(bright music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is a global special open program we're doing every year. We're going to continue it every quarter. We're going to do more and more content, getting the voices out there and celebrating the diversity. And I'm excited to have an amazing guest here, LaDavia Drane, who's the head of Global Inclusion Diversity & Equity at AWS. LaDavia, we tried to get you in on AWS re:Invent, and you were super busy. So much going on. The industry has seen the light. They're seeing everything going on, and the numbers are up, but still not there, and getting better. This is your passion, our passion, a shared passion. Tell us about your situation, your career, how you got into it. What's your story? >> Yeah. Well, John, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad that we finally got this opportunity to speak. How did I get into this work? Wow, you know, I'm doing the work that I love to do, number one. It's always been my passion to be a voice for the voiceless, to create a seat at the table for folks that may not be welcome to certain tables. And so, it's been something that's been kind of the theme of my entire professional career. I started off as a lawyer, went to Capitol Hill, was able to do some work with members of Congress, both women members of Congress, but also, minority members of Congress in the US Congress. And then, that just morphed into what I think has become a career for me in inclusion, diversity, and equity. I decided to join Amazon because I could tell that it's a company that was ready to take it to the next level in this space. And sure enough, that's been my experience here. So now, I'm in it, I'm in it with two feet, doing great work. And yeah, yeah, it's almost a full circle moment for me. >> It's really an interesting background. You have a background in public policy. You mentioned Capitol Hill. That's awesome. DC kind of moves slow, but it's a complicated machinery there. Obviously, as you know, navigating that, Amazon grew significantly. We've been at every re:Invent with theCUBE since 2013, like just one year. I watched Amazon grow, and they've become very fast and also complicated, like, I won't say like Capitol, 'cause that's very slow, but Amazon's complicated. AWS is in the realm of powering a generation of public policy. We had the JEDI contract controversy, all kinds of new emerging challenges. This pivot to tech was great timing because one, (laughs) Amazon needed it because they were growing so fast in a male dominated world, but also, their business is having real impact on the public. >> That's right, that's right. And when you say the public, I'll just call it out. I think that there's a full spectrum of diversity and we work backwards from our customers, and our customers are diverse. And so, I really do believe, I agree that I came to the right place at the right time. And yeah, we move fast and we're also moving fast in this space of making sure that both internally and externally, we're doing the things that we need to do in order to reach a diverse population. >> You know, I've noticed how Amazon's changed from the culture, male dominated culture. Let's face it, it was. And now, I've seen over the past five years, specifically go back five, is kind of in my mental model, just the growth of female leaders, it's been impressive. And there was some controversy. They were criticized publicly for this. And we said a few things as well in those, like around 2014. How is Amazon ensuring and continuing to get the female employees feel represented and empowered? What's going on there? What programs do you have? Because it's not just doing it, it's continuing it, right? And 'cause there is a lot more to do. I mean, the half (laughs) the products are digital now for everybody. It's not just one population. (laughs) Everyone uses digital products. What is Amazon doing now to keep it going? >> Well, I'll tell you, John, it's important for me to note that while we've made great progress, there's still more that can be done. I am very happy to be able to report that we have big women leaders. We have leaders running huge parts of our business, which includes storage, customer experience, industries and business development. And yes, we have all types of programs. And I should say that, instead of calling it programs, I'm going to call it strategic initiatives, right? We are very thoughtful about how we engage our women. And not only how we hire, attract women, but how we retain our women. We do that through engagement, groups like our affinity groups. So Women at Amazon is an affinity group. Women in finance, women in engineering. Just recently, I helped our Black employee network women's group launch, BEN Women. And so you have these communities of women who come together, support and mentor one another. We have what we call Amazon Circles. And so these are safe spaces where women can come together and can have conversations, where we are able to connect mentors and sponsors. And we're seeing that it's making all the difference in the world for our women. And we see that through what we call Connections. We have an inclusion sentiment tracker. So we're able to ask questions every single day and we get a response from our employees and we can see how are our women feeling, how are they feeling included at work? Are they feeling as though they can be who they are authentically at Amazon? And so, again, there's more work that needs to be done. But I will say that as I look at the data, as I'm talking to engaging women, I really do believe that we're on the right path. >> LaDavia, talk about the urgent needs of the women that you're hearing from the Circles. That's a great program. The affinity circles, the groups are great. Now, you have the groups, what are you hearing? What are the needs of the women? >> So, John, I'll just go a little bit into what's becoming a conversation around equity. So, initially I think we talked a lot about equality, right? We wanted everyone to have fair access to the same things. But now, women are looking for equity. We're talking about not just leveling the playing field, which is equality, but don't give me the same as you give everyone else. Instead, recognize that I may have different circumstances, I may have different needs. And give me what I need, right? Give me what I need, not just the same as everyone else. And so, I love seeing women evolve in this way, and being very specific about what they need more than, or what's different than what a man may have in the same situation because their circumstances are not always the same and we should treat them as such. >> Yeah, I think that's a great equity point. I interviewed a woman here, ex-Amazonian, she's now a GSI, Global System Integrator. She's a single mom. And she said remote work brought her equity because people on her team realized that she was a single mom. And it wasn't the, how do you balance life, it was her reality. And what happened was, she had more empathy with the team because of the new work environment. So, I think this is an important point to call out, that equity, because that really makes things smoother in terms of the interactions, not the assumptions, you have to be, you know, always the same as a man. So, how does that go? What's the current... How would you characterize the progress in that area right now? >> I believe that employers are just getting better at this. It's just like you said, with the hybrid being the norm now, you have an employer who is looking at people differently based on what they need. And it's not a problem, it's not an issue that a single mother says, "Well, I need to be able to leave by 5:00 PM." I think that employers now, and Amazon is right there along with other employers, are starting just to evolve that muscle of meeting the needs. People don't have to feel different. You don't have to feel as though there's some kind of of special circumstance for me. Instead, it's something that we, as employers, we're asking for. And we want to meet those needs that are different in some situations. >> I know you guys do a lot of support of women outside of AWS, and I had a story I recorded for the program. This woman, she talked about how she was a nerd from day one. She's a tomboy. They called her a tomboy, but she always loved robotics. And she ended up getting dual engineering degrees. And she talked about how she didn't run away and there was many signals to her not to go. And she powered through, at that time, and during her generation, that was tough. And she was successful. How are you guys taking the education to STEM, to women, at young ages? Because we don't want to turn people away from tech if they have the natural affinity towards it. And not everyone is going to be, as, you know, (laughs) strong, if you will. And she was a bulldog, she was great. She's just like, "I'm going for it. I love it so much." But not everyone's like that. So, this is an educational thing. How do you expose technology, STEM for instance, and making it more accessible, no stigma, all that stuff? I mean, I think we've come a long way, but still. >> What I love about women is we don't just focus on ourselves. We do a very good job of thinking about the generation that's coming after us. And so, I think you will see that very clearly with our women Amazonians. I'll talk about three different examples of ways that Amazonian women in particular, and there are men that are helping out, but I'll talk about the women in particular that are leading in this area. On my team, in the Inclusion, Diversity & Equity team, we have a program that we run in Ghana where we meet basic STEM needs for a afterschool program. So we've taken this small program, and we've turned their summer camp into this immersion, where girls and boys, we do focus on the girls, can come and be completely immersed in STEM. And when we provide the technology that they need, so that they'll be able to have access to this whole new world of STEM. Another program which is run out of our AWS In Communities team, called AWS Girls' Tech Day. All across the world where we have data centers, we're running these Girls' Tech Day. They're basically designed to educate, empower and inspire girls to pursue a career in tech. Really, really exciting. I was at the Girls' Tech Day here recently in Columbus, Ohio, and I got to tell you, it was the highlight of my year. And then I'll talk a little bit about one more, it's called AWS GetIT, and it's been around for a while. So this is a program, again, it's a global program, it's actually across 13 countries. And it allows girls to explore cloud technology, in particular, and to use it to solve real world problems. Those are just three examples. There are many more. There are actually women Amazonians that create these opportunities off the side of their desk in they're local communities. We, in Inclusion, Diversity & Equity, we fund programs so that women can do this work, this STEM work in their own local communities. But those are just three examples of some of the things that our Amazonians are doing to bring girls along, to make sure that the next generation is set up and that the next generation knows that STEM is accessible for girls. >> I'm a huge believer. I think that's amazing. That's great inspiration. We need more of that. It's awesome. And why wouldn't we spread it around? I want to get to the equity piece, that's the theme for this year's IWD. But before that, getting that segment, I want to ask you about your title, and the choice of words and the sequence. Okay, Global Inclusion, Diversity, Equity. Not diversity only. Inclusion is first. We've had this debate on theCUBE many years now, a few years back, it started with, "Inclusion is before diversity," "No, diversity before inclusion, equity." And so there's always been a debate (laughs) around the choice of words and their order. What's your opinion? What's your reaction to that? Is it by design? And does inclusion come before diversity, or am I just reading it to it? >> Inclusion doesn't necessarily come before diversity. (John laughs) It doesn't necessarily come before equity. Equity isn't last, but we do lead with inclusion in AWS. And that is very important to us, right? And thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit about it. We lead with inclusion because we want to make sure that every single one of our builders know that they have a place in this work. And so it's important that we don't only focus on hiring, right? Diversity, even though there are many, many different levels and spectrums to diversity. Inclusion, if you start there, I believe that it's what it takes to make sure that you have a workplace where everyone knows you're included here, you belong here, we want you to stay here. And so, it helps as we go after diversity. And we want all types of people to be a part of our workforce, but we want you to stay. And inclusion is the thing. It's the thing that I believe makes sure that people stay because they feel included. So we lead with inclusion. Doesn't mean that we put diversity or equity second or third, but we are proud to lead with inclusion. >> Great description. That was fabulous. Totally agree. Double click, thumbs up. Now let's get into the theme. Embracing equity, 'cause this is a term, it's in quotes. What does that mean to you? You mentioned it earlier, I love it. What does embrace equity mean? >> Yeah. You know, I do believe that when people think about equity, especially non-women think about equity, it's kind of scary. It's, "Am I going to give away what I have right now to make space for someone else?" But that's not what equity means. And so I think that it's first important that we just educate ourselves about what equity really is. It doesn't mean that someone's going to take your spot, right? It doesn't mean that the pie, let's use that analogy, gets smaller. The pie gets bigger, right? >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And everyone is able to have their piece of the pie. And so, I do believe that I love that IWD, International Women's Day is leading with embracing equity because we're going to the heart of the matter when we go to equity, we're going to the place where most people feel most challenged, and challenging people to think about equity and what it means and how they can contribute to equity and thus, embrace equity. >> Yeah, I love it. And the advice that you have for tech professionals out there on this, how do you advise other groups? 