(gentle music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got a great remote guest coming in. Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow hot startup in AI, computer vision. Really interesting topic in this wave of AI next gen hitting. Joseph, thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I love the startup tsunami that's happening here in this wave. RoboFlow, you're in the middle of it. Exciting opportunities, you guys are in the cutting edge. I think computer vision's been talked about more as just as much as the large language models and these foundational models are merging. You're in the middle of it. What's it like right now as a startup and growing in this new wave hitting? >> It's kind of funny, it's, you know, I kind of describe it like sometimes you're in a garden of gnomes. It's like we feel like we've got this giant headstart with hundreds of thousands of people building with computer vision, training their own models, but that's a fraction of what it's going to be in six months, 12 months, 24 months. So, as you described it, a wave is a good way to think about it. And the wave is still building before it gets to its full size. So it's a ton of fun. >> Yeah, I think it's one of the most exciting areas in computer science. I wish I was in my twenties again, because I would be all over this. It's the intersection, there's so many disciplines, right? It's not just tech computer science, it's computer science, it's systems, it's software, it's data. There's so much aperture of things going on around your world. So, I mean, you got to be batting all the students away kind of trying to get hired in there, probably. I can only imagine you're hiring regiment. I'll ask that later, but first talk about what the company is that you're doing. How it's positioned, what's the market you're going after, and what's the origination story? How did you guys get here? How did you just say, hey, want to do this? What was the origination story? What do you do and how did you start the company? >> Yeah, yeah. I'll give you the what we do today and then I'll shift into the origin. RoboFlow builds tools for making the world programmable. Like anything that you see should be read write access if you think about it with a programmer's mind or legible. And computer vision is a technology that enables software to be added to these real world objects that we see. And so any sort of interface, any sort of object, any sort of scene, we can interact with it, we can make it more efficient, we can make it more entertaining by adding the ability for the tools that we use and the software that we write to understand those objects. And at RoboFlow, we've empowered a little over a hundred thousand developers, including those in half the Fortune 100 so far in that mission. Whether that's Walmart understanding the retail in their stores, Cardinal Health understanding the ways that they're helping their patients, or even electric vehicle manufacturers ensuring that they're making the right stuff at the right time. As you mentioned, it's early. Like I think maybe computer vision has touched one, maybe 2% of the whole economy and it'll be like everything in a very short period of time. And so we're focused on enabling that transformation. I think it's it, as far as I think about it, I've been fortunate to start companies before, start, sell these sorts of things. This is the last company I ever wanted to start and I think it will be, should we do it right, the world's largest in riding the wave of bringing together the disparate pieces of that technology. >> What was the motivating point of the formation? Was it, you know, you guys were hanging around? Was there some catalyst? What was the moment where it all kind of came together for you? >> You know what's funny is my co-founder, Brad and I, we were making computer vision apps for making board games more fun to play. So in 2017, Apple released AR kit, augmented reality kit for building augmented reality applications. And Brad and I are both sort of like hacker persona types. We feel like we don't really understand the technology until we build something with it and so we decided that we should make an app that if you point your phone at a Sudoku puzzle, it understands the state of the board and then it kind of magically fills in that experience with all the digits in real time, which totally ruins the game of Sudoku to be clear. But it also just creates this like aha moment of like, oh wow, like the ability for our pocket devices to understand and see the world as good or better than we can is possible. And so, you know, we actually did that as I mentioned in 2017, and the app went viral. It was, you know, top of some subreddits, top of Injure, Reddit, the hacker community as well as Product Hunt really liked it. So it actually won Product Hunt AR app of the year, which was the same year that the Tesla model three won the product of the year. So we joked that we share an award with Elon our shared (indistinct) But frankly, so that was 2017. RoboFlow wasn't incorporated as a business until 2019. And so, you know, when we made Magic Sudoku, I was running a different company at the time, Brad was running a different company at the time, and we kind of just put it out there and were excited by how many people liked it. And we assumed that other curious developers would see this inevitable future of, oh wow, you know. This is much more than just a pedestrian point your phone at a board game. This is everything can be seen and understood and rewritten in a different way. Things like, you know, maybe your fridge. Knowing what ingredients you have and suggesting recipes or auto ordering for you, or we were talking about some retail use cases of automated checkout. Like anything can be seen and observed and we presume that that would kick off a Cambrian explosion of applications. It didn't. So you fast forward to 2019, we said, well we might as well be the guys to start to tackle this sort of problem. And because of our success with board games before, we returned to making more board game solving applications. So we made one that solves Boggle, you know, the four by four word game, we made one that solves chess, you point your phone at a chess board and it understands the state of the board and then can make move recommendations. And each additional board game that we added, we realized that the tooling was really immature. The process of collecting images, knowing which images are actually going to be useful for improving model performance, training those models, deploying those models. And if we really wanted to make the world programmable, developers waiting for us to make an app for their thing of interest is a lot less efficient, less impactful than taking our tool chain and releasing that externally. And so, that's what RoboFlow became. RoboFlow became the internal tools that we used to make these game changing applications readily available. And as you know, when you give developers new tools, they create new billion dollar industries, let alone all sorts of fun hobbyist projects along the way. >> I love that story. Curious, inventive, little radical. Let's break the rules, see how we can push the envelope on the board games. That's how companies get started. It's a great story. I got to ask you, okay, what happens next? Now, okay, you realize this new tooling, but this is like how companies get built. Like they solve their own problem that they had 'cause they realized there's one, but then there has to be a market for it. So you actually guys knew that this was coming around the corner. So okay, you got your hacker mentality, you did that thing, you got the award and now you're like, okay, wow. Were you guys conscious of the wave coming? Was it one of those things where you said, look, if we do this, we solve our own problem, this will be big for everybody. Did you have that moment? Was that in 2019 or was that more of like, it kind of was obvious to you guys? >> Absolutely. I mean Brad puts this pretty effectively where he describes how we lived through the initial internet revolution, but we were kind of too young to really recognize and comprehend what was happening at the time. And then mobile happened and we were working on different companies that were not in the mobile space. And computer vision feels like the wave that we've caught. Like, this is a technology and capability that rewrites how we interact with the world, how everyone will interact with the world. And so we feel we've been kind of lucky this time, right place, right time of every enterprise will have the ability to improve their operations with computer vision. And so we've been very cognizant of the fact that computer vision is one of those groundbreaking technologies that every company will have as a part of their products and services and offerings, and we can provide the tooling to accelerate that future. >> Yeah, and the developer angle, by the way, I love that because I think, you know, as we've been saying in theCUBE all the time, developer's the new defacto standard bodies because what they adopt is pure, you know, meritocracy. And they pick the best. If it's sell service and it's good and it's got open source community around it, its all in. And they'll vote. They'll vote with their code and that is clear. Now I got to ask you, as you look at the market, we were just having this conversation on theCUBE in Barcelona at recent Mobile World Congress, now called MWC, around 5G versus wifi. And the debate was specifically computer vision, like facial recognition. We were talking about how the Cleveland Browns were using facial recognition for people coming into the stadium they were using it for ships in international ports. So the question was 5G versus wifi. My question is what infrastructure or what are the areas that need to be in place to make computer vision work? If you have developers building apps, apps got to run on stuff. So how do you sort that out in your mind? What's your reaction to that? >> A lot of the times when we see applications that need to run in real time and on video, they'll actually run at the edge without internet. And so a lot of our users will actually take their models and run it in a fully offline environment. Now to act on that information, you'll often need to have internet signal at some point 'cause you'll need to know how many people were in the stadium or what shipping crates are in my port at this point in time. You'll need to relay that information somewhere else, which will require connectivity. But actually using the model and creating the insights at the edge does not require internet. I mean we have users that deploy models on underwater submarines just as much as in outer space actually. And those are not very friendly environments to internet, let alone 5g. And so what you do is you use an edge device, like an Nvidia Jetson is common, mobile devices are common. Intel has some strong edge devices, the Movidius family of chips for example. And you use that compute that runs completely offline in real time to process those signals. Now again, what you do with those signals may require connectivity and that becomes a question of the problem you're solving of how soon you need to relay that information to another place. >> So, that's an architectural issue on the infrastructure. If you're a tactical edge war fighter for instance, you might want to have highly available and maybe high availability. I mean, these are words that mean something. You got storage, but it's not at the edge in real time. But you can trickle it back and pull it down. That's management. So that's more of a business by business decision or environment, right? >> That's right, that's right. Yeah. So I mean we can talk through some specifics. So for example, the RoboFlow actually powers the broadcaster that does the tennis ball tracking at Wimbledon. That runs completely at the edge in real time in, you know, technically to track the tennis ball and point the camera, you actually don't need internet. Now they do have internet of course to do the broadcasting and relay the signal and feeds and these sorts of things. And so that's a case where you have both edge deployment of running the model and high availability act on that model. We have other instances where customers will run their models on drones and the drone will go and do a flight and it'll say, you know, this many residential homes are in this given area, or this many cargo containers are in this given shipping yard. Or maybe we saw these environmental considerations of soil erosion along this riverbank. The model in that case can run on the drone during flight without internet, but then you only need internet once the drone lands and you're going to act on that information because for example, if you're doing like a study of soil erosion, you don't need to be real time. You just need to be able to process and make use of that information once the drone finishes its flight. >> Well I can imagine a zillion use cases. I heard of a use case interview at a company that does computer vision to help people see if anyone's jumping the fence on their company. Like, they know what a body looks like climbing a fence and they can spot it. Pretty easy use case compared to probably some of the other things, but this is the horizontal use cases, its so many use cases. So how do you guys talk to the marketplace when you say, hey, we have generative AI for commuter vision. You might know language models that's completely different animal because vision's like the world, right? So you got a lot more to do. What's the difference? How do you explain that to customers? What can I build and what's their reaction? >> Because we're such a developer centric company, developers are usually creative and show you the ways that they want to take advantage of new technologies. I mean, we've had people use things for identifying conveyor belt debris, doing gas leak detection, measuring the size of fish, airplane maintenance. We even had someone that like a hobby use case where they did like a specific sushi identifier. I dunno if you know this, but there's a specific type of whitefish that if you grew up in the western hemisphere and you eat it in the eastern hemisphere, you get very sick. And so there was someone that made an app that tells you if you happen to have that fish in the sushi that you're eating. But security camera analysis, transportation flows, plant disease detection, really, you know, smarter cities. We have people that are doing curb management identifying, and a lot of these use cases, the fantastic thing about building tools for developers is they're a creative bunch and they have these ideas that if you and I sat down for 15 minutes and said, let's guess every way computer vision can be used, we would need weeks to list all the example use cases. >> We'd miss everything. >> And we'd miss. And so having the community show us the ways that they're using computer vision is impactful. Now that said, there are of course commercial industries that have discovered the value and been able to be out of the gate. And that's where we have the Fortune 100 customers, like we do. Like the retail customers in the Walmart sector, healthcare providers like Medtronic, or vehicle manufacturers like Rivian who all have very difficult either supply chain, quality assurance, in stock, out of stock, anti-theft protection considerations that require successfully making sense of the real world. >> Let me ask you a question. This is maybe a little bit in the weeds, but it's more developer focused. What are some of the developer profiles that you're seeing right now in terms of low-hanging fruit applications? And can you talk about the academic impact? Because I imagine if I was in school right now, I'd be all over it. Are you seeing Master's thesis' being worked on with some of your stuff? Is the uptake in both areas of younger pre-graduates? And then inside the workforce, What are some of the devs like? Can you share just either what their makeup is, what they work on, give a little insight into the devs you're working with. >> Leading developers that want to be on state-of-the-art technology build with RoboFlow because they know they can use the best in class open source. They know that they can get the most out of their data. They know that they can deploy extremely quickly. That's true among students as you mentioned, just as much as as industries. So we welcome students and I mean, we have research grants that will regularly support for people to publish. I mean we actually have a channel inside our internal slack where every day, more student publications that cite building with RoboFlow pop up. And so, that helps inspire some of the use cases. Now what's interesting is that the use case is relatively, you know, useful or applicable for the business or the student. In other words, if a student does a thesis on how to do, we'll say like shingle damage detection from satellite imagery and they're just doing that as a master's thesis, in fact most insurance businesses would be interested in that sort of application. So, that's kind of how we see uptick and adoption both among researchers who want to be on the cutting edge and publish, both with RoboFlow and making use of open source tools in tandem with the tool that we provide, just as much as industry. And you know, I'm a big believer in the philosophy that kind of like what the hackers are doing nights and weekends, the Fortune 500 are doing in a pretty short order period of time and we're experiencing that transition. Computer vision used to be, you know, kind of like a PhD, multi-year investment endeavor. And now with some of the tooling that we're working on in open source technologies and the compute that's available, these science fiction ideas are possible in an afternoon. And so you have this idea of maybe doing asset management or the aerial observation of your shingles or things like this. You have a few hundred images and you can de-risk whether that's possible for your business today. So there's pretty broad-based adoption among both researchers that want to be on the state of the art, as much as companies that want to reduce the time to value. >> You know, Joseph, you guys and your partner have got a great front row seat, ground floor, presented creation wave here. I'm seeing a pattern emerging from all my conversations on theCUBE with founders that are successful, like yourselves, that there's two kind of real things going on. You got the enterprises grabbing the products and retrofitting into their legacy and rebuilding their business. And then you have startups coming out of the woodwork. Young, seeing greenfield or pick a specific niche or focus and making that the signature lever to move the market. >> That's right. >> So can you share your thoughts on the startup scene, other founders out there and talk about that? And then I have a couple questions for like the enterprises, the old school, the existing legacy. Little slower, but the startups are moving fast. What are some of the things you're seeing as startups are emerging in this field? >> I think you make a great point that independent of RoboFlow, very successful, especially developer focused businesses, kind of have three customer types. You have the startups and maybe like series A, series B startups that you're building a product as fast as you can to keep up with them, and they're really moving just as fast as as you are and pulling the product out at you for things that they need. The second segment that you have might be, call it SMB but not enterprise, who are able to purchase and aren't, you know, as fast of moving, but are stable and getting value and able to get to production. And then the third type is enterprise, and that's where you have typically larger contract value sizes, slower moving in terms of adoption and feedback for your product. And I think what you see is that successful companies balance having those three customer personas because you have the small startups, small fast moving upstarts that are discerning buyers who know the market and elect to build on tooling that is best in class. And so you basically kind of pass the smell test of companies who are quite discerning in their purchases, plus are moving so quick they're pulling their product out of you. Concurrently, you have a product that's enterprise ready to service the scalability, availability, and trust of enterprise buyers. And that's ultimately where a lot of companies will see tremendous commercial success. I mean I remember seeing the Twilio IPO, Uber being like a full 20% of their revenue, right? And so there's this very common pattern where you have the ability to find some of those upstarts that you make bets on, like the next Ubers of the world, the smaller companies that continue to get developed with the product and then the enterprise whom allows you to really fund the commercial success of the business, and validate the size of the opportunity in market that's being creative. >> It's interesting, there's so many things happening there. It's like, in a way it's a new category, but it's not a new category. It becomes a new category because of the capabilities, right? So, it's really interesting, 'cause that's what you're talking about is a category, creating. >> I think developer tools. So people often talk about B to B and B to C businesses. I think developer tools are in some ways a third way. I mean ultimately they're B to B, you're selling to other businesses and that's where your revenue's coming from. However, you look kind of like a B to C company in the ways that you measure product adoption and kind of go to market. In other words, you know, we're often tracking the leading indicators of commercial success in the form of usage, adoption, retention. Really consumer app, traditionally based metrics of how to know you're building the right stuff, and that's what product led growth companies do. And then you ultimately have commercial traction in a B to B way. And I think that that actually kind of looks like a third thing, right? Like you can do these sort of funny zany marketing examples that you might see historically from consumer businesses, but yet you ultimately make your money from the enterprise who has these de-risked high value problems you can solve for them. And I selfishly think that that's the best of both worlds because I don't have to be like Evan Spiegel, guessing the next consumer trend or maybe creating the next consumer trend and catching lightning in a bottle over and over again on the consumer side. But I still get to have fun in our marketing and make sort of fun, like we're launching the world's largest game of rock paper scissors being played with computer vision, right? Like that's sort of like a fun thing you can do, but then you can concurrently have the commercial validation and customers telling you the things that they need to be built for them next to solve commercial pain points for them. So I really do think that you're right by calling this a new category and it really is the best of both worlds. >> It's a great call out, it's a great call out. In fact, I always juggle with the VC. I'm like, it's so easy. Your job is so easy to pick the winners. What are you talking about its so easy? I go, just watch what the developers jump on. And it's not about who started, it could be someone in the dorm room to the boardroom person. You don't know because that B to C, the C, it's B to D you know? You know it's developer 'cause that's a human right? That's a consumer of the tool which influences the business that never was there before. So I think this direct business model evolution, whether it's media going direct or going direct to the developers rather than going to a gatekeeper, this is the reality. >> That's right. >> Well I got to ask you while we got some time left to describe, I want to get into this topic of multi-modality, okay? And can you describe what that means in computer vision? And what's the state of the growth of that portion of this piece? >> Multi modality refers to using multiple traditionally siloed problem types, meaning text, image, video, audio. So you could treat an audio problem as only processing audio signal. That is not multimodal, but you could use the audio signal at the same time as a video feed. Now you're talking about multi modality. In computer vision, multi modality is predominantly happening with images and text. And one of the biggest releases in this space is actually two years old now, was clip, contrastive language image pre-training, which took 400 million image text pairs and basically instead of previously when you do classification, you basically map every single image to a single class, right? Like here's a bunch of images of chairs, here's a bunch of images of dogs. What clip did is used, you can think about it like, the class for an image being the Instagram caption for the image. So it's not one single thing. And by training on understanding the corpora, you basically see which words, which concepts are associated with which pixels. And this opens up the aperture for the types of problems and generalizability of models. So what does this mean? This means that you can get to value more quickly from an existing trained model, or at least validate that what you want to tackle with a computer vision, you can get there more quickly. It also opens up the, I mean. Clip has been the bedrock of some of the generative image techniques that have come to bear, just as much as some of the LLMs. And increasingly we're going to see more and more of multi modality being a theme simply because at its core, you're including more context into what you're trying to understand about the world. I mean, in its most basic sense, you could ask yourself, if I have an image, can I know more about that image with just the pixels? Or if I have the image and the sound of when that image was captured or it had someone describe what they see in that image when the image was captured, which one's going to be able to get you more signal? And so multi modality helps expand the ability for us to understand signal processing. >> Awesome. And can you just real quick, define clip for the folks that don't know what that means? >> Yeah. Clip is a model architecture, it's an acronym for contrastive language image pre-training and like, you know, model architectures that have come before it captures the almost like, models are kind of like brands. So I guess it's a brand of a model where you've done these 400 million image text pairs to match up which visual concepts are associated with which text concepts. And there have been new releases of clip, just at bigger sizes of bigger encoding's, of longer strings of texture, or larger image windows. But it's been a really exciting advancement that OpenAI released in January, 2021. >> All right, well great stuff. We got a couple minutes left. Just I want to get into more of a company-specific question around culture. All startups have, you know, some sort of cultural vibe. You know, Intel has Moore's law doubles every whatever, six months. What's your culture like at RoboFlow? I mean, if you had to describe that culture, obviously love the hacking story, you and your partner with the games going number one on Product Hunt next to Elon and Tesla and then hey, we should start a company two years later. That's kind of like a curious, inventing, building, hard charging, but laid back. That's my take. How would you describe the culture? >> I think that you're right. The culture that we have is one of shipping, making things. So every week each team shares what they did for our customers on a weekly basis. And we have such a strong emphasis on being better week over week that those sorts of things compound. So one big emphasis in our culture is getting things done, shipping, doing things for our customers. The second is we're an incredibly transparent place to work. For example, how we think about giving decisions, where we're progressing against our goals, what problems are biggest and most important for the company is all open information for those that are inside the company to know and progress against. The third thing that I'd use to describe our culture is one that thrives with autonomy. So RoboFlow has a number of individuals who have founded companies before, some of which have sold their businesses for a hundred million plus upon exit. And the way that we've been able to attract talent like that is because the problems that we're tackling are so immense, yet individuals are able to charge at it with the way that they think is best. And this is what pairs well with transparency. If you have a strong sense of what the company's goals are, how we're progressing against it, and you have this ownership mentality of what can I do to change or drive progress against that given outcome, then you create a really healthy pairing of, okay cool, here's where the company's progressing. Here's where things are going really well, here's the places that we most need to improve and work on. And if you're inside that company as someone who has a preponderance to be a self-starter and even a history of building entire functions or companies yourself, then you're going to be a place where you can really thrive. You have the inputs of the things where we need to work on to progress the company's goals. And you have the background of someone that is just necessarily a fast moving and ambitious type of individual. So I think the best way to describe it is a transparent place with autonomy and an emphasis on getting things done. >> Getting shit done as they say. Getting stuff done. Great stuff. Hey, final question. Put a plug out there for the company. What are you going to hire? What's your pipeline look like for people? What jobs are open? I'm sure you got hiring all around. Give a quick plug for the company what you're looking for. >> I appreciate you asking. Basically you're either building the product or helping customers be successful with the product. So in the building product category, we have platform engineering roles, machine learning engineering roles, and we're solving some of the hardest and most impactful problems of bringing such a groundbreaking technology to the masses. And so it's a great place to be where you can kind of be your own user as an engineer. And then if you're enabling people to be successful with the products, I mean you're working in a place where there's already such a strong community around it and you can help shape, foster, cultivate, activate, and drive commercial success in that community. So those are roles that tend themselves to being those that build the product for developer advocacy, those that are account executives that are enabling our customers to realize commercial success, and even hybrid roles like we call it field engineering, where you are a technical resource to drive success within customer accounts. And so all this is listed on roboflow.com/careers. And one thing that I actually kind of want to mention John that's kind of novel about the thing that's working at RoboFlow. So there's been a lot of discussion around remote companies and there's been a lot of discussion around in-person companies and do you need to be in the office? And one thing that we've kind of recognized is you can actually chart a third way. You can create a third way which we call satellite, which basically means people can work from where they most like to work and there's clusters of people, regular onsite's. And at RoboFlow everyone gets, for example, $2,500 a year that they can use to spend on visiting coworkers. And so what's sort of organically happened is team numbers have started to pull together these resources and rent out like, lavish Airbnbs for like a week and then everyone kind of like descends in and works together for a week and makes and creates things. And we call this lighthouses because you know, a lighthouse kind of brings ships into harbor and we have an emphasis on shipping. >> Yeah, quality people that are creative and doers and builders. You give 'em some cash and let the self-governing begin, you know? And like, creativity goes through the roof. It's a great story. I think that sums up the culture right there, Joseph. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for this great conversation. I really appreciate it and it's very inspiring. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, John. >> Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow. Hot company, great culture in the right place in a hot area, computer vision. This is going to explode in value. The edge is exploding. More use cases, more development, and developers are driving the change. Check out RoboFlow. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the manager risk across the extended attack surface with Armis. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Got the demo. Got here, Bryan Inman sales engineer at Armis. Bryan, thanks for coming on. We're looking forward to the demo. How you doing? >> I'm doing well, John, thanks for having me. >> We heard from Nadir describing Armis' platform, lot of intelligence. It's like a search engine meets data at scale, intelligent platform around laying out the asset map, if you will, the new vulnerability module among other things that really solves CISCO's problems. A lot of great customer testimonials and we got the demo here that you're going to give us. What's the demo about? What are we going to see? >> Well, John, thanks. Great question. And truthfully, I think as Nadir has pointed out what Armis as a baseline is giving you is great visibility into every asset that's communicating within your environment. And from there, what we've done is we've layered on known vulnerabilities associated with not just the device, but also what else is on the device. Is there certain applications running on that device, the versions of those applications, and what are the vulnerabilities known with that? So that's really gives you great visibility in terms of the devices that folks aren't necessarily have visibility into now, unmanaged devices, IoT devices, OT, and critical infrastructure, medical devices things that you're not necessarily able to actively scan or put an agent on. So not only is Armis telling you about these devices but we're also layering on those vulnerabilities all passively and in real time. >> A lot of great feedback we've heard and I've talked to some of your customers. Rhe agentless is a huge deal. The discoveries are awesome. You can see everything and just getting real time information. It's really, really cool. So I'm looking forward to the demo for our guests. Take us on that tour. Let's go with the demo for the guests today. >> All right. Sounds good. So what we're looking at here is within the Armis console is just a clean representation of the passive reporting of what Armis has discovered. So we see a lot of different types of devices from your virtual machines and personal computers, things that are relatively easy to manage. But working our way down, you're able to see a lot of different types of devices that are not necessarily easy to get visibility into, things like your up systems, IT cameras, dash cams, et cetera, lighting systems. And today's day and age where everything is moving to that smart feature, it's great to have that visibility into what's communicating on my network and getting that, being able to layer on the risk factors associated with it as well as the vulnerabilities. So let's pivot over to our vulnerabilities tab and talk about the the AVM portion, the asset vulnerability management. So what we're looking at is the dashboard where we're reporting another clean representation with customizable dashlets that gives you visuals and reporting and things like new vulnerabilities as they come in. What are the most critical vulnerabilities, the newest as they roll in the vulnerabilities by type? We have hardware. We have application. We have operating systems. As we scroll down, we can see things to break it down by vulnerabilities, by the operating system, Windows, Linux, et cetera. We can create dashlets that show you views of the number of devices that are impacted by these CVEs. And scrolling down, we can see how long have these vulnerabilities been sitting within my environment? So what are the oldest vulnerabilities we have here? And then also of course, vulnerabilities by applications. So things like Google Chrome, Microsoft Office. So we're able to give a good representation of the amount of vulnerabilities as they're associated to the hardware and applications as well. So we're going to dig in and take a a deeper look at one of these vulnerabilities here. So I'm excited to talk today about of where Armis AVM is, but also where it's going as well. So we're not just reporting on things like the CVSS score from NIST NVD. We're also able to report on things like the exploitability of that. How actively is this CVE being exploited in the wild? We're reporting EPSS scores. For example, we're able to take open source information as well as a lot of our partnerships that we have with other vendors that are giving us a lot of great value of known vulnerabilities associated with the applications and with hardware, et cetera. But where we're going with this is in very near future releases, we're going to be able to take an algorithm approach of, what are the most critical CVSS that we see? How exploitable are those? What are common threat actors doing with these CVEs? Have they weaponized these CVEs? Are they actively using those weaponized tools to exploit these within other folks' environments? And who's reporting on these? So we're going to take all of these and then really add that Armis flavor of we already know what that device is and we can explain and so can the users of it, the business criticality of that device. So we're able to pivot over to the matches as we see the CVEs. We're able to very cleanly view, what exactly are the devices that the CVE resides on. And as you can see, we're giving you more than just an IP address or a lot more context and we're able to click in and dive into what exactly are these devices. And more importantly, how critical are these devices to my environment? If one of these devices were to go down if it were to be a server, whatever it may be, I would want to focus on those particular devices and ensuring that that CVE, especially if it's an exploitable CVE were to be addressed earlier than say the others and really be able to manage and prioritize these. Another great feature about it is, for example, we're looking at a particular CVE in terms of its patch and build number from Windows 10. So the auto result feature that we have, for example, we've passively detected what this particular personal computer is running Windows 10 and the build and revision numbers on it. And then once Armis passively discovers an update to that firmware and patch level, we can automatically resolve that, giving you a confidence that that has been addressed from that particular device. We're also able to customize and look through and potentially select a few of these, say, these particular devices reside on your guest network or an employee wifi network where we don't necessarily, I don't want to say care, but we don't necessarily value that as much as something internally that holds significantly, more business criticality. So we can select some of these and potentially ignore or resolve for determining reasons as you see here. Be able to really truly manage and prioritize these CVEs. As I scroll up, I can pivot over to the remediation tab and open up each one of these. So what this is doing is essentially Armis says, through our knowledge base been able to work with the vendors and pull down the patches associated with these. And within the remediation portion, we're able to view, for example, if we were to pull down the patch from this particular vendor and apply it to these 60 devices that you see here, right now we're able to view which patches are going to gimme the most impact as I prioritize these and take care of these affected devices. And lastly, as I pivot back over. Again, where we're at now is we're able to allow the users to customize the organizational priority of this particular CVE to where in terms of, this has given us a high CVSS score but maybe for whatever reasons it may be, maybe this CVE in terms of this particular logical segment of my network, I'm going to give it a low priority for whatever the use case may be. We have compensating controls set in place that render this CVE not impactful to this particular segment of my environment. So we're able to add that organizational priority to that CVE and where we're going as you can see that popped up here but where we're going is we're going to start to be able to apply the organizational priority in terms of the actual device level. So what we'll see is we'll see a column added to here to where we'll see the the business impact of that device based on the importance of that particular segment of your environment or the device type, be it critical networking device or maybe a critical infrastructure device, PLCs, controllers, et cetera, but really giving you that passive reporting on the CVEs in terms of what the device is within your network. And then finally, we do integrate with your vulnerability management and scanners as well. So if you have a scanner actively scanning these, but potentially they're missing segments of your net network, or they're not able to actively scan certain devices on your network, that's the power of Armis being able to come back in and give you that visibility of not only what those devices are for visibility into them, but also what vulnerabilities are associated with those passive devices that aren't being scanned by your network today. So with that, that concludes my demo. So I'll kick it back over to you, John. >> Awesome. Great walk through there. Take me through what you think the most important part of that. Is it the discovery piece? Is it the interaction? What's your favorite? >> Honestly, I think my favorite part about that is in terms of being able to have the visibility into the devices that a lot of folks don't see currently. So those IoT devices, those OT devices, things that you're not able to run a scan on or put an agent on. Armis is not only giving you visibility into them, but also layering in, as I said before, those vulnerabilities on top of that, that's just visibility that a lot of folks today don't have. So Armis does a great job of giving you visibility and vulnerabilities and risks associated with those devices. >> So I have to ask you, when you give this demo to customers and prospects, what's the reaction? Falling out of their chair moment? Are they more skeptical? It's almost too good to be true and end to end vulnerability management is a tough nut to crack in terms of solution. >> Honestly, a lot of clients that we've had, especially within the OT and the medical side, they're blown away because at the end of the day when we can give them that visibility, as I've said, Hey, I didn't even know that those devices resided in that portion, but not only we showing them what they are and where they are and enrichment on risk factors, et cetera, but then we show them, Hey, we've worked with that vendor, whatever it may be and Rockwell, et cetera, and we know that there's vulnerabilities associated with those devices. So they just seem to be blown away by the fact that we can show them so much about those devices from behind one single console. >> It reminds me of the old days. I'm going to date myself here. Remember the old Google Maps mashup days. Customers talk about this as the Google Maps for their assets. And when you have the Google Maps and you have the Ubers out there, you can look at the trails, you can look at what's happening inside the enterprise. So there's got to be a lot of interest in once you get the assets, what's going on those networks or those roads, if you will, 'cause you got in packet movement. You got things happening. You got upgrades. You got changing devices. It's always on kind of living thing. >> Absolutely. Yeah, it's what's on my network. And more importantly at times, what's on those devices? What are the risks associated with the the applications running on those? How are those devices communicating? And then as we've seen here, what are the vulnerabilities associated with those and how can I take action with them? >> Real quick, put a plug in for where I can find the demo. Is it online? Is it on YouTube? On the website? Where does someone see this demo? >> Yeah, the Armis website has a lot of demo content loaded. Get you in touch with folks like engineers like myself to provide demos whenever needed. >> All right, Bryan, thanks for coming on this show. Appreciate, Sales Engineer at Armis, Bryan Inman. Given the demo God award out to him. Good job. Thanks for the demo. >> Thanks, thanks for having me. >> Okay. In a moment, we're going to have my closing thoughts on this event and really the impact to the business operations side, in a moment. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, welcome back to the manager risk across the extended attack surface with Armas I'm John fair host of the cube. Got the demo. God here, Brian Inman sales engineer at Armit. Brian. Thanks for coming on. We're looking forward to the demo, how you doing? >>I'm doing well, John, thanks for having me, >>You know, we heard from Nair, you know, describing arm's platform, a lot of intelligence. It's like a search engine meets data at scale intelligent platform around laying out the asset map. If you will, the new vulnerability module among other things that really solves CISO's problems, a lot of great customer testimonials. And we, we got the demo here that you're gonna give us, what's the demo about what are we, what are we gonna see? >>Well, John, thanks. Great question. And truthfully, I think as NAIA has pointed out what AIS as a baseline is giving you is, is great visibility into every asset on your that's communicating within your, within your environment. And from there, what we've done is we've layered on known vulnerabilities associated with not just the device, but also what else is on the device. What's is there certain applications running on that device, the versions of those applications and what are the vulnerabilities known with that? So that's really gives you great visibility in, in terms of the devices that folks aren't necessarily have visibility into now, unmanaged devices, OT devices, OT, and critical infrastructure, medical devices, things that you're not necessarily able to actively scan or put an agent on. So not only is Armas telling you about these devices, but we're also layer layering on those vulnerabilities all passively and in real time, >>A lot of great feedback we've heard and I've talked to some of your customers, the agent list is a huge deal. The Discover's at awesome. You can see everything and, and just getting real time information. It's really, really cool. So I'm looking forward to, for the demo for our guests, take us on that tour. Let's go with the demo for the guests today. >>All right. Sounds good. So what we're looking at here is within the Armas console is just a clean representation of the passive reporting of what Armas has discovered. So we see a lot of different types of devices, you know, from your virtual machines and personal computers, things that are relatively easy to manage, but working our way down, you're able to see a lot of different of the different types of devices that are not necessarily easy to, to get visibility into things like your up systems, IP cameras, dash cams, et cetera, lighting systems, and, and today's day and age, where everything is moving to the, that smart feature. You know, it's, it's great to have that visibility into, you know, what's communicating on my network and getting that, being able to layer on the risk factors associated with it, as well as the vulnerabilities. So let's pivot over to our vulnerabilities tab and talk about the, the ADM portion, the asset vulnerability management. >>So what we're looking at is the dashboard where we're reporting a, a, another clean representation with customizable dashboards that gives you visuals and reporting and things like new vulnerabilities as they come in, you know, what are the most critical vulnerabilities that are the, the newest as they roll in the vulnerabilities by type, we have hardware, we have application, we have operating systems. As we scroll down, we can see things to break it down by vulnerabilities, by the operating system, windows, Linux, et cetera. We can take, you know, create dashes that show you views of the, the number of, of devices that are impacted by these CVEs and scrolling down. We can see, you know, what, how long have these vulnerabilities been sitting within my environment? So how, what are the oldest vulnerabilities we have here? And then also of course, vulnerabilities by applications. So things like Google Chrome, Microsoft office. >>So we're able to give a, a good representation of the amount of vulnerabilities as they're associated to the hardware and applications as well. So we're gonna dig in and take a, a deeper look at one of these vulnerabilities here. So I'm excited to talk today about where Armas ABM is, but also where it's going as well. So we're not just reporting on things like the CVSs score from, from N N VD. We're also able to report on things like the exploitability of that, right? How, how actively is this, this CVE being exploited in the wild, right? We're reporting E EPSS scores. For example, we're able to take open source information as well as a lot of our partnerships that we have with other vendors that are giving us a lot of great value of known vulnerabilities associated with the applications and with hardware, et cetera. >>But we're where we're going with. This is we're in Fu very near future releases. We're gonna be able to, to take sort of an algorithm approach of what are the most critical CVSs that we see, how exploitable are those, what are common threat actors doing with these, these CVEs have they weaponized these CVS? Are they actively using those weaponized tools to exploit these within, within other folks' environments? And who's reporting on these. So we're gonna take all of these and then really add that Armas flavor of we already know what that device is, and we can explain. And, and so can the users of it, the business criticality of that device, right? So we're able to pivot over to the matches as we see the CVEs, we're able to very cleanly view, what are, what exactly are the devices that the CVE resides on, right? >>And as you can see, we're giving you more than just an IP address or more, you know, a lot more context, and we're able to click in and dive into what exactly are these devices and how, and more importantly, how critical are these devices to, to my, my environment, if one of these devices were to go down, if it were to be a server, if you know, whatever it may be, I would wanna focus on those particular devices and ensuring that that CVE, especially if it's an exploitable CVE were to be addressed or early, earlier than, than say the others, and really be able to manage and prioritize these another great feature about it is, you know, for example, we're looking at a, a particular CVE in terms of its its patch and build number from windows 10. So the AutoSol feature that we have, for example, we've passively detected what this particular personal computer is running windows 10 and the build and revision numbers on it. >>And then once Armas passively discovers an update to that firmware and patch level, we can automatically resolve that, giving you a, a confidence that that has been addressed from that particular device. We're also able to customize and look through and potentially select a few of these, say, you know, these particular devices reside on your guest network or an employee wifi network where we don't necessarily, I don't wanna say care, but we don't necessarily value that as much as something in, you know, internally that has holds significantly more business criticality. So we can select some of these and potentially ignore or resolve for determining reasons. As you see here, be able to really truly manage and prioritize these, these CVEs. As I scroll up, I can pivot over to the remediation tab and open up each one of these. So what this is doing is essentially Arma says, you know, through our knowledge base, been able to work with the vendors and, and pull down the patches associated with these. >>And within the remediation portion, we're able to view, for example, if we were to pull down the patch from this particular vendor and apply it to these 60 devices that you see here, right now, we're able to F to view, you know, which patches are gonna gimme the most impact as I prioritize these and take care of these affected devices. And lastly, as I pivot back, go again, where we're at now is we're able to allow the, the users to customize the organizational priority of this particular CVE, to where in terms of, you know, this has, has given us a high CVSs score, but maybe for whatever reasons it may be maybe this CVE in terms of this particular logical segment of my network, I'm gonna give it a low priority for whatever the use case may be. We have compensating controls set in place that, that render this CVE, not impactful to this particular segment of my environment. >>So we're able to add that organizational priority to that CVE and where we're going, as you can see that that popped up here, but where we're going is we're gonna start to be able to apply the, the organizational priority in terms of the actual device level. Right? So what we'll see is we'll see a, a column added to here to where we'll see the, the business impact of that device, based on the importance of that particular segment of your environment or the device type, be it, you know, critical networking device, or maybe a, a critical infrastructure device, PLCs controllers, et cetera, but really giving you that passive reporting on the CVEs in terms of what the device is within your network. And then finally we do integrate with your vulnerability, vulnerability management, and scanners as well. So if you have a scanner actively scanning these, but potentially they're missing segments of your net network, or they're not able to actively scan certain devices on your network, that's the power of Armas being able to come back in and give you that visibility of not only what those devices are for visibility into them, but also what vulnerabilities are associated with those passive devices that aren't being scanned by your network today. >>So with that that's, that concludes my demo. So I'll kick it back over to you, John. >>Awesome. Great, great walk through there. Take me through what you think the most important part of that. Is it the discovery piece? Is it the interaction what's your favorite? >>Honestly, I think my favorite part about that is, you know, in terms of being able to have the visibility into the devices, that a lot of folks don't see currently. So those OT devices, those OT devices, things that you're not able to, to run a scan on or put an agent on Armas is not only giving you visibility into them, but also layering in, as I said before, those vulnerabilities on top of that, that's just visibility that a lot of folks today don't have. So Armas does a great job of giving you visibility and vulnerabilities and risks associated with those devices. >>So I have to ask you, when you give this demo to customers and prospects, what's the reaction falling outta their chair moment? Are they more skeptical? It's almost too good to be true. And the end to end vulnerability management's is a tough nut to crack in terms of solution. >>Well, honestly, a lot of clients that we've had, you know, especially within the OT and the medical side, they're, they're blown away because at the end of the day, when we can give them that visibility, as I've said, you know, Hey, I, I didn't even know that those devices resided in that, that portion, but not only are we showing them what they are and where they are and enrichment on risk factors, et cetera. But then we show them, Hey, there's a known, you know, we've worked with that vendor, whatever it may be and, you know, Rockwell, et cetera. And we know that there's vulnerabilities associated with those devices. So they just seem to be blown away by the fact that we can show them so much about those devices from behind one single console. >>You know, it reminds me of the old days. I'm gonna date myself here. Remember the old Google maps, mashup days. This is customers. Talk about this as the Google maps for their assets. And when you have the Google maps and you have the Ubers out there, you can look at the trails, you can look at what's happening inside the, inside the enterprise. So there's gotta be a lot of interest in once you get the assets what's going on, on those, on, in those, on those networks or those roads, if you will, cuz you got in packet movement, you got things happening, you got upgrades, you got changing devices. It's always on kind of living thing. >>Absolutely. Yeah. It's what's on my network. And more importantly at times what's on those devices, right? Are the, what are the risks associated with the, the applications running on those? How are those devices communicating? And then as we've seen here, what are the vulnerabilities associated with those and how can I take action with them? >>All right. Real quick, put a plug in for where I can find the demo. Is it online is on YouTube, on the website. Where does someone see this demo? >>Yeah, the Amis website has a lot of demo content loaded. Get you in touch with folks like engineers like myself to, to provide demos whenever, whenever needed. >>All right, Brian, thanks for coming on this show. Appreciate sales engineer, Armas Brian Inman, given the demo God award out to him. Good job. Thanks for the demo. >>Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>Okay. You know, in a moment we're gonna have my closing thoughts on this event and really the impact to the business operation side. In a moment I'm John fur the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Power Panel where we're going to talk about application modernization, also success templates, and take a look at some new survey data to see how CIOs are thinking about digital transformation, as we get deeper into the post isolation economy. And with me are three familiar VIP guests to CUBE audiences. Tony Bear, the principal at DB InSight, Doug Henschen, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research and Sanjeev Mohan principal at SanjMo. Guys, good to see you again, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> All right, Doug. Let's get started with you. You know, this recent survey, which was commissioned by Couchbase, 650 CIOs and CTOs, and IT practitioners. So obviously very IT heavy. They responded to the following question, "In response to the pandemic, my organization accelerated our application modernization strategy and of course, an overwhelming majority, 94% agreed or strongly agreed." So I'm sure, Doug, that you're not shocked by that, but in the same survey, modernizing existing technologies was second only behind cyber security is the top investment priority this year. Doug, bring us into your world and tell us the trends that you're seeing with the clients and customers you work with in their modernization initiatives. >> Well, the survey, of course, is spot on. You know, any Constellation Research analyst, any systems integrator will tell you that we saw more transformation work in the last two years than in the prior six to eight years. A lot of it was forced, you know, a lot of movement to the cloud, a lot of process improvement, a lot of automation work, but transformational is aspirational and not every company can be a leader. You know, at Constellation, we focus our research on those market leaders and that's only, you know, the top 5% of companies that are really innovating, that are really disrupting their markets and we try to share that with companies that want to be fast followers, that these are the next 20 to 25% of companies that don't want to get left behind, but don't want to hit some of the same roadblocks and you know, pioneering pitfalls that the real leaders are encountering when they're harnessing new technologies. So the rest of the companies, you know, the cautious adopters, the laggards, many of them fall by the wayside, that's certainly what we saw during the pandemic. Who are these leaders? You know, the old saw examples that people saw at the Amazons, the Teslas, the Airbnbs, the Ubers and Lyfts, but new examples are emerging every year. And as a consumer, you immediately recognize these transformed experiences. One of my favorite examples from the pandemic is Rocket Mortgage. No disclaimer required, I don't own stock and you're not client, but when I wanted to take advantage of those record low mortgage interest rates, I called my current bank and some, you know, stall word, very established conventional banks, I'm talking to you Bank of America, City Bank, and they were taking days and weeks to get back to me. Rocket Mortgage had the locked in commitment that day, a very proactive, consistent communications across web, mobile, email, all customer touchpoints. I closed in a matter of weeks an entirely digital seamless process. This is back in the gloves and masks days and the loan officer came parked in our driveway, wiped down an iPad, handed us that iPad, we signed all those documents digitally, completely electronic workflow. The only wet signatures required were those demanded by the state. So it's easy to spot these transformed experiences. You know, Rocket had most of that in place before the pandemic, and that's why they captured 8% of the national mortgage market by 2020 and they're on track to hit 10% here in 2022. >> Yeah, those are great examples. I mean, I'm not a shareholder either, but I am a customer. I even went through the same thing in the pandemic. It was all done in digital it was a piece of cake and I happened to have to do another one with a different firm and stuck with that firm for a variety of reasons and it was night and day. So to your point, it was a forced merge to digital. If you were there beforehand, you had real advantage, it could accelerate your lead during the pandemic. Okay, now Tony bear. Mr. Bear, I understand you're skeptical about all this buzz around digital transformation. So in that same survey, the data shows that the majority of respondents said that their digital initiatives were largely reactive to outside forces, the pandemic compliance changes, et cetera. But at the same time, they indicated that the results while somewhat mixed were generally positive. So why are you skeptical? >> The reason being, and by the way, I have nothing against application modernization. The problem... I think the problem I ever said, it often gets conflated with digital transformation and digital transformation itself has become such a buzzword and so overused that it's really hard, if not impossible to pin down (coughs) what digital transformation actually means. And very often what you'll hear from, let's say a C level, you know, (mumbles) we want to run like Google regardless of whether or not that goal is realistic you know, for that organization (coughs). The thing is that we've been using, you know, businesses have been using digital data since the days of the mainframe, since the... Sorry that data has been digital. What really has changed though, is just the degree of how businesses interact with their customers, their partners, with the whole rest of the ecosystem and how their business... And how in many cases you take look at the auto industry that the nature of the business, you know, is changing. So there is real change of foot, the question is I think we need to get more specific in our goals. And when you look at it, if we can boil it down to a couple, maybe, you know, boil it down like really over simplistically, it's really all about connectedness. No, I'm not saying connectivity 'cause that's more of a physical thing, but connectedness. Being connected to your customer, being connected to your supplier, being connected to the, you know, to the whole landscape, that you operate in. And of course today we have many more channels with which we operate, you know, with customers. And in fact also if you take a look at what's happening in the automotive industry, for instance, I was just reading an interview with Bill Ford, you know, their... Ford is now rapidly ramping up their electric, you know, their electric vehicle strategy. And what they realize is it's not just a change of technology, you know, it is a change in their business, it's a change in terms of the relationship they have with their customer. Their customers have traditionally been automotive dealers who... And the automotive dealers have, you know, traditionally and in many cases by state law now have been the ones who own the relationship with the end customer. But when you go to an electric vehicle, the product becomes a lot more of a software product. And in turn, that means that Ford would have much more direct interaction with its end customers. So that's really what it's all about. It's about, you know, connectedness, it's also about the ability to act, you know, we can say agility, it's about ability not just to react, but to anticipate and act. And so... And of course with all the proliferation, you know, the explosion of data sources and connectivity out there and the cloud, which allows much more, you know, access to compute, it changes the whole nature of the ball game. The fact is that we have to avoid being overwhelmed by this and make our goals more, I guess, tangible, more strictly defined. >> Yeah, now... You know, great points there. And I want to just bring in some survey data, again, two thirds of the respondents said their digital strategies were set by IT and only 26% by the C-suite, 8% by the line of business. Now, this was largely a survey of CIOs and CTOs, but, wow, doesn't seem like the right mix. It's a Doug's point about, you know, leaders in lagers. My guess is that Rocket Mortgage, their digital strategy was led by the chief digital officer potentially. But at the same time, you would think, Tony, that application modernization is a prerequisite for digital transformation. But I want to go to Sanjeev in this war in the survey. And respondents said that on average, they want 58% of their IT spend to be in the public cloud three years down the road. Now, again, this is CIOs and CTOs, but (mumbles), but that's a big number. And there was no ambiguity because the question wasn't worded as cloud, it was worded as public cloud. So Sanjeev, what do you make of that? What's your feeling on cloud as flexible architecture? What does this all mean to you? >> Dave, 58% of IT spend in the cloud is a huge change from today. Today, most estimates, peg cloud IT spend to be somewhere around five to 15%. So what this number tells us is that the cloud journey is still in its early days, so we should buckle up. We ain't seen nothing yet, but let me add some color to this. CIOs and CTOs maybe ramping up their cloud deployment, but they still have a lot of problems to solve. I can tell you from my previous experience, for example, when I was in Gartner, I used to talk to a lot of customers who were in a rush to move into the cloud. So if we were to plot, let's say a maturity model, typically a maturity model in any discipline in IT would have something like crawl, walk, run. So what I was noticing was that these organizations were jumping straight to run because in the pandemic, they were under the gun to quickly deploy into the cloud. So now they're kind of coming back down to, you know, to crawl, walk, run. So basically they did what they had to do under the circumstances, but now they're starting to resolve some of the very, very important issues. For example, security, data privacy, governance, observability, these are all very big ticket items. Another huge problem that nav we are noticing more than we've ever seen, other rising costs. Cloud makes it so easy to onboard new use cases, but it leads to all kinds of unexpected increase in spikes in your operating expenses. So what we are seeing is that organizations are now getting smarter about where the workloads should be deployed. And sometimes it may be in more than one cloud. Multi-cloud is no longer an aspirational thing. So that is a huge trend that we are seeing and that's why you see there's so much increased planning to spend money in public cloud. We do have some issues that we still need to resolve. For example, multi-cloud sounds great, but we still need some sort of single pane of glass, control plane so we can have some fungibility and move workloads around. And some of this may also not be in public cloud, some workloads may actually be done in a more hybrid environment. >> Yeah, definitely. I call it Supercloud. People win sometimes-- >> Supercloud. >> At that term, but it's above multi-cloud, it floats, you know, on topic. But so you clearly identified some potholes. So I want to talk about the evolution of the application experience 'cause there's some potholes there too. 81% of their respondents in that survey said, "Our development teams are embracing the cloud and other technologies faster than the rest of the organization can adopt and manage them." And that was an interesting finding to me because you'd think that infrastructure is code and designing insecurity and containers and Kubernetes would be a great thing for organizations, and it is I'm sure in terms of developer productivity, but what do you make of this? Does the modernization path also have some potholes, Sanjeev? What are those? >> So, first of all, Dave, you mentioned in your previous question, there's no ambiguity, it's a public cloud. This one, I feel it has quite a bit of ambiguity because it talks about cloud and other technologies, that sort of opens up the kimono, it's like that's everything. Also, it says that the rest of the organization is not able to adopt and manage. Adoption is a business function, management is an IT function. So I feed this question is a bit loaded. We know that app modernization is here to stay, developing in the cloud removes a lot of traditional barriers or procuring instantiating infrastructure. In addition, developers today have so many more advanced tools. So they're able to develop the application faster because they have like low-code/no-code options, they have notebooks to write the machine learning code, they have the entire DevOps CI/CD tool chain that makes it easy to version control and push changes. But there are potholes. For example, are developers really interested in fixing data quality problems, all data, privacy, data, access, data governance? How about monitoring? I doubt developers want to get encumbered with all of these operationalization management pieces. Developers are very keen to deliver new functionality. So what we are now seeing is that it is left to the data team to figure out all of these operationalization productionization things that the developers have... You know, are not truly interested in that. So which actually takes me to this topic that, Dave, you've been quite actively covering and we've been talking about, see, the whole data mesh. >> Yeah, I was going to say, it's going to solve all those data quality problems, Sanjeev. You know, I'm a sucker for data mesh. (laughing) >> Yeah, I know, but see, what's going to happen with data mesh is that developers are now going to have more domain resident power to develop these applications. What happens to all of the data curation governance quality that, you know, a central team used to do. So