>> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE been profiling the leaders in the technology world, women in technology from developers to the boardroom, everything in between. We have two great guests promoting in from Malaysia. Nancy Wang is the general manager, also CUBE alumni from AWS Data Protection, and founder and board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, awit.org. And of course Kate Watts who's the executive director of Advancing Women in Tech.org. So it's awit.org. Nancy, Kate, thanks for coming all the way across remotely from Malaysia. >> Of course, we're coming to you as fast as our internet bandwidth will allow us. And you know, I'm just thrilled today that you get to see a whole nother aspect of my life, right? Because typically we talk about AWS, and here we're talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. >> Well, Nancy, I love the fact that you're spending a lot of time taking the empowerment to go out and help the industries and helping with the advancement of women in tech. Kate, the executive director it's a 501C3, it's nonprofit, dedicating to accelerating the careers of women in groups in tech. Can you talk about the organization? >> Yes, I can. So Advancing Women in Tech was founded in 2017 in order to fix some of the pathway problems that we're seeing on the rise to leadership in the industry. And so we specifically focus on supporting mid-level women in technical roles, get into higher positions. We do that in a few different ways through mentorship programs through building technical skills and by connecting people to a supportive community. So you have your peer network and then a vertical sort of relationships to help you navigate the next steps in your career. So to date we've served about 40,000 individuals globally and we're just looking to expand our reach and impact and be able to better support women in the industry. >> Nancy, talk about the creation, the origination story. How'd this all come together? Obviously the momentum, everyone in the industry's been focused on this for a long time. Where did AWIT come from? Advancing Women in Technology, that's the acronym. Advancing Women in Technology.org, where'd it come from? What's the origination story? >> Yeah, so AWIT really originated from this desire that I had, to Kate's point around, well if you look around right and you know, don't take my word for it, right? Look at stats, look at news reports, or just frankly go on your LinkedIn and see how many women in underrepresented groups are in senior technical leadership roles right out in the companies whose names we all know. And so that was my case back in 2016. And so when I first got the idea and back then I was actually at Google, just another large tech company in the valley, right? It was about how do we get more role models, how we get more, for example, women into leadership roles so they can bring up the next generation, right? And so this is actually part of a longer speech that I'm about to give on Wednesday and part of the US State Department speaker program. In fact, that's why Kate and I are here in Malaysia right now is working with over 200 women entrepreneurs from all over in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia Philippines, Vietnam, Borneo, you know, so many countries where having more women entrepreneurs can help raise the GDP right, and that fits within our overall mission of getting more women into top leadership roles in tech. >> You know, I was talking about Teresa Carlson she came on the program as well for this year this next season we're going to do. And she mentioned the decision between the US progress and international. And she's saying as much as it's still bad numbers, it's worse than outside the United States and needs to get better. Can you comment on the global aspect? You brought that up. I think it's super important to highlight that it's just not one area, it's a global evolution. >> Absolutely, so let me start, and I'd love to actually have Kate talk about our current programs and all of the international groups that we're working with. So as Teresa aptly mentioned there is so much work to be done not just outside the US and North Americas where typically tech nonprofits will focus, but rather if you think about the one to end model, right? For example when I was doing the product market fit workshop for the US State Department I had women dialing in from rice fields, right? So let me just pause there for a moment. They were holding their cell phones up near towers near trees just so that they can get a few minutes of time with me to do a workshop and how to accelerate their business. So if you don't call that the desire to propel oneself or accelerate oneself, not sure what is, right. And so it's really that passion that drove me to spend the next week and a half here working with local entrepreneurs working with policy makers so we can take advantage and really leverage that passion that people have, right? To accelerate more business globally. And so that's why, you know Kate will be leading our contingent with the United Nations Women Group, right? That is focused on women's economic empowerment because that's super important, right? One aspect can be sure, getting more directors, you know vice presidents into companies like Google and Amazon. But another is also how do you encourage more women around the world to start businesses, right? To reach economic and freedom independence, right? To overcome some of the maybe social barriers to becoming a leader in their own country. >> Yes, and if I think about our own programs and our model of being very intentional about supporting the learning development and skills of women and members of underrepresented groups we focused very much on providing global access to a number of our programs. For instance, our product management certification on Coursera or engineering management our upcoming women founders accelerator. We provide both access that you can get from anywhere. And then also very intentional programming that connects people into the networks to be able to further their networks and what they've learned through the skills online, so. >> Yeah, and something Kate just told me recently is these courses that Kate's mentioning, right? She was instrumental in working with the American Council on Education and so that our learners can actually get up to six college credits for taking these courses on product management engineering management, on cloud product management. And most recently we had our first organic one of our very first organic testimonials was from a woman's tech bootcamp in Nigeria, right? So if you think about the worldwide impact of these upskilling courses where frankly in the US we might take for granted right around the world as I mentioned, there are women dialing in from rice patties from other, you know, for example, outside the, you know corporate buildings in order to access this content. >> Can you think about the idea of, oh sorry, go ahead. >> Go ahead, no, go ahead Kate. >> I was going to say, if you can't see it, you can't become it. And so we are very intentional about ensuring that we have we're spotlighting the expertise of women and we are broadcasting that everywhere so that anybody coming up can gain the skills and the networks to be able to succeed in this industry. >> We'll make sure we get those links so we can promote them. Obviously we feel the same way getting the word out. I think a couple things I'd like to ask you guys cause I think you hit a great point. One is the economic advantage the numbers prove that diverse teams perform better number one, that's clear. So good point there. But I want to get your thoughts on the entrepreneurial equation. You mentioned founders and startups and there's also different makeups in different countries. It's not like the big corporations sometimes it's smaller business in certain areas the different cultures have different business sizes and business types. How do you guys see that factoring in outside the United States, say the big tech companies? Okay, yeah. The easy lower the access to get in education than stay with them, in other countries is it the same or is it more diverse in terms of business? >> So what really actually got us started with the US State Department was around our work with women founders. And I love for Kate to actually share her experience working with AWS startups in that capacity. But frankly, you know, we looked at the content and the mentor programs that were providing women who wanted to be executives, you know, quickly realize a lot of those same skills such as finding customers, right? Scaling your product and building channels can also apply to women founders, not just executives. And so early supporters of our efforts from firms such as Moderna up in Seattle, Emergence Ventures, Decibel Ventures in, you know, the Bay Area and a few others that we're working with right now. Right, they believed in the mission and really helped us scale out what is now our existing platform and offerings for women founders. >> Those are great firms by the way. And they also are very founder friendly and also understand the global workforce. I mean, that's a whole nother dimension. Okay, what's your reaction to all that? >> Yes, we have been very intentional about taking the product expertise and the learnings of women and in our network, we first worked with AWS startups to support the development of the curriculum for the recent accelerator for women founders that was held last spring. And so we're able to support 25 founders and also brought in the expertise of about 20 or 30 women from Advancing Women in Tech to be able to be the lead instructors and mentors for that. And so we have really realized that with this network and this individual sort of focus on product expertise building strong teams, we can take that information and bring it to folks everywhere. And so there is very much the intentionality of allowing founders allowing individuals to take the lessons and bring it to their individual circumstances and the cultures in which they are operating. But the product sense is a skill that we can support the development of and we're proud to do so. >> That's awesome. Nancy, I want to ask you some never really talk about data storage and AWS cloud greatness and goodness, here's different and you also work full-time at AWS and you're the founder or the chairman of this great organization. How do you balance both and do you get, they're getting behind you on this, Amazon is getting behind you on this. >> Well, as I say it's always easier to negotiate on the way in. But jokes aside, I have to say the leadership has been tremendously supportive. If you think about, for example, my leaders Wayne Duso who's also been on the show multiple times, Bill Vaas who's also been on the show multiple times, you know they're both founders and also operators entrepreneurs at heart. So they understand that it is important, right? For all of us, it's really incumbent on all of us who are in positions to do so, to create a pathway for more people to be in leadership roles for more people to be successful entrepreneurs. So, no, I mean if you just looked at LinkedIn they're always uploading my vote so they reach to more audiences. And frankly they're rooting for us back home in the US while we're in Malaysia this week. >> That's awesome. And I think that's a good culture to have that empowerment and I think that's very healthy. What's next for you guys? What's on the agenda? Take us through the activities. I know that you got a ton of things happening. You got your event out there, which is why you're out there. There's a bunch of other activities. I think you guys call it the Advancing Women in Tech week. >> Yes, this week we are having a week of programming that you can check out at Advancing Women in Tech.org. That is spotlighting the expertise of a number of women in our space. So it is three days of programming Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday if you are in the US so the seventh through the ninth, but available globally. We are also going to be in New York next week for the event at the UN and are looking to continue to support our mentorship programs and also our work supporting women founders throughout the year. >> All right. I have to ask you guys if you don't mind get a little market data so you can share with us here at theCUBE. What are you hearing this year that's different in the conversation space around the topics, the interests? Obviously I've seen massive amounts of global acceleration around conversations, more video, things like this more stories are scaling, a lot more LinkedIn activity. It just seems like it's a lot different this year. Can you guys share any kind of current trends you're seeing relative to the conversations and topics being discussed across the the community? >> Well, I think from a needle moving perspective, right? I think due to the efforts of wonderful organizations including the Q for spotlighting all of these awesome women, right? Trailblazing women and the nonprofits the government entities that we work with there's definitely more emphasis on creating access and creating pathways. So that's probably one thing that you're seeing is more women, more investors posting about their activities. Number two, from a global trend perspective, right? The rise of women in security. I noticed that on your agenda today, you had Lena Smart who's a good friend of mine chief information security officer at MongoDB, right? She and I are actually quite involved in helping founders especially early stage founders in the security space. And so globally from a pure technical perspective, right? There's right more increasing regulations around data privacy, data sovereignty, right? For example, India's in a few weeks about to get their first data protection regulation there locally. So all of that is giving rise to yet another wave of opportunity and we want women founders uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity. >> I love it. Kate, reaction to that? I mean founders, more pathways it sounds like a neural network, it sounds like AI enabled. >> Yes, and speaking of AI, with the rise of that we are also hearing from many community members the importance of continuing to build their skills upskill learn to be able to keep up with the latest trends. There's a lot of people wondering what does this mean for my own career? And so they're turning to organizations like Advancing Women in Tech to find communities to both learn the latest information, but also build their networks so that they are able to move forward regardless of what the industry does. >> I love the work you guys are doing. It's so impressive. I think the economic angle is new it's more amplified this year. It's always kind of been there and continues to be. What do you guys hope for by next year this time what do you hope to see different from a needle moving perspective, to use your word Nancy, for next year? What's the visual output in your mind? >> I want to see real effort made towards 50-50 representation in all tech leadership roles. And I'd like to see that happen by 2050. >> Kate, anything on your end? >> I love that. I'm going to go a little bit more touchy-feely. I want everybody in our space to understand that the skills that they build and that the networks they have carry with them regardless of wherever they go. And so to be able to really lean in and learn and continue to develop the career that you want to have. So whether that be at a large organization or within your own business, that you've got the potential to move forward on that within you. >> Nancy, Kate, thank you so much for your contribution. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the organization. What are you guys looking for? Any kind of PSA you want to share with the folks watching? >> Absolutely, so if you're in a position to be a mentor, join as a mentor, right? Help elevate and accelerate the next generation of women leaders. If you're an investor help us invest in more women started companies, right? Women founded startups and lastly, if you are women looking to accelerate your career, come join our community. We have resources, we have mentors and who we have investors who are willing to come in on the ground floor and help you accelerate your business. >> Great work. Thank you so much for participating in our International Women's Day 23 program and we'd look to keep this going quarterly. We'll see you next year, next time. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much John. >> Thank you. >> Okay, women leaders here. >> Nancy: Thanks for having us >> All over the world, coming together for a great celebration but really highlighting the accomplishments, the pathways the investment, the mentoring, everything in between. It's theCUBE. Bring as much as we can. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> OpenAI The company, and ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. Microsoft reportedly is investing an additional 10 billion dollars into the company. But in our view, while the hype around ChatGPT is justified, we don't believe OpenAI will lock up the market with its first mover advantage. Rather, we believe that success in this market will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of data that a technology company has at its disposal, and the compute power that it could deploy to run its system. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the excitement around ChatGPT, and debate the premise that the company's early entry into the space may not confer winner take all advantage to OpenAI. And to do so, we welcome CUBE collaborator, alum, Sarbjeet Johal, (chuckles) and John Furrier, co-host of the Cube. Great to see you Sarbjeet, John. Really appreciate you guys coming to the program. >> Great to be on. >> Okay, so what is ChatGPT? Well, actually we asked ChatGPT, what is ChatGPT? So here's what it said. ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text. It could be fine tuned for a variety of language tasks, such as conversation, summarization, and language translation. So I asked it, give it to me in 50 words or less. How did it do? Anything to add? >> Yeah, think it did good. It's large language model, like previous models, but it started applying the transformers sort of mechanism to focus on what prompt you have given it to itself. And then also the what answer it gave you in the first, sort of, one sentence or two sentences, and then introspect on itself, like what I have already said to you. And so just work on that. So it it's self sort of focus if you will. It does, the transformers help the large language models to do that. >> So to your point, it's a large language model, and GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. >> And if you put the definition back up there again, if you put it back up on the screen, let's see it back up. Okay, it actually missed the large, word large. So one of the problems with ChatGPT, it's not always accurate. It's actually a large language model, and it says state of the art language model. And if you look at Google, Google has dominated AI for many times and they're well known as being the best at this. And apparently Google has their own large language model, LLM, in play and have been holding it back to release because of backlash on the accuracy. Like just in that example you showed is a great point. They got almost right, but they missed the key word. >> You know what's funny about that John, is I had previously asked it in my prompt to give me it in less than a hundred words, and it was too long, I said I was too long for Breaking Analysis, and there it went into the fact that it's a large language model. So it largely, it gave me a really different answer the, for both times. So, but it's still pretty amazing for those of you who haven't played with it yet. And one of the best examples that I saw was Ben Charrington from This Week In ML AI podcast. And I stumbled on this thanks to Brian Gracely, who was listening to one of his Cloudcasts. Basically what Ben did is he took, he prompted ChatGPT to interview ChatGPT, and he simply gave the system the prompts, and then he ran the questions and answers into this avatar builder and sped it up 2X so it didn't sound like a machine. And voila, it was amazing. So John is ChatGPT going to take over as a cube host? >> Well, I was thinking, we get the questions in advance sometimes from PR people. We should actually just plug it in ChatGPT, add it to our notes, and saying, "Is this good enough for you? Let's ask the real question." So I think, you know, I think there's a lot of heavy lifting that gets done. I think the ChatGPT is a phenomenal revolution. I think it highlights the use case. Like that example we showed earlier. It gets most of it right. So it's directionally correct and it feels like it's an answer, but it's not a hundred percent accurate. And I think that's where people are seeing value in it. Writing marketing, copy, brainstorming, guest list, gift list for somebody. Write me some lyrics to a song. Give me a thesis about healthcare policy in the United States. It'll do a bang up job, and then you got to go in and you can massage it. So we're going to do three quarters of the work. That's why plagiarism and schools are kind of freaking out. And that's why Microsoft put 10 billion in, because why wouldn't this be a feature of Word, or the OS to help it do stuff on behalf of the user. So linguistically it's a beautiful thing. You can input a string and get a good answer. It's not a search result. >> And we're going to get your take on on Microsoft and, but it kind of levels the playing- but ChatGPT writes better than I do, Sarbjeet, and I know you have some good examples too. You mentioned the Reed Hastings example. >> Yeah, I was listening to Reed Hastings fireside chat with ChatGPT, and the answers were coming as sort of voice, in the voice format. And it was amazing what, he was having very sort of philosophy kind of talk with the ChatGPT, the longer sentences, like he was going on, like, just like we are talking, he was talking for like almost two minutes and then ChatGPT was answering. It was not one sentence question, and then a lot of answers from ChatGPT and yeah, you're right. I, this is our ability. I've been thinking deep about this since yesterday, we talked about, like, we want to do this segment. The data is fed into the data model. It can be the current data as well, but I think that, like, models like ChatGPT, other companies will have those too. They can, they're democratizing the intelligence, but they're not creating intelligence yet, definitely yet I can say that. They will give you all the finite answers. Like, okay, how do you do this for loop in Java, versus, you know, C sharp, and as a programmer you can do that, in, but they can't tell you that, how to write a new algorithm or write a new search algorithm for you. They cannot create a secretive code for you to- >> Not yet. >> Have competitive advantage. >> Not yet, not yet. >> but you- >> Can Google do that today? >> No one really can. The reasoning side of the data is, we talked about at our Supercloud event, with Zhamak Dehghani who's was CEO of, now of Nextdata. This next wave of data intelligence is going to come from entrepreneurs that are probably cross discipline, computer science and some other discipline. But they're going to be new things, for example, data, metadata, and data. It's hard to do reasoning like a human being, so that needs more data to train itself. So I think the first gen of this training module for the large language model they have is a corpus of text. Lot of that's why blog posts are, but the facts are wrong and sometimes out of context, because that contextual reasoning takes time, it takes intelligence. So machines need to become intelligent, and so therefore they need to be trained. So you're going to start to see, I think, a lot of acceleration on training the data sets. And again, it's only as good as the data you can get. And again, proprietary data sets will be a huge winner. Anyone who's got a large corpus of content, proprietary content like theCUBE or SiliconANGLE as a publisher will benefit from this. Large FinTech companies, anyone with large proprietary data will probably be a big winner on this generative AI wave, because it just, it will eat that up, and turn that back into something better. So I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things to look at here. And certainly productivity's going to be off the charts for vanilla and the internet is going to get swarmed with vanilla content. So if you're in the content business, and you're an original content producer of any kind, you're going to be not vanilla, so you're going to be better. So I think there's so much at play Dave (indistinct). >> I think the playing field has been risen, so we- >> Risen and leveled? >> Yeah, and leveled to certain extent. So it's now like that few people as consumers, as consumers of AI, we will have a advantage and others cannot have that advantage. So it will be democratized. That's, I'm sure about that. But if you take the example of calculator, when the calculator came in, and a lot of people are, "Oh, people can't do math anymore because calculator is there." right? So it's a similar sort of moment, just like a calculator for the next level. But, again- >> I see it more like open source, Sarbjeet, because like if you think about what ChatGPT's doing, you do a query and it comes from somewhere the value of a post from ChatGPT is just a reuse of AI. The original content accent will be come from a human. So if I lay out a paragraph from ChatGPT, did some heavy lifting on some facts, I check the facts, save me about maybe- >> Yeah, it's productive. >> An hour writing, and then I write a killer two, three sentences of, like, sharp original thinking or critical analysis. I then took that body of work, open source content, and then laid something on top of it. >> And Sarbjeet's example is a good one, because like if the calculator kids don't do math as well anymore, the slide rule, remember we had slide rules as kids, remember we first started using Waze, you know, we were this minority and you had an advantage over other drivers. Now Waze is like, you know, social traffic, you know, navigation, everybody had, you know- >> All the back roads are crowded. >> They're car crowded. (group laughs) Exactly. All right, let's, let's move on. What about this notion that futurist Ray Amara put forth and really Amara's Law that we're showing here, it's, the law is we, you know, "We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run." Is that the case, do you think, with ChatGPT? What do you think Sarbjeet? >> I think that's true actually. There's a lot of, >> We don't debate this. >> There's a lot of awe, like when people see the results from ChatGPT, they say what, what the heck? Like, it can do this? But then if you use it more and more and more, and I ask the set of similar question, not the same question, and it gives you like same answer. It's like reading from the same bucket of text in, the interior read (indistinct) where the ChatGPT, you will see that in some couple of segments. It's very, it sounds so boring that the ChatGPT is coming out the same two sentences every time. So it is kind of good, but it's not as good as people think it is right now. But we will have, go through this, you know, hype sort of cycle and get realistic with it. And then in the long term, I think it's a great thing in the short term, it's not something which will (indistinct) >> What's your counter point? You're saying it's not. >> I, no I think the question was, it's hyped up in the short term and not it's underestimated long term. That's what I think what he said, quote. >> Yes, yeah. That's what he said. >> Okay, I think that's wrong with this, because this is a unique, ChatGPT is a unique kind of impact and it's very generational. People have been comparing it, I have been comparing to the internet, like the web, web browser Mosaic and Netscape, right, Navigator. I mean, I clearly still remember the days seeing Navigator for the first time, wow. And there weren't not many sites you could go to, everyone typed in, you know, cars.com, you know. >> That (indistinct) wasn't that overestimated, the overhyped at the beginning and underestimated. >> No, it was, it was underestimated long run, people thought. >> But that Amara's law. >> That's what is. >> No, they said overestimated? >> Overestimated near term underestimated- overhyped near term, underestimated long term. I got, right I mean? >> Well, I, yeah okay, so I would then agree, okay then- >> We were off the charts about the internet in the early days, and it actually exceeded our expectations. >> Well there were people who were, like, poo-pooing it early on. So when the browser came out, people were like, "Oh, the web's a toy for kids." I mean, in 1995 the web was a joke, right? So '96, you had online populations growing, so you had structural changes going on around the browser, internet population. And then that replaced other things, direct mail, other business activities that were once analog then went to the web, kind of read only as you, as we always talk about. So I think that's a moment where the hype long term, the smart money, and the smart industry experts all get the long term. And in this case, there's more poo-pooing in the short term. "Ah, it's not a big deal, it's just AI." I've heard many people poo-pooing ChatGPT, and a lot of smart people saying, "No this is next gen, this is different and it's only going to get better." So I think people are estimating a big long game on this one. >> So you're saying it's bifurcated. There's those who say- >> Yes. >> Okay, all right, let's get to the heart of the premise, and possibly the debate for today's episode. Will OpenAI's early entry into the market confer sustainable competitive advantage for the company. And if you look at the history of tech, the technology industry, it's kind of littered with first mover failures. Altair, IBM, Tandy, Commodore, they and Apple even, they were really early in the PC game. They took a backseat to Dell who came in the scene years later with a better business model. Netscape, you were just talking about, was all the rage in Silicon Valley, with the first browser, drove up all the housing prices out here. AltaVista was the first search engine to really, you know, index full text. >> Owned by Dell, I mean DEC. >> Owned by Digital. >> Yeah, Digital Equipment >> Compaq bought it. And of course as an aside, Digital, they wanted to showcase their hardware, right? Their super computer stuff. And then so Friendster and MySpace, they came before Facebook. The iPhone certainly wasn't the first mobile device. So lots of failed examples, but there are some recent successes like AWS and cloud. >> You could say smartphone. So I mean. >> Well I know, and you can, we can parse this so we'll debate it. Now Twitter, you could argue, had first mover advantage. You kind of gave me that one John. Bitcoin and crypto clearly had first mover advantage, and sustaining that. Guys, will OpenAI make it to the list on the right with ChatGPT, what do you think? >> I think categorically as a company, it probably won't, but as a category, I think what they're doing will, so OpenAI as a company, they get funding, there's power dynamics involved. Microsoft put a billion dollars in early on, then they just pony it up. Now they're reporting 10 billion more. So, like, if the browsers, Microsoft had competitive advantage over Netscape, and used monopoly power, and convicted by the Department of Justice for killing Netscape with their monopoly, Netscape should have had won that battle, but Microsoft killed it. In this case, Microsoft's not killing it, they're buying into it. So I think the embrace extend Microsoft power here makes OpenAI vulnerable for that one vendor solution. So the AI as a company might not make the list, but the category of what this is, large language model AI, is probably will be on the right hand side. >> Okay, we're going to come back to the government intervention and maybe do some comparisons, but what are your thoughts on this premise here? That, it will basically set- put forth the premise that it, that ChatGPT, its early entry into the market will not confer competitive advantage to >> For OpenAI. >> To Open- Yeah, do you agree with that? >> I agree with that actually. It, because Google has been at it, and they have been holding back, as John said because of the scrutiny from the Fed, right, so- >> And privacy too. >> And the privacy and the accuracy as well. But I think Sam Altman and the company on those guys, right? They have put this in a hasty way out there, you know, because it makes mistakes, and there are a lot of questions around the, sort of, where the content is coming from. You saw that as your example, it just stole the content, and without your permission, you know? >> Yeah. So as quick this aside- >> And it codes on people's behalf and the, those codes are wrong. So there's a lot of, sort of, false information it's putting out there. So it's a very vulnerable thing to do what Sam Altman- >> So even though it'll get better, others will compete. >> So look, just side note, a term which Reid Hoffman used a little bit. Like he said, it's experimental launch, like, you know, it's- >> It's pretty damn good. >> It is clever because according to Sam- >> It's more than clever. It's good. >> It's awesome, if you haven't used it. I mean you write- you read what it writes and you go, "This thing writes so well, it writes so much better than you." >> The human emotion drives that too. I think that's a big thing. But- >> I Want to add one more- >> Make your last point. >> Last one. Okay. So, but he's still holding back. He's conducting quite a few interviews. If you want to get the gist of it, there's an interview with StrictlyVC interview from yesterday with Sam Altman. Listen to that one it's an eye opening what they want- where they want to take it. But my last one I want to make it on this point is that Satya Nadella yesterday did an interview with Wall Street Journal. I think he was doing- >> You were not impressed. >> I was not impressed because he was pushing it too much. So Sam Altman's holding back so there's less backlash. >> Got 10 billion reasons to push. >> I think he's almost- >> Microsoft just laid off 10000 people. Hey ChatGPT, find me a job. You know like. (group laughs) >> He's overselling it to an extent that I think it will backfire on Microsoft. And he's over promising a lot of stuff right now, I think. I don't know why he's very jittery about all these things. And he did the same thing during Ignite as well. So he said, "Oh, this AI will write code for you and this and that." Like you called him out- >> The hyperbole- >> During your- >> from Satya Nadella, he's got a lot of hyperbole. (group talks over each other) >> All right, Let's, go ahead. >> Well, can I weigh in on the whole- >> Yeah, sure. >> Microsoft thing on whether OpenAI, here's the take on this. I think it's more like the browser moment to me, because I could relate to that experience with ChatG, personally, emotionally, when I saw that, and I remember vividly- >> You mean that aha moment (indistinct). >> Like this is obviously the future. Anything else in the old world is dead, website's going to be everywhere. It was just instant dot connection for me. And a lot of other smart people who saw this. Lot of people by the way, didn't see it. Someone said the web's a toy. At the company I was worked for at the time, Hewlett Packard, they like, they could have been in, they had invented HTML, and so like all this stuff was, like, they just passed, the web was just being passed over. But at that time, the browser got better, more websites came on board. So the structural advantage there was online web usage was growing, online user population. So that was growing exponentially with the rise of the Netscape browser. So OpenAI could stay on the right side of your list as durable, if they leverage the category that they're creating, can get the scale. And if they can get the scale, just like Twitter, that failed so many times that they still hung around. So it was a product that was always successful, right? So I mean, it should have- >> You're right, it was terrible, we kept coming back. >> The fail whale, but it still grew. So OpenAI has that moment. They could do it if Microsoft doesn't meddle too much with too much power as a vendor. They could be the Netscape Navigator, without the anti-competitive behavior of somebody else. So to me, they have the pole position. So they have an opportunity. So if not, if they don't execute, then there's opportunity. There's not a lot of barriers to entry, vis-a-vis say the CapEx of say a cloud company like AWS. You can't replicate that, Many have tried, but I think you can replicate OpenAI. >> And we're going to talk about that. Okay, so real quick, I want to bring in some ETR data. This isn't an ETR heavy segment, only because this so new, you know, they haven't coverage yet, but they do cover AI. So basically what we're seeing here is a slide on the vertical axis's net score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis's is presence in the dataset. Think of it as, like, market presence. And in the insert right there, you can see how the dots are plotted, the two columns. And so, but the key point here that we want to make, there's a bunch of companies on the left, is he like, you know, DataRobot and C3 AI and some others, but the big whales, Google, AWS, Microsoft, are really dominant in this market. So that's really the key takeaway that, can we- >> I notice IBM is way low. >> Yeah, IBM's low, and actually bring that back up and you, but then you see Oracle who actually is injecting. So I guess that's the other point is, you're not necessarily going to go buy AI, and you know, build your own AI, you're going to, it's going to be there and, it, Salesforce is going to embed it into its platform, the SaaS companies, and you're going to purchase AI. You're not necessarily going to build it. But some companies obviously are. >> I mean to quote IBM's general manager Rob Thomas, "You can't have AI with IA." information architecture and David Flynn- >> You can't Have AI without IA >> without, you can't have AI without IA. You can't have, if you have an Information Architecture, you then can power AI. Yesterday David Flynn, with Hammersmith, was on our Supercloud. He was pointing out that the relationship of storage, where you store things, also impacts the data and stressablity, and Zhamak from Nextdata, she was pointing out that same thing. So the data problem factors into all this too, Dave. >> So you got the big cloud and internet giants, they're all poised to go after this opportunity. Microsoft is investing up to 10 billion. Google's code red, which was, you know, the headline in the New York Times. Of course Apple is there and several alternatives in the market today. Guys like Chinchilla, Bloom, and there's a company Jasper and several others, and then Lena Khan looms large and the government's around the world, EU, US, China, all taking notice before the market really is coalesced around a single player. You know, John, you mentioned Netscape, they kind of really, the US government was way late to that game. It was kind of game over. And Netscape, I remember Barksdale was like, "Eh, we're going to be selling software in the enterprise anyway." and then, pshew, the company just dissipated. So, but it looks like the US government, especially with Lena Khan, they're changing the definition of antitrust and what the cause is to go after people, and they're really much more aggressive. It's only what, two years ago that (indistinct). >> Yeah, the problem I have with the federal oversight is this, they're always like late to the game, and they're slow to catch up. So in other words, they're working on stuff that should have been solved a year and a half, two years ago around some of the social networks hiding behind some of the rules around open web back in the days, and I think- >> But they're like 15 years late to that. >> Yeah, and now they got this new thing on top of it. So like, I just worry about them getting their fingers. >> But there's only two years, you know, OpenAI. >> No, but the thing (indistinct). >> No, they're still fighting other battles. But the problem with government is that they're going to label Big Tech as like a evil thing like Pharma, it's like smoke- >> You know Lena Khan wants to kill Big Tech, there's no question. >> So I think Big Tech is getting a very seriously bad rap. And I think anything that the government does that shades darkness on tech, is politically motivated in most cases. You can almost look at everything, and my 80 20 rule is in play here. 80% of the government activity around tech is bullshit, it's politically motivated, and the 20% is probably relevant, but off the mark and not organized. >> Well market forces have always been the determining factor of success. The governments, you know, have been pretty much failed. I mean you look at IBM's antitrust, that, what did that do? The market ultimately beat them. You look at Microsoft back in the day, right? Windows 95 was peaking, the government came in. But you know, like you said, they missed the web, right, and >> so they were hanging on- >> There's nobody in government >> to Windows. >> that actually knows- >> And so, you, I think you're right. It's market forces that are going to determine this. But Sarbjeet, what do you make of Microsoft's big bet here, you weren't impressed with with Nadella. How do you think, where are they going to apply it? Is this going to be a Hail Mary for Bing, or is it going to be applied elsewhere? What do you think. >> They are saying that they will, sort of, weave this into their products, office products, productivity and also to write code as well, developer productivity as well. That's a big play for them. But coming back to your antitrust sort of comments, right? I believe the, your comment was like, oh, fed was late 10 years or 15 years earlier, but now they're two years. But things are moving very fast now as compared to they used to move. >> So two years is like 10 Years. >> Yeah, two years is like 10 years. Just want to make that point. (Dave laughs) This thing is going like wildfire. Any new tech which comes in that I think they're going against distribution channels. Lina Khan has commented time and again that the marketplace model is that she wants to have some grip on. Cloud marketplaces are a kind of monopolistic kind of way. >> I don't, I don't see this, I don't see a Chat AI. >> You told me it's not Bing, you had an interesting comment. >> No, no. First of all, this is great from Microsoft. If you're Microsoft- >> Why? >> Because Microsoft doesn't have the AI chops that Google has, right? Google is got so much core competency on how they run their search, how they run their backends, their cloud, even though they don't get a lot of cloud market share in the enterprise, they got a kick ass cloud cause they needed one. >> Totally. >> They've invented SRE. I mean Google's development and engineering chops are off the scales, right? Amazon's got some good chops, but Google's got like 10 times more chops than AWS in my opinion. Cloud's a whole different story. Microsoft gets AI, they get a playbook, they get a product they can render into, the not only Bing, productivity software, helping people write papers, PowerPoint, also don't forget the cloud AI can super help. We had this conversation on our Supercloud event, where AI's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting around understanding observability and managing service meshes, to managing microservices, to turning on and off applications, and or maybe writing code in real time. So there's a plethora of use cases for Microsoft to deploy this. combined with their R and D budgets, they can then turbocharge more research, build on it. So I think this gives them a car in the game, Google may have pole position with AI, but this puts Microsoft right in the game, and they already have a lot of stuff going on. But this just, I mean everything gets lifted up. Security, cloud, productivity suite, everything. >> What's under the hood at Google, and why aren't they talking about it? I mean they got to be freaked out about this. No? Or do they have kind of a magic bullet? >> I think they have the, they have the chops definitely. Magic bullet, I don't know where they are, as compared to the ChatGPT 3 or 4 models. Like they, but if you look at the online sort of activity and the videos put out there from Google folks, Google technology folks, that's account you should look at if you are looking there, they have put all these distinctions what ChatGPT 3 has used, they have been talking about for a while as well. So it's not like it's a secret thing that you cannot replicate. As you said earlier, like in the beginning of this segment, that anybody who has more data and the capacity to process that data, which Google has both, I think they will win this. >> Obviously living in Palo Alto where the Google founders are, and Google's headquarters next town over we have- >> We're so close to them. We have inside information on some of the thinking and that hasn't been reported by any outlet yet. And that is, is that, from what I'm hearing from my sources, is Google has it, they don't want to release it for many reasons. One is it might screw up their search monopoly, one, two, they're worried about the accuracy, 'cause Google will get sued. 