot technologies to include in a modern analytics stacks. Particularly, we're seeing a lot of demand as companies move from on premise deployments into the cloud. Not only are they thinking about how do we migrate our systems, our infrastructure into the cloud but with data cataloging more importantly, how do we migrate our users to the cloud? How do we get self-service users to understand where to go to find data, how to understand it, how to trust it, what re-use can we do of it's existing assets so we're not just exploding the amount of processing we're doing in the cloud. So that's been very exciting, it's helped us grow our business. We've now seen four straight years of triple digit revenue growth which is amazing for a high growth company like us. >> Sure. >> We also have over 150 different organizations in production with a data catalog as part of their modern analytics stack. And many of those organizations are moving into the thousands of users. So eBay was probably our first customer to move into the, you know, over a thousand weekly logins they're now up to about 4,000 weekly logins through Alation. But now we have customers like Boeing and General Electric and Pfizer and we just closed a deal with US Air Force. So we're starting to see all sorts of different industries and all sorts of different users from the analytics specialist in your organization, like a data scientist or a data engineer, all the way out to maybe a product manager or someone who doesn't really think of them as an analytics expert using Alation either directly or sometimes through one of our partnerships with folks like Tableau or Microstrategy or Power BI. >> So, if we think about this notion of self- service analytics, Stephanie, and again it's Alation has been a leader in defining this overall category, we think in terms of an individual who has some need for data but is, most importantly, has questions they think data can answer and now they're out looking for data. Take us through that process. They need to know where the data is, they need to know what it is, they need to know how to use it, and they need to know what to do if they make a mistake. How is that, how are the data catalogs, like Alation, serving that, and what's new? >> Yeah, so as consumers, this world of data cataloging is very similar if you go back to the introduction of the internet. >> Sure. >> How did you find a webpage in the 90's? Pretty difficult, you had to know the exact URL to go to in most cases, to find a webpage. And then a Yahoo was introduced, and Yahoo did a whole bunch of manual curation of those pages so that you could search for a page and find it. >> So Yahoo was like a big catalog. >> It was like a big catalog, an inventory of what was out there. So the original data catalogs, you could argue, were what we would call from an technical perspective, a metadata repository. No business user wants to use a metadata repository but it created an inventory of what are all the data assets that we have in the organizations and what's the description of those data assets. The meta- data. So metadata repositories were kind of the original catalogs. The big breakthrough for data catalogs was: How do we become the Google of finding data in the organization? So rather than manually curating everything that's out there and providing an in- user inferant with an answer, how could we use machine learning and AI to look at patterns of usage- what people are clicking on, in terms of data assets- surface those as data recommendations to any end user whether they're an analytics specialist or they're just a self- service analytics user. And so that has been the real break through of this new category called data cataloging. And so most folks are accessing a data catalog through a search interface or maybe they're writing a SQL query and there's SQL recommendations that are being provided by the catalog-- >> Or using a tool that utilizes SQL >> Or using a tool that utilizes SQL, and for most people in a- most employees in a large enterprise when you get those thousands of users, they're using some other tool like Tableau or Microstrategy or, you know, a variety of different data visualization providers or data science tools to actually access that data. So a big part of our strategy at Alation has been, how do we surface this data recommendation engine in those third party products. And then if you think about it, once you're surfacing that information and providing some value to those end users, the next thing you want to do is make sure that they're using that data accurately. And that's a non- trivial problem to solve, because analytics and data is complicated. >> Right >> And metadata is extremely complicated-- >> And metadata is-- because often it's written in a language that's arcane and done to be precise from a data standpoint, that's not easily consumable or easily accessible by your average human being. >> Right, so a label, for example, on a table in a data base might be cust_seg_257, what does that mean? >> It means we can process it really quickly in the system. >> Yeah, but as-- >> But it's useless to a human being-- >> As a marketing manager, right? I'm like, hey, I want to do some customer segmentation analysis and I want to find out if people who live in California might behave differently if I provide them an offer than people that live in Massachusetts, it's not intuitive to say, oh yeah, that's in customer_seg_ so what data catalogs are doing is they're thinking about that marketing manager, they're thinking about that peer business user and helping make that translation between business terminology, "Hey I want to run some customer segmentation analysis for the West" with the technical, physical model, that underlies the data in that data base which is customer_seg_257 is the table you need to access to get the answer to that question. So as organizations start to adapt more self- service analytics, it's important that we're managing not just the data itself and this translation from technical metadata to business metadata, but there's another layer that's becoming even more important as organizations embrace self- service analytics. And that's how is this data actually being processed? What is the logic that is being used to traverse different data sets that end users now have access to. So if I take gender information in one table and I have information on income on another table, and I have some private information that identifies those two customers as the same in those two tables, in some use tables I can join that data, if I'm doing marketing campaigns, I likely can join that data. >> Sure. >> If I'm running a loan approval process here in the United States, I cannot join that data. >> That's a legal limitation, that's not a technical issue-- >> That's a legal, federal, government issue. Right? And so here's where there's a discussion, in folks that are knowledgeable about data and data management, there's a discussion of how do we govern this data? But I think by saying how we govern this data, we're kind of covering up what's actually going on, because you don't have govern that data so much as you have to govern the analysis. How is this joined, how are we combining these two data sets? If I just govern the data for accuracy, I might not know the usage scenario which is someone wants to combine these two things which makes it's illegal. Separately, it's fine, combined, it's illegal. So now we need to think about, how do we govern the analytics themselves, the logic that is being used. And that gets kind of complicated, right? For a marketing manager to understand the difference between those things on the surface is doesn't really make sense. It only makes sense when the context of that government regulation is shared and explained and in the course of your workflow and dragging and dropping in a Tableau report, you might not remember that, right? >> That's right, and the derivative output that you create that other people might then be able to use because it's back in the data catalog, doesn't explicitly note, often, that this data was generated as a combination of a join that might not be in compliance with any number of different rules. >> Right, so about a year and a half ago, we introduced a new feature in our data catalog called Trust Check. >> Yeah, I really like this. This is a really interesting thing. >> And that was meant to be a way where we could alert end users to these issues- hey, you're trying to run the same analytic and that's not allowed. We're going to give you a warning, we're not going to let you run that query, we're going to stop you in your place. So that was a way in the workflow of someone while they're typing a SQL statement or while they're dragging and dropping in Tableau to surface that up. Now, some of the vendors we work with, like Tableau, have doubled down on this concept of how do they integrate with an enterprise data catalog to make this even easier. So at Tableau conference last week, they introduced a new metadata API, they introduced a Tableau catalog, and the opportunity for these type of alerts to be pushed into the Tableau catalog as well as directly into reports and worksheets and dashboards that end users are using. >> Let me make sure I got this. So it means that you can put a lot of the compliance rules inside Alation and have a metadata API so that Alation effectively is governing the utilization of data inside the Tableau catalog. >> That's right. So think about the integration with Tableau is this communication mechanism to surface up these policies that are stored centrally in your data catalog. And so this is important, this notion of a central place of reference. We used to talk about data catalogs