there's a lot of open ended questions that still need to be answered. >> Yeah, That gets automated, Tony, right? With computational governance. So-- >> Of course. >> It's not trivial, it's not trivial, but I'm still an optimist by the end of the decade we'll start to get there. Doug, I want to go to you again and talk about the business case. We all remember, you know, the business case for modernization that is... We remember the Y2K, there was a big it spending binge and this was before the (mumbles) of the enterprise, right? CIOs, they'd be asked to develop new applications and the business maybe helps pay for it or offset the cost with the initial work and deployment then IT got stuck managing the sprawling portfolio for years. And a lot of the apps had limited adoption or only served a few users, so there were big pushes toward rationalizing the portfolio at that time, you know? So do I modernize, they had to make a decision, consolidate, do I sunset? You know, it was all based on value. So what's happening today and how are businesses making the case to modernize, are they going through a similar rationalization exercise, Doug? >> Well, the Y2K era experience that you talked about was back in the days of, you know, throw the requirements over the wall and then we had waterfall development that lasted months in some cases years. We see today's most successful companies building cross functional teams. You know, the C-suite the line of business, the operations, the data and analytics teams, the IT, everybody has a seat at the table to lead innovation and modernization initiatives and they don't start, the most successful companies don't start by talking about technology, they start by envisioning a business outcome by envisioning a transformed customer experience. You hear the example of Amazon writing the press release for the product or service it wants to deliver and then it works backwards to create it. You got to work backwards to determine the tech that will get you there. What's very clear though, is that you can't transform or modernize by lifting and shifting the legacy mess into the cloud. That doesn't give you the seamless processes, that doesn't give you data driven personalization, it doesn't give you a connected and consistent customer experience, whether it's online or mobile, you know, bots, chat, phone, everything that we have today that requires a modern, scalable cloud negative approach and agile deliver iterative experience where you're collaborating with this cross-functional team and course correct, again, making sure you're on track to what's needed. >> Yeah. Now, Tony, both Doug and Sanjeev have been, you know, talking about what I'm going to call this IT and business schism, and we've all done surveys. One of the things I'd love to see Couchbase do in future surveys is not only survey the it heavy, but also survey the business heavy and see what they say about who's leading the digital transformation and who's in charge of the customer experience. Do you have any thoughts on that, Tony? >> Well, there's no question... I mean, it's kind like, you know, the more things change. I mean, we've been talking about that IT and the business has to get together, we talked about this back during, and Doug, you probably remember this, back during the Y2K ERP days, is that you need these cross functional teams, we've been seeing this. I think what's happening today though, is that, you know, back in the Y2K era, we were basically going into like our bedrock systems and having to totally re-engineer them. And today what we're looking at is that, okay, those bedrock systems, the ones that basically are keeping the lights on, okay, those are there, we're not going to mess with that, but on top of that, that's where we're going to innovate. And that gives us a chance to be more, you know, more directed and therefore we can bring these related domains together. I mean, that's why just kind of, you know, talk... Where Sanjeev brought up the term of data mesh, I've been a bit of a cynic about data mesh, but I do think that work and work is where we bring a bunch of these connected teams together, teams that have some sort of shared context, though it's everybody that's... Every team that's working, let's say around the customer, for instance, which could be, you know, in marketing, it could be in sales, order processing in some cases, you know, in logistics and delivery. So I think that's where I think we... You know, there's some hope and the fact is that with all the advanced, you know, basically the low-code/no-code tools, they are ways to bring some of these other players, you know, into the process who previously had to... Were sort of, you know, more at the end of like a, you know, kind of a... Sort of like they throw it over the wall type process. So I do believe, but despite all my cynicism, I do believe there's some hope. >> Thank you. Okay, last question. And maybe all of you could answer this. Maybe, Sanjeev, you can start it off and then Doug and Tony can chime in. In the survey, about a half, nearly half of the 650 respondents said they could tangibly show their organizations improve customer experiences that were realized from digital projects in the last 12 months. Now, again, not surprising, but we've been talking about digital experiences, but there's a long way to go judging from our pandemic customer experiences. And we, again, you know, some were great, some were terrible. And so, you know, and some actually got worse, right? Will that improve? When and how will it improve? Where's 5G and things like that fit in in terms of improving customer outcomes? Maybe, Sanjeev, you could start us off here. And by the way, plug any research that you're working on in this sort of area, please do. >> Thank you, Dave. As a resident optimist on this call, I'll get us started and then I'm sure Doug and Tony will have interesting counterpoints. So I'm a technology fan boy, I have to admit, I am in all of all these new companies and how they have been able to rise up and handle extreme scale. In this time that we are speaking on this show, these food delivery companies would have probably handled tens of thousands of orders in minutes. So these concurrent orders, delivery, customer support, geospatial location intelligence, all of this has really become commonplace now. It used to be that, you know, large companies like Apple would be able to handle all of these supply chain issues, disruptions that we've been facing. But now in my opinion, I think we are seeing this in, Doug mentioned Rocket Mortgage. So we've seen it in FinTech and shopping apps. So we've seen the same scale and it's more than 5G. It includes things like... Even in the public cloud, we have much more efficient, better hardware, which can do like deep learning networks much more efficiently. So machine learning, a lot of natural language programming, being able to handle unstructured data. So in my opinion, it's quite phenomenal to see how technology has actually come to rescue and as, you know, billions of us have gone online over the last two years. >> Yeah, so, Doug, so Sanjeev's point, he's saying, basically, you ain't seen nothing yet. What are your thoughts here, your final thoughts. >> Well, yeah, I mean, there's some incredible technologies coming including 5G, but you know, it's only going to pave the cow path if the underlying app, if the underlying process is clunky. You have to modernize, take advantage of, you know, serverless scalability, autonomous optimization, advanced data science. There's lots of cutting edge capabilities out there today, but you know, lifting and shifting you got to get your hands dirty and actually modernize on that data front. I mentioned my research this year, I'm doing a lot of in depth looks at some of the analytical data platforms. You know, these lake houses we've had some conversations about that and helping companies to harness their data, to have a more personalized and predictive and proactive experience. So, you know, we're talking about the Snowflakes and Databricks and Googles and Teradata and Vertica and Yellowbrick and that's the research I'm focusing on this year. >> Yeah, your point about paving the cow path is right on, especially over the pandemic, a lot of the processes were unknown. But you saw this with RPA, paving the cow path only got you so far. And so, you know, great points there. Tony, you get the last word, bring us home. >> Well, I'll put it this way. I think there's a lot of hope in terms of that the new generation of developers that are coming in are a lot more savvy about things like data. And I think also the new generation of people in the business are realizing that we need to have data as a core competence. So I do have optimism there that the fact is, I think there is a much greater consciousness within both the business side and the technical. In the technology side, the organization of the importance of data and how to approach that. And so I'd like to just end on that note. >> Yeah, excellent. And I think you're right. Putting data at the core is critical data mesh I think very well describes the problem and (mumbles) credit lays out a solution, just the technology's not there yet, nor are the standards. Anyway, I want to thank the panelists here. Amazing. You guys are always so much fun to work with and love to have you back in the future. And thank you for joining today's broadcast brought to you by Couchbase. By the way, check out Couchbase on the road this summer at their application modernization summits, they're making up for two years of shut in and coming to you. So you got to go to couchbase.com/roadshow to find a city near you where you can meet face to face. In a moment. Ravi Mayuram, the chief technology officer of Couchbase will join me. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Well, good day, everybody. And it's great to have you with us here on the theCUBE. As we continue our CUBE Conversations as a part of the AWS startup showcase. Pleased to welcome Jennifer Johnson in today. Jennifer is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Amplitude, which is a global leader in product intelligence. And she tells me her friends call her JJ. And so, today it's... Hello JJ, how are you doing? >> I'm doing great, John. How are you? >> I'm doing very well. Thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time. First off, tell us a little bit about Amplitude, about your work in general for those who might not be familiar, and also, I'd like to hear a little more about product intelligence and about that concept, if you will, and how that has certainly taken on probably a pretty different meaning in this digital world that we're in today. >> That's right. Well, so I've been at Amplitude, I joined in October of 2020. So not that long. And let me tell you, anyone who knows me knows that I am a CMO, but I am also a Category Designer. So, I look at companies, I look at opportunities as market creation opportunities. And we're going to talk about that 'cause that's a big reason why I joined Amplitude and why I'm so excited for the future of Amplitude. And so when we think about... Our website today says product intelligence. If you read between the lines and I tell you I'm a category designer, you might understand that maybe that will evolve over time. But what product intelligence actually means is, is that it really connects digital products to revenue. And what do I mean by that? And we all know that everything is digital. I don't need to tell you that everything is digital. The whole world just moved to digital. And it's interesting because, we think about digital and we think about the DoorDashs and the Pelotons of the world, but really it's every company in every industry. Some of our largest customers are 100-year old companies. And they have had to, not just because of the last year in the pandemic, but they've been really thinking about how do we disrupt ourselves, really. It's not even about disrupting the industry. It's actually about disrupting their own business around digital. So digital really, isn't a nice to have anymore. It's existential. And we all, I think we all know that at this point. But, if the whole world has moved to digital and I think I read something that IDC wrote, we're going to spend $6.8 trillion by 2023 on digital transformation. We're spending an enormous, I mean, I think enormous is even an understatement amount of money on digital. So what is the next thing that you have to do, once you've spent all this time and money and effort in probably millions of dollars, billions per company actually transforming, is you have to actually optimize it. And you have to figure out what digital products and digital investments you're making. You have to make sure that they actually connect to business outcomes. Things like, revenue, things like lifetime value, things like loyalty, things that drive your business forward. And that's really where product intelligence and the future where Amplitude is going is so critical. Because if you think about... Actually, one of our customers said it best. The customers of yesterday or the companies of yesterday, they put a website in front of their old way of doing things, their old products, their old way of doing things and called it digital. Like we just put a website in front of it so it's digital. That is no longer the case. Now it's about redesigning your business and transforming value through new digital products and services. So digital products are actually, the future of how businesses will operate in the new era. And so what happens is, companies say, "Okay, we need to go build all these new products "and services. "And we have these goals of growth and revenue "and we hope the revenue comes out the other end." But there's really no way for... Or no really effective way for companies to actually figure out how to manage and measure that in-between. You build a product, you put it out to market, revenue comes out the other end, but how do you actually know if you're building the right things in the first place? How do you know what features, what behaviors, what actions, what combinations of those, actually lead to things like engagement and revenue and loyalty. And then how do you actually go and double down on those? And what I mean by that is adapting the experience. If you know something works, and you know that every customer that looks like that person will do this, and you can predict an outcome, why wouldn't you serve that up to every single person that looks like that? And really that whole notion of prediction and understanding and prediction and adapting, that's really where Amplitude plays a role. And that's what got me really excited about joining Amplitude and really excited about the future is, every company is a digital company and really companies have to completely rethink how they manage digital because it isn't just putting website in front of it anymore. >> Yeah I mean, you've hit on something there. In fact, we've got a lot to unpack here, which is great. But you talk about that digital (mumbles) you got to have. It's existential now to doing your business which I think is absolutely correct. But because it's everybody, and it is everywhere and you've got a lot of categories, as a Chief Strategy Officer, I mean, you can't be all things to all people. You can't go off in every which way, so how are you focusing then in your efforts in terms of identifying maybe key categories or prime categories, as opposed to, looking at this huge landscape, and that can be overwhelming in some respects how are you focusing then? >> Yeah. I mean, there's two ways to look at it. And it is... Every company is a digital company, but really any company that has any kind of a digital product or a digital app, anything that's digital is a relevant target for Amplitude. Traditionally, we have focused with probably no surprise, we focused on the, probably what I'd say the digital native companies, the companies that are more mature, but really they grew up through digital native. Those are the DoorDashs, the Postmates, the Ubers, the Lyfts. And those companies were just built by design to think this way. "We're building products. "Our app is our business. Our product is our business." So we need to make sure that we deeply understand how the interactions with our customers through that experience actually translates, and how do we continue to tweak and test and optimize. And digitally native companies, tend to understand that inherently. So that's been a lot of the early adopters of Amplitude have been those digitally native companies. Now what we're seeing, and no surprise is, there's a really long tail of companies in more traditional industries. I mean, everything from, hospitality and restaurants. Obviously media is going through a huge digital disruption right now. Automotive. I mean, any company that's looking at how do we build new ways to engage and provide experiences to our customers through any kind of a digital means, a digital product, an app, those are relevant targets for Amplitude. So I think people think, "Oh, it's..." Every industry looks very different but the commonality is everyone needs to move to digital. And the great thing for Amplitude and for the market at large is a lot of our customers are these digitally native, what I would call the thought leaders around digital. And so if we can help bring that, bring those best practices and bring that approach to some of the more traditional companies, in traditional industries and help them become more like the Pelotons and the DoorDashs of the world, then that's great for everybody. >> You know, JJ, when you talk about, this transformation that's going on and the spaces in which is going on which is everywhere right now, I imagine there are still some folks who might be a little reluctant. And you talked about slapping a new website on the old material and they think they're done and they wash their hands and they go away. And it's not that simple. So what's that conversation like to people who maybe aren't willing to jump in, to take that "risk" as they see it, whereas you know, it's an essential to their business. >> Yeah. So, I do think that every disruption technologically speaking or other, is really change management. And digital's no different. It's not just about moving to digital, it's changing the way that you're organized. It's changing your business structure, your strategy, your priorities. So, I think that organizations know they have to go there now. And even the ones that are reluctant, I'd say if they're reluctant they're probably going to get disrupted. So I think everyone understands they need to go there. Our role is really to help organizations get there, without... I mean, digital, the word that usually follows digital is transformation. And I think a lot of people think that digital transformation needs to be this, three to five year strategic journey, and cost millions of dollars with armies of consultants. And really what we're helping to do is, help organizations just answer the question, "how is our product tied to our revenue?" And we do that by bringing the data to the teams that actually need it. And it was really surprising to me to understand the process in some of these really large enterprises, around how product and marketing teams get data. And a lot of times if you have a question about something, if you're a product manager obviously you want to understand how is our product doing? What features are resonating? What features are leading to things like engagement or revenue or subscriptions or loyalty or whatever it is. As a marketer you also want to know that. As a marketer you also want to know, what campaigns are we driving that are actually creating value. Are there things that we should be doing? Are there areas we should double down on? And so the process is if you have a question about something or a hypothesis that you want to answer, a lot of times you have to send this request to some centralized data team or a data science team. Organizations have, large B2C organizations. Most of them have armies of data scientists and business intelligence platforms. And you send a request and you might get an answer back in a few weeks, maybe a month and maybe it's the right answer or usually what happens, and I think we can all relate to this. Is you ask a question and you get data back and then it sparks five more questions. And so that whole process is the cyclical thing that I always say, by the time you actually figure out the answer to your question, it's enough time to get Amazoned in the new digital era. And so what we're actually doing is helping to bring that data which we all know is the crown jewel of any organization. We're bringing that data and we're democratizing it and bringing it to all the teams that actually need it. Unlock it from data scientists and BI, and bring it to the teams that need it, whether it's product, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, whether it's customer success. And the greatest thing is it's not a tool for everyone. And then all of a sudden you have these siloed tools, marketing has their tool, product has their tool, CS has their tool. Is you actually have one platform, one system, and one source of data that all those teams use. So marketing doesn't say, "Well yeah, my mind says this "and it looks at it from this lens." And product says, "Well, my data says this, "but it looks at it from this lens." All of a sudden you've removed that entire conversation or that entire debate. And that changes everything. It changes the way that companies get insights into customer behavior. It changes the way that they build products. It changes the way that the teams work together. Product and marketing can now work off of a common set of data. And so really Amplitude is helping to drive that change. And you don't have to do it through a three-year implementation with an army of consultants that come in. It's something that can be done very easily. And so, I know everyone wants an easy button. It is quite easy though. It's not the three-year or even the one-year transformation. It's actually a way to bring that data to the teams that need it quickly. The other thing I'd say to it is, it's bringing the right data to them. I was reading something from Gartner that said, 85% of marketing analytics tools, now these are tools that usually track things like ad attribution, website visits, and how that relates to revenue. Well in a customer acquisition scenario, well, you just want to know what ads actually lead to a cart. Put someone going to a cart, someone purchasing that was probably sufficient, but in the new world, that's just not answering the same question. Like if you need to answer a question of what features, what behaviors, what actions within the product actually drive business outcomes, knowing what ads people clicked on and what web visits that people had, that's not going to answer... It's just answering a totally different question. And 85% of companies are using marketing analytics tools to actually answer questions like what features, do we need to build? So that's another key point here is, companies need to answer this question. They know they do. They just don't have the tools to do it and the data to do it. So they're using tools that were designed for a completely different purpose. And so really that's another great thing about Amplitude, is we're actually giving them the actual, the right data to answer the questions. >> So, if you're somebody's headlights, for down the road, then in terms of, you're looking for behavior, straights and patterns. You're looking for increased customer engagements, and you have all these wonderful tools now, not that you're missing anything, but where do you think that you could even sharpen the pencil a little bit more so that down the road here, what do you think technologically you are capable or that you would like to be able to deliver, because of making that an even richer engagement, even a bigger, a deeper dig. >> Yeah. Well, I mean, so, we have this immense deep, fast, smart database of customer behavior. So if you think of it, it's almost like the possibilities are endless. Anything that you need to be able to know or any question you could ask of your data to know what combinations of features, what combinations of behaviors actually lead to things like retention or churn or revenue. And then you can actually start to model those into cohorts. If I know that a customer does these five things in this order, and they're five times more likely to churn, well then, any customer that actually, doesn't just look like that based on your demographics, who you are, where you live, et cetera, but based on actually what you do in the product. We can start to cohort them and say, "this person actually looks like this other person "based on their behavior." And therefore we might actually personalize an experience for them. We might send them an offer if we think they're going to churn because we know they're likely to churn base 'cause other people that look like them do. Or we're not going to send them anything because we already know they're loyal. So they're already likely to buy. So it's answering more questions, but then it's also, how do you actually use that to, really personalize experiences? And that word is so overused, but in this way, I mean, it's not about I'm going to serve you a piece of content because I know what industry you work in, or I know where you live. I'm actually going to personalize your experience because I know that you, John, as an individual, do these things and therefore I know that you are either, a loyal customer, or you've got a high likelihood to churn, et cetera. And then I'm going to personalize an experience, that's a good experience for you but also a good experience for the business. So, I think there's more types of analytics. There's more ways to personalize and build experiences. I think in the modern way, not the old demographic way. But also, even every organization around the company, like everyone touches the customer. So, customer experience as we know is, I hate to call it the buzzword. Of course, everybody wants a great customer experience but everybody talks about customer experience. Anyone who touches the customer is part of customer experience, which is basically the whole company. And so if you think about, today, there's obviously product teams, marketing teams, are heavy users of Amplitude. But going forward, I mean, imagine a world where, anytime you have a touch point with a customer, you can use this insight into what they're actually doing in the product to get some level of intelligence that you didn't have before, and use it to proactively give them a better experience. Whether it's, at renewal time, or you know that they're likely to do something so you offer something that gives them a better experience or you're in customer service. And wouldn't it be great to actually know if someone's logging a support ticket. What they're actually doing in the product is going to help you give them a better support experience, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the options here I think are, because of the data that we have and the way that we can, like you said, build these patterns and pattern match what features and actions lead to outcomes, I think the options are limitless. And I think this is the new way. Like companies that understand this is the Holy grail of the new way of digital and understanding your customers and having this intelligence into the product is the new way to engage, the customers that get that are going to be the customers that win. >> Well, it is a new game, you're right. I think limitless is a really good word too because the capabilities that you're developing and the product and services you're providing, really are limitless. So thanks for sharing the time and the insight, a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for being here. >> Thank you. It's been great. Thank you, John. >> You've got John Walls here on theCUBE, CUBE Conversation on the AWS startup showcase. I'm talking with Jennifer Johnson from Amplitude. (soft music)

(upbeat trumpet music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante and we're here in our Palo Alto studios and we're going to talk about big data. For the last ten years, we've seen organizations come to the realization that data can be used to drive competitive advantage and so they dramatically lowered the cost of collecting data. We certainly saw this with Hadoop, but you know what data is plentiful, insights aren't. Infrastructure around big data is very challenging. I'm here with Kumar Sreekanti, co-founder and CEO of BlueData, and a long time friend of mine. Kumar, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, thank you. Good to see you as well. >> We've had a number of conversations over the years, the Hadoop days, on theCUBE, you and I go way back, but I said up front, big data sounded so alluring, but it's very, very complex to get started and we're going to get into that. I want to talk about BlueData. Recently sold to company to HPE, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. >> It's fantastic. Go back, why did you start BlueData? >> When I started BlueData, prior to that I was at VMware and I had a great opportunity to be in the driving seat, working with many talented individuals, as well as with many customers and CIOs. I saw while VMware solved the problem of single instance of virtual machines and transform the data center, I see the new wave of distributed systems, vis-a-vis first example of that is Hadoop, were quite rigid. They were running on bare metal and they were not flexible. They were having, customers, a lot of issues, the ones that you just talked about. There's a new stack coming up everyday. They're running on bare metal. I can't run the production and the DevOps on the same systems. Whereas the cloud was making progress so we felt that there is an opportunity to build a Vmware-like platform that focuses on big data applications. This was back in 2013, right. That was the early genesis. We saw that data is here and data is the new oil as many people have said and the organizations have to figure out a way to harness the power of that and they need an invisible infrastructure. They need very innovative platforms. >> You know, it's funny. We see data as even more valuable than oil because you can only once. (Kumar laughs) You can use data many, many times. >> That's a very good one. >> Companies are beginning to realize that and so talk about the journey of big data. You're a product guy. You've built a lot of products, highly technical. You know a lot of people in the valley. You've built great teams. What was the journey like with BlueData? >> You know, a lot of people would like it to be a straight line from the starting to that point. (Dave laughs) It is not, it's fascinating. At the same time, a stressful, up and downs journey, but very fulfilling. A, this is probably one of the best products that I've built in my career. B, it actually solves a real problem to the customers and in the process you actually find a lot of satisfaction not only building a great product. It actually building the value for the customers. Journey has been very good. We were very blessed with extremely good advisors from the right beginning. We were really fortunate to have good investors and I was very, as you said, my knowledge and my familiarity in the valley, I was able to build a good team. Overall, an extremely good journey. It's putting a bow on the top, as you pointed out, the exit, but it's a good journey. There's a lot of nuance I learned in the process. I'm happy to share as we go through. >> Let's double-click on the problem. We talked a little bit about it. You referenced it. Everyday there's a new open source project coming out. There's The Scoop and The Hive and a new open open source database coming out. Practitioners are challenged. They don't have the skillsets. The Ubers and the Facebooks, they could probably figure it out and have the engineers to do it, but the average enterprise may not. Clearly complexity is the problem, but double-click on that and talk a little bit about, from your perspective, what that challenge is. >> That's a very good point. I think when we started the company, we exactly noticed that. There are companies that have the muscle to hire the set of engineers and solve the problem, vertically specific to their application or their use case, but the average, which is Fortune 500 companies, do not have that kind of engineering man power. Then I also call this day two operations. When you actually go back to Vmware or Windows, as soon as you buy the piece of software, next day it's operational and you know how to use it, but with these new stacks, by the time stack is installed, you already have a newer version. It's actually solutions-led meaning that you want to have a solution understanding, but you want to make the infrastructure invisible meaning, I want to create a cluster or I want to funnel the data. I don't want to think about those things. I just wanted to directly worry about what is my solution and I want BlueData to worry about creating me a cluster, automating it. It's automation, automation, automation, orchestration, orchestration, orchestration. >> Okay, so that's the general way in which you solve this problem. Automate, you got to take the humans out of the equation. Talk specifically about the BlueData architecture. What's the secret sauce behind it? >> We were very fortunate to see containers as the new lightweight virtual machines. We have taken an approach. There are certain applications, particularly stateful, need a different handling than cloud-native non-stateful applications so what we said was, in fact our architecture predates Kubernetes, so we built a bottoms-up, pure white-paper architecture that is geared towards big data, AIML applications. Now, actually, even HPC is starting to move into that direction. >> Well, tell me actually, talk a little bit about that in terms of the evolution of the types of workloads that we've seen. You know, it started all out, Hadoop was batch, and then very quickly that changed. Talk about that spectrum. >> It's actually when we started, the highest ask from the customers were Hadoop and batch processing, but everybody knew that was the beginning and with the streaming and the new streaming technologies, it's near realtime analytics and moving to now AIML applications like H2O and Cafe and now I'm seeing the customer's asking and say, I would like to have a single platform that actually runs all these applications to me. The way we built it, going back to your previous question, the architecture is, our goal is for you to be able to create these clusters and not worry about the copying the data, single copy of the data. We built a technology called DataTap which we talked about in the past and that allows you to have a single copy of the data and multiple applications to be able to access that. >> Now, HPC, you mentioned HPC. It used to be, maybe still is, this sort of crazy crowd. (laughter) You know, they do things differently and everybody bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth and very high-end performance. How do you see that fitting in? Do you see that going mainstream? >> I'm glad you pointed out because I'm not saying everything is moving over, but I am starting to see, in fact, I was in a conversation this morning with an HPC team and an HPC customer. They are seeing the value of the scale of distributed systems. HPC tend to be scale up and single high bandwidth. They are seeing the value of how can I actually bring these two pieces together? I would say it's in infancy. Don't take me to say, look how long Hadoop take, 10 years so it's probably going to take a longer time, but I can see enterprises thinking of a single unified platform that's probably driven by Kubernetes and have these applications instantiated, orchestrated, and automated on that type. >> Now, how about the cloud? Where does that fit? We often say in theCUBE that it's not Moore's Law anymore. The innovation cocktail is data, all this data that we've collected, applying machine intelligence, and then scaling with the cloud. Obviously cloud is hugely important. It gobbled up the whole Hadoop business, but where do you see it fitting? >> Cloud is a big elephant in the room. We all have to acknowledge. I think it provides significant advantages. I always used to say this, and I may have said this in my previous CUBE interviews, cloud is all about the innovation. The reason cloud got so much traction, is because if you compare the amount of innovation to on-prem, they were at least five years ahead of that. Even the BlueData technology that we brought to the barer, EMR on Amazon was in front of the data, but it was only available Amazon. It's what we call an opinionated stack. That means you are forced to use what they give you as opposed to, I want to bring my own piece of software. We see cloud, as well as on-prem pretty much homogenous. In fact, BlueData software runs both on-prem, on the cloud, in a hybrid fashion. Same software and you can bring your stack on the top of the BlueData. >> Okay, so hybrid was the next piece of it. >> What we see is cloud has, at least from the angle from my exposure, cloud is very useful for certain applications, especially what I'm seeing is, if you are collecting the large amounts of data on the cloud, I would rather run a batch processing and curate the data and bring the very important amount of data back into the on-prem and run some realtime. It's just one example. I see a balance between the two. I also see a lot of organizations still collecting terabits of data on-prem and they're not going to take terabits of data overnight to the cloud. We are seeing all the customers asking, we would like to see a hybrid solution. >> The reason I like the acquisition by HPE because not only is it a company started by a friend and someone that I respect and knows how to build solid technology that can last, but it's software. HPE, as a company, my view needs more software content. (Kumar laughs) Software's eating the world as Marc Andressen says. It would be great to see that software live as an independent entity. I'm sure decisions are still being made, but how do you see that playing out? What are the initial discussions like? What can you share with us? >> That's a very, very, well put there. Currently, the goal from my boss and the teams there is, we want to keep the BlueData software independent. It runs on all x86 hardware platforms and we want to drive the roadmap driven by the customer needs on the software like we want to run more HPC applications. Our roadmap will be driven by the customer needs and the change in the stack on the top, not by necessarily the hardware. >> Well, that fits with HPE's culture of always trying to give optionality and we've had this conversation many, many times with senior-level people like Antonio. It's very important that there's no lock-in, open mindset, and certainly HPE lives up to that. Thanks so much for coming-- >> You're welcome. Back into theCUBE. >> I appreciate you having me here as well. >> Your career has been amazing as we go back a long time. Wow. From hardware, software, all these-- >> Great technologies. (laughter) >> Yeah, solving hard problems and we look forward to tracking your career going forward. >> Thank you, thank you. Thanks so much. >> And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante from our Palo Alto Studios. We'll see ya next time. (upbeat trumpet music)

