>>Welcome everyone to our continuous coverage on the cube of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Dave Nicholson. And I am absolutely delighted to be joined by two folks from Unisys. I have a company that has been in the business of helping people with everything related to it for a very, very long time. We heard a talk about data monetization at modernization with ANU Priya, rom Raj vice president of cloud solution management at Unisys, along with ANU palms, the high VP and CTO of cloud solution engineering at UNISIS. And, uh, just so that we keep everything clear, I'm just going to call you on new and ANU Palm, and we'll all know who we're talking to. Sure. The funny thing is I'm David Nicholson or Dave Nicholson. Dave Vellante is one of the founders of Silicon angle, the cube. So usually it's two Dave's battling in >>So I get to be David and he's Dave typically. So we're completely, we're completely used to this, right? So, so tell me about what Eunice is doing UNISIS is doing in the arena of app modernization and data modernization and migration into cloud. You Unisys has a long and storied history of managing it in people's environments, you know, in the sort of on-premise world, as well as, as well as cloud now. But, uh, I knew tell us, tell us a little about what you'd assist is doing in this space. And then we'll, we'll double click and dive in. >>Um, so you, you're probably very, very familiar with the six RS of modernization, right? All the way from migration modernization, all the way from replatform rehost to, to the other side of the spectrum, refactor and rearchitect, right? So what is DASA is that it takes clients on that journey, right? So we see clients in different stages of that journey. There are clients that come to us, uh, recently brought on board a pipeline they're very early in their journey. They just talking about their first set of migrations. There are clients that have taken the leap and done 75% of their workload is on cloud, even for Unisys 95% of more than 95% of our workload actually runs on cloud public cloud. So different stages of the journey, but no matter where they are in the journey, really moving the needle on modernization. Right. And what did he mean by modernization? It's it's taking advantage of the innovation in cloud, whether it's seven containers are AI and bringing that to the client so that they can drive those business outcomes. That's what we are passionate about doing. And we can talk to you about a couple of clients where we've done this on a, but I like to unopened to add on. >>Sure. Yeah. And, and just, and before you dive in on a Palm, I want to hear specifically about the inhibitors that you're seeing, the things that causing friction, right. Movement to cloud. >>Yeah. So cloud of the transformative technology is as disruptive and it brings about lots of benefits that are very well understood, but not realized, um, lower total cost of ownership, higher security, innovation, and agility. But the challenges that you see for customers really benefit from moving and migrating to the cloud are related to security and compliance. That comes up to be the top pain point, followed by cost of ownership that are optimizations that you need to do before you can benefit from really leveraging the benefits from the cloud and then innovation and agility, how to drive that. And there are certain things around app and data about innovation, data analytics, AIML that really helps realize those values, but it needs a concerted effort and a drive and a push to transform your infrastructure from where you are today to really get to derive the true benefits from the cloud. >>And we do a cloud barometer study of about thousands of organizations from a Unisys perspective, Dave, and as a Oklahoma saying, um, more than 60% of our clients say security is the biggest inhibitor they want help with security. You >>No, you're saying the inhibitor to going to cloud is security >>To accelerating the cloud journey. They always are perceptive. >>Is that, is that hesitancy, uh, just perception or is it reality? >>That's a great question, >>Dave, and you don't have to be gentle with me. Like you might with a client, you know, you can, you can reach over and smack me and say get over it. You're going to be fine, Dave, >>Actually, I'm a new from leaned into it already. In many cases, when you, when you actually get to your cloud configuration, right. You probably be more secure in the cloud, but it's getting clients confident with that setup. That's where the rubber meets the road. Right. And that's where we come in to say, um, do you understand the shared responsibility model with cloud? What is the cloud provider do? What does being here at AWS reinvent? What has AWS bring to the table for security? This is what the client is responsible for. For example, application security is completely their client's responsibility, right? In most cases. So, um, just working with the clients so that they understand the shared responsibility model and then making sure we protect all the different layers of the stack, but security, right? Even, even as apps are developed, you need to have DevSecOps pipeline, right? So I didn't say dev ops, I said, dev sec ops, because we want to make security a part of developing your applications and deploying them in cloud as well. So that's what we bring to the table and making sure clients feel confident in, in accelerating their cloud journey. So >>You can deal with customers like me, who, who truly believed that my money is safer in a coffee, can buried in my backyard than it is in a bank, right. With all those banking people wandering around. Um, so when you start looking at an environment and you, and you look at the totality of an it infrastructure landscape, how do you go about determining what is the low hanging fruit? What makes sense to move first from is that, is that always an ROI discussion that comes into play and are your customers, I like to give like five questions at the same time to confuse you and are your customers expecting to immediately save money? And how big is the ROI conversation in this? >>Uh, great question. So a couple of things need to be considered first, just to understand where does the customer in the digital transformation journey are there green fee where they only have on premise data center and they're trying to get to the cloud, or they already have dipped their toes and move to the cloud. And in the cloud, how far in advance are they in their transformation journey, have them not have the done apps and data modernization? Do they have, uh, uh, management operations capability for day one and day two cloud ops and fin ops and security ops, and other leveraging the power of the cloud, the copious amounts of data that cloud brings to the table. Uh, the, the important thing to understand is that 80% of the tools that work in the on-prem do not work in the cloud. So you have to understand the very nature of the cloud and to deal with it differently. >>The same old tools and creeks will not work in the cloud. And I call it the three V's in the cloud, velocity volume, and variety of data is different in the cloud. So when you're talking about security, you need to look at the cloud infrastructure, posture management. You need to look at the cloud workload, pasture management. You need to look at the data that's available and analyze and harness the data using AIML and data analytics. So you need a new set of clicks as it were to really harness the power of the cloud to derive the benefits from increased security, lower cost of ownership and innovation and agility. >>And it makes sense. Yeah. >>I mean, I think you touched on touched on it, but fin ops, right. And you asked the question David on, is that the biggest driver in terms of savings to get to the, to the cloud. And I think it's definitely one of the bigger factors, um, because, and be believe to, to realize that we offer a fin op service. And if you know, Upserve is not just for the cloud, but choosing models at different, right. It's not like your data center planning. We talked about the tools being different. It's more than the tools, right? So you could do reserved instances or you could do spot instances, completely different ballgame with AWS, right. Or you could do AWS savings plans. Are you maximizing all of that? And even beyond that, are you thinking beyond that into like AWS container suppose, um, EKS, are you talking about seven less and that could completely change your bill and your total kind of cost of ownership. You talk Dave about past databases, right? So platform as a service, and that could completely change your total cost of ownership there as well. So are you really maximizing that? And do you have a service around that? Do you have a trusted partner who can help you with fin ops is I think an important consideration there? >>Well, I don't know. Pretty, I know you're dying to talk about a customer example, make it real for us. Give us an example of, uh, of this process inaction where UNISIS has helped a customer on the journey. >>Absolutely. Dave. So, um, uh, one example that comes to mind is a large public university and they've got about a half a million students and they've got 20 plus campuses around the U S in California, Sarah, I might've given myself away there. And, and, uh, in, into what they've done is, um, initially they are big into AWS and they are into their cloud, uh, higher into the IBM cloud journey, uh, big time. And they are a hybrid deployment at this point. And initially, uh, they, uh, when they subscribed to our fin ops service, uh, we, we brought in all the different, uh, thinking around working with different organizations, they need to like business planning, right? You need to know which is your most significant apps and what do you want to invest in them in terms of modernization and in tuning your AWS spend. And so we did that. And so we got them about a 33% cost saving and what they did was then they took, looked at all of their AWS accounts across the campuses and said, we want fin ops across all of them. Let's consolidate all of them. So that's, that's the power of a synopsis is about 33% saving right there. Well, that is >>Particularly exciting for me because I assume that they're going to be lowering my kid's tuition next year. So I'll be, I'll be looking forward to that. And now I know Palm, we know why she was kicked out of the, uh, you know, the, the intelligence agency can't keep a secret. Let's, let's, let's talk about an amusement park, uh, famous for its rodent, but I'm not going to say the name. So, so out upon talk about, uh, the technology space that we're in the midst of here at AWS reinvent, right? Um, each time we have a keynote, we're hit with an, almost a mind boggling number of announcements, right? Customers can't keep, keep this stuff straight. They're 575 different kinds of instances. It used to be, we have S3 and we have VC too. Right. Would you like, would you like one, or would you like both, right? How do you help customers make sense of this? >>Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question because, um, the cloud is, uh, I, as I said, cloud has three V's velocity, variety and volume of data and, and the new kinds of services that are available. Day-by-day, it's growing the keys to really figure out, again, map the business objectives that you as a customer or a company are trying to achieve, understand where you are in your digital transformation journey. And then based on the two, uh, and assess where you at and, and companies like Unisys can work with the customer to assess their, what I call the digital transformation posture, which will then give, uh, give us clear indications or recommendations on what are the next stages in the transformation of journey. So whether it's whether you want to improve your security posture, whether you want to improve your cost of ownership, posture, whether you want to go to go to the cloud and leverage DevSecOps to benefit from the innovation and agility, we can help you. >>Unisys has DevSecOps as a service, uh, containers as a service where we can help our customers and partners migrate to the cloud, modernize the apps. And again, based on research, that's out there, you can speed up app deployment and development by 60% by leveraging the power of the cloud. So the benefits out there for customers to get access to, it's a question of finding the right combination of people, process and technology to get you there. And Unisys being a very trusted advisor is certainly able to help you accelerate that journey and get you to meet your business outcomes. So me, >>Um, let me ask the two of you, what might be an uncomfortable question, and that is obviously Unisys is in the business of managing things that aren't in cloud. Also, you have very, very large existing customers that are spending money with you, right? And if they'll just stay still and not do anything and not change, you'll keep making money into the future. Aren't some of these things that you're doing as a trusted advisor, almost counterintuitive from a, from a finance perspective at Unisys, at least in the short term, how do you, how do you balance that? >>It's a, it's a great question, Dave, and for us, we are customer obsessed. So that's, I know one of the AWS principles and we, we live by that as well. Right? So customer comes first and doing the right thing by them, whether it is the total cost of ownership when it's getting the security posture, right. That comes first for us. And if, if moving them to a public cloud will help them achieve that. We will do that. Right. So even if it means that our bill is going to be lower, right. So we'll give you a great example there. Um, Eunice's, as you know, Dave has been in the mainstream business and we've got customers that are still on clear path, right? So even with those customers, we help them with both transitions. We can run clear path to the, on public cloud and we also help with modernization, right? So we always do the right thing by the customer. It's really the customer's tries in terms of what does the business warrant, how much business disruption are they willing to take as we do this modernization journey. And that's what determines us. And that's what makes us trusted advisers. Um, you're not looking out for the bottom line there in terms of how much our bill would be. Yup. >>Well, that's a, that's actually a great place to wrap up. Uh, I think it's hilarious that you mentioned mainframe since you were five years old, you gave me, you gave me a blank stare. When I mentioned stuff, Unisys was doing 20 years ago on a free auto Palm from Unisys. Thank you so much. It's a great point to close on. You're a trusted advisor when you're doing things that are truly in the customer's best interest and not just in your own company's best interests. I'm Dave Nicholson for the cube. We'd like to thank you for joining our continuous coverage at AWS reinvent 2021 stay tuned because we are your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel AWS and our community partners. Welcome to the cubes Coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by a couple of guests from Unisys. Please welcome unprompted high BP and Cloud CTO on income. Great to have you on the program. Thanks for joining me today. >>Great to be here leader >>and a new pre or a new Ram Raj, VP of Cloud Services. A new welcome. Great to have you on a swell. Great >>to be here in this virtual AWS being that great. >>Thank you. Very socially Distance We're following all the guidelines here. A new Let's start with you. I'd love to get just kind of Ah, you know, a vision of the AWS Unisys partnership. I know you guys are advanced consulting partner MSP. Tell me about that partnership. >>Absolutely. Lisa, we see our clients on a cloud journey which we accelerate with Unisys Cloud Services and AWS partnership is a big piece of that again. Way thorough. We have bean rated in aws MSP partner Come out very, very highly from those msb audited our, uh and we're investing in multiple competencies across the boat as well. So and we work very closely with AWS in terms off innovating in sharing our platform cloud 44 world map In looking at what our customers looking around the corner, what services could be co developed. So we're looking at some potential I o T engagements to jointly with AWS is, well, eso you're always co inventing and it's a great partnership with a W s >>excellent. And you let's stick with you Following on hybrid Cloud Journey you mentioned the Cloud Forte platform. I wanted to understand what that platform is, how your co developing that with AWS and how your customers are benefiting >>absolutely s. Um, every year Unisys does a cloud barometer study across thousands of our clients and and we got some interesting takeaways from that. Essentially two thirds of her clients that have started this cloud journey believe they don't really realize the benefits out of that and up thio 53% off. The the respondents said they needed some help with cloud security. And this is where I believe that Unisys Cloud Services has a strong viewpoint and can find their AWS, um, journey, no matter where, what challenges they're facing, whether it's budgetary challenges on optimizing AWS and whether it's getting I t operations right when you move your applications to AWS. Um, and is it is it getting the that I have seen cops models established? So no matter where clients are in the A journey, we look to accelerate with our set of solutions and services, and we're very proud about the fact that we respond very me to make sure our clients can innovate and achieve the business outcomes that they need. For example, with California Stink City, we were able to work with them on the AWS. John Pretty set up a native other lake and analytics on top of it so we could actually predict and influence graduation rates with students. Our scores are higher than any off are coming because of the outcomes that we deliver for our clients. And it's really about business outcomes and 40 platform, which helps us drive those outcomes. I mean, probably do you want to add on without cloud 40 platform? >>Sure, I know eso, as as I knew was saying cloud for the platform provides AH set off capabilities that allows us to create an offer highly differentiated services with Unisys Pipe and, as was mentioned earlier, our cloud solutions are are able to help customers no matter where they are in their car, in their cloud journeys, whether it's ah Greenfield opportunity, where they where the customers are intending to move to the cloud, or if it's a brownfield opportunity where they already have adopted the cloud and are looking to manage and operate and optimize their deployments. Cloud Forte Platform and our Cloud Solutions are able to provide, uh, customized solution for that customer context to really deliver the solution that addresses some of the pain points that you talked about. The keeping points really relate to security to get secured. It also relates to cost optimization and then optimizing the cloud purse, a cloud deployment hybrid cloud deployment of the key requirement. So our cloud 40 platform health drives the key use cases. The key pain points that our customers are looking for through a combination off accelerators, the number of cloud photo accelerators that enable customers to rapidly prove it provisioned customers and to rapidly migrate to the cloud with God rails so that they're the secure, their compliant. And then we've got the the Cloud Cloud 40 Cloud management platform for ensuring provisioning onda management and operations, along with cost optimization capabilities and the eyelid operations. So it's a comprehensive suite off services and solutions that addresses the key business outcomes. There are customers are are looking for >>outcomes. Focused is absolutely critical, especially these days. I knew I wanted to go back to you for a second. You talked about the Unisys Barometer study, and I like the name of that. When was that done? And I'm just wondering if there are certain things that you saw this year from a customer. Cloud journey. Need perspective because of the pandemic that have really influenced that barometer >>Wait Question. Hey said and development is study. The last version of it was done late last year, and we're still waiting on the ones from this year. So, but we're starting to see some of the trends that were influenced by the pandemic. We saw rush to cloud when the pandemic hit because business adopt to to remote workers to do more digital selling and then seeing our CEO is kind of struggle with optimizing and maximizing the results off their cloud. Spend right, So So that's a unique challenge that that we're seeing based on our tryingto interaction. So the rush to the cloud and the ask for more spend optimization and in terms of spend optimization, that's an interesting facet because, uh, it cuts through my multiple angles. It's it's cuts through having the platforms around, being able to dio right predictions on where you spend is going, and then it also it's across collaborative effort. Finn ops. As we see it, we call it as a synopsis of is that we bring to our clients it's passing with multiple organizations, including finance, to sometimes figure out. Where will this business be? Where should you spend be? What should be the reserved instance buys right. So combining cloud knowledge with financial knowledge and organizational and business knowledge. And that's the service that we bring to our clients with our phenoms services. At least a great question about how how is I kind of making the current business climate affecting our operating models? Um, like we said, there's increased ask for Finn ops is an increase. Ask for security ops because security threats have only amplified. And then the entire cloud ups model. I think hybrid cloud operations its's prompted us to rethink a lot off. How do we do? I t operations and and we're investing a lot in terms of automation and then underpinning that by ai led operation. So, um, you talked about the client management platform making sure we've got the best automation and processes which are repeatable around all the way from just doing provisioning to data operations to optimization. Just making all of that robust and repeatable um, is such a value. Add to clients because then they can see SOS can sleep at night knowing that everything is taken care off and, uh, the CIA, the CEOs can be rest assured that hey, they're not going to get that AWS bill that's going to make them hit the roof. So making sure we've got the right checks and balances and approval flow is all a part of our child management platform. And at that point, I know you really passionate AI and the role that it plays in operations and the entire cloud management platform and cloud for day platform So your thoughts in the poem? >>Yes, sir. No, thank you. But so yeah, yeah, I led operations is really part off the bigger question and the pain point that customers are faced with, which is I've reached the cloud. Now, how do I optimized and get benefits from the cloud on the benefits is around. You know, uh, utility for on demand access to resource is, uh, this cost optimization potential and the security, uh, cloud security potential that, if not managed properly, can really blow up in the face. And unfortunately, you know that in the case on the AI ops led Operation Side, that's again a huge foretell area where Unisys Investor is investing a lot off a lot off i p and creating a lot of differentiation. And the objective there is to ask Customers adopt cloud for day as they adopt Unisys Cloud services. They're able to take advantage off cost optimization capabilities, which essentially looks at historical usage on predicts future usage, based on a number off a I artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that that is able to give you predictions that otherwise very hard to hard to get and, uh, in the cloud environment because of the sheer velocity volume and variety of the data. Doing that in a manual fashion is very, very hard. So automated machine learning driven approach is very productive is very effective on, you know, some of the outcomes that we've achieved is is just amazing. We've been able to save up to 25% off infrastructure costs through the island operations. About 40% off infrastructure incidents have bean reduced due to root cause analysis. Eso onda up to 35% off meantime, to resolution improvements in time. So huge customer benefits driven by e I led operations. The I am a approaches to following the problem. >>Let me see him If I could stick with you for a second big numbers that you just talked about and we talked a few minutes ago about outcomes. It's all about outcomes right now with this rush to cloud as as a new set. And we talked about this on the Cuba all the time. We've seen that the last eight months there is an acceleration of this digital transformation. I'm just curious una come from your perspective as the VP and CTO cloud how are you? What are some of the things that you advise customers to do if they need to rush to the cloud 21 just, you know, move their business quickly and not have the stay on life support. What are some of the things that you advise them to do when they're in this? Maybe a few months ago, when they were in the beginning of this? >>Yeah, that's that's a very interesting question, and lot off our clients are faced with that question as they either they're already in the cloud or the deciding to migrate to the cloud on the whole journey. Customer journeys for either stepping on the cloud or managing and operating the optimizing the cloud deployments is very key. So if you look at the market research that's out there and what we hear from our customers, the key challenges are really, really around. How do I migrate to the cloud without facing a lot of bottlenecks and challenges, and how do I overcome them? So