just as a central place of reference for where all your data assets lie in the organizations, and we have some automated ways to crawl those sources and create a centralized inventory. What we've added in our new release, which is coming out here shortly, is the ability to centralize all your policies in that catalog as well as the pointers to your data in that catalog. So you have a single source of reference for how this data needs to be governed, as well as a single source of reference for how this data is used in the organization. >> So does that mean, ultimately, that someone could try to do something, trust check and say, no you can't, but this new capability will say, and here's why or here's what you do. >> Exactly. >> A descriptive step that says let me explain why you can't do it. >> That's right. Let me not just stop your query and tell you no, let me give you the details as to why this query isn't a good query and what you might be able to do to modify that query should you still want to run it. And so all of that context is available for any end user to be able to become more aware of what is the system doing, and why is recommending. And on the flip side, in the world before we had something like Trust Check, the only opportunity for an IT Team to stop those queries was just to stop them without explanation or to try to publish manuals and ask people to run tests, like the DMV, so that they memorized all those rules of governance. >> Yeah, self- service, but if there's a problem you have to call us. >> That's right. That's right. So what we're trying to do is trying to make the work of those governance teams, those IT Teams, much easier by scaling them. Because we all know the volume of data that's being created, the volume of analysis that's being created is far greater than any individual can come up with, so we're trying to scale those precious data expert resources-- >> Digitize them-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's a digital transformation of how we acquire data necessary-- >> And then-- >> for data transformation. >> make it super transparent for the end user as to why they're being told yes or no so that we remove this friction that's existed between business and IT when trying to perform analytics. >> But I want to build a little bit on one of the things I thought I heard you say, and that is that the idea that this new feature, this new capability will actually prescribe an alternative, logical way for you to get your information that might be in compliance. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, that's right. Because what we also have in the catalog is a workflow that allows individuals called Stewards, analytics Stewards to be able to make recommendations and certifications. So if there's a policy that says though shall not use the data in this way, the Stewards can then say, but here's an alternative mechanism, here's an alternative method, and by the way, not only are we making this as a recommendation but this is certified for success. We know that our best analysts have already tried this out, or we know that this complies with government regulation. And so this is a more active way, then, for the two parties to collaborate together in a distributed way, that's asynchronous, and so it's easy for everyone no matter what hour of the day they're working or where they're globally located. And it helps progress analytics throughout the organization. >> Oh and more importantly, it increases the likelihood that someone who is told you now have self- service capability doesn't find themselves abandoning it the first time that somebody says no, because we've seen that over and over with a lot of these query tools, right? That somebody says, oh wow, look at this new capability until the screen, you know, metaphorically, goes dark. >> Right, until it becomes too complicated-- >> That's right-- >> and then you're like, oh I guess I wasn't really trained on this. >> And then they walk away. And it doesn't get adopted. >> Right. >> And this is a way, it's very human centered way to bring that self- service analyst into the system and be a full participant in how you generate value out of it. >> And help them along. So you know, the ultimate goal that we have as an organization, is help organizations become our customers, become data literate populations. And you can only become data literate if you get comfortable working with the date and it's not a black box to you. So the more transparency that we can create through our policy center, through documenting the data for end users, and making it more easy for them to access, the better. And so, in the next version of the Alation product, not only have we implemented features for analytic Stewards to use, to certify these different assets, to log their policies, to ensure that they can document those policies fully with examples and use cases, but we're also bringing to market a professional services offering from our own team that says look, given that we've now worked with about 20% of our installed base, and observed how they roll out Stewardship initiatives and how they assign Stewards and how they manage this process, and how they manage incentives, we've done a lot of thinking about what are some of the best practices for having a strong analytics Stewardship practice if you're a self- service analytics oriented organization. And so our professional services team is now available to help organizations roll out this type of initiative, make it successful, and have that be supported with product. So the psychological incentives of how you get one of these programs really healthy is important. >> Look, you guys have always been very focused on ensuring that your customers were able to adopt valued proposition, not just buy the valued proposition. >> Right. >> Stephanie McReynolds, Senior Vice President of Marketing Relation, once again, thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> And thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you buy Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. And welcome back here at AWS re:Invent. We are live in Las Vegas, day three of our coverage right here on the Cube, and we continue our discussion now with Justin Warren and John Walls, with Matt Yanchyshyn, who is the director of solutions architecture at AWS. >> That's right. >> Good morning. Good to see you, sir. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Nick Cayou, vice president of the global ecosystem at Pivotal. And, good to see you this morning, Nick. >> Good morning, thanks for having me. >> All right, first off let's just get your take on what's happening here. We were talking a little but before we got started about here we are, day three, well day four if you count the partner conferences, but last day of the show, and there's still a lot of excitement in the air. >> All the energy out here. >> The show floor's still packed. What have you guys seen this week that's kind of stood out in your mind, Matt? >> Well, I mean people stick around for the third day because Werner Vogels is like a hero for so many people here and so, you know, a lot of buzz is to see his keynote this morning. You know, one thing I've been really excited about is all the announcements around machine learning this week. There's just been an incredible amount of innovation, and people are really excited about the DeepRacer and the DeepRacer league announced this morning, so that, you know, the momentum we're seeing and the excitement around machine learning is really cool to see. >> And from your perspective, Nick? >> I'm joining the marathon towards the middle. I came in last night. Matt and I had dinner. But I think the most impactful announcement I saw coming out of AWS was probably the Outposts announcement, sort of the commitment to hybrid, which, and I know Matt played a big role in kind of pioneering that and so that's super exciting, and I just can't believe how many people have stuck around. I mean, we're on the last day of this thing, and it's like, you know, people are staying after the party. They won't leave the house. >> Yeah, exactly right. Well, at four O'clock they're going to have important things that we're going to think about. DeepRacer, by the way, we've had a couple of guests on. That was a really cool idea about taking literally a small, toy truck, if you will, but programming it and doing some, not reflective learning, but reinforced learning with it, and then actually taking it into practice and putting these cars on tracks and having a yearlong competition. So we'll kind of see next year, how that works out. >> Yeah. >> AWS and Pivotal, all right. So what are the two of aligned with now? What brings the two of you here, and the two companies together? >> Yeah, well, I mean, I think first of all, as companies we have a lot in common, certainly how we think about customers. We're both really sort of customer-obsessed companies. But, you know what I see a lot, I work with partners all day long, and we want to make it easy for both our customers and our partners to embrace modern DevOps, like all these enterprises are going through DevOps transformation, and any tools and partnerships we can create to make that journey easier is really a priority for me and my team. >> Okay, and then from the Pivotal side of the fence? >> Yeah, I would say largely it's our customers. You know, a large portion of our clients have chosen to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is sort of our flagship platform, as a service on AWS. Going back to, you know, tune of 2014 was the first public IaaS we supported after Vsphere, so, you know, I think our customers are pushing us to work together, and I think we've met that