(vibrant music) >> Everybody welcome to the special CUBE conversation here at the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Dayna Rothman, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. >> So you guys have a lot of action going on. >> Yes. >> A lot of funding, new CEO, a very successful KubeCon part of the CNCF, we saw each other there. The space is out of control right now. The growth is amazing. >> Yes. >> Amazon reinvent two weeks before in Vegas, packed. >> There's been a lot going on, geez. >> Talk about Mesosphere. You guys got some news and momentum. Talk about the momentum. >> Yeah, we've had a ton of momentum. We got 126 million in funding about eight months ago, or so, a little bit before I joined. I joined five, six months ago. Things have really kicked off in the space. Obviously, the space has gone crazy with everything around Kubernetes and all the different acquisitions and just almost crossing the chasm into some of those later adopters now, which has been really, really great for us. After the funding and hiring on a lot of seasoned executives, we're really taking marketing to the next place, taking what we're doing with product to the next phase, so it's been a great ride so far. >> Yeah, we've had a chance to interview you guys a lot over the years from OpenStack and then as the Cloud Native moves into the mainstream. It's interesting. The tech chops are solid, great company DNA, but it's interesting. You go back a year and a half or two years ago and say the word Kubernete, would be like, what language are you speaking? >> Yeah. >> Now, you see it in Forbes, see it everywhere. Kubernetes has risen to mainstream. Amazon Cloud, Google, Microsoft, they're all growing. Kubernetes is like a core, major generational thing in the tech world. You're new. >> Yes. >> What do you think about Kubernetes? Do you look at this, wow, what is Kubernetes? How did you get attracted to Mesosphere and what do you think about all this? >> Yeah, the funny thing about, just a Kubernetes story and me, I guess. A couple companies ago, working for MarTech company, I did have a boss that actually came from this space and I distinctly remember him talking about Kubernetes at that time and, coming from a different space, I just had like, what are you even talking about? He was going to KubeCon in the early days. So, I was actually familiar with it. Then, how I got attracted to Mesosphere and this space, I'd been at MarTech for a decade and really looking just to do something else and who's doing something really innovative, where's a different space that I can go in that's really growing. MarTech and SalesTech, a lot of these little players right now and nobody's really innovating. Actually, with Mesosphere, my husband actually works there as well and he started about a year and a half ago and I had spoken to the executive team several times about just marketing, best practices and marketing leadership, revenue and attribution, and the more I spoke to them, the more interested I got in the company, and then this role was available and it was just a great fit, plus I knew some of the ins and outs already just from having that connection to Mesosphere in the first place. >> Was it just saying too, you mentioned MarTech. We've been following that space for a long time. We actually got to see how this works with the first cloud before Cloud was a cloud. MarTech was very Cloud-oriented from day one. You think about what that was, self-service, lot of data issues, lot of applications that had real value, 'cause money's there. You got leads and all kinds of marketing activity, so MarTech has that almost cloud-first DNA to begin with and you come from that. Now when you come over to the Cloud Native, you're seeing the developer world building a whole 'nother generation of what looks like many industries that have that same characteristics, self-service, large scale, data. These are the top conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, interesting connection that you have that background. So when you come into this world and you see all these developers building out this application layer, CICD pipelining, and then below Kubernetes, you got all this tech, where are the opportunities? What's the value proposition from Mesosphere? What are you guys attacking? Who's your buyer? Are they developers, are they going to be businesses? Take a minute to explain that. >> A couple of different things to address some of your points. As far as our buyers and where the space is going, I think where we're really strong is really having that enterprise DNA where we can take a lot of this tech and a lot of these open-source projects and really make them enterprise ready so that companies that are much bigger and have all these security regulations and red tape can actually leverage them so that they can continue innovating. As we grow, our buyers are also evolving, from, in the earlier days, mostly developers, engineers, more of that technical crowd, but now we're coming across a lot more executive level folks. We're talking to the CIOs, the CTOs, the business users where we have to shift a little bit and have more of that business use case. The other thing is really that we're getting past the point of the really early adopters. We have customers that have been with us for awhile that are very innovative, Silicon Valley companies, and now we're seeing different industries. We have a lot of automotive clients, finance, manufacturings, some of these older industries that want to adopt technology like Kubernetes, but they don't know how to fit it into what their organization needs and wants from the IT department. >> So there's a lot of education involved, probably. >> I would imagine. >> Yes. >> Value creates other customers. Okay, I've got all these workloads. I see all the early adopters and the web-scale guys. We all live around here. We know all the Ubers and everyone else out there. Lift, what a great case study when you read those guys. But the mainstreamed America kind of companies that have data sets and are going to go to Cloud have to move these workloads around. Are they coming to you guys for specific help? Are they saying, teach us how to do it? What are the specific conversations that you guys have with those customers? >> Sure. Sometimes they come to us with a specific project, but the education piece I think is really big for us to get to the next level on what we're trying to do. That's where what I'm building out in the marketing team is going to be really powerful, so that instead of people coming to us on a project basis, we're educating some of these enterprise companies on how they can leverage it, what they should be thinking about, how they can make that transformation to more of a cloud-like environment and what they need to think about. That's a big part of the strategy going forward, is that we want to get out there as educators, as thought leaders in the space so that we can get in front of some of these folks that maybe have heard of Kubernetes or are thinking about it but don't quite understand what it is and how it fits into their business. We do, though, get several questions on just, hey, I'm interested in CICD, what is it, or what is this Kubernetes, can you guys help us? That's where we're jumping in. >> I want to ask you a question about the B2Bs and the BI space because one of the things I think is really interesting is you start to see the mainstream tech press go, whoa, Enterprise is hot, consumer's not. It tends to have these cycles and when you start to see companies like Mesosphere going to the next level, they're targeting customers in mainstream enterprise. They have to up their game and get on the marketing side. You're hired to do that. What's your strategy? Is it fill the pipeline, is it more educational, build more event, evangelism, localization, is it global? Take us through your vision of what's next level for Mesosphere. >> I think definitely all of those things and one of the most important things for me is, when I came on board, it was really, from an operational perspective, making sure that our marketing department is ready for scale in that we have all the things that we need in order to generate those leads and accelerate them through the pipeline and that we're really partnering with the sales team, so when I think about marketing, it's not just top funnel region, it's like what are the different programs that we're doing in the middle of the funnel to accelerate opportunities to help close deals and that's where we actually create different campaigns to serve some of the middle of the funnel functions. Content is a big piece of my strategy. I come from a content marketing background. I ran content marketing at Marketo for several years pre IPO into post and I really created the content engine there. So I've seen the value of thought leadership content, creating content for the different levels of the buyer journey, so that's a big focus for my team and then building that out with different multi-channel campaigns. Events are huge for us. I love events and we do big scale conferences and ancillary events around the conferences and then we also have a very active field marketing program where we're going into the regions and doing these smaller executive events that are very high-touch. So, it's really like all the different pieces. Right now, we're working on brand, we're working on look and feel, we'll redo the website, so we have everything. >> You're busy. >> Very. (laughs) >> You look great. >> Well, I'm going on. >> You look like you're not stressed at all. You look really relaxed. >> No. >> I want to ask you a question, 'cause you're on the cutting edge, you've got a great background. I love the MarTech. I've always said MarTech never really lived up to its promise because Cloud changed the game, but I still think MarTech will be huge, because with Cloud-scale and data driven strategies, I think it's going to be explosive even further than what we've seen, but there's been a lot of venture backing as Marketo has been successful, just recently bought by Adobe, but as you look at the digital landscape, you mentioned events, what's your thoughts on digital and physical events, 'cause you mentioned high-touch events, spectrum of activities you're deploying, you got physical events which are turning out to be quite fantastic, Face-to-Face is intimate. There's a lot of networking, and digital. How do you bring the event physical world with the digital. How do you view that as a marketer? We combine them, especially for the bigger event campaigns, so whether it's a trade show booth or an ancillary event around a trade show, like a very large party or something like that, we'll have a whole digital promotional strategy around that that includes, maybe we'll create a micro-site, we have ads that are targeted to people that we think that are going to attend these events, we'll do paid programs, other paid channels to drive attendance and to generate that visibility, so I really like to combine them and also email and nurturing is a big part of the strategy as well but it's important to have that online and offline presence and they should map to each other. >> It's interesting, we're seeing a trend, through theCUBE I've been to a lot of events where people want the digital experience to map to what's it like onsite; reputation, work with good people, have that kind of vibe, and it's evolving and search marketing has always been effective. Email marketing is out there, that's tried and true ways to fill the top of the funnel. Is there new techniques that you see coming that marketers should be aware of? You have that history with MarTech. You've seen where it's been and where it's going. What's a new hot area that you're watching that's evolving in real time, because we're go to a web 3.0 where the users have different expectations. It's not just email blasts anymore, although that's one mechanism. What's the new thing? What are you looking at? >> It's this like a new-old thing, I guess, (laughs) but comp-based marketing is something a lot of marketers are getting into right now and it's certainly a hot trend and a hot topic and it's really, I guess, an older way of thinking about marketing instead of that very wide top funnel region where you're just trying to get just thousands of people into your funnel and doing different things, you have your set key account list that you're going after, that your company and your reps and marketing all agree on and you're doing very targeted campaigns to those specific accounts, so we've been doing some really interesting things with different ad platforms. They have ad platforms now where you can actually target on an account by account basis, based on IP address and a lot of other attributes, and you can actually do account-based nurturing through ads, which is very interesting. I can have an ad that specifically calls out the company that only that company sees. Direct mail is actually also a pretty big piece of this, which again, is an older thing. Not direct mail like a little postcard you get, but like a dimensional mailer for an executive >> It's not a spray and pray, very targeted. >> No, it's very targeted. >> Talk about the dynamic, because you're now getting into what we're seeing as a trend where it's not just the marketing person, hey where are my Glengarry leads, or where are the leads, the leads aren't good enough, always that finger-pointing that's tended to go on traditionally, and I may be oversimplifying it, but-- >> It still happens. (laughs) >> The partnering with sales becomes even more critical because you have a lot of surface area in your marketing mix. That's not going away, you mentioned those variety of things, but tightening it up with sales and sales enablement seems to be a trend in marketing in general with data-driven things, because now you can measure everything. Now, it's like, what do you measure? So, having a tighter coupling with sales is a key thing. Talk about that dynamic and how it's changing and what you guys are doing. >> Being really tightly coupled with the sales development team and the sales team is a super important part of our strategy. Even when I think of what our goals are as a marketing organization, it's a lot later in the funnel than I think, historically, marketers have been measured. When I'm reporting out on performance, I report out on the entire funnel. I look at conversion rates for every single stage. Marketing is measured on pipeline and revenue and because of that reason, that requires a very tight coupling with the sales department, understanding who they're going after, what's working, what's not and where people are in the sales cycle so that marketing can jump in and it really assists them. It's not like a who gets credit for what type of situation. It's like we're all moving towards the same goal, so different things that we do, and I think attribution and measurement really helps quite a bit with this, is we can measure what campaign works for different regions. We know what campaigns are good for sourcing people, what campaigns are good for accelerating somebody from a meeting to an op. We can get very granular with topics, channels, campaign types and even accounts, looking at account engagement, so that information is really powerful when you partner with an AE and go at it together. We do a lot of later-stage field events as well, where we're going after key executives in open opportunities and doing very high-end dinners or maybe we're doing a track day or something like that. >> It's interesting because the world's changing from the, again, old to new, is interesting. I love how you put that, because the old way was big end budget, throw it out there, get the reach, and then now it's much more targeted, much more tactical. Still the same strategic objectives, but then cut up into more tactical programs. Is that a challenge for some? Just while you're here, your insight is so amazing. Other marketers that aren't as savvy as you, try to tackle this, what's your advice to them when you start thinking about that, because I'm sure you get asked all the time, how do I tackle this new world? How do you advise friends and colleagues in the industry when they say, I've got to move from the 50/50 ad spin where I don't know where it's being measured, it's a big budget, big ad agency, I want to take those dollars and deploy them into what looks like programs that used to have smaller budgets but in totality can be effective? What's your advice? >> I think it's a hard jump for a lot of marketers. A lot of marketers that I've come in contact with do have that, even if it's not like that big ad budget mentality, it's like that, oh we're responsible for generating leads, and that's kind of where it ends, and you talk impressions in those types of metrics. I think in order to really survive as a marketer these days, you have to move to that next level where you're measuring things and you're really thinking about that full funnel. The advice that I give to a lot of high-end executive teams is to start measuring your marketing department, your VP, your CMO on later stage metrics so that potentially their comp, if it's a bonus or whatever, that it's aligned to the sales team and that we're looking at pipeline and revenue instead of leads generated or impressions or other things like that. >> So real conversion. >> Yeah, just a little bit of a forcing function to get folks there and that's what I do with my team when we look at performance. >> Well Dayna, you're a real pro. Looking forward to having more conversations. I love the MarTech background that you have. I think Cloud Native is essentially going to have, as a major feature, MarTech kind of things. Data, content, analysis, real time, full measurement across multiple spectrums. That's the premise of Cloud, so love to follow up with you. Final topic area is Mesosphere. As you guys go next level, got some big funding, new CEO, what's the positioning, what's the value statement, how are you guys posturing to the marketplace? >> Really focusing on that, how these leader adopters are able to have these enterprise standards by having the flexibility of what some of these different technologies and platforms are able to give these companies. We're definitely focusing a lot on innovating through IOT and we're doing some really cool projects with customers on how they can use our platform for those types of projects and really, from a Kupernetes perspective, we're continuing to work on how we can optimize and drive our value proposition there. Then, again, thinking more in that Cloud-like way, how can we continue pushing the envelope in that Cloud-like experience for our own platform and software. >> Takeaway for you when you look at Amazon reinvent, which was a couple weeks ago and then KubeCon CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation event in Seattle just last week. What was your big takeaway? If you had to look back and zoom out and go on the balcony and look at the stage of the industry, what was your takeaway? What was your personal takeaway? What anecdotal things popped out at you? What was the learnings that you saw in those two events? What's happening? >> I think, again, as time goes, I think a lot of the themes I've been talking about. Especially at KubeCon with 8000 people, they were sold out way before the event. We were actually very surprised that they sold out. We weren't prepared for that 'cause we still had to purchase a bunch of additional tickets, but I think just the popularity of some of these technologies and the business folks and the executives that are attending these events, it is starting to move more towards that enterprise. How can we adopt this stuff for the enterprise? For both events, for me that was a key takeaway. When you're looking at the different vendors, even on the expo floor, what are they talking about, what are they trying to do? Then the attendance at these events and even a lot of the talks were around bringing this stuff to the next level, having more of that cloud-like experience for the enterprise and having those best practices in there. >> As the serious marketer that you are, what was your impression of the role the community plays, because Mesosphere has a great position in the community. They've been a great steward in the community, have a great reputation. The role of the community now as part of the whole marketing production system in and of itself. Reputation, referrals, this is a big part of it. This is a dynamic. Your thoughts on role of the community in marketing in these new areas. >> Role of the community is huge. You need the community on your side in order to grow the business, because those are the folks that are going to evangelize. Those are where the influencers are coming from. For me, as I've gotten into this space, it's really been trying to understand who these people are, what they're interested in, how we can provide value, how we can provide fun, what are the ways we can partner with the community and approach it in more of like a humanistic way, so that's what we've been doing a lot of work, in just trying to get to know the community and creating marketing that is effective and an assistance to them as well. >> One that adds value is always, it's like an upstream project. You create value, you get respected for it, as long as you're not trying to overplay your hand. I do want to get your thoughts on reaction to KubeCon. I thought one of the things that happened there, besides theCUBE being there, of course, we were there from the beginning, was, you guys stole the show at Mesosphere. You had Ice Cube perform, and that was the buzz of the show. Talk about what happened, what was the response, Ice Cube performed, it was great reviews, saw it on Twitter. What was that all about? Share some stories. >> I thought, when we were trying to plan KubeCon, and how can we really, my goal was, I want to take over the show and really generate that buzz. Again, a big piece of that is the community and trying to think of, what can we do for the community that's going to get them excited. Picking an artist is a challenge, right? It's got to hit all these different goals, like you've got to pick somebody that's not crazy millions of dollars, you have to pick somebody that people are really familiar with, you have to pick somebody that most people like that's still relevant. So I think choosing Ice Cube was an important piece of that. Then, that it was just, to me, having come from the MarTech space and the sales-type space, I know what some of these huge, impactful parties and side events can have on a brand and that space is very, that happens a lot, and I've done that in several companies. I don't think it's really happening as much in this space from my experience so far, >> That KubeCon first and that was a big, big production. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What was the feedback? Were you happy with the results, 'cause I thought it was fantastic. >> It was great. We got fantastic feedback. I knew it would be, when we launched it, a very new thing, so it created a lot of buzz, a lot of chatter, could be controversial, which I was prepared for and I thought would be good to start that conversation, but at the event, it was just incredible. We had a completely packed house. Everyone was so excited to be there. We had great reactions on Twitter and I think that the community was just really happy to have that place where we can all come together and have a great time and that enabled us to put our brand out there as, so when people think of Mesosphere, they'll remember that event, so it's been incredibly successful. >> The Ice Cube, great job. Okay, I want to get your thoughts, 2019, what's going to happen for you in 2019? What can we expect from Mesosphere? >> We can definitely expect some great product innovations, different things we're working on, especially with the funding, and a new CEO. We're definitely looking to, we're going to take the brand into the next level. I think you're going to see us a lot more. I'm thinking through a potential, kind of our own user conference in San Francisco for next year, where we'll do a couple of days. Multi-track, thought leadership, a bigger production, so that's something that's exciting. We've got a lot of great programs planned for 2019. >> Awesome. Well, congratulations on a great event at KubeCon with Ice Cube and all of the successful momentum at Mesosphere. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Dayna Rothman here, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere, turning up the heat in the marketing, bringing Mesosphere to the next level. A lot of momentum. The industry's on fire, it's just an amazing time in Cloud Native. This is theCUBE covering every day in Cloud Native here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)

(vibrant music) >> Everybody welcome to the special CUBE conversation here at the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Dayna Rothman, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. >> So you guys have a lot of action going on. >> Yes. >> A lot of funding, new CEO, a very successful CubeCon part of the CNCF, we saw each other there. The space is out of control right now. The growth is amazing. >> Yes. >> Amazon reinvent two weeks before in Vegas, packed. >> There's been a lot going on, geez. >> Talk about Mesosphere. You guys got some news and momentum. Talk about the momentum. >> Yeah, we've had a ton of momentum. We got 126 million in funding about eight months ago, or so, a little bit before I joined. I joined five, six months ago. Things have really kicked off in the space. Obviously, the space has gone crazy with everything around Kubernetes and all the different acquisitions and just almost crossing the chasm into some of those later adopters now, which has been really, really great for us. After the funding and hiring on a lot of seasoned executives, we're really taking marketing to the next place, taking what we're doing with product to the next phase, so it's been a great ride so far. >> Yeah, we've had a chance to interview you guys a lot over the years from OpenStack and then as the Cloud Native moves into the mainstream. It's interesting. The tech chops are solid, great company DNA, but it's interesting. You go back a year and a half or two years ago and say the word Kubernete, would be like, what language are you speaking? >> Yeah. >> Now, you see it in Forbes, see it everywhere. Kubernetes has risen to mainstream. Amazon Cloud, Google, Microsoft, they're all growing. Kubernetes is like a core, major generational thing in the tech world. You're new. >> Yes. >> What do you think about Kubernetes? Do you look at this, wow, what is Kubernetes? How did you get attracted to Mesosphere and what do you think about all this? >> Yeah, the funny thing about, just a Kubernetes story and me, I guess. A couple companies ago, working for MarTech company, I did have a boss that actually came from this space and I distinctly remember him talking about Kubernetes at that time and, coming from a different space, I just had like, what are you even talking about? He was going to CubeCon in the early days. So, I was actually familiar with it. Then, how I got attracted to Mesosphere and this space, I'd been at MarTech for a decade and really looking just to do something else and who's doing something really innovative, where's a different space that I can go in that's really growing. MarTech and SalesTech, a lot of these little players right now and nobody's really innovating. Actually, with Mesosphere, my husband actually works there as well and he started about a year and a half ago and I had spoken to the executive team several times about just marketing, best practices and marketing leadership, revenue and attribution, and the more I spoke to them, the more interested I got in the company, and then this role was available and it was just a great fit, plus I knew some of the ins and outs already just from having that connection to Mesosphere in the first place. >> Was it just saying too, you mentioned MarTech. We've been following that space for a long time. We actually got to see how this works with the first cloud before Cloud was a cloud. MarTech was very Cloud-oriented from day one. You think about what that was, self-service, lot of data issues, lot of applications that had real value, 'cause money's there. You got leads and all kinds of marketing activity, so MarTech has that almost cloud-first DNA to begin with and you come from that. Now when you come over to the Cloud Native, you're seeing the developer world building a whole 'nother generation of what looks like many industries that have that same characteristics, self-service, large scale, data. These are the top conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, interesting connection that you have that background. So when you come into this world and you see all these developers building out this application layer, CICD pipelining, and then below Kubernetes, you got all this tech, where are the opportunities? What's the value proposition from Mesosphere? What are you guys attacking? Who's your buyer? Are they developers, are they going to be businesses? Take a minute to explain that. >> A couple of different things to address some of your points. As far as our buyers and where the space is going, I think where we're really strong is really having that enterprise DNA where we can take a lot of this tech and a lot of these open-source projects and really make them enterprise ready so that companies that are much bigger and have all these security regulations and red tape can actually leverage them so that they can continue innovating. As we grow, our buyers are also evolving, from, in the earlier days, mostly developers, engineers, more of that technical crowd, but now we're coming across a lot more executive level folks. We're talking to the CIOs, the CTOs, the business users where we have to shift a little bit and have more of that business use case. The other thing is really that we're getting past the point of the really early adopters. We have customers that have been with us for awhile that are very innovative, Silicon Valley companies, and now we're seeing different industries. We have a lot of automotive clients, finance, manufacturings, some of these older industries that want to adopt technology like Kubernetes, but they don't know how to fit it into what their organization needs and wants from the IT department. >> So there's a lot of education involved, probably. >> I would imagine. >> Yes. >> Value creates other customers. Okay, I've got all these workloads. I see all the early adopters and the web-scale guys. We all live around here. We know all the Ubers and everyone else out there. Lift, what a great case study when you read those guys. But the mainstreamed America kind of companies that have data sets and are going to go to Cloud have to move these workloads around. Are they coming to you guys for specific help? Are they saying, teach us how to do it? What are the specific conversations that you guys have with those customers? >> Sure. Sometimes they come to us with a specific project, but the education piece I think is really big for us to get to the next level on what we're trying to do. That's where what I'm building out in the marketing team is going to be really powerful, so that instead of people coming to us on a project basis, we're educating some of these enterprise companies on how they can leverage it, what they should be thinking about, how they can make that transformation to more of a cloud-like environment and what they need to think about. That's a big part of the strategy going forward, is that we want to get out there as educators, as thought leaders in the space so that we can get in front of some of these folks that maybe have heard of Kubernetes or are thinking about it but don't quite understand what it is and how it fits into their business. We do, though, get several questions on just, hey, I'm interested in CICD, what is it, or what is this Kubernetes, can you guys help us? That's where we're jumping in. >> I want to ask you a question about the B2Bs and the BI space because one of the things I think is really interesting is you start to see the mainstream