that's the keeping pain point and again cloud for the advisory services and the cloud services that we offer allows customers to take up uh, toe work with us, and we work with the customer to ensure that they're able to do that on and then rapidly migrating to the cloud, managing and operating their operations. The hybrid cloud operations in optimized fashion is a huge challenge. How do they migrate? How do they migrate with security and compliance not being compromised once they're in the cloud, ensuring cloud security is and compliance is is maintained. Ensuring that the cost structure is is optimized so that they're not being mawr wants to move to the cloud compared to on premises and and then taking advantage of the whole cloud. Deployments to ensure you're looking at data are nothing the data to derive meaningful business outcomes. So if the entire end to end customer journey that needs to be looked at optimized. And that's where Unisys comes in with a cloud for the platform where we work with the customers to enhance the journeys. And in this case I want to mention CSU, which is, uh, the California State University, where the approach Unisys to really work with them to deliver uh, cloud services by enhancing the the objective was to enhance the student learning experience to enable adoption off off the technology by the students but also to achieve better performance, better adoption cost savings on we were able to deliver about 30% better performance help realize about 30 33% savings on 40% plus growth in adoption. On this was for about half a million student bodies. The 50,000 plus faculty staff spread across 23 campuses. So deploying, optimizing on and managing the infrastructure is something that Unisys does. Does that. And this is an example of that. I know you want to add anything to that. >>Absolutely Any Permanente's really well and, >>uh, >>it Z also securing, making sure securities with the >>journey >>it Z O Keefe or hybrid cloud. Um, uh, at least I'm sure you're aware of the Unisys tagline is securing tomorrow. So who better s so we really, really take that really, really seriously in terms of making sure we seek clients cloud journeys, and >>you >>probably heard the statistic from her. About 80% off cloud breaches are due to mis configuration, and this could have bean prevented. And and it doesn't. There's an element of the human angle in there. You believe strongly that can automate using our platform. So we've got 2000 plus security policies, which makes sure which again enables our clients to be compliant as well. So no matter what compliant standards, we've got several off our clients, for example, in the financial sector that are hosted on AWS and that we managed and they have to, especially the US They have to comply with Y de f s, the New York Department of Financial Services and making sure that they compliant with all the standards out there, which is next plus plus in this case. So that's part of what we do and enabling those journeys and then just keeping up with the rate of change like on different was talking about the variety and velocity of the data and and the rate of change of the applications out there, especially as businesses react to the pandemic and have to cope with the changing business paradigms out there. They have to be quick. Um, so we've got a drugmaker, one of the most premium drug makers in the US, who is who is against it on AWS, and, uh, they're racing for the cure and they are always looking at How do they get drugs quicker to the market? And that means accelerating applications. And we know that based on research by the Dora study, that if you adopt develops paradigms, you can accelerate 200 times faster than if you didn't. But then you have to underpin backward security as well. So really helping this adopt deaths are cops in all their deployments to AWS so that they can really race for the cure. That's the kind of business outcomes that we really, uh, are really, really proud to drive for our clients. >>Excellent on a pound. Let's wrap this up with you. We've just got about 30 seconds left sticking on the security front. It's such a huge topic right now. It has been for a long time, but even more so during these unprecedented times when you're talking with customers, what makes Unisys unique from a security perspective? >>So first thing is to understand what it takes to solve the hybrid cloud security problem. Like you said earlier, that's the biggest pain point that we hear from customers from our clients on. It's all over the market research all the breaches that have happened, like the zoom breach that happened that compromised about half a million, you know, user log ins. And then there was also the the Marriott breach, where about half a billion users names and credential for legal legal. So it Zaveri easy for customers, potential customers to become like a headline. And our our job really are the companies to make sure that they're not the next capital one or the next Marriott, uh, showing up in the newspaper. So we kind of look at their customer deployments situation on. We put together a comprehensive into an hybrid cloud solution, hybrid cloud security and compliance solution that includes look, securing their cloud infrastructure, their cloud workloads in terms of applications that they might have secured, and also to look at securing their applications, which may or may not be running on the cloud. So we kind of take a very holistic approach, using our homegrown solutions and partner solutions to create a comprehensive, robust hybrid cloud solution that really fits the customer context and and so we we are essentially a trusted adviser for our for our clients to create the solution, which again, at the cloud 40 ashore, which is a cloud security posture management solution. We have a cloud worker protection solution on then stealth, which is a full stack security solution if combined together with the other cloud Forte platform components on. We wrap this up in a matter of security services offering that allows US customers to have complete peace of mind as we take care off assessment remediation monitoring on, then continues Posture, posture, management. I know. Do you want to add anything to that? >>If I'm think in terms of closing, I think like you covered it well, we've got platform competence and services that run the gamut off the off the life cycle from migrations to two transformations. And one thing that I think in terms of outcomes of these, uh, when the service built around it have really helped us. Dr is, um is kind of responding especially to our public sector clients, very passionate about enabling cloud journeys for our public sector clients. And we'll take the example of Georgia Technology s So this is the G t A. Is the technology agency for all services are 14 of the agencies in Georgia and many of these public sector agencies had to quickly adopt cloud to deal with the report workers. Whether it was v D I whether it was chatbots on cloud, um, it was it was, ah, brand new world out there, the new normal. And it was just using the cloud management platform that anyone was refering to. We were able to kind of take them from taking three months. Plus to be able to provision workloads Thio thio less than 30 minutes to provision workloads. And this is this is across hybrid cloud. So and this is >>a big outcome, especially in this time where things were changing so quickly. Well, I wish we had more time, guys because I could tell you have a lot more that you can share. You're just gonna have to come back. And I like that. The tagline securing tomorrow. Adding on to what Anu Pump said So your customers don't become the next headline. I think they would all appreciate that. Thank you both. So much for joining me on the Cube today and sharing what's the latest with Unisys. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank >>you for having us >>aren't my pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. And you're watching the Cube? Yeah,

>> Live, from Washington, DC it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you buy Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Washington, DC with theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. It's a huge show, it's like the reinvent for public sector and it's really booming. Our theCUBE allumnis on Josh Stella, CEO of Fugue. And Peter O'Donoghue, Vice President of Service Application Services at Unisys. You guys are back for the third time. We first interviewed you guys last year here in that reinvent, as well. Good to you back, thanks for joining us again. >> Thanks for having us back on. >> Thanks yeah, great. >> I love to connect the dots. It's almost like the trajectory. And we were talking yesterday about Cloud and how Amazon and other Cloud players, and Stew brought up a term called having experience. And then we were talking about this economies scale. This is really where people who have done it over time, have got their requisite, experience, scar tissue, and learnings. Some jump to try to deliver everything at once. You guys have been together for a while working together. What's the update on the trajectory as you guys go Cloud first? What's the status, what's goin' on? >> You guys made an announcement this week right? >> Sure, yeah, yeah. So, yeah we at Unisys are super excited to announce our new Cloud offering called Cloud Forte. And your point about takin' the lessons from experience and really embedding those into a capability, that's really what Cloud Forte is about. I think, ya know, at a very high level Cloud Forte it's got two major kind of sets of capabilities. One is like subscription services, which is around management and governance of AWS. And actually we've designed it to solve like really tricky problems, that our public sector and frankly our commercial clients are really struggling with. And the second set of services are really professional services, that allow for any need to facilitate and catalyze adoption at scale. And actually they go head on addressing some of the trickiest problems in that space, as well. >> Well, take a minute and just explain, what does the product do? What's the value proposition of this new service? >> Okay. Well, at the management and governance tier, let me tell you what the problems that it solves. I can go into all the minutiae, but I think we could be here a while right? It solves some big problems. Problem one that it solves is, commercially, public sector, and actually federal wise organizations have a tough time managing the finances of AWS Cloud consumption. Actually having the transparency and visibility, and being able to comply with the Antideficiency Act, being able to manage funding, and also being able to tie it back to contracts and contract line owners sounds trivial enough, but it's really a thorn in the side of a lot of folks really trnna adopt Cloud. I would say the second element is what we're calling our command bundle. And the command bundle really kind of, it deliberately kind of solves the... It feels the gap of the shared responsibility model. I think we all here are deeply aware of what that means. But, that's really kind of the air gap, if you will, between while AWS it supports out of the box, and quite frankly what customers need to support. So, things like, classic things like service catalog management, patch management, back up and recovery, IT operations, incident management, asset management. All those things. We've built and we've constructed basically in a flexible framework. A light weight framework that allows folks to do, to go fast. But also has that enterprise level of governance that people people expect to see from the cloud. One of the key elements of our command bundle is what Josh's organization provides, is the Fugue policy engine. So, we find that in order to provide Cloud, it's really important to be able to have those guardrails. To provide basically a nanny like supervisor to make sure that what's deployed is compliant. And actually what's deployed and what's running in production, stays compliant with security policy. So, that's really what command is all about. >> Josh, how about what's under the hood? We've had a lot of conversation on policy and automation. It's third year in on our conversations. What's going on under the hood, what's happening with the things that you guys are doing with Unisys? >> Yeah, so when we last talked they hadn't announced this yet, so we couldn't quite explain what we're working on together. But, we're working with Unisys and other organizations to provide that full automation of the entire infrastructure layer. And it's just fire and forget infrastructure on Cloud. So, one of the things we're seeing consistently is people are really starting to struggle. The markets really maturing around the need to fully automate remediation of problems, detection and remediation. Where the old model of use a monitoring solution, throws a ticket over the wall, search for the pilot tickets. You might have hours, days, weeks, where you're exposed and your data leaks. And Fugue fixes that in under a minute. So, that's what we've been workin' on together and we love the partnership because Unisys has experience in the engagement on the federal side of the market. And Fugue is baked in to just provide all that goodness. >> What's the impact of that? Because you compared kind of the old way to the new way you guys are doing. Just kind of give some categorical or anecdotal color behind what the impact is from that. What does it do, save people's lives, saves time, money. What's the impact? >> Yeah, I'll tell ya the impact and I'll describe a use case. So, we're working with another customer and they came to us and said, in our hosted environments on AWS we have over 500 events a day, where configuration has drifted. And every one of those we have to investigate. We have to come up with a plan. Then we have to execute the plan. Then we have to write a report on how it will never happen again, 500 a day. So, with Fugue, every one of those just is automatically fixed and reported within about 30 seconds to a minute. So, the impact of this is a team of three completely overwhelmed folks, who were looking to hire 10 people to try to, as their Cloud presence group, they just had to staff a larger and larger Cloud services desk. Actually the three people that they have are now on to doing other work. Because it's just automated. >> So, Peter help connect the dots for us, for your customers on the federal side because we know there's been push back. Sometimes customer, oh automation sounds great, but ah wait, on the government side I've got regulations, I've got processes, I've got hurdles that we might need to do. So, how do we get beyond those? >> Well, I think that's a great question. I would say that, so as I was talking about the Cloud Forte offering that, there's a set of offerings in the professional services domain too. We actually have our accelerated bundle, right? And actually one of the things that we, we really believe as important as folks to adopt Cloud is, in order to leverage Cloud most effectively, you really need a mind shift. So, we have like two of the legs of our offerings went around the order of chain management. And kind of making that major transformation for human capital. And actually what really good looks like is folks who actually think Cloud natively, right? So, we find the most successful clients are folks who've kind of made that leap. The other kind of dimension is is around process and process change. And we see ITIL has been super affective and has been kind of a stone wall of enterprise IT for a long time. But, we see that as folks move to the Cloud one of the strong recommendations we make and we have process offerings, is how do we renew... My management in governance process is to actually embrace more DevOps thinking, embrace more of everything as code thinking, including policy. Because what we find is, as I think you're hinting at right, is as folks move to the Cloud you can kind of have like almost a goldilocks scenario. Where, like on one hand I've taken the really heavy weight processes and tools from my data center into my thinking, and I've got now kind of a Porsche 911, but I've put donut wheels on it and I can't move very quickly, and I'm kind of frustrated with it, right? On the other extreme, I've got like the SharePoint era of 2005, 2006 where it is the wild west. It's pandemonium, and God only knows what's goin' on right there. So, what we're trynna do is is really looking for effective enterprise and having transparent governance, making sure that the great lessons learned of before are there. But, we have like a light weight extensible frame work that we have the nanny guardrails on it, so we can understand where this policy drifts. >> And the beauty of this is ya know the APIs giveth and the APIs taketh away. The APIs are why we can go so fast, but it's also why it's really easy to hurt yourself. That's what Fugue is there for. We let you go just as fast, and when can show that all those processes, like in ITIL having a CMDB, that's a side affect of running Fugue. You can query Fugue and you've got your configuration data. >> How you made them go fast, I get that. But how do you protect from breaking, what's the other half? >> Yeah, sure, so the Fugue approach, and Unisys are doing some other things on top of this. But, the Fugue approach is you cannot deploy something unless it is both correct and meets policy and compliance. >> That's the guardrails you're talking about. >> That's the guardrails. And unlike anything else, Fugue tells you exactly how you got it wrong, why, and how to fix it. So, it's not just a big no, at the end of the process. It's hey, on 147 you're not allowed to have unencrypted volumes so change that. Then once the infrastructure is provision, so it must be correct up front, once it's provisioned Fugue will never let it drift again. Again, within 30 seconds to a minute we've seen it needs changed, and we've fixed it. And what that means is... >> Intelligence. >> It is. >> You bring intelligence do it, ya fix it, again this the, this is why I love the automation whole Cloud thing. The non believers don't understand the value of this. I call them the Cloud non believers because this is just game changing. You mentioned the point about the efficiency of people not having to bulk up manual labor to lock down and just open up so many security holes. Peter, I've got to ask you, I hate to put you on the spot here, what's it like now working with Fugue? You guys have done a lot of work together. What's the outcomes? Tell us about the experience. And what is it about their solution that really helps you out? >> Okay, sure. Well, I mean I think the most obvious ya know, response there is is the fact that we've baked it in, and it's part of the solution, it's one of the core tenants, and components within our command bundle. That in itself is a major part of our strategy. What we find in our customers, ya know we do find clients actually kind of range in where they are in terms of their Cloud adoption. And we're also finding with our Cloud Forte bundle folks actually will adopt different parts of it at different times. But, actually we do find clients are very interested... Actually, I think our best clients are folks who actually have been been playing with CI/CD and they've been playing with Cloud. But, they've actually kind of started to see that the sprawl affect is actually starting to happen. And they're looking to have speed, but also security at the same time. We find that the integration of Fugue, and that just, that kind of, that insane Cloud native thinking, and this kind of like ability to speak AWS natively as a native language is really important differentially, when we bring a joint solution to our client. >> How many of the scale pieces created? Josh I want to give you that final word on your, give us an update on your business. What's goin' on? What's the value possession look like now? Obviously, automation we're believers, we just talked about that. But, where's it go next? What's up with Fugue? >> Sure, so what's up for Fugue, all kinds of things over the next quarter or two that we'll be releasing. That I can't quite talk about yet, or my product lead will kill me. But, one of the things we've put a ton of work into is around pre-building libraries of policy for our customers. So, Nist 800-53 for federal we've implemented a lot as policy now. PCI, HIPPA, all kinds of standards, so that when they purchase Fugue they just get these out of the box. It's amazing to watch somebody who's been on Cloud for a little while bring up the Fugue compose or a visualization engine, go discover all their infrastructure, and then do import HIPPA, and find all the little red dots of where they're actually, have been running wrong, fix it all in less than an hour, and not worry about it again. So, we're doing a lot of business in federal. We're doing a lot of business with partners. And we're also doing a lot of business in commercial now, mostly on the larger enterprise side. The value prop is really around that controlling sprawl over time and automated remediation. There's lots of kinds of automation that are partial, unless the system like Fugue does can fix everything, if there are any gaps in that, you're back to manual world. So, it's a kind of binary scenario, so yeah. >> You kind of never give it up, unless you can fully let go of it. >> That's right, that's right. >> Awesome, well congratulations on the part, you want to... >> Can I pull string on that though, I mean I think this another great concrete example of why we like working with you guys. It's part of our business obviously, I would say one of the major blockers getting folks to the Cloud is what do we do with ATOs that folks already have? And how do I bring those security credidations into the Cloud? So, if you think of you know where I think the industry is going to go next, is automation frameworks that allow me to quickly figure out what I inherit, what controls or balance I need to address as I move to the Cloud. But, the fact that Fugue is looking at natively kind of having as a primary citizen of their policies, this idea of those Nist controls, that's going to help provide transparency and visibility. So, that's actually going to be key part of being able to shorten the time to get to an ATO. >> Well, that certainly accelerates the discovery piece. >> Absolutely. >> Then ya kind of understand what ya have first and then you attack it with automation. >> Exactly. >> And everything seems more efficient, that's the goal right? >> Yeah, so this is why you know the true believer there's concrete reality there. Which is I can demonstrate, but I can demonstrate in real time that I'm complying all the time. I mean we've never really had that before, right? >> Yes. I mean again, this wave is coming. And love the commentary again. Public sector is very interesting, it's just being disrupted heavily and at a highly accelerated rate. You guys are doing a great job. Good to see ya Josh, Peter great to see you. CUBE coverage here in Washington, DC. Bringing all the action expected from us, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us, we'll be right back with more after this short break. 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>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering the AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Here, in Las Vegas for TheCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017 Amazon Web Service's Annual Conference. It's a zoo every year. Forty-five thousand people. Just seven years ago they couldn't get 4000 people to come, now the business exploding. Eighteen billion dollars of infrastructure, completely changing the game. I'm John Furrier. Our next two guests are Josh Stella who is the CEO of Fugue and Peter O'Donoghue, vice president of application services at Unisys Federal. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back. >> Thank you. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> So you guys are in the heart of it. We've talked many times about the DevOps ethos at the Amazon public sector event. Man, it's a changing of the guard happening in front of our eyes. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Seeing a whole new way of re-imagining how to deploy services in kind of the old school infrastructure world. But now taking over the applications. This is disruption. Share some insight, what's going on? >> Well, actually I really appreciate your lead in because, we're seeing like lots of big patterns happening at the same time, particularly with, my business that I look after, that I look at, is the federal sector. And actually, I think in the precursor we were talking about federal used to be slower and more staid. And that's still true in some cases, but actually the rate of acceleration is really taken off, but I think the big patterns we're seeing is you know, the CIO who looks at the Cloud as compute, network, and storage, that CIO is alive and well, and actually we sell and we provide managed services to that type of business. But we're seeing kind of like a greater focus and greater concentration on folks who actually want, they see the Cloud as really kind of an inflection point to break with tradition and actually to be able to consume native services, so they can actually affect and bring mission outcomes more effectively. In my own experience I've seen like two mission customers in a space of months to be able to solve like really serious problems and significant problems that they faced, but they wouldn't have been able to do it without being able to access RDS or ELB or Lamda, and these are becoming like the essential building blocks, the Lego blocks, if you will, of building modern Cloud native applications. >> So you're saying they solved the problem that was unique right there on the spot, which is great, you know, good job Cloud. But the question really is, would that ever have been solved in the old model? They would have been probably in a room arguing over architecture. I mean a lot of this is about looking at a solution, jumping on it, making it happen, not sitting in a room arguing. >> That's right. >> Get RFP out there. >> Josh: Yeah, exactly. Well, I think a lot of this has to do with infrastructure and policy as code. Because if you can express these thing as code, you can try things in an hour or two, instead of having to go through the RFP, sit on a whiteboard, waterfall design it. You can experiment without fear of failure because the costs are so low. And that's also bleeding over into public sector as well. >> I heard a quote this morning, I'll share it with you. I know it's a public sector kind of quote. The guy was up onstage really presenting how he transformed his entire, you know, I won't say the name to protect the innocent, but it was pretty massive transformation. He goes, "We couldn't use Amazon a few years ago because it was too cool." Meaning it's new. So the government's kind of like, well, you know, it's not yet tested, security. And security's always been the issue for this one group. He goes, "But now it's not cool to use it, so we can use it." Meaning, it's proven. So, it's kind of the opposite. When it's boring it's cool. When it's boring it must be good. Kind of a federal mindset, I won't try to pitch into the whole federal too much there, but the reality is tried, proven, tested, certified. There are some serious things that have to go on in both enterprise and now on federal. Amazon is continuing to move the needle while doing the heavy work. I mean, that's hard. So once they break through that, then you got the creativity going on. So take us through where we are in this, because the GovCloud is pretty disruptive. How far are we in the Cloud game in you guys' opinion of that getting the job done, checking the boxes of the certifications. I know there's FedRAMP, there's a bunch of other stuff. Is that mostly done right now? I mean how much more work is needed before everyone goes, okay Cloud is the standard? >> Well actually, (mumbles) >> Well let me try to answer, and I think Josh'll have an opinion on, too. Is I think the FedRAMP certification, I think, has been, I would say, probably if not the single most, one of the most important kind of factors in amplifying or accelerating Clouded option in the federal government. And actually, we've also seen that manifest in the state and local markets as well. Which is, we don't really have an equivalent, but if you're on FedRAMP, that's definitely good enough for us. That has become the defacto standard. But we find, though, is, and actually this is where, we really appreciate a product like Fugue, is actually folks find that, I mean actually, you asked about like major patterns or major trends. Like another major trend that we see, and actually I'll kind of come back to your question is, is that there's a significant shortage in talent and knowledge and skills to be able to manage the Cloud, and actually it's such a phenomenally different kind of mindset, so, like to properly govern and manage the Cloud, is actually a really difficult thing. So, you know, >> Good point. >> As a tradition, we got a lot of managed service provider business in our history. And if you look at, say Amazon, you know some folks would look at it as almost an existential threat. But in fact, we don't. It just means that you need to move into a different place in the stack to add value. And actually that place for us is that, you know, in terms of being able to amplify and accelerate that, the planning for, the migrating to, the running workloads in, in a scalable way, cost effective way, securely, and being able to build Cloud natively, our customers are really struggling with that. And they can do it, we've seen them do it one offs, but to be able to do a scale, so being able to really attack the knowledge gap from a human resource perspective? >> John: Great point. >> But also, encapsulating that into templatizing and putting nanny guardrails in are really important. Well that's a great point. There was a conversation I was involved in this morning with the CIA where they basically admitted, we got a lot of smart people, we can build a Cloud. Running and maintaining it... >> Josh: That's right. >> Are two different things. So this is kind of a false trap that a lot of people could fall into. Oh yeah, the Cloud, it's no problem. >> Josh: Yeah. >> So this is where the issues come in. Thoughts on that? >> Yes. >> And what you guys are doing? So I think we've entered the second phase of Clouded option. The first phase was kind of shadow IT bought them up. When I was at AWS I'd go into a customer, they'd say we're not on the Cloud. And then we found out we had 130 accounts that were swiped credit cards. >> John: Don't tell anyone. >> Yeah, don't tell anybody. Help us... >> Secret region. >> Help us sort this out. >> How is this the prototype? Honest, that's right. >> But now the market has changed. And so whether it's commercial or federal or other spaces, we're now in this phase two where these are strategic adoption of Cloud at an enterprise level. And to do that you need automation, you need repeatability, you need consistency, you need policy enforcement, and so that's where a system like Fugue packages all that together, which accelerates the whole operation of that. You know, I don't like the term centralized, because what Fugue allows you to do is assert some things and then decentralize the innovation aspect. >> It reminds me of the whole fabric and the whole grid days. But you bring up a good point, phase two is about kind of grownup Cloud. And so, that begs the question, now what are you guys working on, Unisys and, what's the story between your partnership? Talk about that. Because you know, people are relying on you guys as suppliers, so you have to stand alone and be successful. We talked about your company, but partnering is now important. >> Peter: That's right. >> Who you partner with and why, and what's the outcome options for the customers? >> Well, we're super excited about our relationship with Fugue. And actually primarily, as I talked earlier, we do see the big challenges that the market has right now. There is this huge gap from a knowledge and talent perspective. And also, the pioneers have gone into the Cloud, but now you have to have the settlers there. So how do we kind of attack those at the same time? So, when we're looking for a management platform, you know, we look for three things that really were important to us. The first is, is what I call expressiveness. So actually, I've got a lot of experience implementing kind of like more IT ops, like classical, like Cloud broker solutions, and we found that, you know, in order to be able to build a solution quickly for customers, you need to be able to express yourself. I mean, you can't manage and you can't govern, and you can't meter, you can't bill for, you can't apply policy for what Dr Vogels calls the primitives, right? So if I've only got like three or four primitives, my ability to manage and govern is really limited, right? It's almost like, the metaphor I would use would be maybe somebody gives you a keyboard, you got a half a dozen keys on there, and you're trying to write the great American novel. You can't do that, right? So, expressiveness, being able to articulate the right models and templatize and govern. That's kind of concern number one. Concern number two that we think is really important is, is it kind of goes at that knowledge management piece. We're making a major investment within Unisys Federal, and we're looking at hundreds and hundreds of our associates to be trained and certified, and we're building it a Cloud (mumbles) enablement. But we're looking to encapsulate our best practices and templatize those. So to the point... >> And Josh fits in there what, from a software standpoint? >> Well, he actually provides the way for us to capture that knowledge. So, in terms of what our policies in terms of governing say, you know, load balancers or EC2 instances or you know, how we're gonna manage S3 and gonna protect S3. You know, policies and best practices up and down the stack. Like, even governance processes around dev test environments. We're not gonna leave dev environments flapping in the wind for months on end where people are running up big bills, right? >> John: Got it. >> So Josh's product helps us manage that. And the third thing is what I call like the nanny rails. Now my daughter has just learned how to drive a car. And some of the choices that we made, we took into consideration like lane changing things and like crash avoidance and so and so forth. So, what we want, and actually Josh brought this up very elegantly is, is we want, the forward-leaning federal agencies to be able to go quick. But we want to put the guardrails behind them and have like that nanny kind of supervision behind them so that if things start drifting out of compliance we can drag them back. >> You can notify them, right? >> Some instrumentation. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> And management. >> Well, it's not just notification with Fugue. We don't let you do the wrong thing. And then if somebody goes in later and breaks it, we fix it. So instead of mean time to response of 15 minutes for your monitoring solution, then however long for somebody to pick up the notification, then to respond to it. With Fugue, within 30 seconds we've seen it and we've fixed it. And so that is a real game changer in terms of... >> Yeah, you guys are very impression with DevOps, they way you connect it. And the theme is connecting the tech to business. And in this case it's government, but that's your customer. What's new with you guys? Any announcements here? What's the story? >> Oh yeah, we have... >> Give us the update quick. >> Thank you very much. We have two big announcements. So it used to be, to use all the great management features of Fugue you had to build things using Fugue. So as of today you can download the new version of the system, you can point it at your existing AWS infrastructure. We autogenerate code and diagrams to show you what you're running. You can compare policy against that. So you don't have to write any code. And then when you've got it right, you can just apply Fugue to that. You can import that infrastructure into Fugue management. So a lot of our customers are telling us we have years of development on AWS. It was not done using best practices. We allow you to go back and fix that really quickly without recreating your infrastructure. >> So go in, do some maintenance without breaking it, tearing it down, building it up. >> and then you get all the benefits of Fugue enforcement. Every 30 seconds we examine the environment. If anything breaks we fix it. And so the ability to just pull that into Fugue and do it easily. >> Well it's great that you guys are successful. Congratulations on the partnership with Unisys. Big name, brand name. You guys obviously experienced, trusted advisors and partners to Federal. Personal question for you, Josh. You know, as you look back at the Amazon mothership. >> Josh: Yes. >> You gotta be like, damn that was a good ride. As an alumni and an extender, you're bringing that DNA to your company that you founded. What's it like? I mean, you feel good? You got a spring in your step? You kinda wish you were back on the mothership? >> Oh no, you know it's great working with AWS because I love doing what I'm doing now more than anything I've ever done. And they are great partners to us. They are so helpful. So I love coming back and seeing all my friends at Amazon. >> They're all bosses now. They're managers. >> Josh: That's right, that's right. >> Promoted. >> But being able to go out and do something that's really your vision, there's nothing like it in the world. >> John: I agree. >> Yeah. >> Being an entrepreneur certainly you can control your own destiny. It's a lot of fun, lot of passion. >> Josh: Yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Josh: Thank you. >> The Fugue CEO here with his partner in Unisys here in theCUBE. Live coverage day one. We've got two more live days. It'll be wall to wall. Big parties tonight. Lot of events, lot of action. Forty-five thousand people here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

(inspirational music) >> The history of high performance computing is unique and storied. You know, it's generally accepted that the first true supercomputer was shipped in the mid 1960s by Controlled Data Corporations, CDC, designed by an engineering team led by Seymour Cray, the father of Supercomputing. He left CDC in the 70's to start his own company, of course, carrying his own name. Now that company Cray, became the market leader in the 70's and the 80's, and then the decade of the 80's saw attempts to bring new designs, such as massively parallel systems, to reach new heights of performance and efficiency. Supercomputing design was one of the most challenging fields, and a number of really brilliant engineers became kind of quasi-famous in their little industry. In addition to Cray himself, Steve Chen, who worked for Cray, then went out to start his own companies. Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines. Steve Frank of Kendall Square Research. Steve Wallach tried to build a mini supercomputer at Convex. These new entrants, they all failed, for the most part because the market at the time just wasn't really large enough and the economics of these systems really weren't that attractive. Now, the late 80's and the 90's saw big Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu entering the fray and governments around the world began to invest heavily in these systems to solve societal problems and make their nations more competitive. And as we entered the 21st century, we saw the coming of petascale computing, with China actually cracking the top 100 list of high performance computing. And today, we're now entering the exascale era, with systems that can complete a billion, billion calculations per second, or 10 to the 18th power. Astounding. And today, the high performance computing market generates north of $30 billion annually and is growing in the high single digits. Supercomputers solve the world's hardest problems in things like simulation, life sciences, weather, energy exploration, aerospace, astronomy, automotive industries, and many other high value examples. And supercomputers are expensive. You know, the highest performing supercomputers used to cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe $30 million. And we've seen that steadily rise to over $200 million. And today we're even seeing systems that cost more than half a billion dollars, even into the low billions when you include all the surrounding data center infrastructure and cooling required. The US, China, Japan, and EU countries, as well as the UK, are all investing heavily to keep their countries competitive, and no price seems to be too high. Now, there are five mega trends going on in HPC today, in addition to this massive rising cost that we just talked about. One, systems are becoming more distributed and less monolithic. The second is the power of these systems is increasing dramatically, both in terms of processor performance and energy consumption. The x86 today dominates processor shipments, it's going to probably continue to do so. Power has some presence, but ARM is growing very rapidly. Nvidia with GPUs is becoming a major player with AI coming in, we'll talk about that in a minute. And both the EU and China are developing their own processors. We're seeing massive densities with hundreds of thousands of cores that are being liquid-cooled with novel phase change technology. The third big trend is AI, which of course is still in the early stages, but it's being combined with ever larger and massive, massive data sets to attack new problems and accelerate research in dozens of industries. Now, the fourth big trend, HPC in the cloud reached critical mass at the end of the last decade. And all of the major hyperscalers are providing HPE, HPC as a service capability. Now finally, quantum computing is often talked about and predicted to become more stable by the end of the decade and crack new dimensions in computing. The EU has even announced a hybrid QC, with the goal of having a stable system in the second half of this decade, most likely around 2027, 2028. Welcome to theCUBE's preview of SC22, the big supercomputing show which takes place the week of November 13th in Dallas. theCUBE is going to be there. Dave Nicholson will be one of the co-hosts and joins me now to talk about trends in HPC and what to look for at the show. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too, Dave. >> Oh, you heard my narrative up front Dave. You got a technical background, CTO chops, what did I miss? What are the major trends that you're seeing? >> I don't think you really- You didn't miss anything, I think it's just a question of double-clicking on some of the things that you brought up. You know, if you look back historically, supercomputing was sort of relegated to things like weather prediction and nuclear weapons modeling. And these systems would live in places like Lawrence Livermore Labs or Los Alamos. Today, that requirement for cutting edge, leading edge, highest performing supercompute technology is bleeding into the enterprise, driven by AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So when we think about the conversations we're going to have and the coverage we're going to do of the SC22 event, a lot of it is going to be looking under the covers and seeing what kind of architectural things contribute to these capabilities moving forward, and asking a whole bunch of questions. >> Yeah, so there's this sort of theory that the world is moving toward this connectivity beyond compute-centricity to connectivity-centric. We've talked about that, you and I, in the past. Is that a factor in the HPC world? How is it impacting, you know, supercomputing design? >> Well, so if you're designing an island that is, you know, tip of this spear, doesn't have to offer any level of interoperability or compatibility with anything else in the compute world, then connectivity is important simply from a speeds and feeds perspective. You know, lowest latency connectivity between nodes and things like that. But as we sort of democratize supercomputing, to a degree, as it moves from solely the purview of academia into truly ubiquitous architecture leverage by enterprises, you start asking the question, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could have this hooked up into our ethernet networks?" And so, that's a whole interesting subject to explore because with things like RDMA over converged ethernet, you now have the ability to have these supercomputing capabilities directly accessible by enterprise computing. So that level of detail, opening up the box of looking at the Nix, or the storage cards that are in the box, is actually critically important. And as an old-school hardware knuckle-dragger myself, I am super excited to see what the cutting edge holds right now. >> Yeah, when you look at the SC22 website, I mean, they're covering all kinds of different areas. They got, you know, parallel clustered systems, AI, storage, you know, servers, system software, application software, security. I mean, wireless HPC is no longer this niche. It really touches virtually every industry, and most industries anyway, and is really driving new advancements in society and research, solving some of the world's hardest problems. So what are some of the topics that you want to cover at SC22? >> Well, I kind of, I touched on some of them. I really want to ask people questions about this idea of HPC moving from just academia into the enterprise. And the question of, does that mean that there are architectural concerns that people have that might not be the same as the concerns that someone in academia or in a lab environment would have? And by the way, just like, little historical context, I can't help it. I just went through the upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 14. This has got one terabyte of storage in it. One terabyte of storage. In 1997, I helped build a one terabyte NAS system that a government defense contractor purchased for almost $2 million. $2 million! This was, I don't even know, it was $9.99 a month extra on my cell phone bill. We had a team of seven people who were going to manage that one terabyte of storage. So, similarly, when we talk about just where are we from a supercompute resource perspective, if you consider it historically, it's absolutely insane. I'm going to be asking people about, of course, what's going on today, but also the near future. You know, what can we expect? What is the sort of singularity that needs to occur where natural language processing across all of the world's languages exists in a perfect way? You know, do we have the compute power now? What's the interface between software and hardware? But really, this is going to be an opportunity that is a little bit unique in terms of the things that we typically cover, because this is a lot about cracking open the box, the server box, and looking at what's inside and carefully considering all of the components. >> You know, Dave, I'm looking at the exhibitor floor. It's like, everybody is here. NASA, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Intel, HPE, AWS, all the hyperscale guys, Weka IO, Pure Storage, companies I've never heard of. It's just, hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors, Nvidia, Oracle, Penguin Solutions, I mean, just on and on and on. Google, of course, has a presence there, theCUBE has a major presence. We got a 20 x 20 booth. So, it's really, as I say, to your point, HPC is going mainstream. You know, I think a lot of times, we think of HPC supercomputing as this just sort of, off in the eclectic, far off corner, but it really, when you think about big data, when you think about AI, a lot of the advancements that occur in HPC will trickle through and go mainstream in commercial environments. And I suspect that's why there are so many companies here that are really relevant to the commercial market as well. >> Yeah, this is like the Formula 1 of computing. So if you're a Motorsports nerd, you know that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport. SC22, this is where everybody wants to be. Another little historical reference that comes to mind, there was a time in, I think, the early 2000's when Unisys partnered with Intel and Microsoft to come up with, I think it was the ES7000, which was supposed to be the mainframe, the sort of Intel mainframe. It was an early attempt to use... And I don't say this in a derogatory way, commodity resources to create something really, really powerful. Here we are 20 years later, and we are absolutely smack in the middle of that. You mentioned the focus on x86 architecture, but all of the other components that the silicon manufacturers bring to bear, companies like Broadcom, Nvidia, et al, they're all contributing components to this mix in addition to, of course, the microprocessor folks like AMD and Intel and others. So yeah, this is big-time nerd fest. Lots of academics will still be there. The supercomputing.org, this loose affiliation that's been running these SC events for years. They have a major focus, major hooks into academia. They're bringing in legit computer scientists to this event. This is all cutting edge stuff. >> Yeah. So like you said, it's going to be kind of, a lot of techies there, very technical computing, of course, audience. At the same time, we expect that there's going to be a fair amount, as they say, of crossover. And so, I'm excited to see what the coverage looks like. Yourself, John Furrier, Savannah, I think even Paul Gillin is going to attend the show, because I believe we're going to be there three days. So, you know, we're doing a lot of editorial. Dell is an anchor sponsor, so we really appreciate them providing funding so we can have this community event and bring people on. So, if you are interested- >> Dave, Dave, I just have- Just something on that point. I think that's indicative of where this world is moving when you have Dell so directly involved in something like this, it's an indication that this is moving out of just the realm of academia and moving in the direction of enterprise. Because as we know, they tend to ruthlessly drive down the cost of things. And so I think that's an interesting indication right there. >> Yeah, as do the cloud guys. So again, this is mainstream. So if you're interested, if you got something interesting to talk about, if you have market research, you're an analyst, you're an influencer in this community, you've got technical chops, maybe you've got an interesting startup, you can contact David, david.nicholson@siliconangle.com. John Furrier is john@siliconangle.com. david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I'd be happy to listen to your pitch and see if we can fit you onto the program. So, really excited. It's the week of November 13th. I think November 13th is a Sunday, so I believe David will be broadcasting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Really excited. Give you the last word here, Dave. >> No, I just, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm really, really excited about this. It's cutting edge stuff and I'm really going to be exploring this question of where does it fit in the world of AI and ML? I think that's really going to be the center of what I'm really seeking to understand when I'm there. >> All right, Dave Nicholson. Thanks for your time. theCUBE at SC22. Don't miss it. Go to thecube.net, go to siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in Dallas. (inquisitive music)