'Cause you guys are doing a lot of great work. Other organizations are catching up. What would be your advice to folks who are working on this equity challenge to reach gender equity and other equitable strategic initiatives? And everyone's working on this. Sustainability and equity are two big projects we're seeing in every single company right now. >> Yeah, yeah. I will say that I believe that AWS has proven that equity and going after equity does work. Embracing equity does work. One example I would point to is our AWS Impact Accelerator program. I mean, we provide 30 million for early stage startups led by women, Black founders, Latino founders, LGBTQ+ founders, to help them scale their business. That's equity. That's giving them what they need. >> John: Yeah. >> What they need is they need access to capital. And so, what I'd say to companies who are looking at going into the space of equity, I would say embrace it. Embrace it. Look at examples of what companies like AWS is doing around it and embrace it because I do believe that the tech industry will be better when we're comfortable with embracing equity and creating strategic initiatives so that we could expand equity and make it something that's just, it's just normal. It's the normal course of business. It's what we do. It's what we expect of ourselves and our employees. >> LaDavia, you're amazing. Thank you for spending the time. My final couple questions really more around you. Capitol Hill, DC, Amazon Global Head of Inclusion, Diversity & Equity, as you look at making change, being a change agent, being a leader, is really kind of similar, right? You've got DC, it's hard to make change there, but if you do it, it works, right? (laughs) If you don't, you're on the side of the road. So, as you're in your job now, what are you most excited about? What's on your agenda? What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I'm most excited about the potential of what we can get done, not just for builders that are currently in our seats, but for builders in the future. I tend to focus on that little girl. I don't know her, I don't know where she lives. I don't know how old she is now, but she's somewhere in the world, and I want her to grow up and for there to be no question that she has access to AWS, that she can be an employee at AWS. And so, that's where I tend to center, I center on the future. I try to build now, for what's to come, to make sure that this place is accessible for that little girl. >> You know, I've always been saying for a long time, the software is eating the world, now you got digital transformation, business transformation. And that's not a male only, or certain category, it's everybody. And so, software that's being built, and the systems that are being built, have to have first principles. Andy Jassy is very strong on this. He's been publicly saying, when trying to get pinned down about certain books in the bookstore that might offend another group. And he's like, "Look, we have first principles. First principles is a big part of leading." What's your reaction to that? How would you talk to another professional and say, "Hey," you know this, "How do I make the right call? Am I doing the wrong thing here? And I might say the wrong thing here." And is it first principles based? What's the guardrails? How do you keep that in check? How would you advise someone as they go forward and lean in to drive some of the change that we're talking about today? >> Yeah, I think as leaders, we have to trust ourselves. And Andy actually, is a great example. When I came in as head of ID&E for AWS, he was our CEO here at AWS. And I saw how he authentically spoke from his heart about these issues. And it just aligned with who he is personally, his own personal principles. And I do believe that leaders should be free to do just that. Not to be scripted, but to lead with their principles. And so, I think Andy's actually a great example. I believe that I am the professional in this space at this company that I am today because of the example that Andy set. >> Yeah, you guys do a great job, LaDavia. What's next for you? >> What's next. >> World tour, you traveling around? What's on your plate these days? Share a little bit about what you're currently working on. >> Yeah, so you know, at Amazon, we're always diving deep. We're always diving deep, we're looking for root cause, working very hard to look around corners, and trying to build now for what's to come in the future. And so I'll continue to do that. Of course, we're always planning and working towards re:Invent, so hopefully, John, I'll see you at re:Invent this December. But we have some great things happening throughout the year, and we'll continue to... I think it's really important, as opposed to looking to do new things, to just continue to flex the same muscles and to show that we can be very, very focused and intentional about doing the same things over and over each year to just become better and better at this work in this space, and to show our employees that we're committed for the long haul. So of course, there'll be new things on the horizon, but what I can say, especially to Amazonians, is we're going to continue to stay focused, and continue to get at this issue, and doing this issue of inclusion, diversity and equity, and continue to do the things that work and make sure that our culture evolves at the same time. >> LaDavia, thank you so much. I'll give you the final word. Just share some of the big projects you guys are working on so people can know about them, your strategic initiatives. Take a minute to plug some of the major projects and things that are going on that people either know about or should know about, or need to know about. Take a minute to share some of the big things you guys got going on, or most of the things. >> So, one big thing that I would like to focus on, focus my time on, is what we call our Innovation Fund. This is actually how we scale our work and we meet the community's needs by providing micro grants to our employees so our employees can go out into the world and sponsor all types of different activities, create activities in their local communities, or throughout the regions. And so, that's probably one thing that I would like to focus on just because number one, it's our employees, it's how we scale this work, and it's how we meet our community's needs in a very global way. And so, thank you John, for the opportunity to talk a bit about what we're up to here at Amazon Web Services. But it's just important to me, that I end with our employees because for me, that's what's most important. And they're doing some awesome work through our Innovation Fund. >> Inclusion makes the workplace great. Empowerment, with that kind of program, is amazing. LaDavia Drane, thank you so much. Head of Global Inclusion and Diversity & Equity at AWS. This is International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching and stay with us for more great interviews and people and what they're working on. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>Mhm. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS Re Invent 2021. Live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Ferrier We have to live sets to remote studios over 100 guests on the Cube at this year's show and we're really excited to get to the next decade in cloud innovation and welcome from the keynote stage. Mark Ruin the Chief Network Officer Andy VPs Dish Network Mark, Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. >>Enjoyed your keynote this morning. So big news coming from AWS and dish you guys announced in the spring telecom industry First dish in AWS have formed a strategic collaboration to reinvent, reinvent five G connectivity and innovation. Let's let's really kind of dig into the AWS dish partnership. >>Yeah, you know, we're putting our network in the cloud, which allows us to have a different speed of innovation and a much more corroborative way of bringing new technology. And then we have access to all the developer ecosystem of AWS. So that's but as you say, it's a world first to put the telco in the cloud. >>And so the first time the five g network is going to be in the cloud, and it was also announced I'm curious, uh, that Las Vegas is going to be the first city live here. We are sitting in Las Vegas. What's the any status you can give us on >>that? So we're building across the US and Las Vegas is a place that we've built and we better testing. So that's where we have all run and we're testing all sorts of traffic and capability with our people and partners live here at the same time that we have the reinvent and, uh, Bianco around. We're also starting to test new capabilities like orchestration, slicing things that we've never seen any industry. So that's pretty exciting, I >>have to ask you. In the telecom industry, there has been an inflexion point around cloud and cloud Impact Ran is opening up new opportunities. What is the telecom industry getting and missing at the same time? Because it seems to be two schools of thought cloud pro cloud ran and then hold onto the old way. >>I think everybody would like to go to Iran and the cloud, but it's not as easy if you have a big installed base. So for us. You know, we all knew it. It's easy so we can adopt the best technology and the newest. But of course, if you have a big instal base, there is going to be a transformation, if you wish. So you know, people are starting trying to set the expectation of how much time it will take. But for us, you know we are. We're moving ahead because we're building a completely new network. >>It's a lot easier than well, it's a relative term. It's >>really much more fun. And we can We don't have to make compromises, right? So but it's still a lot of work, you know, we're discovering we're learning a lot of things. We're partners. >>What if you have a clean sheet of paper or Greenfield? What's the playbook to roll this out across the campus for a large geographic area? >>Yeah, so pretty much You have the same capability in terms of coverage and capabilities than anybody else, but we can do it in an automated manner. We can do it with much thinner and efficient hardware, pretty much hardware with a few accelerators, so a bit of jargon. But, you know, we just have access to a larger ecosystem and much more silicon and all the good things that are coming with the cloud >>talk to us about some of the unique challenges of five G that make running it in the cloud so much more helpful. And then also, why did you decide to partner with AWS? Clearly you have choice, but I'd love to know the backstory on that. >>Yeah, I've been in the telco industry forever, and I've always seen that our speed of innovation was to slow. The telco is very good at reliability. You know, your phone always works. Um, it's very reliable. You can have massive traffic, but the speed of innovation is not fast enough. And the the applications that are coming on the clouds are much faster. So what we wanted to marry is the reliability of the telco and and all the knowledge that exists with the speed of the cloud. And that's what we're doing with bringing their ecosystem into our ecosystem to get the best of two worlds. >>Lots of transformation in the vertical industries. We heard from Adam today on stage vertical with ai machine learning. How does that apply in the telco world because it's an edge you got. See, sports