tech press go, whoa, Enterprise is hot, consumer's not. It tends to have these cycles and when you start to see companies like Mesosphere going to the next level, they're targeting customers in mainstream enterprise. They have to up their game and get on the marketing side. You're hired to do that. What's your strategy? Is it fill the pipeline, is it more educational, build more event, evangelism, localization, is it global? Take us through your vision of what's next level for Mesosphere. >> I think definitely all of those things and one of the most important things for me is, when I came on board, it was really, from an operational perspective, making sure that our marketing department is ready for scale in that we have all the things that we need in order to generate those leads and accelerate them through the pipeline and that we're really partnering with the sales team, so when I think about marketing, it's not just top funnel region, it's like what are the different programs that we're doing in the middle of the funnel to accelerate opportunities to help close deals and that's where we actually create different campaigns to serve some of the middle of the funnel functions. Content is a big piece of my strategy. I come from a content marketing background. I ran content marketing at Marketo for several years pre IPO into post and I really created the content engine there. So I've seen the value of thought leadership content, creating content for the different levels of the buyer journey, so that's a big focus for my team and then building that out with different multi-channel campaigns. Events are huge for us. I love events and we do big scale conferences and ancillary events around the conferences and then we also have a very active field marketing program where we're going into the regions and doing these smaller executive events that are very high-touch. So, it's really like all the different pieces. Right now, we're working on brand, we're working on look and feel, we'll redo the website, so we have everything. >> You're busy. >> Very. (laughs) >> You look great. >> Well, I'm going on. >> You look like you're not stressed at all. You look really relaxed. >> No. >> I want to ask you a question, 'cause you're on the cutting edge, you've got a great background. I love the MarTech. I've always said MarTech never really lived up to its promise because Cloud changed the game, but I still think MarTech will be huge, because with Cloud-scale and data driven strategies, I think it's going to be explosive even further than what we've seen, but there's been a lot of venture backing as Marketo has been successful, just recently bought by Adobe, but as you look at the digital landscape, you mentioned events, what's your thoughts on digital and physical events, 'cause you mentioned high-touch events, spectrum of activities you're deploying, you got physical events which are turning out to be quite fantastic, Face-to-Face is intimate. There's a lot of networking, and digital. How do you bring the event physical world with the digital. How do you view that as a marketer? We combine them, especially for the bigger event campaigns, so whether it's a trade show booth or an ancillary event around a trade show, like a very large party or something like that, we'll have a whole digital promotional strategy around that that includes, maybe we'll create a micro-site, we have ads that are targeted to people that we think that are going to attend these events, we'll do paid programs, other paid channels to drive attendance and to generate that visibility, so I really like to combine them and also email and nurturing is a big part of the strategy as well but it's important to have that online and offline presence and they should map to each other. >> It's interesting, we're seeing a trend, through theCUBE I've been to a lot of events where people want the digital experience to map to what's it like onsite; reputation, work with good people, have that kind of vibe, and it's evolving and search marketing has always been effective. Email marketing is out there, that's tried and true ways to fill the top of the funnel. Is there new techniques that you see coming that marketers should be aware of? You have that history with MarTech. You've seen where it's been and where it's going. What's a new hot area that you're watching that's evolving in real time, because we're go to a web 3.0 where the users have different expectations. It's not just email blasts anymore, although that's one mechanism. What's the new thing? What are you looking at? >> It's this like a new-old thing, I guess, (laughs) but comp-based marketing is something a lot of marketers are getting into right now and it's certainly a hot trend and a hot topic and it's really, I guess, an older way of thinking about marketing instead of that very wide top funnel region where you're just trying to get just thousands of people into your funnel and doing different things, you have your set key account list that you're going after, that your company and your reps and marketing all agree on and you're doing very targeted campaigns to those specific accounts, so we've been doing some really interesting things with different ad platforms. They have ad platforms now where you can actually target on an account by account basis, based on IP address and a lot of other attributes, and you can actually do account-based nurturing through ads, which is very interesting. I can have an ad that specifically calls out the company that only that company sees. Direct mail is actually also a pretty big piece of this, which again, is an older thing. Not direct mail like a little postcard you get, but like a dimensional mailer for an executive >> It's not a spray and pray, very targeted. >> No, it's very targeted. >> Talk about the dynamic, because you're now getting into what we're seeing as a trend where it's not just the marketing person, hey where are my Glengarry leads, or where are the leads, the leads aren't good enough, always that finger-pointing that's tended to go on traditionally, and I may be oversimplifying it, but-- >> It still happens. (laughs) >> The partnering with sales becomes even more critical because you have a lot of surface area in your marketing mix. That's not going away, you mentioned those variety of things, but tightening it up with sales and sales enablement seems to be a trend in marketing in general with data-driven things, because now you can measure everything. Now, it's like, what do you measure? So, having a tighter coupling with sales is a key thing. Talk about that dynamic and how it's changing and what you guys are doing. >> Being really tightly coupled with the sales development team and the sales team is a super important part of our strategy. Even when I think of what our goals are as a marketing organization, it's a lot later in the funnel than I think, historically, marketers have been measured. When I'm reporting out on performance, I report out on the entire funnel. I look at conversion rates for every single stage. Marketing is measured on pipeline and revenue and because of that reason, that requires a very tight coupling with the sales department, understanding who they're going after, what's working, what's not and where people are in the sales cycle so that marketing can jump in and it really assists them. It's not like a who gets credit for what type of situation. It's like we're all moving towards the same goal, so different things that we do, and I think attribution and measurement really helps quite a bit with this, is we can measure what campaign works for different regions. We know what campaigns are good for sourcing people, what campaigns are good for accelerating somebody from a meeting to an op. We can get very granular with topics, channels, campaign types and even accounts, looking at account engagement, so that information is really powerful when you partner with an AE and go at it together. We do a lot of later-stage field events as well, where we're going after key executives in open opportunities and doing very high-end dinners or maybe we're doing a track day or something like that. >> It's interesting because the world's changing from the, again, old to new, is interesting. I love how you put that, because the old way was big end budget, throw it out there, get the reach, and then now it's much more targeted, much more tactical. Still the same strategic objectives, but then cut up into more tactical programs. Is that a challenge for some? Just while you're here, your insight is so amazing. Other marketers that aren't as savvy as you, try to tackle this, what's your advice to them when you start thinking about that, because I'm sure you get asked all the time, how do I tackle this new world? How do you advise friends and colleagues in the industry when they say, I've got to move from the 50/50 ad spin where I don't know where it's being measured, it's a big budget, big ad agency, I want to take those dollars and deploy them into what looks like programs that used to have smaller budgets but in totality can be effective? What's your advice? >> I think it's a hard jump for a lot of marketers. A lot of marketers that I've come in contact with do have that, even if it's not like that big ad budget mentality, it's like that, oh we're responsible for generating leads, and that's kind of where it ends, and you talk impressions in those types of metrics. I think in order to really survive as a marketer these days, you have to move to that next level where you're measuring things and you're really thinking about that full funnel. The advice that I give to a lot of high-end executive teams is to start measuring your marketing department, your VP, your CMO on later stage metrics so that potentially their comp, if it's a bonus or whatever, that it's aligned to the sales team and that we're looking at pipeline and revenue instead of leads generated or impressions or other things like that. >> So real conversion. >> Yeah, just a little bit of a forcing function to get folks there and that's what I do with my team when we look at performance. >> Well Dayna, you're a real pro. Looking forward to having more conversations. I love the MarTech background that you have. I think Cloud Native is essentially going to have, as a major feature, MarTech kind of things. Data, content, analysis, real time, full measurement across multiple spectrums. That's the premise of Cloud, so love to follow up with you. Final topic area is Mesosphere. As you guys go next level, got some big funding, new CEO, what's the positioning, what's the value statement, how are you guys posturing to the marketplace? >> Really focusing on that, how these leader adopters are able to have these enterprise standards by having the flexibility of what some of these different technologies and platforms are able to give these companies. We're definitely focusing a lot on innovating through IOT and we're doing some really cool projects with customers on how they can use our platform for those types of projects and really, from a Kupernetes perspective, we're continuing to work on how we can optimize and drive our value proposition there. Then, again, thinking more in that Cloud-like way, how can we continue pushing the envelope in that Cloud-like experience for our own platform and software. >> Takeaway for you when you look at Amazon reinvent, which was a couple weeks ago and then CubeCon CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation event in Seattle just last week. What was your big takeaway? If you had to look back and zoom out and go on the balcony and look at the stage of the industry, what was your takeaway? What was your personal takeaway? What anecdotal things popped out at you? What was the learnings that you saw in those two events? What's happening? >> I think, again, as time goes, I think a lot of the themes I've been talking about. Especially at CubeCon with 8000 people, they were sold out way before the event. We were actually very surprised that they sold out. We weren't prepared for that 'cause we still had to purchase a bunch of additional tickets, but I think just the popularity of some of these technologies and the business folks and the executives that are attending these events, it is starting to move more towards that enterprise. How can we adopt this stuff for the enterprise? For both events, for me that was a key takeaway. When you're looking at the different vendors, even on the expo floor, what are they talking about, what are they trying to do? Then the attendance at these events and even a lot of the talks were around bringing this stuff to the next level, having more of that cloud-like experience for the enterprise and having those best practices in there. >> As the serious marketer that you are, what was your impression of the role the community plays, because Mesosphere has a great position in the community. They've been a great steward in the community, have a great reputation. The role of the community now as part of the whole marketing production system in and of itself. Reputation, referrals, this is a big part of it. This is a dynamic. Your thoughts on role of the community in marketing in these new areas. >> Role of the community is huge. You need the community on your side in order to grow the business, because those are the folks that are going to evangelize. Those are where the influencers are coming from. For me, as I've gotten into this space, it's really been trying to understand who these people are, what they're interested in, how we can provide value, how we can provide fun, what are the ways we can partner with the community and approach it in more of like a humanistic way, so that's what we've been doing a lot of work, in just trying to get to know the community and creating marketing that is effective and an assistance to them as well. >> One that adds value is always, it's like an upstream project. You create value, you get respected for it, as long as you're not trying to overplay your hand. I do want to get your thoughts on reaction to CubeCon. I thought one of the things that happened there, besides theCUBE being there, of course, we were there from the beginning, was, you guys stole the show at Mesosphere. You had Ice Cube perform, and that was the buzz of the show. Talk about what happened, what was the response, Ice Cube performed, it was great reviews, saw it on Twitter. What was that all about? Share some stories. >> I thought, when we were trying to plan CubeCon, and how can we really, my goal was, I want to take over the show and really generate that buzz. Again, a big piece of that is the community and trying to think of, what can we do for the community that's going to get them excited. Picking an artist is a challenge, right? It's got to hit all these different goals, like you've got to pick somebody that's not crazy millions of dollars, you have to pick somebody that people are really familiar with, you have to pick somebody that most people like that's still relevant. So I think choosing Ice Cube was an important piece of that. Then, that it was just, to me, having come from the MarTech space and the sales-type space, I know what some of these huge, impactful parties and side events can have on a brand and that space is very, that happens a lot, and I've done that in several companies. I don't think it's really happening as much in this space from my experience so far, >> That CubeCon first and that was a big, big production. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What was the feedback? Were you happy with the results, 'cause I thought it was fantastic. >> It was great. We got fantastic feedback. I knew it would be, when we launched it, a very new thing, so it created a lot of buzz, a lot of chatter, could be controversial, which I was prepared for and I thought would be good to start that conversation, but at the event, it was just incredible. We had a completely packed house. Everyone was so excited to be there. We had great reactions on Twitter and I think that the community was just really happy to have that place where we can all come together and have a great time and that enabled us to put our brand out there as, so when people think of Mesosphere, they'll remember that event, so it's been incredibly successful. >> The Ice Cube, great job. Okay, I want to get your thoughts, 2019, what's going to happen for you in 2019? What can we expect from Mesosphere? >> We can definitely expect some great product innovations, different things we're working on, especially with the funding, and a new CEO. We're definitely looking to, we're going to take the brand into the next level. I think you're going to see us a lot more. I'm thinking through a potential, kind of our own user conference in San Francisco for next year, where we'll do a couple of days. Multi-track, thought leadership, a bigger production, so that's something that's exciting. We've got a lot of great programs planned for 2019. >> Awesome. Well, congratulations on a great event at CubeCon with Ice Cube and all of the successful momentum at Mesosphere. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Dayna Rothman here, Vice President of Marketing at Mesosphere, turning up the heat in the marketing, bringing Mesosphere to the next level. A lot of momentum. The industry's on fire, it's just an amazing time in Cloud Native. This is theCUBE covering every day in Cloud Native here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCom North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat the cloud-native computing foundation and its ecosystem partner. >> Welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE's live coverage here in Seattle of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE. Three days of live coverage. Wall to wall, 8000 people here. Doubled from the previous event in North America, expanding globally, we are here with Liz Rice, technology analyst, evangelist at Aqua Security and program co-chair here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. Liz, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> I know you had a busy day, keynotes and all. A lot of activity, a lot of hand shaking, walking around, very crowded. >> It is, we're packed. We're absolutely at capacity here and the event sold out and it's busy. >> A lot of energy, real quick, I know you guys did a lot of work, you guys always do a great job, exceptional performance again. >> Thank you. >> CNCF does a great job on the content programming. It's about the open source communities. That's fundamental, a lot of end users, both participating and consuming. Vendor list is expanding. Putting the program together gets challenging when you have these kind of numbers. What were the themes? How did you put it all together? What was resonating? What's the focus? >> Yeah, it was so hard, we had so many applications that we could only accept 13%, which makes it almost impossible some of the decisions you have to make. And some of the things that were coming out, were like Knative, a lot of submissions around Knative. Serverless in general obviously being quite a hot topic, I would say across our industry. Really great talks from end users and we've seen a few on the keynote stage. Where some brands that we're all aware of, people like Airbnb, sharing their stories of what they've done to make their deployments, their cloud-native deployments, their use of kubernetes successful. So it's not just working from the ties, and doing some experiments, they are telling us how they've done this for real. >> You had a very successful KubeCon in Copenhagen. And so how did you integrate from Copenhagen to here. What were some of the inefficiencies? Obviously, the bigger numbers here. You recently had China the success where, we've reported on SiliconANGLE, the open source consumption and contribution is off the charts. It's huge, it's growing and it's a new dynamic. So between China, and Copenhagen, here, interesting things happening. >> China was phenomenal for me. It was my first trip to China, so it was eye-opening in all sorts of respects. And one of the really interesting things there was the use of machine learning. The uses of kube flow, real life examples. Again I think there is something about how much data they've been able to collect in China. But we heard some really great stories of, for example, electricity companies using machine learning on kubernetes to predict demand. It was fascinating. >> It's a lot of adoption. >> Yes. >> They are at the front end, they are a mobile culture. IOT is booming over there, it's just massive. >> Absolutely. >> Alright here in Seattle, obviously Seattle home of AWS, and I was just talking to some folks here locally in Seattle, just this morning, they said they think this is the biggest conference of the year here in Seattle. Which is really telling where you guys have come from. Interesting dynamic. A lot of new ecosystem partners. What's happening? It seems to be energy, the buzz. There's a subtext here that's buzzing around the hallways. What's the most important thing that people should be taking away from this event this year? >> I think the scale of it is coming from real adoption and businesses that are moving their applications into the cloud. Public cloud and hybrid cloud and finding success through doing that with cloud native components. You mentioned the end users who want to be part of the community, and they actually wanted to contribute to the community. You can look around the hall and see booths from, like Uber's over there. They're really contributing to this community. It's not just a bunch of enthusiasts, it's for real. >> Problems being solved, real company end users. >> So Liz, one of the things we've been looking at this is not a monolith here. You've actually got a whole lot of communities. As I've been wandering the floor, if I'm talking to people. We had Matt come on to talk about Envoy and they had their own conference at the beginning of the week and they had 250 people. As I'm wandering around, you talk to a number and it's like oh, I'm here all about Helm. You know there's different service meshes all over the place that everybody is talking about. >> Yeah another big theme. >> You're heavily focused on the security aspects there. I believe you've got a project that Aqua has been involved in. It was kube-hunter if I've got it. Maybe before you talk about kube-hunter, maybe just talk about balancing, this isn't one community, it's gotten really big. Do we need to break this into a micro-services space show? We'll have the core, but lots of other things and spread it out all over the world. >> Sure, it's a real challenge as this community is growing so fast and trying to keep the community feel. Balancing what the contributors want to do and making sure they're getting value and having the conversations they want, but also enabling the vendors, and the end users, and every constituent part to get something good out of this conference. It's a challenge as this gets bigger. There's no kind of, if this doubles again, will it feel the same? That's hard to imagine. So we got to think carefully about how-- >> We've seen that happen and it would not, even from last year to this year was a big change for a lot of people. >> For sure. >> So kube-hunter tell us about that. >> Yeah, kube-hunter, yes, kube-hunter is one of our open source projects at Aqua. It's basically penetration testing for kubernetes clusters, so it's written in Python. It attempts to make network requests looking for things like the open ports. It will tell you if you got some misconfigurations, 'cause a lot of the security issues with kubernetes can come about through poor configuration. And the other thing you can do, you can run it from externally to your cluster. You can also run it inside a pod inside your cluster and then that's simulating what might happen if an attacker got into your cluster, what could they do from there. They compromised a pod which could happen to a software vulnerability. Once they're in the pod, how vulnerable are you? What's the blast radius of that attack? And kube-hunter can help you see whether it's a complete disaster or actually fairly contained. >> Alright, Liz how are we doing from a security standpoint? We've watched the rise of containers over the last few years. And it's like okay wait do I need to put in some kind of lightweight VM? Do I do something there? What can I trust? What do I do? At AWS Reinvent a couple of weeks ago, there's the whole container marketplace. Feels like we are making progress but still plenty of work to do. >> Right, right, container security has lots of parts to it as you go through the life cycle of a container. Actually at AWS Reinvent, Aqua was recognized as having, I think they called it competency. Which I think it's a bit better than competency in container security. >> That's a complement I believe. >> Yeah, really complement, really competent. I think as community on the open source level, there are lots of good things happening. For example, the defaults in kubernetes have been getting better and better. If you are an enterprise, and particularly if you're a financial user, or a media company, or a government organization, you have much stronger requirements from a security perspective and that's where the open source tooling on its own may not be sufficient, and you may need to plug in commercial solutions like Aqua to really beef that up. And also to provide that end to end security right from when you're building your image through to the run time protection which is really powerful. >> Security has got to be built in from the beginning. Let me get your thoughts on end user traction and the huge demand for what end users are doing. I know you guys are seeing on the program side, the Linux foundation, CNC was talking about trying to get more case studies. We're seeing the end users prominent here. You mentioned Uber, Apple's here. A bunch of other companies, they're here. So end users are not only just contributing, they are also consuming. How are the new enterprises that are coming in consuming and interacting and engaging with kubernetes? Where are they on the IQ, if you will, level and what are they engaging on? Kubernetes has matured a bit and ready. It's been deployed, people using it. People gathering around it, but now people are starting to consume and deploy it at different scales. What's the end user uptake? What's the hot areas? What do you see the most people digging in? >> Great question, so I think we are seeing a lot of, particularly, I want to say like mature start-ups, so the Ubers and the Airbnbs and the Lyfts. They've got these massive scaled technology problems, and kubernetes is giving them, and the whole cloud-native community around it, it's giving them the ability to do these kind of custom things that they need to do. The kind of weird and wonderful things. They can add whatever adaptations they need, that maybe they wouldn't get if they were in a traditional architecture. So they're kind of the prominent voices that we are hearing right now. But at Aqua we are seeing some of these, maybe what you might call more traditional businesses like banks. They want to replicate that. They want to shape functionality really quickly. They are seeing challenges from upstart and they want to compete. So they know they've got to shift functionality quickly. They've got to do continuous deployment. Containers enable that. The whole cloud-native world enables that and that's where the adoption's from. >> They can take the blueprints from the people who built it from the ground up, the large scale startups, cloud-native in the beginning, and kind of apply the traditional IT kind of approach with the same tooling and the same platform. >> And we are seeing some interesting things around making that easier. So things like the CNAB, the cloud-native application bundling, that is coming out at Microsoft and Docker are involved in that. I think that's all to do with making it easier for enterprises to just go, yeah, this is the application I want to run it in the cloud. >> So let me ask you a question around the customer end users that we see coming onboard, because you have the upstream kind of community, the downstream benefits are impacting certainly IT and then developers, right? The classic developers, IT is starting to reimagine their infrastructure. All the goodness with cloud, and machine learning, and application is being redefined. It's changing the investment. So in 2019, what's your view on how companies are shaping their investment strategy to IT investment or technology investment strategies with cloud-native? Because this is a real trend that you just pointed out. Okay I'm a big company and I've used the old way and now I want the new way. So there's a lot of okay, instant start. Turn the key, does it run? There's a lot of managed services here, so the new persona of customer. How does that impact their investment, IT investments in your mind? What are you seeing please share any color commentary around that? >> I'm sure we're all aware that we're seeing shifts away from the traditional data center into public cloud which has implications around opex rather than capex. And I guess following on from that people worrying about whether vendor lock-in is a thing. Should they be just adopting in one public cloud or perhaps putting their eggs across different baskets? Should they be using these managed platforms? We have all these different distributions, we have these different managed solutions for kubernetes, there's a lot of choice out there. I think it's going to be interesting to see how that shapes out over the next few years. Are all these different distributions going to find a niche or how's that going to work? >> Matt Klein had a great observation. He was on earlier today from Lyft. He says look to solve a problem, use the tech to solve a problem, and then iterate, build on that. It's iteration mull of dev, ops. I think that's a good starting point. There's no magic silver bullet here. There's no magic answer, I think it's more of just get in there and get it going. The other question I have for you is 2019 prediction for kubernetes. What's going to happen this coming year? We're seeing this picture now, 8000 people, diverse audience. >> Yeah. >> What's the prediction 2019 for kubernetes? >> Oh, great question. I think maybe broader than just kubernetes, but the kind of cloud-native. Because kubernetes is like Janet said in her keynote this morning it's essentially boring. It kind of does what it's supposed to do now. I think what's going to be interesting is seeing those other pieces around it and above it, the improved developer experiences making it easier for companies to adopt. Maybe some of these choices around things like what service mesh you're going to use. How you're going to implement your observability. How you're going to deploy all this stuff without needing to hire 20 super detailed experts. We've got all the experts in this stuff. They're kind of here. The early adopters, great. Maybe that next wave, how are they going to be able to take advantage of this cloud-native? >> I think the programmability is key. Well great to have-- >> I think a big part of that is actually is going to be serverless. The ease of using serverless rather than the flexibility you get out of-- >> The millisecond latency around compute, yeah it's great. Well thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. Final question for you, what surprised you this year? Is there one thing that jumped out at you that you didn't expect? Good, bad or ugly? Great show here, it was packed. The waiting list was like 1500. What was the surprise this year from a program standpoint? >> I think actually the nicest surprise was the contribution of Phippy and all those lovely characters from Phippy Goes to the Zoo and those characters being donated by Microsoft, Matt Butcher and Karen Chu's work, was terrific. And it's just beautiful, just lovely. >> That's awesome, thanks so much Liz. Appreciate Liz right here. Program co-chair at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, also technology evangelist at Aqua Security. That's her day job and her other job, she's running the content programming which is very huge here. Congratulations, I know it's tough work, a great job. >> Thank you very much. >> It's theCUBE coverage, breaking down all the action here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman, stay with us. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're only on day two, we've got a whole nother day. A lot of great stories coming out of here and great content. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and, their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, for AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent, 2018. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, our sixth year covering this event. We've been to all the re:Invents, except for the original one, watched the progress of cloud computing. And it's a lot of new things happening, more compute, more power. We're here with our special guest, RaeJeanne Skillern, who's also known as RJ inside Intel. Vice-President of Data Center Group and the General Manager of the Cloud Service Provider Platform Group at Intel. Good to see you again. >> Nice to see you again. >> The headline on silkenangle dot com right now, "In a blockbuster move, "Amazon jumps into data center with both feet". Which really validates kind of some of the commentary we've been seeing in the queue for many, many years. And our analysts and you guys are involved in the Data Center. Data Center's still going to be a big part of computing. It's not going away. That's your business. >> Yes. >> And the cloud service provider, which is also growing. So, take a minute. >> It is growing, I've been personally covering the public cloud at Intel for a decade. And, when I started I'm not sure I had any concept how big this was going to be. And the one thing that I'm positive about, is we're just still at the beginning. Because every use case you see, all the development, all the IOT, all the business transformation, we're just starting, right. This is a good place to be, but there's more coming. And, if I look at just 2018, I'm a little competitive at work, but we were to proud to announce earlier this year, the end of the summer, that the cloud is now 43% of the Data Center Group's revenue. So, coming from when I started, 10% or something like that little, now to be the number one contributor. And, we, in the first half of the year, had a 43% a year revenue growth. This industry is booming. And I wish I could say it was my hard doing, but I mean, if you come to an event like this, you know why it's growing. >> And the cham is increasing in the total market availability with the cloud, is requiring more and more horsepower. >> Yes. >> You've got IOT Edge, you've got the Data Center, you got the cloud, and software is being written, specifically to take advantage of something. So, huge market opportunity, still. >> Yes. >> What are some of the innovations? Take us through a little bit of your mindset on how you guys are attacking this growth, surface area of the market, starting to see specialized things, general purpose, compute is not going away, storage, networking, still very important. You've got FTGAs out there. I mean, amazing amount of opportunities, with innovations. >> You know, you hit so much of it, and I really agree with some of the comments you made. It started off for us, with silicon technology. But, what a lot of people don't know is, we have core computes, network, storage, FPGAs, purpose built accelerators, and we can create custom aesics for any one of our customers. We also have a unique ability to not only just customize, uniquely, but you talked about the many different use cases from Edge to Data Center, it's because every workload demands a different set of technology capability. If you want true optimization at the TCO, per TCO level. And so that's why it's so important for us to work with customers like Amazon, not just to customize one SKU, but many SKUs. We are, and I was surprised at this number, out of our latest Xeon processor, the Intel Xeon scalable processors, there's actually 54 instances, on just that one CPU generation alone, and 51 of those, are from a custom CPU, that were tailored for unique workloads and instance types. So, that's part of it, but you also talked about the software. And, that's another thing, I think people think Intel's the hardware company. OK, we make hardware, we're a huge software company, thousands of engineers. And, what I love about my job, is I built a team and call them the Cloud Ninjas, but they're software and hardware engineers, that go onsite with customers. They, whether it's performance tuning and optimization, or we are co-creating cloud services. New cloud services, with our customers, that innovation, up and down the stack, that's where real innovation can happen. Two heads together, not just one. (laughs) >> So the cloud is now the number one consumer of your technologies. >> Yes. >> There are a lot of misconceptions early on about the cloud. Everybody thought, okay, the cloud is going to be just one big cloud. It's actually quite diverse. It's global in scale, it's a services business, which has always been sort of fragmented and global, despite Amazon's dominance in infrastructure service. The Data Center itself, the players are kind of consolidating, which is kind of interesting. So, how has cloud affected the way in which you guys look at the market, go to market, everybody else thought everything was going to be standard off the shelf components, in the early days of cloud. >> No. >> Now you're driving towards customization. >> No. >> So what's happening there, what are the big ideas. >> I think we've learned a lot along the way, you're right. One of the things, I mean, these cloud service providers are pushing me off the road map. They want more than we can deliver, so that's where we bring so much at hand to do about it. But, I'd say while a lot of big players are getting bigger, the market is still really in a healthy way diversified. The Super Seven, as we call them, the world's largest, they're growing fast, about 35% around the world. The next wave around the world are growing almost as fast, about 25, 27%. Consumer SAS, has been, Twitters, and Facebooks, and Ubers, right, has been a large part of the cloud. It's now 50/50 with business. And they're both growing at the same categories going forwards, so you're going to see the diversity. Not just big players, but also small. Not just consumers, but business services. And then that's spanning a lot of global growth, and a lot of, if you see the wall of logos in any Amazon presentation, it's because they have partners all over the world. >> RaeJeanne, I want to get your perspective. I talked about this a couple years ago on theCUBE, about the power law of distribution of cloud providers, the top of the head is the big guys, then kind of narrows down. But then I was predicting a cloud service provider market was going to expand and I want to get your thoughts cause that's kind of happening now, you're kind of saying. But I want to get specific on this. You got core cloud, Amazon's of the world. Then you've got hybrid cloud, kind of Data Center. Then you've got the business cloud, business SAS. >> Business SAS. >> Sales force, Twitter, you mentioned those guys. >> Uh huh. >> They run clouds. Enterprises are now going to be cloudified, with commonality. >> Multi-cloud road. >> This is changing the nature of the business. Do you see it that way, talk about this business cloud, it's not competing with core cloud, it's just an expansionary. >> It's so interesting because there is certainly some competition or cannibalization within the cloud. But what I tend to see is, whichever part of this, because you'll hear a Business SAS company, some of it's running in the cloud, some of it's running on their own premises. They're doing that for a reason and both are growing. And then you talk about infrastructure service, but what really happens, especially we another rise moves their business into the cloud, there is just some part of it, just moved A to B, but what we're finding is about 30% of it is TAM expansive, because there are things when you move to an Amazon, or you move to another cloud service provider, take a mature SAS provider, they're just things that they can do that you never would have been able to do in your own IT shop. So, that's driving TAM expansion on top of it. That's also creating a lot of new market entry points, for new businesses to come in and innovate around. Security offerings, verticalized offerings, geo-based specialized offerings. So, yes, there's some friendly competition, but even when I ask somebody who would say, they might be the little challenger to a big infrastructure service player, they say but you know what, we actually get so much business by working with them too, it's hard for me to say, are they competition or a partner, right. That's the industry we live in. >> Co-creation, you mentioned that earlier, a big part of it. >> And the other big TAM expander is you've got the data, you've got AI, machine learning. >> Yes. >> You've got the cloud for scale and then you've got Edge. >> Yeah. >> These are not, it's not a zero sum game, where you're moving stuff from the Data Center into the cloud, these are all incremental. >> New. All new. >> So what are you seeing there? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about the Edge. For me, it kind of feels like that next, uncharted frontier, everybody's investing, everybody's doing amazing things. We're getting the 5G out, we're getting better technologies, we're learning how to store data, and move it faster, quicker, and cheaper. We're getting set up, but the use cases are just yet to be really fully defined. And I'll be honest, when I look at my market modeling, over the next five to 10 years, I always put a little disclaimer, this does not comprehend what's going to happen when billions of devices come online, when we activate. So I think when people say, it's a cloud, it's been going so fast it's going to just slow down. Why? Because innovation's not stopping. >> I think you hit the nail on a point we try to clarify on theCUBE here, is that a lot of people are misunderstanding what a cloud is, and about cloud service providers. As it grows, it's a rising tide floats all boats, so everyone tries to squint through, they're winning and a market share there. It's a different game changing, so that's a great point. I want to, as we get ready to end this segment here, give you a chance to talk about the relationship with Intel. You guys, again, cloud service provider is growing. Big part of your business. But you guys have been working with Amazon, for a long time, talk about the relationship between Intel and AWS. >> Yeah it is, it's a privilege, to be able to. The folks at a company like Amazon, and specifically the ones at Amazon I work with, they have the ability, obviously, to track some of the most amazing talent in the industry. And these people move fast. And, they have a lot of choice. You can either be there with them, ahead of them, and do the customization and differentiate them, and give them what they need. Or, they're going to leave you in the dust. So, I'd like to say we have a great partnership, because they've given us the honor over 12 years. We have so many, from the Data Center, to the Edge, the car, the racer car, deep lines. So many things we're doing together, Stage Maker, Machine and Deep Learning. But it's a, if we slow down, even for a bit, we're going to get left behind. So my job is to just keep running and trying to get ahead of them. And every time I think I get there, they come and poof. But, we're working together. It's a great, challenging partnership. But one that I can guarantee there's better innovation, from Intel, coming out of it, because of getting the opportunity to work with Amazon. >> And you guys are contributing to them too. It's a good win, win scenario. >> I believe so. They've said some really nice things about us, so, about our processing technologies. Our products, seven generations of our products, we're in every availability zone, every instance frame. We've got a great position. >> Well, congratulations on the business performance, I love the Cloud Service Provider expansion, love the Data Center focus, that's really relevant. And acknowledging by Amazon, that's good news to see. And, just stuff. Thank you guys for your partnership with theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Here at theCUBE, Intel Cube. Intel is a big sponsor of theCUBE, we really appreciate that. I'm John with Dave Vallante. Stay with us for more AWS coverage re:Invent, our sixth year in a row, covering all the action. All the value being created. Stay tuned for more after this short break. (techno music)

(lively orchestral music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the cofounder of SiliconANGLE Media, cohost of theCUBE. We're here with fellow cloud influencer, friend of theCUBE, Sarbjeet Johal, who's always on Twitter. If you check out my Twitter stream, you'll find out we've always got some threads. He's always jumping in the CrowdChat and I think was in the leaderboard for our last CrowdChat on multi-cloud Kubernetes. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here. >> Thanks for coming in. So you're very prolific on Twitter. We love the conversations. We're gettin' a lot of energy around some of the narratives that have been flowing around, obviously helped this week by the big news of IBM acquiring Red Hat for, what was it, 30, what was the number, 34? >> 34, yeah. >> $34 billion, huge premium, essentially changing the game in open source, some think, some don't, but it begs the question, you know, cloud obviously is relevant. Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, actually now saying cloud is where it's at, 20% have been on the cloud, 80% have not yet moved over there, trillion-dollar market which we called, actually, I called, a few years ago when I wrote my Forbes story about Amazon, the Trillion Dollar Baby I called it. This is real. >> Yeah. So apps are moving to the cloud, value for businesses on the cloud, people are seeing accelerated timelines for shipping. Software. >> Yeah. >> Software offer is eating the world. Cloud is eating software, and data's at the center of it. So I want to get your thoughts on this, because I know that you've been talking a lot about technical debt, you know, the role of developer, cloud migration. The reality is, this is not easy. If you're doin' cloud native, it's pretty easy. >> Still pretty easy, yeah. >> If that's all you got, right, so if you're a startup and/or built on the cloud, you really got the wind at your back, and it's lookin' really good. >> Yeah. >> If you're not born in the cloud, you're an IT shop, they've been consolidating for years, and now told to jump to a competitive advantage, you literally got to make a pivot overnight. >> Yeah, actually, at high level, I think cloud consumption you can divide into two buckets, right? One is the greenfield which, as you said, it's not slam dunk, all these startups are born in cloud, and all these new projects, systems of innovation what I usually refer to those, are born in cloud, and they are operated in cloud, and at some point they will sort of fade away or die in cloud, but the hard part is the legacy applications sitting in the enterprise, right? So those are the trillion dollar sort of what IBM folks are talking about. That's a messy problem to tackle. Within that, actually, there are some low-hanging fruits. Of course, we can move those workloads to the cloud. I usually don't refer the application, the workloads as applications because people are sort of religiously attached to the applications. They feel like it's their babies, right? >> Yeah. >> So I usually say workload, so some workloads are ripe for the cloud. It's data mining, BI, and also the AI part of it, right? So but some other workloads which are not right for the cloud right now or they're hard to move or the ERP system, systems of record and systems of engagement or what we call CRMs and marketing sort of applications which are legacy ones. >> Yeah, hard-coded operationalized software frameworks and packages and vendors like Oracle. >> Yes. >> They're entrenched. >> Oracle SAP, and there's so many other software vendors that have provided tons of software to the data centers that they're sitting there, and the hard part is that nobody wants to pull the plug on the existing applications. I've seen that time and again. I have done, my team has done more than 100 data center audits from EMC and VMware days. We have seen that time and again. Nobody wants to pull the plug on the application. >> 'Cause they're runnin' in production! (laughs) >> They are running in production. And it's hard to measure the usage of those applications, also, that's a hard part of the sort of old stack, if you will. >> Yeah. So the reality is, this is kind of getting to the heart of what we wanted to talk about which is, you know, vendor hype and market realities. >> Yeah. >> The market reality is, you can't unplug legacy apps overnight, but you got a nice thing called containers and Kubernetes emerging, that's nice. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so check, I love that, but still, the reality is, is okay, then who does it? >> Yeah. >> Do I add more complexity? We just had Jerry Chen and hot startup Rockset on, they're trying to reduce the complexity by just having a more simple approach. This is a hard architectural challenge. >> It is. >> So that's one fundamental thing I want to discuss with you. And then there's the practical nature of saying assuming you get the architecture right, migrating and operating. Let's take those as separate, let's talk architecture, then we'll talk operating and migrating. >> Okay. >> Architecturally, what do people do, what are people doing, what you're seeing, what do you think is the right architecture for cloud architects, because that's a booming position. >> Yeah. >> There's more and more cloud architects out there, and the openings for cloud architects is massive. >> Yeah, I think in architecture, the microservices are on the rise. There are enabling technologies behind it. It doesn't happen sort of magically overnight. We have had some open source sort of development in that area the, the RESTful APIs actually gave the ports to the microservices. Now we can easily inter-operate between applications, right? So and our sort of, sorry I'm blanking out, so our way to divide the compute at the sort of micro-chunks from VM, virtual machine, to the container to the next level is the serverless, right? So that is giving ports to the microservices, and the integration technologies are improving at the same time. The problem of SEL lies in the data, which is the storage part and the data part and the network, and the network is closely associated with security. So security and network are two messy parts. They are in the architecture, even in the pure cloud architecture in the Kubernete world, those are two sort of hard parts. And Cisco is trying to address the network part. I speak, I spoke to some folks there, and what they are doing in that space, they are addressing the network and SCODI part, sort of deepening-- >> And it's a good time for them to do that. >> Yeah. >> Because, I mean, you go back, and you know, we covered DevNet Create, which is Susie Wee, she's a rising star at Cisco, and now she's running all of DevNet. So the developer network within Cisco's has a renaissance because, you know, you go back 20 years ago, if you were a network guy, you ran the show, I mean, everything ran the network. The network was everything. The network dictated what would happen. Then it kind of went through a funk of like now cloud native's hot and serverless, but now that programability's hitting the network because remember the holy trinity of transformation is compute, storage, and networking. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> Those aren't going away. >> Yeah, they aren't going away. >> Right, so networking now is seeing some, you know, revitalization because you can program it, you can automate it, you can throw DevOps to it. This is kind of changing the game a little bit. So I'm intrigued by the whole network piece of it because if you can automate some network with containers and Kubernetes and, say, service meshes, then it's become programmable, then you can do the automation, then it's infrastructure, it's code. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Infrastructure is code. It has to cover all three of those things. >> That is true, and another aspect is that we talk about multi-cloud all the time, which Cisco is focusing on also, like IBM, like VMware, like many other players who talk about multi-cloud, but problem with the multi-cloud right now is that you cannot take your security policies from one cloud provider to another and then just say, okay, just run there, right? So you can do the compute easy, containers, right, or Kubernetes are there, but you can't take the network as is, you cannot, you can still take the storage but not storage policies, so the policy-driven computing is still not there. >> Yeah. >> So we need, I think, more innovation in that area. >> Yeah, there's some technical issues. I talk a lot of startups, and they're jumpin' around from Azure to Amazon, and everyone comes back to Amazon because they say, and I'm not going to name names, but I'll just categorically say with what's going on is when they get to Microsoft and Oracle and IBM, the old kind of guards is they come in and they find that they check the boxes on the literature, oh, they do this, that, and that, but it's really just a lot of reverse proxies, there's a lot of homegrown stuff in there-- >> Yeah. >> That are making it work and hang together but not purely built from the ground up. >> Exactly, yeah, so they're actually sort of re-bottling the old sort of champagne kind of stuff, like they re-label old stuff and put layers of abstraction on top of it and that's why we're having those problems with the sort of legacy vendors. >> So let's get into some of the things that I know you're talking about a lot on Twitter, we're engaging on with with the community is migration, and so I want to kind of put a context to the questions so we can riff together on it. Let's just say that you and I were hired by the the CIO of a huge enterprise, financial services, pick your vertical. >> Yeah. >> Hey, Sarbjeet and John, fix my problems, and they give us the keys to the kingdom, bag of money, whatever it takes, go make it happen. What do we do, what's the first things that we do? Because they got a legacy, we know what it looks like, you got the networks, you're racking stack, top-of-rack switches, you got perimeter-based security. We got to go in and kind of level the playing field. What's our strategy, what do we what do we recommend? >> Yeah, the first thing first, right? So first, we need to know the drivers for the migration, right, what is it? Is it a cost-cutting, is it the agility, is it mergers and acquisitions? So what are the, what is the main driver? So that knowing that actually will help us like divvy up the problem, actually divide it up. The next thing, the next best practice is, I always suggest, I've done quite a few migrations, is that do the application portfolio analysis first. You want to find that low-hanging fruit which can be moved to the cloud first. The reason, main reason behind that is that your people and processes need to ease into using the cloud. I use consumption term a lot, actually on Twitter you see that, so I'm a big fan of consumption economics. So your people and processes need to adapt, like your change control, change management, ITSM, the old stuff still is valid, actually. We're giving it a new name, but those problems don't go away, right? How you log a ticket, how you how the support will react and all that stuff, so it needs to map to the cloud. SLA is another less talked about topic in our circles on Twitter, and our industry partners don't talk about, but that's another interesting part. Like what are the SLAs needed for, which applications and so forth. So first do the application profiling, find the low-hanging fruit. Go slow in the beginning, create the phases, like phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four. And it also depends number, on the number of applications, right? IBM folks were talking about that thousand average number of applications per enterprise. I think it's more than thousand, I've seen it. And that, just divvy up the problem. And then another best practice I've learned is migrate as is, do not transform and migrate, because then you're at, if something is not working over there or the performance problem or any latency problem, you will blame it on your newer architecture, if you will. Move as is, then then transform over there. And if you want me to elaborate a little more on the transformation part, I usually divide transformation into three buckets, actually this is what I tell the CIOs and CTOs and CEOs, that transformation is of three types. Well, after you move, transformation, first it is the infrastructure-led transformation. You can do the platforming and go from Windows to Linux and Linux to AIX and all that stuff, like you can go from VM to container kind of stuff, right? And the second is a process-led transformation, which is that you change your change control, change management, policy-driven computing, if you will, so you create automation there. The third thing is the application where you open the hood of the application and refactor the code and do the Web service enablement of your application so that you can weave in the systems of innovation and plug those into the existing application. So you want to open your application. That's the whole idea behind all this sort of transformation is your applications are open so you can bring in the data and take out the data as you weave. >> From your conversations and analysis, how does cloud, once migrations happen in cloud operations, how does that impact traditional network, network architecture, network security, and application performance? >> On the network side, actually, how does it, let me ask you a question, what do you mean by how does it-- >> In the old days, used a provisional VLAN. >> The older stuff? >> So I got networks out there, I got a big enterprise, okay, we know how to run the networks, but now I'm movin' to the cloud. >> Yeah. >> I'm off premises, I'm on premise, now I'm in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> How do I think about the network's differently? Whose provisioning the subnets, who's doing the VPNs? You know, where's the policy, all these policy-based things that we're startin' to see at Kubernetes. >> Yeah. >> They were traditionally like networks stuff-- >> You knew what it was. >> That's now happening at the microservices level. >> Yeah. >> So new paradigm. >> The new paradigm, actually, the whole idea is that your network folks, your storage folks, your server folks, like what they were used to be in-house, they need to be able to program, right? That's the number one thing. So you need to retrain your workforce, right? If you don't have the, you cannot retrain people overnight, and then you bring in some folks who know how to program networks and then bring those in. There's a big misconception about, from people, that the service, sorry, the service provider, which is called cloud service provider, is it responsible for the security of your applications or for the network, sort of segmentation of your network. They are not, actually, they don't have any liability over security if you read the SLAs. It's your responsibility to have the sort of right firewalling, right checks and balances in place for the network for storage, for compute, right policies in place. It's your responsibility. >> So let's talk about the, some tweets you've been doin' 'cause I've been wanting to pull the ones that I like. You tweeted a couple days ago, we don't know how to recycle failed startups. >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> Okay, and I said open source. And you picked up and brought up another image, is open source a dumping ground for failed startups? And it was interesting because what I love about open source is, in the old days of proprietary software, if the company went under, the code went under with it, but at least now, with open source, at least something can survive. But you bring up this dumping concept, that also came up in an interview earlier today with another guest which was with all this contribution coming in from vendors, it's almost like there's a dumping going on into open source in general, and you can't miss a beat without five new announcements per day that's, you know, someone's contributing their software from this project or a failed, even failed startup, you know, last hope, let's open source it. Is that good or bad, I mean, what's your take on that, what was your posture or thinking around this conversation? It is good, is it bad? >> Yeah, I believe it's, it's a economic problem, economics thing, right? So when somebody's like proprietary model doesn't work, they say, okay, let me see if this works, right? Actually, they always go first with like, okay let me sell-- >> Make money. >> Let me make money, right? A higher margin, right, everybody loves that, right? But then, if they cannot penetrate the market, they say, okay, let me make it open source, right? And then I will get the money from the support, or my own distro, like, distros are a big like open source killer, I said that a few times. Like the vendor-specific distributions of open source, they kill open source like nothing else does. Because I was at Rackspace when we open-sourced OpenStack, and I saw what happened to OpenStack. It was like eye-opening, so everybody kind of hijacked OpenStack and started putting their own sort of flavors in place. >> Yeah, yeah, we saw the outcome of that. >> Yeah. >> It niched into infrastructures of service, kind of has a special purpose-built view. >> And when I-- >> And that it comes cloud native didn't help either. Cloud grew at that time, too, talking about the 2008 timeframe. >> Yeah, yeah, and exactly. And another, why I said that was, it was in a different context, actually, I invested some money into an incubator in Berkeley, The Batchery, so we have taken what, 70-plus startups through that program so far, and I've seen that pattern there. So I will interview the people who want to bring their startup to our incubator and all that, and then after, most of them fail, right? >> Yeah. >> They kind of fade away or they leave, they definitely leave our incubator after a certain number of weeks, but then you see like what happens to them, and now also living in the Valley, you can't avoid it. I worked with 500 Startups a little bit and used to go to their demo days from the Rackspace days because we used to have a deal with them, a marketing deal, so the pattern I saw that was, there's a lot of innovation, there was a lot of brain power in these startups that we don't know what, these people just fade away. We don't have a mechanism to say, okay, hey you are doing this, and we are also doing similar stuff, we are a little more successful than, let's merge these two things and make it work. So we don't know how to recycle the startups. So that's what was on it. >> It's almost a personal network of intellectual capital. >> Yeah. >> Kind of, there needs to be a new way to network in the IP that's in people's heads. Or in this case, if it's open source, that's easy there, too, so being inaccessible. >> So there's no startup, there's no Internet of startups, if you will. >> Yeah, so there's no-- >> Hey, you start a CUBE group. (Sarbjeet laughing) You'll do it, start a CrowdChat. All right, I want to ask you about this consumption economics. >> Yeah. >> I like this concept. Can you take a minute to explain what you mean by consumption economics? You said you're all over it. I know you talk a lot about it on Twitter. >> Yes. >> What is it about, why is it important? >> Actually, the pattern I've seen in tech industry for last 25, 24 years in Silicon Valley, so the pattern I've seen is that everybody focuses on the supply side, like we do this, we like, we're going to change the way you work and all that stuff, but people usually do not focus on the consumption side of things, like people are consuming things. I'm a great fan of a theory called Jobs to Be Done theory. If you get a time, take a look at that. So what jobs people are trying to do and how you can solve that problem. Actually, if you approach your products, services from that angle, that goes a long way. Another aspect I talk about, the consumption economics, is age of micro-consumption, and again, there are reasons behind it. The main reason is there's so much thrown at us individually and and also enterprise-wise, like so much technology is thrown at us, if we try to batch, like if were ready to say, okay, we're not going to consume the technology now, and we're going to do every six months, like we're going to release every six months, or new software or new packages, and also at the same time, we will consume every six months, that doesn't work. So the whole notion when I talk about the micro-consumption is that you keep bringing the change in micro-chunks. And I think AWS has mastered the game of micro-supply, as a micro-supplier of that micro-change. >> Yeah. >> If you will. So they release-- >> And by the way, they're very customer-centric, so listening to the demand side. >> Exactly. So they kind of walk hand in hand with the customer in a way that customer wants this, so they're needing this, so let us release it. They don't wait for like old traditional model of like, okay, every year there's a new big release and there are service packs and patches and all that stuff, even though other vendors have moved along the industry. But they still have longer cycles, they still release like 10 things at a time. I think that doesn't work. So you have to give, as a supplier, to the masses of the workers of the world in HPs and IBMs, give the change in smaller chunks, don't give them monolithic. When you're marketing your stuff, even marketing message should be in micro-chunks, like or even if you created like five sort of features and sort of, let's, say in Watson, right, just give them one at a time. Be developer-friendly because developers are the people who will consume that stuff. >> Yeah, and then making it more supply, less supply side but micro-chunks or microservices or micro-supply. >> Yeah. >> Having a developer piece also plays well because they're also ones who can help assemble the micro, it's in a LEGO model of composeability. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so I think that's definitely right. The other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on is validated by Jerry Chen at Greylock and his hot startups and a few others is my notion of stack overhaul. The changes in the stack are significant. I tweeted, and you commented on it, on the Red Hat IBM deal 'cause they were talkin' about, oh, the IBM stack is going to be everywhere, and they're talking about the IBM stack and the old full-stack developer model, but if you look at the consumption economics, you look at horizontally scalable cloud, native serverless and all those things goin' on with Kubernetes, the trend is a complete radical shifting of the stack where now the standardization is the horizontally scalable, and then the differentiations at the top of the stack, so the stack has tweaked and torqued it a little bit. >> Yeah. >> And so this is going to change a lot. Your thoughts and reaction to that concept of stack, not a complete, you know, radical wholesale change, but a tweak. >> Actually our CTO at Rackspace, John Engates, gave us a sort of speech at one of the kind of conferences here in Bay Area, the title of that was Stack, What Stack, right? So the point he was trying to make was like stack is like, we are not in the blue stack, red stack anymore, so we are a cross-stack, actually. There are a lot of the sort of small LEGO pieces, we're trying to put those together. And again, the reason behind that is because there's some enabling technology like Web services in RESTful APIs, so those have enabled us to-- >> And new kinds of glue layers, if you will. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Abstraction layers. >> Yeah, I call it digital glue. There's a new type of digital glue, and now we have, we are seeing the emergence of low code, no code sort of paradigms coming into the play, which is a long debate in itself. So they are changing the stack altogether. So everything is becoming kind of lightweight, if you will, again-- >> And more the level of granularity is getting, you know, thinner and thinner, not macro. So you know, macroservices doesn't exist. That was my, I think, my tweet, you know, macroservices or microservices? >> Yeah. >> Which one you think's better? And we know what's happening with microservices. That is the trend. >> That is the trend. >> So that is that antithesis of macro. >> Yeah. >> Or monolithic. >> Yeah, so there's a saying in tech, actually I will rephrase it, I don't know exactly how that is, so we actually tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short run and underestimate in the long term, right? So there's a famous saying somebody, said that, and that's, I think that's so true. What we actually wanted to do after the dot-com bust was the object-oriented, like the sort of black box services, it as, we called them Web services back then, right? >> Yeah. >> There were books written by IBM-- >> Service-oriented architecture-- >> Yeah, SOA. >> Web services, RSS came out of that. >> Yes. >> I mean, a lot of good things that are actually in part of what the vision is happening today. >> It's happening now actually, it just happening today. And mobile has changed everything, I believe, not only on the consumer side, even on the economic side. >> I mean, that's literally 16, 17 years later. >> Yes, exactly, it took that long. >> It's the gestation period. >> Yes. >> Bitcoin 10 years ago yesterday, the white paper was built. >> Yeah. >> So the acceleration's certainly happening. I know you're big fan of blockchain, you've been tweeting about it lately. Thoughts on blockchain, what's your view on blockchain? Real, going to have a big impact? >> I think it will have huge impact, actually. I've been studying on it, actually. I was light on it, now I'm a little bit, I'm reading on it this and I understand. I've talked to people who are doing this work. I think it will have a huge impact, actually. The problem right now with blockchain is that, the speed, right? >> It's slow, yeah. So yeah, it's very slow, doc slow, if you will. But I think that is a technical problem, we can solve that. There's no sort of functional problem with the blockchain. Actually, it's a beautiful thing. Another aspect which come into play is the data sovereignty. So blockchains actually are replicated throughout the world if you want the worldwide money exchange and all that kind of stuff going around. We will need to address that because the data in Switzerland needs to sit there, and data in the U.S. needs to stay in the U.S. That blockchain actually kind of, it doesn't do that. You have a copy of the same data everywhere. >> Yeah, I mean, you talk about digital software to find money, software to find data center. I mean, it's all digital. I mean, someone once said whatever gets digitized grows exponentially. (Sarbjeet laughing) Oh, that was you! >> Actually I-- >> On October 30th. >> That was, that came from a book, actually. It's called Exponential Organizations. Actually, they're two great books I will recommend for everybody to read, actually there's a third one also. So (laughs) the two are, one is Exponential Organizations. It's a pretty thin book, you should take, pick it up. And it talks about like whatever get digitized grows exponentially, but our organizations are not, like geared towards handling that exponential growth. And the other one is Consumption Economics. The title of the book is Consumption Economics, actually. I saw that book after I started talking about it, consumption economics myself. I'm an economics major, actually, so that's why I talk about that kind of stuff and those kind comments, so. >> Well, and I think one of the things, I mean, we've talked about this privately when we've seen each other at some of theCUBE events, I think economics, the chief economic officer role will be a title that will be as powerful as a CSO, chief security officer, because consumption economics, token economics which is the crypto kind of dynamic of gamification or network effects, you got economics in cloud, you got all kinds of new dynamics that are now instrumented that need, that are, they're throwin' off numbers. So there's math behind things, whether it's cryptocurrency, whether it's math behind reputation, or any anything. >> Yeah. >> Math is driving everything, machine learning, heavy math-oriented algorithms. >> Yeah, actually at the end of the day, economics matters, right? That's what we are all trying to do, right? We're trying to do things faster cheaper, right? That's what automation is all about. >> And simplifying, too. >> And simplifying service. >> You can't throw complexity in, more complexity. >> Yeah. >> That's exponential complexity. >> Sometimes while we are trying to simplify things, and I also said, like many times the tech is like medicine, right? I've said that many times. (laughs) Tech is like medicine, every pill has a side effect. Sometimes when we are trying to simplify stuff, we add more complexity, so. >> Yeah. What's worse, the pain or the side effects? Pick your thing. >> Yeah, you pick your thing. And your goal is to sort of reduce the side effects. They will be there, they will be there. And what is digital transformation? It's all about business. It's not, less about technology, technology's a small piece of that. It's more about business models, right? So we're trying to, when we talk about micro-consumption and the sharing economy, they're kind of similar concepts, right? So Ubers of the world and Airbnbs all over the world, so those new business models have been enabled by technology, and we want to to replicate that with the medicine, with the, I guess, education, autos, and you name it. >> So we obviously believe in microcontent at theCUBE. We've got the Clipper tool, the search engine. >> I love that. >> So the CUBEnomics. It's a book that we should be getting on right away. >> Yeah, we should do that! >> CUBEnomics. >> CUBEnomics, yeah. >> The economics behind theCUBE interviews. Sarbjeet, thank you for coming on. Great to see you, and thank you for your participation-- >> Thanks, John. >> And engagement online in our digital community. We love chatting with you and always great to see you, and let's talk more about economics and digital exponential growth. It's certainly happening. Thanks for coming in, appreciate it. >> It was great having, being here, actually. >> All right, the CUBE Conversation, here in Palo Alto Studios here for theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (lively orchestral music)