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. With COVID-19 hitting, organizations really had to focus on business resiliency, and we've got two great guests here to talk about that topic. Bob Bender's the chief technology officer at Founders Federal Credit Union. And he's joined by Jim Shook, who is the director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the CUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks, Dave, great to see you, thank you. So, Bob, let's start with you, give us a little bit of background on Founders and your role. >> Founders Federal Credit Union is a financial institution that has about 225,000 members, serving them in 30 different locations, located in the Carolinas. I serve as chief technology officer bringing in the latest technology and cyber resilient direction for the company. >> Great. And Jim, talk about your role. Is this a new role that was precipitated by COVID or was this something that Dell has had for a while? Certainly relevant. >> It's actually been around for a while, Dave. The organization invested in this space going back about five years, I founded the cyber security and compliance practice. So really, my role is most of the time in the field with our customers, helping them to understand and solve their issues around the cyber resilience and cyber recovery field that we're talking about. But I also, to do that properly, spend a lot of time with organizations that are interested in that space. So it could be with an advisory partner, could be the FBI, might be a regulator, a particular group like Sheltered Harbor that we've worked with frequently. So it's just really, as you point out, taken off first with ransomware a couple of years ago, and then with the recent challenges from work from home in COVID. So we're really helping out a lot of our customers right now. >> Bob, I've talked privately to a number of CIOs and CSOs and many have said to me that when COVID hit that their business continuance was really much too (voice cuts out) Now, you guys actually started your journey way back in 2017. I wonder if you could take us back a few years and what were the trends that you were seeing that precipitated you to go on this journey? >> Well, I think we actually saw the malware, the horizon there. And I'll take you back a little further 'cause I just love that story is, when we looked at the relationship of Dell EMC, we talked to the 1% of the 1%, who is protecting their environment, their data capital, the new critical asset in our environment. And Dell EMC was the top of the line every time. When we looked at the environment and what it required, to put our assets under protection, again, we turned to Dell EMC and said, where do we need to go here? You look at this Mecklenburg County, you look at the city of Atlanta, you look at Boeing and I hate to use the examples, but some very large companies, some really experienced companies were susceptible to this malware attacks that we just knew ourself it was going to change us. So the horizon was moving fast and we had to as well. >> Well, you were in a highly regulated industry as well. How did that factor into the move? Well, you're exactly right. We had on our budget, our capital budget horizon, to do an air gap solution. We were looking at that. So the regulatory requirements were requiring that, the auditors were in every day talking about that. And we just kept framing that in what we were going to do in that environment. We wanted to make sure as we did this purpose built data bunker, that we looked at everything, talk to the experts, whether that was federal state regulation. You mentioned Sheltered Harbor, there's GDPR. All these things are changing how are we going to be able to sustain a forward look as we stand this environment up. And we also stood up a cyber security operations center. So we felt very confident in our Runbooks, in our incident response, that you would think that we would be ready to execute. I'll share with you that we reached out every which way and a friend called me and was actually in a live ransomware event and asked if I wanted to come on to their site to help them through that incident. We had some expertise on our staff that they did not possess at that time. So going into that environment, spending 30 hours of the last 72 hours of an attack we came back changed. We came back changed and went to our board and our executives and said, "We thought we knew what we were doing." But when you see the need to change from one to 10 servers recovery to 300 in 72 hours, we just realized that we had to change our plan. We turned to the investment we had already made and what we had looked at for some time, and said, "Dell EMC, we're ready to look at that "PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution. "How can you stand this up very quickly?" >> So, Jim, Bob was saying that he looked at the 1% of the 1%, so these guys are early adopters, but anything you can add to that discussion in terms of what you saw precipitate the activity, let's go pre-COVID, certainly ransomware was part of that. Was that the big catalyst that you saw? >> It really was. So when we started the practice, it was following up on the Sony Pictures attack, which only hit Sony in that. But it was unique in that it was trying to destroy an organization as opposed to just steal their data. So we had financial industry really leading the way, the regulators in the financial industry saying, "Gosh, these attacks could happen here "and they would be devastating." So they led the way. And as our practice continued, 2016 became the year of ransomware and became more prevalent, with the attackers getting more sophisticated and being able to monetize their efforts more completely with things like cryptocurrencies. And so as we come around and start talking to Bob, he still was well ahead of the game. People were talking about these issues, starting to grow concerned, but didn't really understand what to do. And Dave, I know we'll get to this a little bit later, but even today, there's quite a bit of disconnect, many times between the business, understanding the risks of the business and then the technology, which really is the business now, but making those pieces fit together and understanding where you need to improve to secure against these risks is a difficult process. >> Well, I think I'd love to come back to Bob and try to understand how you pitch this to the board, if you will, how you made the business case. To Jim's point, the adversaries are highly capable. It's a lucrative business. I always talk to my kids about ROI numerator and denominator. If you can raise the denominator, that's going to lower the value. And that's the business that you're in is making it less attractive for the bad guys. But how did you present this to the board? Was it a board level discussion? >> It was, exactly. We brought Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution to them and said, not only you're experiencing and seeing in the news daily, these attacks in our regions, but we have actually gone out into an environment and watch that attack play out. Not only that is when we stepped away, and we ran through some tabletops with them and we stepped away. And we said, "Are you okay? "Do you know how it got in? "Are you prepared to protect now and detect that again?" Within 30 days, they were hit again by the same ransomware attacks and hackers. So I hate to say this, but I probably fast forwarded on the business case and in the environment, the horizon around me, players, they made my case for me. So I really appreciated that top down approach. The board invested, the executive invested, they understood what was at risk. They understood that you don't have weeks to recover in the financial institution. You're dealing with hundreds of thousand transactions per second so it made my case. We had studied, we had talked to the experts. We knew what we wanted. We went to Dell EMC and said, "I have six months and here's my spend." And that's from equipment hitting our CoLOS and our data centers, standing it up, standing up the Runbooks and it's fully executed. And I wanted an environment that was not only holistic. We built it out to cover all of our data and that I could stand up the data center within that environment. I didn't need another backup solution. I needed a cyber recovery environment, a lifestyle change, if you would say. It's got to be different than your BCP/DR. While it inherits some of those relationships, we fund it with employees separately. We treated the incident response separately, and it is really benefited. And I think we've really grown. And we continue to stress that to educate ourselves not only at the board level, but a bottom up approach as well with the employees. 'cause they're a part of that human firewall as well. >> I think you've seen this where a lot of organizations, they do a checkbox on backup or as I was saying before, DR. But then in this world of digital, when a problem hits, it's like, "Oh-oh, we're not ready." So I wonder Jim, if we can get into this solution that Bob has been talking about the Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, there's a mouthful there. You got the power branding going on. What is that all about? Talk to us about the tech that's behind this. >> It's something that we've developed over time and really added to in our capability. So at its core, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is going to protect your most critical data and applications so that if there is a cyber attack, a ransomware or destructive attack, they're safe from that attack. And you can take that data and recover the most important components of the business. And to do that, we do a number of things, Dave. The solution itself takes care of all these things. But number one is we isolate the data so that you can't get there from here. If you're a bad actor, even an insider, you can't get to the data because of how we've architected. And so we'll use that to update the critical applications and data. Then we'll lock that data down. People will use terms like immutability or retention lock. So we'll lock it down in that isolated environment, and then we'll analyze it. So it's one thing to be able to protect the data with the solution, it's another, to be able to say that what I have here in my data vault, in my air gapped isolated environment is clean. It's good data. And if there was an attack, I can use that to recover. And then of course over time, we've built out all the capabilities. We've made it easier to deploy, easier to manage. We have very sophisticated services for organizations that need them. And then we can do a much lighter touch for organizations that have a lot of their built in capabilities. At its core, it's a recover capability so that if there was an attack that was unfortunately successful, you don't lose your business. You're not at the mercy of the criminals to pay the ransom. You have this data and you can recover it. >> So Bob, talk to us about your objectives going into this. It's more than a project. It really is a transformation of your resiliency infrastructure, I'll call it. What were your objectives going in? A lot of companies are reacting, and it's like, you don't have time to really think. So what are the objectives? How long did it take? Paint a picture of the project and what it looked like, some of the high level milestones that you were able to achieve. >> Well, I think several times Dell EMC was able to talk us off the edge, where it really got complicated. The Foundation Services is just one of your more difficult conversations, one of the top three, definitely, patch management, notification, and how you're going to rehydrate that data, keeping that window very small to reduce that risk almost completely as you move. I think other area this apply is that we really wanted to understand our data. And I think we're on a road to achieving that. It was important that if we were going to put it into the vault, it had a purpose. And if we weren't going to put it in a vault, let's see why would we choose to do that? Why would we have this data? Why would we have this laying around? Because that's a story of our members, 225 stories. So their ability to move into financial security, that story is now ours to protect. Not only do we want to serve you in the services and the industry and make sure you achieve what you're trying to, but now we have that story about you that we have to protect just as passionately. And we had that. I think that was two of the biggest things. I think the third is that we wanted to make sure we could be successful moving forward. And I'll share with you that in the history of the credit union, we achieved one of the biggest projects here, in the last two years. That umbrella of the Cyber Recovery solution protection was immediate. We plugged in a significant project of our data capital and it's automatically covered. So I take that out of the vendor of responsibility, which is very difficult to validate, to hold accountable sometimes. And it comes back under our control into this purpose built data security and cyber resilient, business strategy. That's a business strategy for us is to maintain that presence. So everything new, we feel that we're sized, there's not going to be a rip and replace, a huge architectural change because we did have this as an objective at the very beginning. >> Tim, when you go into a project like this, what do you tell customers in terms of things that they really should be focused on to have a successful outcome? >> I'm going to say first that not everybody has a Bob Bender. So we have a lot of these conversations where we have to really start from the beginning and work through it with our customers. If you approach this the right way, it's really about the business. So what are the key processes for your business? It can be different from a bank than from a hospital than from a school point. So what are the key things that you do? And then what's the tech that supports that and underlies those processes? That's what we want to get into the vault. So we'll have those conversations early on. I think we have to help a lot of organizations through the risks too. So understand the risk landscape, why doing one or two little things aren't really going to protect you from the full spectrum of attackers. And then the third piece really is, where do we start? How do we get moving on this process? How do we get victory so that the board can understand and the business can understand, and we can continue to progress along the way? So it's always a bit of a journey, but getting that first step and getting some understanding there on the threat landscape, along with why we're doing this is very important. >> So, Bob, what about any speed bumps that you encountered? What were some of those? No project is ever perfect. What'd you run into? How'd you deal with it? >> Well, I would say the Foundation Services were major part of our time. So it really helped for Dell EMC to come and explain to us and look at that perimeter and how our data is brought into that and size that for us and make sure it's sustainable. So that is definitely, could be a speed bump that we had to overcome. But today, because of those lifts, those efforts invested the Runbooks, the increase in new products, new data as our business organically grows is a non-event. It's very plug and play and that's what we wanted from the start. Again, you go back to that conversation at 1% of the 1%, it's saying, who protects you? We followed that. We stayed with the partner we trusted, the horizon holistically has come back and paid for itself again and again. So speed bumps, we're just enjoying that we were early adapters. I don't want to throw anybody out there, but you look about two weeks ago, there was a major announcement about an attack that was successful. They got them with ransomware and the company paid the ransom. But it wasn't for the ransomware, it was for the data they stole so that they would delete it. That's again, why we wanted this environment is we needed time to react in the case that these malwares are growing much faster than we're capable of understanding how they're attacking. Now it's one, two punch, where's it going to be? Where is it going to end? We're not going to likely be patient zero, but we're also not going to have to be up at night worrying that there's a new strain out there. We have a little time now that we have this secure environment that we know has that air gap solution that was built with the regulatory consideration, with the legal considerations, with the data capital, with the review of malware and such. You can go back in time and say, "Scan to see if I have a problem. So again, the partnership is while we focus on our business, they're focusing on the strategy for the future. And that's what we need. We can't be in both places at once. >> How long did the project take from the point of which you agreed, signed the contract to where you felt like you were getting value out of the solution? >> Six months. >> Really? >> We were adamant. I'd put it off for a year and a half, that's two budget cycles basically is what it felt. And then I had to come back and ask for that money back because we felt so passionate that our data, our critical data didn't need to be at that risk any longer. So it was a very tight timeline. And again, product on prem within six months. And it was a lot of things going on there. So I just wasn't idle during that time. I was having a conversation with Dell EMC about our relationship and our contracts. Let's build that cyber resilience into the contract. Now we've got this, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery environment, let's build it here where you also agree to bring on extra hardware or product if I need that. Let's talk about me being on a technology advisory panel So I can tell you where the pricing of the regulations are going, so you can start to build that in. Let's talk about the executive board reporting of your products and how that can enable us. We're not just talking about cyber and protecting your data. We're talking about back then 60% of your keep the lights on IT person will spend with auditors, talking about how we were failing. This product helped us get ahead of that to now where we're data analytic. We're just analysts that can come back to the business table and say, "We can stand that up very quickly." Not only because of the hardware and the platform solution we have, but it is now covered with a cyber resilience of the the cyber security recovery platform. >> I want to ask you about analytics. Do you feel as though you've been able to go from what is generally viewed as a reactive mode into something that is more anticipatory or proactive using analytics? >> Well, I definitely do. We pull analytics daily and sometimes hourly to make sure we're achieving our KPIs. And looking at the KRIs, we do risk assessments from the industry to make sure if our controls layer of defenses are there, that they will still work what we stood up three years ago. So I definitely think we've gone from an ad hoc rip and replace approach to transformation into a more of a threat hunting type of approach. So our cyber security operation center, for us, is very advanced and is always looking for opportunities not only to improve, to do self-assessments, but we're very active. We're monetizing that with a CUSO arm of the credit union to go out and help others where we're successful, others that may not have that staff. It's very rewarding for us. And I hate to say it sometimes it's at their expense of being in-evolved in the event of a ransomware attack or a malware event. We learned so much the gaps we have, that we could take this back, create Runbooks and make the industry stronger against these types of attacks. >> Well, so Jim, you said earlier, not every company has a Bob Bender. How common is it that you're able to see customers go from that reactive mode into one that is proactive? Is that rare or is it increasingly common? It can't be a 100%, but what are you seeing as trends? >> It's more common now. You think of, again, back to Bob, that's three plus years ago, and he's been a tireless supporter and tireless worker in his industry and in his community, in the cyber area. And efforts like those of Bob's have helped so many other organizations I think, understand the risks and take further action. I think too, Bob talks about some of the challenges with getting started in that three year timeframe, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery has become more productized, our practice is more mature. We have more people, more help. We're still doing things out there that nobody else is touching. And so we've made it easier for organizations that have an interest in this area, to deploy and deploy quickly and to get quick value from their projects. So I think between that some of the ease of use, and then also there's more understanding, I think, of what the bad actors can do and those threats. This isn't about somebody maybe having an outage for a couple of hours. This is about the very existence of a business being threatened. That if you're attacked, you might not come back from it. And there've been some significant example that you might lose hundreds of millions of dollars. So as that awareness has grown, more and more people have come on board and been able to leverage learnings from people like Bob who started much earlier. >> Well, I can see the CFO saying, "Okay, I get it. "I have no choice where we're going to be attacked. "We know that, I got to buy the insurance. You got me." But I can see the CFO saying, "Is there any way we can "get additional value out of this? "Can we use it to improve our processes and cut our costs? "Can we monetize this in some way?" Bob, what's the reality there? Are you able to find other sources of value beyond just an insurance policy? >> Definitely, Dave you're exactly right. We're able to go out there and take these Runbooks and really start to educate what cyber resilience means and what air gap means, what are you required to do, and then what is your responsibility to do it. When you take these exercises that are offered and you go through them, and then you change that perspective and go through a live event with other folks that see that after 60 hours of folks being up straight, it really changes your view to understand that there's no finish line here. We're always going to be trying to improve the product and why not pick somebody that you're comfortable with and you trust. And I think that's the biggest win we have from this is that was a Dell EMC partnership with us. It is very comfortable fit. We moved from backup and recovery into cyber resilience and cybersecurity as a business strategy with that partner, with our partner Dell, and it hasn't failed us. It's a very comforting. We're talking about quality of life for the employee. You hear that, keep the lights on. And they've really turned into professionals to really understand what security means differently today and what that quality of data is. Reports, aren't just reports, they're data capital. The new currency today of the value we bring. So how are we going to use that? How are we going to monetize that? It's changing. And then I hate to jump ahead, but we had our perimeters at 1% of our workforce remote and all of a sudden COVID-19 takes on a different challenge. We thought we were doing really good and next, we had to move 50% of our employees out in five days. And because of that Dell EMC, holistic approach, we were protected every step of the way. We didn't lose any time saying, we bought the wrong control, the wrong hardware, the wrong software. It was a very comfortable approach. The Runbooks held us, our security posture stayed solid. It's been a very rewarding. >> Well, Bob, that was my next question, actually is because you've started the journey. >> Sorry. >> No, no, it's okay. Because you started the journey early, were you able to respond to COVID in a more fast sell manner? it sounds like you just went right in. But there's nuance there, because you've got now 50% or more of the workforce working at home, you got endpoint security to worry about. You got identity access management, and it sounds like you were, "No problem. "We've got this covered." Am I getting that right? >> You're exactly right, Dave. We test our endpoints daily. We make sure that we understand what residue of data is where. And when we saw that employee shift to a safe environment, our most consideration at that time, we felt very comfortable that the controls we had in place, again, Dell and their business partners who we are going to hold true and be solid. And we test those metrics daily. I get reports back telling me, what's missing in patch management, what's missing in a backup. I'll go back to keeping BCP and cyber security separate. In the vault, we take approach of recovery and systems daily. And now that goes from maybe a 2% testing rate almost to 100% annually. So again, to your point, COVID was a real setback. We just executed the same Runbooks we had been maturing all along. So it was very comfortable for employees and it was very comfortable for our IT structure. We did not feel any service delays or outages because of that. In a day, when you have to produce that data, secure that data, every minute of every day of every year, it's very comforting to know it's going to happen. You don't push that button and nothing happens. It's executed as planned. >> Jim, did you see a huge spike in demand for your services as a result of COVID and how did you handle it? You guys got a zillion customers, how did you respond and make sure that you were taking care of everybody? >> We really did see a big spike, Dave. I think there were a couple of things going on. As Bob points out, the security posture changes very quickly when you're sending