stadiums, for instance. You're seeing all kinds of home impact. How is vertical specialisation? >>Yeah. So what is unique about the cloud is that you can observe a lot of things, you know, in the cloud you have access to data, so you see what's happening, and then you use a lot of algorithms. We call it Machine Learning Analytics to make decisions. Now, for us, it means if you're a stadium, you're going to have a much better visibility of what's happening. Where is the traffic? You know, people moving in and moving out? Are they going to buy some food awards? So you see the traffic and you can adapt the way you steal the traffic the way you distribute video, the way you distribute entertainment to how people are moving because you can observe what is happening in the network, which you can't do in a classic or legacy five g network. So once you observe, you can have plenty of ideas, right? And you can start innovation again, mix a lot of things and offer new services. >>In this last 22 months, when we saw this rapid pivot to work from home. And now it's work from anywhere, right? We talk about hybrid cloud hybrid events here, but this hybrid work environment talk to me about the impact that that decision A W s are going to have on all of those companies and people who are going to be remote and working from the edge for maybe permanently. >>Yes, you say, You know what is important is that people want to have access to the to the cloud to the services, the enterprise from wherever they are. So as a software architect, I need to make sure that we can follow them and offer that service from wherever they are in a similar manner today. If you're making a phone call, you don't have to think if you're connecting to the Web, you know, through WiFi through this and that, you have to think we want to make it as simple as making a phone call. In the past, where you always connected, you always secured. You always have access to your data. So that's really the ambition we have. And, of course, with the new remote abbots, the video conferencing that's the perfect time to come with a new offer. >>And the Strand also is moving towards policy based. You mentioned understanding video and patterns. Having that differentiated services capability in real time is a big deal. >>Yeah, that's a big deal. Actually, what enterprise want? They want to manage their policy, so they want to decide what traffic gets, a premium access and what traffic can be put in the background. You want to update your computers? Maybe that's not a premium price for that. You can do it at any time, but you want to have real time, customer service and support. You want premium? And who am I to decide for an enterprise? Enterprises want to decide. So what we offer them is the tools to create their policy, and their policy will be a competitive advantage for them when they can different change. >>And this brings up another point. I want to ask you. You brought this up earlier about this. The ideas, the creativity that enables with cloud you mentioned ideas will come out. These are this is where the developers now can really encode. This is the whole theme of this Pathfinders keynote. You were up on stage. This is a real opportunity to add value. Doing all the heavy lifting in the top of the stack and enabling new use cases, new applications, new expectations. >>You know what I tell to my engineers? My dream as an engineer is to be, uh, developer friendly. I want people to come to us because it's fun to work in our environment and try things. And a lot of the ideas that developers will have won't work. But if they can spin it off very fast, they will move to that killer application of killer service very fast. So my job is to bring that to them so that it's very easy to consume and and trying to live And, you know, just like bringing >>candy to a baby here. >>Yeah, cause right And have fun and, uh, and discover it for yourself and decide for yourself. >>I gotta ask your questions in the Telecom for a while. We've been seeing on the Cube earlier in our intro keynote analysis that we're now living in an era with SAS applications. No more shelf where now, with purpose built applications that you're seeing now and horizontally scalable, vertically integrated machine learning. You can't hide the ball anymore around what's working. You can't put a project out there and say no, you can't justify. You can't put you can put lipstick on that. You can't know you're seeing on >>that bad cake. Yeah, it's all the point of beta testing and market adoption. You try, you put it there. It works. You say the brake doesn't work. You try again, right? That's the way it works. And and in Telco, you're right. We were cooking for a year or two years, Three years and saying, Oh, you know what? That's what you need. It doesn't work like this faster now. Yeah, Yeah. And people want to be able to influence and they want to say, I like it. I don't like it. And the market is deciding. >>Speaking of influence, one of the things we know we talk a lot about with A W S and their guests is their customer. First customer obsession focused. You know, the whole reason we're here is that is to serve the customer, talk to me about how customers and joint customers are influencing some of the design choices that you guys are making as you're bringing five due to the cloud. >>So what is important for us? We have to dreams, right? The first one is for consumers. We want consumers to have access to the network so that they feel that they are VIP and often I know you and I, sometimes when we're connected to the network with tropical, we don't get the feeling where a V i p So that's something that's a journey for us to make people feel like they get the service and the network is following them and caring about them for the enterprises. You want to let them decide what they want. You were talking about policy building. They want to come with their own rating engine. They want to come with their own geographical maps. Like here. I have traffic here. I don't need coverage. So we want to open up so that the enterprise decide how they invest, how they spend the money on the network >>giving control back to the end user. Whether that's a consumer or enterprise, >>absolutely giving control to the end user and the enterprises. And we're there to support and accelerate the service for them. >>Mark, I want to ask you about leadership. You mentioned all these new things. Are there your dreams? And it's happening Giving engineers the canvas to paint their own future. It's gonna be fun is fun as you're affecting that change. What can people do as leaders to create that momentum to bring the whole organisation along is their tricks of the trade. Is their best practises >>Absolutely their best practises? Um, we were very much following develops where, you know, as a leader, you don't know, you're just learning and you're exposing and you're sharing. Uh, we're also creating an open world where we're asking all our partners to be open. Sometimes, you know, they feel like a bit challenge. Like, do I want to show what I'm doing? And I would say, Yeah, sure, because you're benefiting between each other. Um, And then you want to give tools to your engineers and your marketers to be fast speed, speed, speed, speed so that they can just play and learn. And at the end of the day, you said it. It's all about fun. You know, if it's fun, it's easy to do >>that. We're having fun here. >>That is true. We always have fun here. Last question for you is talk about some of the things that AWS announced this morning. Lots of stuff going on in Adam's keynote. What excites you about this continued partnership between AWS and Dish? >>Yeah, we were. We were surprised and so happy about AWS answer to when we came in with the first one to come big time in the telco and the Cloud was not ready. To be honest, it was Enterprise and Data Club and AWS. When is going all the way, we've asked to transform their cloud to make it a telco frantic, loud. So we have a lot of discussions about networking, routing, service level agreements and a lot of things that are very technical. And there are a true partner innovating with us. We have a road map with ideas and that's pretty unique. So, great partner, >>I was going to say it sounds like a really true >>trust and partnership. We're sharing ideas and challenging each other all the time, so that's really great. >>Awesome and users benefit consumers Benefit enterprises benefit Mark Thank you for joining Joining me on the programme today. Georgia Keynote enjoyed hearing more about dish and AWS. And what are you doing to power? The future. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you >>for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube? The global leader in tech coverage, So mhm. Yeah.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, Bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent survey data from ETR shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected US GDP growth at six to 7% this year. Many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery, including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen IT Project budgets. However skills shortages are blocking progress at some companies which bodes well for an increased reliance on external IT services. Moreover, while there's much talk about the rotation out of work from home plays and stocks such as video conferencing, VDI, and other remote worker tech, we see organizations still trying to figure out the ideal balance between funding headquarter investments that have been neglected and getting hybrid work right. In particular, the talent gap combined with a digital mandate, means companies face some tough decisions as to how to fund the future while serving existing customers and transforming culturally. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE's Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome back Erik Porter Bradley of ETR who will share fresh data, perspectives and insights from the latest survey data. Erik, great to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Always good to see you and happy to be on the show again. >> Okay, we're going to share some macro data and then we're going to dig into some highlights from ETR's most recent March COVID survey and also the latest April data. So Erik, the first chart that we want to show, it shows CIO and IT buyer responses to expected IT spend for each quarter of 2021 versus 2020, and you can see here a steady quarterly improvement. Erik, what are the key takeaways, from your perspective? >> Sure, well, first of all, for everyone out there, this particular survey had a record-setting number of participation. We had a 1,500 IT decision makers participate and we had over half of the Fortune 500 and over a fifth of the Global 1000. So it was a really good survey. This is seventh iteration of the COVID Impact Survey specifically, and this is going to transition to an overlarge macro survey going forward so we can continue it. And you're 100% right, what we've been tracking here since March of last year was, how is spending being impacted because of COVID? Where is it shifting? And what we're seeing now finally is that there is a real re-acceleration in spend. I know we've been a little bit more cautious than some of the other peers out there that just early on slapped an eight or a 9% number, but what we're seeing is right now, it's at a midpoint of over six, about 6.7% and that is accelerating. So, we are still hopeful that that will continue, and really, that spending is going to be in the second half of the year. As you can see on the left part of this chart that we're looking at, it was about 1.7% versus 3% for Q1 spending year-over-year. So that is starting to accelerate through the back half. >> I think it's prudent to be cautious (indistinct) 'cause normally you'd say, okay, tech is going to grow a couple of points higher than GDP, but it's really so hard to predict this year. Okay, the next chart here that we want to show you is we asked respondents to indicate what strategies they're employing in the short term as a result of coronavirus and you can see a few things that I'll call out and then I'll ask Erik to chime in. First, there's been no meaningful change of course, no surprise in tactics like remote work and holding travel, however, we're seeing very positive trends in other areas trending downward, like hiring freezes and freezing IT deployments, a downward trend in layoffs, and we also see an increase in the acceleration of new IT deployments and in hiring. Erik, what are your key takeaways? >> Well, first of all, I think it's important to point out here that we're also capturing that people believe remote work productivity is still increasing. Now, the trajectory might be coming down a little bit, but that is really key, I think, to the backdrop of what's happening here. So people have a perception that productivity of remote work is better than