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by, Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan, New York City, at Automation Anywhere's Imagine Conference 2018. About 1,100 professionals really talking about the future of work bots, and really how automation is gonna help people do the mundane a little bit easier, and hopefully free us all up to do stuff that's a little bit more important, a little higher value. We're excited to have our next guest, he's Craig Le Clair, the VP and Principal Analyst from Forrester, and he's been covering this space for a long time. Craig, great to see ya. >> Yeah, nice to see you, thanks for having me on. >> So, first off, just kind of general impressions of the event? Have you been to this before? It's our first time. >> Yes, I did a talk here last year, so it was a little bit smaller then. There's obviously more people here today, but it's pretty much, I think it was in Brooklyn last year. >> It was in Brooklyn, okay. >> So, this is an upgrade. >> So, RP Robotic Process Automation, more affectionately, probably termed as bots. >> Yeah. >> They're growing, we're seeing more and more time and our own interactions with companies, kind of on the customer service side. How are they changing the face of work? How are they evolving as really a way for companies to get more leverage? >> Yeah, so I'll make one clarification of your sentence, and that's, you know, bots do things on behalf of people. What we're talking to in a call center environment is a chat bot. So, they have the ability to communicate or really, I would say, attempt to communicate with people. They're not doing a very good job of it in my view. But, bots work more in the background, and they'll do things for you, right? So, you know, they're having a tremendous effect. I mean, one of the statistics I was looking at the other day, per one billion dollars of revenue, the average company had about 150 employees in finance and accounting ten years ago. Now, instead of having 120 or 130, it's already down to 70 or 80, and that's because the bots that we're talking about here can mimic that human activity for posting to a general ledger, for switching between applications, and really, move those folks on to different occupations, shall we say. >> Right, right. >> Yeah. >> Well it's funny, Jeff Immelt just gave his little keynote address, and he said, "This is the easiest money you'll find in digital transformation is implementing these types of technology." >> Yeah, it's a good point, and it was a great talk, by the way, by Jeff. But, you know, companies have been under a lot of pressure to digitally transform. >> Right. >> You know, due to really the mobile, you know, mobile peaked around 2012, and that pushed everyone into this gap that companies couldn't really deal with the consumer technology that was out there, right? So then you had the Ubers of the world and digital transformation. So, there's been a tremendous focus on digital transformation, but very little progress. >> Right. >> When we do surveys, only 11% are showing any progress at all. So, along comes this technology, Robotic Process Automation that allows you to build bots without changing any of the back end systems. There's no data integration. You know, there's no APIs involved. There's no big transformation consultants flying in. There's not even a Requirements Document because you're gonna start with recording the actual human activity at a work station. >> Right. >> So, it's been an elixir, you know, frankly for CIOs to go into their boss and say, "You know what, we're doing great, you know, I've just made this invoice process exist in a lot better way." You know, we're on our path to digital transformation. >> And it's really a different strategy, because, like you said, it's not kind of rip and replace the old infrastructure, you're not rewriting a lot of applications, you're really overlaying it, right? >> Which is one of the potential downfalls is that, you know, sometimes you need to move to that new cloud platform. You don't want, to some extent, the technology institutionalizes what could be a very bad process, one that needs to be modernized, one that needs to be blown up. You know, we're still using the airline reservation systems from 1950s, and layers, and layers, and layers and layers built upon them. At some point, you're gonna have to design a new experience with new technology, so there's some dangers with the seduction of building bots against core systems. >> Right, so the other thing that's happening is the ongoing, I love Moore's Law, it's much more about an attitude then the physics of a microprocessor, but you know, compute, and store, and networking, 5Gs just around the corner, cloud-based systems now really make that available in a much different way, and as you said, mobile experience delivers it to us. So as those continue to march on and asymptomatically approach zero and infinite scale, we're not there yet, but we're everyday getting a little bit closer. Now we're seeing AI, we're seeing machine-learning, >> Yes. >> We're seeing a new kind of class of horsepower, if you will, that just wasn't available before at the scale it's at today. So, now you throw that into the mix, these guys have been around 14 years, how does AI start to really impact things? >> It's a fascinating subject and question. I mean, we're, at Forrester, talking about the forces of automation. And, by the way, RPA is just a subset of a whole set of technologies: AI, you mentioned, and AI is a subset of automation, and there's Deep Learning, is a subset of AI and you go on and on, there are 30, 40 different automation technologies. And these will have tremendous force, both on jobs in the future, and on shifting control really to machines. So, right now, you can look at this little bubble we had of consumer technology and mobile, shifting a lot of power to the consumer, and that's been great for our convenience, but now with algorithms being developed that are gonna make more and more decisions, you could argue that the power is going to shift back to those who own the machines, and those who own the algorithms. So, there's a power shift, a control shift that we're really concerned about. There's a convergence of the physical and digital world, which is IOT and so forth, and that's going to drive new scale in companies, which are gonna further dehumanize some of our life, right? So that affects, it squeezes humans out of the process. Blockchain gets rid of intermediaries that are there to really transfer ideas and money and so forth. So, all of these forces of automation, which we think is gonna be the next big conversation in the industry, are gonna have tremendous effect societally and in business. >> Right. Well, there's certainly, you know, there's the case where you just you can't necessarily rescale a whole class of an occupation, right? The one that we're all watching for, obviously, is truck drivers, right? Employs a ton of people, autonomous vehicles are right around the corner. >> Right. >> On the other hand, there's going to be new jobs that we don't even know what they're gonna be yet, to quote all the graduating seniors, it's graduation season, most of them are going to work in jobs that don't even exist 10 years from now. >> Correct, correct, very true. >> And the other thing is every company we talk to has got tons of open reqs, and they can't get enough people to fulfill what they need, and then Mihir, I think touched on an interesting point in the keynote, where, ya know, now we're starting to see literal population growth slow down in developed countries, >> Yes. >> Like in Japan is at the leading edge, and you mentioned Europe, and I'm not sure where the US is, so it's kind of this interesting dichotomy: On one side, machines are going to take more and more of our jobs, or more and more portions of our job. On the other hand, we don't have people to do those jobs necessarily anyway, not necessarily today, but down the road, and you know, will we get to more of this nirvana-state where people are being used to do higher-value types of activities, and we can push off some of this, the crap and mundane that still, unfortunately, takes such a huge portion of our day to day world? >> Yeah, yeah. So, one thought that some of us believe at Forrester, I being one of them, is that we're at a, kind of, neutral right point now where a lot of the AI, which is really the most disruptive element we're talking about here, our PA is no autonomous learning capability, there's no AI component to our PA. But, when AI kicks in, and we've seen evidence of it as we always do first in the consumer world where it's a light version of AI in Netflix. There's no unlimited spreadsheets sitting there figuring out which one to watch, right? They're taking in data about your behavior, putting you in clusters, mapping them to correlating them, and so forth. We think that business hasn't really gotten going with AI yet, so in other words, this period that you just described, where there seems to be 200,000 people hired every month in the ADP reports, you know, and there's actually 50,000 truck driver jobs open right now. And you see help-wanted signs everywhere. >> Right, right. >> We think that's really just because business hasn't really figured out what to do with technology yet. If you project three or four years, our projections are that there will be a significant number of, particular in the cubicles that our PA attacks, a significant number of dislocation of current employment. And that's going to create this job transformation, we think, is going to be more the issue then replacement. And if you go back in history, automations have always led to transformation. >> Right. >> And I won't go through the examples because we don't have time, but there are many. And we think that's going to be the case here in that automation dividends, we call them, are going to be, are being way underestimated, that they're going to be new opportunities, and so forth. The skills mis-match is the issue that, you know, you have what RPA attacks are the 60 million that are in cubicles today in the US. And the average education there is high school. So, they're not gonna be thrown out of the cubicles and become data scientists overnight, right? So, there's going to be a massive growth in the gig economy, and there's an informal and a formal segment of that, that's going to result in people having to patch together their lives in ways they they hadn't had before, so there's gonna be some pain there. But there are also going to be some strong dividends that will result from this level of productivity that we're gonna see, again, in a few years, cause I think we're at a neutral point right now. >> Well, Amara's Law doesn't get enough credit, right? We overestimate in the short-term, and then underestimate the long-term needs affect. >> Absolutely. >> And one of the big things on AI is really moving from this, in real time, right? And all these fast databases and fast analytics, is we move from a world where we are looking in the rear view mirror and making decisions on what happened in the past to you know, getting more predictive, and then even more prescriptive. >> Yes. >> So, you know, the value unlock there is very very real, I'm never fascinated to be amazed by how much inefficiency there still is every time we go to these conferences. (Craig laughs) You know we thought we solved it all at SAP and ERP, that was clearly-- >> Clearly not the case. Funny work to do. >> But, it's even interesting, even from last year, you mentioned that there the significant delta just from year to year is pretty amazing. >> Yes, I've been amazed at the level of innovation in the core digital worker platforms, the RPA platforms, in the last year has been pretty amazing work. What we were talking about a year ago when I spoke at this conference, and what we're talking about now, the areas are different. You know, we're not talking about basic control of the applications of the desktop. We're talking about integration with text analytics. We're talking about comp combining process mining information with desktop analytics to create new visions of the process. You know, we weren't talking about any of that a year ago. We're talking about bot stores. They're out there, and downloadable robots. Again, not talking about last year at all. So, just a lot of good progress, good solid progress, and I'm very happy to be a part of it. >> And really this kind of the front end scene of so much of the development is manifested on the front end, where we used to always talk about citizen developers back in the day. You know, Fred Luddy, who was just highlighted Service Now, most innovative company. That was his, you know, vision of Citizen Developer. And then we've talked about citizen integrators, which is really an interesting concept, and now we're talking about really citizens, or analysts, having the ability via these tools to do integrations and to deliver new kind of work flows that really weren't possible before unless you were a hardcore programmer. >> Yeah, although I think that conversation is a little bit premature in this space, right? I think that most of the bot development requires programming skills today, and they're going to get more complicated in that most of the bot activities today are doing, you know, three decisions or less. Or they're looking at four or five apps that are involved, or they're doing a series of four or five hundred clicks that they're emulating. And the progression is to get the digital workers to get smarter and incorporating various AI components, so you're going to have to build, be able to deal statistically with algorithm developments, and data, and learning, and all of that. So, it's not.... The core of this, the part of it that's going to be more disruptive to business is going to be done by pretty skilled developers, and programmers, and data scientists, and statistical, you know, folks that are going through. But, having said that, you're going to have a digital workforce that's got to be managed, and you know, has to be viewed as an employee at some level to get the proper governance. So you have to know when that digital worker was born, when they were hired, who do they report to, when were they terminated, and what their performance review is. You gotta be doing performance reviews on the digital workers with the kind of dashboard analytics that we have. And that's the only way to really govern, because the distinction in this category is that you're giving these bots human credentials, and you're letting them access the most trusted application boundaries, areas, in a company. So, you better treat them like employees if you want proper governance. >> Which becomes tricky as Mihir said when you go from one bot to ten bots to ten thousand. Then the management of this becomes not insignificant. >> Right. >> So Craig, I want to give you the last word. You said, you know, big changes since last year. If we sit down a year from now, 2019, _ Oh. >> Lord knows where we'll be. What are we gonna talk about? What do you see as kind of the next, you know, 12-month progression? >> You know, I hope we don't go to Jersey after Brooklyn, New York, and-- >> Keep moving. >> I see Jersey over there, but it's where it belongs, you know, across the river. I'm from Jersey, so I can say that. You know, I think next year we're gonna see more integration of AI modules into the digital worker. I think with a lot of these explosive markets, like RPA is, there's always a bit of cooling off period, and I think you're going to see some tapering off of the growth of some of the platform companies, AA, but also their peers and compatriots. That's natural. I think that the area has been a little bit, you know, analysis and tech-industry loves change. If there's no change, there's nothing for us to write about. So, we usually over-project. Now, in this case, the 2.8 billion-dollar market project five years out that I did is being exceeded, which is rare. But I expect some tapering off in a year where there's not a ceiling hit, but that, you know, you end up with going through these more simple applications that can be robotized easily. And now you're looking at slightly more complicated scenarios that take a little more, you know, AI and analytics embedded-ness, and require a little more care, they have a little more opaque, and a little more thought, and that'll slow things down a bit. But, I still think we're on our way to a supermarket and a lot of productivity here. >> So just a little less low-hanging fruit, and you gotta step up the game a little bit. >> I guess you could, you said it much simpler then I did. >> I'm a simple guy, Craig. >> But that's why you're the expert on this panelist. >> Alright, Craig, well thanks for sharing your insight, >> Alright. >> Really appreciate it, and do look forward to talking to you next year, and we'll see if that comes true. >> Alright, appreciate it, take care now. >> He's Craig Le Clair and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018.

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. (techno music) >> Hello and welcome back. this is the exclusive coverage from theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-host. We're here in New York City for special on the ground coverage. We go out where all the action is. It's happening here in New York City for Blockchain Week, New York, #BlockchainWeekNY Of course, Consensus 2018 and a variety of other events, happening all over the place. We got D-Central having a big boat event here, tons of events from Hollywood. We got New York money, we got Hollywood money, we got nerd money, it's money everywhere, and of course great deals are happening, and I'm here with two friends who have done a deal. Al Burgio is a CEO of DigitalBits co-founder, and Nithin who's the partner at Arcadia Crypto Ventures. You guys we've, you know, we're like family now, and you're hiding secrets from me. You did a deal. Al, what's going on here? Some news. >> Yeah, well first John, thanks for having us. We always love coming on the show, and really enjoy spending time with you and so forth. We, you know previous conversations that we've had, we were not out there fundraising. But really had the opportunity to meet a lot of great people Nithin and his firm being definitely one of them. And as a result of that, really building this, say, following, these relationships within the venture community, more specifically the crypto venture community. When we were ready to actually go out and do, let's say a first round, for us it happened very quickly, and it was a result of being able to leverage those relationships that we had. For me, it was kind of remarkable to see that support come and happen so quickly. Normally venture, it's just a process. Many many months. >> John: Long road. >> Then a month to close. >> John: Kiss all the frogs. >> Yeah, here it's like, you know, people can do due diligence on the fly, You have an opportunity with events like this. >> John: They're smart. >> They're smart, and and there's an opportunity to really foster these relationships in this really tight-knit community. And, you know, Nithin and his firm being obviously one of those. And so when we were ready to go out and do our first round, it happened quickly, and I'd like to think that in a lot of ways, it happened amongst friends. >> Well, you're being humble. We've been covering you, you've been on theCUBE earlier, when you just started the idea, so it's fun to watch you have this idea come to fruition, but you're in a, you're hitting a TAM a Total Available Market that's pretty large. And that's one of the secrets, to have a TAM. Aggressive bold move, we'll how it turns out for you, but you know, you got to have the moonshot, you're going after the loyalty market, which is completely run by the syndicate, what do you want to call it, the mafia of loyalty. >> Yeah, well, I would say that in some cases, those that are supporting us see that as really just one use case. Because we built this general-purpose blockchain, one of the use cases and one of the first use cases that were out there to support, happens to be the loyalty space. >> John: Big. And it's massive, highly fragmented but massive market, and we can solve a lot of liquidity issues with our technology. But then it goes beyond that. So it's a big market at the start, and then that can scale even greater from there. and I think that's part of what, I mean obviously, I'm not going to speak for Nithin. >> Nithin, let me weigh in here, pass the mic over. Nithin talk about the deal, why these guys? I know you met 'em, you like Al, and the feedback I've heard from other folks is he's a classic entrepreneur and that obviously, the entrepreneur gets the deal, but obviously you don't just give money 'cause you like someone. What about this deal is it that you guys like? You guys been there early, you got some great people on your team, what about this deal is it that you like? >> Sure, for us, Al met pretty much most of, almost all the criteria that we had, okay. That we had when we go, the thesis before we go fund someone. We don't get so many deals like that. Usually we get you know, they made 50% of the criteria, we might still put money because you can't get the 100%. So one thing, Al as a founder, he's experienced, he has done it multiple times before, he sold companies. Tech guy, which is very key for us. A tech project is very key. Okay, second thing, he's built the whole thing. It's not like he's raising the money to go and build it. He built it, now he's raising money to go for go to market strategies, which makes sense. He's shown it, and we tested it out. So like, we were completely blown away. He has a team behind 'im. He's built a team on every side, on the marketing side, on PR, events. And the idea, this is a general blockchain, but he's addressing a very specific issue. It is a real problem. Loyalty points, or rewards points, or gift points. Or whatever you call them. It is segmented, it's fragmented, and this is a chance. And there might be many people who are trying to solve this problem, but I think Al has the greatest possibility, or probability, of becoming the winner. >> You and I have talked on theCUBE before, both of you guys are CUBE alumni, I know you both, so I'll ask you, 'cause I'll just remind everyone, we've talked about token economics. One of the things that's coming up here at the Consensus 2018 event in New York, onstage certainly, and some fireworks in one of the sessions, is like if you're not decentralized, why the hell are you doing a decentralized model? So one of the criterias is, the fit for the business model, has to fit the notion of a decentralized world, with the ability of tokens becoming an integral part. What about this deal makes that happen? Obviously, fragmentation, is that still decentralized? So, how are you sorting through the nuances of saying, okay, is it decentralized the market for him, and this deal? Or does it fit? >> See no, decentralize is one thing okay, in here, more than decentralized, I would say there was the platform, so that all the companies can come in, use this common platform, release it, and as a user you're getting a chance to atomically swap it if you don't like something. Most of the reward points or loyalty points go waste. Maybe the companies want it to go waste, I don't know if that is. >> It's a natural burn at equilibrium going on anyway right? Perfect fit! >> So that is the only, that was the only doubt that we had. Would companies want this, because do they want their customers' loyalty points going waste rather than swapping it for something else? That was the only question that we had. Well, that's a question that will get answered in the market. But otherwise we hadn't seen something like this before. >> What's your take of the show so far? We saw each other in the hallway as we were getting set up for theCUBE, for two days of coverage, in New York, for Blockchain Week, New York, what's your take? Obviously pretty packed. >> Oh my god, it's so packed, and it's great, the show is going on. It is bringing a lot of money in, it's bringing all the investors in a new money, old money, traditional money, nerd money as you said. >> It smells like money! >> Everybody's coming in. See the beauty about those things coming in is, you're going to get a lot of people from other fields that are going to come into this field to solve problems. 'Cause earlier, if there is no money coming in, you're going to have very smart people, or very intelligent people stick with physics or whichever was their field. Now, they're going to look into the space because they're getting paid. See that brings more people who are intelligent, and who can solve problems. That is very key for me. >> Al, I want to ask you as an entrepreneur, one things you usually have to struggle with, as any entrepreneur, is navigating the 3-D chess you got to play, whether it's competitive strategy, market movement, certainly the market's moving and shifting very quickly, but you've got growth, big tailwind for you. What's your takeaway? Because now you have new things coming on. Every every day it seems like a new shoe is dropping. SEC's firing a warning on utility tokens, security tokens are still coming, are now coming online, but that looks very promising, and then ecosystems become super important. You guys just announced news this morning around the ecosystem. >> Yeah, tomorrow we have some. We had some news today, but we have more tomorrow. >> John: Well talk about the news. >> Yeah, so we have a multi-tiered go to market strategy. Obviously in the loyalty space, again I want to emphasize, it's just one use case, but it's a massive one. You have brands, the enterprise. And many of those those enterprises or brands may operate their loyalty program internally, in terms of like back offices systems, in some cases they're outsourcing the app to a SAS provider, some application provider, that's kind of hidden in the background. But let's just say like Hilton. I use Hilton, it's the location for the event, but Hilton, you have this user experience using this app, but maybe that technology, the SAS application that's powering that, is actually not Hilton technology. And so let's just say, there's 30 million people in the Hilton program and there may be 30 million of them on the Marriott, coexisting on some SAS application. And so that's another important category for us. SAS providers and so forth, supporting that industry. And then last but not least, today, whether enterprise or SAS company, many cases not touching their own hardware, right? They're using the cloud. >> So they're outsourcing the backend. >> Yeah, and so you have managed cloud providers. >> So what does it mean for the market? I don't understand, I'm not following you. >> Well, I guess what I'm saying is that there needs to be a common standard, across enterprise application provider, in global cloud community, cloud is the new hardware. >> True. So horizontally scaling loyalties as we were (mumbles). >> Exactly, so we have, we're basically securing partnerships on all three levels, to make sure that, if you want to use new technology, you want to ensure that it's widely supported, across a variety of partners you may want to work with if you're an enterprise. Whether, a software company, cloud company, and so forth. You want to be able to ensure that it can back up the truck. So we've basically signed partnerships at all of these tiers. You're going to see news in the morning. It's late here on a Monday evening. So tomorrow 9:00 a.m, major cloud company, one of the major cloud companies, and there's more to follow, making an announcement that they've joined our ecosystem partner program, and supporting this open source technology in a number of different ways. Which we're really excited about. >> You see ecosystem as a strategic move for you. >> Absolutely, this is, for us, this is, it's all about helping the consumer, but it's not about one consumer at a time for us. It's very much an enterprise play. It's one enterprise at a time. And with each enterprise we basically add to the ecosystem millions if not tens of millions of consumers instantly. >> Nithin I want to ask you a question, because what he just brought up is interesting to me as well. As a new thing, it's not new, but it's new to the crypto world, new to the analog world, that's not in the tech field. Tech business, we all know about global system integrators, we know about ecosystems, we know the value of developer programs, and community, all those things, check, check, check. But now those things are coming to new markets. People have never seen an ecosystem play before. So it's kind of, not new, it's new for some people, it's a competitive advantage opportunity. >> True, it is. See the whole thing is so new, that you can't even define it at this point. It's very hard to define. It's like, see, as an example I would say, none of us thought that when the iPhone came, there would be a 60 billion dollar taxi sharing economy that comes out of it, right? Same thing. Blockchain comes, we just don't know. And it's very hard to predict. >> New brands are going to emerge, I mean if you look at every major inflection point, I point to a couple that I think are relevant, TCP/IP was created, internetworking. >> Yep. >> That essentially went after proprietary networks, like IBM, Digital, Stacks, but it didn't replace, it wasn't a new functionality, it was interoperability. >> Yes. >> The web, HTTP, created a whole new functionality. >> Yep. >> Out of that emerged new brands. >> Yeah. >> So I think this wave's coming is a, new brands are going to emerge. >> Here, what's the brand, I don't know what's going to emerge. There it was interoperability. >> John: Well, new players. >> It's here, it's more, the collaboration. The collaboration is so huge, it's the scale is so huge, in the sense you can collaborate across the world. You're cutting those borders, there are no borders that can hold you. Even though interoperability happened in internet, There were the Googles, and the Facebook, that still had those borders. >> Well, don't put it, Cisco came out of that, 3Com, and those generations, but the hyper-scalers came out of the web. >> Yep. >> So I'm saying, well I'm saying, I want to get your reaction to, is I think that is such a small scale relative to blockchain and crypto because it's global, it's every industry, it's not just tech it's just like everything. So there's got to be new brands. Startups going to come out of the woodwork, that's my point. >> It's not yet time for the brands to come in. See that's the whole thing. So let's put it this way, the internet was there from 1978, if you really look at it, ARPANET or DARPA, those things were there. Email was there, but it was by 1997, or by the time we all came to know Google it was 2001. There is that gap between the brand forming, because it has to permeate first, more people have to use it, like what is the user-- >> Everything was was a bubble, but everything happened. I got food delivered to my house today, right? It happened, people were saying that's a crazy idea. >> It's now it's going on, right. So it's the timing and they know the time for it to permeate so here, how many people are using Bitcoin, and to do what? Most of them are just speculating right? There's very few real use case of remittance or speculative trading, that's what's happening. See that's what I said. The other use cases, it has to permeate. And that comes with more user adoption. And the user adoption initially is going to come from the speculation. >> I think it's a good sign, honestly I think it's a tell sign, because I remember when the web was new, I was in coming out right and growing in the industry. People were poo poo, oh that's just for kids. The big company's said, we wouldn't, who the hell is going to use the World Wide Web? Enter the search engines. >> I remember that like it was yesterday. I forget that I'm not a kid anymore, and I had the opportunity to be an entrepreneur during that era. One of the things I want to add is that, we had, I think what Nithin is really pointing out, it started with the infrastructure, you had network engineers and ISPs, you know, and email. But what was the enterprise application here? What was that consumer application, and that followed right? So it started infrastructure, then it evolved. Once we saw these applications, enterprises started to go crazy. Whether it was the Ubers of the world surfacing, or enterprises reinventing themselves, that's kind of the next wave. >> Well, this is why I think you're a good opportunity. 