'Cause a lot of people are jamming on this ChatGPT as, "Oh it does everything for me." when it's clearly not a hundred percent accurate all the time. >> So Lina Kahn is looming, and so Google's like be careful. >> Yeah so Google's just like, this is the third, could be a third rail. >> But the first thing you said is a concern. >> Well no. >> The disruptive (indistinct) >> What they will do is do a Waymo kind of thing, where they spin out a separate company. >> They're doing that. >> The discussions happening, they're going to spin out the separate company and put it over there, and saying, "This is AI, got search over there, don't touch that search, 'cause that's where all the revenue is." (chuckles) >> So, okay, so that's how they deal with the Clay Christensen dilemma. What's the business model here? I mean it's not advertising, right? Is it to charge you for a query? What, how do you make money at this? >> It's a good question, I mean my thinking is, first of all, it's cool to type stuff in and see a paper get written, or write a blog post, or gimme a marketing slogan for this or that or write some code. I think the API side of the business will be critical. And I think Howie Xu, I know you're going to reference some of his comments yesterday on Supercloud, I think this brings a whole 'nother user interface into technology consumption. I think the business model, not yet clear, but it will probably be some sort of either API and developer environment or just a straight up free consumer product, with some sort of freemium backend thing for business. >> And he was saying too, it's natural language is the way in which you're going to interact with these systems. >> I think it's APIs, it's APIs, APIs, APIs, because these people who are cooking up these models, and it takes a lot of compute power to train these and to, for inference as well. Somebody did the analysis on the how many cents a Google search costs to Google, and how many cents the ChatGPT query costs. It's, you know, 100x or something on that. You can take a look at that. >> A 100x on which side? >> You're saying two orders of magnitude more expensive for ChatGPT >> Much more, yeah. >> Than for Google. >> It's very expensive. >> So Google's got the data, they got the infrastructure and they got, you're saying they got the cost (indistinct) >> No actually it's a simple query as well, but they are trying to put together the answers, and they're going through a lot more data versus index data already, you know. >> Let me clarify, you're saying that Google's version of ChatGPT is more efficient? >> No, I'm, I'm saying Google search results. >> Ah, search results. >> What are used to today, but cheaper. >> But that, does that, is that going to confer advantage to Google's large language (indistinct)? >> It will, because there were deep science (indistinct). >> Google, I don't think Google search is doing a large language model on their search, it's keyword search. You know, what's the weather in Santa Cruz? Or how, what's the weather going to be? Or you know, how do I find this? Now they have done a smart job of doing some things with those queries, auto complete, re direct navigation. But it's, it's not entity. It's not like, "Hey, what's Dave Vellante thinking this week in Breaking Analysis?" ChatGPT might get that, because it'll get your Breaking Analysis, it'll synthesize it. There'll be some, maybe some clips. It'll be like, you know, I mean. >> Well I got to tell you, I asked ChatGPT to, like, I said, I'm going to enter a transcript of a discussion I had with Nir Zuk, the CTO of Palo Alto Networks, And I want you to write a 750 word blog. I never input the transcript. It wrote a 750 word blog. It attributed quotes to him, and it just pulled a bunch of stuff that, and said, okay, here it is. It talked about Supercloud, it defined Supercloud. >> It's made, it makes you- >> Wow, But it was a big lie. It was fraudulent, but still, blew me away. >> Again, vanilla content and non accurate content. So we are going to see a surge of misinformation on steroids, but I call it the vanilla content. Wow, that's just so boring, (indistinct). >> There's so many dangers. >> Make your point, cause we got to, almost out of time. >> Okay, so the consumption, like how do you consume this thing. As humans, we are consuming it and we are, like, getting a nicely, like, surprisingly shocked, you know, wow, that's cool. It's going to increase productivity and all that stuff, right? And on the danger side as well, the bad actors can take hold of it and create fake content and we have the fake sort of intelligence, if you go out there. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we are as humans are consuming this as language. Like we read that, we listen to it, whatever format we consume that is, but the ultimate usage of that will be when the machines can take that output from likes of ChatGPT, and do actions based on that. The robots can work, the robot can paint your house, we were talking about, right? Right now we can't do that. >> Data apps. >> So the data has to be ingested by the machines. It has to be digestible by the machines. And the machines cannot digest unorganized data right now, we will get better on the ingestion side as well. So we are getting better. >> Data, reasoning, insights, and action. >> I like that mall, paint my house. >> So, okay- >> By the way, that means drones that'll come in. Spray painting your house. >> Hey, it wasn't too long ago that robots couldn't climb stairs, as I like to point out. Okay, and of course it's no surprise the venture capitalists are lining up to eat at the trough, as I'd like to say. Let's hear, you'd referenced this earlier, John, let's hear what AI expert Howie Xu said at the Supercloud event, about what it takes to clone ChatGPT. Please, play the clip. >> So one of the VCs actually asked me the other day, right? "Hey, how much money do I need to spend, invest to get a, you know, another shot to the openAI sort of the level." You know, I did a (indistinct) >> Line up. >> A hundred million dollar is the order of magnitude that I came up with, right? You know, not a billion, not 10 million, right? So a hundred- >> Guys a hundred million dollars, that's an astoundingly low figure. What do you make of it? >> I was in an interview with, I was interviewing, I think he said hundred million or so, but in the hundreds of millions, not a billion right? >> You were trying to get him up, you were like "Hundreds of millions." >> Well I think, I- >> He's like, eh, not 10, not a billion. >> Well first of all, Howie Xu's an expert machine learning. He's at Zscaler, he's a machine learning AI guy. But he comes from VMware, he's got his technology pedigrees really off the chart. Great friend of theCUBE and kind of like a CUBE analyst for us. And he's smart. He's right. I think the barriers to entry from a dollar standpoint are lower than say the CapEx required to compete with AWS. Clearly, the CapEx spending to build all the tech for the run a cloud. >> And you don't need a huge sales force. >> And in some case apps too, it's the same thing. But I think it's not that hard. >> But am I right about that? You don't need a huge sales force either. It's, what, you know >> If the product's good, it will sell, this is a new era. The better mouse trap will win. This is the new economics in software, right? So- >> Because you look at the amount of money Lacework, and Snyk, Snowflake, Databrooks. Look at the amount of money they've raised. I mean it's like a billion dollars before they get to IPO or more. 'Cause they need promotion, they need go to market. You don't need (indistinct) >> OpenAI's been working on this for multiple five years plus it's, hasn't, wasn't born yesterday. Took a lot of years to get going. And Sam is depositioning all the success, because he's trying to manage expectations, To your point Sarbjeet, earlier. It's like, yeah, he's trying to "Whoa, whoa, settle down everybody, (Dave laughs) it's not that great." because he doesn't want to fall into that, you know, hero and then get taken down, so. >> It may take a 100 million or 150 or 200 million to train the model. But to, for the inference to, yeah to for the inference machine, It will take a lot more, I believe. >> Give it, so imagine, >> Because- >> Go ahead, sorry. >> Go ahead. But because it consumes a lot more compute cycles and it's certain level of storage and everything, right, which they already have. So I think to compute is different. To frame the model is a different cost. But to run the business is different, because I think 100 million can go into just fighting the Fed. >> Well there's a flywheel too. >> Oh that's (indistinct) >> (indistinct) >> We are running the business, right? >> It's an interesting number, but it's also kind of, like, context to it. So here, a hundred million spend it, you get there, but you got to factor in the fact that the ways companies win these days is critical mass scale, hitting a flywheel. If they can keep that flywheel of the value that they got going on and get better, you can almost imagine a marketplace where, hey, we have proprietary data, we're SiliconANGLE in theCUBE. We have proprietary content, CUBE videos, transcripts. Well wouldn't it be great if someone in a marketplace could sell a module for us, right? We buy that, Amazon's thing and things like that. So if they can get a marketplace going where you can apply to data sets that may be proprietary, you can start to see this become bigger. And so I think the key barriers to entry is going to be success. I'll give you an example, Reddit. Reddit is successful and it's hard to copy, not because of the software. >> They built the moat. >> Because you can, buy Reddit open source software and try To compete. >> They built the moat with their community. >> Their community, their scale, their user expectation. Twitter, we referenced earlier, that thing should have gone under the first two years, but there was such a great emotional product. People would tolerate the fail whale. And then, you know, well that was a whole 'nother thing. >> Then a plane landed in (John laughs) the Hudson and it was over. >> I think verticals, a lot of verticals will build applications using these models like for lawyers, for doctors, for scientists, for content creators, for- >> So you'll have many hundreds of millions of dollars investments that are going to be seeping out. If, all right, we got to wrap, if you had to put odds on it that that OpenAI is going to be the leader, maybe not a winner take all leader, but like you look at like Amazon and cloud, they're not winner take all, these aren't necessarily winner take all markets. It's not necessarily a zero sum game, but let's call it winner take most. What odds would you give that open AI 10 years from now will be in that position. >> If I'm 0 to 10 kind of thing? >> Yeah, it's like horse race, 3 to 1, 2 to 1, even money, 10 to 1, 50 to 1. >> Maybe 2 to 1, >> 2 to 1, that's pretty low odds. That's basically saying they're the favorite, they're the front runner. Would you agree with that? >> I'd say 4 to 1. >> Yeah, I was going to say I'm like a 5 to 1, 7 to 1 type of person, 'cause I'm a skeptic with, you know, there's so much competition, but- >> I think they're definitely the leader. I mean you got to say, I mean. >> Oh there's no question. There's no question about it. >> The question is can they execute? >> They're not Friendster, is what you're saying. >> They're not Friendster and they're more like Twitter and Reddit where they have momentum. If they can execute on the product side, and if they don't stumble on that, they will continue to have the lead. >> If they say stay neutral, as Sam is, has been saying, that, hey, Microsoft is one of our partners, if you look at their company model, how they have structured the company, then they're going to pay back to the investors, like Microsoft is the biggest one, up to certain, like by certain number of years, they're going to pay back from all the money they make, and after that, they're going to give the money back to the public, to the, I don't know who they give it to, like non-profit or something. (indistinct) >> Okay, the odds are dropping. (group talks over each other) That's a good point though >> Actually they might have done that to fend off the criticism of this. But it's really interesting to see the model they have adopted. >> The wildcard in all this, My last word on this is that, if there's a developer shift in how developers and data can come together again, we have conferences around the future of data, Supercloud and meshs versus, you know, how the data world, coding with data, how that evolves will also dictate, 'cause a wild card could be a shift in the landscape around how developers are using either machine learning or AI like techniques to code into their apps, so. >> That's fantastic insight. I can't thank you enough for your time, on the heels of Supercloud 2, really appreciate it. All right, thanks to John and Sarbjeet for the outstanding conversation today. Special thanks to the Palo Alto studio team. My goodness, Anderson, this great backdrop. You guys got it all out here, I'm jealous. And Noah, really appreciate it, Chuck, Andrew Frick and Cameron, Andrew Frick switching, Cameron on the video lake, great job. And Alex Myerson, he's on production, manages the podcast for us, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and our newsletters. Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE, does some great editing, thanks to all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, wherever you listen. Publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Want to get in touch, email me directly, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post. And by all means, check out etr.ai. They got really great survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, We'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (electronic music)

>>Welcome back here on the Cube. I'm John Walls. We are in Las Vegas at the Venetian, and this is Reinvent 22 in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. Glad to have you with us here as we continue our conversations. I'm joined by Paul Puckett, who's the former director of the Enterprise Cloud Management Services at the US Army. Paul, good to see you sir. Hey, you as well, John. Thank you. And Justin, she who is managing director and cloud go to market lead at Accenture Federal Services. Justin, good morning to you. Good morning, John. Yeah, glad to have you both here on the cube. First time too, I believe, right? Yes sir. Well, welcome. I wish we had some kind of baptism or indoctrination, but I'll see what I can come up with in the next 10 minutes for you. Let's talk about the Army, Paul. So enterprise cloud management, US Army. You know, I can't imagine the scale we're talking about here. I can't imagine the solutions we're talking about. I can't imagine the users we're talking about. Just for our folks at home, paint the picture a little bit of what kind of landscape it is that you have to cover with that kind of title. >>Sure. The United States Army, about 1.4 million people. Obviously a global organization responsible for protecting and defending the United States as part of our sister services in the Department of Defense. And scale often comes up a lot, right? And we talk about any capability to your solution for the United States Army scale is the, the number one thing, but oftentimes people overlook quality first. And actually when you think of the partnership between the Army and Accenture Federal, we thought a lot when it came to establishing the enterprise Cloud management agency that we wanted to deliver quality first when it came to adopting cloud computing and then scale that quality and not so much be afraid of the, the scale of the army and the size that forces us to make bad decisions. Cuz we wanted to make sure that we proved that there was opportunity and value in the cloud first, and then we wanted to truly scale that. And so no doubt, an immense challenge. The organization's been around for now three years, but I think that we've established irreversible momentum when it comes to modernization, leveraging cloud computing >>For the army. So let's back up. You kind of threw it in there, the ecma. So this agency was, was your a collaboration, right? To create from the ground up and it's in three years in existence. So let's just talk about that. What went into that thinking? What went into the planning and then how did you actually get it up and run into the extent that it is today? >>Sure. Well, it was once the enterprise cloud management office. It was a directorate within the, the CIO G six of the United States Army. So at the headquarters, the army, the chief information Officer, and the G six, which is essentially the military arm for all IT capability were once a joint's organization and the ECMO was created to catalyze the adoption of cloud computing. The army had actually been on a, a cloud adoption journey for many years, but there wasn't a lot of value that was actually derived. And so they created the ecma, well, the ECMO at the time brought me in as the director. And so we were responsible for establishing the new strategy for the adoption of cloud. One of the components of that strategy was essentially we needed an opportunity to be able to buy cloud services at scale. And this was part of our buy secure and build model that we had in place. And so part of the buy piece, we put an acquisition strategy together around how we wanted to buy cloud at scale. We called it the cloud account management optimization. OTA >>Just rolls right off the >>Tongue, it just rolls right off the tongue. And for those that love acronyms, camo, >>Which I liked it when I was say cama, I loved that. That was, that was, >>You always have to have like a tundra, a little >>Piece of that. Very good. It was good. >>But at the time it was novetta, no, Nevada's been bought up by afs, but Novea won that agreement. And so we've had this partnership in place now for just about a year and a half for buying cloud computing net scale. >>So let's talk about, about what you deal with on, on the federal services side here, Justin, in terms of the army. So obviously governance, a major issue, compliance, a major issue, security, you know, paramount importance and all that STEM leads up to quality that Paul was talking about. So when you were looking at this and keeping all those factors in, in your mind, right? I mean, how many, like, oh my God, what kind of days did you have? Oh, well, because this was a handful. >>Well, it was, but you could see when we were responding to the acquisition that it was really, you know, forward thinking and forward leaning in terms of how they thought about cloud acquisition and cloud governance and cloud management. And it's really kind of a sleepy area like cloud account acquisition. Everyone's like, oh, it's easy to get in the cloud, you know, run your credit card on Amazon and you're in, in 30 seconds or less. That's really not the case inside the federal government, whether it's the army, the Air Force or whoever, right? Those, those are, they're real challenges in procuring and acquiring cloud. And so it was clear from, you know, Paul's office that they understood those challenges and we were excited to really meet them with them. >>And, and how, I guess from an institutional perspective, before this was right, I I assume very protective, very tight cloistered, right? You, you, in terms of being open to or, or a more open environment, there might have been some pushback was they're not. Right? So dealing with that, what did you find that to be the case? Well, so >>There's kind of a few pieces to unpacking that. There's a lot of fear in trepidation around something you don't understand, right? And so part of it is the teaching and training and the, and the capability and the opportunity in the cloud and the ability to be exceptionally secure when it comes to no doubt, the sensitivity of the information of the Department of Defense, but also from an action acquisition strategy perspective, more from a financial perspective, the DOD is accustomed to buying hardware. We make these big bets of these big things to, to live in today's centers. And so when we talk about consuming cloud as a utility, there's a lot of fear there as well, because they don't really understand how to kind of pay for something by the drink, if you will, because it incentivizes them to be more efficient with their utilization of resources. >>But when you look at the budgeting process of the d od, there really is not that much of incentive for efficiency. The p PPE process, the planning program, budgeting, execution, they care about execution, which is spending money and you can spend a lot of money in the cloud, right? But how are you actually utilizing that? And so what we wanted to do is create that feedback loop and so the utilization is actually fed into our financial systems that help us then estimate into the future. And that's the capability that we partnered with AFS on is establishing the closing of that feedback loop. So now we can actually optimize our utilization of the cloud. And that's actually driving better incentives in the PPE >>Process. You know, when you think about these keywords here, modernized, digitized, data driven, so on, so forth, I, I don't think a lot of people might connect that to the US government in general just because of, you know, it's a large intentionally slow moving bureaucratic machine, right? Is that fair to characterize it that way? It >>Is, but not in this case. Right? So what we done, >>You you totally juxtapose that. Yeah. >>Yeah. So what we've done is we've really enabled data driven decision making as it relates to cloud accounts and cloud governance. And so we have a, a tool called Cloud Tracker. We deployed for the army at a number of different classifications, and you get a full 360 view of all of your cloud utilization and cloud spend, you know, really up to date within 24 hours of it occurring, right? And there a lot of folks, you know, they didn't never went into the console, they never looked at what they were spending in cloud previously. And so now you just go to a simple web portal and see the entire entirety of the army cloud spend right there at your fingertips. So that really enables like better decision making in terms of like purchasing savings plans and reserved instances and other sorts of AWS specific tools to help you save money. >>So Paul, tell me about Cloud Tracker then. Yeah, I mean from the client side then, can you just say this dashboard lays it out for you right? In great detail about what kind of usage, what kind of efficiencies I assume Yeah. What's working, what's not? >>Absolutely. Well, and, and I think a few things to unpack that's really important here is listen, any cloud service provider has a concept. You can see what you're actually spending. But when it comes to money in the United States government, there are different colors of money. There's regulations when it comes to how money is identified for different capabilities or incentives. And you've gotta be very explicit in how you track and how you spend that money from an auditability perspective. Beyond that, there is a move when it comes to the technology business management, which is the actual labeling of what we actually spend money on for different services or labor or software. And what Cloud Tracker allows us to do is speak the language of the different colors of money. It allows us to also get very fine grain in the actual analysis of, from a TBM perspective, what we're spending on. >>But then also it has real time hooks into our financial systems for execution. And so what that really does for us is it allows us to complete the picture, not just be able to see our spend in the cloud, but also be able to able to see that spending context of all things in the P P P E process as well as the execution process that then really empowers the government to make better investments. And all we're seeing is either cost avoidance or cost savings simply because we're able to close that loop, like I said. Yep. And then we're able to redirect those funds, retag them, remove them through our actual financial office within the headquarters of the army, and be able to repurpose that to other modernization efforts that Congress is essentially asking us to invest >>In. Right. So you know how much money you have, basically. Exactly. Right. You know how much you've already spent, you know how you're spending it, and now you how much you have left, >>You can provide a reliable forecast for your spend. >>Right. You know, hey, we're, we're halfway through this quarter, we're halfway through the, the fiscal year, whatever the case might be. >>Exactly. And the focus on expenditures, you know, the government rates you on, you know, how much have you spent, right? So you have a clear total transparency into what you're going to spend through the rest of the fiscal. Sure. >>All right. Let's just talk about the relationship quickly then about going forward then in terms of federal services and then what on, on the, the US Army side. I mean, what now you've laid this great groundwork, right? You have a really solid foundation where now what next? >>We wanna be all things cloud to the army. I mean, we think there's tremendous opportunity to really aid the modernization efforts and governance across the holistic part of the army. So, you know, we just, we want to, we wanna do it all with the Army as much as we can. It's, it's, it's a fantastic >>Opportunity. Yeah. AFS is, is in a very kind of a strategic role. So as part of the ecma, we own the greater strategy and execution for adoption of cloud on behalf of the entire army. Now, when it comes to delivery of individual capabilities for mission here and there, that's all specific to system owners and different organizations. AFS plays a different role in this instance where they're able to more facilitate the greater strategy on the financial side of the house. And what we've done is we've proven the ability to adopt cloud as a utility rather than this fixed thing, kind of predict the future, spend a whole bunch of money and never use the resource. We're seeing the efficiency for the actual utilization of cloud as a utility. This actually came out as one of the previous NDAs. And so how we actually address nda, I believe it was 2018 in the adoption of cloud as a utility, really is now cornerstone of modernization across all of the do d and really feeds into the Jo Warfighting cloud capability, major acquisition on behalf of all of the D O D to establish buying cloud as just a common service for everyone. >>And so we've been fortunate to inform that team of some of our lessons learned, but when it comes to the partnership, we just see camo moving into production. We've been live for now a year and a half. And so there's another two and a half years of runway there. And then AFS also plays a strategic role at part of our cloud enablement division, which is essentially back to that teaching part, helping the Army understand the opportunity of cloud computing, align the architectures to actually leverage those resources and then deliver capabilities that save soldier's >>Lives. Well, you know, we've, we've always known that the Army does its best work on the ground, and you've done all this groundwork for the military, so I'm not surprised, right? It's, it's a winning formula. Thanks to both of you for being with us here in the executive summit. Great conversation. Awesome. Thanks for having us. A good deal. All right. Thank you. All right. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture here at Reinvent 22, and you're catching it all on the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) (logo shimmers) >> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to AWS re Invent 2022. We are live here from the show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada, we're theCUBE, my name is Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier, John, are you excited for the next segment? >> I love the innovation story, this next segment's going to be really interesting, an example of ecosystem innovation in action, it'll be great. >> Yeah, our next guests are actually award-winning, I am very excited about that, please welcome Alan and Becky from IBM. Thank you both so much for being here, how's the show going for ya? Becky you got a, just a platinum smile, I'm going to go to you first, how's the show so far? >> No, it's going great. There's lots of buzz, lots of excitement this year, of course, three times the number of people, but it's fantastic. >> Three times the number of people- >> (indistinct) for last year. >> That is so exciting, so what is that... Do you know what the total is then? >> I think it's over 55,000. >> Ooh, loving that. >> John: A lot. >> It's a lot, you can tell by the hallways- >> Becky: It's a lot. >> John: It's crowded, right. >> Yeah, you can tell by just the energy and the, honestly the heat in here right now is pretty good. Alan, how are you feeling on the show floor this year? >> Awesome, awesome, we're meeting a lot of partners, talking to a lot of clients. We're really kind of showing them what the new IBM, AWS relationship is all about, so, beautiful time to be here. >> Well Alan, why don't you tell us what that partnership is about, to start us off? >> Sure, sure. So the partnership started with the relationship in our consulting services, and Becky's going to talk more about that, right? And it grew, this year it grew into the IBM software realm where we signed an agreement with AWS around May timeframe this year. >> I love it, so, like you said, you're just getting started- >> Just getting started. >> This is the beginning of something magic. >> We're just scratching the surface with this right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> But it represents a huge move for IBM to meet our clients where they are, right? Meet 'em where they are with IBM technology, enterprise technology they're used to, but with the look and feel and usage model that they're used to with AWS. >> Absolutely and so to build on that, you know, we're really excited to be an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. We've had this relationship for a little over five years with AWS, I'd say it's really gone up a notch over the last year or two as we've been working more and more closely, doubling down on our investments, doubling down on our certifications, we've got over 15,000 people certified now, almost 16,000 actually- >> Savannah: Wow. >> 14 competencies, 16 service deliveries and counting. We cover a mass of information and services from Data Analytics, IoT, AI, all the way to Modernization, SAP, Security Services, right. So it's pretty comprehensive relationship, but in addition to the fantastic clients that we both share, we're doing some really great things around joint industry solutions, which I'll talk about in a few minutes and some of those are being launched at the conference this year, so that's even better. But the most exciting thing to me right now is that we just found out that we won the Global Innovator Partner of the Year award, and a LATAM Partner of the Year award. >> Savannah: Wow. >> John: That's (indistinct) >> So, super excited for IBM Consulting to win this, we're honored and it's just a great, exciting part to the conference. >> The news coming out of this event, we know tomorrow's going to be the big keynote for the new Head of the ecosystem, Ruba. We're hearing that it's going to be all about the ecosystem, enabling value creation, enabling new kinds of solutions. We heard from the CEO of AWS, this nextGen environment's upon us, it's very solution-oriented- >> Becky: Absolutely. >> A lot of technology, it's not an either or, it's an and equation, this is a huge new shift, I won't say shift, a continuation for AWS, and you guys, we've been covering, so you got the and situation going on... Innovation solutions and innovation technology and customers can choose, build a foundation or have it out of the box. What's your reaction to that? Do you think it's going to go well for AWS and IBM? >> I think it fits well into our partnership, right? The the thing you mentioned that I gravitate to the most is the customer gets to choose and the thing that's been most amazing about the partnership, both of these companies are maniacally focused on the customer, right? And so we've seen that come about as we work on ways the customer to access our technology, consume the technology, right? We've sold software on-prem to customers before, right, now we're going to be selling SaaS on AWS because we had customers that were on AWS, we're making it so that they can more easily purchase it by being in the marketplace, making it so they can draw down their committed spin with AWS, their customers like that a lot- [John] Yeah. >> Right. We've even gone further to enable our distributor network and our resellers, 'cause a lot of our customers have those relationships, so they can buy through them. And recently we've enabled the customer to leverage their EDP, their committed spend with AWS against IBM's ELA and structure, right, so you kind of get a double commit value from a customer point of view, so the amazing part is just been all about the customers. >> Well, that's interesting, you got the technology relationship with AWS, you mentioned how they're engaging with the software consumption in marketplace, licensed deals, there's all kinds of new business model innovations on top of the consumption and building. Then you got the consulting piece, which is again, a big part of, Adam calls it "Business transformation," which is the result of digital transformation. So digital transformation is the process, the outcome is the business transformation, that's kind of where it all kind of connects. Becky, what's your thoughts on the Amazon consulting relationships? Obviously the awards are great but- >> They are, no- >> What's the next step? Where does it go from here? >> I think the best way for me to describe it is to give you some rapid flyer client examples, you know, real customer stories and I think that's where it really, rubber meets the road, right? So one of the most recent examples are IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, in his three key results actually mentioned one of our big clients with AWS which is the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US and is an AI solution that's helped automate claims processing. So the veterans are trying to get their benefits, they submit the claims, snail mail, phone calls, you know, some in person, some over email- >> Savannah: Oh, it gives me all the feels hearing you talk about this- >> It's a process that used to take 25 to 30 days depending on the complexity of the claims, we've gotten it down with AWS down to within 24 hours we can get the veterans what they need really quickly so, I mean, that's just huge. And it's an exciting story that includes data analytics, AI and automation, so that's just one example. You know, we've got examples around SAP where we've developed a next generation SAP for HANA Platform for Phillips Carbon Black hosted on AWS, right? For them, it created an integrated, scalable, digital business, that cut out a hundred percent the capital cost from on-prem solutions. We've got security solutions around architectures for telecommunications advisors and of course we have lots of examples of migration and modernization and moving workloads using Red Hat to do that. So there's a lot of great client examples, so to me, this is the heart of what we do, like you said, both companies are really focused on clients, Amazon's customer-obsessed, and doing what we can for our clients together is where we get the impact. >> Yeah, that's one of the things that, it sounds kind of cliche, "Oh we're going to work backwards from the customer," I know Amazon says that, they do, you guys are also very customer-focused but the customers are changing. So I'd love to get your reaction because we're now in that cloud 2.0, I call that 2.0 or you got the Amazon Classic, my word, and then Next Gen Cloud coming, the customers are different, they're transforming because IT's not a department anymore, it's in the DevOps pipeline. The developers are driving a lot of IT but security and on DataOps, it's the structural change happening at the customer, how do you guys see that at IBM? I know we cover a lot of Red Hat and Arvind talks to us all the time, meeting the customer where they are, where are they? Where are the customers? Can you share your perspective on where they are? >> It's an astute observation, right, the customer is changing. We have both of those sets of customers, right, we still have the traditional customer, our relationship with Central IT, right, and driving governance and all of those things. But the folks that are innovating many times they're in the line of business, they're discovering solutions, they're building new things. And so we need our offerings to be available to them. We need them to understand how to use them and be convenient for these guys and take them through that process. So that change in the customer is one that we are embracing by making our offerings easy to consume, easy to use, and easy to build into solutions and then easy to parlay into what central IT needs to do for governance, compliance, and these types of things, it's becoming our new bread and butter. >> And what's really cool is- >> Is that easy button- >> We've been talking about- >> It's the easy button. >> The easy button a lot on the show this week and if you just, you just described it it's exactly what people want, go on Becky. >> Sorry about that, I was going to say, the cool part is that we're co-creating these things with our clients. So we're using things like the Amazon Working Backward that you just mentioned.