hybrid work and that's from the IT decision makers themselves, but what we're seeing here is that, most importantly, these organizations are citing plans to increase hiring, and that's something that I think is really important to point out. It's showing a real following, and to your point right in the beginning of the intro, we are seeing deployments stabilize versus prior survey levels, which means early on, they had no plans to launch new tech deployments, then they said, "Nope, we're going to start." and now that stalling, and I think it's exactly right, what you said, is there's an IT skills shortage. So people want to continue to do IT deployments 'cause they have to support work from home and a hybrid back return to the office, but they just don't have the skills to do so, and I think that's really probably the most important takeaway from this chart, is that stalling and to really ask why it's stalling. >> Yeah, so we're going to get into that for sure, and I think that's a really key point, is that accelerating IT deployments, it looks like it's hit a wall in the survey, but before we get deep into the skills, let's take a look at this next chart, and we're asking people here how our return to the new normal, if you will, and back to offices is going to change spending with on-prem architectures and applications. And so the first two bars, they're Cloud-friendly, if you add them up, it's 63% of the respondents, say that either they'll stay in the Cloud for the most part, or they're going to lower their on-prem spend when they go back to the office. The next three bars are on-prem friendly. If you add those up it's 29% of the respondents say their on-prem spend is going to bounce back to pre-COVID levels or actually increase, and of course, 12% of that number, by the way, say they've never altered their on-prem spend. So Erik, no surprise, but this bodes well for Cloud, but isn't it also a positive for on-prem? We've had this dual funding premise, meaning Cloud continues to grow, but neglected data center spend also gets a boost. What's your thoughts? >> Really, it's interesting. It's people are spending on all fronts. You and I were talking in the prep, it's like we're in battle and I've got naval, I've got air, I've got land, I've got to spend on Cloud and digital transformation, but I also have to spend for on-prem. The hybrid work is here and it needs to be supported. So this is spending is going to increase. When you look at this chart, you're going to see though, that roughly 36% of all respondents say that their spending is going to remain mostly on Cloud. So that is still the clear direction, digital transformation is still happening, COVID accelerated it greatly, you and I, as journalists and researchers already know this is where the puck is going, but spend has always lagged a little bit behind 'cause it just takes some time to get there. Inversely, 27% said that their on-prem spending will decrease. So when you look at those two, I still think that the trend is the friend for Cloud spending, even though, yes, they do have to continue spending on hybrid, some of it's been neglected, there are refresh cycles coming up, so, overall it just points to more and more spending right now. It really does seem to be a very strong backdrop for IT growth. >> So I want to talk a little bit about the ETR taxonomy before we bring up the next chart. We get a lot of questions about this, and of course, when you do a massive survey like you're doing, you have to have consistency for time series, so you have to really think through what the buckets look like, if you will. So this next chart takes a look at the ETR taxonomy and it breaks it down into simple-to-understand terms. So the green is the portion of spending on a vendor's tech within a category that is accelerating, and the red is the portion that is decelerating. So Erik, what are the key messages in this data? >> Well, first of all, Dave, thank you so much for pointing that out. We used to do, just what we call a Net score. It's a proprietary formula that we use to determine the overall velocity of spending. Some people found it confusing. Our data scientists decided to break this sector, break down into what you said, which is really more of a mode analysis. In that sector, how many of the vendors are increasing versus decreasing? So again, I just appreciate you bringing that up and allowing us to explain the reasoning behind our analysis there. But what we're seeing here goes back to something you and I did last year when we did our predictions, and that was that IT services and consulting was going to have a true rebound in 2021, and that's what this is showing right here. So in this chart, you're going to see that consulting and services are really continuing their recovery, 2020 had a lot of the clients and they have the biggest sector year-over-year acceleration sector wise. The other thing to point out on this, which we'll get to again later, is that the inverse analysis is true for video conferencing. We will get to that, so I'm going to leave a little bit of ammunition behind for that one, but what we're seeing here is IT consulting services being the real favorable and video conferencing having a little bit more trouble. >> Great, okay, and then let's take a look at that services piece, and this next chart really is a drill down into that space and emphasizes, Erik, what you were just talking about. And we saw this in IBM's earnings, where still more than 60% of IBM's business comes from services and the company beat earnings, in part, due to services outperforming expectations, I think it had a somewhat easier compare and some of this pent-up demand that we've been talking about bodes well for IBM and other services companies, it's not just IBM, right, Erik? >> No, it's not, but again, I'm going to point out that you and I did point out IBM in our predictions when we did in late December, so, it is nice to see. One of the reasons we don't have a more favorable rating on IBM at the moment is because they are in the process of spinning out this large unit, and so there's a little bit of a corporate action there that keeps us off on the sideline. But I would also want to point out here, Tata, Infosys and Cognizant 'cause they're seeing year-over-year acceleration in both IT consulting and outsourced IT services. So we break those down separately and those are the three names that are seeing acceleration in both of those. So again, at the Tata, Infosys and Cognizant are all looking pretty well positioned as well. >> So we've been talking a little bit about this skills shortage, and this is what's, I think, so hard for forecasters, is that in the one hand, There's a lot of pent up demand, Scott Gottlieb said it's like Woodstock coming out of the COVID, but on the other hand, if you have a talent gap, you've got to rely on external services. So there's a learning curve, there's a ramp up, it's an external company, and so it takes time to put those together. So this data that we're going to show you next, is really important in my view and ties what we were saying at the top. It asks respondents to comment on their staffing plans. The light blue is "We're increasing staff", the gray is "No change" and the magenta or whatever, whatever color that is that sort of purplish color, anyway, that color is decreasing, and the picture is very positive across the board. Full-time staff, offshoring, contract employees, outsourced professional services, all up trending upwards, and this Erik is more evidence of the services bounce back. >> Yeah, it's certainly, yes, David, and what happened is when we caught this trend, we decided to go one level deeper and say, all right, we're seeing this, but we need to know why, and that's what we always try to do here. Data will tell you what's happening, it doesn't always tell you why, and that's one of the things that ETR really tries to dig in with through the insights, interviews panels, and also going direct with these more custom survey questions. So in this instance, I think the real takeaway is that 30% of the respondents said that their outsourced and managed services are going to increase over the next three months. That's really powerful, that's a large portion of organizations in a very short time period. So we're capturing that this acceleration is happening right now and it will be happening in real time, and I don't see it slowing down. You and I are speaking about we have to increase Cloud spend, we have to increase hybrid spend, there are refresh cycles coming up, and there's just a real skills shortage. So this is a long-term setup that bodes very well for IT services and consulting. >> You know, Erik, when I came out of college, somebody told me, "Read, read, read, read as much as you can." And then they said, "Read the Wall Street Journal every day." and so I did it, and I would read the tech magazines and back then it was all paper, and what happens is you begin to connect the dots. And so the reason I bring that up is because I've now taken a bath in the ETR data for the better part of two years and I'm beginning to be able to connect the dots. The data is not always predictive, but many, many times it is. And so this next data gets into the fun stuff where we name names. A lot of times people don't like it because they're either marketing people at organizations, say, "Well, data's wrong." because that's the first thing they do, is attack the data. But you and I know, we've made some really great calls, work from home, for sure, you're talking about the services bounce back. We certainly saw the rise of CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, well before people were talking about that, same thing with video conferencing. And so, anyway, this is the fun stuff and it looks at positive versus negative sentiment on companies. So first, how does ETR derive this data and how should we interpret it, and what are some of your takeaways? >> Sure, first of all, how we derive the data, are systematic survey responses that we do on a quarterly basis, and we standardize those responses to allow for time series analysis so we can do trend analysis as well. We do find that our data, because it's talking about forward-looking spending intentions, is really more predictive because we're talking about things that might be happening six months, three months in the future, not things that a lot of other competitors and research peers are looking at things that already happened, they're looking in the past, ETR really likes to look into the future and our surveys are set up to do so. So thank you for that question, It's a enjoyable lead in, but to get to the fun stuff, like you said, what we do here is we put ratings on the datasets. I do want to put the caveat out there that our spending intentions really only captures top-line revenue. It is not indicative of profit margin or any other line items, so this is only to be viewed as what we are rating the data set itself, not the company, that's not what we're in the game of doing. So I think that's very important for the marketing and the vendors out there themselves when they take a look at this. We're just talking about what we can control, which is our data. We're going to talk about a few of the names here on this highlighted vendors list. One, we're going to go back to that you and I spoke about, I guess, about six months ago, or maybe even earlier, which was the observability space. You and I were noticing that it was getting very crowded, a lot of new entrants, there was a lot of acquisition from more of the legacy or standard players in the space, and that is continuing. So I think in a minute, we're going to move into that observability space, but what we're seeing there is that it's becoming incredibly crowded and we're possibly seeing signs of them cannibalizing each other. We're also going to move on a little bit into video conferencing, where we're capturing some spend deceleration, and then ultimately, we're going to get into a little bit of a storage refresh cycle and talk about that. But yeah, these are the highlighted vendors for April, we usually do this once a quarter and they do change based on the data, but they're not usually whipsawed around, the data doesn't move that quickly. >> Yeah, so you can see some of the big names in the left-hand side, some of the SAS companies that have momentum. Obviously, ServiceNow has been doing very, very well. We've talked a lot about Snowflake, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all very positive, as well as several others. I guess I'd add some things. I mean, I think if thinking about the next decade, it's Cloud, which is not going to be like the same Cloud as the last decade, a lot of machine learning and deep learning and AI and the Cloud is extending to the edge and the data center. Data, obviously, very important, data is decentralized and distributed, so data architectures are changing. A lot of opportunities