'Cause I remember licking stamps and sending out envelopes to get people to come to a seminar, held at a hotel. That's how you did it in the old world. The web replaced that with direct response. >> But there's some, there's something else-- >> The mainframe ran faster than the web. You're replacing an old loyalty, that's like licking the stamps. It's not about comparing what you're doing to something else. >> There's also something that helps, that we're not acknowledging, that really helped take internet from 1.0 to 2.0, it's Linux. You know I remember websites were insanely expensive. It was Windows servers, it was Sun Solaris, all of this crazy, expensive, server systems, that you needed to have, so the barrier of entry was extremely high. Then Linux came along, and you still needed to have your own data center space, and so still high, but the licensing fees kind of went away. >> And now with containers and Kubernetes-- >> Exactly. >> I made a bet I was going to get Kubernetes in a crypto show. >> Anybody from a bedroom could start a company, right? You could do it with your pajamas still on. >> John: Well orchestration's easier. >> Absolutely. So this has started, this really, revolution. Now you have blockchain and you start to introduce enterprise-grade blockchain technologies, it's the next wave, you know, it's not VoIP, it's value over IP. >> Okay, I'm going to ask both you guys a final question, to end this segment here at the block event. I know you guys want to get back, and I'm taking you anyway from the schmoozing and networking and the fun out there, deejay. Predictions, next year this time, what are we going to be? What's the we're going to look like? What's going to evolve? I mean we had a conversation with Richard, who partnered with you guys at Arcadia Crypto Partners, saying the trading things interesting, the liquidity has changed. What's your take? I want you guys both to take a minute to make a prediction. Next year, what's different, who's out, who's in, what's happening, is it growing? >> So I, you know, I would say this, surprisingly, CTOs, I love CTOs, but many CTOs, I would say that well above 50% of CTOs, still can't spell blockchain. Really, and what I mean by that, really understand the transformational power what this is, in terms of how this is really web 3.0. This is going to change so many industries, create so much value for consumers, help businesses and so forth, and we're going to cross that 50% mark. >> Next year. >> With CTOs-- >> 50% of what? Be clear on-- >> Basically, we're going, in terms of the net, that blockchain's going to capture, and really enterprises and not just enterprises, service providers and so forth-- >> 50% of the mind share or 50% of the projects? >> Yeah no, I'm talking it's, people aren't going to be saying, oh, blockchain, isn't that Bitcoin? They're going to really understand, and they're going to understand that impact. And over the course of the next 12 months, we're going to see that. And it starts, obviously in many cases, with the CIO, CTO of many companies. There are definitely a lot of CIOs and CTOs on the forefront of innovation that get it, but what I'm saying is that more than 50% don't. >> So you're saying-- They're very busy in doing what they're doing today, and it hasn't hit them yet. >> To recap, you're saying by next year, 50% of CTOs or CTO equivalents, will have a clear understanding of what blockchain is-- >> Absolutely. >> And what it can do. >> Absolutely. >> Nithin, your prediction, next year, this time, what's different, what's new, what's the prediction? >> So, one of the key things that I think is going to happen is there's going to be a lot more training, and knowledge that's going to spread out, so that a lot more people understand, what blockchain is and what bitcoin is. Even now, as Al said, he was telling about CTOs, if the CTOs are, that's the state, that they can't spell blockchain, imagine where the real common man is. You've got people like Jamie Dimon coming on TV and saying he doesn't like Bitcoin, but he likes blockchain. I'm like, what the heck is he saying? That he likes a database? >> He was selling it short 100% (chuckles) >> Yeah, he likes a database. And then you have Warren Buffett coming over there-- >> Rat poison. >> And then this is rat poison. And like my question is, does any of his funds buy gold? Do they buy gold? He was telling that this is only worth as much as the next buy buying at a higher price. >> What's Warren Buffett's best tech investment? >> I don't know, I think he bought Apple, he started buying Apple now, right? When it's reached a thousand bucks? Or it reached a trillion dollars or close to that, or 750 billion? >> The Apple buy was 2006. If you were there, then you were good. >> Yeah, but-- >> So, your prediction? >> Market wise I don't know, what's going to happen? I'm expecting this, the crypto, the utility token, or the crypto market, to be at least a six trillion dollar business. But it'll happen next year? Definitely not. But I've been proven wrong, like I was expecting it to happen by 2025, but then it went to 750 billion by December. Well, it's not too far. >> You did get the prediction right, in the Bahamas at POLYCON18, about the drop around the tax consequences of the-- >> Right. >> People slinging trades around, not knowing the tax consequences. >> Right, right. We don't know because, who knows? Because what is going on over there, is IRS is still saying it's a property. That's what the last (slurs) is. SEC is saying it is all equity, and the CFTC was saying it's commodity. So what tax do I pay? >> Okay, lightning round question, 'cause I want to, one more popped in my head. The global landscape, from an investor standpoint, the US, we know what's going on in the US, accredited, SEC is throwing, firing across, bullets across the bow of the boats, kind of holding people in line. What percentage of US big investors will be overseas by next year? >> Percentage of-- >> Having, meaning having deals being done, proxy deals being down outside the US, what percentage? >> It's still going to be low though. That is going to be low, because that, I don't think the US investor, means the large scale of those investors-- >> You don't think the big funds will co-locate outside the US? >> There will be some, but not enough. >> Put a number, a percentage. >> Percentage-wise I think it's still going to be less than 10%. >> Al, your prediction? >> In terms of investment? >> Investment, investors saying hey, I got money here, I want to put it out there. >> Outside of the United States? >> Share money, not move their whole fund, but do deals from a vehicle. >> Do deals outside. I think I agree with Nithin. >> Throwing darts at the board here. >> No, I'm going to clarify. There's definitely massive investment happening overseas. In some respects probably bigger than the United States. So that's not going away. If anything that's going to grow. But your question is, in terms of US entities, making abroad investments, overseas investments, versus just domestic? I think that trend doesn't necessarily change. You have the venture community, there are certain bigger venture funds that can have global operations 'cause at the end of the day, they need to have global operations, to be able to do that, and most venture funds aren't that massive, they don't have that infrastructure. So they're going to focus on their own backyard. So I don't necessarily think blockchain changes the venture mindset. It's just easier for them logistically to do due diligence on their own backyard and invest in those. >> Guys, always a pleasure. Great to see you. You guys are like friends with entourage here, great to get the update here at Blockchain Week. We get to Silicon Valley week, we'll connect up again. I'm John Furrier, here in New York, theCUBE's continuing coverage of crypto, decentralized applications, and blockchain of course, we're all over it. You'll see us all over, all of the web, all the shows. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. (upbeat pop music) >> Rebecca: Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Jeff Frick. What you're seeing right now are the hordes of people here at IFS World, and we are here to talk to our two guests Sumair Dutta, who is an analyst at the Service Council, and Mark Brewer, who's the Global Industry Director of Service at IFS. Thanks so much for joining us! >> Well thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah absolutely. >> Jeff: How did we draw you away from the cappuccino machine of there? The-- >> I know, I know. >> Jeff: The baristas are workin' hard. >> Rebecca: It's very buzzy, it's very exciting. So talk to us a little bit about FSM six which is, which is going to be released at the end of this year. What's new, what's exciting? Right, so IFS field service management six, you know I think the first point to make is that we already have what is recognized as the most complete solution in field service management, so this release was really focused on improving the user experience. It's a common theme throughout this conference, I think you'll hear. So how do, not only our customers, but our customers customers, their partners, all stakeholders get the most intuitive user experience out of this solution, to derive the value that encapsulated in there. I think another thing that goes along with that is, we're moving to a zero customization goal. That is to say, you'll still have, you know, ultra levels of configurability in this product from a workflow perspective, from a user interface perspective, from a business rule perspective. But instead of doing that through customization, you're doing that through configuration. Which means, you can sit on an evergreen model, you're not restricted on your upgrades. You can start on the latest and greatest, in other words, our customers are able to encapsulate an excellent experience and their business rules all within a standard offering. >> Field service management you don't really necessarily think of as inside the ERP suite, right? Kind of a hang off, I dunno what the right term is. So how does that make this offering different within all the offerings that IFS has? >> Mark: Yeah, it's a great question. So one of the uniques about the IFS FSM solution, is that it is complimentary to whatever back-end systems you already have, so let's say you have something from one of our peers in the business, so you're not runnin' IFS apps for your ERP, you're runnin' somethin' else, that doesn't matter. You can still derive best in class field service management from the FSM solution, it integrates with pretty much any other back-end. So if you truly are a service focused operation of which many companies, you know, 70% of their revenue derive from service, you can get that, if you like best-in-class service capability, without throwin' anythin' out that you're already got. And that's why FSM is somewhat different to the majority of other portfolio applications at IFS. >> So talk a little bit about how closely you work with your customers, I mean that is a real point of pride for IFS is how customer focused, how customer centered you are. So describe your process, in how you collaborate with customers, in terms of what they want the end product to look like. >> Really glad you asked that question, and it's incredibly timely for this event because, when the event closes on Thursday, we actually have a day dedicated to what we call our customer advisory council. So we have 12 of our strategic field service customers gathering in Atlanta to effectively help plan the roadmap. So we're not talkin' about tomorrows feature functions, we're talkin' about a three to five year strategy from their business. So this is not, if you like, the users asking for features, it's actually C-level, and executive management level from our customers that are actually giving us insights into where their taking their service operation in the future. Not really a technology discussion, but a business strategy discussion. We can then take that away, that involves our R&D organization as well, by the way, we take that away, we augment that with our own roadmap goals, technology that is obviously, you know, within the field service space already, AI, AR, IOT, and so forth, and, you know, bringin' those three things together, that's how we ensure that we are building applications, not just for today, but for what's next, as per the conference tag-line, you know? So heavily customer centric. Just on Friday, all those customers in the room, tellin' us where they want to go. >> Sumair, what are you seeing as sort of trends in this field service market, and how are you seeing IFS responding to those? >> Yeah that's a great question. You know field service as a whole wasn't something that was talked about previously, and we see so much more interest in the field of field service and the overall equation of aftermarket service and support. You know, previously that was a bi-product of being a business, we have a product, we need to support it, so we need to maybe throw some resources, but let's do that at the lowest cost. Now you'll see more and more companies talk about you know, service as a profit center, that we need to make money as a service. And this is primarily being driven by three major themes, three major disruptors: you have technology of course, and all of the new tools, AR, AI, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, IOT, and that's driving companies to figure out what is there story in each one of those solutions? We're not all there, no one's solved the problem, but we're all trying to figure out where do those fit into the way we deliver service, and the way our customers consume service? Then you have in field service specifically, workforce related challenges, disruptions. In our research we find about 70% of companies are going to face a talent shortage in the next five to 10 years. And this is research that's done across manufacturing and other disciplines as well. So your capacity in the sense of the number of workers you have is not going up, and you have to bring in new workers, you have to attract new talent, but then you have that outgoing flow of workforce and knowledge that's leaving your organization. So you're trying to balance all of those needs. And then eventually customers are demanding more, and you might say what does that mean you know, in an industrial setting? Well we're all consumers in some form, and we have consumer experiences, you know, the Amazons of the world, the Ubers of the world, who give us an element of convenience and access to information. And that is beginning to translate more and more so into the B to B service environment. So as a service organization you're balancing: customer needs which are rising, you've got a talent pool or a labor pool that's probably declining, and all of these disruptive technologies that you have to incorporate into your business, and so as a company as IFS that has been very customer centric, IFS has done a lot around field service management to improve some of the workforce capacity challenges with their solutions around FSM, they are taking a greater stake in some of the customer engagement solutions, with the acquisitions of MPL systems, and potentially future acquisitions down the road, and then from a technology point of view, I like IFS' approach, they've been, they're not quick to jump to the end, to say, you know, here's our AI solution per se, but they're essentially trying to establish those steps for companies to get from point A to point B to point C, to say here's where analytics can help you, here's where mobility can help you, it's a little bit more of a pragmatic approach as opposed to a marketing first approach, and so IFS has done a really good job in terms of the workforce elements, the technology elements, and now moreso on the customer engagements side as well. >> You know what really strikes me, as we're having this conversation is: the way that customers engage with companies has changed dramatically, right? Certainly on a consumer side, and a business side, so much now the engagement is via an electronic interface. And I can see where the increasing importance of the field sales person in that truck is actually the face of the company, and probably quite often the only person that the customer actually engages. So that's a really different type of service level requirement not to meet an SLA delivery because of a contractual obligation, but in terms of actually being the face in the engagement, in the touch point of your company, with an actual customer. It's probably happening more and more in the field as a percentage of the total than it ever has. >> That's a great observation, you know we actually, many of our customers today regard that field engineer as the trusted advisor of the customer, he's the trusted advisor, you know. They don't see him as a salesperson, they see him as their, you know confidant, their trusted advisor. He's not only going to be the hero to fix their problem, he's actually going to tell them how they can prevent such a problem in the future, and he's also going to try and offer them, you know, I can fix this problem today, but actually if you bought into a wider service contract, you wouldn't need to care about how many visits, and how many parts you consume, it will actually cover you completely with a gold contract. He upsells and cross-sells at the same time as becoming the hero, so, perfect observation. >> So are they actively, you know, kind of retraining those folks to really start to think of themselves more as a kind of a customer engagement representative versus just a field service person? You see that in the real world? >> Most definitely, most definitely. Because more and more, we've got an educated buyer, the buyer's savvy, you know, he's done a lot of his own work before actually committing to a purchase these days, much the same in this space, so, you know, rather than be sold to, they want to be advised. And it's a different experience again, to use that phrase, from a technology perspective, you know, that mobile application that used to be about, here's your jobs, go visit these locations, it actually now is when you're there, maybe you should talk about this particular offering, we have a promotion on that particular unit, these customer uses X, Y, and Z features, talk to them about another incremental gain from that, so the intelligence has moved from just fix the problem, to actually become their trusted advisor, like I said. >> And I would add to that, it's not just about training, it's about hiring, so it's the profile of who you bring in as a field service technician, you're not only bringing someone who's technically savvy, or mechanically savvy, or digitally savvy, you're bringing someone who can communicate with customers, someone who can work as a team, so internally, your internal customers and then your external customers who can communicate, who can provide solutions, who can provide guidance. We've done some studies of field service engineers, and they say, you know, our work is 10% fixing things, and 90% of solving customer problems. So it's having that empathy, having that knowledge of what the customer's going through, and potentially what the customer might go through in the future and being able to preempt some of that with advice, potentially selling, potentially guiding your customers with information, and so it is a much more wholistic experience because they are the face of the organization. >> And as a consequence, expectations have raised in the customer base. They want more than just a fix. >> It's so wild right, this whole, this conversation about machines taking our jobs, and yet everyone that we talk to, there's not enough people to do the jobs, and so it just: A reinforces that we need the help, but B, more importantly, that it's the combination of a machine helping do the scheduling, helping decide where to go, helping to know what the opportunity is for that particular engagement with the person who's empathetic, has history with the company, history with the problems. That actually is a much better solution than either one, or the other. >> Yeah, to talk about artificial intelligence again, you know, we see, there's a couple of things: one it allows scaling of the human, if you will, not replacement of the human, we won't have sufficient, no skilled employees, secondly I think it all bends the human experience, because, I'll give you an example. We got to customer that's in, like the, breakdown recovery service for vehicles, in the US in fact, today a call center agent in their contact center they'll take a call, but the virtual assistant is actually listening to the conversation, kind of like a Siri in the background, and they pick up on phrases like tow-truck, automatically pops up on the agents screen, the nearest tow truck is 10 miles away, it's Steve, you know, in this location to the customer. They'll pick up on emergency, we can get there with a closer engineer, we can pull him off another job. That's actually going in the ear of the agent, and it's going on the screen of the agent, they are providin' a level of service, you know, that the customer is pretty, you know, impressed by, as a consequence. That's a great example of: it's not just the human experience, or the AI experience, it's a combined experience. >> It's the human empathy along with the automated knowledge that you're combining there, that's great. Well Mark and, thank you so much for joining us Mark and Sumair, I really appreciate it, it's been a great conversation. >> Sumair: Well thank you very much. >> Mark: Thank you, thanks. >> Jeff: Thanks! >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we'll have more from IFS World Conference just after this. (gentle dance beat)

>> Announcer: From Milpitas, California, at the edge of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube. Covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at Western Digital in Milpitas, California at the Auto Tech Council, Autonomous vehicle meetup, get-together, I'm exactly sure. There's 300 people, they get together every year around a lot of topics. Today is all about autonomous vehicles, and really, this whole ecosystem of startups and large companies trying to solve, as I was just corrected, not the thousands of problems but the millions and billions of problems that are going to have to be solved to really get autonomous vehicles to their ultimate destination, which is, what we're all hoping for, is just going to save a lot of lives, and that's really serious business. We're excited to have the guy that's kind of running the whole thing, Derek Curtain. He's the chairman of the Auto Tech Council. Derek, saw you last year, great to be back, thanks for having us. >> Well, thanks for having me back here to chat. >> So, what's really changed in the last year, kind of contextually, since we were here before? I think last year it was just about, like, mapping for autonomous vehicles. >> Yes. >> Which is an amazing little subset. >> There's been a tremendous amount of change in one year. One thing I can say right off the top that's critically important is, we've had fatalities. And that really shifts the conversation and refocuses everybody on the issue of safety. So, there's real vehicles out there driving real miles and we've had some problems crop up that the industry now has to re-double down in their efforts and really focus on stopping those, and reducing those. What's been really amazing about those fatalities is, everybody in the industry anticipated, 'oh' when somebody dies from these cars, there's going to be the governments, the people, there's going to be a backlash with pitchforks, and they'll throw the breaks on the whole effort. And so we're kind of hoping nobody goes out there and trips up to mess it up for the whole industry because we believe, as a whole, this'll actually bring safety to the market. But a few missteps can create a backlash. What's surprising is, we've had those fatalities, there's absolutely some issues revealed there that are critically important to address. But the backlash hasn't happened, so that's been a very interesting social aspect for the industry to try and digest and say, 'wow, we're pretty lucky.' and 'Why did that happen?' and 'Great!' to a certain extent. >> And, obviously, horrible for the poor people that passed away, but a little bit of a silver lining is that these are giant data collection machines. And so the ability to go back after the fact, to do a postmortem, you know, we've all seen the video of the poor gal going across the street in the dark and they got the data off the one, 101 87. So luckily, you know, we can learn from it, we can see what happened and try to move forward. >> Yeah, it is, obviously, a learning moment, which is absolutely not worth the price we pay. So, essentially, these learning moments have to happen without the human fatalities and the human cost. They have to happen in software and simulations in a variety of ways that don't put people in the public at risk. People outside the vehicle, who haven't even chosen to adopt those risks. So it's a terrible cost and one too high to pay. And that's the sad reality of the whole situation. On the other hand, if you want to say silver lining, well, there is no fatalities in a silver lining but the upside about a fatality in the self-driving world is that in the human world we're used to, when somebody crashes a car they learn a valuable lesson, and maybe the people around them learned a valuable lesson. 'I'm going to be more careful, I'm not going to have that drink.' When an autonomous car gets involved in any kind of an accident, a tremendous number of cars learn the lesson. So it's a fleet learning and that lesson is not just shared among one car, it might be all Teslas or all Ubers. But something this serious and this magnitude, those lessons are shared throughout the industry. And so this extremely terrible event is something that actually will drive an improvement in performance throughout the industry. >> That's a really good, that's a super good point. Because it is not a good thing. But again, it's nice that we can at least see the video, we could call kind of make our judgment, we could see what the real conditions were, and it was a tough situation. What's striking to me, and it came up in one of the other keynotes is, on one hand is this whole trust issue of autonomous vehicles and Uber's a great example. Would you trust an autonomous vehicle? Or will you trust some guy you don't know to drive your daughter to the prom? I mean, it's a really interesting question. But now we're seeing, at least in the Tesla cases that have been highlighted, people are all in. They got a 100% trust. >> A little too much trust. >> They think level five, we're not even close to level five and they're reading or, you know, doing all sorts of interesting things in the car rather than using it as a driver assist technology. >> What you see there is that there's a wide range of customers, a wide range users and some of them are cautious, some of them will avoid the technology completely and some of them will abuse it and be over confident in the technology. In the case of Tesla, they've been able to point out in almost every one of their accidents where their autopilot is involved, they've been able to go through the logs and they've been able to exonerate themselves and say, 'listen, this was customer misbehavior. Not our problem. This was customer misbehavior.' And I'm a big fan, so I go, 'great!' They're right. But the problem is after a certain point, it doesn't matter who's fault it is if your tool can be used in a bad way that causes fatalities to the person in the car and, once again, to people outside the car who are innocent bystanders in this, if your car is a tool in that, you have reconsider the design of that tool and you have to reconsider how you can make this idiot proof or fail safe. And whether you can exonerate yourself by saying, 'the driver was doing something bad, the pedestrian was doing something bad,' is largely irrelevant. People should be able to make mistakes and the systems need to correct those mistakes. >> But, not to make excuses, but it's just ridiculous that people think they're driving a level five car. It's like, oh my goodness! Really. >> Yeah when growing up there was that story or the joke of somebody that had cruise control in the R.V. so they went in the back to fry up some bacon. And it was a running joke when I was a kid but you see now that people with level two autonomous cars are kind of taking that joke a little too far and making it real and we're not ready for that. >> They're not ready. One thing that did strike that is here today that Patty talked about, Patty Rob from Intel, is just with the lane detection and the forward-looking, what's the technical term? >> There's forward-looking radar for braking. >> For braking, the forward-looking radar. And the crazy high positive impact on fatalities just those two technologies are having today. >> Yeah and you see the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the entire insurance industry, is willing to lower your rates if you have some of these technologies built into your car because these forward-looking radars and lidars that are able to apply brakes in emergency situations, not only can they completely avoid an accident and save the insurer a lot of money and the driver's life and limb, but even if they don't prevent the accident, if they apply a brake where a human driver might not have or they put the break on one second before you, it could have a tremendous affect on the velocity of the impact and since the energy that's imparted in a collision is a function of the square of the velocity, if you have a small reduction of velocity, you could have a measurable impact on the energy that's delivered in that collision. And so just making it a little slower can really deliver a lot of safety improvements. >> Right, so want to give you a chance to give a little plug in terms of, kind of, what the Auto Tech Council does. 'Cause I think what's great with the automotive industry right, is clearly, you know, is born in the U.S. and in Detroit and obviously Japan and Europe those are big automotive presences. But there's so much innovation here and we're seeing them all set up these kind of innovation centers here in the Bay area, where there's Volkswagen or Ford and the list goes on and on. How is the, kind of, your mission of bringing those two worlds together? Working, what are some of the big hurdles you still have to go over? Any surprises, either positive or negative as this race towards autonomous vehicles seems to be just rolling down the track? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Silicone Valley historically a source of great innovation for technologies. And what's happened is that the technologies that Silicone Valley is famous for inventing, cloud-based technology and network technology, processing, artificial intelligence, which is machine learning, this all Silicone Valley stuff. Not to say that it isn't done anywhere else in the world, but we're really strong in it. And, historically, those may not have been important to a car maker in Detroit. And say, 'well that's great, but we had to worry about our transmission, and make these ratios better. And it's a softer transmission shift is what we're working on right now.' Well that era is still with us but they've layered on this extremely important software-based and technology-based innovation that now is extremely important. The car makers are looking at self-driving technologies, you know, the evolution of aid as technologies as extremely disruptive to their world. They're going to need to adopt like other competitors will. It'll shift the way people buy cars, the number of cars they buy and the way those cars are used. So they don't want to be laggards. No car maker in the world wants to come late to that party. So they want to either be extremely fast followers or be the leaders in this space. So to that they feel like well, 'we need to get a shoulder to shoulder with a lot of these innovation companies. Some of them are pre-existing, so you mentioned Patti Smith from Intel. Okay we want to get side by side with Intel who's based here in Silicone Valley. The ones that are just startups, you know? Outside I see a car right now from a company called Iris, they make driver monitoring software that monitors the state of the driver. This stuff's pretty important if your car is trading off control between the automated system and the driver, you need to know what the driver's state is. So that's startup is here in Silicone Valley, they want to be side by side and interacting with startups like that all the time. So as a result, the car companies, as you said, set up here in Silicone Valley. And we've basically formed a club around them and said, 'listen, that's great! We're going to be a club where the innovators can come and show their stuff and the car makers can come and kind of shop those wares. >> It's such crazy times because the innovation is on so many axis for this thing. Somebody used in the keynote care, or Case. So they're connected, they're autonomous, so the operation of them is changing, the ownership now, they're all shared, that's all changing. And then the propulsion in the motors are all going to electric and hybrid, that's all changing. So all of those factors are kind of flipping at the same time. >> Yeah, we just had a panel today and the subject was the changes in supply chain that Case is essentially going to bring. We said autonomy but electrification is a big part of that as well. And we have these historic supply chains that have been very, you know, everyone's going as far GM now, so GM will have these premier suppliers that give them their parts. Brake stores, motors that drive up and down the windows and stuff, and engine parts and such. And they stick year after year with the same suppliers 'cause they have good relationships and reliability and they meet their standards, their factories are co-located in the right places. But because of this Case notion and these new kinds of cars, new range of suppliers are coming into play. So that's great, we have suppliers for our piston rods, for example. Hey, they built a factory outside Detroit and in Lancing real near where we are. But we don't want piston rods anymore we want electric motors. We need rare earth magnets to put in our electric motors and that's a whole new range of suppliers. That supply either motors or the rare earth magnets or different kind of, you know, a switch that can transmit right amperage from your battery to your motor. So new suppliers but one of the things that panel turned up that was really interesting is, specifically, was, it's not just suppliers in these kind of brick and mortar, or mechanical spaces that car makers usually had. It's increasing the partners and suppliers in the technology space. So cloud, we need a cloud vendor or we got to build the cloud data center ourselves. We need a processing partner to sell us powerful processors. We can't use these small dedicated chips anymore, we need to have a central computer. So you see companies like Invidia and Intel going, 'oh, that's an opportunity for us we're keen to provide.' >> Right, exciting times. It looks like you're in the right place at the right time. >> It is exciting. >> Alright Derek, we got to leave it there. Congratulations, again, on another event and inserting yourself in a very disruptive and opportunistic filled industry. >> Yup, thanks a lot. >> He's Derek, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from Western Digital Auto Tech Council event in Milpitas, California. Thanks for watching and see you next time. (electronic music)