` We're using the IBM garage methodology to get innovative to do design working, design thinking workshops, and think about where is that end user?, Where is that stakeholder? Where are they, they thinking, feeling, doing, saying how do we make the easier? How do we get the easy button for them so that they can have the right solutions for their businesses. We work mostly with lines of business in my part of the organization, and they're hungry for that. >> You know, we had a quote on theCUBE yesterday, Savannah remember one of our guests said, you know, back in the, you know, 1990s or two 2000s, if you had four production apps, it was considered complex >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You know, now you got hundreds of workloads, thousands of workloads, so, you know, this end-to-end vision that we heard that's playing out is getting more complex, but the easy button is where these abstraction layers and technology could come in. So it's getting more complex because there's more stuff but it's getting easier because- >> Savannah: What is the magnitude? >> You can make it easier. This is a dynamic, share your thoughts on that. >> It's getting more complex because our clients need to move faster, right, they need to be more agile, right, so not only are there thousands of applications there are hundreds of thousands microservices that are composing those applications. So they need capabilities that help them not just build but govern that structure and put the right compliance over that structure. So this relationship- >> Savannah: Lines of governance, yeah- >> This relationship we built with AWS is in our key areas, it's a strategic move, not a small thing for us, it covers things like automation and integration where you need to build that way. It covers things like data and AI where you need to do the analytics, even things like sustainability where we're totally aligned with what AWS is talking about and trying to do, right, so it's really a good match made there. >> John: It really sounds awesome. >> Yeah, it's clear. I want to dig in a little bit, I love the term, and I saw it in my, it stuck out to me in the notes right away, getting ready for you all, "maniacal", maniacal about the customer, maniacal about the community, I think that's really clear when we're talking about 24 days to 24 hours, like the veteran example that you gave right there, which I genuinely felt in my heart. These are the types of collaborations that really impact people's lives, tell me about some of the other trends or maybe a couple other examples you might have because I think sometimes when our head's in the clouds, we talk a lot about the tech and the functionality, we forget it's touching every single person walking around us, probably in a different way right now than we may even be aware- >> I think one of the things that's been, and our clients have been asking us for, is to help coming into this new era, right, so we've come out of a pandemic where a lot of them had to do some really, really basic quick decisions. Okay, "Contact Center, everyone work from home now." Okay, how do we do that? Okay, so we cobbled something together, now we're back, so what do we do? How do we create digital transformation around that so that we are going forward in a really positive way that works for our clients or for our contact center reps who are maybe used to working from home now versus what our clients need, the response times they need, and AWS has all the technology that we're working with like Amazon Connect to be able to pull those things together with some of our software like Watson Assistant. So those types of solutions are coming together out of that need and now we're moving into the trend where economy's getting tougher, right? More cost cutting potentially is coming, right, better efficiencies, how do we leverage our solutions and help our clients and customers do that? So I think that's what the customer obsession's about, is making sure we really understand where their pain points are, and not just solve them but maybe get rid of 'em. >> John: Yeah, great one. >> Yeah. And not developing in a silo, I mean, it's a classic subway problem, you got to be communicating with your community if you want to continue to serve them. And IBM's been serving their community for a very long time, which is super impressive, do you think they're ready for the challenge? >> Let's do it. >> So we have a new thing on theCUBE. >> Becky: Oh boy. >> We didn't warn you about this, but here we go. Although you told, Alan, you've mentioned you're feeling very cool with the microphone on, so I feel like, I'm going to put you in the hot seat first on this one. Not that I don't think Becky's going to smash it, but I feel like you're channeling the power of the microphone. New challenges, treat it like a 32nd Instagram reel-style story, a hot take, your thought leadership, money clip, you know, this is your moment. What is the biggest takeaway, most important thing happening at the show this year? >> Most important thing happening at the show? Well, I'm glad you mentioned it that way, because earlier you said we may have to sing (presenters and guests all laughing) >> So this is much better than- >> That's actually part of the close. >> John: Hey, hey. >> Don't worry, don't worry, I haven't forgotten that, it's your Instagram reel, go. (Savannah laughs) >> Original audio happening here on theCUBE, courtesy of Alan and IBM, I am so here for it. >> So what my takeaway and what I would like for the audience to take away, out of this conversation especially, but even broadly, the IBM AWS relationship is really like a landmark type of relationship, right? It's one of the biggest that we've established on both sides, right- >> Savannah: It seems huge, okay you are too monolith in the world of companies, like, yeah- >> Becky: Totally. >> It's huge. And it represents a strategic change on both sides, right? With that customer- >> Savannah: Fundamentally- >> In the middle right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So we're seeing things like, you know, AWS is working with us to make sure we're building products the way that a AWS client likes to consume them, right, so that we have the right integration, so they get that right look and feel, but they still get the enterprise level capabilities they're used to from IBM, right? So the big takeaway I like for people to take, is this is a new IBM, it's a new AWS and IBM relationship, and so expect more of that goodness, more of those new things coming out of it. [John] Excellent, wow. >> That was great, well done, you nailed it. and you're going to finish with some acapella, right? (Alan laughs) >> You got a pitch pipe ready? (everyone laughs) >> All right Becky, what about you? Give us your hot take. >> Well, so for me, the biggest takeaway is just the way this relationship has grown so much, so, like you said, it's the new IBM it's the new AWS, we were here last year, we had some good things, this year we're back at the show with joint solutions, have been jointly funded and co-created by AWS and IBM. This is huge, this is a really big opportunity and a really big deal that these two companies have come together, identified joint customer needs and we're going after 'em together and we're putting 'em in the booth. >> Savannah: So cool. And there's things like smart edge for welding solutions that are out there. >> Savannah: Yes. >> You know, I talked about, and it's, you know you wouldn't think, "Okay, well what's that?" There's a lot to that, a lot of saving when you look at how you do welding and if you apply things like visual AI and auditory AI to make sure a weld is good. I mean, I think these are, these things are cool, I geek out on these things- >> John: Every vertical. >> I'm geeking out with you right now, just geeking- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so- >> Every vertical is infected. >> They are and it's so impactful to have AWS just in lockstep with us, doing these solutions, it's so different from, you know, you kind of create something that you think your customers like and then you put it out there. >> Yeah, versus this moment. >> Yeah, they're better together. >> It's strategic partnership- >> It's truly a strategic partnership. and we're really bringing that this year to reinvent and so I'm super excited about that. >> Congratulations. >> Wow, well, congratulations again on your awards, on your new partnership, I can't wait to hear, I mean, we're seven months in, eight months in to this this SaaS side of the partnership, can't wait to see what we're going to be talking about next year when we have you back on theCUBE. >> I know. >> and maybe again in between now and then. Alan, Becky, thank you both so much for being here, this was truly a joy and I'm sure you gave folks a taste of the new IBM, practicing what you preach. >> John: Great momentum. >> And I'm just, I'm so impressed with the two companies collaborating, for those of us OGs in tech, the big companies never collaborated before- >> Yeah. >> John: Yeah. Joint, co-created solutions. >> And you have friction between products and everything else. I mean's it's really, co-collaboration is, it's a big theme for us at all the shows we've been doing this year but it's just nice to see it in practice too, it's an entirely different thing, so well done. >> Well it's what gets me out of the bed in the morning. >> All right, congratulations. >> Very clearly, your energy is contagious and I love it and yeah, this has been great. Thank all of you at home or at work or on the International Space Station or wherever you might be tuning in from today for joining us, here in Las Vegas at AWS re Invent where we are live from the show floor, wall-to-wall coverage for three days with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the source for high tech coverage. (cheerful upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We are back, approaching the finish line here at Supercomputing 22, our last interview of the day, our last interview of the show. And I have to say Dave Nicholson, my co-host, My name is Paul Gillin. I've been attending trade shows for 40 years Dave, I've never been to one like this. The type of people who are here, the type of problems they're solving, what they talk about, the trade shows are typically, they're so speeds and feeds. They're so financial, they're so ROI, they all sound the same after a while. This is truly a different event. Do you get that sense? >> A hundred percent. Now, I've been attending trade shows for 10 years since I was 19, in other words, so I don't have necessarily your depth. No, but seriously, Paul, totally, completely, completely different than any other conference. First of all, there's the absolute allure of looking at the latest and greatest, coolest stuff. I mean, when you have NASA lecturing on things when you have Lawrence Livermore Labs that we're going to be talking to here in a second it's a completely different story. You have all of the academics you have students who are in competition and also interviewing with organizations. It's phenomenal. I've had chills a lot this week. >> And I guess our last two guests sort of represent that cross section. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions, High Performance Solutions at Dell. And Matt Leininger, who is the HPC Strategist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Now, there is perhaps, I don't know you can correct me on this, but perhaps no institution in the world that uses more computing cycles than Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is always on the leading edge of what's going on in Supercomputing. And so we want to talk to both of you about that. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. >> Sure, glad to be here. >> For having us. >> Let's start with you, Armando. Well, let's talk about the juxtaposition of the two of you. I would not have thought of LLNL as being a Dell reference account in the past. Tell us about the background of your relationship and what you're providing to the laboratory. >> Yeah, so we're really excited to be working with Lawrence Livermore, working with Matt. But actually this process started about two years ago. So we started looking at essentially what was coming down the pipeline. You know, what were the customer requirements. What did we need in order to make Matt successful. And so the beauty of this project is that we've been talking about this for two years, and now it's finally coming to fruition. And now we're actually delivering systems and delivering racks of systems. But what I really appreciate is Matt coming to us, us working together for two years and really trying to understand what are the requirements, what's the schedule, what do we need to hit in order to make them successful >> At Lawrence Livermore, what drives your computing requirements I guess? You're working on some very, very big problems but a lot of very complex problems. How do you decide what you need to procure to address them? >> Well, that's a difficult challenge. I mean, our mission is a national security mission dealing with making sure that we do our part to provide the high performance computing capabilities to the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. We do that through the Advanced Simulation computing program. Its goal is to provide that computing power to make sure that the US nuclear rep of the stockpile is safe, secure, and effective. So how we go about doing that? There's a lot of work involved. We have multiple platform lines that we accomplish that goal with. One of them is the advanced technology systems. Those are the ones you've heard about a lot, they're pushing towards exit scale, the GPU technologies incorporated into those. We also have a second line, a platform line, called the Commodity Technology Systems. That's where right now we're partnering with Dell on the latest generation of those. Those systems are a little more conservative, they're right now CPU only driven but they're also intended to be the everyday work horses. So those are the first systems our users get on. It's very easy for them to get their applications up and running. They're the first things they use usually on a day to day basis. They run a lot of small to medium size jobs that you need to do to figure out how to most effectively use what workloads you need to move to the even larger systems to accomplish our mission goals. >> The workhorses. >> Yeah. >> What have you seen here these last few days of the show, what excites you? What are the most interesting things you've seen? >> There's all kinds of things that are interesting. Probably most interesting ones I can't talk about in public, unfortunately, 'cause of NDA agreements, of course. But it's always exciting to be here at Supercomputing. It's always exciting to see the products that we've been working with industry and co-designing with them on for, you know, several years before the public actually sees them. That's always an exciting part of the conference as well specifically with CTS-2, it's exciting. As was mentioned before, I've been working with Dell for nearly two years on this, but the systems first started being delivered this past August. And so we're just taking the initial deliveries of those. We've deployed, you know, roughly about 1600 nodes now but that'll ramp up to over 6,000 nodes over the next three or four months. >> So how does this work intersect with Sandia and Los Alamos? Explain to us the relationship there. >> Right, so those three laboratories are the laboratories under the National Nuclear Security Administration. We partner together on CTS. So the architectures, as you were asking, how do we define these things, it's the labs coming together. Those three laboratories we define what we need for that architecture. We have a joint procurement that is run out of Livermore but then the systems are deployed at all three laboratories. And then they serve the programs that I mentioned for each laboratory as well. >> I've worked in this space for a very long time you know I've worked with agencies where the closest I got to anything they were actually doing was the sort of guest suite outside the secure area. And sometimes there are challenges when you're communicating, it's like you have a partner like Dell who has all of these things to offer, all of these ideas. You have requirements, but maybe you can't share 100% of what you need to do. How do you navigate that? Who makes the decision about what can be revealed in these conversations? You talk about NDA in terms of what's been shared with you, you may be limited in terms of what you can share with vendors. Does that cause inefficiency? >> To some degree. I mean, we do a good job within the NSA of understanding what our applications need and then mapping that to technical requirements that we can talk about with vendors. We also have kind of in between that we've done this for many years. A recent example is of course with the exit scale computing program and some things it's doing creating proxy apps or mini apps that are smaller versions of some of the things that we are important to us. Some application areas are important to us, hydrodynamics, material science, things like that. And so we can collaborate with vendors on those proxy apps to co-design systems and tweak the architectures. In fact, we've done a little bit that with CTS-2, not as much in CTS as maybe in the ATS platforms but that kind of general idea of how we collaborate through these proxy applications is something we've used across platforms. >> Now is Dell one of your co-design partners? >> In CTS-2 absolutely, yep. >> And how, what aspects of CTS-2 are you working on with Dell? >> Well, the architecture itself was the first, you know thing we worked with them on, we had a procurement come out, you know they bid an architecture on that. We had worked with them, you know but previously on our requirements, understanding what our requirements are. But that architecture today is based on the fourth generation Intel Xeon that you've heard a lot about at the conference. We are one of the first customers to get those systems in. All the systems are interconnected together with the Cornell Network's Omni-Path Network that we've used before and are very excited about as well. And we build up from there. The systems get integrated in by the operations teams at the laboratory. They get integrated into our production computing environment. Dell is really responsible, you know for designing these systems and delivering to the laboratories. The laboratories then work with Dell. We have a software stack that we provide on top of that called TOSS, for Tri-Lab Operating System. It's based on Redhead Enterprise Linux. But the goal there is that it allows us, a common user environment, a common simulation environment across not only CTS-2, but maybe older systems we have and even the larger systems that we'll be deploying as well. So from a user perspective they see a common user interface, a common environment across all the different platforms that they use at Livermore and the other laboratories. >> And Armando, what does Dell get out of the co-design arrangement with the lab? >> Well, we get to make sure that they're successful. But the other big thing that we want to do, is typically when you think about Dell and HPC, a lot of people don't make that connection together. And so what we're trying to do is make sure that, you know they know that, hey, whether you're a work group customer at the smallest end or a super computer customer at the highest end, Dell wants to make sure that we have the right setup portfolio to match any needs across this. But what we were really excited about this, this is kind of our, you know big CTS-2 first thing we've done together. And so, you know, hopefully this has been successful. We've made Matt happy and we look forward to the future what we can do with bigger and bigger things. >> So will the labs be okay with Dell coming up with a marketing campaign that said something like, "We can't confirm that alien technology is being reverse engineered." >> Yeah, that would fly. >> I mean that would be right, right? And I have to ask you the question directly and the way you can answer it is by smiling like you're thinking, what a stupid question. Are you reverse engineering alien technology at the labs? >> Yeah, you'd have to suck the PR office. >> Okay, okay. (all laughing) >> Good answer. >> No, but it is fascinating because to a degree it's like you could say, yeah, we're working together but if you really want to dig into it, it's like, "Well I kind of can't tell you exactly how some of this stuff is." Do you consider anything that you do from a technology perspective, not what you're doing with it, but the actual stack, do you try to design proprietary things into the stack or do you say, "No, no, no, we're going to go with standards and then what we do with it is proprietary and secret."? >> Yeah, it's more the latter. >> Is the latter? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're not going to try to reverse engineer the industry? >> No, no. We want the solutions that we develop to enhance the industry to be able to apply to a broader market so that we can, you know, gain from the volume of that market, the lower cost that they would enable, right? If we go off and develop more and more customized solutions that can be extraordinarily expensive. And so we we're really looking to leverage the wider market, but do what we can to influence that, to develop key technologies that we and others need that can enable us in the high forms computing space. >> We were talking with Satish Iyer from Dell earlier about validated designs, Dell's reference designs for for pharma and for manufacturing, in HPC are you seeing that HPC, Armando, and is coming together traditionally and more of an academic research discipline beginning to come together with commercial applications? And are these two markets beginning to blend? >> Yeah, I mean so here's what's happening, is you have this convergence of HPC, AI and data analytics. And so when you have that combination of those three workloads they're applicable across many vertical markets, right? Whether it's financial services, whether it's life science, government and research. But what's interesting, and Matt won't brag about, but a lot of stuff that happens in the DoE labs trickles down to the enterprise space, trickles down to the commercial space because these guys know how to do it at scale, they know how to do it efficiently and they know how to hit the mark. And so a lot of customers say, "Hey we want what CTS-2 does," right? And so it's very interesting. The way I love it is their process the way they do the RFP process. Matt talked about the benchmarks and helping us understand, hey here's kind of the mark you have to hit. And then at the same time, you know if we make them successful then obviously it's better for all of us, right? You know, I want to secure nuclear stock pile so I hope everybody else does as well. >> The software stack you mentioned, I think Tia? >> TOSS. >> TOSS. >> Yeah. >> How did that come about? Why did you feel the need to develop your own software stack? >> It originated back, you know, even 20 years ago when we first started building Linux clusters when that was a crazy idea. Livermore and other laboratories were really the first to start doing that and then push them to larger and larger scales. And it was key to have Linux running on that at the time. And so we had the. >> So 20 years ago you knew you wanted to run on Linux? >> Was 20 years ago, yeah, yeah. And we started doing that but we needed a way to have a version of Linux that we could partner with someone on that would do, you know, the support, you know, just like you get from an EoS vendor, right? Security support and other things. But then layer on top of that, all the HPC stuff you need either to run the system, to set up the system, to support our user base. And that evolved into to TOSS which is the Tri-Lab Operating System. Now it's based on the latest version of Redhead Enterprise Linux, as I mentioned before, with all the other HPC magic, so to speak and all that HPC magic is open source things. It's not stuff, it may be things that we develop but it's nothing closed source. So all that's there we run it across all these different environments as I mentioned before. And it really originated back in the early days of, you know, Beowulf clusters, Linux clusters, as just needing something that we can use to run on multiple systems and start creating that common environment at Livermore and then eventually the other laboratories. >> How is a company like Dell, able to benefit from the open source work that's coming out of the labs? >> Well, when you look at the open source, I mean open source is good for everybody, right? Because if you make a open source tool available then people start essentially using that tool. And so if we can make that open source tool more robust and get more people using it, it gets more enterprise ready. And so with that, you know, we're all about open source we're all about standards and really about raising all boats 'cause that's what open source is all about. >> And with that, we are out of time. This is our 28th interview of SC22 and you're taking us out on a high note. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions at Dell. Matt Leininger, HPC Strategist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Great discussion. Hopefully it was a good show for you. Fascinating show for us and thanks for being with us today. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us >> Dave it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely. >> Hope we'll be back next year. >> Can't believe, went by fast. Absolutely at SC23. >> We hope you'll be back next year. This is Paul Gillin. That's a wrap, with Dave Nicholson for theCUBE. See here in next time. (soft upbear music)

(lighthearted music) >> Hey all. Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Kubecon North America '22 CloudNativeCon. We're in Detroit. We've been here all day covering day one of the event from our perspective. Three days of coverage coming at you. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, a lot of buzz today. A lot of talk about the maturation of Kubernetes with different services that vendors are offering. We talked a little bit about security earlier today. One of the things that is a hot topic is national security. >> Yeah, this is a huge segment we got coming up. It really takes that all that nerd talk about Kubernetes and puts it into action. We actually see demonstrable results. This is about advanced artificial intelligence for tactical decision making at the edge to support our military operations because a lot of the deaths are because of bad technology. And this has been talked about. We've been covering Silicon Angle, we wrote a story there now on this topic. This should be a really exciting segment so I'm really looking forward to it. >> Excellent, so am I. Please welcome back one of our alumni, Nick Barcet senior director, customer led open innovation at Red Hat. Great to have you back. Greg Forrest joins us as well from Lockheed Martin Director of AI Foundations. Guys, great to have you on the program. Nick, what's been your perception before we dig into the news and break that open of KubeCon 2022? >> So, KubeCon is always a wonderful event because we can see people working with us in the community developing new stuff, people that we see virtually all year. But it's the time at which we can really establish human contact and that's wonderful. And it's also the moments where we can make big topic move forward and the topics have been plenty at this KubeCon from MicroShift to KCP, to AI, to all domains have been covered. >> Greg, you're the director of AI foundations at Lockheed Martin. Obviously well known, contractors to the military lot of intellectual property, storied history. >> Greg: Sure. >> Talk about this announcement with Red Hat 'cause I think this is really indicative of what's happening at the edge. Data, compute, industrial equipment, and people, in this case lives are in danger or to preserve peace. This is a killer story in terms of understanding what this all means. What's your take on this relationship with Red Hat? What's the secret sauce? >> Yeah, it's really important for us. So part of our 21st century security strategy as a company is to partner with companies like Red Hat and Big Tech and bring the best of the commercial world into the Department of Defense for our soldiers on the ground. And that's exactly what we announced today or Tuesday in our partnership. And so the ability to take commercial products and utilize them in theater is really important for saving lives on the ground. And so we can go through exactly what we did as part of this demonstration, but we took MicroShift at the edge and we were able to run our AI payloads on that. That provided us with the ability to do things like AI based RF sensing, so radio frequency sensing. And we were also able to do computer vision based technologies at the edge. So we went out, we had a small UAV that went out and searched for a target on the ground. It found a target using its radio frequency capabilities, the RF capabilities. Then once we're able to hone in on that target, what Red Hat device edge and MicroShift enables us to do is actually then switch sensing modalities. And then we're able to look at this target via the camera and use computer vision-based technologies to actually more accurately locate the target and then track that target in real time. So that's one of the keys to be able to actually switch modalities in real time on one platform is really important for our joint all domain operations construct. The idea of how do you actually connect all of these assets in the environment, in the battle space. >> Talk about the challenge and how hard it is to do this. The back haul, you'll go back to the central server, bring data back, connecting things. What if there's insecurity around connectivity? I mean there's a lot of things going, can you just scope the magnitude of how hard it's to actually deploy something at a tactical edge? >> It is. There's a lot of data that comes from all of these sensors, whether they're RF sensors or EO or IR. We're working across multiple domains, right? And so we want to take that data back and train on that and then redeploy to the edge. And so with MicroShift, we're able to do that in a way that's robust, that's repeatable, and that's automated. And that really instills trust in us and our customers that when we deploy new software capabilities to the edge over the air, like we did in this demonstration that they're going to run right on the target hardware. And so that's a huge advantage to what we're doing here that when we push software to the edge in real time we know it's going to run. >> And in realtime is absolutely critical. We talk about it in so many different industries. Oh, it's customers expect realtime access whether it's your banking app or whatnot. But here we're talking about literally life and death situations on the battlefield. So that realtime data access is literally life and death. >> It's paramount to what we're doing. In this case, the aircraft started with one role which was to go find a radio frequency admitter and then switch roles to then go get cameras and eyes on that. So where is that coming from? Are there people on the ground? Are there dangerous people on the ground? And it gives the end user on the ground complete situational awareness of what is actually happening. And that is key for enhanced decision making. Enhanced decision making is critical to what we're doing. And so that's really where we're advancing this technology and where we can save lives. >> I read a report from General Mattis when he was in service that a lot of the deaths are due to not having enough information really at the edge. >> Greg: Friendly fire. >> Friendly fire, a lot of stuff that goes on there. So this is really, really important. Nick, you're sitting there saying this is great. My customer's talking about the product. This is your innovation, Red Hat device edge in action. This is real. This is industrial- >> So it's more than real. Actually this type of use case is what convinced us to transform a technology we had been working on which is a small form factor of Kubernetes to transform it into a product. Because sometimes, US engineers have a tendency to invent stuff that are great on paper, but it's a solution trying to find a problem. And we need customers to work with us to make sure that do solution do solve a real problem. And Lockheed was great. Worked with us upstream on that project. Helped us prove out that the concept was actually worth it and we waited until Lockheed had tested the concept in the air. >> Okay, so Red Hat device edge and MicroShift, explain that, how that works real quick for the folks that don't know. So one of the thing we learned is that Kubernetes is great but it's only part of the journey. In order to get those workloads on those aircraft or in order to get those workloads in a factory, you also need to consider the full life cycle of the device itself. And you don't handle a device that is inside of a UAV or inside of a factory the same way you handle a server. You have to deal with those devices in a way that is much more akin to a setup box. So we had to modify how the OS was behaving to deal with devices and we reduced what we had built in real for each edge aspect and combined it with MicroShift and that's what became with that Red Hat device edge. >> We're in a low SWAP environment, space, weight and power, right? Or very limited, We're on a small UAS in this demonstration. So the ability to spool up and spool down containers and to save computing power and to do that on demand and orchestrate that with MicroShift is paramount to what we're doing. We wouldn't be able to do it without that capability. >> John: That's awesome. >> I want to get both of your opinions. Nick, we'll start with you and then Greg we'll go to you. In terms of MicroShift , what is its superpower? What differentiates it from other competing solutions in the market? >> So MicroShift is Kubernetes but reduced to the strict minimum of a runtime version of Kubernetes so that it takes a minimal footprint so that we maximize the space available for the workload in those very constraints environments. On a board where you have eight or 16 gig of RAM, if you use only two gig of that to run the infrastructure component, you leave the rest for the AI workload that you need on the drone. And that's what is really important. >> And these AI payloads, the inference that we're doing at the edge is very compute intensive. So again, the ability to manage that and orchestrate that is paramount to running on these very small board computers. These are small drones that don't have a lot of weight that don't allow a lot of space. >> John: Got to be efficient >> And be efficient with it. >> How were you guys involved? Talk about the relationship. So you guys were tightly involved. Talk about the roles you guys played together. Was it co-development? Was it customer/partner? Talk about the relationship. >> Yeah, so we started actually with satellite. So you can think of small cube sets in a very similar environment to a low powered UAV. And it started there. And then in the last, I would say year or so, Nick we have worked together to develop MicroShift. We work closely on Slack channels together like we're part of the same team. >> John: That's great. >> And hey Red Hat, this is what we need, this is what we're looking for. These are the constraints that we have. And this team has been amazing and just delivered on everything that we've asked for. >> I mean this is really an example of the innovation at the edge, industrial edge specifically. You got an operating system, you got form factor challenges, you got operating parameters. And just to having that flex, you can't just take this and put it over there. >> But it's what really is a community applied to an industrial context. So what happened there is we worked as part of the MicroShift community together with a real time communication channel, the same slack that anybody developing Kubernetes uses we've been using to identify where the problems were, how to solve them, bring new ideas and that's how we tackle these problems. >> Yeah, a true open source model I mean the Red Hat and the Lockheed teams were in it together on a daily basis communicating like we were part of the same company. And and that's really how you move these things forward. >> Yeah, and of course open source is great but also you got to lock down the security. How did you guys handle that? What's going on with the security? 'Cause you got to make sure no take over the devices. >> So the funny thing is that even though what we produce is highly inclusive of security concern, our development model is completely open. So it's not security biopurification, it's security because we apply the best practices. >> John: You see everything. >> Absolutely. >> Yes. >> And then you harden it in the joint development, there it is. >> Yeah, but what we support, what we offer as a product is the same for Lockheed or for any other customer because there is no domain where security is not important. When you control the recognition on a drone or where you control the behavior of a robot in a factory, security is paramount because you can't immobilize a country by infecting a robot the same way you could immobilize a military operation- >> Greg: That's right. >> By infecting a UAV. >> Not to change the subject, but I got to go on a tangent here cause it pops in my head. You mentioned cube set, not related to theCUBE of course. Where theCube for the video. Cube sets are very powerful. People can launch space right now very inexpensively. So it's a highly contested and congested environment. Any space activity going on around the corner with you guys? 'Cause remember the world's not around, it's edge is now in space. Mars is the edge. >> That's right. >> Our first prototype for MicroShift was actually a cube set. >> Greg: That's where it started. >> And IBM project, the project called Endurance. That's the first time we actually put MicroShift into use. And that was a very interesting project, very early version of MicroShift . And now we have talks with many other people on reproducing that at more industrial level this was more like a cool high school project. >> But to your point, the scalability across different platforms is there. If we're running on top of MicroShift on this common OS, it just eases the development. Behind the scenes, we have a whole AI factory at Lockheed Martin where we have a common ecosystem for how we actually develop and deploy these algorithms to the edge. And now we've got a common ecosystem at the edge. And so it helps that whole process to be able to do that in automated ways, repeatable ways so we can instill trust in our DRD customer that the validation of verification of this is a really important aspect. >> John: Must be a fun place to work. >> It is, it's exciting. There's endless opportunities. >> You must get a lot of young kids applying for those jobs. They're barely into the whole. I mean, AI's a hot feel and people want to get their hands on real applications. I was serious about space. Is there space activity going on with you guys or is it just now military edge, not yet military space? Or is that classified? >> Yeah, so we're working across multiple fronts, absolutely. >> That's awesome. >> What excite, oh, sorry John. What excites you most, never a dull moment with what you're doing, but just the potential to enable a safer, a more secure world, what excites you most about this partnership and the direction and the we'll say the trajectory it's going on? >> Yeah, I think, for me, the safer insecure world is paramount to what we're doing. We're here for national defense and for our allies and that's really critical to what we're doing. That's what motivates me. That's what gets me up in the morning to know that there is a soldier on the ground who will be using this technology and we will give be giving that person the situational awareness to make the right decisions at the right time. So we can go from small UAVs to larger aircraft or we can do it in a small confined edge device like a stalker UAV. We can scale this up to different products different platforms and they don't even have to be Lockheed Martin >> John: And more devices that are going to be imagined. >> More devices that we haven't even imagined yet. >> Right, that aren't even on the frontier yet. Nick, what's next from your perspective? >> In the domain we are in, next is always plenty of things. Sustainability is a huge domain right now on which we're working. We have lots of things going on in the AI space, stuff going on with Lockheed Martin. We have things going on in the radio network domain. We've been very heavily involved in telecommunication and this is constantly evolving. There is not one domain that, in terms of infrastructure Red Hat is not touching >> Well, this is the first of multiple demonstrations. The scenarios will get more complex with multiple aircraft and in the future, we're also looking at bringing a lot of the 5G work. Lockheed has put a large focus on 5G.mil for military applications and running some of those workloads on top of MicroShift as well is things to come in the future that we are already planning and looking at. >> Yeah, and it's needed in theater to have connectivity. Got to have your own connectivity. >> It's paramount, absolutely. >> Absolutely, it's paramount. It's game-changing. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCube talking about how Red Hat and Lockheed Martin are working together to leverage AI to really improve decision making and save more lives. It was a wonderful conversation. We're going to have to have you back 'cause we got to follow this. >> Yeah, of course. >> This was great, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Lisa: Our pleasure, thank you. >> Greg: Really appreciate it. >> Excellent. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from KubeCon CloudNativeCon '22 from Detroit. Stick around. Next guest is going to join John and Savannah in just a minute. (lighthearted music)