to connect across Clouds and actually create abstraction layers, and then something that we've been covering a lot is processor performance is actually accelerating relative to Moore's law. It's probably instead of doubling every two years, it's quadrupling every two years, and so that is a huge factor, especially as it relates to powering AI and AI inferencing at the edge. This is a whole new territory, custom Silicon is really becoming in vogue and so something that we're watching very, very closely. >> Yeah, I completely, agree on that and I do think that the next version of Cloud will be very different. Another thing to point out on that too, is you can't do anything that you're talking about without collecting the data and organizations are extremely serious about that now. It seems it doesn't matter what industry they're in, every company is a data company, and that also bodes well for the storage goal. We do believe that there is going to just be a huge increase in the need for storage, and yes, hopefully that'll become portable across multi-Cloud and hybrid as well. >> Now, as Erik said, the ETR data, it's really focused on that top-line spend. So if you look on the right side of that chart, you saw NetApp was kind of negative, was very negative, right? But it is a company that's in transformation now, they've lowered expectations and they've recently beat expectations, that's why the stock has been doing better, but at the macro, from a spending standpoint, it's still stout challenged. So you have big footprint companies like NetApp and Oracle is another one. Oracle's stock is at an all time high, but the spending relative to sort of previous cycles are relative to, like for instance, Snowflake, much, much smaller, not as high growth, but they're managing expectations, they're managing their transition, they're managing profitability. Zoom is another one, Zoom looking negative, but Zoom's got to use its market cap now to transform and increase its TAM. And then Splunk is another one we're going to talk about. Splunk is in transition, it acquired SignalFX, It just brought on this week, Teresa Carlson, who was the head of AWS Public Sector. She's the president and head of sales, so they've got a go-to-market challenge and they brought in Teresa Carlson to really solve that, but Splunk has been trending downward, we called that several quarters ago, Erik, and so I want to bring up the data on Splunk, and this is Splunk, Erik, in analytics, and it's not trending in the right direction. The green is accelerating spend, the red is in the bars is decelerating spend, the top blue line is spending velocity or Net score, and the yellow line is market share or pervasiveness in the dataset. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, first I want to go back. There's a great point, Dave, about our data versus a disconnect from an equity analysis perspective. I used to be an equity analyst, that is not what we do here. And the main word you said is expectations, right? Stocks will trade on how they do compare to the expectations that are set, whether that's buy-side expectations, sell-side expectations or management's guidance themselves. We have no business in tracking any of that, what we are talking about is the top-line acceleration or deceleration. So, that was a great point to make, and I do think it's an important one for all of our listeners out there. Now, to move to Splunk, yes, I've been capturing a lot of negative commentary on Splunk even before the data turns. So this has been a about a year-long, our analysis and review on this name and I'm dating myself here, but I know you and I are both rock and roll fans, so I'm going to point out a Led Zeppelin song and movie, and say that the song remains the same for Splunk. We are just seeing recent spending attentions are taking yet another step down, both from prior survey levels, from year ago levels. This, we're looking at in the analytics sector and spending intentions are decelerating across every single group, and we went to one of our other slide analysis on the ETR+ platform, and you do by customer sub-sample, in analytics, it's dropping in every single vertical. It doesn't matter which one. it's really not looking good, unfortunately, and you had mentioned this is an analytics and I do believe the next slide is an information security. >> Yeah, let's bring that up. >> And unfortunately it's not doing much better. So this is specifically Fortune 500 accounts and information security. There's deep pockets in the Fortune 500, but from what we're hearing in all the insights and interviews and panels that I personally moderate for ETR, people are upset, that they didn't like the strong tactics that Splunk has used on them in the past, they didn't like the ingestion model pricing, the inflexibility, and when alternatives came along, people are willing to look at the alternatives, and that's what we're seeing in both analytics and big data and also for their SIM and security. >> Yeah, so I think again, I pointed Teresa Carlson. She's got a big job, but she's very capable. She's going to meet with a lot of customers, she's a go-to-market pro, she's going to to have to listen hard, and I think you're going to see some changes there. Okay, so sorry, there's more bad news on Splunk. So (indistinct) bring this up is Net score for Splunk and Elastic accounts. This is for analytics, so there's 106 Elastic accounts in the dataset that also have Splunk and it's trending downward for Splunk, that's why it's green for Elastic. And Erik, the important call out from ETR here is how Splunk's performance in Elastic accounts compares with its performance overall. The ELK stack, which obviously Elastic is a big part of that, is causing pain for Splunk, as is Datadog, and you mentioned the pricing issue, well, is it pricing in your assessment or is it more fundamental? >> It's multi-level based on the commentary we get from our ITDMs teams that take the survey. So yes, you did a great job with this analysis. What we're looking at is the spending within shared accounts. So if I have Splunk already, how am I spending? I'm sorry if I have Elastic already, how am I spending on Splunk? And what you're seeing here is it's down to about a 12% Net score, whereas Splunk overall, has a 32% Net score among all of its customers. So what you're seeing there is there is definitely a drain that's happening where Elastic is draining spend from Splunk and usage from them. The reason we used Elastic here is because all observabilities, the whole sector seems to be decelerating. Splunk is decelerating the most, but Elastic is the only one that's actually showing resiliency, so that's why we decided to choose these two, but you pointed out, yes, it's also Datadog. Datadog is Cloud native. They're more dev ops-oriented. They tend to be viewed as having technological lead as compared to Splunk. So a really good point. Dynatrace also is expanding their abilities and Splunk has been making a lot of acquisitions to push their Cloud services, they are also changing their pricing model, right? They're trying to make things a little bit more flexible, moving off ingestion and moving towards consumption. So they are trying, and the new hires, I'm not going to bet against them because the one thing that Splunk has going for them is their market share in our survey, they're still very well entrenched. So they do have a lot of accounts, they have their foothold. So if they can find a way to make these changes, then they will be able to change themselves, but the one thing I got to say across the whole sector is competition is increasing, and it does appear based on commentary and data that they're starting to cannibalize themselves. It really seems pretty hard to get away from that, and you know there are startups in the observability space too that are going to be even more disruptive. >> I think I want to key on the pricing for a moment, and I've been pretty vocal about this. I think the old SAS pricing model where you essentially lock in for a year or two years or three years, pay up front, or maybe pay quarterly if you're lucky, that's a one-way street and I think it's a flawed model. I like what Snowflake's doing, I like what Datadog's doing, look at what Stripe is doing, look at what Twilio is doing, you mentioned it, it's consumption-based pricing, and if you've got a great product, put it out there and damn, the torpedoes, and I think that is a game changer. I look at, for instance, HPE with GreenLake, I look at Dell with Apex, they're trying to mimic that model and apply it to infrastructure, it's much harder with infrastructure 'cause you've got to deploy physical infrastructure, but that is a model that I think is going to change, and I think all of the traditional SAS pricing is going to come under disruption over the next better part of the decades, but anyway, let's move on. We've been covering the APM space pretty extensively, application performance management, and this chart lines up some of the big players here. Comparing Net score or spending momentum from the April 20th survey, the gray is, sorry, the gray is the April 20th survey, the blue is Jan 21 and the yellow is April 21, and not only are Elastic and Datadog doing well relative to Splunk, Erik, but everything is down from last year. So this space, as you point out, is undergoing a transformation. >> Yeah, the pressures are real and it's sort of that perfect storm where it's not only the data that's telling us that, but also the direct feedback we get from the community. Pretty much all the interviews I do, I've done a few panels specifically on this topic, for anyone who wants to dive a little bit deeper. We've had some experts talk about this space and there really is no denying that there is a deceleration in spend and it's happening because that spend is getting spread out among different vendors. People are using a Datadog for certain aspects, they are using Elastic where they can 'cause it's cheaper. They're using Splunk because they have to, but because it's so expensive, they're cutting some of the things that they're putting into Splunk, which is dangerous, particularly on the security side. If I have to decide what to put in and whatnot, that's not really the right way to have security hygiene. So this space is just getting crowded, there's disruptive vendors coming from the emerging space as well, and what you're seeing here is the only bit of positivity is Elastic on a survey-over-survey basis with a slight, slight uptick. Everywhere else, year-over-year and survey-over-survey, it's showing declines, it's just hard to ignore. >> And then you've got Dynatrace who, based on the interviews you do in the (indistinct), one-on-one, or one-on-five, the private interviews that I've been invited to, Dynatrace gets very high scores for their roadmap. You've got New Relic, which has been struggling financially, but they've got a really good product and a purpose-built database just for this APM space, and then of course, you've got Cisco with AppD, which is a strong business for them, and then as you mentioned, you've got startups coming in, you got ChaosSearch, which Ed Walsh is now running, leave the data in place in AWS and really interesting model, Honeycomb is getting really disruptive, Jeremy Burton's company, Observed. So this space is it's becoming jumped ball. >> Yeah, there's a great line that came out of one of them, and that was that the lines are blurring. It used to be that you knew exactly that AppDynamics, what they were doing, it was APM only, or it was logging and monitoring only, and a lot of what I'm hearing from the ITDM experts is that the lines are blurring amongst all of these names. They all have functionality that kind of crosses over each other. And the other interesting thing is it used to be application versus infrastructure monitoring, but as you know, infrastructure is becoming code more and more and more, and as infrastructure becomes code, there's really no difference between application and infrastructure monitoring. So we're seeing a convergence and a blurring of the lines in this space, which really doesn't bode well, and a great point about New Relic, their tech gets good remarks. I just don't know if their enterprise level service and sales is up to snuff right now. As one of my experts said, a CTO of a very large public online hospitality company essentially said that he would be shocked that within 18 months if all of these players are still standalone, that there needs to be some M and A or convergence in this space. >> Okay, now we're going to call out some of the data that really has jumped out to ETR in the latest survey, and some of the names that are getting the most queries from ETR clients, many of which are investor clients. So let's start by having a look at one of the most important and prominent work from home names, Zoom. Let's look at this. Erik is the ride over for Zoom? >> Ah, I've been saying