>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of H P S. Green Lake announcement. We've been following Green Lake and the cadence of announcements making. Now we're gonna talk about ransomware, ransomware become a household term. But what people really don't understand is that virtually any bad actor can become a ransomware criminal by going on the dark web hiring a ransomware as a service sticking, putting a stick into a server and taking a piece of the action and that is a really insidious threat. Uh, the adversaries are extremely capable, so we're going to dig into that with Omar assad, who's the storage platform, lead cloud data services at H P E and Deepak verma vice president of product Zito, which is now an H P E company Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. >>Thank you. Welcome. Pleasure to be here. So >>over you heard my little narrative upfront. How does the Xarelto acquisition fit into that discourse? >>Thank you. Dave first of all, we're extremely excited to welcome Sir toe into the HP family. Uh, the acquisition of Puerto expands the Green Lake offerings from H P E uh, into the data protection as a service and ransomware protection as a service capabilities and it at the same time accelerates the transformation that the HP storage businesses going through as it transforms itself into more of a cloud native business, which sort of follows on from the May 4th announcements that you helped us cover. Uh, this enables the HP sales teams to now expand the data protection perimeter and to start offering data protection as a service and ransomware as a service with the best in class technologies uh, from a protection site as well as from ransomware recovery side of the house. And so we're all the way down already trying to integrate uh, you know, the little offerings as part of the Green lake offerings and extending support through our services organization. And the more of these announcements are gonna roll out later in the month. >>And I think that's what you want to see from it as a service offering. You want to see a fast cadence of new services that are not a box by a box that are applying. No, it's services that you want to access. So let's, let's talk about before we get into the tech, can we talk about how you're helping customers deal with ransomware? Maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing. >>First of all, extremely excited to be part of the HP family now. Um, Quick history and that we've been around for about 11 years. We've had about 9000 plus customers and they all benefit from essentially the same technology that we invented 11 years ago. First and foremost, one of the use cases has been continuous data protection. So were built on the CdP platform, which means extremely low RTO S and R P O S for recovery. I'll give you example there um, United Airlines is an application that cost them $1 million dollars for every hour that they're down. They use traditional approaches. That would be a lot of loss with Zito, we have that down two seconds of loss in case and the application goes down. So that's kind of core and fundamental to our plaque. The second uh critical use case that for us has been simplicity. A lot of customers have said we make the difficult, simple. So DRS is a complex uh process. Um, give you an example there. Hcea Healthcare Consolidated four different disaster recovery platforms into a single platform in Puerto and saved about $10 million dollars a year. So it's making that operations of having disaster recovery process is much simpler. Um the third kind of critical use case for us as uh, the environment has evolved as the landscape has involved has been around hybrid cloud. So being able to take customers to the platforms that they want to go to that's critical for us And for our customers an example, there is Kingston technology's so Kingston tried some competitive products to move to Azure, it would take them about 24 hours to recover 30 VMS or so with zero technology. They will get about all their 1000 VMS up in Azure instantaneously. So these are three use cases that were foundational. Built. Built the company in the tech. >>Nice. Thank you. Thank you for that. So simple works well these days, especially with all this complexity we have to deal with. Can we get into the secret sauce a little bit. I mean CdP has been around forever. What do you guys do that? That's different. Maybe you can talk about that. Sure. >>Um it's cdp based, I think we've perfected the technology. It's less about being able to just copy the data. It's more about what you do when things go bump. We've made it simpler with driven economies of scale lower and being platform agnostic. We've really brought that up across to whatever platforms once upon a time it was moving from physical to virtual or even across different virtualization platforms and then being able to move across to whatever cloud platform customer may want or or back >>to cbP continuous data protection by the way for the audience that may not know that go ahead. And >>one of the additional points that I want to add to the box comment over here is the the basics of platform independence is what really drew uh hp technologists into the technology because you know, one of the things we have many, we have the high end platform with the H B electra nine Kv of the electro six kids the midrange platform. Then we have a bunch of file and object offerings on the side. What zero does it University universally applies to all those technologies and along with, you know, as you pair them up with our computer offerings to offer a full stack but now the stack is disaster recovery capable. Natively with the integration of certo, you know, one of the things that, you know, Deepak talked about about the as your migrations that a lot of the customers are talking about cloud is also coming up as a D our use case for a lot of our customers, customers, you know, you know, as we went through thousands of customers interviews one of the, one of the key things that came back was investing in a D our data center which is just waiting there for a disaster to happen. It's a very expensive insurance policy. So absurd. Oh, through its native capabilities allows customers to do is to just use public cloud as a D our target and and as a service, it just takes care of all the format conversions and recoveries and although that's completely automated inside the platform and and we feel that, you know, when you combine this either at the high end of data center storage offering or the middle age offering with this replication, D. R. And ransomware protection built into the same package, working under the same hood, it just simplifies and streamlines the customers deployment. >>Come here a couple of things. So first of all historically, if you wanted to recover to appoint within let's say, you know, 10 seconds, five seconds you have to pay up. Big time. Number one. Number two is you couldn't test your D. R. It was too risky. So people just had it in, they had a checkbox on compliance but they actually couldn't really test it because they were afraid they were going to lose data. So it sounds like you're solving both of those problems or >>or you know we remember the D. R. Test where it was a weekend. It was an event right? It was the event and at the end of