people to work from home or people remotely, you've expanded or obliterated your parameter, you're not ready for it. And so security becomes even more important and more top of mind. So with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we can go in and we can protect those most critical applications. So organizations are really looking at their full security posture. What can we do better to detect and protect against these threats? And that's really important. For us, we're focusing on what happens when those fail? And with that extension and people going home, and then the threat actors getting even more active, the possibilities of those failures become more possible and the risks are just in front of everybody. So I think it was a combination of all of those things. Many, many customers came to us very quickly and said, "Tell us more about what you're doing here. "How does it fit into our infrastructure? "What does it protect us against? "How quickly can we deploy?" And so there has been a huge uptake in interest. And we're fortunate in that, as you pointed out early on, Dave, we invested early here. I'm five years into the practice. We've got a lot of people, very mature, very sophisticated in this area, a lot of passion among our team. And we can go take care of all those customers. >> Bob, if you had a mulligan, thinking about this project, what would you do differently if you had a chance to do it over? >> I think I would start earlier. I think that was probably the biggest thing I regret in that realizing you need to understand that you may not have the time you think you do. And luckily, we came to our senses, we executed and I got to say it was with common sense, comfortable products that we already understood. We didn't have to learn a whole new game plan. I don't worry about that. I don't worry about the sizing of the product 'cause we did it, I feel correctly going in and it fits us as we move forward. And we're growing at an increased rate that we may not expect. It's plug and play. Again, I would just say, stay involved, get involved, know that what we know today about malware and these attacks are only going to get more complicated. And that's where I need to spend my time, my group become experts there. Why I really cherish the Dell EMC relationship is from the very beginning, they've always been very passionate on delivering products that recover and protect and now are cyber resilient. I don't have to challenge that, you pay for what you get for. And I just got to say, I don't think there's much other than I would have started earlier. So start today, don't put it off. >> So you said earlier though, you're never done, you never are, in this industry. So what's your roadmap look like? Where do you want to go from here with this capability? >> I definitely want to keep educating my staff, keep training them, keep working with Dell. Again, I tell you they're such forward thinking as a company. They saved me that investment. So if you're looking at part of the investment, it's got to be, are you with a partner that's forward thinking? So we definitely want to mature this, challenge it, keep challenging, keep working with Dell and their products to deliver more. Again, we go to the federal and state regulatory requirements. You go to the Sheltered Harbor, the ACET testing from the NCUA regulators, just software asset management. You can keep on going down the line. This product, I hate to say it, it's like the iPhone. You think about how many products the iPhone has now made not relevant. I don't even own a flashlight, I don't think. This is what the Dell product line brings to me is that I can trust they're going to keep me relevant so I can stay at the business table and design products that help our members today. >> Jim, how about from Dell's perspective, the roadmap, without giving away any confidential information, where do you want to take this? We talk about air gaps. I remember watching that documentary Zero Days and hearing them say, "We got through an air gap. "No problem." So analytics obviously plays a role in this machine intelligence, machine learning, AI. Where does Dell want to take this capability? Where do you see that going? >> We've got some things in mind and then we're always going to listen to our customers and see where the regulations are going to. And thus far, we've been ahead of those with the help of people like Bob. I think where we have a huge advantage, Dave is with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. It's a product. So we've got people who are dedicated to this full time. We have a maturity in the organization, in the field to deliver it and to service it. And having something as a product like that really enables us to have roadmaps and support and things that customers need to really make this effective for them. So as we look out on the product, and thanks for your reminder, I don't want to risk saying anything here I'm going to get in trouble for. We look at things in three paths. One is we want to increase the ability for our customers to consume the product. So they want it in different forms. They might want it in appliances, in the Cloud, virtual, all of those things are things that we've developed and continue to develop. They want more capabilities. So they want the product to do more things. They want it to be more secure, and keeping up. As you mentioned, machine learning with the analytics is a big key for us. Even more mundane things like operational information makes it easier to keep the vault secure and understand what's going on there without having to get into it all the time. So those are really valuable. And then our third point, really, we can't do everything. And so we have great partners, whether they're doing delivery, offering cyber recovery as a service or providing secure capabilities, like our relationship with Unisys. They have a stealth product that is a zero knowledge, zero trust product that helps us to secure some of the connections to the vault. We'll keep iterating on all of those things and being innovative in this space, working with the regulators, doing things. Bob's mentioned a couple of times, Sheltered Harbor. We've been working with them for two years to have our product endorsed to their specification. Something that nobody else is even touching. So we'll continue along all those paths, but really following our customer's lead in addition to maybe going some places that they haven't thought about before. >> It's great guys. I have to fear that when you talk to SecOps pros, you ask them what their biggest challenge is, and they'll say lack of talent, lack of skills. And so this is a great example, Jim, you're mentioning it, you've productized this. This is a great example of a technology company translating, IT labor costs into R&D. And removing those so customers can spend time running their business. Bob and Jim, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Great story. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, Bob. >> All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (instrumental music)

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Hello and welcome back. You're just in time for our third session spot. I Q amplify your insights with AI in this session will explore how AI gets you to the why of your data capturing changes and trends in the moment they happen. >>You'll >>start to understand how you can transform your data culture by making it easier for analysts to enable business users to consume insights in real time. >>You >>might think this all sounds too good to be true. Well, since seeing is believing, we're joined by thought spots. Vika Scrotum, senior product manager. Anak Shaped Mirror, principal product manager to walk you through all of this on MAWR. Over to you actually, >>Thank you. Wanna Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session. I am Action Hera, together with my colleague because today we will talk to you about how spot I Q uses a. I to generate meaningful insights for the users Before we dwell into that. Let's see why this is becoming so important. Your business and your data is growing and moving faster than ever. Data is considered the new oil Howard. Only those will benefit who can extract value of it. The data used in most of your organization's is just the tip of the iceberg beneath the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see or what you don't know to ask. That makes the difference in this data driven world. Let's learn how one can extract maximum value of the data to make smarter business decisions. We believe that analytics should require less input while producing more output with higher quality in a traditional approach. To be honest, users generally depend on somebody else to create data models, complex data queries to get answers to their pre anticipated questions. But solution like hot spot business users already have a Google like experience where they can just go and get answers to their questions. Now, if you look at other consumer applications, there are multiple of recommendation engines which are out there, which keep recommending. Which article should I read next? Which product should I buy? Which movie should I watch in a way, helping me optimized? Where should I focus my time on in a Similarly in analytics, as your data is growing, solutions must help users uncovered insights to questions which they may not ask, we believe, and a I automated insights will help users unleash the full potential off their data Across the spectrum, we see a potential in a smart, AI driven solution toe autonomously. Monitor your data and feed in relevant insights when you need them, much like a self driving car navigates our users safely to their desired destination. With this, yeah, I'm happy to introduce you to spot like you are a driven insights engine at scale, which will help you get full potential off your data like you automatically discovers, personalize and drive insights hidden in your data. So whenever you search to create answers, spot that you continues to ask a lot more questions on your behalf as it keeps drilling and related date dimensions and measures employed insights which may be of interest to you. Now you as a user can continue to ask your questions or can dig deeper into the inside, provided by spotted you Spartak. You also provides a comprehensive set of insights, which helps user get answers to their advance business questions. In a few clicks, so spotted it. You can help you detect any outlier, for example, spot that you can not only tell you which seller has the highest returns than others, but also which product that sellers selling has higher returns than other products. Or, like you can quickly detect any trends in your data and help us answer questions like how my account sign ups are trending after my targeted campaign is over. I can quickly use for, like, toe get unanswered how my open pipeline is related to my bookings amount and what's the like there. What it means is that how much time a lead will take to convert into a deal I can use partake. You, too, create multiple clusters off my all my customer base and then get answers to questions that which customer segment is buying which particular brand and what are the attributes last and the most used feature Key drivers of change spotted you helps you get answer to a question. What factors lead to the change in sales off a store in 2020 as compared to 2019? We can do all this and simple fix. That's barbecue. What is so unique about Spartak? You how it works hand in hand with our search experience, the more you search, the smarter. The spot that you get as it keeps learning from your usage behavior on generates relevant insights for you for your users. Spartak. You ensures that users can trust every insights. A generator. It broadly does this and broadly, two ways. It keeps their insights relevant by learning the underlying data model on. By incorporating the users feedback that is, users can provide feedback to the spot I Q similar to any social media back from, they can like watching sites they find useful on dislike. What insights Do not find it useful based on users. Feedback Spot like you can downgrade any insight if the users have not find it useful. In addition to that, users can dig deep into any Spartak you insight on all calculations behind it are available for a user to look and understand. The transparency in these calculations not only increases the analytical trust among the users, but also help them learn how they can use the search bar to do much more. I'm super excited to announce Partake you is now available on embrace so our automated A insights engine can run queries life and in database on these datasets so you do not need to bring your data to thoughts about as you connect your data sources. Touch Part performs full indexing value to the data you have selected, not just the headers in the material and as you run sport in Q, it optimizes and run efficient queries on your data warehouse on. I am super pleased to introduce you. This new spot like you monitor the spot that you monitor will enable all your users to keep track of their key metrics. Spartak, you monitor will not only provide them regular updates off their key metrics, but we also analyze all the underlying data on related dimensions to help them explain. What is leading to the change of a particular metric monitor will also be available on your mobile app so that you can keep track of your metrics whenever and wherever you go, because will talk for further detail about this during the demo. So now let's see Spartak in action. But before we go there, let's meet any. Amy is an analyst at a global retail about form. Amy is preparing for her quarterly sales review meeting with the management, so Amy has to report how the sales has meat performing how, what, what factors lead to the change in the sales? And if there are any other impressing insights, which everyone should off tell to the management? So but this Let's see how immigrant use part like you to prepare for the meeting. So Amy goes to that spot, chooses the sales data set for her company. But before we see how many users what I Q to prepare for the meeting. I just wanted to highlight that all this data which we're going to talk about is residing in Snowflake. >>So >>Touch Part is going to do a life query on the snowflake database on even spot. A Q analysis will run on the Snowflake databases, so we'll go back and see how you can use it. So Amy is preparing for the sales meeting for 2019. We just ended. So images right Sales 2019 on here. She has the graph of the Continent tickets, >>so >>what she does is immediately pence it >>for >>the report. She's creating Andi now. This graph is available >>there now. >>Any Monnet observed >>that >>the Q four sales is significantly higher than Q >>three, so >>you she wants to deep dive into this. So she just select these two data points and does the right click and runs particularities. So now, as we talked earlier, Spartak, you recommends which columns Spartak Things Will best explains this change >>on. >>Not only that, you can look that Spartacus automatically understood that Amy is trying toe identify what led to this change. So the change analysis we selected So now with this, >>Amy >>has a bit more business context when he realizes that she doesn't want to add these columns. So she's been using because she thinks this is too granular for the management right now. >>If >>she wants, she can add even more columns. All columns are available for her, and she can reduce columns. So now she runs 42 analysis. So while this product Unisys is running, what the system will do with the background, this part I Q will drill across all the dimensions, which any is selected and try to explain the difference, which is approximately $10 million in sales. So let's see if Amy's report is ready. Yeah, so with this, what's product you has done is protect you has drilled across all dimensions. Amy has selected and presented how the different values in these dimensions have changed. So it's product. You will not only tell you which values in these dimensions have changed the most, but also does an attribution that how much of this change has led to the overall change scenes. So here in the first inside sport accuse telling that 10 products have the largest change out of the 3 45 values and the account for 39% increase. Overall, there has been look by the prototype category. It's saying that five product types of the largest change out of the 15 values, and they account for 98.6% of total increase. And they're not saying the sailors increased their also demonstrating that in some categories the sales has actually decreased to ensure the sales has decreased. Amy finds this inside should be super useful so immediately pins this on the same pain, but she was preparing for and she's getting ready with that. Amy also wants to dig deeper into this inside. My name goes here. She sees that spot. I Q has not only calculated the change across these product types, but has also calculated person did change. So Amy immediately sorts this by wasn't did change. And then she notices that even though Sweater as a category as a prototype, was not appearing in the change analysis but has the most significant change in terms of percentage in comparison to Q two vs Q four. So she also wants to do this so she can just quickly change the title. And she can pin this insight as well under spin board for the management to look at with this done. Now, Amy, just want to go back to this sales and see if she can find anything else interesting. So now Amy has already figured out the possible causes. What led to the increase in sales? So now, for the whole of 2019, as this is also your closing, Amy looks, uh, the monthly figures for 2019, and she gets this craft now. If Amy has to understand, if there is an interesting insight, she can dig into different dimensions and figure out on her own or immigrant, just click on this product analysis. That's product immediately suggest all the dimensions and measures immigrant analyze sales by Andi many. We will run this What will happen is this barbecue system will try to identify outliers. The different trend analysis Onda cross correlation across different measures. So Amy again realizes that this is a bit too much for her. So she reduces some of these insights, which she thinks are not required for the management right now from the business context and the business meeting. And then she just immediately runs this analysis. So now, with this, Amy is hoping to get some interesting insights from Spartak, which immigrant present to her management meeting. Let's see what sport gets for her. So now the Alice is run within 10 seconds, so spot taken started analyzing. So these are the six anomaly sport like you found across different products, where their total sales are higher than the rest. He also founded Spot. I just found eight insights off different product types which has tired total sales and look across these enemy sees that oh jackets have against the highest sales across all the categories in December as well. Amy wants toe been this to the PIN board on M. It moves further now. Amy's is that it has also shown Total Country purchased their product a me thinks this is not a useful insights. Amy can get this feedback. The system and system asked, Why are you saying you don't find this useful so the system can remember? So you can also say that anomalies are obvious right now and give this feedback and the system will remember. In addition, Amy finds that the system has automatically correlated the total sales in total contrary purchase. Amy Pence this as well to the pin board. Andi. She loves this inside where she she is that not only the total sales have increased, but total quantity purchases have increased a lot more on their training, opposed as well. So she also opens this now anything. She is ready for her meeting with the management. So she just goes and shares the PIN board, which she just created with the management. And you know what happens immediately? The jacket sales category Manager Mr Tom replies back to Amy and says in the request, Any d really like this? So now we will see how Spartak you can help any educators as request doesn't mean really need to create these kind of reports every month to cater toe Tom's request. So with this, I will handle it because to take us walk us through How spot that you can cater this request. Hi, >>everyone. So analysts like Amy are always flooded with such requests from the business users and with Spot and you monitor. Amy can set up everyone who needs updates on a on a metric in just a few simple steps and enable them to drag these metrics whenever and wherever they want. And north of the metrics, they also get the corresponding change analysis on the device off their choice with hot Spot. What I give money being available on both Web and the mobile labs. So let's get started with the demo will be set up a meet and go to the search tab and creator times we start for the metrics you want to monitor, right? And please know if the charges already created is already created. All is available is, um, usually a section in a PIN board. Also dancer. Then there's no need to create a new child. She can simply then uh, right click on the chart and select moisture from the menu, which then shows, which then shows the breakdown off the metric he's going to monitor, including the measure. What it's been grouped by on what it is filtered on. Okay, and also as this is a weekly metric, all the subscribers are going to get a weekly notification for this metric had been a monthly metric. Then the notifications would have been delivered on a monthly cadence. Next she can click on, continue and go to the configure dimensions called on Page. Here A is recommending what all dimensions could best being the change in this metric, she can go ahead with default recommendation, or she can change the columns as she seems very she can click, she conflict, continue and go to the next page, which is the subscriber stage. It is added by default to the subscriber, but she can search everyone who needs update on this metric and add them on this metric by clicking confirmed, she'll see a toast message on the bottom of the page, taking on which will take a me to this page, which is a metric detail page On the top of this page, we can see the movement of the metric and how it is changing over time, 92 you can see that the Mets jacket, since number has increased by 2.5% in the week off 23rd of December has compared toa the week off 16th of December and just below e a has invaded the man is generated in sites which are readily available for consumption. Okay to discharge. Right here says that pain products have the largest change out of all the 28 values and contributes to the 88% of the total increase in the same. And this one right here is that Midwest is the larger Midwest has the largest change and accounts for 55.66% off the total increase. Now, all this goodness is also available on the mobile lab. Right? So let me just show you how business users are going to get notified on the based. On this metric, all the business users who are subscribed to this metric are going to get a regular email as well as push notifications on the mobile lab. And when the click on this, they line on a metric detail page which has all the starts, which I just showed you on the on the bed version, okay. And one cyclic on back burden. They land on this page, which is a monitor tab, and it summarizes all the metrics Which opportunity monitoring and gives them a whole gave you to stay all I want to stay on top of their businesses. Okay. Eso that folks was monitor. Now I'll search back to slaves and cover. Summarize the key takeaways. From what? That she and I just don't know. So it's part of you wanted, uh, Summit Spartak you. It automatically discovers insights and helps you unless the full potential of your data and that's what I do is comprehensive set off analysis. You can answer your advanced business question in just a few simple steps and the end speed of your time. Bring state. And with a new support for embrace, you can run sport like you on your data in your data warehouse and with spotted you monitor, you can monitor all the business metrics and not just died. We can also understand that teaching teaching drivers on those metrics on the platform of your choice. So with that, I'll hand over toe, you know. >>Thank you so much. Both of you That was fantastic. Um, I just love spot like, because it makes me look like much more of a rock star with data than I really am. So thank you guys for that fantastic presentation. Um, so we've got a couple of minutes for a couple of questions for you. The first one is for action. Um, once spot I Q generates a number of insights. Can you run spot I Q again on one of those insights? >>Yeah, As a philosophy off Spiric, you sport like you never takes the user to the dead end Spartak. You also transparently shares the calculation. So user can not only the keeper that on edit Understand how this product you inside has been calculated, but user can also run us for like you analysts is honest for data analysis as well. Which music? And continue to do not on the first level. Second level in the third level as well. >>That's cool. Thank you. Actually on then The next one is for because for spot ik monitor is it possible to edit the dimensions used for explaining the factors to change that was detected? >>Yes. It's an owner of the metric you can change the dimensions whenever you want and save them for everyone else. >>Okay, well, I think that's about all we've got time for in this session. So all that remains is for me to say a huge thank you to Because an Akshay Andi, we've got the last session of this track coming up in a few minutes. So grab a snack. Come right back and listen to an amazing customer story with Snowflake on Western Union, they're up next.