hello I'm John Furrier with thecube and welcome to this special presentation of the cube and Horizon 3.ai they're announcing a global partner first approach expanding their successful pen testing product Net Zero you're going to hear from leading experts in their staff their CEO positioning themselves for a successful Channel distribution expansion internationally in Europe Middle East Africa and Asia Pacific in this Cube special presentation you'll hear about the expansion the expanse partner program giving Partners a unique opportunity to offer Net Zero to their customers Innovation and Pen testing is going International with Horizon 3.ai enjoy the program [Music] welcome back everyone to the cube and Horizon 3.ai special presentation I'm John Furrier host of thecube we're here with Jennifer Lee head of Channel sales at Horizon 3.ai Jennifer welcome to the cube thanks for coming on great well thank you for having me so big news around Horizon 3.aa driving Channel first commitment you guys are expanding the channel partner program to include all kinds of new rewards incentives training programs help educate you know Partners really drive more recurring Revenue certainly cloud and Cloud scale has done that you got a great product that fits into that kind of Channel model great Services you can wrap around it good stuff so let's get into it what are you guys doing what are what are you guys doing with this news why is this so important yeah for sure so um yeah we like you said we recently expanded our Channel partner program um the driving force behind it was really just um to align our like you said our Channel first commitment um and creating awareness around the importance of our partner ecosystems um so that's it's really how we go to market is is through the channel and a great International Focus I've talked with the CEO so you know about the solution and he broke down all the action on why it's important on the product side but why now on the go to market change what's the what's the why behind this big this news on the channel yeah for sure so um we are doing this now really to align our business strategy which is built on the concept of enabling our partners to create a high value high margin business on top of our platform and so um we offer a solution called node zero it provides autonomous pen testing as a service and it allows organizations to continuously verify their security posture um so we our company vision we have this tagline that states that our pen testing enables organizations to see themselves Through The Eyes of an attacker and um we use the like the attacker's perspective to identify exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities so we created this partner program from a perspective of the partner so the partner's perspective and we've built It Through The Eyes of our partner right so we're prioritizing really what the partner is looking for and uh will ensure like Mutual success for us yeah the partners always want to get in front of the customers and bring new stuff to them pen tests have traditionally been really expensive uh and so bringing it down in one to a service level that's one affordable and has flexibility to it allows a lot of capability so I imagine people getting excited by it so I have to ask you about the program What specifically are you guys doing can you share any details around what it means for the partners what they get what's in it for them can you just break down some of the mechanics and mechanisms or or details yeah yep um you know we're really looking to create business alignment um and like I said establish Mutual success with our partners so we've got two um two key elements that we were really focused on um that we bring to the partners so the opportunity the profit margin expansion is one of them and um a way for our partners to really differentiate themselves and stay relevant in the market so um we've restructured our discount model really um you know highlighting profitability and maximizing profitability and uh this includes our deal registration we've we've created deal registration program we've increased discount for partners who take part in our partner certification uh trainings and we've we have some other partner incentives uh that we we've created that that's going to help out there we've we put this all so we've recently Gone live with our partner portal um it's a Consolidated experience for our partners where they can access our our sales tools and we really view our partners as an extension of our sales and Technical teams and so we've extended all of our our training material that we use internally we've made it available to our partners through our partner portal um we've um I'm trying I'm thinking now back what else is in that partner portal here we've got our partner certification information so all the content that's delivered during that training can be found in the portal we've got deal registration uh um co-branded marketing materials pipeline management and so um this this portal gives our partners a One-Stop place to to go to find all that information um and then just really quickly on the second part of that that I mentioned is our technology really is um really disruptive to the market so you know like you said autonomous pen testing it's um it's still it's well it's still still relatively new topic uh for security practitioners and um it's proven to be really disruptive so um that on top of um just well recently we found an article that um that mentioned by markets and markets that reports that the global pen testing markets really expanding and so it's expected to grow to like 2.7 billion um by 2027. so the Market's there right the Market's expanding it's growing and so for our partners it's just really allows them to grow their revenue um across their customer base expand their customer base and offering this High profit margin while you know getting in early to Market on this just disruptive technology big Market a lot of opportunities to make some money people love to put more margin on on those deals especially when you can bring a great solution that everyone knows is hard to do so I think that's going to provide a lot of value is there is there a type of partner that you guys see emerging or you aligning with you mentioned the alignment with the partners I can see how that the training and the incentives are all there sounds like it's all going well is there a type of partner that's resonating the most or is there categories of partners that can take advantage of this yeah absolutely so we work with all different kinds of Partners we work with our traditional resale Partners um we've worked we're working with systems integrators we have a really strong MSP mssp program um we've got Consulting partners and the Consulting Partners especially with the ones that offer pen test services so we they use us as a as we act as a force multiplier just really offering them profit margin expansion um opportunity there we've got some technology partner partners that we really work with for co-cell opportunities and then we've got our Cloud Partners um you'd mentioned that earlier and so we are in AWS Marketplace so our ccpo partners we're part of the ISP accelerate program um so we we're doing a lot there with our Cloud partners and um of course we uh we go to market with uh distribution Partners as well gotta love the opportunity for more margin expansion every kind of partner wants to put more gross profit on their deals is there a certification involved I have to ask is there like do you get do people get certified or is it just you get trained is it self-paced training is it in person how are you guys doing the whole training certification thing because is that is that a requirement yeah absolutely so we do offer a certification program and um it's been very popular this includes a a seller's portion and an operator portion and and so um this is at no cost to our partners and um we operate both virtually it's it's law it's virtually but live it's not self-paced and we also have in person um you know sessions as well and we also can customize these to any partners that have a large group of people and we can just we can do one in person or virtual just specifically for that partner well any kind of incentive opportunities and marketing opportunities everyone loves to get the uh get the deals just kind of rolling in leads from what we can see if our early reporting this looks like a hot product price wise service level wise what incentive do you guys thinking about and and Joint marketing you mentioned co-sell earlier in pipeline so I was kind of kind of honing in on that piece sure and yes and then to follow along with our partner certification program we do incentivize our partners there if they have a certain number certified their discount increases so that's part of it we have our deal registration program that increases discount as well um and then we do have some um some partner incentives that are wrapped around meeting setting and um moving moving opportunities along to uh proof of value gotta love the education driving value I have to ask you so you've been around the industry you've seen the channel relationships out there you're seeing companies old school new school you know uh Horizon 3.ai is kind of like that new school very cloud specific a lot of Leverage with we mentioned AWS and all the clouds um why is the company so hot right now why did you join them and what's why are people attracted to this company what's the what's the attraction what's the vibe what do you what do you see and what what do you use what did you see in in this company well this is just you know like I said it's very disruptive um it's really in high demand right now and um and and just because because it's new to Market and uh a newer technology so we are we can collaborate with a manual pen tester um we can you know we can allow our customers to run their pen test um with with no specialty teams and um and and then so we and like you know like I said we can allow our partners can actually build businesses profitable businesses so we can they can use our product to increase their services revenue and um and build their business model you know around around our services what's interesting about the pen test thing is that it's very expensive and time consuming the people who do them are very talented people that could be working on really bigger things in the in absolutely customers so bringing this into the channel allows them if you look at the price Delta between a pen test and then what you guys are offering I mean that's a huge margin Gap between street price of say today's pen test and what you guys offer when you show people that they follow do they say too good to be true I mean what are some of the things that people say when you kind of show them that are they like scratch their head like come on what's the what's the catch here right so the cost savings is a huge is huge for us um and then also you know like I said working as a force multiplier with a pen testing company that offers the services and so they can they can do their their annual manual pen tests that may be required around compliance regulations and then we can we can act as the continuous verification of their security um um you know that that they can run um weekly and so it's just um you know it's just an addition to to what they're offering already and an expansion so Jennifer thanks for coming on thecube really appreciate you uh coming on sharing the insights on the channel uh what's next what can we expect from the channel group what are you thinking what's going on right so we're really looking to expand our our Channel um footprint and um very strategically uh we've got um we've got some big plans um for for Horizon 3.ai awesome well thanks for coming on really appreciate it you're watching thecube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Cube's special presentation with Horizon 3.ai with Raina Richter vice president of emea Europe Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific APAC for Horizon 3 today welcome to this special Cube presentation thanks for joining us thank you for the invitation so Horizon 3 a guy driving Global expansion big international news with a partner first approach you guys are expanding internationally let's get into it you guys are driving this new expanse partner program to new heights tell us about it what are you seeing in the momentum why the expansion what's all the news about well I would say uh yeah in in international we have I would say a similar similar situation like in the US um there is a global shortage of well-educated penetration testers on the one hand side on the other side um we have a raising demand of uh network and infrastructure security and with our approach of an uh autonomous penetration testing I I believe we are totally on top of the game um especially as we have also now uh starting with an international instance that means for example if a customer in Europe is using uh our service node zero he will be connected to a node zero instance which is located inside the European Union and therefore he has doesn't have to worry about the conflict between the European the gdpr regulations versus the US Cloud act and I would say there we have a total good package for our partners that they can provide differentiators to their customers you know we've had great conversations here on thecube with the CEO and the founder of the company around the leverage of the cloud and how successful that's been for the company and honestly I can just Connect the Dots here but I'd like you to weigh in more on how that translates into the go to market here because you got great Cloud scale with with the security product you guys are having success with great leverage there I've seen a lot of success there what's the momentum on the channel partner program internationally why is it so important to you is it just the regional segmentation is it the economics why the momentum well there are it's there are multiple issues first of all there is a raising demand in penetration testing um and don't forget that uh in international we have a much higher level in number a number or percentage in SMB and mid-market customers so these customers typically most of them even didn't have a pen test done once a year so for them pen testing was just too expensive now with our offering together with our partners we can provide different uh ways how customers could get an autonomous pen testing done more than once a year with even lower costs than they had with with a traditional manual paint test so and that is because we have our uh Consulting plus package which is for typically pain testers they can go out and can do a much faster much quicker and their pain test at many customers once in after each other so they can do more pain tests on a lower more attractive price on the other side there are others what even the same ones who are providing um node zero as an mssp service so they can go after s p customers saying okay well you only have a couple of hundred uh IP addresses no worries we have the perfect package for you and then you have let's say the mid Market let's say the thousands and more employees then they might even have an annual subscription very traditional but for all of them it's all the same the customer or the service provider doesn't need a piece of Hardware they only need to install a small piece of a Docker container and that's it and that makes it so so smooth to go in and say okay Mr customer we just put in this this virtual attacker into your network and that's it and and all the rest is done and within within three clicks they are they can act like a pen tester with 20 years of experience and that's going to be very Channel friendly and partner friendly I can almost imagine so I have to ask you and thank you for calling the break calling out that breakdown and and segmentation that was good that was very helpful for me to understand but I want to follow up if you don't mind um what type of partners are you seeing the most traction with and why well I would say at the beginning typically you have the the innovators the early adapters typically Boutique size of Partners they start because they they are always looking for Innovation and those are the ones you they start in the beginning so we have a wide range of Partners having mostly even um managed by the owner of the company so uh they immediately understand okay there is the value and they can change their offering they're changing their offering in terms of penetration testing because they can do more pen tests and they can then add other ones or we have those ones who offer 10 tests services but they did not have their own pen testers so they had to go out on the open market and Source paint testing experts um to get the pen test at a particular customer done and now with node zero they're totally independent they can't go out and say okay Mr customer here's the here's the service that's it we turn it on and within an hour you're up and running totally yeah and those pen tests are usually expensive and hard to do now it's right in line with the sales delivery pretty interesting for a partner absolutely but on the other hand side we are not killing the pain testers business we do something we're providing with no tiers I would call something like the foundation work the foundational work of having an an ongoing penetration testing of the infrastructure the operating system and the pen testers by themselves they can concentrate in the future on things like application pen testing for example so those Services which we we're not touching so we're not killing the paint tester Market we're just taking away the ongoing um let's say foundation work call it that way yeah yeah that was one of my questions I was going to ask is there's a lot of interest in this autonomous pen testing one because it's expensive to do because those skills are required are in need and they're expensive so you kind of cover the entry level and the blockers that are in there I've seen people say to me this pen test becomes a blocker for getting things done so there's been a lot of interest in the autonomous pen testing and for organizations to have that posture and it's an overseas issue too because now you have that that ongoing thing so can you explain that particular benefit for an organization to have that continuously verifying an organization's posture yep certainly so I would say um typically you are you you have to do your patches you have to bring in new versions of operating systems of different Services of uh um operating systems of some components and and they are always bringing new vulnerabilities the difference here is that with node zero we are telling the customer or the partner package we're telling them which are the executable vulnerabilities because previously they might have had um a vulnerability scanner so this vulnerability scanner brought up hundreds or even thousands of cves but didn't say anything about which of them are vulnerable really executable and then you need an expert digging in one cve after the other finding out is it is it really executable yes or no and that is where you need highly paid experts which we have a shortage so with notes here now we can say okay we tell you exactly which ones are the ones you should work on because those are the ones which are executable we rank them accordingly to the risk level how easily they can be used and by a sudden and then the good thing is convert it or indifference to the traditional penetration test they don't have to wait for a year for the next pain test to find out if the fixing was effective they weren't just the next scan and say Yes closed vulnerability is gone the time is really valuable and if you're doing any devops Cloud native you're always pushing new things so pen test ongoing pen testing is actually a benefit just in general as a kind of hygiene so really really interesting solution really bring that global scale is going to be a new new coverage area for us for sure I have to ask you if you don't mind answering what particular region are you focused on or plan to Target for this next phase of growth well at this moment we are concentrating on the countries inside the European Union Plus the United Kingdom um but we are and they are of course logically I'm based into Frankfurt area that means we cover more or less the countries just around so it's like the total dark region Germany Switzerland Austria plus the Netherlands but we also already have Partners in the nordics like in Finland or in Sweden um so it's it's it it's rapidly we have Partners already in the UK and it's rapidly growing so I'm for example we are now starting with some activities in Singapore um um and also in the in the Middle East area um very important we uh depending on let's say the the way how to do business currently we try to concentrate on those countries where we can have um let's say um at least English as an accepted business language great is there any particular region you're having the most success with right now is it sounds like European Union's um kind of first wave what's them yes that's the first definitely that's the first wave and now we're also getting the uh the European instance up and running it's clearly our commitment also to the market saying okay we know there are certain dedicated uh requirements and we take care of this and and we're just launching it we're building up this one uh the instance um in the AWS uh service center here in Frankfurt also with some dedicated Hardware internet in a data center in Frankfurt where we have with the date six by the way uh the highest internet interconnection bandwidth on the planet so we have very short latency to wherever you are on on the globe that's a great that's a great call outfit benefit too I was going to ask that what are some of the benefits your partners are seeing in emea and Asia Pacific well I would say um the the benefits is for them it's clearly they can they can uh talk with customers and can offer customers penetration testing which they before and even didn't think about because it penetrates penetration testing in a traditional way was simply too expensive for them too complex the preparation time was too long um they didn't have even have the capacity uh to um to support a pain an external pain tester now with this service you can go in and say even if they Mr customer we can do a test with you in a couple of minutes within we have installed the docker container within 10 minutes we have the pen test started that's it and then we just wait and and I would say that is we'll we are we are seeing so many aha moments then now because on the partner side when they see node zero the first time working it's like this wow that is great and then they work out to customers and and show it to their typically at the beginning mostly the friendly customers like wow that's great I need that and and I would say um the feedback from the partners is that is a service where I do not have to evangelize the customer everybody understands penetration testing I don't have to say describe what it is they understand the customer understanding immediately yes penetration testing good about that I know I should do it but uh too complex too expensive now with the name is for example as an mssp service provided from one of our partners but it's getting easy yeah it's great and it's great great benefit there I mean I gotta say I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing I like this continuous automation that's a major benefit to anyone doing devops or any kind of modern application development this is just a godsend for them this is really good and like you said the pen testers that are doing it they were kind of coming down from their expertise to kind of do things that should have been automated they get to focus on the bigger ticket items that's a really big point so we free them we free the pain testers for the higher level elements of the penetration testing segment and that is typically the application testing which is currently far away from being automated yeah and that's where the most critical workloads are and I think this is the nice balance congratulations on the international expansion of the program and thanks for coming on this special presentation really I really appreciate it thank you you're welcome okay this is thecube special presentation you know check out pen test automation International expansion Horizon 3 dot AI uh really Innovative solution in our next segment Chris Hill sector head for strategic accounts will discuss the power of Horizon 3.ai and Splunk in action you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage foreign [Music] [Music] welcome back everyone to the cube and Horizon 3.ai special presentation I'm John Furrier host of thecube we're with Chris Hill sector head for strategic accounts and federal at Horizon 3.ai a great Innovative company Chris great to see you thanks for coming on thecube yeah like I said uh you know great to meet you John long time listener first time caller so excited to be here with you guys yeah we were talking before camera you had Splunk back in 2013 and I think 2012 was our first splunk.com and boy man you know talk about being in the right place at the right time now we're at another inflection point and Splunk continues to be relevant um and continuing to have that data driving Security in that interplay and your CEO former CTO of his plug as well at Horizon who's been on before really Innovative product you guys have but you know yeah don't wait for a breach to find out if you're logging the right data this is the topic of this thread Splunk is very much part of this new international expansion announcement uh with you guys tell us what are some of the challenges that you see where this is relevant for the Splunk and Horizon AI as you guys expand uh node zero out internationally yeah well so across so you know my role uh within Splunk it was uh working with our most strategic accounts and so I looked back to 2013 and I think about the sales process like working with with our small customers you know it was um it was still very siled back then like I was selling to an I.T team that was either using this for it operations um we generally would always even say yeah although we do security we weren't really designed for it we're a log management tool and we I'm sure you remember back then John we were like sort of stepping into the security space and and the public sector domain that I was in you know security was 70 of what we did when I look back to sort of uh the transformation that I was witnessing in that digital transformation um you know when I look at like 2019 to today you look at how uh the IT team and the security teams are being have been forced to break down those barriers that they used to sort of be silent away would not commute communicate one you know the security guys would be like oh this is my box I.T you're not allowed in today you can't get away with that and I think that the value that we bring to you know and of course Splunk has been a huge leader in that space and continues to do Innovation across the board but I think what we've we're seeing in the space and I was talking with Patrick Coughlin the SVP of uh security markets about this is that you know what we've been able to do with Splunk is build a purpose-built solution that allows Splunk to eat more data so Splunk itself is ulk know it's an ingest engine right the great reason people bought it was you could build these really fast dashboards and grab intelligence out of it but without data it doesn't do anything right so how do you drive and how do you bring more data in and most importantly from a customer perspective how do you bring the right data in and so if you think about what node zero and what we're doing in a horizon 3 is that sure we do pen testing but because we're an autonomous pen testing tool we do it continuously so this whole thought I'd be like oh crud like my customers oh yeah we got a pen test coming up it's gonna be six weeks the week oh yeah you know and everyone's gonna sit on their hands call me back in two months Chris we'll talk to you then right not not a real efficient way to test your environment and shoot we saw that with Uber this week right um you know and that's a case where we could have helped oh just right we could explain the Uber thing because it was a contractor just give a quick highlight of what happened so you can connect the doctor yeah no problem so um it was uh I got I think it was yeah one of those uh you know games where they would try and test an environment um and with the uh pen tester did was he kept on calling them MFA guys being like I need to reset my password we need to set my right password and eventually the um the customer service guy said okay I'm resetting it once he had reset and bypassed the multi-factor authentication he then was able to get in and get access to the building area that he was in or I think not the domain but he was able to gain access to a partial part of that Network he then paralleled over to what I would assume is like a VA VMware or some virtual machine that had notes that had all of the credentials for logging into various domains and So within minutes they had access and that's the sort of stuff that we do you know a lot of these tools like um you know you think about the cacophony of tools that are out there in a GTA architect architecture right I'm gonna get like a z-scale or I'm going to have uh octum and I have a Splunk I've been into the solar system I mean I don't mean to name names we have crowdstriker or Sentinel one in there it's just it's a cacophony of things that don't work together they weren't designed work together and so we have seen so many times in our business through our customer support and just working with customers when we do their pen tests that there will be 5 000 servers out there three are misconfigured those three misconfigurations will create the open door because remember the hacker only needs to be right once the defender needs to be right all the time and that's the challenge and so that's what I'm really passionate about what we're doing uh here at Horizon three I see this my digital transformation migration and security going on which uh we're at the tip of the spear it's why I joined sey Hall coming on this journey uh and just super excited about where the path's going and super excited about the relationship with Splunk I get into more details on some of the specifics of that but um you know well you're nailing I mean we've been doing a lot of things on super cloud and this next gen environment we're calling it next gen you're really seeing devops obviously devsecops has already won the it role has moved to the developer shift left is an indicator of that it's one of the many examples higher velocity code software supply chain you hear these things that means that it is now in the developer hands it is replaced by the new Ops data Ops teams and security where there's a lot of horizontal thinking to your point about access there's no more perimeter huge 100 right is really right on things one time you know to get in there once you're in then you can hang out move around move laterally big problem okay so we get that now the challenges for these teams as they are transitioning organizationally how do they figure out what to do okay this is the next step they already have Splunk so now they're kind of in transition while protecting for a hundred percent ratio of success so how would you look at that and describe the challenge is what do they do what is it what are the teams facing with their data and what's next what are they what are they what action do they take so let's use some vernacular that folks will know so if I think about devsecops right we both know what that means that I'm going to build security into the app it normally talks about sec devops right how am I building security around the perimeter of what's going inside my ecosystem and what are they doing and so if you think about what we're able to do with somebody like Splunk is we can pen test the entire environment from Soup To Nuts right so I'm going to test the end points through to its I'm going to look for misconfigurations I'm going to I'm going to look for um uh credential exposed credentials you know I'm going to look for anything I can in the environment again I'm going to do it at light speed and and what what we're doing for that SEC devops space is to you know did you detect that we were in your environment so did we alert Splunk or the Sim that there's someone in the environment laterally moving around did they more importantly did they log us into their environment and when do they detect that log to trigger that log did they alert on us and then finally most importantly for every CSO out there is going to be did they stop us and so that's how we we do this and I think you when speaking with um stay Hall before you know we've come up with this um boils but we call it fine fix verifying so what we do is we go in is we act as the attacker right we act in a production environment so we're not going to be we're a passive attacker but we will go in on credentialed on agents but we have to assume to have an assumed breach model which means we're going to put a Docker container in your environment and then we're going to fingerprint the environment so we're going to go out and do an asset survey now that's something that's not something that Splunk does super well you know so can Splunk see all the assets do the same assets marry up we're going to log all that data and think and then put load that into this long Sim or the smoke logging tools just to have it in Enterprise right that's an immediate future ad that they've got um and then we've got the fix so once we've completed our pen test um we are then going to generate a report and we can talk about these in a little bit later but the reports will show an executive summary the assets that we found which would be your asset Discovery aspect of that a fix report and the fixed report I think is probably the most important one it will go down and identify what we did how we did it and then how to fix that and then from that the pen tester or the organization should fix those then they go back and run another test and then they validate like a change detection environment to see hey did those fixes taste play take place and you know snehaw when he was the CTO of jsoc he shared with me a number of times about it's like man there would be 15 more items on next week's punch sheet that we didn't know about and it's and it has to do with how we you know how they were uh prioritizing the cves and whatnot because they would take all CBDs it was critical or non-critical and it's like we are able to create context in that environment that feeds better information into Splunk and whatnot that brings that brings up the efficiency for Splunk specifically the teams out there by the way the burnout thing is real I mean this whole I just finished my list and I got 15 more or whatever the list just can keeps growing how did node zero specifically help Splunk teams be more efficient like that's the question I want to get at because this seems like a very scale way for Splunk customers and teams service teams to be more so the question is how does node zero help make Splunk specifically their service teams be more efficient so so today in our early interactions we're building customers we've seen are five things um and I'll start with sort of identifying the blind spots right so kind of what I just talked about with you did we detect did we log did we alert did they stop node zero right and so I would I put that you know a more Layman's third grade term and if I was going to beat a fifth grader at this game would be we can be the sparring partner for a Splunk Enterprise customer a Splunk Essentials customer someone using Splunk soar or even just an Enterprise Splunk customer that may be a small shop with three people and just wants to know where am I exposed so by creating and generating these reports and then having um the API that actually generates the dashboard they can take all of these events that we've logged and log them in and then where that then comes in is number two is how do we prioritize those logs right so how do we create visibility to logs that that um are have critical impacts and again as I mentioned earlier not all cves are high impact regard and also not all or low right so if you daisy chain a bunch of low cves together boom I've got a mission critical AP uh CPE that needs to be fixed now such as a credential moving to an NT box that's got a text file with a bunch of passwords on it that would be very bad um and then third would be uh verifying that you have all of the hosts so one of the things that splunk's not particularly great at and they'll literate themselves they don't do asset Discovery so dude what assets do we see and what are they logging from that um and then for from um for every event that they are able to identify one of the cool things that we can do is actually create this low code no code environment so they could let you know Splunk customers can use Splunk sword to actually triage events and prioritize that event so where they're being routed within it to optimize the Sox team time to Market or time to triage any given event obviously reducing MTR and then finally I think one of the neatest things that we'll be seeing us develop is um our ability to build glass cables so behind me you'll see one of our triage events and how we build uh a Lockheed Martin kill chain on that with a glass table which is very familiar to the community we're going to have the ability and not too distant future to allow people to search observe on those iocs and if people aren't familiar with it ioc it's an instant of a compromise so that's a vector that we want to drill into and of course who's better at Drilling in the data and smoke yeah this is a critter this is an awesome Synergy there I mean I can see a Splunk customer going man this just gives me so much more capability action actionability and also real understanding and I think this is what I want to dig into if you don't mind understanding that critical impact okay is kind of where I see this coming got the data data ingest now data's data but the question is what not to log you know where are things misconfigured these are critical questions so can you talk about what it means to understand critical impact yeah so I think you know going back to the things that I just spoke about a lot of those cves where you'll see um uh low low low and then you daisy chain together and they're suddenly like oh this is high now but then your other impact of like if you're if you're a Splunk customer you know and I had it I had several of them I had one customer that you know terabytes of McAfee data being brought in and it was like all right there's a lot of other data that you probably also want to bring but they could only afford wanted to do certain data sets because that's and they didn't know how to prioritize or filter those data sets and so we provide that opportunity to say hey these are the critical ones to bring in but there's also the ones that you don't necessarily need to bring in because low cve in this case really does mean low cve like an ILO server would be one that um that's the print server uh where the uh your admin credentials are on on like a printer and so there will be credentials on that that's something that a hacker might go in to look at so although the cve on it is low is if you daisy chain with somebody that's able to get into that you might say Ah that's high and we would then potentially rank it giving our AI logic to say that's a moderate so put it on the scale and we prioritize those versus uh of all of these scanners just going to give you a bunch of CDs and good luck and translating that if I if I can and tell me if I'm wrong that kind of speaks to that whole lateral movement that's it challenge right print serve a great example looks stupid low end who's going to want to deal with the print server oh but it's connected into a critical system there's a path is that kind of what you're getting at yeah I use Daisy Chain I think that's from the community they came from uh but it's just a lateral movement it's exactly what they're doing in those low level low critical lateral movements is where the hackers are getting in right so that's the beauty thing about the uh the Uber example is that who would have thought you know I've got my monthly Factor authentication going in a human made a mistake we can't we can't not expect humans to make mistakes we're fallible right the reality is is once they were in the environment they could have protected themselves by running enough pen tests to know that they had certain uh exposed credentials that would have stopped the breach and they did not had not done that in their environment and I'm not poking yeah but it's an interesting Trend though I mean it's obvious if sometimes those low end items are also not protected well so it's easy to get at from a hacker standpoint but also the people in charge of them can be fished easily or spearfished because they're not paying attention because they don't have to no one ever told them hey be careful yeah for the community that I came from John that's exactly how they they would uh meet you at a uh an International Event um introduce themselves as a graduate student these are National actor States uh would you mind reviewing my thesis on such and such and I was at Adobe at the time that I was working on this instead of having to get the PDF they opened the PDF and whoever that customer was launches and I don't know if you remember back in like 2008 time frame there was a lot of issues around IP being by a nation state being stolen from the United States and that's exactly how they did it and John that's or LinkedIn hey I want to get a joke we want to hire you double the salary oh I'm gonna click on that for sure you know yeah right exactly yeah the one thing I would say to you is like uh when we look at like sort of you know because I think we did 10 000 pen tests last year is it's probably over that now you know we have these sort of top 10 ways that we think and find people coming into the environment the funniest thing is that only one of them is a cve related vulnerability like uh you know you guys know what they are right so it's it but it's it's like two percent of the attacks are occurring through the cves but yeah there's all that attention spent to that and very little attention spent to this pen testing side which is sort of this continuous threat you know monitoring space and and this vulnerability space where I think we play a such an important role and I'm so excited to be a part of the tip of the spear on this one yeah I'm old enough to know the movie sneakers which I loved as a you know watching that movie you know professional hackers are testing testing always testing the environment I love this I got to ask you as we kind of wrap up here Chris if you don't mind the the benefits to Professional Services from this Alliance big news Splunk and you guys work well together we see that clearly what are what other benefits do Professional Services teams see from the Splunk and Horizon 3.ai Alliance so if you're I think for from our our from both of our uh Partners uh as we bring these guys together and many of them already are the same partner right uh is that uh first off the licensing model is probably one of the key areas that we really excel at so if you're an end user you can buy uh for the Enterprise by the number of IP addresses you're using um but uh if you're a partner working with this there's solution ways that you can go in and we'll license as to msps and what that business model on msps looks like but the unique thing that we do here is this C plus license and so the Consulting plus license allows like a uh somebody a small to mid-sized to some very large uh you know Fortune 100 uh consulting firms use this uh by buying into a license called um Consulting plus where they can have unlimited uh access to as many IPS as they want but you can only run one test at a time and as you can imagine when we're going and hacking passwords and um checking hashes and decrypting hashes that can take a while so but for the right customer it's it's a perfect tool and so I I'm so excited about our ability to go to market with uh our partners so that we understand ourselves understand how not to just sell to or not tell just to sell through but we know how to sell with them as a good vendor partner I think that that's one thing that we've done a really good job building bring it into the market yeah I think also the Splunk has had great success how they've enabled uh partners and Professional Services absolutely you know the services that layer on top of Splunk are multi-fold tons of great benefits so you guys Vector right into that ride that way with friction and and the cool thing is that in you know in one of our reports which could be totally customized uh with someone else's logo we're going to generate you know so I I used to work in another organization it wasn't Splunk but we we did uh you know pen testing as for for customers and my pen testers would come on site they'd do the engagement and they would leave and then another release someone would be oh shoot we got another sector that was breached and they'd call you back you know four weeks later and so by August our entire pen testings teams would be sold out and it would be like well even in March maybe and they're like no no I gotta breach now and and and then when they do go in they go through do the pen test and they hand over a PDF and they pack on the back and say there's where your problems are you need to fix it and the reality is that what we're going to generate completely autonomously with no human interaction is we're going to go and find all the permutations of anything we found and the fix for those permutations and then once you've fixed everything you just go back and run another pen test it's you know for what people pay for one pen test they can have a tool that does that every every Pat patch on Tuesday and that's on Wednesday you know triage throughout the week green yellow red I wanted to see the colors show me green green is good right not red and one CIO doesn't want who doesn't want that dashboard right it's it's exactly it and we can help bring I think that you know I'm really excited about helping drive this with the Splunk team because they get that they understand that it's the green yellow red dashboard and and how do we help them find more green uh so that the other guys are in red yeah and get in the data and do the right thing and be efficient with how you use the data know what to look at so many things to pay attention to you know the combination of both and then go to market strategy real brilliant congratulations Chris thanks for coming on and sharing um this news with the detail around the Splunk in action around the alliance thanks for sharing John my pleasure thanks look forward to seeing you soon all right great we'll follow up and do another segment on devops and I.T and security teams as the new new Ops but and super cloud a bunch of other stuff so thanks for coming on and our next segment the CEO of horizon 3.aa will break down all the new news for us here on thecube you're watching thecube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music] yeah the partner program for us has been fantastic you know I think prior to that you know as most organizations most uh uh most Farmers most mssps might not necessarily have a a bench at all for penetration testing uh maybe they subcontract this work out or maybe they do it themselves but trying to staff that kind of position can be incredibly difficult for us this was a differentiator a a new a new partner a new partnership that allowed us to uh not only perform services for our customers but be able to provide a product by which that they can do it themselves so we work with our customers in a variety of ways some of them want more routine testing and perform this themselves but we're also a certified service provider of horizon 3 being able to perform uh penetration tests uh help review the the data provide color provide analysis for our customers in a broader sense right not necessarily the the black and white elements of you know what was uh what's critical what's high what's medium what's low what you need to fix but are there systemic issues this has allowed us to onboard new customers this has allowed us to migrate some penetration testing services to us from from competitors in the marketplace But ultimately this is occurring because the the product and the outcome are special they're unique and they're effective our customers like what they're seeing they like the routineness of it many of them you know again like doing this themselves you know being able to kind of pen test themselves parts of their networks um and the the new use cases right I'm a large organization I have eight to ten Acquisitions per year wouldn't it be great to have