july that the entire I. T. Organizing honey >>it's not gonna be home this weekend. Exactly what >>we've changed. That is a click of a button. You can D. R. Test today if you want to you can have disaster recovery still running. You can D. R. Test in Azure bring up your environment an isolated network bubble, make sure everything's running and bring it and bring it down. The interesting thing is the technology was invented back when our fear in the industry was losing a data center was losing power was catastrophic, natural disasters. But the technology has lent itself very well to the new threats which which are very much around ransomware as you mentioned because it's a type of disaster. Somebody's going after your data. Physical servers are still around but you still need to go back to a point in time and you need to do that very quickly. So the technology has really just found itself uh appealing to new challenges. >>If a customer asks you can I really eliminate cyber attacks, where should I put my my if I had 100 bucks to spend. Should I spend it on you know layers and defense should I spend it on recovery. Both, what would you tell them? >>I think it's a balanced answer. I think prevention is 100% impossible. Uh It's really I'd say spend it in in thirds. You want to spend a third of it and and prevention a third of it maybe in detection and then a third of it in uh recovery. So it's really that balancing act that means you can't leave the front door open but then have a lot of recovery techniques invested in. It has to be it has to be a balance and it's also not a matter of if it's a matter of when so we invest in all three areas. Hopefully two of them will work to your advantage. >>You dave you you should always protect your perimeter. I mean that that goes without saying but then as you invest in other aspects of the business, as Deepak mentioned, recovery needs to be fast and quick recovery whether from your recovering from a backup disaster. Are you covering from a data center disaster a corrupted file or from a ransomware attack. A couple of things that zero really stitches together like journal based recovery has been allowed for a while but making journal based recovery platform independent in a seamless fashion with the click of a button within five seconds go back to where your situation was. That gives you the peace of mind that even if the perimeter was breached, you're still protected, you know, five minutes into the problem And, and that's the peace of mind, which along with data protection as a service, disaster recovery as a service and now integrating this, you know, recovery from ransomware along with it in a very simple, easy to consume package is what drew us into the >>more you can do this you said on the use the cloud as a target. I could use the cloud as an air gap if I wanted to. It sounds like it's cloud Native, correct? Just wrap your stack in kubernetes and shove it in the cloud and have a host and say we're cloud to No, really I'm serious. So >>absolutely, we we looked at that approach and that that's where the challenge comes in, Right? So I give you the example of Kingston technology just doesn't scale, it's not fast enough. What we did was developed a platform for cloud Native. We consume cloud services where necessary in order to provide that scalability. So one example in Azure is being able to use scale set. So think about a scenario where you just declare a disaster, you've got 1000 VMS to move over, we can spin up the workers that need to do the work to get 1000 VMS spin them down. So you're up and running instantaneously and that involves using cloud Native uh tools and technologies, >>can we stay on that for a minute, So take take us through an example of what life was like would be like without zero trying to recover and what it's like with Puerto resources, complexity time maybe you could sort of paint a picture. Sure. >>Let me, I'll actually use an example from a customer 10 Kata. They uh develop defensive fabrics, especially fabric. So think about firefighters, think about our men and women abroad that need protective clothing that developed the fibers behave. They were hit by ransomware by crypto locker. That this was before zero. Unfortunately it took they took about a two week uh data loss. It took them weeks to recover that environment, bring it back up and the confidence was pretty low. They invested in, they looked at our technology, they invested in the technology and then they were hit with a different variant of crypto locker immediately. The the IT administrators and the ITS folks there were relieved right, they had a sense of confidence to say yes we can recover. And the second time around they had data loss of about 10 seconds, they could recover within a few minutes. So that's the before and after picture giving customers that confidence to say yep, a breach happened, we tried our best but now it's up to recovery and I can recover without having to dig tapes out from some vault and hopefully have a good copy of data sitting there and then try that over and over again and there's a tolerance right before a time before which business will not be able to sustain itself. So what we want to do is minimize that for businesses so that they can recover as quickly as possible with as little data loss as possible. >>Thank you for that. So, Omar, there's a bigger sort of cyber recovery agenda that you have as part of, of green lake, I'm sure. What, what should we expect, what's next? Where do you want to take this? >>So uh excellent question point in the future day. So one of the things that you helped us, uh you know, unveil uh in May was the data services. Cloud console. Data services. Cloud console was the first uh sort of delivery as we took the storage business as it is and start to transform into more of a cloud native business. We introduced electra uh which is the cloud native hardware with the customers buy for persistent storage within their data center. But then data services, cloud console truly cemented that cloud operational model. Uh We separated the management from, from the devices itself and sort of lifted it up as a sas service into the public, public cloud. So now what you're gonna see is, you know, more and more data and data management services come up on the data services. Cloud console and and zero is going to be one of the first ones. Cloud physics was another one that we we talked about, but zero is the is the true data management service that is going to come up on data services, cloud console as part of the Green Lake services agenda that that HP has in the customer's environ and then you're gonna see compliance as a service. You're going to see data protection as a service. You're gonna see disaster recovery as a service. But the beautiful thing about it is, is choice with simplicity as these services get loaded up on data services, clown console. All our customers instantly get it. There's nothing to install, there's nothing to troubleshoot uh, there's nothing to size. All those capabilities are available on the console, customers go in and just start consuming Xarelto capabilities from a management control plane, Disaster recovery control plan are going to be available on the data services, cloud console, automatically detecting electro systems, rian Bear systems, container based systems, whichever our customers have deployed and from there is just a flip of a button. Another way to look at it is it sort of gives you that slider that you have data protection or back up on one side, you've got disaster recovery on one side, you've got ransomware protection on on the extreme right side, you can just move a slider across and choose the service level that you want without worrying about best practices, installation, application integration. All of that just takes control from the data services, cloud concepts. >>Great, great summary because historically you would have to build that right now. You can buy it as a service. You can programmatically, you know, deploy it and that's a game changer. Have to throw it over the fence to some folks. That's okay. Now, you know, make it make it work and then they change the code and you come back a lot of finger pointing. It's now it's your responsibility. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. We're excited to provide Zito continue provides the desert of customers but also integrate with the Green Green Lake platform and let the rest of Green Lake customers experience some of the sort of technology and really make that available as a service. >>That's great. This is a huge challenge for customers. I mean they do, I pay their ransom. Do not pay the ransom. If I pay the ransom the FBI is going to come after me. But if I don't pay the ransom, I'm not gonna get the crypto key. So solutions like this are critical. You certainly see the president pushing for that. The United States government said, hey, we got to do a better job. Good job guys, Thanks for for sharing your story in the cube and congratulations. Thank >>you. Thank you David. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody. Uh this is the, I want to tell you that everything that you're seeing today as part of the Green Lake announcement is going to be available on demand as part of the HP discover more. So you got to check that out. Thank you. You're watching the cube. >>Mhm mm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everybody to VeeamON 2021 you're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Villante. You know in 2020 cyber adversaries they seize the opportunity to really up their game and target workers from home and digital supply chains. It's become increasingly clear to observers that we're entering a new era of cyber threats where infiltrating companies via so-called Island Hopping and stealthily living off the land meaning they're using your own tools and infrastructure to steal your data. So they're not signaling with new tools that they're in there. It's becoming the norm for sophisticated hacks. Moreover, these well-funded and really sophisticated criminals and nation States are aggressively retaliating against incident responses. In other words, when you go to fix the problem they're not leaving the premises they're rather they're tightening the vice on victims by holding your data ransom and threatening to release previously ex filtrated and brand damaging information to the public. What a climate in which we live today. And with me to talk about these concerning trends and what you can do about it as Gil Vega, the CISO of Veeam Gil great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. So, you know, you're hearing my intro. It's probably understating the threat. You are a Veeam's first CISO. So how do you see the landscape right now? >> That's right. Yeah. And I've been with the company for just over a year now, but my background is in financial services and spent a lot of time managing cybersecurity programs at the classified level in Washington DC. So I've gleaned a lot of scar tissue from lots of sophisticated attacks and responses. But today I think what we're seeing is really a one-upmanship by a sophisticated potentially nation state sponsored adversaries, this idea of imprisoning your data and charging you to release it is it's quite frightening. And as we've seen in the news recently it can have devastating impacts not only for the economy, but for businesses. Look at the gas lines in the Northeast right now because of the quality of a pipeline, a ransomware attack. I just, the government just released an executive order this morning, that hopes to address some of the some of the nation's unpreparedness for these sophisticated attacks. And I think it's time. And I think everyone's excited about the opportunity to really apply a whole of government approach, to helping critical infrastructure to helping and partnering with private sector and imposing some risks, frankly, on some of the folks that are engaged in attacking our country. >> A number of years ago, I often tell this story. I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Gates the former Defense Secretary. And it was a while ago we were talking about cyber and he sits on a number of boards. And we were talking about how it's a board level issue. And, and we're talking about cyber crime and the like and nation States. And I said, well, wait, cyber warfare, even. And I said, "But don't we have the best cyber tech. I mean, can't we go on the offense?" And he goes, "Yeah, we do. And we can, but we have more to lose." And to your point about critical infrastructure, it's not just like, okay, we have the most powerful weapons. It's really we have the most valuable infrastructure and a lot to lose. So it's really a tricky game. And this notion of having to be stealthy in your incident response is relatively new. Isn't it? >> It is. It is. And you know, there are, you mentioned that and I was surprised you mentioned because a lot of people really don't talk about it as you're going into your response your adversaries are watching or watching your every move. You have to assume in these days of perpetual state of compromise in your environments, which means that your adversaries have access to your environment to the point that they're watching your incident responders communicate with one another and they're countering your moves. So it's sort of a perverse spin on the old mutually assured destruction paradigm that you mentioned the United States has the world's largest economy. And quite frankly the world's most vulnerable, critical infrastructure. And I would concur with Director Gates or Secretary Gates rather it is assessment that we've got to be awfully careful and measured in our approach to imposing risks. I think the government has worked for many years on defining red lines. And I think this latest attack on the colonial pipeline affecting the economy and people's lives and potentially putting people's lives at risk is towing also the close to that red line. And I'm interested to see where this goes. I'm interested to see if this triggers even a, you know a new phase of cyber warfare, retaliation, you know proactive defense by the National Security Community of the United States government. Be interesting to see how this plays out. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right though. You've got this sort of asymmetric dynamic now which is unique for the United States as soon as strongest defense in the world. And I wanted to get it to ransomware a bit. And specifically this notion of ransomware as a service it's really concerning where criminals can actually outsource the hack as a service and the bad guys will set up, you know, on the dark web they'll have, you know, help desks and phone lines. They'll do the negotiations. I mean, this is a really concerning trend. And obviously Veeam plays a role here. I'm wondering as a, as a SecOps pro what should we be doing about this? >> Yeah, you mentioned ransomware as a service, whereas RWS it's an incredibly pernicious problem perpetrated by sophisticated folks who may or may not have nation state support or alliances. I think at a minimum certain governments are looking the other way as it relates to these criminal activities. But with ransomware as a service, you're essentially having very sophisticated folks create very complex ransomware code and distributed to people who are willing to pay for it. And oftentimes take a part of the ransom as their payment. The, issue with obviously ransomware is you know the age old question, are you going to pay a ransom or are you not going to pay a ransom? The FBI says, don't do it. It only encourages additional attacks. The Treasury Department put out some guidance earlier earlier in the year, advising companies that they could be subject to civil or criminal penalties. If they pay a ransom and the ransom goes to a sanction density. So there's danger on all sides. >> Wow okay. But so, and then the other thing is this infiltrating via digital supply chains I call it Island Hopping and the like, we saw that with the solar winds hack and the scary part is, you know different malware is coming in and self forming and creating different signatures. Not only is it very difficult to detect, but remediating, you know, one, you know combined self formed malware it doesn't necessarily take care of the others. And so, you know, you've got this sort of organic virus, like thing, you know, create mutating and that's something that's certainly relatively new to me in terms of its prevalence your thoughts on that and how to do it. >> Yeah, exactly right. You know, the advent of the polymorphic code that changes the implementation of advanced artificial intelligence and some of this malware is making our job increasingly difficult which is why I believe firmly. You've got to focus on the fundamentals and I think the best answers for protecting against sophisticated polymorphic code is,are found in the NIST cybersecurity framework. And I encourage everyone to really take a close look at implementing that cybersecurity framework across their environments, much like we've done here, here at Veeam implementing technologies around Zero Trust again assuming a perpetual state of compromise and not trusting any transaction in your environment is the key to combating this kind of attack. >> Well, and you know, as you mentioned, Zero Trust Zero Trust used to be a buzzword. Now it's like become a mandate. And you know, it's funny. I mean, in a way I feel like the crypto guys I know there's a lot of fraud in crypto, but but anybody who's ever traded crypto it's like getting into Fort Knox. I mean, you got to know your customer and you've got to do a little transaction. I mean, it's really quite sophisticated in terms of the how they are applying cybersecurity and you know, most even your bank isn't that intense. And so those kinds of practices, even though they're a bit of a pain in the neck, I mean it's worth the extra effort. I wonder if you could talk about some of the best practices that you're seeing how you're advising your clients in your ecosystem and the role that Veeam can play in helping here. >> Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned so many recommendations and I think the thing to remember here so we don't overwhelm our small and medium sized businesses that have limited resources in this area is to remind them that it's a journey, right? It's not a destination that they can continually improve and focus on the fundamentals. As I mentioned, things like multi-factor authentication you know, a higher level topic might be micro-segmentation breaking up your environment into manageable components that you can monitor a real time. Real time monitoring is one of the key components to implementing Zero Trust architecture and knowing exactly what good looks like in your environment in a situation where you've got real-time monitoring you can detect the anomalies, the things that shouldn't be happening in your environment and to spin up your response teams, to focus and better understand what that is. I've always been a proponent of identity and access management controls and a key focus. We've heard it in this industry for 25 years is enforcing the concept of least privilege, making sure that your privileged users have access to the things they need and only the things that they need. And then of course, data immutability making sure that your data is stored in backups that verifiably has not been changed. And I think this is where Veeam comes into the equation where our products provide a lot of these very easily configured ransomware protections around data and your ability to the ability to instantly back up things like Office 365 emails, you know support for AWS and Azure. Your data can be quickly restored in the event that an attacker is able to in prison that with encryption and ransom demands. >> Well, and so you've certainly seen in the CISOs that I've talked to that they've had to obviously shift their priorities, thanks to the force march to digital, thanks to COVID, but Identity access management, end point security cloud security kind of overnight, you know, Zero Trust. We talked about that and you could see that in some of these, you know, high flying security stocks, Okta Zscaler, CrowdStrike, they exploded. And so what's in these many of these changes seem to be permanent sort of you're I guess, deeper down in the stack if you will, but you, you compliment these toolings with obviously the data protection approach the ransomware, the cloud data protection, air gaps, immutability. Maybe you could talk about how you fit in with the broader, you know, spate of tools. I mean, your, my eyes bleed when you look at all the security companies that are out there. >> Yeah for sure. You know, I'm just going to take it right back to the NIST cybersecurity framework and the five domains that you really need to focus on. Identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover, you know and until recently security practitioners and companies have really focused on on the protect, identify and protect, right and defend rather where they're focused on building, you know, moats and castles and making sure that they've got this, you know hard exterior to defend against attacks. I think there's been a shift over the past couple of years where companies have recognized that the focus needs to be on and respond and recover activities, right? Assuming that people are going to breach or near breach, your entities is a safe way to think about this and building up capabilities to detect those breaches and respond effectively to those breaches are what's key in implementing a successful cybersecurity program where Veeam fits into this since with our suite of products that that can help you through the recovery process, right? That last domain of the NIST cybersecurity framework it'll allow you to instantaneously. As