(upbeat music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And as you know, I've been running a CxO series in this COVID economy. And as we go into the post-isolation world, really want to focus and expand our scope and really look at startups. And of course, we're going to look at startups, let's follow the money. And I want to start with the investor. Mark Roberge is here. He's the managing director at Stage 2 capital. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School, former CRO over at HubSpot. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, you bet, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> So I love that, you know... looking at your career a little bit, on your LinkedIn and following some of your videos, I love the fact that you did, and now you teach and you're also applying it with Stage 2 Capital. Tell us a little bit more about both of your career and Stage 2. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's a bit serendipitous, especially last 10 years, but I've always had this learn, do, teach framework in my, in mind as I go through the decades of my career, you know, like you're probably like 80% learning in your twenties, early thirties and you know, 20% doing. Then, you know, I think my thirties was like leading the HubSpot sales team, a lot of doing, a little bit of teaching, you know, kind of hopping into different schools, et cetera, and also doing a lot of, some writing. And now like, I'm teaching it. I think investing kind of falls into that too, you know, where you've got this amazing opportunity to meet, the next generation of, of extraordinary entrepreneurs and engage with them. So yeah, that, that has been my career. You know, Dave, I've been a, passionate entrepreneur since 22 and then, the last one I did was HubSpot and that led to just an opportunity to build out one of the first sales teams in a complete inside environment, which opened up the doors for a data driven mindset and all this innovation that led to a book that led to recruitment on HBS's standpoint, to like come and teach that stuff, which was such a humbling honor to pursue. And that led to me a meeting my co-founder, Jay Po, of Stage 2 Capital, who was a customer to essentially start the first VC fund, running back by sales and marketing leaders, which was his vision. But when he proposed it to me, addressed a pretty sizeable void, that I saw, in the entrepreneur ecosystem that I thought could make a substantial impact to the success rate of startups. >> Great, I want to talk a little bit about how you guys compete and what's different there, but you know, I've read some of your work, looked at some of your videos, and we can bring that into the conversation. But I think you've got some real forward-thinking for example, on the, you know, the best path to the upper right. The upper right, being that, that xy-axis on growth and adoption, you know, do you go for hyper-growth or do you go for adoption? How you align sales and marketing, how you compensate salespeople. I think you've got some, some leading-edge thinking on that, that I'd love for you to bring into the conversation, but let's start with Stage 2. I mean, how do you compete with the big guys? What's different about Stage 2 Capital? >> Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, we're a bunch of sales and marketing and execs. I mean, our backing is, a hundred plus CROs, VPs of marketing, CMOs from, from the public companies. I mean, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Asana, I mean, just pick a unicorn, we probably have some representation from it. So that's, a big part of how we compete, is most of the time, when a rocket ship startup is about to build a sales team, one of our LPs gets a call. And because of that, we get a call, right. And, and so there's, we're just deep in, in helping... So first off, assess the potential and risks of a startup in their current, go to market design, and then really, you know, stepping in, not just with capital, but a lot of know-how in terms of, you know, how to best develop this go-to-market for their particular context. So that's a big part of our differentiation. I don't think we've ever lost a deal that we tried to get into, you know, for that reason, just because we come in at the right stage, that's right for our value prop. I'd say Dave, the biggest, sort of difference, in our investing theme. And this really comes out of like, post HubSpot. In addition to teaching the HBS, I did parachute into a different startup every quarter, for one day, where you can kind of like assess their go-to-market, looking for, like, what is the underlying consistency of those series A businesses that become unicorns versus those that flatline. And if I, you know, I've now written like 50 pages on it, which I, you know, we can, we can highlight to the crew, but the underlying cliffnotes is really, the avoidance of a premature focus on top line revenue growth, and an acute focus early on, on customer attention. And, I think like, for those of you, who run in that early stage venture community these days, and especially in Silicon Valley, there's this like, triple, triple, double, double notion of, like year one, triple revenue, year two, triple revenue, year three, double revenue, year four, double revenue, it's kind of evolved to be like the holy grail of what your objectives should be. And I do think like there is a fraction of companies that are ready for that and a large amount of them that, should they pursue that path, will lead to failure. And, and so, we take a heavy lens toward world-class customer retention as a prerequisite, to any sort of triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling type model. >> So, let me ask you a couple of questions there. So it sounds like your LPs are heavily, not only heavily and financially invested, but also are very active. I mean, is that a, is that a fears thing? How active are the LPs in reality? I mean, they're busy people. They're they're software operators. >> Yeah. >> Do they really get involved in businesses? >> Absolutely. I mean, half of our deals that we did in fund one came from the LPs. So we get half of our funnel, comes from LPs. Okay. So it's always like source-pick-win-support. That's like, what basically a VC does. And our LPs are involved in every piece of that. Any deal that we do, we'll bring in four or five of our LPs to help us with diligence, where they have particular expertise in. So we did an insuretech company in Q4, one of our LPs runs insurance practice at Workday. And this particular play he's selling it to big insurance companies. He was extremely helpful, to understand that domain. Post investment, we always bring in four or five LPs to go deeper than I can on a particular topic. So one of our plays is about to stand up in account based marketing, you know, capability. So we brought in the CMO, a former CMO at Rapid7 and the CMO at Unisys, both of which have, stood in, stood up like, account based marketing practices, much more deeply, than I could. You know of course, we take the time to get to know our LPs and understand both their skills, and experiences as well as their willingness to help, We have Jay Simons, who's the President of Atlassian. He doesn't have like hours every quarter, he's running a $50 billion company, right? So we have Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, right? He's running a $10 billion company now. So, we just get deal flow from them and maybe like an event once or twice a year, versus I would say like 10 to 20% of our LPs are like that. I would say 60% of them are active operators who are like, "You know what? I just miss the early days, and if I could be active with one or two companies a quarter, I would love that." And I would say like a quarter of them are like semi-retired and they're like, they're choosing between helping our company and being on the boat or the golf course. >> Is this just kind of a new model? Do you see having a different philosophy where you want to have a higher success rate? I mean, of course everybody wants to have a, you know, bat a thousand. >> Yeah. >> But I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah. I don't think it, I'm not advocating slower growth, but just healthier growth. And it's just like an extra, it's really not different than sort of the blitzscaling oriented San Francisco VC, okay? So, you know, I would say when we were doing startups in the nineties, early 2000s before The Lean Startup, we would have this idea and build it in a room for a year and then sell it in parallel, basically sell it everywhere and Eric Ries and The Lean Startup changed all that. Like he introduced MVPs and pivots and agile development and we quickly moved to, a model of like, yeah, when you have this idea, it's not like... You're really learning, keep the team small, keep the burn low, pivot, pivot, pivot, stay agile and find product-market fit. And once you do that, scale. I would say even like, West Coast blitzscaling oriented VCs, I agree with that. My only take is... We're not being scientifically rigorous, on that transition point. Go ask like 10 VCs or 10 entrepreneurs, what's product-market fit, and you'll get 10 different answers. And you'll get answers like when you have lots of sales, I just, profoundly disagree with that. I think, revenue in sales has very little to do with product-market fit. That's like, that's like message-market fit. Like selling ice to Eskimos. If I can sell ice to Eskimos, it doesn't mean that product-market fit. The Eskimos didn't need the ice. It just means I was good at like pitching, right? You know, other folks talk about like, having a workable product in a big market. It's just too qualitative. Right? So, that's all I'm advocating is, that, I think almost all entrepreneurs and investors agree, there's this incubation, rapid learning stage. And then there's this thing called product-market fit, where we switch to rapid scale. And all I'm advocating is like more scientist science and rigor, to understanding some sequences that need to be checked off. And a little bit more science and rigor on what is the optimal pace of scale. Because when it comes to scale, like pretty much 50 out of 50 times, when I talk to a series A company, they have like 15 employees, two sales reps, they got to like 2 million in revenue. They raise an 8 million-dollar round in series A, and they hired 12 salespeople the next month. You know, and Dave, you and your brother, who runs a large sales team, can really understand how that's going to failure almost all the time. (Dave mumbles) >> Like it's just... >> Yeah it's a killer. >> To be able to like absorb 10 reps in a month, being a 50, it's just like... Who even does all those interviews? Who onboards them? Who manages them? How do we feed them with demand? Like these are some of the things I just think, warrant more data and science to drive the decisions on when and how fast to scale. >> Mark, what is the key indicator then, of product-market fit? Is it adoption? Is it renewal rates? >> Yeah. It's retention in my opinion. Right? So, so the, the very simple framework that I require is you're ready to scale when you have product-market and go to market-fit. And let's be, extremely precise, and rigorous on the definitions. So, product-market fit for me, the best metric is retention. You know, that essentially means someone not only purchased your offering, but experienced your offering. And, after that experience decided to repurchase. Whether they buy more from you or they renew or whatever it is. Now, the problem with it is, in many, like in the world we live inside's, it's like, the retention rate of the customers we acquire this quarter is not evident for a year. Right, and we don't have a year to learn. We don't have a year to wait and see. So what we have to do is come up with a leading indicator to customer retention. And that's something that I just hope we see more entrepreneurs talking about, in their product market fit journey. And more investors asking about, is what is your lead indicator to customer retention? Cause when that gets checked off, then I believe you have product-market fit, okay? So, there's some documentation on some unicorns that have flirted with this. I think Silicon Valley calls it the aha moment. That's great. Just like what. So like Slack, an example, like, the format I like to use for the lead indicator of customer retention is P percent of customers, do E event, in T time, okay? So, it basically boils it down to those three variables, P E T. So if we bring that to life and humanize it, 70% of the customers, we sign up, this is Slack, 70% of the customers who sign up, send 2000 team messages in 30 days, if that happens, we have product-market fit. I like that a lot more, than getting to a million in revenue or like having a workable product in a big market. Dropbox, 85% of customers, share one file in one hour. HubSpot, I know this was the case, 75% of customers, use five or more of the 25 features in the platform, within 60 days. Okay? P percent, do E event, in T time. So, if we can just format that, and look at that through customer cohorts, we often get visibility into, into true product market-fit within weeks, if not like a month or two. And it's scientifically, data-driven in terms of his foundation. >> Love it. And then of course, you can align sales compensation, you know, with that retention. You've talked a lot about that, in some of your work. I want to get into some of the things that stage two is doing. You invest in SaaS companies. If I understand it correctly, it's not necessarily early stage. You're looking for companies that have sort of achieved some degree of revenue and now need help. It needs some operational help and scaling. Is that correct? >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's a little bit broader in size, as any sort of like B2B software, any software company that's scaling through a sales team. I mean, look at our backers and look at my background. That's, that's what we have experience in. So not really any consumer plays. And yeah, I mean, we're not, we have a couple product LPs. We have a couple of CFO type LPs. We have a couple like talent HR LPs, but most of us are go-to-market. So we don't, you know, there's awesome seed funds out there that help people set up their product and engineering team and go from zero to one in terms of the MVP and find product-market fit. Right? We like to come in right after that. So it's usually like between the seed and the A, usually the revenue is between half a million and 1.5 million. And of course we put an extraordinary premium on customer retention, okay? Whereas I think most of our peers put an extraordinary premium on top line revenue growth. We put an extraordinary premium on retention. So if I find a $700,000 business that, you know, has whatever 50, 70 customers, you know, depending on their ticket size, it has like North of 90% local retention. That's super exciting. Even if they're only growing like 60%, it's super exciting. >> What's a typical size of investments. Do you typically take board seats or not? >> Yeah. We typically put in like between like seven hundred K, one and a half million, in the first check and then have, larger amounts for follow on. So on the A and the B. We try not to take board's seats to be honest with you, but instead the board observers. It's a little bit selfish in terms of our funds scale. Like the general counsel from other venture capitalists is of course, like, the board seat is there for proper governance in terms of like, having some control over expenditures and acquisition conversations, et cetera, or decisions. But a lot of people who have had experience with boards know that they're very like easy and time efficient when the company is going well. And there are a ton of work when the company is not going well. And it really hurts the scale, especially on a smaller fund like us. So we do like to have board observers seats, and we go to most of the board meetings so that our voice is heard. But as long as there's another fund in there that, has, world-class track record in terms of, holding proper governance at the board level, we prefer to defer to them on that. >> All right, so the COVID lock down, hit really in earnest in March, of course, we all saw the Sequoia memo, The Black Swan memo. You were, I think it HubSpot, when, you remember the Rest In Peace Good Times memo, came out very sort of negative, put up all over the industry, you know, stop spending. But there was some other good advice in there. I don't mean to sort of, go too hard on that, but, it was generally a negative sentiment. What was your advice to your portfolio companies, when COVID hit, what were you telling them? >> Yeah, I summarized this in our lead a blog article. We kicked off our blog, which is partially related to COVID in April, which has kind of summarize these tips. So yes, you are correct, Dave. I was running sales at HubSpot in '08 when we had last sort of major economic, destabilization. And I was freaking out, you know (laughs briefly) at the time we were still young, like 20, 30 reps and numbers to chase. And... I was, actually, after that year, looking back, we are very fortunate that we had a value prop that was very recession-proof. We were selling to the small business community, who at the time was cutting everything except new ways to generate sales. And we happen to have the answer to that and it happened to work, right? So it showed me that, there's different levels of being recession proof. And we accelerated the raise of our second fund for stage two with the anticipation that there would be a recession, which, you know, in the venture world, some of the best things you could do is close a fund and then go into a recession, because, there's more deals out there. The valuations are lower and it's much easier to understand, nice to have versus must have value props. So, the common theme I saw in talking to my peers who looked back in the '01 crisis, as well as the '08 crisis, a year later was not making a bolder decision to reorient their company in the current times. And usually on the go-to-market, that's two factors, the ICP who you're selling to, ideal customer profile and the CVP, what your message is, what's your customer value prop. And that was really, in addition to just stabilizing cash positions and putting some plans in there. That was the biggest thing we pushed our portfolio on was, almost like going through the exercise, like it's so hard as a human, to have put like nine months into a significant investment leading up to COVID and now the outcome of that investment is no longer relevant. And it's so hard to let that go. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. >> But you have to, you have to. And now it's everything from like, you spent two years learning how to sell to this one persona. And now that persona is like, gyms, retail and travel companies. Like you've got to let that go. (chuckle simultaneously) You know what I mean? Like, and, you know, it's just like... So that's really what we had to push folks on was just, you know, talking to founders and basically saying this weekend, get into a great headspace and like, pretend like you were parachuted into your company as a fresh CEO today. And look around and appreciate the world and what it is. What is this world? What are the buyers talking about? Which markets are hot, which markets are not, look at the assets that you have, look at your product, look at your staff, look at your partners, look at your customer base, and come up with a strategy from the ground up based on that. And forget about everything you've done in the last year. Right? And so, that's really what we pushed hard on. And in some cases, people just like jumped right on it. It was awesome. We had a residential real estate company that within two weeks, stood up a virtual open house module that sold like hotcakes. >> Yeah. >> That was fantastic execution. And we had other folks that we had to have like three meetings with to push them deep enough, to go more boldly. But that, was really the underlying pattern that I saw in past, recessions and something I pushed the portfolio on, is just being very bold on your pivots. >> Right? So I wanted to ask you how your portfolio companies are doing. I'm imagining you saw some looked at this opportunity as a tailwind. >> Yeah. >> You mentioned the virtual, open house, a saw that maybe were exposed, had, revenue exposure to hard-hit industries and others kind of in the middle. How are your portfolio companies doing? >> Yes, strong. I'm trying to figure out, like, of course I'm going to say that, but I'm trying to figure out like how to provide quant, to just demonstrate that. We were fortunate that we had no one, and this was just dumb luck. I mean, we had no one exclusively selling to like travel, or, restaurants or something. That's just bad luck if you were, and we're fortunate that we got a little lucky there, We put a big premium, obviously we had put a big premium on customer retention. And that, we always looked at that through our recession proof lens at all our investments. So I think that helped, but yeah, I mean, we've had, first off, we made one investment post COVID. That was the last investment on our first fund and that particular company, March, April, May, their results were 20% higher than any month in history. Those are the types of deals we're seeing now is like, you literally find some deals that are accelerating since COVID and you really just have to assess if it's permanent or temporary, but that one was exciting. We have a telemedicine company that's just like, really accelerating post COVID, again, luck, you know, in terms of just their alignment with the new world we're living in. And then, jeez! I mean, we've had, I think four term sheets, for markups in our portfolio since March. So I think that's a good sign. You know, we only made 11 investments and four of them, either have verbal or submitted term sheets on markups. So again, I feel like the portfolio is doing quite well, and I'm just trying to provide some quantitative measures. So it doesn't feel like a political answer. (Mark chuckles) >> Well, thank you for that, but now, how have you, or have you changed your sort of your thesis post COVID? Do you feel like your... >> Sure. >> Your approach was sort of geared towards, you know, this... >> Yeah. >> Post COVID environment? But what changes have you made. >> A little bit, like, I think in any bull market, generally speaking, there's just going to be a lot of like triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling, huge focus on top-line revenue growth. And in any down market, there's going to be a lot of focus on customer retention unit economics. Now we've always invested in the latter, so that doesn't change much. There's a couple of things that have changed. Number one, we do look for acceleration post COVID. Now, that obviously we were not, we weren't... That lens didn't exist pre-COVID, So in addition to like great retention, selling through a sales team, around the half million to a million revenue, we want to see acceleration since COVID and we'll do diligence to understand if that's a permanent, or a temporary advantage. I would say like... Markets like San Francisco, I think become more attractive in post COVID. There's just like, San Francisco has some magic happening there's some VC funds that avoid it, cause it's too expensive. There's some VC funds that only invest in San Francisco, because there's magic happening. We've always just been, you know... we have two portfolio companies there that have done well. Like we look at it and if it's too expensive, we have to avoid it. But we do agree that there's magic happening. I did look at a company last week. (chuckles inaudibly) So Dave, there are 300K in revenue, and their last valuation is 300 million. (both chuckle) >> Okay, so why is San Francisco more attractive, Mark? >> Well, I mean and those happened in Boston too. >> We looked at... (Mark speaks inaudibly) >> I thought you were going to tell me the valuations were down. (Dave speaks inaudibly) >> Here's the deal all right, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't and this is one, but in general, I think like they have come down. And honestly, the other thing that's happened is good entrepreneurs that weren't raising are now raising. Okay? So, a market like that I think becomes more attractive. The other thing that I think that happens is your sort of following strategies different. Okay so, there is some statistical evidence that, you know, obviously we're coming out of a bear market, a bullish market in, in both the public and the private equities. And there's been a lot of talk about valuations in the private sector is just outrageous. And so, you know, we're fortunate that we come in at this like post seed, pre-A, where it's not as impacted. It is, but not as or hasn't been, but because there's so many more multibillion-dollar funds that have to deploy 30 to 50 million per investment, there's a lot of heating up that's happened at that stage. Okay? And so pre COVID, we would have taken advantage of that by taking either all or some of our money off the table, in these following growth rounds. You know, as an example, we had a company that we made an investment with around 30 million evaluation and 18 months later, they had a term