a tool to be able to perform a penetration test both internal and external of that acquisition before we integrate the two companies and maybe bringing on some risk it's a very effective partnership uh one that really is uh kind of taken our our Engineers our account Executives by storm um you know this this is a a partnership that's been very valuable to us [Music] a key part of the value and business model at Horizon 3 is enabling Partners to leverage node zero to make more revenue for themselves our goal is that for sixty percent of our Revenue this year will be originated by partners and that 95 of our Revenue next year will be originated by partners and so a key to that strategy is making us an integral part of your business models as a partner a key quote from one of our partners is that we enable every one of their business units to generate Revenue so let's talk about that in a little bit more detail first is that if you have a pen test Consulting business take Deloitte as an example what was six weeks of human labor at Deloitte per pen test has been cut down to four days of Labor using node zero to conduct reconnaissance find all the juicy interesting areas of the of the Enterprise that are exploitable and being able to go assess the entire organization and then all of those details get served up to the human to be able to look at understand and determine where to probe deeper so what you see in that pen test Consulting business is that node zero becomes a force multiplier where those Consulting teams were able to cover way more accounts and way more IPS within those accounts with the same or fewer consultants and so that directly leads to profit margin expansion for the Penn testing business itself because node 0 is a force multiplier the second business model here is if you're an mssp as an mssp you're already making money providing defensive cyber security operations for a large volume of customers and so what they do is they'll license node zero and use us as an upsell to their mssb business to start to deliver either continuous red teaming continuous verification or purple teaming as a service and so in that particular business model they've got an additional line of Revenue where they can increase the spend of their existing customers by bolting on node 0 as a purple team as a service offering the third business model or customer type is if you're an I.T services provider so as an I.T services provider you make money installing and configuring security products like Splunk or crowdstrike or hemio you also make money reselling those products and you also make money generating follow-on services to continue to harden your customer environments and so for them what what those it service providers will do is use us to verify that they've installed Splunk correctly improved to their customer that Splunk was installed correctly or crowdstrike was installed correctly using our results and then use our results to drive follow-on services and revenue and then finally we've got the value-added reseller which is just a straight up reseller because of how fast our sales Cycles are these vars are able to typically go from cold email to deal close in six to eight weeks at Horizon 3 at least a single sales engineer is able to run 30 to 50 pocs concurrently because our pocs are very lightweight and don't require any on-prem customization or heavy pre-sales post sales activity so as a result we're able to have a few amount of sellers driving a lot of Revenue and volume for us well the same thing applies to bars there isn't a lot of effort to sell the product or prove its value so vars are able to sell a lot more Horizon 3 node zero product without having to build up a huge specialist sales organization so what I'm going to do is talk through uh scenario three here as an I.T service provider and just how powerful node zero can be in driving additional Revenue so in here think of for every one dollar of node zero license purchased by the IT service provider to do their business it'll generate ten dollars of additional revenue for that partner so in this example kidney group uses node 0 to verify that they have installed and deployed Splunk correctly so Kitty group is a Splunk partner they they sell it services to install configure deploy and maintain Splunk and as they deploy Splunk they're going to use node 0 to attack the environment and make sure that the right logs and alerts and monitoring are being handled within the Splunk deployment so it's a way of doing QA or verifying that Splunk has been configured correctly and that's going to be internally used by kidney group to prove the quality of their services that they've just delivered then what they're going to do is they're going to show and leave behind that node zero Report with their client and that creates a resell opportunity for for kidney group to resell node 0 to their client because their client is seeing the reports and the results and saying wow this is pretty amazing and those reports can be co-branded where it's a pen testing report branded with kidney group but it says powered by Horizon three under it from there kidney group is able to take the fixed actions report that's automatically generated with every pen test through node zero and they're able to use that as the starting point for a statement of work to sell follow-on services to fix all of the problems that node zero identified fixing l11r misconfigurations fixing or patching VMware or updating credentials policies and so on so what happens is node 0 has found a bunch of problems the client often lacks the capacity to fix and so kidney group can use that lack of capacity by the client as a follow-on sales opportunity for follow-on services and finally based on the findings from node zero kidney group can look at that report and say to the customer you know customer if you bought crowdstrike you'd be able to uh prevent node Zero from attacking and succeeding in the way that it did for if you bought humano or if you bought Palo Alto networks or if you bought uh some privileged access management solution because of what node 0 was able to do with credential harvesting and attacks and so as a result kidney group is able to resell other security products within their portfolio crowdstrike Falcon humano Polito networks demisto Phantom and so on based on the gaps that were identified by node zero and that pen test and what that creates is another feedback loop where kidney group will then go use node 0 to verify that crowdstrike product has actually been installed and configured correctly and then this becomes the cycle of using node 0 to verify a deployment using that verification to drive a bunch of follow-on services and resell opportunities which then further drives more usage of the product now the way that we licensed is that it's a usage-based license licensing model so that the partner will grow their node zero Consulting plus license as they grow their business so for example if you're a kidney group then week one you've got you're going to use node zero to verify your Splunk install in week two if you have a pen testing business you're going to go off and use node zero to be a force multiplier for your pen testing uh client opportunity and then if you have an mssp business then in week three you're going to use node zero to go execute a purple team mssp offering for your clients so not necessarily a kidney group but if you're a Deloitte or ATT these larger companies and you've got multiple lines of business if you're Optive for instance you all you have to do is buy one Consulting plus license and you're going to be able to run as many pen tests as you want sequentially so now you can buy a single license and use that one license to meet your week one client commitments and then meet your week two and then meet your week three and as you grow your business you start to run multiple pen tests concurrently so in week one you've got to do a Splunk verify uh verify Splunk install and you've got to run a pen test and you've got to do a purple team opportunity you just simply expand the number of Consulting plus licenses from one license to three licenses and so now as you systematically grow your business you're able to grow your node zero capacity with you giving you predictable cogs predictable margins and once again 10x additional Revenue opportunity for that investment in the node zero Consulting plus license my name is Saint I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Horizon 3. I'm going to talk to you today about why it's important to look at your Enterprise Through The Eyes of an attacker the challenge I had when I was a CIO in banking the CTO at Splunk and serving within the Department of Defense is that I had no idea I was Secure until the bad guys had showed up am I logging the right data am I fixing the right vulnerabilities are my security tools that I've paid millions of dollars for actually working together to defend me and the answer is I don't know does my team actually know how to respond to a breach in the middle of an incident I don't know I've got to wait for the bad guys to show up and so the challenge I had was how do we proactively verify our security posture I tried a variety of techniques the first was the use of vulnerability scanners and the challenge with vulnerability scanners is being vulnerable doesn't mean you're exploitable I might have a hundred thousand findings from my scanner of which maybe five or ten can actually be exploited in my environment the other big problem with scanners is that they can't chain weaknesses together from machine to machine so if you've got a thousand machines in your environment or more what a vulnerability scanner will do is tell you you have a problem on machine one and separately a problem on machine two but what they can tell you is that an attacker could use a load from machine one plus a low from machine two to equal to critical in your environment and what attackers do in their tactics is they chain together misconfigurations dangerous product defaults harvested credentials and exploitable vulnerabilities into attack paths across different machines so to address the attack pads across different machines I tried layering in consulting-based pen testing and the issue is when you've got thousands of hosts or hundreds of thousands of hosts in your environment human-based pen testing simply doesn't scale to test an infrastructure of that size moreover when they actually do execute a pen test and you get the report oftentimes you lack the expertise within your team to quickly retest to verify that you've actually fixed the problem and so what happens is you end up with these pen test reports that are incomplete snapshots and quickly going stale and then to mitigate that problem I tried using breach and attack simulation tools and the struggle with these tools is one I had to install credentialed agents everywhere two I had to write my own custom attack scripts that I didn't have much talent for but also I had to maintain as my environment changed and then three these types of tools were not safe to run against production systems which was the the majority of my attack surface so that's why we went off to start Horizon 3. so Tony and I met when we were in Special Operations together and the challenge we wanted to solve was how do we do infrastructure security testing at scale by giving the the power of a 20-year pen testing veteran into the hands of an I.T admin a network engineer in just three clicks and the whole idea is we enable these fixers The Blue Team to be able to run node Zero Hour pen testing product to quickly find problems in their environment that blue team will then then go off and fix the issues that were found and then they can quickly rerun the attack to verify that they fixed the problem and the whole idea is delivering this without requiring custom scripts be developed without requiring credential agents be installed and without requiring the use of external third-party consulting services or Professional Services self-service pen testing to quickly Drive find fix verify there are three primary use cases that our customers use us for the first is the sock manager that uses us to verify that their security tools are actually effective to verify that they're logging the right data in Splunk or in their Sim to verify that their managed security services provider is able to quickly detect and respond to an attack and hold them accountable for their slas or that the sock understands how to quickly detect and respond and measuring and verifying that or that the variety of tools that you have in your stack most organizations have 130 plus cyber security tools none of which are designed to work together are actually working together the second primary use case is proactively hardening and verifying your systems this is when the I that it admin that network engineer they're able to run self-service pen tests to verify that their Cisco environment is installed in hardened and configured correctly or that their credential policies are set up right or that their vcenter or web sphere or kubernetes environments are actually designed to be secure and what this allows the it admins and network Engineers to do is shift from running one or two pen tests a year to 30 40 or more pen tests a month and you can actually wire those pen tests into your devops process or into your detection engineering and the change management processes to automatically trigger pen tests every time there's a change in your environment the third primary use case is for those organizations lucky enough to have their own internal red team they'll use node zero to do reconnaissance and exploitation at scale and then use the output as a starting point for the humans to step in and focus on the really hard juicy stuff that gets them on stage at Defcon and so these are the three primary use cases and what we'll do is zoom into the find fix verify Loop because what I've found in my experience is find fix verify is the future operating model for cyber security organizations and what I mean here is in the find using continuous pen testing what you want to enable is on-demand self-service pen tests you want those pen tests to find attack pads at scale spanning your on-prem infrastructure your Cloud infrastructure and your perimeter because attackers don't only state in one place they will find ways to chain together a perimeter breach a credential from your on-prem to gain access to your cloud or some other permutation and then the third part in continuous pen testing is attackers don't focus on critical vulnerabilities anymore they know we've built vulnerability Management Programs to reduce those vulnerabilities so attackers have adapted and what they do is chain together misconfigurations in your infrastructure and software and applications with dangerous product defaults with exploitable vulnerabilities and through the collection of credentials through a mix of techniques at scale once you've found those problems the next question is what do you do about it well you want to be able to prioritize fixing problems that are actually exploitable in your environment that truly matter meaning they're going to lead to domain compromise or domain user compromise or access your sensitive data the second thing you want to fix is making sure you understand what risk your crown jewels data is exposed to where is your crown jewels data is in the cloud is it on-prem has it been copied to a share drive that you weren't aware of if a domain user was compromised could they access that crown jewels data you want to be able to use the attacker's perspective to secure the critical data you have in your infrastructure and then finally as you fix these problems you want to quickly remediate and retest that you've actually fixed the issue and this fine fix verify cycle becomes that accelerator that drives purple team culture the third part here is verify and what you want to be able to do in the verify step is verify that your security tools and processes in people can effectively detect and respond to a breach you want to be able to integrate that into your detection engineering processes so that you know you're catching the right security rules or that you've deployed the right configurations you also want to make sure that your environment is adhering to the best practices around systems hardening in cyber resilience and finally you want to be able to prove your security posture over a time to your board to your leadership into your regulators so what I'll do now is zoom into each of these three steps so when we zoom in to find here's the first example using node 0 and autonomous pen testing and what an attacker will do is find a way to break through the perimeter in this example it's very easy to misconfigure kubernetes to allow an attacker to gain remote code execution into your on-prem kubernetes environment and break through the perimeter and from there what the attacker is going to do is conduct Network reconnaissance and then find ways to gain code execution on other machines in the environment and as they get code execution they start to dump credentials collect a bunch of ntlm hashes crack those hashes using open source and dark web available data as part of those attacks and then reuse those credentials to log in and laterally maneuver throughout the environment and then as they loudly maneuver they can reuse those credentials and use credential spraying techniques and so on to compromise your business email to log in as admin into your cloud and this is a very common attack and rarely is a CV actually needed to execute this attack often it's just a misconfiguration in kubernetes with a bad credential policy or password policy combined with bad practices of credential reuse across the organization here's another example of an internal pen test and this is from an actual customer they had 5 000 hosts within their environment they had EDR and uba tools installed and they initiated in an internal pen test on a single machine from that single initial access point node zero enumerated the network conducted reconnaissance and found five thousand hosts were accessible what node 0 will do under the covers is organize all of that reconnaissance data into a knowledge graph that we call the Cyber terrain map and that cyber Terrain map becomes the key data structure that we use to efficiently maneuver and attack and compromise your environment so what node zero will do is they'll try to find ways to get code execution reuse credentials and so on in this customer example they had Fortinet installed as their EDR but node 0 was still able to get code execution on a Windows machine from there it was able to successfully dump credentials including sensitive credentials from the lsas process on the Windows box and then reuse those credentials to log in as domain admin in the network and once an attacker becomes domain admin they have the keys to the kingdom they can do anything they want so what happened here well it turns out Fortinet was misconfigured on three out of 5000 machines bad automation the customer had no idea this had happened they would have had to wait for an attacker to show up to realize that it was misconfigured the second thing is well why didn't Fortinet stop the credential pivot in the lateral movement and it turned out the customer didn't buy the right modules or turn on the right services within that particular product and we see this not only with Ford in it but we see this with Trend Micro and all the other defensive tools where it's very easy to miss a checkbox in the configuration that will do things like prevent credential dumping the next story I'll tell you is attackers don't have to hack in they log in so another infrastructure pen test a typical technique attackers will take is man in the middle uh attacks that will collect hashes so in this case what an attacker will do is leverage a tool or technique called responder to collect ntlm hashes that are being passed around the network and there's a variety of reasons why these hashes are passed around and it's a pretty common misconfiguration but as an attacker collects those hashes then they start to apply techniques to crack those hashes so they'll pass the hash and from there they will use open source intelligence common password structures and patterns and other types of techniques to try to crack those hashes into clear text passwords so here node 0 automatically collected hashes it automatically passed the hashes to crack those credentials and then from there it starts to take the domain user user ID passwords that it's collected and tries to access different services and systems in your Enterprise in this case node 0 is able to successfully gain access to the Office 365 email environment because three employees didn't have MFA configured so now what happens is node 0 has a placement and access in the business email system which sets up the conditions for fraud lateral phishing and other techniques but what's especially insightful here is that 80 of the hashes that were collected in this pen test were cracked in 15 minutes or less 80 percent 26 of the user accounts had a password that followed a pretty obvious pattern first initial last initial and four random digits the other thing that was interesting is 10 percent of service accounts had their user ID the same as their password so VMware admin VMware admin web sphere admin web Square admin so on and so forth and so attackers don't have to hack in they just log in with credentials that they've collected the next story here is becoming WS AWS admin so in this example once again internal pen test node zero gets initial access it discovers 2 000 hosts are network reachable from that environment if fingerprints and organizes all of that data into a cyber Terrain map from there it it fingerprints that hpilo the integrated lights out service was running on a subset of hosts hpilo is a service that is often not instrumented or observed by security teams nor is it easy to patch as a result attackers know this and immediately go after those types of services so in this case that ILO service was exploitable and were able to get code execution on it ILO stores all the user IDs and passwords in clear text in a particular set of processes so once we gain code execution we were able to dump all of the credentials and then from there laterally maneuver to log in to the windows box next door as admin and then on that admin box we're able to gain access to the share drives and we found a credentials file saved on a share Drive from there it turned out that credentials file was the AWS admin credentials file giving us full admin authority to their AWS accounts not a single security alert was triggered in this attack because the customer wasn't observing the ILO service and every step thereafter was a valid login in the environment and so what do you do step one patch the server step two delete the credentials file from the share drive and then step three is get better instrumentation on privileged access users and login the final story I'll tell is a typical pattern that we see across the board with that combines the various techniques I've described together where an attacker is going to go off and use open source intelligence to find all of the employees that work at your company from there they're going to look up those employees on dark web breach databases and other forms of information and then use that as a starting point to password spray to compromise a domain user all it takes is one employee to reuse a breached password for their Corporate email or all it takes is a single employee to have a weak password that's easily guessable all it takes is one and once the attacker is able to gain domain user access in most shops domain user is also the local admin on their laptop and once your local admin you can dump Sam and get local admin until M hashes you can use that to reuse credentials again local admin on neighboring machines and attackers will start to rinse and repeat then eventually they're able to get to a point where they can dump lsas or by unhooking the anti-virus defeating the EDR or finding a misconfigured EDR as we've talked about earlier to compromise the domain and what's consistent is that the fundamentals are broken at these shops they have poor password policies they don't have least access privilege implemented active directory groups are too permissive where domain admin or domain user is also the local admin uh AV or EDR Solutions are misconfigured or easily unhooked and so on and what we found in 10 000 pen tests is that user Behavior analytics tools never caught us in that lateral movement in part because those tools require pristine logging data in order to work and also it becomes very difficult to find that Baseline of normal usage versus abnormal usage of credential login another interesting Insight is there were several Marquee brand name mssps that were defending our customers environment and for them it took seven hours to detect and respond to the pen test seven hours the pen test was over in less than two hours and so what you had was an egregious violation of the service level agreements that that mssp had in place and the customer was able to use us to get service credit and drive accountability of their sock and of their provider the third interesting thing is in one case it took us seven minutes to become domain admin in a bank that bank had every Gucci security tool you could buy yet in 7 minutes and 19 seconds node zero started as an unauthenticated member of the network and was able to escalate privileges through chaining and misconfigurations in lateral movement and so on to become domain admin if it's seven minutes today we should assume it'll be less than a minute a year or two from now making it very difficult for humans to be able to detect and respond to that type of Blitzkrieg attack so that's in the find it's not just about finding problems though the bulk of the effort should be what to do about it the fix and the verify so as you find those problems back to kubernetes as an example we will show you the path here is the kill chain we took to compromise that environment we'll show you the impact here is the impact or here's the the proof of exploitation that we were able to use to be able to compromise it and there's the actual command that we executed so you could copy and paste that command and compromise that cubelet yourself if you want and then the impact is we got code execution and we'll actually show you here is the impact this is a critical here's why it enabled perimeter breach affected applications will tell you the specific IPS where you've got the problem how it maps to the miter attack framework and then we'll tell you exactly how to fix it we'll also show you what this problem enabled so you can accurately prioritize why this is important or why it's not important the next part is accurate prioritization the hardest part of my job as a CIO was deciding what not to fix so if you take SMB signing not required as an example by default that CVSs score is a one out of 10. but this misconfiguration is not a cve it's a misconfig enable an attacker to gain access to 19 credentials including one domain admin two local admins and access to a ton of data because of that context this is really a 10 out of 10. you better fix this as soon as possible however of the seven occurrences that we found it's only a critical in three out of the seven and these are the three specific machines and we'll tell you the exact way to fix it and you better fix these as soon as possible for these four machines over here these didn't allow us to do anything of consequence so that because the hardest part is deciding what not to fix you can justifiably choose not to fix these four issues right now and just add them to your backlog and surge your team to fix these three as quickly as possible and then once you fix these three you don't have to re-run the entire pen test you can select these three and then one click verify and run a very narrowly scoped pen test that is only testing this specific issue and what that creates is a much faster cycle of finding and fixing problems the other part of fixing is verifying that you don't have sensitive data at risk so once we become a domain user we're able to use those domain user credentials and try to gain access to databases file shares S3 buckets git repos and so on and help you understand what sensitive data you have at risk so in this example a green checkbox means we logged in as a valid domain user we're able to get read write access on the database this is how many records we could have accessed and we don't actually look at the values in the database but we'll show you the schema so you can quickly characterize that pii data was at risk here and we'll do that for your file shares and other sources of data so now you can accurately articulate the data you have at risk and prioritize cleaning that data up especially data that will lead to a fine or a big news issue so that's the find that's the fix now we're going to talk about the verify the key part in verify is embracing and integrating with detection engineering practices so when you think about your layers of security tools you've got lots of tools in place on average 130 tools at any given customer but these tools were not designed to work together so when you run a pen test what you want to do is say did you detect us did you log us did you alert on us did you stop us and from there what you want to see is okay what are the techniques that are commonly used to defeat an environment to actually compromise if you look at the top 10 techniques we use and there's far more than just these 10 but these are the most often executed nine out of ten have nothing to do with cves it has to do with misconfigurations dangerous product defaults bad credential policies and it's how we chain those together to become a domain admin or compromise a host so what what customers will do is every single attacker command we executed is provided to you as an attackivity log so you can actually see every single attacker command we ran the time stamp it was executed the hosts it executed on and how it Maps the minor attack tactics so our customers will have are these attacker logs on one screen and then they'll go look into Splunk or exabeam or Sentinel one or crowdstrike and say did you detect us did you log us did you alert on us or not and to make that even easier if you take this example hey Splunk what logs did you see at this time on the VMware host because that's when node 0 is able to dump credentials and that allows you to identify and fix your logging blind spots to make that easier we've got app integration so this is an actual Splunk app in the Splunk App Store and what you can come is inside the Splunk console itself you can fire up the Horizon 3 node 0 app all of the pen test results are here so that you can see all of the results in one place and you don't have to jump out of the tool and what you'll show you as I skip forward is hey there's a pen test here are the critical issues that we've identified for that weaker default issue here are the exact commands we executed and then we will automatically query into Splunk all all terms on between these times on that endpoint that relate to this attack so you can now quickly within the Splunk environment itself figure out that you're missing logs or that you're appropriately catching this issue and that becomes incredibly important in that detection engineering cycle that I mentioned earlier so how do our customers end up using us they shift from running one pen test a year to 30 40 pen tests a month oftentimes wiring us into their deployment automation to automatically run pen tests the other part that they'll do is as they run more pen tests they find more issues but eventually they hit this inflection point where they're able to rapidly clean up their environment and that inflection point is because the red and the blue teams start working together in a purple team culture and now they're working together to proactively harden their environment the other thing our customers will do is run us from different perspectives they'll first start running an RFC 1918 scope to see once the attacker gained initial access in a part of the network that had wide access what could they do and then from there they'll run us within a specific Network segment okay from within that segment could the attacker break out and gain access to another segment then they'll run us from their work from home environment could they Traverse the VPN and do something damaging and once they're in could they Traverse the VPN and get into my cloud then they'll break in from the outside all of these perspectives are available to you in Horizon 3 and node zero as a single SKU and you can run as many pen tests as you want if you run a phishing campaign and find that an intern in the finance department had the worst phishing behavior you can then inject their credentials and actually show the end-to-end story of how an attacker fished gained credentials of an intern and use that to gain access to sensitive financial data so what our customers end up doing is running multiple attacks from multiple perspectives and looking at those results over time I'll leave you two things one is what is the AI in Horizon 3 AI those knowledge graphs are the heart and soul of everything that we do and we use machine learning reinforcement techniques reinforcement learning techniques Markov decision models and so on to be able to efficiently maneuver and analyze the paths in those really large graphs we also use context-based scoring to prioritize weaknesses and we're also able to drive collective intelligence across all of the operations so the more pen tests we run the smarter we get and all of that is based on our knowledge graph analytics infrastructure that we have finally I'll leave you with this was my decision criteria when I was a buyer for my security testing strategy what I cared about was coverage I wanted to be able to assess my on-prem cloud perimeter and work from home and be safe to run in production I want to be able to do that as often as I wanted I want to be able to run pen tests in hours or days not weeks or months so I could accelerate that fine fix verify loop I wanted my it admins and network Engineers with limited offensive experience to be able to run a pen test in a few clicks through a self-service experience and not have to install agent and not have to write custom scripts and finally I didn't want to get nickeled and dimed on having to buy different types of attack modules or different types of attacks I wanted a single annual subscription that allowed me to run any type of attack as often as I wanted so I could look at my Trends in directions over time so I hope you found this talk valuable uh we're easy to find and I look forward to seeing seeing you use a product and letting our results do the talking when you look at uh you know kind of the way no our pen testing algorithms work is we dynamically select uh how to compromise an environment based on what we've discovered and the goal is to become a domain admin compromise a host compromise domain users find ways to encrypt data steal sensitive data and so on but when you look at the the top 10 techniques that we ended up uh using to compromise environments the first nine have nothing to do with cves and that's the reality cves are yes a vector but less than two percent of cves are actually used in a compromise oftentimes it's some sort of credential collection credential cracking uh credential pivoting and using that to become an admin and then uh compromising environments from that point on so I'll leave this up for you to kind of read through and you'll have the slides available for you but I found it very insightful that organizations and ourselves when I was a GE included invested heavily in just standard vulnerability Management Programs when I was at DOD that's all disa cared about asking us about was our our kind of our cve posture but the attackers have adapted to not rely on cves to get in because they know that organizations are actively looking at and patching those cves and instead they're chaining together credentials from one place with misconfigurations and dangerous product defaults in another to take over an environment a concrete example is by default vcenter backups are not encrypted and so as if an attacker finds vcenter what they'll do is find the backup location and there are specific V sender MTD files where the admin credentials are parsippled in the binaries so you can actually as an attacker find the right MTD file parse out the binary and now you've got the admin credentials for the vcenter environment and now start to log in as admin there's a bad habit by signal officers and Signal practitioners in the in the Army and elsewhere where the the VM notes section of a virtual image has the password for the VM well those VM notes are not stored encrypted and attackers know this and they're able to go off and find the VMS that are unencrypted find the note section and pull out the passwords for those images and then reuse those credentials across the board so I'll pause here and uh you know Patrick love you get some some commentary on on these techniques and other things that you've seen and what we'll do in the last say 10 to 15 minutes is uh is rolled through a little bit more on what do you do about it yeah yeah no I love it I think um I think this is pretty exhaustive what I like about what you've done here is uh you know we've seen we've seen double-digit increases in the number of organizations that are reporting actual breaches year over year for the last um for the last three years and it's often we kind of in the Zeitgeist we pegged that on ransomware which of course is like incredibly important and very top of mind um but what I like about what you have here is you know we're reminding the audience that the the attack surface area the vectors the matter um you know has to be more comprehensive than just thinking about ransomware scenarios yeah right on um so let's build on this when you think about your defense in depth you've got multiple security controls that you've purchased and integrated and you've got that redundancy if a control fails but the reality is that these security tools aren't designed to work together so when you run a pen test what you want to ask yourself is did you detect node zero did you log node zero did you alert on node zero and did you stop node zero and when you think about how to do that every single attacker command executed by node zero is available in an attacker log so you can now see you know at the bottom here vcenter um exploit at that time on that IP how it aligns to minor attack what you want to be able to do is go figure out did your security tools catch this or not and that becomes very important in using the attacker's perspective to improve your defensive security controls and so the way we've tried to make this easier back to like my my my the you know I bleed Green in many ways still from my smoke background is you want to be able to and what our customers do is hey we'll look at the attacker logs on one screen and they'll look at what did Splunk see or Miss in another screen and then they'll use that to figure out what their logging blind spots are and what that where that becomes really interesting is we've actually built out an integration into Splunk where there's a Splunk app you can download off of Splunk base and you'll get all of the pen test results right there in the Splunk console and from that Splunk console you're gonna be able to see these are all the pen tests that were run these are the issues that were found um so you can look at that particular pen test here are all of the weaknesses that were identified for that particular pen test and how they categorize out for each of those weaknesses you can click on any one of them that are critical in this case and then we'll tell you for that weakness and this is where where the the punch line comes in so I'll pause the video here for that weakness these are the commands that were executed on these endpoints at this time and then we'll actually query Splunk for that um for that IP address or containing that IP and these are the source types that surface any sort of activity so what we try to do is help you as quickly and efficiently as possible identify the logging blind spots in your Splunk environment based on the attacker's perspective so as this video kind of plays through you can see it Patrick I'd love to get your thoughts um just seeing so many Splunk deployments and the effectiveness of those deployments and and how this is going to help really Elevate the effectiveness of all of your Splunk customers yeah I'm super excited about this I mean I think this these kinds of purpose-built integration snail really move the needle for our customers I mean at the end of the day when I think about the power of Splunk I think about a product I was first introduced to 12 years ago that was an on-prem piece of software you know and at the time it sold on sort of Perpetual and term licenses but one made it special was that it could it could it could eat data at a speed that nothing else that I'd have ever seen you can ingest massively scalable amounts of data uh did cool things like schema on read which facilitated that there was this language called SPL that you could nerd out about uh and you went to a conference once a year and you talked about all the cool things you were splunking right but now as we think about the next phase of our growth um we live in a heterogeneous environment where our customers have so many different tools and data sources that are ever expanding and as you look at the as you look at the role of the ciso it's mind-blowing to me the amount of sources Services apps that are coming into the ciso span of let's just call it a span of influence in the last three years uh you know we're seeing things like infrastructure service level visibility application performance monitoring stuff that just never made sense for the security team to have visibility into you um at least not at the size and scale which we're demanding today um and and that's different and this isn't this is why it's so important that we have these joint purpose-built Integrations that um really provide more prescription to our customers about how do they walk on that Journey towards maturity what does zero to one look like what does one to two look like whereas you know 10 years ago customers were happy with platforms today they want integration they want Solutions and they want to drive outcomes and I think this is a great example of how together we are stepping to the evolving nature of the market and also the ever-evolving nature of the threat landscape and what I would say is the maturing needs of the customer in that environment yeah for sure I think especially if if we all anticipate budget pressure over the next 18 months due to the economy and elsewhere while the security budgets are not going to ever I don't think they're going to get cut they're not going to grow as fast and there's a lot more pressure on organizations to extract more value from their existing Investments as well as extracting more value and more impact from their existing teams and so security Effectiveness Fierce prioritization and automation I think become the three key themes of security uh over the next 18 months so I'll do very quickly is run through a few other use cases um every host that we identified in the pen test were able to score and say this host allowed us to do something significant therefore it's it's really critical you should be increasing your logging here hey these hosts down here we couldn't really do