I mentioned before, restore data in the event of a catastrophic breach. And I think it provides companies with the assurances that while they're protecting and building those Zero Trust components into their environments to protect against these pernicious and well-resourced adversaries there's the opportunity for them to recover very quickly using the VM suite of tools? >> Well, I see, I think there's an interesting dynamic here. You're pointing out Gil. There's not no longer is it that, you know, build a moat the Queen's leaving her castle. I always say, you know there is no hardened perimeter anymore. And so you've seen, you know, the shift obviously from hardware based firewalls and you I mentioned those other companies that are doing great but to me, it's all about these layers and response is a big in recovery is a huge part of that. So I'm seeing increasingly companies like Veeam is a critical part of that, that security cyber data protection, you know, ecosystem. I mean, to me it's just as important as the frontline pieces of even identity. And so you see those markets exploding. I think it's, there's a latent value that's building in companies like Veeam that are a key part of those that data protection layer you think about you know, defense strategies. It's not just you, the frontline it's maybe it's airstrikes, maybe it's, you know, C etcetera. And I see that this market is actually a huge opportunity for for organizations like yours. >> I think you're right. And I think the proof is in, you know in the pudding, in terms of how this company has grown and what we've delivered in version 11 of our suite, including, you know features like continuous data protection, we talked about that reliable ransomware protection support for AWS S3 Glacier and Azure archive the expanded incident recovery, and then support for disaster recovery and backup as a service. You know, what I found most interesting in my year here at Veeam is just how much our administrators the administrators in our company and our customers companies that are managing backups absolutely love our products that ease of use the instant backup capabilities and the support they receive from Veeam. It's almost cultish in terms of how our customers are using these products to defend themselves in today's pretty intense cyber threat environment. >> Well, and you talked about the NIST framework, and again big part of that is recovery, because we talked about earlier about, do you pay the ransom or not? Well, to the extent that I can actually recover from having all my data encrypted then I've got obviously a lot more leverage and in many ways, I mean, let's face it. We all know that it's not a matter of if it's, when you get infiltrated. And so to the extent that I can actually have systems that allow me to recover, I'm now in a much much stronger position in many respects, you know and CISOs again, will tell you this that's where we're shifting our investments >> Right. And you've got to do all of them. It's not just there's no silver bullet, but but that seems to me to be just a a misunderstood and undervalued part of the equation. And I think there's tremendous upside there for companies like yours. >> I think you're right. I think what I'll just add to that is the power of immutability, right? Just verifiably ensuring that your data has not changed because oftentimes you'll have attackers in these low and slow live off the land types of attacks change your data and affect its integrity with the Veeam suite of tools. You're able to provide for immutable or unchanged verifiable data and your backup strategy which is really the first step to recovery after a significant event. >> And that's key because a lot of times the hackers would go right after the backup Corpus you know, they'll sometimes start there is that all the data, you know, but if you can make that immutable and again, it, you know there's best practices there too, because, you know if you're not paying the cloud service for that immutability, if you stop paying then you lose that. So you have to be very careful about, you know how you know, who has access to that and you know what the policies are there, but again, you know you can put in, you know so a lot of this, as you know, is people in process. It's not just tech, so I'll give you the last word. I know you got to jump, but really appreciate.. >> Yeah, sure. >> You know, the only, the only thing that we didn't mention is user awareness and education. I think that is sort of the umbrella key focus principle for any successful cybersecurity program making sure your people understand, you know how to deal with phishing emails. You know, ransomware is a huge threat of our time at 90% of ransomware malware is delivered by phishing. So prepare your workforce to deal with phishing emails. And I think you'll save yourself quite a few headaches. >> It's great advice. I'm glad you mentioned that because because bad user behavior or maybe uninformed user behaviors is the more fair way to say it. It will trump good security every time. Gil, thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and and keep fighting the fight. Best of luck going forward. >> Great. Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Villante for the CUBEs continuous coverage VeeamON 2021, the virtual edition. We will be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, >>from The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Everybody welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the IBM think 2020 digital event experience. My name is Dave Volante. Manish Gupta is here. He's the global managing director for chemicals, petroleum and industrial products that IBM Manish. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. How you doing out there in Saratoga, California? All good. >>I'm doing great. I'm doing great, given, considering everything. The role of all of this. >>I mean, right, it's tough times, but look it, We can still, you know, have a smile every now and then, right? I mean, you know, it's very nice for a lot of people in our hearts. Go out. Everybody there. So I I want to start off one of the areas that you're steeped in is the energy sector. You know, generally, people are very much concerned about oil. Price of oil drop below, you know, zero went negative. People have been paying people take oil and understand that was a technical, but still the prices of depressed >>I >>learned about credit risk and the like. But what's your take on what's going on in the energy sector right now? >>Yes. So I think the companies that, uh, that have taken on a lot of debt and don't have a stable operating conditions will naturally suffer through this in the oil industry. Clearly, until the prices come back with will be as demand picks up, that would be several months to more than that. As we can imagine, we'll see the The more stable companies, the more I'll say companies that have ah longer balance sheets survived for sure. In addition, you know, the the other aspect of it is of course, they're all double down on making sure your companies and your free services companies or double down on productivity conserving cash as well as considering how they accelerate. In my view, there transition are more more profitable areas of growth as demand comes back, >>is there? Is