challenge. You know, one of the things we're here to talk about from a Pivotal perspective is all the work we've done with Amazon to expose Amazon services to our platform through this technology called a service broker, that you know, over the past six months, Amazon engineers and Pivotal engineers have worked kind of assiduously to deliver to market, and now it's getting in the hands of customers. You know, after this session we're going to go speak with about 50 customers in a private room about how they're deploying Cloud Foundry on AWS and utilizing the service broker to be more productive and drive more innovation of services into their developer community. >> So what are some of the services customers are attracted to? What are they pushing you to put into this service broker? What do they want to do with that? Maybe you could give us a bit of a flavor of that? >> So we came out initially a couple months ago with 18 services that we support, so things like S3, RDS, some of the Hadoop offerings. You know, I think we're going to see the basics, the S3s, probably consumed first, but we're working. We're actually putting some ideas together to see how we can build kind of reference architectures and paradigms to let our customers know how to take advantage of these services like machine learning or some of the Hadoop offerings, etc. >> Yeah, I mean, we started out with some of the IoT integrations already for the service brokers, but I agree. We're starting with the core services, the databases, DynamoDB, RDS, S3, etc. And we're starting to layer in more services over time. >> Well you've got to start with the basics so that you can then build upon that. >> Exactly. >> Which is what Amazon has a long history of doing. You know, you started with EC2 and then you grew beyond S3 and now we have services like SageMaker and things that drive the car with DeepRacer, so it would be nice if we could actually do training models using Pivotal Cloud Foundry. >> Well actually, nothing's stopping us from using PCF. One of the things I love about it is with Cloud Foundry you can use the Service Brokers. It makes it easier for you to adopt AWS services, but nothing's stopping you from using any AWS service, and it's one of actually the great parts of the partnership, so you're not limited to what we have service brokers for. >> Yeah. So, enterprises have been going on this cloud journey for some time, and Amazon's been around for a long time. AWS has had these services for a while, Pivotal as well. Where are we seeing customers? Where's the momentum for customers, where they're transforming their businesses, and we're hearing a lot about hybrid cloud here at the show. Where are enterprises putting their workloads? What are they looking at putting workloads into hybrid as compared to putting things over into public cloud or using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for? >> I guess I'll take it from my angle first. So, you know, approximately 70% of our customers are still running their workloads on prem, right? That doesn't mean to say that they're not expanding those applications out to Amazon, for example, and I think the key trend we're seen is, you know, cloud is becoming more of an operating model, and what we focus on is teaching our clients how to build and rebuilt software. The big sort of surface area below the iceberg for us right now is all of the enterprise applications, legacy monoliths that need to be kind of decomposed and moved into a cloud operating model, modernized through things like data services that we can expose through our platform to something like AWS. And, you know, it's starting to shift. We were talking earlier about the Outpost and how I think the goal is to kind of meet customers where they are together, if that's the best way to put it. >> Yeah. >> Both Amazon and Pivotal. >> Yeah, I mean with the size of customers we're working with, like Comcast and Liberty Mutual and US Air Force, it's not like a single jump into the cloud. It's a migration, a lot of different workloads, a lot of different divisions of these companies. So it's sort of a continuum, and so different companies are at different stages of their migration and adoption of the cloud all over different parts of the business, so I think the hybrid story is really meeting that need. You have some divisions that are going to jump right into server lists and IoT, and then you have other parts of the company that maybe, you know, have a mainframe that they're still tied to, so there's always going to be some of these dependencies, and so I think hybrid story allows us to sort of address all different parts of the companies we work with. >> So what are the factors then? If I'm looking at, you know, a hybrid cloud solution, how do you help people decide what to put where? Because, you know, you got it on prem, it becomes, you know, a heave, right? To move some things over, and so, could be easier to I guess, take the lightest lift and go from there, but that's not necessarily the best route to go, so how do you help people with that kind of decision? >> Yeah, I mean, we believe in the fullness of time that customers will eventually move everything to the cloud but, you know, in the meantime, like I said, it's going to be a multiyear journey for a lot of these big customers. So like if you take, you know, a Liberty Mutual or a Comcast, these are very large companies, and we work with them to find teams and workloads within, and that comes down to people a lot of the time. You know, different teams may be at a different point of sort of agility in terms of DevOps, and if they're able to adapt their software. If their software runs on x86 infrastructure and if they're already using CICD for example and if they're used to containers, then they're going to be good candidates. So I always look to the people and then the products and then decide what they're going to migrate in that order. >> Yeah, and I would say that, you know, there's a lot of big enterprises that are looking to shut down data centers and they've already made a decision to fundamentally move infrastructure to AWS for example, right? And a lot of times we'll be brought in after the fact if you will, to deliver that developer experience on top of an already made, fundamentally an outsourcing decision, so all the reasons, you know, cost, complexity, flexible finances, consumption-based pricing, a lot of that kind of substrate decision has already been made, and we're generally coming in and saying, okay, now let's look at the application architecture. Are there things like latency and/or regulatory requirements that would require you to keep this on prem versus moving completely to the public cloud? Are there services? So, you know, could you move off of legacy middleware for example, on prem, and take advantage of, you know, refactoring and moving applications into the public cloud to improve your cost structure there? There's a myriad of issues. I think we would generally agree. A lot of times we get guidance from our customers in their respective market segment as to what's most important to them. >> So looking ahead trying to sketch out the vision of what we're going to see in the future, what do you think that customers are going to be asking for you, next year, two years out? >> Well, I think we've had a great reception for a lot of the templates and the automation that we've co-engineered. You know, Nick was talking about a lot of the co-engineering. So we have something called the AWS Quick Starts that allow you to deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry really quickly, and so we've had really good reception from customers. >> Yep. >> Like, things that we can make it easier for them to deploy Pivotal and just sort of explore using AWS. We're going to double down on those efforts. More service brokers, more Quick Starts, more Automation more self-service for customers to they can get started with pivotal, you know, quickly. >> Yeah, and I'd add we're also, we support a product we launched about three quarters ago, Pivotal Container Service, on AWS, and so I think we'll see by virtue of the partnership with VMware, a lot more customer demand to run PKS, you know, on AWS, on Outposts, on VM cloud for AWS, and all the variants of the VMware and Amazon partnership as well. >> Yeah, like you said, meeting customers where they are. >> That's right, yeah. >> Well you're about to meet Cisco >> (laughs) that's right. >> So, good luck with that, and I'm sure you're going to get a very positive earful, which is always a good thing and continue that great work with them. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> Back with more AWS re:Invent. We're live here in Las Vegas at the Sands expo, and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back, this is VMworld 2018, you're watching theCUBE. With Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman and we've got a nice presence here front of the VM village, right next to the solutions expo we're over the three days. We've got about 95 guests and 75 interviews. Happen to welcome back to the program Lynn Lucas is the CMO of Cohesity. People are commenting a little bit about our presence here but, I don't know, I think Cohesity has a little bit of a bigger footprint and a few more people have been talking about you there so. First of all, welcome back to the program. >> Well thanks very much for having us again. We've been so excited to be here at VMworld. So obviously of course, customers are the core of our business and yeah, we thought we'd make a little bit of noise the first night. >> Yeah, a little bit. The booth is hopping, people are lining up. You usually have some games you're doing. I know I'd seen it at Cisco Live. Maybe give people just a little taste of what Cohesity's doing at the show. >> Well sure, so you know, we do have a great amazing marketing team here and they've got some cool games going on in the booth but what it's really about is bringing folks in and talking about how we can help them with their, consolidating their data silos and so we've also got eight demo stations in there, live theater presentations, Adam Rasner, who was here on the program earlier. >> From AutoNations, yeah. >> From AutoNations, CIO is speaking again today and what we're here to do is really talk to customers about how we can help them really modernize their data center and move into a hybrid cloud world. >> Yeah, it's always interesting, at VMworld there's you know, customers, I want to spend a bunch of time understanding how to use even more the things that I've got. But then there's also the new stuff. So Cohesity, you have a mix of that. New product announcement Helios, maybe bring us through what customers are really digging into and bring us up to speed on Helios. >> Yeah absolutely, thank you for mentioning that. Well, there's a broader trend which of course you guys have been covering which is data fueling business, but data's fragmented. It's in all these silos. Cohesity's been addressing that for the last several years with Cohesity Data Platform, Hyper converged secondary storage. Helios now adds to that offering and provides a single global unified view of all your secondary data and applications. It's a sass space service but it's not just a dashboard or a monitoring. It is active management which is really going to bring about great efficiencies for the IT organization. >> I was speaking to your CEO, I think it was yesterday we had a briefing and he walked me through some of that and I actually spoke with your customer AutoNation last week as well and they gave me an update on things. And it became quite clear to me that I'd missed something I misunderstood about Cohesity that it wasn't just about data protection. That's just sort of the first thing that you do. And AutoNation mentioned this as well, that they'd started using Cohesity for data protection but then they realized that, well actually I could use this for secondary data storage and they'd already had the platform, they bought it a couple of years ago. And these additional features just arrive on the platform. So is Helios also one of these features that just gets added to something that you've already made an investment in? >> So thanks for kind of calling out those use cases. So Helios is actually available as a freemium offer right now and it's intended for customers that have multiple sites whether those sites be you know LA, Tokyo, Dubai. But also in the Cloud because Cohesity offers capabilities if you're in Adjure, if you're in AWS, and now Google Cloud as well. So our new freemium edition of Helios is going to give that global view, that ability for IT to at a glance see how all of their secondary data and apps are working, do they have any capacity needs coming up, and the ability to role out automated policies globally. And so this is where we hear a lot of interest from IT because infrastructure really frankly has been so primitive right. When you think about it most of it architected in the last century. And they spend so much time just trying to keep thing up to date and keep the complexity down. And Helios offers a single way to manage all of that. And there's a lot more coming in Helios overtime because it's got machine learning capability built into it so I think you're going to see just the beginning right now and a long list of things that'll be coming out over time that will really help IT advance their operational efficiency. >> Yeah Lynn, definitely, Multi cloud is one of the top things we've been seeing at this show and it's been short. The VMworld's position, their partnership with AWS and some of the other providers. Help us understand how Cohesity lives in this multi cloud world, the things like the VMC and all those, how do those tie together? >> Yeah and great questions. So you know, customers, you said, they're in a multi cloud world and what most organizations are understanding is that two things, one, they've got to choose the cloud for the right set of workloads, right. It's not a fantasy. It can be more expensive if it's not thought about in terms of the use cases that they're looking for. Obvious;y has a mass advantage in terms of elastic scalability, compute power. And the other thing I think that now is becoming more to the forefront is that the cloud is created for IT just has many silos. And if you're a multi cloud organization which most are, well now you've got silos of different types between the two clouds. So Cohesity is creating with Helios, a single operating model across any environment whether that be Cloud, Core or Edge. And that is really what we aim to do is create that invisible kind of layer so that IT can focus more on helping the business. You know, I was talking to a prospect here just a couple of days ago and because we're so today instant gratification oriented the CEO just says, hey, I need that file, or I need this deleted maybe because of GDPR. And the IT teams are obviously struggling with how is this happening when I have such complex infrastructure Silos. Helios is the first step in helping to solve that. >> Yeah, Lynn, I'm wondering, do you know, there's so many players that want to be that platform across the multi cloud. VMware put their case forward is to how they do this. You know Microsoft has pretty good positioning when we talk about hybrid Cloud. Can you speak to how Cohesity can be across these environments, partnerships, alliances, eco system, help put this together because no single company can do it all? >> Totally agree with you. I mean I don't think any vendor today could operate on their own. It is an eco system. So first and foremost, VMware is our partner. And the Cloud providers are our partners along with many other companies that are here, Nutanix, Pure. We operate in the secondary world, right. The secondary realm first and foremost and that's the 80 percent of the enterprise data and infrastructure that hasn't had a lot of innovation. You pointed out, it started with data protection. There's a been a lot of pain points there, but it extends to file, to test dev to analytics and we really provide that complement to VMware for customers that are looking for a way to modernize their data center where Cohesity can back up, instantly restore VM's in the case of a disaster. Also move them up to the Cloud for test dev, then spin them back when they're ready to come back into production. So we're a real complement to the primary environment. >> I wanted to get into that a little bit Lynn. So one of the things when I'm talking to vendors and particularly with customers, they sometimes take a solution to remove some pain points. But then once they've actually got something in place there's all of these new possibilities that opens up for them and particularly around the silo aspect. Could you maybe give us an example of a customer who's been able to realize a new opportunity once they use Cohesity to remove some of that siloing and now they can build things on this platform that they've purchased? >> Yeah and so great questions. So one of our customers, you talked about AutoNation, but let me bring up another one. Manhattan Associates, large organization, software organization, also started with Cohesity with data protection and then realized, we can use the same platform for consolidating file services. It allowed them to instead of adding Opex in the form of additional teams to manage their very massively growing environment to reinvest those teams in actually a new model for the business which is to bring out more capability for the business in a faster time than they would of otherwise. So a lot of what we talk about is the operational simplicity that we bring. For every business, what they invest that in or reinvest those resources is going to be different but it enables them in that case to do more in their core business which is serving their manufacturing supply chain customers in a more efficient way. >> And that's quite important I think for IT teams to be able to join with the business and to show that they're actually providing new value rather than being seen as just a cost center which we hear that from IT teams al the time. They're quite sick of being, well you're just a cost, you're not involved in strategic decisions that are important to the business. So having a platform something like this, means that you can be part of those conversations. You can get a seat at the table and be involved in creating new value for the business. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean the analyst community's been talking about this for a long time. I know right, that most of IT unfortunately has been investing, I think it's 80 percent, maybe 80 percent plus, and just keeping everything running and the business gets so frustrated and creates shadow IT. Another customer of ours, so Verizon Subsidiary, XO Communications, another example where instead of having to I believe, invest in seven more folks just to manage their data protection and their file storages, once they were able to invest in Cohesity because of the simplicity of not having so many vendors, not having the complexity of managing silos of infrastructure, they took that same budget and were able to invest it in doing more for their government clients. >> Lynn, wonder if you could give is some of the company updates? Number of customers, you know, we talked a little bit about the product but just kind of step it back at a corporate level. >> Yeah, so the solution's really resonating. We had the good fortune to put out some news about our physical year. We grew 300 percent year over year in revenue which is I think fantastic growth for any company. We're certainly super pleased that the confidence our customers have in us. We saw a 76 percent growth in new customers Q4 over Q3 and this is primarily folks that I think are seeing the benefit of moving to a modern, scale out platform for data protection. As you mentioned, there are others now starting to discover file services. We feel that we haven't even tapped that. And these are, we've mentioned some customers, but others like Hyatt, US Air force. So there are some very large enterprise and government customers that have seen the benefits in the secondary world of adopting the new scale out hyper converged platform. >> That's great. Last thing, we were talking about multi Cloud. I think you had some news you wanted to share about where else we might be seeing Cohesity in theCUBE. >> That's right and so let's break the news here. So we are super pleased to have theCUBE at Microsoft Ignite in the Cohesity booth. We are very excited about that opportunity. Microsoft and as you're obviously being a very strong partners with Cohesity. We do a lot of work with them. And we're excited to bring theCUBE to the Microsoft customer set and your global audience watching worldwide in about a months time I think. >> Yeah Lynn, absolutely. We really appreciate the partnership. And for those who don't know, we love to cover all the shows. We do over 110 shows. Microsoft shows have been on the top of our list and we've talked with Microsoft, we have lots of guests on the program from Microsoft. We've had Fonti Adele on, we've have Brad Anderson on. But it, through the partnership with Cohesity we're there, we're going to have lots of editorial guests from Microsoft, from the ecosystem, our independent coverage. But we have Cohesity as our host. So thanks again. >> Happy to have you guys there and make the opportunity. Microsoft obviously a massive player in the IT ecosystem and it's important that you guys cover what's going on at that show. >> Okay, great and so of course you can always check out at the Cohesity website all the places they're being. To find where we'll be, check out theCUBE.net. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Always great to catch up with you Lynn Lucas. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> And we'll be back with lots more. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here live in Orlando for Cisco Live 2018, it's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman for three days of coverage. Our next guest is Lynn Lucas, CMO of Cohesity, welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Great to be back, thank you, gentlemen. >> So great story, you guys announced huge news yesterday, 250 million dollars in a Series D funding, that's a boatload of capital, a boatload of cash. >> Jon that's a ludicrous amount of cash. >> It is a ludicrous amount of cash. >> You guys are rich, having a big party, Ludacris was playing, this is big news. Why the funding, why the big treasure trove of cash, what's the strategy? >> Sure, so, Cohesity, as you know, has been working on really reinventing secondary storage and this is a huge market, 60 billion dollars, SoftBank only invests in companies that are disrupting big markets and they see what Cohesity's doing and really felt very compelled about having an investment in us to take that forward, to take Mohit Aron, our CEO and founder's vision forward, to really change the world and transform secondary data and applications in the data center, so we're really looking forward to this investment from SoftBank along with Cisco, which is why we're here at Cisco Live HPE, Morgan Stanley joined us and driving new innovation and driving our go to market expansion. >> So Cisco investments put some cash in, obviously they're interested in that, I want to get your thoughts about what's different, and a lot of people are trying to understand the Cohesity story, it's not just storage, there's a cloud game going on now where Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco onstage said it's a whole new ballgame with scale. What's different about you guys around that scale question, because, okay, storage, and backup and recovery we've been around that block before, we've seen other people do it. >> What's different, and does the cloud scale tie into that? >> Cloud is a huge part of this, and Mohit, as you may know, came from Google, he was one of the lead developers for the Google file system, so he gets cloud, he gets scale, I think in a way that few founders do, and his vision has been to bring this cloud-like simplicity to what today arguably is a set of very siloed legacy solutions for not just backup, which you brought up, but also file services, test dev analytics, when you think about it over the last 20 years, customers have basically bought point solutions for all of those areas and they're dealing with a pretty fragmented mess, and then they've been trying to figure out how to get that to the cloud, and it's been very difficult at best, so what's different about Cohesity is it's not just a better backup, we also are a distributed file system that allows customers to put all of their secondary storage into one consolidated hyper-converged platform. >> Lynn, with that much money, one of the things everybody's looking at is what are some of the big hiring moves that Cohesity's gonna make? I've had quite a few friends that have joined over the last year. When you came on board, obviously the marketing organization's growing. Speak a little bit about the culture, what kind of people Cohesity is looking for. >> Well when you join Cohesity, you join a mission, we're on a mission, and it's been a tremendous ride for me already. I haven't honestly had this much fun in tech in really since Cisco, and I'm proud to be there. This time, last year, the company was only about 200 people, we're well north of 600 now. Tremendous growth. Where are we hiring? Really all areas, we're building out engineering in particular in India, but also we opened a new office in RTP earlier this year, sales, and marketing as you mentioned, really across the board, we've seen tremendous demand and so we're scaling the business to support our customers >> around the globe. >> I mean when you're on a rocket ship, sometimes you just gotta hold on, not get blown off as the growth comes in. Where are you guys seeing the growth coming from the marketplace when someone says, hey, what's clicking right for Cohesity, why are you winning, what's the dynamic from the customer, what problem are you solving, why is it working? >> So really we see three areas that click with customers right now. So first is legacy backup, we've got a perfect storm of events going on right now with two major vendors that are having some challenges and customers struggling with the amount of data and how do they start to move that to the cloud for archive scenarios, so that's one. The second is this file services area. Legacy, again, people are tired of paying for those forklift upgrades, and so a lot of organizations, CIOs, we had a major bank in San Francisco, 45 day sale cycles, start to finish, multimillion dollar deal, 'cause the CIO was like, I cannot sign another multimillion dollar forklift upgrade for my legacy vendor, and then cloud. We mentioned that before but, here it was a big theme with Chuck, Google Cloud, we partner with Google, we partner with Amazon, we've partnered with Azure, customers are looking for how can they do archiving, how can they do replication, test dev in the cloud, we make that simple. >> A really paradigm shift on the backup side. >> Yeah. >> I'll ask you a personal question if you don't mind, put you on the spot here. You've been an industry executive, you've seen ways of innovation, >> you mentioned Cisco, so you've seen successes, you've seen some companies, you've been involved with some partners with other folks that have gone here and there in the industry. When you looked at Cohesity, what attracted you to the company, what made you jump, that leap of faith? Because it's always tough for start-ups, it's like am I making the right move, a good opportunity, personally what was attracting you to the opportunity >> when you dug into it and you did the due diligence? >> Great question, three things. One, Mohit Aron himself, true technical genius founder, committed to what he's doing with a very humble sense of serving the customer. Two, the culture at Cohesity is fantastic. People want to work together collaboratively, and then how we are really disrupting the industry I feel that Cohesity is one of those architectures that will be the standard that others will be looking at in the next five to ten years. >> Lynn, there's a lot of discussion lately about products and platforms, and one of the challenges we have today is it's a multi-cloud world, so while customers are making bets, it's, as you said, it's Amazon, it's Google, it's Microsoft, they've got their data centers, they're using a lot of SAS, how do you build a platform that can span all of these different environments? >> Great question, so first of all, I wake up every day and I say to my team many times, and our sales team, CIOs don't wake up going, hey I'd like to buy a platform today, right? Customers want to solve business problems, so talking to CIOs, really what they're saying is, is I don't really care where my data and my applications are, I just want my business users to have access to it at the right time in a compliant way, because compliance has become a bigger issue. So