sheet for 500. So that's a pretty good return in 18 months. And you know, that's an expensive, you know, so that that's like, wow, you know, we probably, even though we're super bullish on the company, we may want to take off a 2X exposition... >> Yeah. >> And take advantage of the secondaries. And the other thing that happens here, as you pointed out, Dave is like, risk is not, it doesn't become de-risk with later rounds. Like these big billion dollar funds come in, they put pressure on very aggressive strategic moves that sometimes kills companies and completely outside of our control. So it's not that we're not bullish on the company, it's just that there's new sets of risks that are outside of the scope of our work. And so, so that that's probably like a less, a lesser opportunity post COVID and we have to think longer term and have more patient capital, as we navigate the next year or so of the economy. >> Yeah, so we've got to wrap, but I want to better understand the relationship between the public markets and you've seen the NASDAQ up, which is just unbelievable when you look at what's happening in main street, and the relationship between the public markets and the private markets, are you saying, they're sort of tracking, but not really identical. I mean, what's the relationship. >> Okay, there's a hundred, there's thousands of people that are better at that than me. Like the kind of like anecdotal thoughts that I, or the anecdotal narrative that I've heard in past recessions and actually saw too, was the private market, when the public market dropped, it took nine months roughly for the private market to correct. Okay, so there was a lag. And so there's, some arguments that, that would happen here, but this is just a weird situation, right? Of like the market, even though we're going through societal crazy uncertainty, turmoil and, and tremendous tragedy, the markets did drop, but they're pretty hot right now, specifically in tech. And so there's a number of schools of thoughts there that like some people claim that tech is like the utilities companies of the eighties, where it's just a necessity and it's always going to be there regardless of the economy. Some people argue that what's happened with COVID and the remote workplace have made, you know, accelerated the adoption of tech, the inevitable adoption, and others could argue that like, you know, the worst is still the come. >> Yeah. And of course, you've got The Fed injecting so much liquidity into the system, low interest rates, Mark, last question. Give me a pro tip for entrepreneurs. (Mark Sighs) >> I would say, like, we've talked a lot about, this methodology with, you know, customer retention, really focusing there, align everything there as opposed to top line revenue growth initially. I think that the extension I do at this point is, do your diligence on your investors, and what their thoughts are on your future growth plans to see if they're aligned. Cause that, that becomes like, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when they dig into this work, they do want to operate around it. But that becomes that much harder when you have investors that think a different way. So I would just, you know, just always keep in mind that, you know, I know it's so hard to raise money, but you know, do the diligence on your investors to understand, what they'd like to see in the next two years and how it's aligned with your own vision. >> Mark is really great having you on. I'd love to have you back and as this thing progresses, and see how it all shakes out. It really a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. We'll see you next time. (music plays)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, to CUBE's coverage here in San Francisco at RSA Conference 2020. I'm John Furrier, your host. You know, cybersecurity industry's changing. Enterprises are now awake to the fact that it's now a bigger picture around securing the enterprise, 'cause it's not only the data center. It's cloud, it's the edge, a lot of great stuff. We've got a great guest here from Dell EMC. Peter Gerr's a consultant, cyber resilience solutions and services marketing at Dell EMC. Great to see you. >> You too, John. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you again, thank you. >> So, you know, I was joking with Dave Volante just this morning around the three waves of cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud. And we see obviously the progression. Hybrid cloud is where everyone spends most of their time. That's from ground to cloud, on-premises to cloud. So pretty much everyone knows-- >> Peter: On-ramp, kind of. >> That on-prem is not going away. Validated by all the big cloud players. but you got to nail the equation down for on-premises to the cloud, whether it's, I'm Amazon-Amazon, Azure-Azure, whatever, all those clouds. But the multicloud will be a next generation wave. That as an industry backdrop is very, very key. Plus AI and data are huge inputs into solving a lot of what is going to be new gaps, blind spots, whatever insecurity. So I got to, you know, Dell has a history with huge client base, traditional enterprises transforming. You're in the middle of all this, so you got the airplane at 30,000 feet and the companies have to swap out their engines and reboot their teams, and it's a huge task. What's going on with cyber and the enterprises? What are some of the key things? >> Well, so I like to keep it pretty simple. I've been in this industry over 20 years and I've really consistently talked about data as the global currency, right? So it's beautifully simple. Whatever industry you're in, whatever size company you're in, enterprise or even now small to medium businesses, their businesses are driven by data. Connectivity to that data, availability of the data, integrity of the data, and confidentiality of the data. And so sort of the area of the world that I focus upon is protecting customers' most valuable data assets, now, whether those are on-prem, in the cloud, or in a variety of modalities, and ensuring that those assets are protected and isolated from the attack surface, and then ability to recover those critical assets quickly so they can resume business operations. That's really the area that I work in. Now, that data, as you pointed out, it could start on-prem. It could live in multicloud. It can live in a hybrid environment. The key is really to understand that not all data is created equally. If you were to have a widespread cyber attack, really the key is to bring up those critical applications systems and data sets first to return to business operations. >> Yeah, it's funny-- >> Peter: It's really challenging >> You know, it's not funny, it's actually just ironic, but it's really kind of indicative of the society now is that EMC was bought by Dell Storage and the idea of disruption has always been a storage concept. We don't want a lot of disruption when we're doing things, right? >> Peter: None, we can't, yeah. >> So whether it's backup and recovery or cyber ransomware, whatever it is, the idea of non-disruptive operations-- >> Absolutely. >> Has been a core tenant. Now, that's obviously the same for cyber, as you can tell. So I got to ask you, what is your definition and view of cyber resilience? Because, well, that's what we're talking about here, cyber resilience. What's your view on that? >> So when we started developing our cyber recovery solution about five years ago, we used the NIST cybersecurity framework, which is a very well-known standard that defines really five pillars of how organizations can think about building a cyber resilience strategy. A cyber resilience strategy really encompasses everything from perimeter threat detection and response all the way through incident response after an attack and everything that happens in between, protecting the data and recovering the data, right? And critical systems. So I think of cyber resilience as that holistic strategy of protecting an organization and its data from a cyber attack. >> That's great insight. I want to get your thoughts on how that translates into the ecosystem, because this is an ecosystem around cyber resilience. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> And let's just say, and you may or may not be able to comment on this, but RSA is now being sold. >> Peter: Yeah, no, that's fair. >> So that's going out of the Dell family. But you guys have obviously VMware and Secureworks. But it's not just you guys. It's an ecosystem. >> It really is. >> How does Dell now without, with and without RSA, fit into the ecosystem? >> So as I mentioned, cyber resilience is really thought of as a holistic strategy. RSA and other Dell assets like Carbon Black fit in somewhere in that continuum, right? So RSA is really more on threat detection and response, perimeter protection. The area of the business that I work on, data protection and cyber recovery, really doesn't address the prevention of attacks. We really start with the premise that preventing a cyber attack is not 100% possible. If you believe that, then you need to look at protecting and recovering your assets, right? And so whether it's RSA, whether it's Carbon Black, whether it's Secureworks, which is about cyber incident and response, we really work across those groups. It's about technology, processes, and people. It's not any one thing. We also work outside of the Dell technologies umbrella. So we integrate, our cyber recovery solution is integrated with Unisys Stealth. So there's an example of how we're expanding and extending the cyber recovery solution to bring in other industry standards. >> You know, it's interesting. I talk to a lot of people, like, I'm on theCube here at RSA. Everyone wants better technology, but there's also a shift back to best-of-breed, 'cause you want to have the best new technology, but at the same time, you got to have proven solutions. >> Peter: That's the key. >> So what are you guys selling, what is the best-of-breed from Dell that you guys are delivering to customers? What are some of the areas? >> So I'm old EMC guy myself, right? And back from the days of disaster recovery and business continuity, right? More traditional data protection and backup. The reality is that the modern threats of cyber hackers, breaches, insider attacks, whatever you like, those traditional data protection strategies weren't built to address those types of threats. So along with transformation and modernization, we need to modernize our data protection. That's what cyber recovery is. It's a modern solution to the modern threat. And what it does is it augments your data, excuse me, your disaster recovery and your backup environment with a purpose-built isolated air gap digital vault which is built around our proven Data Domain and PowerProtect DD platforms that have been around for over a decade. But what we've done is added intelligence, analytics, we've hardened that system, and we isolate it so customers can protect really their most valuable assets in that kind of a vault. >> So one of things I've been doing some research on and digging into is cyber resilience, which you just talked about, cyber security, which is the industry trend, and you're getting at cyber recovery, okay? >> Peter: Correct. >> Can you talk about some examples of how this all threads together? What are some real recent wins or examples? >> Sure, sure. So think of cyber recovery as a purpose-built digital vault to secure your most valuable assets. Let me give you an example. One of our customers is a global paint manufacturer, okay? And when we worked with them to try to decide what of their apps and data sets should go into this cyber recovery vault, we said, "What is the most critical intellectual property "that you have?" So in their case, and, you know, some customers might say my Oracle financials or my Office 365 environment. For this customer it was their proprietary paint matching system. So they generate $80 to $100 million every day based upon this proprietary paint matching system which they've developed and which they use every day to run their business. If that application, if those algorithms were destroyed, contaminated, or posted on the public internet somewhere, that would fundamentally change that company. So that's really what we're talking about. We're working with customers to help them identify their most critical assets, data, systems, applications, and isolate those from the threat vector. >> Obviously all verticals are impacted by cyber security. >> Every vertical is data-driven, that's right. >> And so obviously the low-hanging fruit, are they the normal suspects, financial services? Is there a particular one that's hotter than, obviously financial services has got fraud and all that stuff on it, but is that still number one, or-- >> So I think there's two sides to the coin. One, if you look at the traditional enterprise environments, absolutely financial services and healthcare 'cause they're both heavily regulated, therefore that data has very high value and is a very attractive target to the would-be hackers. If you look on the other end of the spectrum, though, the small to medium businesses that all rely on the internet for their business to run, they're the ones that are most susceptible because they don't have the budgets, the infrastructure, or the expertise to protect themselves from a sophisticated hacker. So we work across all verticals. Obviously the government is also very susceptible to cyber threats. But it's every industry, any business that's data-driven. I mean, everyone's been breached so many times, no one even knows how many times. I got to ask you about some cool trends we're reporting on here. Homomorphic encryption is getting a lot of traction here because financial services and healthcare are two-- >> Peter: Homomorphic? >> Homomorphic, yeah. Did I say that right? >> It's the first time I've ever heard that term, John. >> It's encryption at in use. So you have data at rest, data in flight, and data in use. So it's encryption when you're doing all your, protecting all your transactional data. So it's full implementation with Discovery. Intel's promoting it. We discovered a startup that's doing that, as well. >> Peter: Yeah, that's new for me, yeah. >> But it allows for more use cases. But data in use, not just motion, or in-flight, whatever they call it. >> Peter: I get it, yeah, static. >> So that's opening up these other thing. But it brings up the why, why that's important, and the reason is that financial services and healthcare, because they're regulated, have systems that were built many moons ago or generations ago. >> Absolutely. >> So there was none of these problems that you were mentioning earlier, like, they weren't built for that. >> Correct. >> But now you need more data. AI needs sharing of data. Sharing is a huge deal. >> Real-time sharing, too, right? >> Real-time sharing. >> And I think that's where the homomorphic encryption comes in. >> That's exactly right. So you mentioned that. So these industries, how can they maintain their existing operations and then get more data sharing? Do you have any insight into how you see that? Because that's one of those areas that's becoming like, okay, HIPAA, we know why that was built, but it's also restrictive. How do you maintain the purity of a process-- >> If your infrastructure is old? That is a challenge, healthcare especially, because, I mean, if I'm running a health system, every dollar that I have should really go into improving patient care, not necessarily into my IT infrastructure. But the more that every industry moves towards a real-time data-driven model for how we give care, right, the more that companies need to realize that data drives their business. They need to do everything they can to protect it and also ensure that they can recover it when and if a cyber attack happens. >> Well, I really appreciate the insight, and it's going to be great to see Dell Technologies World coming up. We'll dig into a lot of that stuff. While we're here and talking us about some of these financial services, banking, I want to get your thoughts. I've been hearing this term Sheltered Harbor being kicked around. What is that about? What does that mean? >> Sheltered Harbor, you're right, I think you'll hear a lot more about it. So Sheltered Harbor is a financial industries group and it's also a set of best practices and specifications. And really, the purpose of Sheltered Harbor is to protect consumer and financial institutions' data and public confidence in the US financial system. So the use case is this. You can imagine that a bank having a cyber attack and being unable to produce transactions could cause problems for customers of that bank. But just like we were talking about, the interconnectedness of the banking system means that one financial institution failing because of a cyber attack, it could trigger a cascade and a panic and a run on the US financial banks and therefore the global financial system. Sheltered Harbor was developed to really protect public confidence in the financial system by ensuring that banks, brokerages, credit unions are protecting their customer data, their account records, their most valuable assets from cyber attack, and that they can recover them and resume banking operations quickly. >> So this is an industry group? >> It's an industry group. >> Or is it a Dell group or-- >> No, Sheltered Harbor is a US financial industry group. It's a non-profit. You can learn more about it at shelteredharbor.org. The interesting thing for Dell Technologies is we're actually the first member of the Sheltered Harbor solution provider program, and we'll be announcing that shortly, in fact, this week, and we'll have a cyber recovery for Sheltered Harbor solution in the market very shortly. >> Cyber resilience, great topic, and you know, it just goes to show storage is never going away. The basic concepts of IT, recovery, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations. Cloud scale changes the game. >> Peter: It's all about the data. >> It's all about the data. >> Still, yes, sir. >> Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. >> Thank you, John. >> RSA coverage here, CUBE, day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier here on the ground floor in Moscone in San Francisco. Thanks for watching (electronic music)

>>Fly from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angled media. >>Okay, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco for RSA. Copper's 2020. I'm John Farrow, your host, you know, cybersecurity industry's changing and enterprises are now awake to the fact that is now a bigger picture around securing the enterprise cause it's not only the data center, it's cloud, it's the edge. A lot of great stuff. I've got a great guest here from Dell, EMC, Peter Garris, consultant cyber resilient solutions and services marketing, uh, Dell EMC. Great to see you. Thanks for to John. Good to see you again. So you know, I was joking with Dave Alante just this morning around the three ways of cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. And we see obviously the progression hybrid cloud is where everyone spend most of their time. That's from ground to cloud on premises to cloud. Yep. So pretty much everyone knows around on premise is not going away, validated by all the big cloud players. >>But you've got to nail the equation down for on premises to the cloud, whether it's Amazon, Amazon, Azure, Azure, whatever, all those costs. But the multicloud will be a next generation wave that is an industry backdrop and it's very, very key. Plus AI and data are huge inputs into solving a lot of what is going to be new gaps, blind spots, whatever insecurity. So I guess, you know, Dell's has a history with huge client base, traditional enterprises transforming. You're in the middle of all this. So you've got, you know, the airplane at three to 30,000 feet. Yep. And the companies have to swap out their engines and reboot their teams and it's a huge task. What's going on with cyber and the enterprises? What are, what are some of the key things? Well, so I like to keep it pretty simple. I've been in this industry over 20 years and I've really consistently talked about data as the global currency, right. >>So it's beautifully simple. Whatever industry you're in, whatever size company you're in, enterprise or even now, small to medium businesses, their businesses are driven by data connectivity. That data availability of the data, integrity of the data and confidentiality of the data, and so the sort of the area of the world that I focus upon is protecting customers. Most valuable data assets now, whether those are on prem, in the cloud or in a variety of modalities, and ensuring that those assets are protected and isolated from the attack surface and then ability to recover those critical assets quickly so they can return resume business operations. That's really the area that I work in. Now, that data, as you pointed out, it could start on prem, it could live in multi-cloud, it can live in a hybrid environment. The key is really to to understand that not all data is created equally if you were to have a widespread cyber attack, really the key is to bring up those critical applications, systems and datasets first to return to business operations. >>Really challenging. You know, it's not funny. It's actually, I just, I run it, but it's, it's, it's, it's really kind of indicative of the society now is that EMC was bought by Dell storage and the idea of disruption was always been a storage concept. Yes, we want, we don't want a lot of disruption when we're doing things right. So not know whether it's backup and recovery or cyber ransomware, whatever it is, the idea of non-disruptive operations. Absolutely. A core tenant. Now that's obviously the same for cyber as you can tell. So I've got to ask you, what is your definition in view of cyber resilience because, well, that's what we're talking about here. Cyber resilience. What's your view on this? So when we started developing our cyber recovery solution about five years ago, we used, uh, the NIST cybersecurity framework, which is a very well known standard that defines really five pillars of how organizations can think about building a cyber resilience strategy. >>A cyber resilience strategy really encompasses everything from a perimeter threat detection and response all the way through incident response after an attack. And everything that happens in between protecting the data and recovering the data, right? And critical systems. So I think of cyber resilience is that holistic strategy of protecting an organization and its data from a cyber attack as great insight. I want to get your thoughts on how that translates into the ecosystem. Okay. Because there's an ecosystem around cyber resilience. Absolute, let's just say, and you may or may not be able to comment on this, but RSA was now being sold. Yeah, no, that's fair. That's going out of the Dell family. But you guys have, you know, obviously VMware and insecure words, but it's not just you guys. It's an ecosystem. It really is. Does Dell now without, with and without RSA fit into the ecosystem. >>So as I mentioned, cyber resilience is really thought of as a holistic strategy. RSA and, and other Dell assets like carbon black, um, fit in somewhere in that continuum. Right? So RSA is really more on threat detection and response, perimeter protection. The area of the business that I work on, data protection and cyber recovery really doesn't address the, um, prevention of attacks. We really start with the premise that preventing a cyber attack is not a hundred percent possible. If you believe that, then you need to look at protecting and recovering your assets. Right? And so whether it's RSA, whether it's carbon black, whether it's secure works, which is about cyber incident and response, we really work across those groups. It's, it's about technology processes and people. It's not any one thing. We also work outside of the Dell technologies umbrella. So we integrate, our cyber recovery solution is integrated with Unisys stealth. >>Uh, so there's an example of how we're expanding and extending the cyber recovery solution to bring in, you know, other industry standards. You know, it's interesting, I talked to a lot of people that come on the Q of history here at RSA. Sure. Everyone wants better technology, but this also has shipped back the best of breed because you one of the best new technologies. At the same time, you've gotta have proven solutions. So what are you guys selling? What is the best of breed from, uh, Dell? Yeah, you guys are delivering to customers. What are some of the areas? So I, I'm old EMC guy myself, right? And, and back from the days of disaster recovery and business continuity, right? More traditional data protection and backup. The reality is that the modern threats of cyber sec of cyber hackers, breaches, insider attacks, whatever you like, those traditional data protection strategies weren't built to address those types of threats. >>So along with transformation and modernization, we need to modernize our data protection. That's what cyber recovery is. It's a modern solution to the modern threat. And what it does is it augments your data or your, excuse me, your disaster recovery and your backup environment with a purpose built isolated air gap digital vault, which is built around our proven data domain and power protect DD