anything as an attacker so if you do have to make trade-offs you can make some trade-offs of your logging resolution at the lower end in order to increase logging resolution on the upper end so you've got that level of of um justification for where to increase or or adjust your logging resolution another example is every host we've discovered as an attacker we Expose and you can export and we want to make sure is every host we found as an attacker is being ingested from a Splunk standpoint a big issue I had as a CIO and user of Splunk and other tools is I had no idea if there were Rogue Raspberry Pi's on the network or if a new box was installed and whether Splunk was installed on it or not so now you can quickly start to correlate what hosts did we see and how does that reconcile with what you're logging from uh finally or second to last use case here on the Splunk integration side is for every single problem we've found we give multiple options for how to fix it this becomes a great way to prioritize what fixed actions to automate in your soar platform and what we want to get to eventually is being able to automatically trigger soar actions to fix well-known problems like automatically invalidating passwords for for poor poor passwords in our credentials amongst a whole bunch of other things we could go off and do and then finally if there is a well-known kill chain or attack path one of the things I really wish I could have done when I was a Splunk customer was take this type of kill chain that actually shows a path to domain admin that I'm sincerely worried about and use it as a glass table over which I could start to layer possible indicators of compromise and now you've got a great starting point for glass tables and iocs for actual kill chains that we know are exploitable in your environment and that becomes some super cool Integrations that we've got on the roadmap between us and the Splunk security side of the house so what I'll leave with actually Patrick before I do that you know um love to get your comments and then I'll I'll kind of leave with one last slide on this wartime security mindset uh pending you know assuming there's no other questions no I love it I mean I think this kind of um it's kind of glass table's approach to how do you how do you sort of visualize these workflows and then use things like sore and orchestration and automation to operationalize them is exactly where we see all of our customers going and getting away from I think an over engineered approach to soar with where it has to be super technical heavy with you know python programmers and getting more to this visual view of workflow creation um that really demystifies the power of Automation and also democratizes it so you don't have to have these programming languages in your resume in order to start really moving the needle on workflow creation policy enforcement and ultimately driving automation coverage across more and more of the workflows that your team is seeing yeah I think that between us being able to visualize the actual kill chain or attack path with you know think of a of uh the soar Market I think going towards this no code low code um you know configurable sore versus coded sore that's going to really be a game changer in improve or giving security teams a force multiplier so what I'll leave you with is this peacetime mindset of security no longer is sustainable we really have to get out of checking the box and then waiting for the bad guys to show up to verify that security tools are are working or not and the reason why we've got to really do that quickly is there are over a thousand companies that withdrew from the Russian economy over the past uh nine months due to the Ukrainian War there you should expect every one of them to be punished by the Russians for leaving and punished from a cyber standpoint and this is no longer about financial extortion that is ransomware this is about punishing and destroying companies and you can punish any one of these companies by going after them directly or by going after their suppliers and their Distributors so suddenly your attack surface is no more no longer just your own Enterprise it's how you bring your goods to Market and it's how you get your goods created because while I may not be able to disrupt your ability to harvest fruit if I can get those trucks stuck at the border I can increase spoilage and have the same effect and what we should expect to see is this idea of cyber-enabled economic Warfare where if we issue a sanction like Banning the Russians from traveling there is a cyber-enabled counter punch which is corrupt and destroy the American Airlines database that is below the threshold of War that's not going to trigger the 82nd Airborne to be mobilized but it's going to achieve the right effect ban the sale of luxury goods disrupt the supply chain and create shortages banned Russian oil and gas attack refineries to call a 10x spike in gas prices three days before the election this is the future and therefore I think what we have to do is shift towards a wartime mindset which is don't trust your security posture verify it see yourself Through The Eyes of the attacker build that incident response muscle memory and drive better collaboration between the red and the blue teams your suppliers and Distributors and your information uh sharing organization they have in place and what's really valuable for me as a Splunk customer was when a router crashes at that moment you don't know if it's due to an I.T Administration problem or an attacker and what you want to have are different people asking different questions of the same data and you want to have that integrated triage process of an I.T lens to that problem a security lens to that problem and then from there figuring out is is this an IT workflow to execute or a security incident to execute and you want to have all of that as an integrated team integrated process integrated technology stack and this is something that I very care I cared very deeply about as both a Splunk customer and a Splunk CTO that I see time and time again across the board so Patrick I'll leave you with the last word the final three minutes here and I don't see any open questions so please take us home oh man see how you think we spent hours and hours prepping for this together that that last uh uh 40 seconds of your talk track is probably one of the things I'm most passionate about in this industry right now uh and I think nist has done some really interesting work here around building cyber resilient organizations that have that has really I think helped help the industry see that um incidents can come from adverse conditions you know stress is uh uh performance taxations in the infrastructure service or app layer and they can come from malicious compromises uh Insider threats external threat actors and the more that we look at this from the perspective of of a broader cyber resilience Mission uh in a wartime mindset uh I I think we're going to be much better off and and will you talk about with operationally minded ice hacks information sharing intelligence sharing becomes so important in these wartime uh um situations and you know we know not all ice acts are created equal but we're also seeing a lot of um more ad hoc information sharing groups popping up so look I think I think you framed it really really well I love the concept of wartime mindset and um I I like the idea of applying a cyber resilience lens like if you have one more layer on top of that bottom right cake you know I think the it lens and the security lens they roll up to this concept of cyber resilience and I think this has done some great work there for us yeah you're you're spot on and that that is app and that's gonna I think be the the next um terrain that that uh that you're gonna see vendors try to get after but that I think Splunk is best position to win okay that's a wrap for this special Cube presentation you heard all about the global expansion of horizon 3.ai's partner program for their Partners have a unique opportunity to take advantage of their node zero product uh International go to Market expansion North America channel Partnerships and just overall relationships with companies like Splunk to make things more comprehensive in this disruptive cyber security world we live in and hope you enjoyed this program all the videos are available on thecube.net as well as check out Horizon 3 dot AI for their pen test Automation and ultimately their defense system that they use for testing always the environment that you're in great Innovative product and I hope you enjoyed the program again I'm John Furrier host of the cube thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, season two, episode four. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. This topic is cybersecurity detect and protect against threats. Very excited to welcome a CUBE alumni back to the program. Snehal Antani, the co-founder and CEO of Horizon3 joins me. Snehal, it's great to have you back in the studio. >> Likewise, thanks for the invite. >> Tell us a little bit about Horizon3, what is it that you guys do? You were founded in 2019, got a really interesting group of folks with interesting backgrounds, but talk to the audience about what it is that you guys are aiming to do. >> Sure, so maybe back to the problem we were trying to solve. So my background, I was a engineer by trade, I was a CIO at G Capital, CTO at Splunk and helped grow scale that company. And then took a break from industry to serve within the Department of Defense. And in every one of my jobs where I had cyber security in my responsibility, I suffered from the same problem. I had no idea I was secure or that we were fixing the right vulnerabilities or logging the right data in Splunk or that our tools and processes and people worked together well until the bad guys had showed up. And by then it was too late. And what I wanted to do was proactively verify my security posture, make sure that my security tools were actually effective, that my people knew how to respond to a breach before the bad guys were there. And so this whole idea of continuously verifying my security posture through security testing and pen testing became a passion project of mine for over a decade. And through my time in the DOD found the right group of an early people that had offensive cyber experience, that had defensive cyber experience, that knew how to build and ship and deliver software at scale. And we came together at the end of 2019 to start Horizon3. >> Talk to me about the current threat landscape. We've seen so much change in flux in the last couple of years. Globally, we've seen the threat actors are just getting more and more sophisticated as is the different types of attacks. What are you seeing kind of horizontally across the threat landscape? >> Yeah, the biggest thing is attackers don't have to hack in using Zero-days like you see in the movies. Often they're able to just log in with valid credentials that they've collected through some mechanism. As an example, if I wanted to compromise a large organization, say United Airlines, one of the things that an attacker's going to go off and do is go to LinkedIn and find all of the employees that work at United Airlines. Now you've got say, 7,000 pilots. Of those pilots, you're going to figure out quickly that their user IDs and passwords or their user IDs at least are first name, last initial @united.com. Cool, now I have 7,000 potential logins and all it takes is one of them to reuse a compromised password for their corporate email, and now you've got an initial user in the system. And most likely, that initial user has local admin on their laptops. And from there, an attacker can dump credentials and find a path to becoming a domain administrator. And what happens oftentimes is, security tools don't detect this because it looks like valid behavior in the organization. And this is pretty common, this idea of collecting information on an organization or a target using open source intelligence, using a mix of credential spraying and kind of low priority or low severity exploitations or misconfigurations to get in. And then from there, systematically dumping credentials, reusing those credentials, and finding a path towards compromise. And less than 2% of CVEs are actually used in exploits. Most of the time, attackers chain together misconfigurations, bad product defaults. And so really the threat landscape is, attackers don't hack in, they log in. And organizations have to focus on getting the basics right and fundamentals right first before they layer on some magic easy button that is some security AI tools hoping that that's going to save their day. And that's what we found systemically across the board. >> So you're finding that across the board, probably pan-industry that a lot of companies need to go back to basics. We talk about that a lot when we're talking about security, why do you think that is? >> I think it's because, one, most organizations are barely treading water. When you look at the early rapid adopters of Horizon3's pen testing product, autonomous pen testing, the early adopters tended to be teams where the IT team and the security team were the same person, and they were barely treading water. And the hardest part of my job as a CIO was deciding what not to fix. Because the bottleneck in the security process is the actual capacity to fix problems. And so, fiercely prioritizing issues becomes really important. But the tools and the processes don't focus on prioritizing what's exploitable, they prioritize by some arbitrary score from some arbitrary vulnerability scanner. And so we have as a fundamental breakdown of the small group of folks with the expertise to fix problems tend to be the most overworked and tend to have the most noise to need to sift through. So they don't even have time to get to the basics. They're just barely treading water doing their day jobs and they're often sacrificing their nights and weekends. All of us at Horizon3 were practitioners at one point in our career, we've all been called in on the weekend. So that's why what we did was fiercely focus on helping customers and users fix problems that truly matter, and allowing them to quickly reattack and verify that the problems were truly fixed. >> So when it comes to today's threat landscape, what is it that organizations across the board should really be focused on? >> I think, systemically, what we see are bad password or credential policies, least access privileged management type processes not being well implemented. The domain user tends to be the local admin on the box, no ability to understand what is a valid login versus a malicious login. Those are some of the basics that we see systemically. And if you layer that with it's very easy to say, misconfigure vCenter, or misconfigure a piece of Cisco gear, or you're not going to be installing, monitoring security observability tools on that HPE Integrated Lights Out server and so on. What you'll find is that you've got people overworked that don't have the capacity to fix. You have the fundamentals or the basics not well implemented. And you have a whole bunch of blind spots in your security posture. And defenders have to be right every time, attackers only have to be right once. And so what we have is this asymmetric fight where attackers are very likely to get in, and we see this on the news all the time. >> So, and nobody, of course, wants to be the next headline, right? Talk to me a little bit about autonomous pen testing as a service, what you guys are delivering, and what makes it unique and different than other tools that have been out, as you're saying, that clearly have gaps. >> Yeah. So first and foremost was the approach we took in building our product. What we set upfront was, our primary users should be IT administrators, network engineers, and that IT intern who, in three clicks, should have the power of a 20-year pen testing expert. So the whole idea was empower and enable all of the fixers to find, fix, and verify their security weaknesses continuously. That was the design goal. Most other security products are designed for security people, but we already know they're task saturated, they've got way too many tools under the belt. So first and foremost, we wanted to empower the fixers to fix problems that truly matter. The second part was, we wanted to do that without having to install credentialed agents all over the place or writing your own custom attack scripts, or having to do a bunch of configurations and make sure that it's safe to run against production systems so that you could test your entire attack surface. Your on-prem, your cloud, your external perimeter. And this is where AWS comes in to be very important, especially hybrid customers where you've got a portion of your infrastructure on AWS, a portion on-prem, and you use Horizon3 to be able to attack your complete attack surface. So we can start on-prem and we will find say, the AWS credentials file that was mistakenly saved on a shared drive, and then reuse that to become admin in the cloud. AWS didn't do anything wrong, the cloud team didn't do anything wrong, a developer happened to share a password or save a password file locally. That's how attackers get in. So we can start from on-prem and show how we can compromise the cloud, start from the cloud and show how we can compromise on-prem. Start from the outside and break in. And we're able to show that complete attack surface at scale for hybrid customers. >> So showing that complete attack surface sort of from the eyes of the attacker? >> That's exactly right, because while blue teams or the defenders have a very specific view of their environment, you have to look at yourself through the eyes of the attacker to understand what are your blind spots, what do they see that you don't see. And it's actually a discipline that is well entrenched within military culture. And that's also important for us as the company. We're about a third of Horizon3 served in US special operations or the intelligence community with the United States, and then DOD writ large. And a lot of that red team mindset, view yourself through the eyes of the attacker, and this idea of training like you fight and building muscle memory so you know how to react to the real incident when it occurs is just ingrained in how we operate, and we disseminate that culture through all of our customers as well. >> And at this point in time, every business needs to assume an attacker's going to get in. >> That's right. There are way too many doors and windows in the organization. Attackers are going to get in, whether it's a single customer that reused their Netflix password for their corporate email, a patch that didn't get applied properly, or a new Zero-day that just gets published. A piece of Cisco software that was misconfigured, not buy anything more than it's easy to misconfigure these complex pieces of technology. Attackers are going to get in. And what we want to understand as customers is, once they're in, what could they do? Could they get to my crown jewel's data and systems? Could they borrow and prepare for a much more complicated attack down the road? If you assume breach, now you want to understand what can they get to, how quickly can you detect that breach, and what are your ways to stifle their ability to achieve their objectives. And culturally, we would need a shift from talking about how secure I am to how defensible are we. Security is kind of a point in time state of your organization. Defensibility is how quickly you can adapt to the attacker to stifle their ability to achieve their objective. >> As things are changing constantly. >> That's exactly right. >> Yeah. Talk to me about a typical customer engagement. If there's, you mentioned folks treading water, obviously, there's the huge cybersecurity skills gap that we've been talking about for a long time now, that's another factor there. But when you're in customer conversations, who are you talking to? Typically, what are they coming to you for help? >> Yeah. One big thing is, you're not going to win and win a customer by taking 'em out to steak dinners. Not anymore. The way we focus on our go to market and our sales motion is cultivating champions. At the end of the proof of concept, our internal measure of successes is, is that person willing to get a Horizon3 tattoo? And you do that, not through steak dinners, not through cool swag, not through marketing, but by letting your results do the talking. Now, part of those results should not require professional services or consulting. The whole experience should be self-service, frictionless, and insightful. And that really is how we've designed the product and designed the entire sales motion. So a prospect will learn or discover about us, whether it's through LinkedIn, through social, through the website, but often because one of their friends or colleagues heard about us, saw our result, and is advocating on our behalf when we're not in the room. From there, they're going to be able to self-service, just log in to our product through their LinkedIn ID, their Google ID. They can engage with a salesperson if they want to. They can run a pen test right there on the spot against their home without any interaction with a sales rep. Let those results do the talking, use that as a starting point to engage in a more complicated proof of value. And the whole idea is we don't charge for these, we let our results do the talking. And at the end, after they've run us to find problems, they've gone off and fixed those issues, and they've rerun us to verify that what they've fixed was properly fixed, then they're hooked. And we have a hundred percent technical win rate with our prospects when they hit that find-fix-verify cycle, which is awesome. And then we get the tattoo for them, at least give them the template. And then we're off to the races. >> Sounds like you're making the process more simple. There's so much complexity behind it, but allowing users to be able to actually test it out themselves in a simplified way is huge. Allowing them to really focus on becoming defensible. >> That's exactly right. And the value is, especially now in security, there's so much hype and so much noise. There's a lot more time being spent self-discovering and researching technologies before you engage in a commercial discussion. And so what we try to do is optimize that entire buying experience around enabling people to discover and research and learn. The other part, remember is, offensive cyber and ethical hacking and so on is very mysterious and magical to most defenders. It's such a complicated topic with many nuance tools that they don't have the time to understand or learn. And so if you surface the complexity of all those attacker tools, you're going to overwhelm a person that is already overwhelmed. So we needed the experience to be incredibly simple and optimize that find-fix-verify aha moment. And once again, be frictionless and be insightful. >> Frictionless and insightful. Excellent. Talk to me about results, you mentioned results. We love talking about outcomes. When a customer goes through the PoC, PoV that you talked about, what are some of the results that they see that hook them? >> Yeah, the biggest thing is, what attackers do today is they will find a low from machine one plus a low from machine two equals compromised domain. What they're doing is they're chaining together issues across multiple parts of your system or your organization to opone your environment. What attackers don't do is find a critical vulnerability and exploit that single machine. It's always a chain, always multiple steps in the attack. And so the entire product and experience in, actually, our underlying tech is around attack paths. Here is the path, the attack path an attacker could have taken. That node zero our product took. Here is the proof of exploitation for every step along the way. So you know this isn't a false positive. In fact, you can copy and paste the attacker command from the product and rerun it yourself and see it for yourself. And then here is exactly what you have to go fix and why it's important to fix. So that path, proof, impact, and fix action is what the entire experience is focused on. And that is the results doing the talking, because remember, these folks are already overwhelmed, they're dealing with a lot of false positives. And if you tell them you've got another critical to fix, their immediate reaction is "Nope, I don't believe you. This is a false positive. I've seen this plenty of times, that's not important." So you have to, in your product experience and sales process and adoption process, immediately cut through that defensive or that reflex. And it's path, proof, impact. Here's exactly what you fix, here are the exact steps to fix it, and then you're off to the races. What I learned at Splunk was, you win hearts and minds of your users through amazing experience, product experience, amazing documentation. >> Yes. >> And a vibrant community of champions. Those are the three ingredients of success, and we've really made that the core of the product. So we win on our documentation, we win on the product experience, and we've cultivated pretty awesome community. >> Talk to me about some of those champions. Is there a customer story that you think really articulates the value of node zero and what it is that you are doing? >> Yeah, I'll tell you a couple. Actually, I just gave this talk at Black Hat on war stories from running 10,000 pen tests. And I'll try to be gentle on the vendors that were involved here, but the reality is, you got to be honest and authentic. So a customer, a healthcare organization ran a pen test and they were using a very well-known managed security services provider as their security operations team. And so they initiate the pen test and they wanted to audit their response time of their MSSP. So they run the pen test and we're in and out. The whole pen test runs two hours or less. And in those two hours, the pen test compromises the domain, gets access to a bunch of sensitive data, laterally maneuvers, rips the entire environment apart. It took seven hours for the MSSP to send an email notification to the IT director that said, "Hey, we think something suspicious is going on." >> Wow. >> Seven hours! >> That's a long time. >> We were in and out in two, seven hours for notification. And the issue with that healthcare company was, they thought they had hired the right MSSP, but they had no way to audit their performance. And so we gave them the details and the ammunition to get services credits to hold them accountable and also have a conversation of switching to somebody else. >> Accountability is key, especially when we're talking about the threat landscape and how it's evolving day to day. >> That's exactly right. Accountability of your suppliers or your security vendors, accountability of your people and your processes, and not having to wait for the bad guys to show up to test your posture. That's what's really important. Another story that's interesting. This customer did everything right. It was a banking customer, large environment, and they had Fortinet installed as their EDR type platform. And they initiate us as a pen test and we're able to get code execution on one of their machines. And from there, laterally maneuver to become a domain administrator, which in security is a really big deal. So they came back and said, "This is absolutely not possible. Fortinet should have stopped that from occurring." And it turned out, because we showed the path and the proof and the impact, Fortinet was misconfigured on three machines out of 5,000. And they had no idea. >> Wow. >> So it's one of those, you want to don't trust that your tools are working, don't trust your processes, verify them. Show me we're secure today. Show me we're secure tomorrow. And then show me again we're secure next week. Because my environment's constantly changing and the adversary always has a vote. >> Right, the constant change in flux is huge challenge for organizations, but those results clearly speak for themselves. You talked about speed in terms of time, how quickly can a customer deploy your technology, identify and remedy problems in their environment? >> Yeah, this find-fix-verify aha moment, if you will. So traditionally, a customer would have to maybe run one or two pen tests a year. And then they'd go off and fix things. They have no capacity to test them 'cause they don't have the internal attack expertise. So they'd wait for the next pen test and figure out that they were still exploitable. Usually, this year's pen test results look identical than last year's. That isn't sustainable. So our customers shift from running one or two pen tests a year to 40 pen tests a month. And they're in this constant loop of finding, fixing, and verifying all of the weaknesses in their infrastructure. Remember, there's infrastructure pen testing, which is what we are really good at, and then there's application level pen testing that humans are much better at solving. >> Okay. >> So we focus on the infrastructure side, especially at scale. But can you imagine, 40 pen tests a month, they run from the perimeter, the inside from a specific subnet, from work from home machines, from the cloud. And they're running these pen tests from many different perspectives to understand what does the attacker see from each of these locations in their organization and how do they systemically fix those issues? And what they look at is, how many critical problems were found, how quickly were they fixed, how often do they reoccur. And that third metric is important because you might fix something, but if it shows up again next week because you've got bad automation, you're in a rat race. So you want to look at that reoccurrence rate also. >> The reoccurrence rate. What are you most excited about as, obviously, the threat landscape continues to evolve, but what are you most excited about for the company and what it is that you're able to help organizations across industries achieve in such tumultuous times? >> Yeah. One of the coolest things is, because I was a customer for many of these products, I despised threat intelligence products. I despised them. Because there were basically generic blog posts. Maybe delivered as a data feed to my Splunk environment or something. But they're always really generic. Like, "You may have a problem here." And as a result, they weren't very actionable. So one of the really cool things that we do, it's just part of the product is this concept of flares, flares that we shoot up. And the idea is not to cause angst or anxiety or panic, but rather we look at threat intelligence and then because all of the insights we have from your pen test results, we connect those two together and say, "Your VMware Horizon instance at this IP is exploitable. You need to fix it as fast as possible, or is very likely to be exploited. And here is the threat intelligence and in the news from CSAI and elsewhere that shows why it's important." So I think what is really cool is we're able to take together threat intelligence out in the wild combined with very precise understanding of your environment to give you very accurate and actionable starting points for what you need to go fix or test or verify. And when we do that, what we see is almost like, imagine this ball bouncing, that is the first drop of the ball, and then that drives the first major pen test. And then they'll run all these subsequent pen tests to continue to find and fix and verify. And so what we see is this tremendous amount of excitement from customers that we're actually giving them accurate, detailed information to take advantage of, and we're not causing panic and we're not causing alert and fatigue as a result. >> That's incredibly important in this type of environment. Last question for you. If autonomous pen testing is obviously critical and has tremendous amount of potential for organizations, but it's only part of the equation. What's the larger vision? >> Yeah, we are not a pen testing company and that's something we decided upfront. Pen testing is a sensor. It collects and understands a tremendous amount of data for your attack surface. So the natural next thing is to analyze the pen test results over time to start to give you a more accurate understanding of your governance, risk, and compliance posture. So now what happens is, we are able to allow customers to go run 40 pen tests a month. And that kind of becomes the initial land or flagship product. But then from there, we're able to upsell or increase value to our customers and start to compete and take out companies like Security Scorecard or RiskIQ and other companies like that, where there tended to be, I was a user of all those tools, a lot of garbage in, garbage out. Where you can't fill out a spreadsheet and get an accurate understanding of your risk posture. You need to look at your detailed pen test results over time and use that to accurately understand what are your hotspots, what's your recurrence rate and so on. And being able to tell that story to your auditors, to your regulators, to the board. And actually, it gives you a much more accurate way to show return on investment of your security spend also. >> Which is huge. So where can customers and those that are interested go to learn more? >> So horizonthree.ai is the website. That's a great starting point. We tend to very much rely on social channels, so LinkedIn in particular, to really get our stories out there. So finding us on LinkedIn is probably the next best thing to go do. And we're always at the major trade shows and events also. >> Excellent. Snehal, it's been a pleasure talking to you about Horizon3, what it is that you guys are doing, why, and the greater vision. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you, likewise. >> All right. For my guest, I'm Lisa Martin. We want to thank you for watching the AWS Startup Showcase. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(pulsing music) (digital music) >> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. A lot of bummed out Bruins fans, but a lot of happy Celtics fans. We're optimistic for tonight, Boston's crazy sports town, but we're talking tech, we're talking open source. Dr. Amanda Purnell is here. She's the director of data and analytics innovation at the US Department of Veteran Affairs, and Ben Cushing is the chief architect for federal health and life sciences at Red Hat. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, thank for coming on. >> Thank you for having us. >> So glad to be here. >> So we heard your keynote this morning, project Arches. Now you were telling us just briefly about your previous life as a clinician. >> That's right. >> That's really interesting, because you know what the outcome has to be. So talk about that project in your perspective. What the goals were and how you actually got it done. >> I could tell the long view. I'm a psychologist by training. I spent the first 10 years of my VA career providing care to veterans. So engaging in healthcare behavior change, providing training to providers and really trying to understand what is the care pathway for veterans, what's the experience of veterans along each of those touchpoints, and it became clear to me over time that there were opportunities for us to improve the transitions of care and provide better information at the right time to improve those decisions that are being made at the point of care. Ben and I were just talking before we began today, part of the core of the development of Arches was beginning with human-centered design. We wanted to interview and better understand what was the experience across the VA of many different stakeholders and trying to access meaningful information, understand in that moment what do I need to make a decision with a veteran or what do I need to make a decision with my care team and how can I improve the quality of care for veterans? And so, hundreds of interviews later, it became clear to us that we wanted to help those individuals already working for the VA to continue to improve excellence of care and one of those ways that we're trying to do that is using technology to make life easier for our veterans and for our clinicians. >> I always like to say, they say, "Follow the money." I like to follow the data. And you said something in your keynote about nurses have to have access to information and it just gets to an architectural question, because as a caregiver, you have to get insights and data and you need it fast, 'cause you're saving lives, but a lot of times, architectures are very centralized. They're monolithic and you have to beg, borrow, steal, break through blockers to get to the data that you need. How do you square that circle in today's world? Maybe you could talk about that, and then specific to Arches, how you dealt with that. >> I can dive into that a little bit. I have to say, Amanda had touched on this during the keynote, VA was one of the first, if not the first, healthcare organizations in the world to actually adopt electronic health records and because of that, they just have this incredibly rich amount of historical data and the challenge, as you pointed out, is gaining access to it. So there are a number of programs within VA designed specifically for that. And they are bringing data not just from the data warehouses, but also data from the electronic health records that are running inside of VA right now, and then also third party community data sets, as well as applications that run inside the VA. Now the value here really happens when you produce insights. Data by itself is useless. >> Lot of data out there. They're plentiful. >> You need to create knowledge and then you need that knowledge to inform your process that comes next. Those actions are really what matters. All of healthcare is process and activity and data is really just a historical record. I mean, all data that we look at is happening in the past and then as we're reading it, we're producing knowledge, again, to inform our process. Arches, the program itself, is right in that space at the knowledge layer of actually taking that data and turning it into actual insight and something that is usable and insightful for clinicians to affect the ability to deliver better care and also to actually improve their own working experience. A lot of the models that are getting built out are specifically designed to help their workflow, help them reach better outcomes for the veterans, but also for themselves, because if we can care for the providers, it'll certainly help them care for the patients even more so. >> So how does it work? I mean, from the provider's perspective, how was their life improved by Arches? >> That's a great question. We want to make it easier to access the information. So as Ben noted, the average person providing care in the field doesn't know how to code, doesn't know how to pull a unique request for an individual data point, and what we're trying to do with Arches is provide a user interface that allows for both a non-technical person and a very technical person to access information, and then what gets provisioned in front of a provider is something that is farther abstracted from the underlying data layer and more like here's a specific insight. So I use the example in my keynote of chronic kidney disease. So what's provisioned to the provider in that moment is this person is at higher risk for chronic kidney disease based on this basic information. So it's surfacing just the right amount of information to allow for that care pathway to be improved, but the physician doesn't need to see all of the layers of code underneath. They need to trust that it's worthwhile, but they don't need to know all the background abstractions. >> So it's a self-service, essentially, infrastructure in that sense. You're hiding the underlying complexities. You gave an example in your keynote of an individual who realized that they were under counting the probability of a potential disease for African Americans. >> Yes. >> I believe she just rewrote the algorithm. >> She did. >> Describe that process, because in a lot of organizations, injecting that new algorithm may have required new data sources, would take an act of the Pope to do. How did it work in Arches? >> This is what I get excited about with Arches is that we have the opportunity to empower enthusiastic people like Dr. Joshi to discover an insight and she's a talented informaticist, so she could do the technical work and provision a container for her to work in, for her to do the data analysis, the underground stuff that we're not letting the average provider have to cope with. We were able to provision the tools that she need, the environment that she needed to be able to test and develop the new insight, confirm that they're there and then begin to validate that and test it in other facilities. So our thinking is, how do we bring the resources to the users rather than saying to the users, "This is what's available. Good luck." (chuckles) >> So we've been talking a lot about, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> I want to add on to that. What we're actually experiencing inside of healthcare right now is the emergence of of learning health systems. >> Yes. >> And this is a great example of that. The terrifying number is, it takes 17 years for new knowledge that gets created with healthcare research, whether it's NIH or VA or elsewhere, it takes 17 years for those practices to make their way into practice. Generally the way that happens is through the education of new staff. And so the dissemination of that knowledge is just so freaking slow that we cannot move nimbly enough to take on that new knowledge and actually implement it in clinical space. What Amanda's describing is something that now happens in months. New knowledge getting produced and then actually getting disseminated out, both the insights, whether they are those probabilities, predictions and recommendations and the actual processes, which are getting automated, as well. So if you think about healthcare as just a process, you can automate a whole lot of that and we can move that needle really fast and actually take that 70-year number down to a couple months. >> In the early days when we were all talking about AI and getting excited about digital, I would often ask the question, will machines be able to make better diagnoses than doctors and to your point, Ben, that's not the right question. >> Exactly. >> It isn't the right question. >> The question is, how can machines compress the time to better patient outcomes- >> Yes. >> in concert with humans and that's what we're seeing now. >> That's right, it's surfacing those insights to start a conversation. >> We've been talking a lot about artificial intelligence for the last two days. As clinician or someone with a clinical background, how do you see the clinical experience changing as machines grow more intelligent? >> I think that there's a learning curve for people to feel confident in an artificial intelligence. It makes sense. So someone spent decades, perhaps, of their life obtaining medical training, doing fellowships, doing additional training that they have trust in that deep training. There are times, however, where a technology is able to surface something that we didn't know that we didn't know and it's important, as we make use of artificial intelligence, that we clearly validate it with independent means and that we clearly also bring in additional analysis to understand what are the elements and then test that new technology in an environment before we scale it widely, so that clinicians can see, yes, this was useful. If it wasn't useful, how can we make it even better? So it goes back to what we were talking about earlier that we have to bring in human-centered design to figuring out how do we make use of AI or machine learning models and make sure that there's trust in those models and that we can clearly articulate value for the clinicians and care teams on the ground. >> Is that a natural evolution of Arches? >> This is all built around it. Arches is the technology platform, but there's no magical technology that's going to change how humans interact. And so the way we think about each project is we think about what are the technological components and what are the human factors components? And we have to think about the entire care pathway. I'll go back to that example, the chronic kidney disease. She identified that we were under identifying African Americans for chronic kidney disease. So she changed the algorithm. Not only did she change the algorithm, we also had to think about who would be informed of those changes, how would that change, who would be connected to the veteran in that point of care and build out the care pathway in the care team and that's really how you actually influence an outcome. Surfacing an insight is important, but it's one part of a much larger picture. >> So what is Arches? You said it's a technology platform built on open source. At least, there's a lot of open source in there. And it's got API connectors to all the legacy technologies that you need it to. Can you describe, paint a picture of what it actually is? >> Arches is evolving as it should. So it's designed to meet the unique needs that aren't being met by other infrastructure in the VA. So we started first by identifying the need for cloud compute, so it's in the cloud, it has open source technology so that we're not stuck with any one provider and also has the ability to use containers to be able to move insights out of Arches to an enterprise solution. We're also bringing in multi-cloud strategy, which also something had been discussed quite a bit at this conference, to make sure that we're not saying only one cloud provider can be the solution for veterans' needs. Our mission is serving veterans and so we want to have access to all the technology and not just one and so we're looking at how do we expand the scope to make sure that we have the most variety possible so we can meet the needs of veterans. >> I can add a little bit to it, as well. Think of Arches as a program. It's an incubation space under the office of innovation. So it's a place where the governance allows for trying new ideas and really pushing the envelope for VA in general. There's not a lot of organizations, if any at VA, that allow for that type of incubation and so Arches is in a unique position to create new technologies and new novel approaches to solving big problems. And then the next step to that is moving the work from Arches out into the enterprise, as you called it out. So for instance, the system of engagement where the actual clinicians interact with patients, the model needs to find its way there and we can't do that in a way that disturbs the current workflow that the clinicians have. We need to be able to bring the model to where the clinician is, have those recommendations, probabilities and predictions surfaced to the clinician in a way that is precise to their existing workflow. They need it at the time they need it. Arches itself is not delivering that part of it. It's more like the place where the innovation happens and the incubation really occurs and then it's about taking this container, really, and moving out to other systems that are already deployed out to the hospitals, the edge, and in the cloud. >> And the federated governance occurs in Arches or elsewhere? >> It happens across the continuum. It's starting in Arches. the clinical validation that happens there is wickedly important, because the clinicians need to know that what they're working with is actually legit. And so when they know that the researchers and the clinicians who are involved in that incubation period have done their work, they can feel confident with the recommendations they're getting from the machine learning models that are getting deployed to one of them. >> So many questions, so little time. What's the business impact? How would you describe that? >> For me, it's an emotional impact. People have a sense of, "I have a place to develop a solution and I can get in there quick, and I can test out an idea. I could potentially partner with an external partner or if I have the talents and skills to do it myself." It's empowering all of those innovators who have great ideas to work together to test and develop and validate solutions, and they're not waiting years to get the idea off the ground. >> Amazing. >> Go ahead, bring it. >> Is Arches open source? >> Arches is a platform and it has open source component. So that the underlying infrastructure of technology is open source. >> Why was it important to you that this be built on an open source platform? >> It's important for us that we not marry ourself to any one technology and that we allow for, as much as possible, transparency and many different tools and the right tools for the right solution. So we didn't want to find ourselves connected to only one way of doing things. We want to have versatility to have the right tool for the right problem at the right time. >> I'm so sorry, we're out of time. This is so interesting and I really appreciate you here guys, coming on and sharing your insights for theCUBE audience. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. We're in day two of Red Hat Summit 2022. You're watching theCUBE. (digital pulsing music) >> Due to the pandemic, the federal government declared a public health emergency, which created an urgency for healthcare coverage. >> One of the biggest-