the distributed file system that Mohit has invented, SpanFS, Span is for spanning the private data center to the public cloud, and that is part of the magic of what Cohesity is, is this ability to span seamlessly and create one operating environment independent of whether you are on your private cloud or one of the three major public clouds today. >> One of the things that I said on Twitter, when you saw the news, that couldn't help myself, but I said, hey you got multiple horse on the track, there's a couple competitors you have now in this new area, there was some rumblings in the community around, oh Cohesity, the perfect M&A target, these guys are gonna get bought out quickly, other people are gonna want them to go public, you and I were talking last night off camera around this notion, I want you to just take a minute to explain. This is not a quick flip, the 250 million dollars, when I saw that I'm like okay that's a signal, they're not going anywhere, they're in it for the long game. Talk about that dynamic, those rumors about Cohesity looking for the M&A, not in the cards, >> what's the formal statement on that? >> I would say that Mohit is really determined to make a difference in the world, make a difference in technology, I'd argue he already has done so at Nutanix, he was CTO and co-founder there, he's done it at Google, but he is in this for the long haul, and also SoftBank. SoftBank doesn't invest in small companies, they're looking for those that are disruptive, that are gonna give themselves and their investors a big return, and if you look at some of the other investments that they've made, we're the second largest enterprise software investment after Slack that they've made, they clearly see a longterm future for the company. >> They want a durable company. >> They want a durable company, they see a lot of opportunity, and we're really looking forward to that expansion. >> You're playing the long game. >> Absolutely. >> On this one, so the founder's been there done that, he doesn't need the money, he's been successful. >> I would argue that he's been successful, yes. >> Lynn, love to get your viewpoint on what you're hearing from customers. For the longest time it's, well the enterprise moves slow and there's so much change happening, disruption in digital transformations, what we talk about, you talked about billions of dollars of opportunity, how fast is the market changing, what are you hearing >> from the enterprises that you work with? >> I think that was the myth, that this was an area, particularly about backup that was kind of sticky and it was gonna change slowly. Not from my vantage point in talking to customers, I think that they are looking for a change, and one of the benefits that we provide them is the simplicity to give them agility. When you have got so much operational complexity, we're working with a customer who was looking at having to hire seven more individuals just to manage scale out of backup and recovery for a new government customer that they were bringing online, with Cohesity they didn't have to hire those seven people for that, they could invest in IT in those seven individuals in development. That's the kind of agility CIOs are looking for and they can move faster when they get rid of that complexity, Gartner often talks about that 80/20 rule, right, 80% is managing what you've got. >> I think in some ways is it that the adoption of cloud that's making them need to make a change, or are there other factors that you're seeing as to kind of key drivers for them being open to it. >> I think cloud is an enabler and certainly the business leaders kind of said, cloud is the panacea, I think what we've seen in the industry is that a lot went to cloud and found this doesn't actually solve all our problems and that it's a hybrid cloud world, it's gonna remain that way. It's the business still that's driving them to want to move quickly, and IT wants to do that, right? >> Yeah, it's right to my point actually is that people thought cloud was simple and cheap and when they got there they realized oops, wait, I still need to worry about my data and my applications, 'cause that's, as you said, >> key to what we have to look at. >> Yeah, cloud needs to be used as an augmentation to your private data center and you're gonna have some great use cases. We've got customers that do archiving to the cloud. Easy access, e-discovery, find it more quickly. Customers that will spin up test dev in the cloud, do some work there with the compute resources and then spin it back down, those are great examples of how you can use cloud to augment your private data center. >> Well, Lynn, thanks for spending the time in theCUBE here, and congratulations on the big funding round, your booth is in the center of the hall there, it's all built out beautifully, timed it perfectly with the news. I gotta ask you since we're here at Cisco Live, what's the most important story that people should know about about Cisco Live this year? I mean obviously the world is moving to a whole 'nother era, modernizing cloud, things are being consolidated and reinvested in, platforms are emerging, it's not your grandfather's backup and recovery storage, it's wholly integrated platforms. What's the takeaway for the folks that didn't make it here, what's the big story coming out of Cisco Live, obviously your news is one of the top ones, but generally speaking in the industry, what's the top news? >> Yeah I think Chuck really got it right in the keynote yesterday, I think that this discussion that he had in particular of their work with Google Cloud and bringing together this on-prem and the cloud world in a seamless way so that it doesn't matter, that's a trend, we're here to help make that happen. We think customers like AutoNation, Hyatt, US Air Force are right in joining us in doing that and I think that that's the way of the future. >> Thanks so much for inviting theCUBE to your Cohesity party last night. >> Thank you, gentlemen. >> Take a minute to explain some of the reaction a little bit, big crowd at the House of Blues, who was playing, what was the reaction, real quick. >> We had Ludacris, we thought it would be fun to time a bit of a celebration knowing the news that we had, and was just thrilled to see him engage the audience here, I think they had a good time, I think we all enjoyed some fine food and drink and a little music until the wee hours and thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. >> Lynn Lucas, the CMO here inside theCUBE, Cohesity on the fresh funding announcement of 250 million dollars in the long game, really changing the game, the cloud platform enabling new programming models, new value creation opportunities and new brands are emerging, it's awesome, Cisco certainly building on their leadership here at Cisco Live, this is theCUBE with coverage, day two, Cisco Live, stay with us for more after this short break. 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>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in the windy city, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman this is our second day of covering VeeamOn 2018, second year of theCUBE at VeeamOn Danny Allan is here, he's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. Welcome back to theCUBE, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, very excited to be here! >> Loved the keynote yesterday, gave a lot of detail. The bumper sticker, the summary on your product strategy, how would you summarize your product strategy? >> It is to be the most comprehensive intelligent data management platform that meets the demands of the enterprise. >> So, when you say intelligent data management, people hear that, and they don't--certainly don't go immediately to backup and data protection, so you've expanded that notion of what you guys do, there's a TAM expansion there as well, which is great. What do you guys mean by intelligent data management? >> So, believe it's a journey first of all, right? And it starts with backup in our application, I know that there are vendors that are saying hey this is a new world, completely different. You know what, the cornerstone of this, is still backup in our application so that is the first stage in this journey. We believe that, right now, especially the customers I'm talking to, they're deploying things on the public Cloud, they're deploying things SAS Clouds, it's all over the place, it's growing, it's sprawling, they're trying to get their hands around it. So they have to do that first, is the next step, and then it's an evolution beyond that to okay, now we understand it, now let me do something with it, let me actually drive the business to better outcomes. >> So, some things we know, or we believe anyway, that data protection and orchestration are moving up on the list of priorities for CXOs. That's I think very clear, you would agree. But there's a dichotomy that exists between the perception from the business side, as to, what can be done in terms of data protection, particularly with regard to the degrees of automation and what IT today can deliver. So there's tension there, and there's, frankly lots of opportunity for churn. When you talk to people about, okay, are you going to switch data protection vendors as you go to this digitalization, multi-Cloud? Or you went to them, and they go no we're totally open, we have an open mind. So that's good news for you guys. So thinking about those trends, how do you take advantage, from a product standpoint? >> Well Veeam has been known, I always talk about three words, it just works, people love us because the software works and it's reliable. So that's the starting point in all of this, the opportunity I believe is in that, it just