there a silver lining here? I mean, in normal times, you know, of the oil price drops and the like, a tax cut. Um, I know the government. The United States government, anyway, has been beefing up its strategic reserves that has a history of buying low Is there any good that you see coming out of this? So >>So I think the good that'll come out is is surely that the stronger companies will come through more successfully. The company that have taken less risk, the companies that have that have invested in more more stable operating platforms and and at the end of the day, I think, the companies that have taken a more future proof strategy for their business portfolio. So whether you take a B B, for example or a shell, they're actively working the words deporting the energy transition. I think that will be the You'll see an acceleration of companies starting the thinker off where they need to go in the future. You support the energy transition. I think the silver lining of the end of the day will be, Ah, that as is, sometimes you just said oil is very precious. Resource, therefore, should not be burned. And and so the question at hand is, you know, what do you do with with all the oil that's available? What do you build out of it? Whether it's petrochemicals, I think that transition to more future proof product portfolio on business model will be will be truly the silver lining. >>How about the broader industrial companies that you follow? I mean, they were sort of moving down a path of digital transformation. I o t obviously is the big theme within many industrial sectors. What are you seeing in the broader? >>So I think in the broader base clearly, you know, supply chains and the spread of barely, you know, demand demand dropping prior demand signals which were sometimes ignored for historical reporting. Ah, that that is now becoming more important. I your sense and response by then. So as you step back and look that that they need to maintain business continuity is, of course, the highest priority. But as they come out off this, we expect that we're thinking of this is as the future for industrial sector will be. What we would call is hybrid. I you know, supply chains will need to be local and global manufacturing will need to be both traditional. A swell is additive. I you know, you you produce more, more locally and in addition of products and services will need to be a combination of digital and and physical. And at the end of the day if you step back. I saw something recently that said, Ah, you know who's leading the digital transformation in your company Now the multiple choices were the CEO, the CDO CIO, or is it? And this option was circled over 19. If you think of it in simple terms, covered, 19 is creating the acceleration of digital transformation because the only valid response in in my mind as you look at these ah as these different hybrid models is a consideration of technology being being a fulcrum off, getting a future proof of black mom. >>So it would seem to me that the financial framework are going to change. The The notion of how you made money for the last 10 years is not going to be the way you make money going forward. Yeah, there's there's likely to be some share shifts. In other words, those that figure out how to be profitable with this sort of new model perhaps could gain share efficiently. And and maybe you're going to see some share shifts in the industrial zone. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yes. So companies that are in what we would call essential of vertical industries will definitely be the ones that they continue to grow. You take a simple example, or for spectral chemicals companies, companies that make make plastics as well as chemical, they're going to a variety of other applications. Plastics. Interestingly enough, it's now a resurgence, and the reason it's resurgent is it's really it's a boarding, you know, hygiene, packaging, medical packaging, etcetera, etcetera. We'll see industries that shift that way if we step back and look at a broader and broader ah study that was done actually about 10 years ago by Harvard. With that, the companies that survive a recession, I think it said about 9% of the company's actually flourish coming out of a recession, about 75% take three years to recover and on the remainder was. I think if you do the math about 17 18% Ah, do not survive. But to do such a recession now, the ones that drive through >>I >>had a dual focus on both the customer experience and customer engagement and shifting to areas of higher value by thinking of what they should be doing and how they should be doing doing those things and Secondly, they also focused a lot on on operational improvements. And whether that's obliging, that's manufacturing. It's whether it's outsourcing non core functions. Automating that's a problem that you're focused on customer on operations is the hallmark of a successful outcome. Was what the study studied determined putting that that that your focus is what will be the the prime hallmark as we come through this >>interesting it Now, of course, biology sort of got us into this problem in technology. Deal with some of these issues on Help us get out of this problem. And what specifically is IBM doing? >>Yes, So we've We've identified seven areas off focus as we think of off coming out of this crisis, and we have referred to those 78 years of off focus as being our emerge. Stronger areas of focus the ones that I think are relevant, are including new ways of working. Ah, cyber resilience. Thinking of extreme motivation, automation. An intelligent work flows thinking off, making sure that we are eating our clients with having more in a more system that are available on demand, helping them create platforms and applications that can work regardless of the location At the end of the day, we step back for a brief three areas of focus that we see will be new. It new ways of working and supporting work. They're working or remote working. Ah, extreme automation. When industrial companies come back to work safe, distancing, he's going to be the norm as well as allowing for but the fact that you want to be you want to be prepared for the next crisis. Therefore, extreme automation, whether that implementing robots and factories or or implementing solutions that guide you in the worker safety or workers being close together as well as supporting customer engagement or the customer experience is being done. Putting that extreme automation layer through so that so that the reliance and the ability to cooperate with out the workforce becomes more important. I think it's really the acceleration that we expect. We'll be able to support our clients with, uh, as as they come out of there soon, as they as they had after the next normal. >>You see software robots as being a part of that sort of automation friends, you know, r p A and the like >>for sure that that's an important part, especially in the back office functions that will be software robots and, I think, layered on top of that when you buy AI. Then you have AI augmenting a lot of professionals, whether it's chat bots in customer call centers or technical service centers or or it far greater increasing in automation processes that could be automated. But then the AI would would support for the rest that