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's special showcase with Unstoppable Domains. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. And Matt Gould who's the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >> Well, thank you, happy to be here. >> So first of all, love the story you've got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big Web3 wave, which we know that leads into, metaverse unlimited new ways, people are consuming information, content, applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with Web3. So this is kind of what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >> Yeah, well, I would say it's a torrent of change that got unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items and you see it from, you know Gaming and Fortnite and Skins and Warcraft and all these other places. But this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend to a whole lot more applications, from money, which everyone's familiar with, to NFT projects like Board Apes or CryptoBucks. >> You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pod. I think you're on 117 episodes now and growing. You guys do a deep dive, so people watching check out the Unstoppable Podcast. But on the last podcast, Matt, you mentioned some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet, but IP was generated by the United States Department of Commerce and R&D, that became the internet, the internet became the web. Back then it was just get some web pages up and find what you're looking for. Very analog compared to what's now today, now you mentioned gaming. You mentioned how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about the queue for many, many years now, but it's at actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding in groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >> Yeah, well, I think it just goes back to the shift of people's where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much of their assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset compared to literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen. And simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, ways for you to track digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with Web3 is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application and then I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now as we transition from a model in Web2, where you are on a hosted service like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? To a system where it's much more open. You can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you and you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an end-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game, and you can spend it somewhere else. So the user is now enable to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now, you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot in how applications serve up to users. It's going to change their user experiences for instance. >> I think the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying, "I'm done with being mined "and being manipulated by the big Facebook "and the LinkedIns of the world who are using the user." Now, the contract was a free product and you gave up your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does a digital identity architecture work with Unstoppable? How would you guys enabling that? Can you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique, you had an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together, can you explain? >> Yeah, so we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle, when you log on Instagram, you have an Instagram handle. It's your name, right? You have that name that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a 100% of their followers, right? And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers, who are today's small businesses, who build up these large, you know profitable, small businesses online, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. And then they could be deplatformed, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform if that platform raises their fees. You've seen several platforms increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed, right? So we just said, "You know what, "the first thing you're going to want to own "that this is going to be your piece of digital property "is going to be your name across these applications." If you look at every computing network in the history of computing networks, they end up with a naming system. And when we looked back at DNS, you know which came out in the 90s, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier instead of mapping these IP addresses. And then we said to ourselves, "What's going to happen in the future?" Is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their Web2 world in order to identify themselves as they log into all these applications. They're going to have an NFT domain in the Web3 world in order to authenticate and bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. And the bigger breakthrough here is that NFT domain systems all of these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users. They're built on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them and that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging Web3 metaverse. And we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're going to need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of these long IP addresses or hex addresses in the case of crypto. >> Yeah, and also people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name verification, you see the link tree is everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app. I mean, doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people trying to figure it out. I got a github handle. I got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >> Yeah, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app and you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency, and then the first time you try to send it, there's this field where you want to send it and it's this very long hex address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the D apps system replace IP addresses, NFT domains on blockchain systems replace hex addresses for sending and receiving cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you could have an error, or you could send it to the wrong place, it's pretty scary. You could send it to johnfurrier.nft. And so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing it worked with .com domains. And this is the same thing for Bitcoin and other crypto. >> It's interesting, look at the Web2 or trend one to two, Web1 went to two, it was all about use, ease of use, right? And making things simpler, clutter, more pages can't find things that was search, that was Google. Since then, has there actually been an advancement? >> Hmm. >> Facebook certainly is not an advancement, they're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of a free search to all the resources in the world, to which by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the Toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that Web3 crossover? So take us through your vision on digital identity on Web2, Google searching, Facebook's broken, democracy's broken, users aren't in charge to Web3? >> Got it. Well, we can start at Web1. So the way that I think about it is if you go to Web1, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it, right? And then what happened with Web2, was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about Web2, these are all websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or a search engine or whatever. And then as we move to Web3, the new thing that's happening here, is the user is coming onto that experience and they're able to connect in their wallet or their Web3 identity to that app and they can bring their data to the party. So it's kind of like Web1, you just have a static web page, Web2, you have a static webpage with a service, like a server back here, and then Web3, the user can come in and bring their database with them in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that you want data to be portable across apps. So we touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an in-game item for one game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. It also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. But then another thing that happens is I can bring unlimited amount of additional information about myself when I plug in my wallet. And as an example, when I plug into Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enable that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites and I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >> You know, I've always thought about this and always debated it with Dave a lot and my co-host, does top down governance privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation? So what you're getting at here is, "Hey, if you can actually have that solved "(laughing) before it even starts." It was almost as if those services were built for the problem of Web2. >> Yes. >> Not three. >> Right. >> What's your reaction to that? >> I think that is right on the money. And if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots and there have been huge breaches. Like Equifax, you know a few years back is a big one and this all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data, they create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to be attack. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at Web3. So for those in the audience who have used, a Web3 application, one of these D app, to trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that stored, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on apps or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these defi exchanges, for instance, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the user is actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, "Wow, that's a much better or data model." And that gives so much more control of user 'cause the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. And so I think you're right and like we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see it like if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR and then all the companies are going, "We can't comply with that." They keep postponing it or like changing it a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're going to be in a much better spot. >> And GDPR is again a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. I always said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored and nevermind how they delete someone's entry in a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level they become so complicated. So right on the money there good, good call out. There question for you. Is this then? Okay, so do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is important on the identity side, wallet is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >> Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term and actually work together. So, if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to mattgloud.crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defi trades or whatever. And that doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think we're going to... Still early, so figuring out exactly how the industry is going to shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon and maybe a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging... What you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. And I also think that your financial applications of defi are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. And just a note on this, when you have a wallet that usually has multiple cryptocurrency addresses, so you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. You're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate and we collaborate with several large wallets as well, like blockchain.com and another 30 plus of these to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >> So the wallet basically is a D app, the way you look at it, the integrated. >> Yeah. >> Whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized application with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay. I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm an my own NFT. I mean, how this video's going to be an NFT soon. We get on board with the program here, but how do I log into my app? I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit is there benchmarking? Is there approval process? Is there APIs and SDK kind of thinking around it? How are you thinking about dealing with the apps? >> Yeah, so all of the above. And what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution, but it's consumer based. So what we've done is adapted some SSO protocols that other people have used, the standard ones, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you GET the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are, you know, standard Web2 APIs, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user-controlled NFT. So they're assigning it that with their private public key pair in order to make those updates. So that allows you to connect into both of these systems. We think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. You have an integration of these technologies over time. And we really see these Web3 components and net two domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google off, Facebook off, or you can type in an email address, you could see NFT, Unstoppable Domains or NFT authorization. And you can SSO in to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself, 'cause you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, "Yes, I am a unique individual. "I do live in New York and I just bought a new house." And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. And we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts online for e-commerce specifically in the future because that opens up a whole new market. 'Cause they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information directly to the app. >> I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency, in game end engagement, in game data. And now bringing that to kind of a horizontally scalable like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think that's a huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is you getting any pushback from, ICANN, the International Corporation of Naming and Numbers, they got dot everything now.club, 'cause the clubhouse, they got dot, party.live. I mean the real domain name people are over here, Web2, you guys are coming out with the Web3. Where is that connect for people who are not following along the Web3 trend? How do you rationalize the domain angle here? >> Yeah, well, so I would say that NFT domains are what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago. And they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, 20 to 50 million small businesses who own the majority of these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus. NFT domains, because all of a sudden you have the wallet, you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end users. So instead of being for 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to four billion people who have an internet connection. And so we actually think that the market size for NFT domains is somewhere 50 to a hundred X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for individuals on a day to day basis. So it's like people are going to want you on a use them for receiving cryptocurrency or receiving dollars or payments or USCC coin, where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. And they're not going to want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what Web2 is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are going to want to work with and adopt this new NFT technology, 'cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain names. So like in short, I think NFT domain names are domain names with superpowers. This is the next generation of naming systems. And naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >> Yeah, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean they just can't, they're not built for that. And having people, having their own names, is essentially what decentralization is all about. 'Cause we, what is a company? It's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place, they're decentralized. So then you decentralize the identity and everything's been changed. So completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. You pretty much laid out what's next for Web3, but you guys are in this state of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common use case for folks who are putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see, what's the progression? >> Yeah, so the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately, is we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to 100% year over year. So first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it, if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. And then we want to make it easier for all those people to send crypto back and forth. And I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like... I would say utility focused tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. And that's the really the first step for NFT domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFT domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network top down where you're like a government or corporation, you say, oh, you have to have ID, here's your password, you have to have it. We're going to do it, bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet and up to you domain name, it's going to give them some utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. And we're going to say, "Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile?" Yes. Okay, great. You just attach that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes, Instagram? Yes, TikTok, yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay, yeah, we can attach that back. And then what happens is you end up building up organically digital identifiers for people using these blockchain naming systems. And once they have that, they're going to just... They're going to be able to share that information and that's going to lead to better experiences online for both commerce, but also just better user experiences in general. >> Every company when they web came along first, everyone pro proved the web once. Oh, it's terrible. A bad idea. Oh, it's so, unreliable, so slow. Hard to find things. Web2, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these premalinks became so long, the webpage address fully qualified, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit ceiling. Here, everyone gets their NFT, they start doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. So we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink, permanent. >> Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Yes indeed. I mean, if we're lucky it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >> And the gas prices thing that's always come out always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain's perfect for this 'cause it's, imitable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >> Well, so a couple comments on efficiency. First of all, we picked domains as first product to market. 'Cause you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple times per year. So, the usage for that to set this up and configure it, most people set it up and configure it and then they only have a few changes per year. First of all, the overall you, it's not like a game. >> An IO problem. >> Right, right, right. So that part's good. So we picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking, are computer systems going to get more efficient over time? And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. And I remember the 90s, I had a modem and it was 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56 and then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. And I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time and there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. And you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you would try to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would've had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah, some applications are going to be wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >> Yeah, the motivated parties for innovations here, I mean a point cast failed miserably that was like, they tried to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds, double, triple in homes right now. Matt, congratulations, great stuff. Final, TikTok moment here. How would you summarize in a short clip, the difference between digital identity and Web2 and Web3. >> In Web2, you don't get to own your own online presidence, and in Web3 you do get to own it. So I think if you were going to simplify it, really Web3 is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >> So now users are in charge. >> Exactly, you got it. >> They're not the product anymore. If you got to be the product you might as well monetize the product, and that's the data. Real quick thoughts just to close out the roll of data and all this, your view. >> We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with their users. >> Awesome stuff, Matt, take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What are you guys looking for for hiring, fundraising? Give a quick commercial for what's going on Unstoppable Domains. >> Yeah, so if you haven't already, check us out at unstoppabledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at Unstoppable web. And we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And we are just crossed a hundred people. We're growing, three to five hundred percent year over year. We're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into Web3, even if you're coming from a traditional to background, please reach out. We love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >> And you're a virtual company. You have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >> Yeah, I actually just assumed we are 100% remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet in mostly concentrated in the US and the EU areas. >> I heard a rumor too. Maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >> This is true. And that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. But we also know that recovery is an important part of any organization. So if you push too hard, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. And so we want people to be with us long term, and we do think that this is a 10 year move. And so yeah, do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you- >> That's what I was going to ask you. So what's the consequence of, I don't take vacation. >> Yeah, we literally unplug you. (both laughing) >> You won't be able to get into slack. Right, and that's (indistinct). >> Well, when people start having their avatars be their bought and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFT saying that that's not the real person, it's not the real human. >> Yeah, exactly. We'll be able to check. >> NFT is great innovation, great use case, Matt congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with theCUBE. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, John had a wonderful time. >> All right, this is theCUBE Unstoppable Domains showcasing. We've got 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE, "Unstoppable Domains Showcase." I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on Web 3.0. And also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening, Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Part of Kaleido Insights. Jeremiah, great to see you thanks for coming on I appreciate it. Ren Besnard, Vice President of Marketing and Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on theCUBE for this showcase. >> Wow, my pleasure. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Jeremiah, I want to start with you. You've seen many ways refer in all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the Web 2.0 wave now the Web 3.0 is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up it's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this Web 3.0, can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many webs. What is Web 3.0 mean, what is it all about? >> Well John, you and I worked in the Web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platform which are the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities, and could not really monetize or make decisions. So Web 3.0 which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto, blockchain and sometimes the metaverse. Is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And in this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it, and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's Web 3.0. Without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we're talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into to crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say it's kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with dream is actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the Web 3.0 movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? >> I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of Web 3.0. And at this stage I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, you know, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s, you know. When I started working with Google, at that point in time the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely similar except faster. >> Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations of the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007. But you got Amazon Web Services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movements. So you've got cloud which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you've got now decentralized wave coming, okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right. So how, how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook. They're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as- >> That's right. >> They can control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >> So the thing that we seen out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing. (Jeremiah coughing) Are the ones that have been easier to move across. Have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with (indistinct). So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise Web 3.0 when it to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. >> Pre-Web 3.0 no, but actions there. How do you guys see the dangers, 'cause there's a lot of negative press but also there's a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positive. It's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is. But what are the dangers, how do you guys educate people, what should people pay attention to, what should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >> Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, the sharing economy. And we are walking into Web 3.0 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks DAOn in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though. In the last periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was going to happen. And we walked and think this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media's going to change the world around. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's a change. And so I think we're going to see that sorted out in suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. >> Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be docs out there? You saw the board, eight guys that did that were kind of docs a little bit there. And that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment imutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this because this is a big issue. >> Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it to, you know. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety, reporting of potential attacks and so on. In Web 3.0, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of Web 3.0 of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety, the need for hardware, wallet, impersonators on discord, you know, security storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, oxydemous or fully docked. The decentralized nature of Web 3.0 will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities become public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of Web 2.O and Web 3.0 at play here, you know. Maybe occurring on the notion of 2.5. But for now I think in Web 2.0, all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If Web 3.0 enables us to be anonymous, if DAOs have voting control, you know. What happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are, basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. >> I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because. Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture. But if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, to this trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know I'm starting to getting into this new way. >> You're right, and that word you said trust, that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs, people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in the, that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonym and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet, address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a Web 3.0 FICO Score. And you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact, you know, how did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that. We might see a new form of a scoring emerge, of course. Who controls that scoring? That's a whole nother topic gone on controling and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFT projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and in their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC, you know, your customers. So that's self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between our full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >> That's awesome. And I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah we've become historians over the years. We're getting old I'm a little bit older than you. (Jeremiah laughs) But we've seen the- >> You're young men. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a, kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved, the standards organization just to slow things DAO and mark things up a little bit. So, you know, you look at DAOs like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is from people I talk to is, it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition, vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade offs of that? >> Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to, Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this It's a digital cooperative. and we've heard of worker cooperatives before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things, identity, governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on Web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate. And as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, what's your take, that's the setup. >> So, you know for me when I started my journey into crypto and Web 3.0, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant. And an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure, you know. In the traditional company structure, you have (indistinct), the company's led by a CEO and other executives. The DAO is a flat structure, and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision making is very different, you know. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using (indistinct) as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in Web 3.0 culture. And we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models. And I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >> Yeah and that's a great point. >> Go ahead, Jeremiah. >> That's a great point, Ren. Around the transparency for governance. So, John you post the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now in the most doubts are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Or you can appoint delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power. Almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there sometimes are hierarchy except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens. But that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. >> You know, Ren I was talking with Matt G, the Founder of Unstoppable. And I was telling him about the Domain Name System. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government 'cause the internet was started by the US. The Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, 'cause the innovation yet was isn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus melding with it. So there's certain technologies that require, Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community let's not formalize anything. Like the government did with the Domain Name System. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it. I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU. But this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's you guys reaction to that? >> So I think, you know to take the stab at it. We have as a business, you know, thinking of Unstoppable Domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So you know the degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAO, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove buyers quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. You know as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very you a different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. >> Awesome. Jeremiah, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in, we've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared, created content enabled things to much more of a vanity. You update the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web 3.0 or is it, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? 'Cause as Web 3.0 comes you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influencers, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation. People have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >> Sure, the influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web 3.0. In this market, I mean there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved. They are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aok, famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economy. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. >> Can you see- >> Lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are air dropping NFTs, branded NFTs influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Back to you. >> That's super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. And the brands which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game changing instrumentation level. >> I think that what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketeer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on Web 3.0 has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto. Because as Jaremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a fly wheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands are gaining and delivering elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. >> That's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic. And they didn't really know what to do they called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with authenticity and environment like Web 3.0 where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >> That's right, and be because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behaved with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives do they participate in these NFT communities, do they purchase them or numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, you know, different NFT projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course you could talk to, Ren about that because it's owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. >> That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now where it goes, all right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. >> Sure, I think the vision of Web 3.0 where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach Web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to of the end, it just doesn't. In part there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one-percenter. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenter now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >> Awesome, Ren final comments. >> I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notion of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion. One that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and Web 3.0 essentially you think of a few 100 tribes. And I think that more projects are going to be a more coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see, you know, an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low 100 millions of crypto and NFT holders into the big hands basically. And that's going to be extreme interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >> All right, Ren and Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight great segment breaking down Web 3.0 or Web 2.5 as Jeremiah says but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers. As part of theCUBE and the Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.