platforms. Uh, that, you know, I've been around for over a decade. Um, but what we've done is added intelligence, uh, analytics. We've hardened that system and we isolate it. Uh, so customers can protect really the most valuable assets in that kind of evolved. So one of the things I've been doing some research on and digging into is cyber resilience, which you just talked about cybersecurity, which is the industry trend and you're getting at cyber recovery. Okay. Can you talk about some examples of how this all threads together? >>What are some real recent examples? Sure. So think of cyber recovery as a purpose-built digital vault to secure your most valuable assets. Let me give you an example. One of our customers, is it a global paint manufacturer? Okay. And when we work with them to try to decide what of their apps and datasets should go into this cyber recovery vault, it said, what is the most critical intellectual property that you have? So in their Kenyan, Oh, some customers might say my Oracle financials or my office three 65 environment. For this customer it was their proprietary paint matching system. So they generate 80 to $100 million every day based upon this proprietary paint matching system, which they've developed and which they use every day to run their business. If that application, if those algorithms were destroyed, contaminated or you know, posted on the public internet somewhere, that would fundamentally change that company. >>So that's really what we're talking about. We're working with customers to help them identify their most critical assets, data systems, applications, and isolate those from the threat vector. Obviously all verticals are impacted by cyber security. Every vertical is data-driven. That's true. Obviously the low hanging fruit, are they below the normal suspects financial services? Is there, is there a particular one that's harder than having financial services got fraud and all that stuff on it, but yeah, that's still number one or so. I think there's two sides to the coin. One, if you look at the traditional enterprise environments, absolutely financial services in healthcare because they're both heavily regulated, uh, therefore that data has very high value and is a very attractive target to the Woodby hackers. If you look on the other end of the spectrum though, the small to medium businesses that all rely on the internet for their business to run, uh, they're the ones that are most susceptible because they don't have the budgets, the infrastructure or the expertise to protect themselves from a sophisticated hacker. >>Um, so we, you know, we work across all verticals. Obviously the government is also very susceptible to cyber threats, but it's every industry, any business that's data-driven. I mean, everyone's been breached so many times and no one even knows how many times. Uh, I gotta ask you about, um, um, some cool trends we're reporting on here. Sure. Homomorphic encryption is getting a lot of traction here because financial services in healthcare homomorphic homomorphic yeah. Okay. Did I say that right? Oh, it's the first time I've ever heard that term, John. I, it's encryption at end use. So you have data at rest, data in flight and data and use encryption. When you're doing all, you're protecting all your transactional data. Ah, so it's focusing with discovery. Intel's promoting it. Uh, we just covered a startup that's doing that as well. That's new, that's new for me, but allows for more use cases, but data and use, not just motion static. >>Yeah. That's opening up these other things. But it brings up the why, why that's important. And the reason is, is that financial services and healthcare, because they're regulated. Yes. Have systems that were built many moons ago or generations. Absolutely. So there was not these problems that you mentioned earlier that were built for that, but now you need more data. AI needs sharing of data sharing is a huge deal. Real time share real time. Right. And I think that's where the homomorphic encryption comes in. That's exactly right. So you mentioned that, so these industries, how can they maintain their existing operations and then get more data share? Do you have any insight into how you see that? Because that's one of those areas that's becoming like, okay, HIPAA, we know why that was built, but it's also restrictive. Yeah. How do you maintain the purity of a process if your infrastructure is, is old? >>That is, that is a challenge. Healthcare especially because, I mean, if I'm, if I'm, uh, you know, running a health system, every dollar that I have should really go into improving patient care, not necessarily into my it infrastructure, but the more that every industry moves towards a real time data-driven model for, for how we give care. Right? Yeah. Um, the more that, uh, companies need to realize that data drives their business, they need to do everything they can to protect it and also ensure that they can recover it when and if a cyber attack happens. Well, I really appreciate the insight and it's going to be great to see Dell technologies world coming up. We'll dig into a lot of that stuff while we're here on talking to us about some of this financial service in banking. I want to get your thoughts, I've been hearing this term sheltered Harbor. >>Yeah. Being kicked around. What does that about? What does that mean? Sheltered Harbor? You're right, I think you'll hear a lot more about it. So sheltered Harbor, uh, was, uh, is it isn't financial industries group and it's also a set of, uh, best practices and specifications. And really the, the purpose of sheltered Harbor is to protect consumer and financial institutions data, uh, and public confidence in the U S financial system. So the, the, the use cases, this, you can imagine that a, a bank having a cyber attack and B being unable to produce transactions could cause problems for customers of that bank. But the, just like we were talking about the interconnectedness of the banking system means that one financial institution failing because of a cyber attack, it could trigger a cascade and a panic and a run on the U S financial banks. And therefore the global financial system sheltered Harbor was developed to really protect public confidence in the financial system by ensuring that banks, brokerages, credit unions are protecting their customer data, their account records, their most valuable assets from cyber attack and that they can recover them and resume banking operations quick. >>So this is an industry group. It's an industry build group. Sheltered Harbor is a U S financial, uh, industry group. Uh, it's a nonprofit. You can, you can learn more about it. It's sheltered harbor.org. Uh, the interesting thing for Dell technologies is we're actually the first member of the sheltered Harbor solution provider program and we'll be announcing that shortly. In fact this week and we'll have a cyber recovery for sheltered Harbor solution in the market very shortly. Cyber resilience. Great topic, and you know, it just goes to show storage has never gone away. The basic concepts of it, recovery, continuous operations, not disruptive operations. Yeah, cloud scale changes the game. It's all about the data. All about the data. Still sites, RSA coverage here, cube day, two of three days of coverage. I'm John furrier here on the ground floor in Moscone in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up three big days of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante and Jeffrick. It has been such fun co-hosting with you both. It's always a ghast to be with you so three days, what have we learned? We've learned we're making the world of work work better for people. Beyond that what do you think? >> New branding you know there which I think underscores ServiceNow's desire to get into the C-Suite. Become a strategic partner. Some of the things we heard this week, platform of platforms. The next great enterprise software company is what they aspire to, just from a financial standpoint. This company literally wants to be a hundred billion dollar valuation company. I think they got a reasonable shot at doing that. They're well on their way to four billion dollars in revenue. It's hard to be a software company and hit a billion. You know the number of companies who get there ar very limited and they are the latest. We're also seeing many products, one platform and platforms in this day and age beat products. Cloud has been a huge tailwind for ServiceNow. We've seen the SaaSification of industries and now we're seeing significant execution on the original vision at penetration into deeply into these accounts. And I got to say when you come to events like this and talk to customers. There's amazing enthusiasm as much of if not more than any show that we do. I mean I really got, what's your take? >> We go to so many shows and it's not hard to figure out the health of a show. Right you walk around the floor, what's the energy, how many people are there? What's the ecosystem I mean, even now as I look around we're at the very end of the third day and there is action at most of the booths still. So it's a super healthy ecosystem. I think it grew another 4,000 people from this year of the year of year growth. So it's clearly on the rise. SaaS is a big thing, I think it's really interesting play and the kind of simple workflow. Not as much conversation really about the no code and the low code that we've heard in the past. Maybe they're past that but certainly a lot of conversation about the vertical stack applications that they're building and I think at the end of the day. We talked about this before, it's competition for your screen. You know what is it that you work in everyday. Right if you use, I don't care what application. SalesForce or any SaaS application which we all have a lot of on our desktop today. If you use it as a reporting tool it's a pain. It's double entry, it's not good. But what is the tool that you execute your business on everyday? And that's really a smart strategy for them to go after that. The other thing that I just think is ripe and we talked about a little bit. I don't know if they're down playing it because they're not where they want to be at or they're just downplaying it but the opportunity for machine learning and artificial intelligence to more efficiently impact workflows with the data from the workflow is a huge opportunity. So what was a bunch of workflows and approvals and this and that should all get, most of it should just get knocked out via AI over a short period of time. So I think they're in a good spot and then the other thing which we hear over and over. You know Frank Slootman IT our homies I still love that line. But as has been repeated IT is everywhere so what a great way to get into HR. To get into legal, to get into facilities management, to get into these other things. Where like hey this is a really cool efficient little tool can I build a nice app for my business? So seemed to be executing on that strategy. >> Yeah CJ just said IT will always be at our core. Rebecca the keynote was interesting. It got mixed reviews and I think part of that is they're struggling we heard tat from some of our guests. There's a hybrid audience now. You got the IT homies, you got the DevOps crowd and then you got the business leaders and so the keynote on day one was really reaching an audience. Largely outside of the core audience. You know I think day two and day three were much more geared toward that direct hit. Now I guess that's not a bad thing. >> No and I think that I mean as you noted it's a hybrid audience so you're trying to reach and touch and inspire and motivate a lot of different partners, customers, analysts. People who are looking at your business in a critical way. The first day John Donahoe it struck me as very sort of aspirational. Really talking about what is our purpose, what do we do as an organization. What are our values, what problems are we trying to solve here and I think that that laying out there in the way that he did was effective because it really did bring it back to, here's what we're about. >> Yeah the other thing I learned is succession has been very successful. Frank Slootman stepped down last year as CEO. He's maintained his chairman title, he's now stepped down as chairman. Fred kind of you know went away for a little while. Fred's back now as chairman. John Donahoe came in. People don't really put much emphasis on this but Fred Luddy was the chief product officer. Dan McGee was the COO, CJ Desai took over for both of them. He said on the CUBE. You know you texted me, you got big shoes to fill. He said I kept that just to remind me and he seems to have just picked up right where those guys left off. You know Pat Casey I think is understated and vital to the culture of this company. You know Jeff you see that, he's like a mini Fred you know and I think that's critical to maintain that cultural foundation. >> But as we said you know going the way that Pat talked about kind of just bifurcation in the keynote and the audiences in the building and out of the building. Which I've never heard before kind of an interesting way to cut it. The people that are here are their very passionate community and they're all here and they're adding 4,000 every single year. The people that are outside of the building maybe don't know as much about it and really maybe that aspirational kind of messaging touched them a little bit more cause they're not into the nitty gritty. It's really interesting too just cause this week is such a busy week in technology. The competition for attention, eyeballs and time. I was struck this morning going through some of our older stuff where Fred would always say. You know I'm so thankful that people will take the time to spend it with us this week. And when people had choices to go to Google IO, Microsoft build, of course we're at Nutanix next, Red Hat Summit I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other ones. >> Busy week. >> The fact that people are here for three days of conference again they're still here is a pretty good statement in terms of the commitment of their community. >> Now the other thing I want to mention is four years ago Jeff was I think might have been five years ago. We said on the CUBE this company's on a collision course with SalesForce and you can really start to see it take shape. Of the customer service management piece. We know that SalesForce really isn't designed for CSM. Customer Service Management. But he talked about it so they are on a collision course there. They've hired a bunch of people from SalesForce. SalesForce is not going to rollover you know they're going to fight hard for that hard, Oracle's going to fight hard for that. So software companies believe that they should get their fair share of the spend. As long as that spend is a 100%. That's the mentality of a software company. Especially those run by Marc Benioff and Larry Ellis and so it's going to be really interesting to see how these guys evolve. They're going to start bumping into people. This guy's got pretty sharp elbows though. >> Yeah and I think the customer relation is very different. We were at PagerDuty Summit last right talked to Nick Meta who just got nominated for entrepreneur of the year I think for Ink from GainSight and he really talked about what does a customer management verses opportunity management. Once you have the customer and you've managed that sale and you've made that sale. That's really were SalesForce has strived in and that's we use it for in our own company but once you're in the customer. Like say you're in IBM or you're in Boeing. How do you actually manage your relationship in Boeing cause it's not Boeing and your sales person. There's many many many relationships, there's many many many activities, there's somewhere you're winning, somewhere you're losing. Somewhere you're new, somewhere you're old and so the opportunity there is way beyond simply managing you know a lead to an opportunity to a closed sale. That' just the very beginning of a process and actually having a relationship with the customer. >> The other thing is so you can, one of the measurements of progress in 2013 this company 95% of its business was in IT. Their core ITSM, change management, help desk etc. Today that number's down to about two thirds so a third of the business is outside of IT. We're talking about multi-hundreds of millions of dollars. So ITOM, HR, the security practice. They're taking these applications and they're becoming multi-hundred million dollar businesses. You know some of them aren't there yet but they're you know north of 50, 75 we're taking about hundreds of customers. Higher average price, average contract values. You know they don't broadcast that here but you know you look at peel back the numbers and you can see just tremendous financial story. The renewal rates are really really high. You know in the mid 90s, high 90s which is unheard of and so I think this company is going to be the next great enterprise software company and their focus on the user experience I think is important because if you think about the great enterprise software companies. SalesForce, Oracle, SAP, maybe put IBM in there because they sort of acquired their way to it. But those three, they're not the greatest user experiences in the world. They're working on the UI but they're, you know Oracle, we use Oracle. It's clunky, it's powerful. >> They're solving such different problems. Right when those companies came up they were solving a very different problem. Oracle on their relational database side. Very different problem. You know ARP was so revolutionary when SAP came out and I still just think it's so funny that we get these massive gains of efficiency. We had it in the ARP days and now we're getting it again. So they're coming at it from a very different angle. That they're fortunate that there are more modern architecture, there are more modern UI. You know unfortunately if you're legacy you're kind of stuck in your historical. >> In your old ways right? >> Paradigm. >> So the go to market gets more complicated as they start selling to all these other divisions. You're seeing overlay, sales forces you know it's going to be interesting. IBM just consolidated it's big six shows into one. You wonder what's going to happen with this. Are they going to have to create you know mini Knowledges for all these different lines of business. We'll see how that evolves. You think with the one platform maybe they keep it all together. I hope they don't lose that core. You think of VM world, rigt there's still a core technical audience and I think that brings a lot of the energy and credibility to a show like this. >> They still do have some little regional shows and there's a couple different kind of series that they're getting out because as we know. Once you get, well just different right. AWS reinvents over $40,000 last year. Oracle runs it I don't even know what Oracle runs. A 65,000, 75,000. SalesForce hundred thousand but they kind of cheat. They give away lot of tickets but it is hard to keep that community together. You know we've had a number of people come up to us while we're off air to say hi, that we've had on before. The company's growing, things are changing, new leadership so to maintain that culture I think that's why Pat is so important and the key is that connection to the past and that connection to Fred. That kind of carried forward. >> The other thing we have to mention is the ecosystem when we first started covering ServiceNow Knowledge it was you know fruition partners, cloud Sherpas I mean it. Who are these guys and now you see the acquisitions, it's EY is here, Deloitte is here, Accenture is here. >> Got Fruition. >> PWC you see Unisys is here. I mean big name companies, Capgemini, KPMG with big install bases. Strong relationships it's why you see the sales guys at ServiceNow bellying up to these companies because they know it's going to drive more business for them. So pretty impressive story I mean it's hard to be critical of these guys, your price is too high. Okay I mean alright. But the value's there so people are lining up so. >> Yeah I mean it's a smoking hot company as you said. What do they needed to do next? What do you need to see from them next? >> Well I mean the thing is they laid out the roadmap. You know they announced twice a year at different cities wit each a letter of the alphabet. They got to execute on that. I mean this is one of those companies that's theirs to lose. It really is, they got the energy. They got to retain the talent, attract new talent, the street's certainly buying their story. Their free cash flow is growing faster than their revenue which is really impressive. They're extremely well run company. Their CFO is a rockstar stud behind the scenes. I mean they got studs in development, they got a great CEO they got a great CFO. Really strong chief product officer, really strong general managers who've got incredible depth in expertise. I mean it's theirs to lose, I mean they really just have to keep executing on that roadmap keeping their customer focus and you know hoping that there's not some external factor that blows everything up. >> Yeah good point, good point. What about the messaging? We've heard as you said, it's new branding so it's making the world of work work better, there's this focus on the user experience. The idea that the CIO is no longer just so myopic in his or her portfolio. Really has to think much more broadly about the business. A real business leader, I mean is this. Are you hearing this at other conferences too? Is it jiving with the other? >> You know everyone talks about the new way to work, the new to work, the new way to work and the consumers they sort of IT and you know all the millennials that want to operate everything on their phone. That's all fine and dandy. Again at the end of the day, where do people work? Because again you're competing everyone has, excuse me many many applications unfortunately that we have to run to get our day job done and so if you can be the one that people use as the primary way that they get work done. That's the goal... >> Rebecca: That's where the money is. >> That's the end game right. >> Well I owe that so the messaging to me is interesting because IT practitioners as a community are some of the most under appreciated. You know overworked and they're only here from the business when things go bad. For decades we've seen this the thing that struck me at ServiceNow Knowledge 13 when we first came here was wow. These IT people ar pumped. You know you walk around a show the IT like this, they're kind of dragging their feet, heads down and the ServiceNow customers are excited. They're leading innovation in their companies. They're developing new applications on these platforms. It's a persona that I think is being reborn and it sound exciting to see. >> It's funny you bring up the old chest because before it was a lot about just letting IT excuse me, do their work with a little bit more creativity. Better tools, build their own store, build an IT services Amazon likened store. We're not hearing any of that anymore. >> Do more with less, squeeze, squeeze. >> If we're part of delivering value as we've talked about with the banking application and link from MoonsStar you know now these people are intimately involved with the forward facing edge of the company. So it's not talking about we'll have a cool service store. I remember like 2014 that was like a big theme. We're not hearing that anymore, we've moved way beyond that in terms of being a strategic partner in the business. Which we here over and over but these are you know people that header now the strategic partner for the business. >> Okay customers have to make bets and they're making bets on ServiceNow. They've obviously made a bunch of bets on Oracle. Increasingly they're making bets on Amazon. You know we're seeing that a lot. They've made big bets on VM ware, obviously big bets on SAP so CIOs they go to shows like this to make sure that they made the right bet and they're not missing some blind spots. To talk to their peers but you can see that their laying the chips on the table. I guess pun intended, I mean they're paying off. >> That's great, that's a great note to end on I think. So again a pleasure co-hosting with both of you. It's been a lot of fun, it's been a lot of hard work but a lot of fun too. >> Thank you Rebecca and so the CUBE season Jeff. I got to shout out to you and the team. I mean you guys, it's like so busy right now. >> I thought you were going to ask if we were going next. I was going to say oh my god. >> Next week I know I'm in Chicago at VMON. >> Right we have VMON, DON, we've got a couple of on the grounds. SAP Sapphire is coming up. >> Dave: Pure Accelerate. >> Pure Accelerate, OpenStack, we're going back to Vancouver. Haven't been there for a while. Informatica World, back down here in Las Vegas Pure Storage, San Francisco... >> We got the MIT's CTO conference coming up. We got Google Next. >> Women Transforming Technology. Just keep an eye on the website upcoming. We can't give it all straight but... >> The CUBE.net, SiliconAngle.com, WikiBon.com, bunch of free content.- you heard it here first. >> There you go. >> For Rebecca Knight and Jeffrick and Dave Vellante this has been the CUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We will see you next time. >> Thanks everybody, bye bye.