can't be simply automated but need intelligence support as well. >>So if I go back to your CEO of a Harvard study, last thing I want to be I'm on the board just feels, is in your 17%. I either want to be in the 90% if I'm well positioned right now, and maybe you have an opportunity to do so. But if not, I'm in that fat middle. And I really wanna be ableto come out of this stronger, even if it may might take a couple of years. So my question is, it seems like companies, they're gonna have to, at least in the near term, potentially sacrifice profitability in order to gain that business continuance, business resiliency that you talked about. Can they can They have their cake and eat it, too. In other words, can they maybe take a near term hit on profitability? But they ultimately become more successful and more profitable? Maybe using data >>the data would be one thing. I think the other part of this will will using data, for example, to predict demand forecast where where the puck is going and the use of data on on a monthly basis is going to be inadequate. Clearly right. Getting more more capability for real time demand sensing to create platforms that allow us to allow companies to understand where needs are emerging so that they can pivot there. Ah, their product portfolio accordingly, Collaborating with customers in in a far more I'll call it CO create crowd source way Ah would create more resilient customer relationship that come out in the future as well. And at the end, I think they'll be also an element around asset like strategies, which requires partnering with IBM suppliers etcetera, which then allow data to be the foundation where you can essentially say I'm using this much of this capability our forces, I'm investing in insignificant of capital a place. >>So when I talk to executives. I'm hearing the consistent themes We very much are concerned about the health and well of our of our employees getting remote home infrastructure going once we ensure that they're healthy, we want to make sure that they're productive getting staying close to customers for sure. Making Short Foster are in line because there's so much uncertainty. But not a lot of time right now is being spent on sort of the long term strategic aspect of the organization that maybe will come back slowly. So what advice are you giving the organizations right now in this situation? >>Yeah. So I think the biggest focus would be, as I think, Winston Churchill said, this never based a good crisis. Eso So considering considering that as being the backdrop Ah, these are the times when, when recognizing what would be the sources of value, like I said before making sure the dual focus is kept in mind, apart from of course, ah, employee health and safety and engagement. Ah, then then, in addition to that, keeping in mind that the localization off supply chains will need to be a big topic keeping your ah, as they say, powder dry for but the opportunity of buyer and march. I would also be an element start considering how you re configure your supply chain. And at the end of the day, another important element would be making sure that you are Ah, you. As you come out of this, don't lose sight off sustainable development. No as well as you go back to the things off the fact that since digital will be an important fulcrum come out the other end apart from the other elements we talked about that you start prioritized those digital transformation programs that focus on both operations and supply chain as well as customer engagement. And that becomes a key focus and no longer just driven by, Let's say, the straight business case, but also persisting and ending. The resilience will come out and deal with people prices as well. >>So many of those things that you just mentioned might have been culturally challenging for a lot of organizations prior to over it. But in a way, organization's going to get covert Mulligan or the CEO. You know, the boards of directors might have felt like okay, we had to make some changes, but we got to be careful now with Covic being such a disruptor. Uh huh. Organizations been really drive forward and set up for the next decade. Bring us home. What do your final thought? >>Yeah, I think boards and see years have Do you have to really think of this in stages and and start to Of course, the initially the start of this crisis was not not planned, but recognizing that this recovery will appear in stages, so we think of it is respond, which is where most companies are the next day being ah you know, being being recover, which is getting started back up or dealing with demand and so on. And the third stage being green went I think boards and see years need to start putting perhaps three work streams in place around these three different time horizons. And keep that they're planning in place so that they can effectively work to recovery while they have a separate stream. That's focusing on the reinvent, but they're more resilient and more prepared, and they are able to take and take advantage of both the opportunities as well as of getting more resilient company for the future, >>great insight and an awesome advice. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. We're seeing the pattern emerged where? We're not just gonna go back the last decade. We're really gonna have toe prepare for the next decade. Business resiliency and business continuance and flexibility. It's a whole new world, folks. This is the Cube covering IBM. Think 2020 the digital event. We'll be right back right after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M I. T. Everybody. This is the Cube. The leader in live coverage. My name is David wanted. I'm here with my co host, Paul Gill, in this day to coverage of the M I t cdo I Q conference. A lot of acronym stands for M I. T. Of course, the great institution. But Chief Data officer information quality event is his 13th annual event. Lars to Maria's here is the managing partner of Brass Rat Capital. Cool name Lars. Welcome to the Cube. Great. Very much. Glad I start with a name brass around Capitol was That's >> rat is reference to the M I t school. Okay, Beaver? Well, he is, but the students call it a brass rat, and I'm third generation M i t. So it's just seen absolutely appropriate. That is a brass rods and capital is not a reference to money, but is actually referenced to the intellectual capital. They if you have five or six brass rats in the same company, you know, we Sometimes engineers arrive and they could do some things. >> And it Boy, if you put in some data data capital in there, you really explosions. We cause a few problems. So we're gonna talk about some new regulations that are coming down. New legislation that's coming down that you exposed me to yesterday, which is gonna have downstream implications. You get ahead of this stuff and understand it. You can really first of all, prepare, make sure you're in compliance, but then potentially take advantage for your business. So explain to us this notion of open government act. >> Um, in the last five years, six years or so, there's been an effort going on to increase the transparency across all levels of government. Okay, State, local and federal government. The first of federal government laws was called the the Open Data Act of 2014 and that was an act. They was acted