works. And so if we take them through this journey, towards intelligent data management, every step has to be about it just works. In some ways, the step from stage one to stage two, which is aggregating data, is at an infrastructure level, as you get to the later stages of three, four, five, it's it just works at a business level, and so our focus is still going to be on that simplicity, reliability, making sure the platform works. >> So I want to follow up on that, because, it just works obviously is going to resonate with the IT pro, who's got to deal with failed backups, with poor reporting, with lousy recovery, blah, you know, slow, etc, etc, etc, gettin' pounded because they're losing data, we all know that thankless world. But in terms of the business side, there's billions of dollars being left on the table by businesses in the fortune one thousand because they have inadequate data protection, processes, procedures, architectures. Not, I mean there's becoming aware of it, but what's the above-the-line message? So, it just works, how do you crack through that billions of dollars of opportunity and get CFOs to open up the wallet? That is the great opportunity for you guys, I think. >> It is, so they have challenges in a number of areas, right compliance, security, regulatory, we don't talk to executives at the C level and hear them say oh I need backup, I need replication, they're saying reduce my costs. Well if you can leverage it just works, and deploy this in a way that requires less FTEs, that makes it simpler to do it, that can give them attestation, proof, that hey, I can fail over to the public Cloud, I can burst up to the public Cloud or a manage Cloud, if I can give that fluidity, that's an it just works at an ROI perspective. Or, we talked about intelligent data management, sometimes, I'll be honest, I roll my eyes when I hear artificial intelligence. And that's not because it's not real, it's because what we haven't done is taken it just works and applied it to the business. So an example of this, forget artificial intelligence for a moment, one of the examples I give is, if you see malware crossing the network, that is a really good time to do something, let's leverage that intelligence to provide an outcome. And that's an it just works at the business level rather than at the infrastructure level. >> Alright, so Danny, above the message it's, any data, any app, across any Cloud. We have these pesky little things called like, physics, and data gravity, and the like. So protecting, getting access to my data in the public cloud versus the edge with, where we're going to see 90+% of the data in the future versus my traditional data centers where it's providing the stats. It's a complicated world, how do you make it that simple? >> So let me expand our benefits into a third area, so Veeam took off, in that it was easy to use, it was reliable, but the second one is the portability and the agnosticism of the platform, you didn't need media servers, it was all self-describing backup things, VBKs or vibs, without trying to get too technical here, that self-describing capability allows us to move between infrastructures. In some ways what VMware did, at the hardware level, they decouple the workload from a physical server, we're decoupling the workload from the infrastructure on which it sits because it's this self-describing, very portable format, that enables fluidity of movement. >> I haven't heard much about Edge yet, is that a place that you expect to begin to have a play? >> Yes, and I expect we have to do that, and the reason is because a lot of the computing now is happening at the edge and you want to make you actions out of the edge. There's this concept in the US Air Force called the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, and act, and you would try to act out on the edge, but my belief is that data protection systems will do some of that protection out on the edge, but sometimes they won't know what to do, and so the information will be sent back to the Cloud, or sent back to the core to make a better business decision on what should we do with this data. >> You think about your platform, we were talking to Peter McKay about, you've kind of gone from a product company to a platform company. We talked about that a little bit, but I wonder if we can dig into it more from a standpoint of your role as head of product strategy. What does platform mean, where do you see that platform going, can you share a little roadmap with us? >> Platform to me has kind of three connotations to it, one is that you have the capabilities within the platform that are very broad, and we believe we have that, we can cover physical/virtual Cloud, we have orchestration, we have reporting, we have all of those capabilities. The second, though, is comprehensive APIs, you need to have the extensibility in a platform that you can actually talk to the ecosystem of partners. And that's actually the third area, it's being able to work with your Ciscos and your NetApps, and your HPEs and all of our partners to deliver these better outcomes. >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny, last year, Stu, when you saw Veeam, and you took the introduction of those capabilities. I noted, I remember the ascendancy of EMC back in the day, they did a really good job of connecting to everything that was out there. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it's integration work, they just went in and rolled up their sleeves and did the dirty work. >> A lot of work Dave, I've got the scars, living in interrupt lab, so. (laughing) >> And you guys do that dirty work, and every time you do that it expands your total available market. I don't want to say it's unique in the business, but you seem to have an aptitude to do it without it appearing to be such a heavy lift to the marketplace. Why is that? >> Well it's, frankly it's a scalability thing, we're an almost one billion dollar company, this year we should cross a billion dollars in bookings, and if you want to scale, to add more and more partners, you take our storage integrations for example we were doing maybe one a year for a few years, and we recognized all these vendors knocking on our door saying hey, give us that capability. And so we've added, just in the last six months, IBM, Lenovo, Infinit App, Pure. The only way you can do that, is to have a consistent API framework that people can plug into. It's the way we scale. >> Again, I look at a company like VMware, we saw all the sort of integration challenges that they went through, and the limited resources they had, you remember it, and the Cartel got the SDKs first, and it took forever to get the integrations done a year later you might see some function. It just seems like you guys have some sort of good process internally to actually make this stuff work. >> We're the largest small company you've ever met, we're really agile internally. It helps us to respond to the customer requests, they come to us and say hey I want this, I want this. If we can't respond to that quickly we'll never be successful. >> Danny, I just wonder if you can expand a little bit on the Cloud opportunity. Should we be looking to see more Cloud services out of Veeam kind of layer on what's happening, you have the acquisition a year ago, and-- >> Unquestionably, so I'd say 2017 was the year of agents, we added support for physical and for Cloud, but through agents. I tell everyone that 2018 is really the year of the Cloud for us, we started the year by acquiring N2W software, but last week for example, it's not even making huge PR announcements, we just release version two of backup for Office 365, which adds OneDrive and Sharepoint support. And you'll see in the next release of our product, Anton has a break-in session on this today, another huge capability around, not just integrating with the cloud but actually integrating in a way that provides business value. I'm a big believer in, you don't just put a check-box in, I support Cloud, I can send things to the Cloud, it's how do I actually use the Cloud in a way that delivers business outcome. So this year actually, 2018 is about Cloud for Veeam. >> I want to follow up on that because as an observer of this industry for a long time there seems to be sort of two philosophies, and you just laid out yours, you're not a big believer in check-boxes, and I've seen it, you're an old company. We got every feature, and they would take the salesperson, we have this they don't. Grr, headlock, buy it! (Danny laughing) So you're not trying to do the check-box game, you're trying to map business value, or your features and capabilities to business value for the customer, that's how you sell, and emphasize in your sales motions? >> Yeah, so, this is somewhat of a controversial statement, but we sometimes say we won't be first to market with a feature, we'll be first to market with a solution. So you can come out with, for example, sending things to object storage in the Cloud, and if you're sending up a one gigabyte object, that is a totally--you're not going to leverage that in the real world. But if you deliver that in a way that is actually effective, then you can leverage the Cloud as a tool, because the Cloud is not a destination for most of these enterprises, it's a tool in their toolbox that they use to solve a problem. So we're all about solving those problems. >> Excellent. Alright, Danny, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE, we'll give you last word on VeeamOn 2018, and maybe give us a little preview of what we can expect? >> Well, we're really excited to be here, the most exciting thing to me is, is the recognition, the conversation with customers about this journey towards intelligent data management, as you said, most customers are in stage one, stage two, but for us this is a partnership, this isn't us just giving software, this is talking to customers, talking to partners, making them successful. >> Alright well hey, congratulations on a great show, and all the success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here! >> Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. From Chicago, theCUBE, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (light music)