it for a little bit of a time now actually. I do believe it is, and we'll get into it, but again, pointing out, great, Dave, the reason we're presenting today Splunk, Elastic and Zoom, they are the most viewed on the ETR+ platform. Trailing behind that only slightly is F5, I decided not to bring F5 to the table today 'cause we don't have a rating on the data set. So then I went one deep, one below that and it's pure. So the reason we're presenting these to you today is that these are the ones that our clients and our community are most interested in, which is hopefully going to gain interest to your viewers as well. So to get to Zoom, yeah, I call Zoom the pandemic bull market baby. This was really just one that had a meteoric ride. You look back, January in 2020, the stock was at $60 and 10 months later, it was like 580, that's in 10 months. That's cooled down a little bit into the mid-300s, and I believe that cooling down should continue, and the reason why is because we are seeing huge deceleration in our spending intentions. They're hitting all-time lows, it's really just a very ugly dataset. More importantly than the spending intentions, for the first time, we're seeing customer growth in our survey flatten. In the past, we knew that the deceleration of spend was happening, but meanwhile, their new customer growth was accelerating, so it was kind of hard to really make any call based on that. This is the first time we're seeing flattening customer growth trajectory, and that in tandem with just dominance from Microsoft in every sector they're involved in, I don't care if it's IP telephony, productivity apps or the core video conferencing, Microsoft is just dominating. So there's really just no way to ignore this anymore. The data and the commentary state that Zoom is facing some headwinds. >> Well, plus you've pointed out to me that a lot of your private conversations with buyers says that, "Hey, we're, we're using the freebie version of Zoom, and we're not paying them." And that combined with Teams, I mean, it's... I think, look, Zoom, they've got to figure out how to use their elevated market cap to transform and expand their TAM, but let's move on. Here's the data on Pure Storage and we've highlighted a number of times this company is showing elevated spending intentions. Pure announced it's earnings in May, IBM just announced storage, it was way down actually. So still, Pure, more positive, but I'll on that comment in a moment, but what does this data tell you, Erik? >> Yeah, right now we started seeing this data last survey in January, and that was the first time we really went positive on the data set itself, and it's just really continuing. So we're seeing the strongest year-over-year acceleration in the entire survey, which is a really good spot to be. Pure is also a leading position among its sector peers, and the other thing that was pretty interesting from the data set is among all storage players, Pure has the highest positive public Cloud correlation. So what we can do is we can see which respondents are accelerating their public Cloud spend and then cross-reference that with their storage spend and Pure is best positioned. So as you and I both know, digital transformation Cloud spending is increasing, you need to be aligned with that. And among all storage sector peers, Pure is best positioned in all of those, in spending intentions and adoptions and also public Cloud correlation. So yet again, to start another really strong dataset, and I have an anecdote about why this might be happening, because when I saw the data, I started asking in my interviews, what's going on here? And there was one particular person, he was a director of Cloud operations for a very large public tech company. Now, they have hybrid, but their data center is in colo, So they don't own and build their own physical building. He pointed out that during COVID, his company wanted to increase storage, but he couldn't get into his colo center due to COVID restrictions. They weren't allowed. You had 250,000 square feet, right, but you're only allowed to have six people in there. So it's pretty hard to get to your rack and get work done. He said he would buy storage, but then the colo would say, "Hey, you got to get it out of here. It's not even allowed to sit here. We don't want it in our facility." So he has all this pent up demand. In tandem with pent up demand, we have a refresh cycle. The SSD depreciation cycle is ending. SSDs are moving on and we're starting to see a new technology in that space, NVMe sorry, technology increasing in that space. So we have pent up demand and we have new technology and that's really leading to a refresh cycle, and this particular ITDM that I spoke to and many of his peers think this has a long tailwind that storage could be a good sector for some time to come. >> That's really interesting, thank you for that extra metadata. And I want to do a little deeper dive on storage. So here's a look at storage in the industry in context and some of the competitive. I mean, it's been a tough market for the reasons that we've highlighted, Cloud has been eating away that flash headroom. It used to be you'd buy storage to get more spindles and more performance and we're sort of forced to buy more, flash, gave more headroom, but it's interesting what you're saying about the depreciation cycle. So that's good news. So ETR combines, just for people's benefit here, combines primary and secondary storage into a single category. So you have companies like Pure and NetApp, which are really pure play primary storage companies, largely in the sector, along with Veeam, Cohesity and Rubrik, which are kind of secondary data or data protection. So my quick thoughts here that Pure is elevated and remains what I call the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, but that's positive tailwinds there, so that's good news. Rubrik is very elevated but down, it's big competitor, Cohesity is way off its highs, and I have to say to me, Veeam is like the Steady Eddy consistent player here. They just really continue to do well in the data protection business, and the highs are steady, the lows are steady. Dell is also notable, they've been struggling in storage. Their ISG business, which comprises servers and storage, it's been softer in COVID, and during even this new product rollout, so it's notable with this new mid range they have in particular, the uptick in Dell, this survey, because Dell is so large, a small uptick can be very good for Dell. HPE has a big announcement next month in storage, so that might improve based on a product cycle. Of course, the Nimble brand continues to do well, IBM, as I said, just announced a very soft quarter, down double digits again, and they're in a product cycle shift. And NetApp, it looks bad in the ETR data from a spending momentum standpoint, but their management team is transforming the company into a Cloud play, which Erik is why it was interesting that Pure has the greatest momentum in Cloud accounts, so that is sort of striking to me. I would have thought it would be NetApp, so that's something that we want to pay attention to, but I do like a lot of what NetApp is doing, and other than Pure, they're the only big kind of pure play in primary storage. So long-winded, intro there, Erik, but anything you'd add? >> No, actually I appreciate it as long-winded. I'm going to be honest with you, storage is not my best sector as far as a researcher and analyst goes, but I actually think that a lot of what you said is spot on. We do capture a lot of large organizations spend, we don't capture much mid and small, so I think when you're talking about these large, large players like NetApp not looking so good, all I would state is that we are capturing really big organization spending attention, so these are names that should be doing better to be quite honest, in those accounts, and at least according to our data, we're not seeing it in. It's longterm depression, as you can see, NetApp now has a negative spending velocity in this analysis. So, I can go dig around a little bit more, but right now the names that I'm hearing are Pure, Cohesity. I'm hearing a little bit about Hitachi trying to reinvent themselves in the space, but I'll take a wait-and-see approach on that one, but pure Cohesity are the ones I'm hearing a lot from our community. >> So storage is transforming to Cloud as a service. You've seen things like Apex in GreenLake from Dell and HPE and container storage. A little, so not really a lot of people paying attention to it, but Pure bought a company called Portworx which really specializes in container storage, and there's many startups there, they're trying to really change the way. David Flynn, has a startup in that space, he's the guy who started Fusion-io. So a lot of transformations happening here. Okay, I know it's been a long segment, we have to summarize, and let me go through a summary and then I'll give you the last word, Erik. So tech spending appears to be tracking US GDP at 6 to 7%. This talent shortage could be a blocker to accelerating IT deployments, so that's kind of good news actually for services companies. Digital transformation, it remains a priority, and that bodes, well, not only for services, but automation. UiPath went public this week, we profiled that extensively, that went public last Wednesday. Organizations that sit at the top face some tough decisions on how to allocate resources. They're running the business, growing the business, transforming the business, and we're seeing a bifurcation of spending and some residual effects on vendors, and that remains a theme that we're watching. Erik, your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm going to go back quickly to just the overall macro spending, 'cause there's one thing I think is interesting to point out and we're seeing a real acceleration among mid and small. So it seems like early on in the COVID recovery or COVID spending, it was the deep pockets that moved first, right? Fortune 500 knew they had to support remote work, they started spending first. Around that in the Fortune 500, we're only seeing about 5% spend, but when you get into mid and small organizations, that's creeping up to eight, nine. So I just think it's important to point out that they're playing catch up right now. I also would point out that this is heavily skewed to North America spending. We're seeing laggards in EMEA, they just don't seem to be spending as much. They're in a very different place in their recovery, and I do think that it's important to point that out. Lastly, I also want to mention, I know you do such a great job on following a lot of the disruptive vendors that you just pointed out, with Pure doing container storage, we also have another bi-annual survey that we do called Emerging Technology, and that's for the private names. That's going to be launching in May, for everyone out there who's interested in not only the disruptive vendors, but also private equity players. Keep an eye out for that. We do that twice a year and that's growing in its respondents as well. And then lastly, one comment, because you mentioned the UiPath IPO, it was really hard for us to sit on the sidelines and not put some sort of rating on their dataset, but ultimately, the data was muted, unfortunately, and when you're seeing this kind of hype into an IPO like we saw with Snowflake, the data was resoundingly strong. We had no choice, but to listen to what the data said for Snowflake, despite the hype. We didn't see that for UiPath and we wanted to, and I'm not making a large call there, but I do think it's interesting to juxtapose the two, that when snowflake was heading to its IPO, the data was resoundingly positive, and for UiPath, we just didn't see that. >> Thank you for that, and Erik, thanks for coming on today. It's really a pleasure to have you, and so really appreciate the collaboration and look forward to doing more of these. >> Yeah, we enjoy the partnership greatly, Dave. We're very happy to have you on the ETR family and looking forward to doing a lot, lot more with you in the future. >> Ditto. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you have to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast, and please subscribe to the series. Check out ETR website it's etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me, david.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me on Twitter @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. I could see you in Clubhouse. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Porter Bradley for the CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's the theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Alright, welcome to theCUBE coverage here at RSA Conference in San Francisco and Moscone Halls, theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, in a cyber security is all about encryption data and also security. We have a very hot startup here, that amazing guest, Dr. Ellison Anne Williams, CEO and Founder of Enveil just recently secured a $10 million Series A Funding really attacking a real problem around encryption and use. Again, data ,security, analytics, making it all secure is great. Allison, and thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> So congratulations on the funding before we get started into the interview talking about the hard news, you guys that are around the funding. How long have you guys been around? What's the funding going to do? What are you guys doing? >> Yeah, so we're about three and a half years old as a company. We just announced our Series A close last week. So that was led by C5. And their new US Funds The Impact Fund and participating. Other partners included folks like MasterCard, Capital One Ventures, Bloomberg, Beta 1843, etc. >> So some names jumped in C5 led the round. >> For sure. >> How did this get started? What was the idea behind this three years you've been actually doing some work? Are you going to production? Is it R&D? Is it in market? Give us a quick update on the status of product and solution? >> Yeah, so full production. For production of the product. We're in fact in 2.0 of the release. And so we got our start inside of the National Security Agency, where I spent the majority of my career. And we developed some breakthroughs in an area of technology called homomorphic encryption, that allows you to perform computations into the encrypted domain as if they were in the unencrypted world. So the tech had never existed in a practical capacity. So we knew that bringing seeds of that technology out of the intelligence community and using it to seed really and start the company, we would be creating a new commercial market. >> So look at this, right? So you're at the NSA, >> Correct >> Your practitioner, they're doing a lot of work in this area, pioneering a new capability. And did the NSA spin it out did they fund it was the seed capital there or did you guys bootstrap it >> No. So our seed round was done by an entity called Data Tribe. So designed to take teams in technologies that were coming out of the IC that wanted to commercialize to do so. So we took seed funding from them. And then we were actually one of the youngest company ever to be in the RSA Innovation Sandbox here in 2017, to be one of the winners and that's where the conversation really started to change around this technology called homomorphic encryption, the market category space called securing data in use and what that meant. And so from there, we started running the initial version of a product out in the commercial world and we encountered two universal reaction. One that we were expecting and one that we weren't. And the one that we were expecting is that people said, "holy cow, this actually works". Because what we say we do keeping everything encrypted during processing. Sounds pretty impossible. It's not just the math. And then the second reaction that we encountered that we weren't expecting is those initial early adopters turned around and said to us, "can we strategically invest in you?" So our second round of funding was actually a Strategic Round where folks like Bloomberg beta,Thomson Reuters, USA and Incue Towel came into the company. >> That's Pre Series A >> Pre Series A >> So you still moving along, if a sandbox, you get some visibility >> Correct. >> Then were the products working on my god is you know, working. That's great. So I want to get into before I get into some of the overhead involved in traditionally its encryption there always has been that overhead tax. And you guys seem to solve that. But can you describe first data-at-rest versus data-in-motion and data-in-user. data at rest, as means not doing anything but >> Yeah, >> In flight or in you so they the same, is there a difference? Can you just tell us the difference of someone this can be kind of confusing. >> So it's helpful to think of data security in three parts that we call the triad. So securing data at rest on the file system and the database, etc. This would be your more traditional in database encryption, or file based encryption also includes things like access control. The second area, the data security triad is securing data- in- transit when it's moving around through the network. So securing data at rest and in transit. Very well solution. A lot of big name companies do that today, folks like Talus and we partner with them, Talus, Gemalto, etc. Now, the third portion of the data security triad is what happens to that data when you go use or process it in some way when it becomes most valuable. And that's where we focus. So as a company, we secure data-in-use when it's being used or processed. So what does that mean? It means we can do things like take searches or analytics encrypt them, and then go run them without ever decrypting them at any point during processing. So like I said, this represents a new commercial market, where we're seeing it manifest most often right now are in things like enabling secure data sharing, and collaboration, or enabling secure data monetization, because its privacy preserving and privacy enabling as a capability. >> And so that I get this right, the problem that you solved is that during the end use parts of the triad, it had to be decrypted first and then encrypted again, and that was the vulnerability area. Look, can you describe kind of like, the main problem that you guys saw was that-- >> So think more about, if you've got data and you want to give me access to it, I'm a completely different entity. And the way that you're going to give me access to it is allowing me to run a search over your data holdings. We see this quite a bit in between two banks in the areas of anti-money laundering or financial crime. So if I'm going to go run a search in your environment, say I'm going to look for someone that's an EU resident. Well, their personal information is covered under GDPR. Right? So if I go run that search in your environment, just because I'm coming to look for a certain individual doesn't mean you actually know anything about that. And so if you don't, and you have no data on them whatsoever, I've just introduced a new variable into your environment that you now have to account for, From a risk and liability perspective under something like GDPR. Whereas if you use us, we could take that search encrypt it within our walls, send it out to you and you could process it in its encrypted state. And because it's never decrypted during processing, there's no risk to you of any increased liability because that PII or that EU resident identifier is never introduced into your space. >> So the operating side of the business where there's compliance and risk management are going to love this, >> For sure. >> Is that really where the action is? >> Yes, compliance risk privacy. >> Alright, so get a little nerdy action on this one. So encryption has always been an awesome thing depending on who you talk to you, obviously, but he's always been a tax associate with the overhead processing power. He said, there's math involved. How does homeomorphic work? Does it have problems with performance? Is that a problem? Or if not, how do you address that? Where does it? I might say, well, I get it. But what's the tax for me? Or is your tax? >> Encryption is never free. I always tell people that. So there always is a little bit of latency associated with being able to do anything in an encrypted capacity, whether that's at rest at in transit or in use. Now, specifically with homomorphic encryption. It's not a new area of encryption. It's been around 30 or so years, and it had often been considered to be the holy grail of encryption for exactly the reasons we've already talked about. Doing things like taking searches or analytics and encrypting them, running them without ever decrypting anything opens up a world of different types of use cases across verticals and-- >> Give those use case examples. What would be some that would be low hanging fruit. And it would be much more higher level. >> Some of the things that we're seeing today under that umbrella of secure data sharing and collaboration, specifically inside of financial services, for use cases around anti-money laundering and financial crimes so, allowing two banks to be able to securely collaborate with with each other, along the lines of the example that I gave you just a second ago, and then also for large multinational banks to do so across jurisdictions in which they operate that have different privacy and secrecy regulations associated with them. >> Awesome. Well, Ellison, and I want to ask you about your experience at the NSA. And now as an entrepreneur, obviously, you have some, you know, pedigree at the NSA, really, you know, congratulations. It's going to be smart to work there, I guess. Secrets, you know, >> You absolutely do. >> Brains brain surgeon rocket scientist, so you get a lot of good stuff. But now that you're on the commercial space, it's been a conversation around how public and commercial are really trying to work together a lot as innovations are happening on both sides of the fence there. >> Yeah. >> Then the ICC and the Intelligence Community as well as commercial. Yeah, you're an entrepreneur, you got to go make money, you got shareholders down, you got investors? What's the collaboration look like? How does the world does it change for you? Is it the same? What's the vibe in DC these days around the balance between collaboration or is there? >> Well, we've seen a great example of this recently in that anti-money laundering financial crime use case. So the FCA and the Financial Conduct Authority out of the UK, so public entity sponsored a whole event called a tech spread in which they brought the banks together the private entities together with the startup companies, so your early emerging innovative capabilities, along with the public entities, like your privacy regulators, etc, and had us all work together to develop really innovative solutions to real problems within the banks. In the in the context of this text spread. We ended up winning the know your customer customer due diligence side of the text brand and then at the same time that us held an equivalent event in DC, where FinCEN took the lead, bringing in again, the banks, the private companies, etc, to all collaborate around this one problem. So I think that's a great example of when your public and your private and your private small and your private big is in the financial services institutions start to work together, we can really make breakthroughs-- >> So you see a lot happening >> We see a lot happening. >> The encryption solution actually helped that because it makes sense. Now you have the sharing the encryption. >> Yeah. >> Does that help with some of the privacy and interactions? >> It breaks through those barriers? Because if we were two banks, we can't necessarily openly, freely share all the information. But if I can ask you a question and do so in a secure and private capacity, still respecting all the access controls that you've put in place over your own data, then it allows that collaboration to occur, whereas otherwise I really couldn't in an efficient capacity. >> Okay, so here's the curveball question for you. So anybody Startup Series today, but you really got advanced Series A, you got a lot of funding multiple years of operation. If I asked you what's the impact that you're going to have on the world? What would you say to that, >> Over creating a whole new market, completely changing the paradigm about where and how you can use data for business purposes. And in terms of how much funding we have, we have, we've had a few rounds, but we only have 15 million into the company. So to be three and a half years old to see this new market emerging and being created with with only $15 million. It's really pretty impressive. >> Yeah, it's got a lot of growth and keep the ownership with the employees and the founders. >> It's always good, but being bootstrap is harder than it looks, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> Or how about society at large impact. You know, we're living global society these days and get all kinds of challenges. You see anything else in the future for your vision of impact. >> So securing data and your supplies horizontally across verticals. So far we've been focused mainly on financial services. But I think healthcare is a great vertical to move out in. And I think there are a lot of global challenges with healthcare and the more collaborative that we could be from a healthcare standpoint with our data. And I think our capabilities enable that to be possible. And still respecting all the privacy regulations and restrictions. I think that's a whole new world of possibility as well. >> And your secret sauce is what math? What's that? What's the secret sauce, >> Math, Math and grit. >> Alright, so thanks for sharing the insights. Give a quick plug for the company. What are you guys looking to do? Honestly, $10 million in funding priorities for you and the team? What do you guys live in to do? >> So priorities for us? privacy is a global issue now. So we are expanding globally. And you'll be hearing more about that very shortly. We also have new product lines that are going to be coming out enabling people to do more advanced decisioning in a completely secure and private capacity. >> And hiring office locations DC. >> Yes. So our headquarters is in DC, but we're based on over the world, so we're hiring, check out our web page. We're hiring for all kinds of roles from engineering to business functionality >> And virtual is okay virtual hires school >> Virtual hires is great. We're looking for awesome people no matter where they are. >> You know, DC but primary. Okay, so great to have you gone. Congratulations for one, the financing and then three years of bootstrapping and making it happen. Awesome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for coming ,appreciate it. So keep coming to your RSA conference in Moscone. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching more after this short break (pop music playing)