>> Welcome to this Cube Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Derek Manky next, the Chief Security Insights and Global Threat Alliances at Fortiguard Labs. Derek, welcome back to the program. >> Hey, it's great to be here again. A lot of stuff's happened since we last talked. >> So Derek, one of the things that was really surprising from this year's Global Threat Landscape Report is a 10, more than 10x increase in ransomware. What's going on? What have you guys seen? >> Yeah so this is massive. We're talking over a thousand percent over a 10x increase. This has been building Lisa, So this has been building since December of 2020. Up until then we saw relatively low high watermark with ransomware. It had taken a hiatus really because cyber criminals were going after COVID-19 lawyers and doing some other things at the time. But we did see a seven fold increase in December, 2020. That has absolutely continued this year into a momentum up until today, it continues to build, never subsided. Now it's built to this monster, you know, almost 11 times increase from, from what we saw back last December. And the reason, what's fueling this is a new verticals that cyber criminals are targeting. We've seen the usual suspects like telecommunication, government in position one and two. But new verticals that have risen up into this third and fourth position following are MSSP, and this is on the heels of the Kaseya attack of course, that happened in 2021, as well as operational technology. There's actually four segments, there's transportation, automotive, manufacturing, and then of course, energy and utility, all subsequent to each other. So there's a huge focus now on, OT and MSSP for cyber criminals. >> One of the things that we saw last year this time, was that attackers had shifted their focus away from enterprise infrastructure devices, to home networks and consumer grade products. And now it looks like they're focusing on both. Are you seeing that? >> Yes, absolutely. In two ways, so first of all, again, this is a kill chain that we talk about. They have to get a foothold into the infrastructure, and then they can load things like ransomware on there. They can little things like information stealers as an example. The way they do that is through botnets. And what we reported in this in the first half of 2021 is that Mirai, which is about a two to three-year old botnet now is number one by far, it was the most prevalent botnet we've seen. Of course, the thing about Mirai is that it's an IOT based botnet. So it sits on devices, sitting inside consumer networks as an example, or home networks, right. And that can be a big problem. So that's the targets that cyber criminals are using. The other thing that we saw that was interesting was that one in four organizations detected malvertising. And so what that means Lisa, is that cyber criminals are shifting their tactics from going just from cloud-based or centralized email phishing campaigns to web born threats, right. So they're infecting sites, waterhole attacks, where, you know, people will go to read their daily updates as an example of things that they do as part of their habits. They're getting sent links to these sites that when they go to it, it's actually installing those botnets onto those systems, so they can get a foothold. We've also seen scare tactics, right. So they're doing new social engineering lures, pretending to be human resource departments. IT staff and personnel, as an example, with popups through the web browser that look like these people to fill out different forms and ultimately get infected on home devices. >> Well, the home device use is proliferate. It continues because we are still in this work from home, work from anywhere environment. Is that, you think a big factor in this increase from 7x to nearly 11x? >> It is a factor, absolutely. Yeah, like I said, it's also, it's a hybrid of sorts. So a lot of that activity is going to the MSSP angle, like I said to the OT. And to those new verticals, which by the way, are actually even larger than traditional targets in the past, like finance and banking, is actually lower than that as an example. So yeah, we are seeing a shift to that. And like I said, that's, further backed up from what we're seeing on with the, the botnet activity specifically with Mirai too. >> Are you seeing anything in terms of the ferocity, we know that the volume is increasing, are they becoming more ferocious, these attacks? >> Yeah, there is a lot of aggression out there, certainly from, from cyber criminals. And I would say that the velocity is increasing, but the amount, if you look at the cyber criminal ecosystem, the stakeholders, right, that is increasing, it's not just one or two campaigns that we're seeing. Again, we're seeing, this has been a record cases year, almost every week we've seen one or two significant, cyber security events that are happening. That is a dramatic shift compared to last year or even, two years ago too. And this is because, because the cyber criminals are getting deeper pockets now. They're becoming more well-funded and they have business partners, affiliates that they're hiring, each one of those has their own methodology, and they're getting paid big. We're talking up to 70 to 80% commission, just if they actually successfully, infect someone that pays for the ransom as an example. And so that's really, what's driving this too. It's a combination of this kind of perfect storm as we call it, right. You have this growing attack surface, work from home environments and footholds into those networks, but you have a whole bunch of other people now on the bad side that are orchestrating this and executing the attacks too. >> So what can organizations do to start- to slow down or limit the impacts of this growing ransomware as a service? >> Yeah, great question. Everybody has their role in this, I say, right? So if we look at, from a strategic point of view, we have to disrupt cyber crime, how do we do that? It starts with the kill chain. It starts with trying to build resilient networks. So things like ZTA and a zero trust network access, SD-WAN as an example for protecting that WAN infrastructure. 'Cause that's where the threats are floating to, right. That's how they get the initial footholds. So anything we can do on the preventative side, making networks more resilient, also education and training is really key. Things like multi-factor authentication are all key to this because if you build that preventatively and it's a relatively small investment upfront Lisa, compared to the collateral damage that can happen with these ransomware paths, the risk is very high. That goes a long way, it also forces the attackers to- it slows down their velocity, it forces them to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new strategy. So that is a very important piece, but there's also things that we're doing in the industry. There's some good news here, too, that we can talk about because there's things that we can actually do apart from that to really fight cyber crime, to try to take the cyber criminals offline too. >> All right, hit me with the good news Derek. >> Yeah, so a couple of things, right. If we look at the botnet activity, there's a couple of interesting things in there. Yes, we are seeing Mirai rise to the top right now, but we've seen big problems of the past that have gone away or come back, not as prolific as before. So two specific examples, EMOTET, that was one of the most prolific botnets that was out there for the past two to three years, there is a take-down that happened in January of this year. It's still on our radar but immediately after that takedown, it literally dropped to half of the activity it had before. And it's been consistently staying at that low watermark now at that half percentage since then, six months later. So that's very good news showing that the actual coordinated efforts that were getting involved with law enforcement, with our partners and so forth, to take down these are actually hitting their supply chain where it hurts, right. So that's good news part one. Trickbot was another example, this is also a notorious botnet, takedown attempt in Q4 of 2020. It went offline for about six months in our landscape report, we actually show that it came back online in about June this year. But again, it came back weaker and now the form is not nearly as prolific as before. So we are hitting them where it hurts, that's that's the really good news. And we're able to do that through new, what I call high resolution intelligence that we're looking at too. >> Talk to me about that high resolution intelligence, what do you mean by that? >> Yeah, so this is cutting edge stuff really, gets me excited, keeps me up at night in a good way. 'Cause we we're looking at this under the microscope, right. It's not just talking about the what, we know there's problems out there, we know there's ransomware, we know there's a botnets, all these things, and that's good to know, and we have to know that, but we're able to actually zoom in on this now and look at- So we, for the first time in the threat landscape report, we've published TTPs, the techniques, tactics, procedures. So it's not just talking about the what, it's talking about the how, how are they doing this? What's their preferred method of getting into systems? How are they trying to move from system to system? And exactly how are they doing that? What's the technique? And so we've highlighted that, it's using the MITRE attack framework TTP, but this is real time data. And it's very interesting, so we're clearly seeing a very heavy focus from cyber criminals and attackers to get around security controls, to do defense innovation, to do privilege escalation on systems. So in other words, trying to be common administrator so they can take full control of the system. As an example, lateral movement, there's still a preferred over 75%, 77 I believe percent of activity we observed from malware was still trying to move from system to system, by infecting removable media like thumb drives. And so it's interesting, right. It's a brand new look on these, a fresh look, but it's this high resolution, is allowing us to get a clear image, so that when we come to providing strategic guides and solutions in defense, and also even working on these takedown efforts, allows us to be much more effective. >> So one of the things that you said in the beginning was we talked about the increase in ransomware from last year to this year. You said, I don't think that we've hit that ceiling yet, but are we at an inflection point? Data showing that we're at an inflection point here with being able to get ahead of this? >> Yeah, I would like to believe so, there is still a lot of work to be done unfortunately. If we look at, there's a recent report put out by the Department of Justice in the US saying that, the chance of a criminal to be committing a crime, to be caught in the US is somewhere between 55 to 60%, the same chance for a cyber criminal lies less than 1%, well 0.5%. And that's the bad news, the good news is we are making progress in sending messages back and seeing results. But I think there's a long road ahead. So, there's a lot of work to be done, We're heading in the right direction. But like I said, they say, it's not just about that. It's, everyone has their role in this, all the way down to organizations and end users. If they're doing their part of making their networks more resilient through this, through all of the, increasing their security stack and strategy. That is also really going to stop the- really ultimately the profiteering that wave, 'cause that continues to build too. So it's a multi-stakeholder effort and I believe we are getting there, but I continue to still, I continue to expect the ransomware wave to build in the meantime. >> On the end-user front, that's always one of the vectors that we talk about, it's people, right? There's so much sophistication in these attacks that even security folks and experts are nearly fooled by them. What are some of the things that you're saying that governments are taking action on some recent announcements from the White House, but other organizations like Interpol, the World Economic Forum, Cyber Crime Unit, what are some of the things that governments are doing that you're seeing that as really advantageous here for the good guys? >> Yeah, so absolutely. This is all about collaboration. Governments are really focused on public, private sector collaboration. So we've seen this across the board with Fortiguard Labs, we're on the forefront with this, and it's really exciting to see that, it's great. There's always been a lot of will to work together, but we're starting to see action now, right? Interpol is a great example, they recently this year, held a high level forum on ransomware. I actually spoke and was part of that forum as well too. And the takeaways from that event were that we, this was a message to the world, that public, private sector we need. They actually called ransomware a pandemic, which is what I've referred to it as before in itself as well too. Because it is becoming that much of a problem and that we need to work together to be able to create action, action against this, measure success, become more strategic. The World Economic Forum were leading a project called the Partnership Against Cyber Crime Threat Map Project. And this is to identify, not just all this stuff we talked about in the threat landscape report, but also looking at, things like, how many different ransomware gangs are there out there. What do the money laundering networks look like? It's that side of the supply chain to map out, so that we can work together to actually take down those efforts. But it really is about this collaborative action that's happening and it's innovation and there's R&D behind this as well, that's coming to the table to be able to make it impactful. >> So it sounds to me like ransomware is no longer a- for any organization in any industry you were talking about the expansion of verticals. It's no longer a, "If this happens to us," but a matter of when and how do we actually prepare to remediate, prevent any damage? >> Yeah, absolutely, how do we prepare? The other thing is that there's a lot of, with just the nature of cyber, there's a lot of connectivity, there's a lot of different, it's not just always siloed attacks, right. We saw that with Colonial obviously, this year where you have attacks on IT, that can affect consumers, right down to consumers, right. And so for that very reason, everybody's infected in this. it truly is a pandemic I believe on its own. But the good news is, there's a lot of smart people on the good side and that's what gets me excited. Like I said, we're working with a lot of these initiatives. And like I said, some of those examples I called up before, we're actually starting to see measurable progress against this as well. >> That's good, well never a dull day I'm sure in your world. Any thing that you think when we talk about this again, in a few more months of the second half of 2021, anything you predict crystal ball wise that we're going to see? >> Yeah, I think that we're going to continue to see more of the, I mean, ransomware, absolutely, more of the targeted attacks. That's been a shift this year that we've seen, right. So instead of just trying to infect everybody for ransom, as an example, going after some of these new, high profile targets, I think we're going to continue to see that happening from the ransomware side and because of that, the average costs of these data breaches, I think they're going to continue to increase, it already did in 2021 as an example, if we look at the cost of a data breach report, it's gone up to about $5 million US on average, I think that's going to continue to increase as well too. And then the other thing too is, I think that we're going to start to see more, more action on the good side like we talked about. There was already a record amount of takedowns that have happened, five takedowns that happened in January. There were arrests made to these business partners, that was also new. So I'm expecting to see a lot more of that coming out towards the end of the year too. >> So as the challenges persist, so do the good things that are coming out of this. Where can folks go to get this first half 2021 Global Threat Landscape? What's the URL that they can go to? >> Yeah, you can check it out, all of our updates and blogs including the threat landscape reports on blog.fortinet.com under our threat research category. >> Excellent, I read that blog, it's fantastic. Derek, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for breaking this down for us, showing what's going on. Both the challenging things, as well as the good news. I look forward to our next conversation. >> Absolutely, it was great chatting with you again, Lisa. Thanks. >> Likewise for Derek Manky, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube Conversation. (exciting music)

>>Mhm. >>What? >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector partner awards for today's award for the award of best partner transformation, best global expansion. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich and now I'm very pleased to introduce you to our next guest. They are James Lester Global Managing Director, public Safety attic censure. And Lauren a thoroughly director of performance analytics and research of the Seattle Police Department. Welcome gentlemen, it's wonderful to have you on the program. >>Thanks for having us >>terrific. Well, we're going to talk a lot about data and a lot about public safety and how, you know, data analytics analytics is making a big impact um in the public safety world. So do tell us I'd like to start with you James. Uh tell us how X enters intelligent public safety platform turns data into a strategic asset. >>Thanks Natalie. Well, the intelligent public safety platform is all about combining different data sets together and taking a platform approach to using data within public safety. What it does is it allows us to bring a whole host of different types of data together in one place, put that through a series of different analytical transactions and then visualize that information back to where however within the public safety environment needs it and really does four key things. One is, it helps with situational awareness, helps the officer understand the situation that they're in and gives them insight to help support and guide them. Secondly it helps enhance investigations. So how do you join those dots? How do you help navigate and speed up complex investigations by better understanding a range of data sets. And thirdly it really helps with force management and understanding the behavior and the activities within the force and how best to use those critical assets of police officers and police staff themselves. And then finally what it does is it really looks at digital evidence management. How do you actually manage data effectively as an asset within the force? So those are the four key things. And certainly with our work at Seattle we've really focused on that force management area. >>Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that. Now let's shift to Lauren tell us how has I PSP you know, really helped your staff make some key contributions towards public safety in the city of Seattle. >>Yeah. Thanks. Uh so you know I think our business intelligence journey started maybe a little in advance of the I. P. S. P. With our partnership With accenture on the data analytics platform. And we've been taking that, say my PSP approach since 2015 as part of our efforts to comply with a federal consent decree. So, you know, I think what what we probably don't understand necessarily is that most police departments build sort of purpose built source systems to onboard data and make good use of them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that data is readily available. So, um, you know, we've been able to demonstrate compliance with the elements of a settlement agreement for our consent decree, but we've also been able to do a whole host of research projects designed to better understand how police operate in the criminal logical environment, how they perform and um, and really make the best use of those assets as we have them deployed around the city doing law enforcement work. >>Terrific. Now, James, let's shift to you one of the kind of key dilemmas here in the sectors. You know, how can you utilize these um, new technologies in policing, um, and law enforcement while still building trust with the public? >>Absolutely. I mean, I do think that it is critical that public safety agencies are able to use the benefits of new technology, criminals are using technology in all sorts of different ways. Uh and it's important that policing and public safety organizations are able to exploit the advantages that we now see through technology and the ability to understand and analyze data. But equally, it's critical that these implemented in ways that engage and involve the public, that the way in which the analytics and analysis is conducted is open and transparent, so people understand how the data is being used, uh and also that officers themselves are part of the process when these tools are built and developed, so they gain a thorough understanding of how to use them and how to implement them. So, being open and transparent in the way that these platforms are built is absolutely critical. >>Yeah, that's an excellent point because clearly bad actors are already using data. Um, so we might as well use it to help, you know, the good actors out there and help the public. So in your opinion, Lauren, um, you know, what is the next phase of this kind of model? Um, what are you hoping to do next with this kind of technology? >>So as we use this technology as we understand more about it, we're really building data curiosity within the management group at SPD. So really sort of, I would say the first phase of a business intelligence platform in policing is about orienting people to the problem, how many of these things happen at what time and where do they happen around the city? And then beginning to build better questions from the people who are actually doing the business of delivering police service in the city and the future of that, I think is taking that critical feedback and understanding how to respond with really more intelligence services, predictive services that help to kind of cut through that just general descriptive noise and provide insights to the operation in a city that has About 900,000 dispatches in a year. It's difficult to pinpoint which dispatches are of interest to police managers, which crimes which calls may be of interest to the city at large as they manage public safety and risk management. And so are, you know, sort of future development agenda. Our road map, if you will for the next several years is really focused on developing intelligent processes that make use of all of that data, boil it down to what's critically important and help direct people who are most familiar with the operation. To those uh those events, those critical pieces of insight that might be helpful in allowing them to make better management decisions. >>Yeah. And what what are some of the key areas that you find this platform can be effective in terms of uh you know public safety, certain criminal activities James. >>Um I think the PSP has a wide range of applications so certainly looking at how we can bring a whole range of data together that previously has maybe been locked away in individual silos or separate systems. So public safety agencies are really able to understand what they know and the information that they have and make it much easier to access and understand that information. Um I also think it's allowing us to perform levels of analytics and therefore insight on those data sets, which previously public safety agencies have have struggled to do. Um And in the case of Seattle focusing on the uh force management aspect, I think it's helped them understand the activities and behavior of their workforce um in context and in relation to other events and other activities to a much greater depth than they've been able to do previously. >>Terrific. Well, Lauren obviously, you know, this was a really tough year with Covid. What impact did the pandemic have on your operations and some of your more modern policing efforts? >>Oh, I mean, obviously it radically changed the way that we deploy forces in the organization beginning early in March. Uh you know, like most of the world, we all moved home trying to keep up the pace of development and continue to manage the operation. But as that was happening, you know, people are still living their lives out in the world and out in the city. So we pretty quickly found ourselves trying to adapt to that new use of public spaces, trying to identify problems in an environment that really doesn't look anything like the previous couple of years that we were working in, uh and uh, you know, data and and really sort of the availability of technology that helps too identify what's new and what's interesting and rapidly develop those insights and get them available for police managers was critical and helping us identify things like trends in potential exposure events. So being able to identify uh, you know, just exactly how many calls involve the use of personal protective equipment, use that to forecast potential exposure for our workforce. Be able to track exposure reports in the field to be able to determine whether there are staffing concerns that need to be considered. Uh and all of that. Uh you know, we're able to pretty rapidly prototype and deploy dashboards and tools that help folks, especially the command staff, have kind of a global sense for how the operation is functioning as the environment is literally shifting underneath them as uh, you know, uh the use of public spaces is changing and as dispatch procedures are changing as public policy is changing related to, you know, things like jail booking availability and public health and safety policies. The department was able to stay on top of those key metrics and really make sort of the best minute by minute decisions based in the data. And that's really not something that's been available, uh You know, without sort of the ready availability of data at your fingertips and the ability to rapidly prototype things that direct people to what's important. >>Yeah, thank you for that. Now, James, I'd love to hear your comments on that. I mean, has the pandemic altered or, you know, given you any kind of fresh perspective on uh you know, modern policing efforts using these kinds of platforms? >>Well, I think that the pandemic has shown the importance of using data in new and different ways. I mean, one thing the pandemic certainly did was see a shift in in crime types. You know, traditional street based volume crime declined, where we saw increases in cyber and online crime. And therefore the flexibility that police services have had to have in order to shift how they combat changing crime types has meant that they've had to be able to use data as they say, in new and different ways. And think about how can they be more disruptive in their tactics? How can they get new types of insight and really platforms like the intelligent public safety platform help them become much more flexible and much more nimble and that's certainly something that's been required as a result of the pandemic. >>Yeah, that's really great to hear. Um you know, Lauren going to you, I'd love to hear how specifically I PSP was able to help you uh you know, the Seattle Police department as well as statewide inquiries and end investigations. What kind of enhancements were you able to receive from that? >>Uh Well, you know, I mean in terms of investigations, uh the way that Seattle deploys the intelligent public safety platform, our focus is really primarily on deployment of resources that force management, the accountability, piece of things. And so from our perspective, the ability to onboard new data sources quickly uh and make use of that information in a kind of a rapid sort of responsive function was really critical for us but um you know, certainly and I think as as most communities are exploring new ways of approaching community safety, uh the intelligent public safety platform uh for us was really effective in being able to answer those, those questions that are coming up as as people are reforming the way that policing is deployed in their communities, were able to reach out and see just exactly how many hours are spent on one particular function over another, something that perhaps could be available for a co responder model, or take a look at, you know, this sort of natural experiment that we have out in our criminal logical environment as people are using spaces differently. And as we are approaching enforcement policy differently, being able to take a look at what are the effects of perhaps not arresting people for certain types of crime? Do we see some displacement of those effects across different crime types? Do we see an increase in harm in other areas of the operation? Have we seen you know increases in one particular crime type while another one declines? How is the environment responding these rapid changes and what really is a natural experiment occurring out in the world? >>Yeah I mean it's really incredible um Having all that data at our fingertips and really being able to utilize it to have a fuller perspective of what's really happening right? What what do you think James? >>Yeah. I mean I think being able to really utilize different data sets is something that police forces are seeing to become more and more important. Um They're recognizing that becoming increasingly data lead can really help improve their performance. Um And the challenge to date has really been how do we bring those data sets together but not then require police officers to way through reams and reams of data. I mean the volumes of data now that organizations are having to manage is huge. And so really the power of the I. P. S. P. Is being able to filter through all of that data and really deliver actionable insight. So something that the police officer can go and do something with and really make a difference around. Um And that's something that that's absolutely critical. And modern day policing is increasingly having this data driven evidence based approach to help make it far more effective and really focused on the needs of its citizens. >>Yeah and as you mentioned, I mean the algorithms are really driving this you know, um giving us these actionable insights but how can we ensure that they're acting fairly to all the stakeholders James. I'd like you to answer this please. >>Um Absolutely. I mean, trust and confidence within policing is absolutely paramount. Uh and whilst the use of these sorts of tools, I think is critical to helping keep communities in the public safe. It's very important that these tools are deployed in an open transparent way. And part of that is understanding the algorithms, making sure that algorithmic fairness is built in so that these are tested and any sort of bias or unintended consequences are understood and known and factored in to the way in which the tools are both built and used. Um, and then on top of that, I think it's open, it's important that these are open and transparent, that it's clear how and why departments are using these technologies. And it's also critical that the officers using them are trained and understood how to use them and how to use the insights that they're starting to deliver. >>Yeah, and thanks for mentioning that Lauren, what kind of training are you providing your staff at the Seattle police department And you know, how do you see this evolving in the next few years >>with regard to algorithmic fairness, what kind of training along those lines or training >>with the I. P. S. P. And all these other kinds of technologies that you're embracing now to help with your public safety initiatives? >>Well, you know, I think one of the one of the real benefits to becoming an evidence based organization, a truly evidence led organization is that you don't have to train folks uh to use data. What you have to do is leverage data to make it work and be really infused with their everyday operations. So we, you know, we have police officers and we have managers and we have commanders and they've got a very complex set of tasks that they've been trained to work with. It's really sort of our mission to be trained in, how to identify uh you know, the correct UX UI design, how to make sure that the insights that are being directed to those folks are really tailored to the business they're operating. And so to that extent, the analytical staff that we have is really focused on sort of continuous improvement and constant learning about how we can be mindful of things like bias and the algorithms and the various systems that we're deploying uh and also be up to date on the latest and how police operations really are sort of deployed around the city and ways that we can infuse those various management functions or those police service functions with data and analytics that are just naturally working with people's business sense and they're uh really sort of primary function, which is the delivery of police service >>terrific. Well, James lastly with you um just real quick you know, what are your thoughts in terms of being able to extend the power of I. P. S. P. Beyonce Seattle uh in the broader United States? >>Well I mean I think my PSP has huge applicability to any public safety agency in in the US and beyond and we're already seeing other agencies around the world interested in using it and deploying it um Where they basically want to get uh and be able to utilize a wider range of data where they want to be able to drive greater insight into that that data set um Where they want to be confident in deploying open and fair algorithms um to really make a difference. Um And if we to take the the specific example of the U. S. And the work that we've done with Seattle then I think tools like the intention public safety platform have a huge part to play in the wider reimagining of policing within the US in understanding officer and departmental behavior and actually opening up and sharing information with citizens that increased levels of trust and transparency between public safety agencies and the communities and citizens that they serve. >>And you know, on that note, do you think that I PSP is useful in terms of collaboration efforts, you know, with other police departments, perhaps in other states? Um you know or just just as a global national effort. Lauren, do you see that kind of potential in the future? >>Yeah and actually we do that now. So one of the really sort of powerful things about having all of this data at your fingertips and I would say having this kind of awesome responsibility of being the steward of this type of asset for the community. Um and and really sort of for the industry at large is that we're able to take the data and rapidly develop new research projects with researchers around the world. So the Seattle Police Department maintains a network of about I think we're up to about 55 current researchers and institutions. I think we've got about 33, institutions around the world. People really working on real time problems related to the things that matter to our community right now. And having this data available at our fingertips allows us to rapidly develop data sources. We can actually get on a call with one of our researchers uh and build out a table for them to use or start exploring the data in an ad hoc querying layer layer and, you know, making visualizations and helping the researchers form better questions so that when we develop their data, when we deploy it to them, uh they can pretty quickly get in there. It's in the format that they're looking for, They understand it. They can run some tests and determine whether the data that we provided for them actually meets their needs. And if it doesn't, we can develop a new set pretty quickly. I I think that also that research function, that discovery function that were enabled through the use of these data is actually helping to bring together uh the community of law enforcement around this this idea of Collaborative understanding of how policing works around the city, you know, sorry, around the world. So of 18,000 or so law enforcement agencies in the United States, there is broad variability in people's competency in their use of data, but we're finding that agencies that have access to these types of tools or who are starting to develop access to these tools and the competencies to use them are coming together. Uh and beginning to talk about how we can understand sort of cross cultural and cross regional correlations and patterns that we see across our multiple operations. And although, you know, those are varied uh and and range around the country or even around the world, I think that that collaboration on understanding how policing works, what's normal, what's abnormal, what we can do about it is really going to be powerful in the future. >>Yeah, Well, this is really exciting. Yeah. Well, what are your thoughts? >>I was just going to build on the point that Lauren was making there because I think I think that is a really important one. Um you know, when when you look around the world, the challenges that different public safety and policing agencies face are actually dramatically similar um and the ability for policing organizations to come together and think about how they use data, think about how they use data in a fair and transparent way is something we're really starting to see and that ability to share insight to experiment um and really make sure that you're bringing lots of different insight together to further the way in which police forces all over the world can actually help keep their citizens safe and combat what is an increasingly rapidly and evolving threat. Landscape is something that we see tools like the intelligent public safety platform really helping to do and if one police force starts to use it in a certain way in one jurisdiction and has success there, there is definitely the ability to share that insight with others and get this global pool of understanding and knowledge all furthering the level of safety and security that can be delivered to communities in the public. >>Terrific. Well, thank you both so much for your insights has been really fantastic to hear. You know, how these new technologies are really coming to the aid of public safety officials and helping secure the public. That was Lauren a thoroughly director of performance analytics and research at the Seattle police Department and James Schlesser. Global Managing Director, Public Safety at its center. And I'm Natalie early, your host for the cube and that was our session for the AWS Global Public uh, partner Awards. Thank you very much for watching. >>Mm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Well, hello everybody and welcome again to theCUBE. We continue our initiative here at IBM Think and now we're joined by two distinguished guests who are really going the extra mile for us, I might say. Here we are in the States at a very reasonable hour, in Korea, it's a little later in the evening so we certainly appreciate their time and their patience here. We're joined by Mr. Khee-Hong Song, who is the CEO and President of IBM Korea and Mr. Jung Sik Suh, who is the CEO of Hyundai AutoEver, which is an IT service company affiliated with the Hyundai Motor Group. And gentlemen (greeting in Korean) Thank you for joining this. We appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for inviting us. >> Hi. >> Yes, hi, very good to see you there. And I hope I didn't do the greeting injustice there. First off, Khee, I'll start with you. Let's talk about first off, kind of this digital transformation that transpires not only here in the United States, but of course is global. And certainly, with an IT advanced company like Korea, give us just really kind of a calibration, where are you in terms of this transformation in Korea with regard to digital? >> A lot of people are interested in the post-COVID world and how it is going to look like. What changes this pandemic will bring. The Korean government is really focusing on growing the digital sector. Taking this advantage, and taking this opportunity as a chance to really upgrade the entire IT system of the nation. So for example, like a Korean economy had been contracted by -1% and industry players also faced difficulties. For example, discount stores are -20% Y2Y. department stores are lost 30% of their revenue. But the government is injecting money to really change the game, leveraging the digital technology. >> Yeah, and you mentioned COVID, and obviously that's had a global impact. Not only in your operations here in the United States certainly, but Africa in Europe, and certainly in Asia as we talked about. Can you go just a little bit deeper on that in terms of what those impacts have been and maybe a little more specificity on coming out of that. You mentioned the economic impacts that Korea is currently suffering, but looking for a bounce back, looking for a rebound with the government. Maybe a little more specifics about the impact of COVID. And then Mr. Sung, I'll turn to you for that as well. First off, Khee, if you will. >> Okay, in an effort to recover from COVID-19 economic recession, Korean government announced Digital New Deal, which is to lay a foundation for digital economy that will spur economic growth and innovation. Now the policy aims to create a new digital economy, which is underpinned by new technologies such as 5G, big data and artificial intelligence. According to IDC research, 55% of Korean companies have already overcome the economic downturn and are moving toward the growth in next normal. They have been very active in making investments to become the enterprise of the future. And this is higher than global average of 37% in terms of recovery rate. This indicates that leading Korean companies are quickly preparing for the next, even in the face of a crisis. >> Jung, We've been hearing from Khee talking about the digital and certainly the impacts of COVID. And I assume that at Hyundai, you have had to deal with this certainly, this impact and are now coming out the other end, some very positive news from numbers we're hearing from Khee. If you could talk about though, maybe from your perspective in terms of that impact. And then, what kind of a rebound do you see or kind of positive uptick do you see in terms of digital in your business, say, in the next 12 to 18 months? >> I think the 12 to 18 months, we are reinforcing the digitalization, not just the working environment, but also others, especially for in terms of sales. Until now most of the B2C sales changed to digital or the internet environment, but unfortunately, car manufacturing OEM companies are not too ready for the e-commerce environment. But Hyundai is very actively, and proactively, and preemptively starting the e-commerce. So I think, next to 12 to 18 month, two-digit percent of our sales are will be fulfilled by internet-based. I mean, we'll have to face the most biggest and most challenging but possible change after COVID. >> Yeah, what's driving that then, is it just that people are more likely to want to be at home whether it's as a consumer or whether it's your workforce, whatever the case may be, but you're talking about this kind of going from a physical world to a more digital-based world as I'm hearing you describe it. Is that accurate? >> Yes. So we are the digital world, from just communicate with customer, but also our internal operation. Like the manufacturing environment and also the sales environment, et cetera. >> And Khee, if you would talk about maybe how this is impacting your business and just in terms of IBM in general. Not just with Hyundai, but I'm sure you support a lot of healthcare initiatives, a lot of other e-commerce initiatives and what have you, What's kind of the bottom line impact there for you right now in terms of this massive shift over to digital? >> Well, in IBM, our goal is to work with industry clients and technology partners to accelerate this transformation through automation, transition to hybrid cloud, and help our clients to really gain some benefits from their change. So one area I can talk about is automation. We see increasing requirements from our clients on automation for operational excellence, amid the economic downturn, and for hygiene purposes as well. So Seoul Asan Hospital is one of the leading hospitals in Korea and has the largest number of beds. Asan hospital and IBM worked together to develop a bed allocation automation system based on design thinking, workshop and garage method. The automation system considers a patient's specific preferences, surgery schedule, customized treatment for each patient, and various reservation status in each department. The result was outstanding. The hospital could reduce the bed assignment lead time from 20 minutes to seven minutes with a 0% error rate. And currently, more than a hundred hospitalization registration procedures are being processed every day without human intervention. And patient satisfaction and productivity of medical staff have improved significantly. That is just one great example of automation which is taking place in many other industries as well. Second is transformation to cloud. A large credit card company in Korea has chosen IBM as a partner to convert enterprise wide systems including the most complex account system to a managed private cloud using cloud technology from IBM and Red Hat. >> Khee, you talked about these key factors, if you will, about cloud transformation and different kinds of operational efficiencies and all these very fundamental. But very important factors to consider, when you're talking to your clients right now, what are their, I wouldn't say hesitations, but I guess maybe their challenges in deciding what tasks will go where and to what degree they're good with the cloud environment, to what degree they want it still on prem, to what, where the hybrid comes into play. I mean, these are all are fairly crucial decisions that your clients are making. >> Well, I think the barrier to any decision, like quick decision or sort of complete understanding is the technology itself is changing very quickly. I mean, last year, two years ago, versus now, when all technology companies, should we say something different. And that is not because it changed the position itself. The technology itself changed, and technology companies are responding to the trend. So that's why some clients get confused, and that confusion slows down the adaption of digital technology. But as I mentioned earlier, this pandemic situation, I'm pretty sure they're, like Mr. Sung can talk about some changes in Hyundai motors. Many companies realized that doing nothing or slowing down is not the best answer in this environment. And they are now proactively embracing those changes. >> So Jung, if you would then follow up on that, I would like to hear from you about Hyundai and the factors that you've considered in your digital decision making in terms of workloads, and capacities, and just where you house information, where you house your data, where you process it. What are some of those factors that you have thought about and then maybe going forward, how much more are you going to do? What are you considering right now in terms of future transformations? >> I think the other, our competitor, the other OEMs also think like that the car itself should be changed to digital. It means that, currently, the software portion of the car is just a seven to 10% of total our, the procurement. But it'll be changed to 20 to 30% in five years. It means that some portion will be to increased by three times There is a one our research changed. The other one is that kind of a software mostly located and not just in the car, which means that car is just a software edge activity. It means that just that the input and output, or some real-time transaction, or other computation and calculation analysis and decision could be the car cloud. Therefore, the cloud is main party of the car software. And also the car is it's just to edge. We have edge cloud and main cloud. It will be occurred just to within just several years. First, really, Hyundai has currently more than 40% of the car is connected in listening. And also cumulatively, we are connected by around the four million car in the word. It will be changed to 10 million car would be connected within one years. >> So 10 million Hyundai cars will be connected to cloud generating information and also- >> Yes, collecting information. And we are ready for the OTA, which means over-the-air software update for the 10 million car within one years. And also, it will double up year by year. >> Okay. >> Which means that all of the car, all the operated by cloud. >> Okay. >> And cars, it says to input and output an edge activities, therefore car is on cloud. >> Okay. >> John: Right? Khee: Interesting. >> Jung: That is the major driver for our digital transformation. >> And if you would, just what role is IBM having that? You're talking about a massive increase of 10 million cars is a very impressive number. >> And the data, the 10 million cars are producing are will be enormous. So IBM's role is actually helping clients in this kind of situation. To help those companies collect data and then like a seamless communication with the cloud. So that at the real time, the 10 million cars get the information timely. And also, like all those cars are communicating with each other that is made possible upon a hybrid cloud platform. And I think that is IBM's contribution to Hyundai Motors. Not just Hyundai Motors, but industries who have similar challenges and desires. >> One more thing, lately, IBM helped us our all IT operation in US and Europe, which composed of our 50% of our revenue come from. Therefore it means that dozens of billion of revenue operation is located in US and Europe. All over the US, Europe IT operation conducted by the IBM India and orchestrated by IBM Korean people. >> So it's amazing as Mr. Suh mentioned, IBM Korea is leading the project. All the service delivery is done in India leveraging IBM India. And we are serving Hyundai motors in the United States and Europe. So it's a truly a global IT operation environment. And that is made possible based upon IBM's cloud technology. >> Well, your summary was spot on. I couldn't say it any better, Khee. Thank you for that. Jung, thank you as well. Talking about this impressive global impact and really partnership that Hyundai is taking with IBM in the several continents. And making it work for millions of consumers around the world. Thank you both for your time today. I appreciate it. >> Khee: Thank you very much, John. >> Jung: Thank you. >> All right, we've been talking about Korea as an IT power country for the IBM perspective. And certainly, using Hyundai is a beautiful example of just how this partnership is working and growing, and providing great service for consumers at the end of the day. You've been watching "theCube" and IBM Think. (upbeat theme music) (upbeat theme music) (humming)