>> Male Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of KubeCon 2018. Part of the CNCF Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with co-host, with Lauren Cooney, founder of Spark Labs, helping me out as analyst this week, great to have our next guest, shared acquaintance, Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, Cube alumni, welcome back! >> Thanks for having me back again. >> Got your voice, you're losing your voice from all the talking you're doing here on Cloud Foundry. >> Cloud cloud cloud all the time. >> So we were talking yesterday, I want to get you on because you guys have done some research. >> Yeah. >> On cloud, and we were chatting about, I should give you a plug on the opening segment yesterday about some of the things you're finding about Kubernetes. Certainly in our bubble, it's so passe now, we're moving on to STO and CUBE Flow, but you have research that, you know, is mainstream tech, outside of the bubble we live in, is actually now evolving into the first inning of Kubernetes, if you will. What does the research say, what's that all about? >> Well, the research says, trying not to apologize already, my voice is all over the place, so we've been tracking containers for now almost three years and I remember three years ago, everyone's like, "Okay, well we've talked about Docker for years now, "it's so passe," but when you got beyond the bubbles where tech is, people were just like starting to think about it. And so containers are just now getting to where people are either using them or using them as proof of concept. But Kubernetes has become a really big part of the conversation the last year, and it's continuing to take it by storm, and so we're starting to see organizations that are interested in it, but in terms of adoption and awareness beyond just the core central, there's still a massive education gap there. And a really big opportunity to educate people, not only on these tools, but what they really want to know is how do these tools help them get through their day and accomplish their work? >> So essentially, there's a lag of sequence of early adopters, fast followers, and now mainstream. Mainstream are getting accustomed to containers, now hitting up on Kubernetes, we're still pushing the front line. >> Well I think, you know, we are, and I think this is one of my observations as well, Abby, is that we look at these technologies, right? And I'm in the hallways, and I'm talking to folks in the cab line and things along those lines, and they're just here to actually learn about the technology, about Kubernetes, they actually don't understand it fully yet, and they're trying to figure out really what to do with it, and their companies have sent them here. And then it's, you know, you talk to the folks that are, you know, kind of were here for the long haul and were there at the beginning of CNCF and things along those lines, and they're like, "Oh yeah, everyone's adopted it," right? So you've got these two spectrums and I think my question to you is, what do you think is needed for this to really cross the chasm? >> Well, I'll actually answer that with another piece of data We do global research, and one of the things we found, we ask about, "What are your priorities for the next "couple of years?" and resoundingly across every persona, so developers, operators, IT decision makers, executives, their top three priorities for the next two years is continuous delivery. So let's think about that: continuous delivery for me is a priority; building that culture change is a priority; and so the tech is there to supplement that. But the real work, the hard work, is a priority, and I think that's exactly where it should be. So as these organizations really implement that continuous delivery methodology, they're going to pull these technologies in to supplement that. >> So it's not a technology problem, it's a people problem. But your point is, to the industry, let's be realistic and understand the segments that are adopting at what pace, matching education or evangelism or transformation at the right piece of the journey. >> Yeah, I mean all this tech, even Cloud Foundry, is a supplemental tool. >> Yeah. >> The hard work is really continuous delivery, building in that culture change, making software a core part of your business, making technology part of your day-to-day conversation, and that heavy lift has to come in order for any of these technologies to be successful. >> You guys have done a great job, I just want to say, Cloud Foundry, I want to give you some props. Congratulations on the work you've done. Take a minute to talk about some of the success. You're an ingredient in a lot of successful applications out there; what are some of the stats? How many people are using Cloud Foundry? What's some of the uptick, share some of the numbers of the performance with Cloud Foundry. >> Well, I mean we're in use of over half the Fortune 500 across every industry; what's been so phenomenal and so awesome about Cloud Foundry, and we really saw this at Summit, is all the industries that are using this to change. But what was interesting about our last summit, which we just had a couple of weeks ago, is all of these companies want to get on stage and not talk about the tech; they want to talk about the culture change. You know, hearing Boeing get on stage and say, "Actually, you know what the real work is "is the transformation we had to undergo "in order to do this work," and hear that over and over again, and it's so awesome to be part of that change because technology needs to be there to supplement that change and be part of that. But it's really great to see this come into fruition, like hearing the stories from Home Depot and Comcast and US Air Force and how it's fundamentally changing their businesses and helping them get out the door at scale, I mean that's really where the cool stuff happens. >> You've had great success there, and a lot of end users too, it's not like a bunch of one-offs. >> No. >> So how's the summit last week in Boston? >> It was amazing. We had half of our attendees at our summit are end users. And you know, the big high I get is like, hearing everyone talk about what they're doing and "This is what I did!" and stuff you've never heard of. Like, "Oh, I didn't realize you were using that," and "Oh, that's a really great way to use it "in very inventive ways," and so it really just refreshes you, like "Oh, this is what matters." The users and how they're using it and what they're going to do with the tech, I mean, isn't that why we're all here, right? And it's great, and they're creating such amazing technologies that it makes you energized about what's going on. >> Yeah, and I think it's amazing to me, cause I was actually at the Cloud Foundry summit as well, and there was one customer, I can't remember the name that got on stage, and they were using like, they had 2100 end users or something like that, developers, their company actually using Cloud Foundry, and I think that was the number, and I think it was really tremendous to see how many people inside of one company are actually using the technology across the board. It was really great. >> I mean, this is all about, I mean we're at a modern software era, and this is a whole new guard coming on board, and it's a whole new architecture. >> And it's a whole new way of thinking about it. Like, you know right now, we talk about how tech and there's a gap and we're pushing the tech and people are going to get there, but it's not going to be too long before the enterprises are pushing back and saying, "Hey, this is what I need, here's where I am, "I'm running at a scale you didn't think about yet." You know we're running, we have a lot of users that are running tens of thousands and thousands of applications: what about when they're in the hundreds of thousands of applications, and what does that look like? And they're saying, "Well I'm going to do this, "and here's what I need to do." >> There are going to be a lot of microservices. Abby, I got to ask you to end the segment. Thanks for coming on, I know you were rushed to come on, I appreciate you taking the time, you're super busy. What's your priorities for next year? Obviously you got a lot of successes under your belt. What's next, what are you going to check off the list this year? >> Well, inner operability is a big theme for me this year. And what does that mean, that means building bridges to other technologies and other projects, like the amazing work that's happening in CNCF and all those great technologies, so making sure that when those technologies mature, how do we bring those to the enterprise, and then really continuing to work on an ecosystem and work with our members and to really get more contributors around the table. >> Awesome, developers and contributors, dev plus contribute, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure. >> Thanks Abby. >> You're contributing your insight and I know you've got the voice going, but appreciate you taking the time, so Kube conversations here at theCUBE here in Denmark for KubeCon 2018, part of CNCF. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, we'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)