I'm from San Juan Puerto Rico it's the cube covering coin agenda brought to you by silicon angle hello everyone welcome to special cube covers we're here exclusive conversations at coin agenda we just had blockchain unbound Puerto Rico is where we're at and we'll covering all the trends and latest news and analysis and cryptocurrency blockchain decentralized internet my next guest is Dan Bates founder and president of impact PPA Dan great to have you on thanks John glad to be here so one of the trends I'm noticing is a couple things flight to quality on the ico side first of all lot of the Deadwood's being pushed aside by the community still some stuff out there that you know might not have a business model but good entrepreneurs doing it then you start to see real use cases emerging I interviewed Green Chain they're disrupting how produce grains movement between suppliers and buyers and other impact mission driven stuff like how do you solve the energy crisis right we're in Puerto Rico right the grids half alive everyone knows that you're doing something really compelling take a minute to explain what you guys are doing is you have a token up and running what are you guys doing what's your value proposition so what we do is we've created a system by which you can now have renewable energy delivered to developing nations and we've taken the intermediary out of the equation whereby the world bank historically would take years to fund a project if they would do that they're big trepidation was how do you get paid at the end of the day so what we've done is we've come up with a solution that allows for generation of rent you know with the energy using renewables and track it all the way through to a payment rail if you will that a user can now prepay for energy on their mobile device it's m-pesa if you know what end pace is in Africa 70% of the transactions in Africa are done on a mobile device we are decentralized and pace up for energy so ok mobile app I get out you everyone can think about BRR and all the benefits and Airbnb brings you just have stuff happened talk about what's under the hood what's actually disruptive about what you guys are doing give some specifics because you're tying into Isis and jittering energy using the blocks you have a token how does it all work okay so what we do is in in the in the ability to fund the project getting the World Bank getting USA USA ID out of the equation what we now allow for is the community typically we are very liberal or tend to skew liberal right we actually believe that climate change is real and we want to help support these economies and these new types of you know betterment of the planet right but we don't expect that to be a philanthropic effort so people will buy the impact token which will fund projects that will then create what we're doing right now it's an AR C 20 of what we call a gen credit not a secondary token it's a credit that allows people to access the ledger so a guy will go down to the store just like he does right now and he charges his phones with more minutes or with a data plan it's fiat to a plan a digital currency we do the same thing it's now fiat into a gen credit we call it that allows them and transact with the blockchain so we get identity we get reputation we get trust and honesty about those transactions using the blockchain okay so where does the energy come from because the energy sources now are interesting because you're seeing people do great amazing things solar panels wind farming they see an Asia top of the apartment buildings there's a lot of wind yeah generally but how do they move that power into the market all right so what we do is right now we're using wind and solar rooftop or micro grid for instance we just finished a project in Haiti doing 150 kilowatts for a town called les a wha they haven't had power in two years a hurricane matthew prior to Hurricane Maria coming through Puerto Rico Puerto Rico's in a similar situation right so we created this micro grid using their existing infrastructure of transmission to distribution then we put smart meters on the home that smart meter connects to the blockchain and now people can have power at their homes pay-as-you-go awesome so what I've been to some of the hurdles you guys have had obviously to me it's a no-brainer of energy being tokenized is that makes such sense why wouldn't you want to do that obviously these regulatory issues that are incumbent legacy Dogma or or specific legislation of paperwork what not where's the efficiencies being automated away with the blockchain and what are some of the hurdles that you guys have gone through to get to this point all right so we work in the emerging economies of the world oftentimes there is not the kind of regulation that we have in the US or in the developed world like the EU something like that so when we go out to remote we go out to remote places like you know in Kenya and Ethiopia Latin America wherever it might be we don't have some of the Institute's that you would have if you were trying to set this up in Palo Alto I don't have to worry about PG&E and an interconnect and an off take and all that so what we do is that we'll go out set up a micro grid we're giving power to people who may have never had it before so all those regulatory layers are stripped away they're grateful for it that can they pay for it yes they can't afford to go buy a solar panel and a wind turbine on batteries and inverters nor would they know how to hook it all up yeah but they know that if they can buy power on a cellphone like they're already doing for other goods and services now we've got a game-changer Dan talk about the token economics I get this the payment rail piece mobile app no-brainer I get that check okay easy to use now I want to as a buyer of energy there's a token I some children there where's the other side of the marketplace how does that token economics work do you just take us through a use case and walk us through that example sure so as I said the impact token is our base token that will be the the value token that purchasers will buy in order to fund projects once we go beyond that and we now have what we call a Jen credit it may not be a token in the traditional sense or a coin it's a credit that allows us to transact with the ledger that way we can know about these people one of the greatest opportunities that we feel that we have in the marketplace is identity and reputation you have a billion two people who don't have a connection what if we could learn about those billion too and understand how they use power and where they use power so Jen credits kind of off chain management that you're doing you write to the ledger for in term util access right for that Tran action I got to ask you about things like spoofing why can't I just take your energy this is where the tokens become interesting because I mean it should solve the spoofing problem well right and you know energy energy needs to be passed down copper it's got to go on a wire that doesn't mean somebody's not going to cut the wire and bootleg it and all that stuff smoothing is not going to be the problem in this case it is a physical connection that needs to be made our smart meters allow for us to turn on or off let that connection by the user right if he doesn't pay you don't forget it yeah you know there's vandalism they're stuffed all over the world and we have methods in place to try and mitigate that as much as possible you you saw our platform that we're building we're tokenizing our media business amazing you liked it was good thanks for the plug there I was an aspirin and we were talking last night about our you know generational gap between us and our kids and you have your son here and your son's working with you my sons Alex working with us we have a young team as well I want you to talk about someone who's so experienced in the business you've done a lot of variety adventures from you know film to entertainment technology us older veterans it's the polite way to say it have seen the movie before they've seen the waves this is a huge way but this wave is gonna be can surf a few of them hang ten on our boards but this wave is really gonna be powered and led by the younger generation what's your thoughts share your vision of the role that the younger generation has to take here and what makes them capable in your mind okay so I'm gonna answer that question two ways first of all I'm so enamored with what the younger generation is trying to do with this corruption let's change the existing paradigm and make something better that's what blockchain allows for all sorts of industries goods and services right it's gonna be amazing what these guys come up with that's one of the things I love about doing this thing right I'm an old guy and I get to hang around these young people makes me feel young again yeah but the other thing that we have and I think you share it as well as we have to offer to these young guys experience right it's not like we're gonna go out to a market that we don't know about and try and explore it for success you know I've been in the renewables business for ten years delivering projects to 35 countries I got my boots on the ground I got my hands dirty doing this for 10 years now and I think the other part of that building this project and making it successful is the team that we've put together behind it we have an advisor who advises presidents dr. Michael Dorsey that's really important that's valuable that he understands the global marketplace the way he does the other one is Vinay Gupta who has been in blockchain since the 90s and has always wanted to work in the developing world with a block came distributed ledger technology that's really important I think I want to just double down and we amplify that point this is not a young man's game only exclusively it's such this markets attracting alpha entrepreneurs older veterans because as you said earlier it disrupts every vertical that's right so experience and mentorship bringing people together that can help that's right celebrate the disruption that's right driven by the young guys cool I love that but it's not like Zuckerberg made this one comment oh if you're not under the age of 30 then you don't know such delivery he got his ass handed to him on that but in this case this market is open and willing to learn and the disruptions the mission that's right and this team matters that's our experience the makeup of your board makeup of your advisors since a roll for everybody look experiences capital right it is its own virtual currency having been in all these countries having worked with presidents having worked in the 90s you know since the 90s and what that is valuable it's intangible but it is valuable dan I think we just invented a new category in the ico category an advisor tokens [Laughter] cottage industry believe tokens anyway but imagine if you could actually measure an advisor yeah the quality of adviser and the roles that they play absolutely as a token that's coming up next in our our next I see oh hey I really appreciate what you're doing I love how you work with your son father-son team you recognize the role of how the generations can shift together love it love your mission thank you thanks for sharing the news coverage here in Puerto Rico been here on the island all week getting the best stories the best people sharing them with you were open content that's the cube doing our part here at coin agenda for one day we're not gonna be you tomorrow go to Vegas just came back from watching unbound great stuff John let me give you the the URL if you don't mind no problem please if you want to go learn more about us impact PPI calm great job impact PBA calm is the cube live coverage here in Puerto Rico more after this short break