unanimously by Congress and signed by Obama. They was taking the departments of the various agencies of the United States government and trying to roll up all the expenses into one kind of expense. This is where we spent our money and who got the money and doing that. That's what they were trying to do. >> Big picture type of thing. >> Yeah, big picture type thing. But unfortunately, it didn't work, okay? Because they forgot to include this odd word called mentalities. So the same departments meant the same thing. Data problem. They have a really big data problem. They still have it. So they're to G et o reports out criticizing how was done, and the government's gonna try and correct it. Then in earlier this year, there was another open government date act which said in it was signed by Trump. Now, this time you had, like, maybe 25 negative votes, but essentially otherwise passed Congress completely. I was called the Open as all capital O >> P E >> n Government Data act. Okay, and that's not been implemented yet. But there's live talking around this conference today in various Chief date officers are talking about this requirement that every single non intelligence defense, you know, vital protection of the people type stuff all the like, um, interior, treasury, transportation, those type of systems. If you produce a report these days, which is machine, I mean human readable. You must now in two years or three years. I forget the exact invitation date. Have it also be machine readable. Now, some people think machine riddle mil means like pdf formats, but no, >> In fact, what the government did is it >> said it must be machine readable. So you must be able to get into the reports, and you have to be able to extract out the information and attach it to the tree of knowledge. Okay, so we're all of sudden having context like they're currently machine readable, Quote unquote, easy reports. But you can get into those SEC reports. You pull out the net net income information and says its net income, but you don't know what it attaches to on the tree of knowledge. So, um, we are helping the government in some sense able, machine readable type reporting that weaken, do machine to machine without people being involved. >> Would you say the tree of knowledge You're talking about the constant >> man tick semantic tree of knowledge so that, you know, we all come from one concept like the human is example of a living thing living beast, a living Beeston example Living thing. So it also goes back, and they're serving as you get farther and farther out the tree, there's more distance or semantic distance, but you can attach it back to concept so you can attach context to the various data. Is this essentially metadata? That's what people call it. But if I would go over see sale here at M I t, they would turn around. They call it the Tree of Knowledge or semantic data. Okay, it's referred to his semantic dated, So you are passing not only the data itself, but the context that >> goes along with the data. Okay, how does this relate to the financial transparency? >> Well, Financial Transparency Act was introduced by representative Issa, who's a Republican out of California. He's run the government Affairs Committee in the House. He retired from Congress this past November, but in 2017 he introduced what's got referred to his H R 15 30 Um, and the 15 30 is going to dramatically change the way, um, financial regulators work in the United States. Um, it is about it was about to be introduced two weeks ago when the labor of digital currency stuff came up. So it's been delayed a little bit because they're trying to add some of the digital currency legislation to that law. >> A front run that Well, >> I don't know exactly what the remember soul coming out of Maxine Waters Committee. So the staff is working on a bunch of different things at once. But, um, we own g was asked to consult with them on looking at the 15 30 act and saying, How would we improve quote unquote, given our technical, you know, not doing policy. We just don't have the technical aspects of the act. How would we want to see it improved? So one of the things we have advised is that for the first time in the United States codes history, they're gonna include interesting term called ontology. You know what intelligence? Well, everyone gets scared by the word. And when I read run into people, they say, Are you a doctor? I said, no, no, no. I'm just a date. A guy. Um, but an intolerant tea is like a taxonomy, but it had order has important, and an ontology allows you to do it is ah, kinda, you know, giving some context of linking something to something else. And so you're able Thio give Maur information with an intolerant that you're able to you with a tax on it. >> Okay, so it's a taxonomy on steroids? >> Yes, exactly what? More flexible, >> Yes, but it's critically important for artificial intelligence machine warning because if I can give them until ology of sort of how it goes up and down the semantics, I can turn around, do a I and machine learning problems on the >> order of 100 >> 1000 even 10,000 times faster. And it has context. It has contacts in just having a little bit of context speeds up these problems so dramatically so and it is that what enables the machine to machine? New notion? No, the machine to machine is coming in with son called SP R M just standard business report model. It's a OMG sophistication of way of allowing the computers or machines, as we call them these days to get into a standard business report. Okay, so let's say you're ah drug company. You have thio certify you >> drugged you manufactured in India, get United States safely. Okay, you have various >> reporting requirements on the way. You've got to give extra easy the FDA et cetera that will always be a standard format. The SEC has a different format. FERC has a different format. Okay, so what s p r m does it allows it to describe in an intolerant he what's in the report? And then it also allows one to attach an ontology to the cells in the report. So if you like at a sec 10 Q 10 k report, you can attach a US gap taxonomy or ontology to it and say, OK, net income annual. That's part of the income statement. You should never see that in a balance sheet type item. You know his example? Okay. Or you can for the first time by having that context you can say are solid problem, which suggested that you can file these machine readable reports that air wrong. So they believe or not, There were about 50 cases in the last 10 years where SEC reports have been filed where the assets don't equal total liabilities, plus cheryl equity, you know, just they didn't add >> up. So this to, >> you know, to entry accounting doesn't work. >> Okay, so so you could have the machines go and check scale. Hey, we got a problem We've >> got a problem here, and you don't have to get humans evolved. So we're gonna, um uh, Holland in Australia or two leaders ahead of the United States. In this area, they seem dramatic pickups. I mean, Holland's reporting something on the order of 90%. Pick up Australia's reporting 60% pickup. >> We say pick up. You're talking about pickup of errors. No efficiency, productivity, productivity. Okay, >> you're taking people out of the whole cycle. It's dramatic. >> Okay, now what's the OMG is rolling on the hoof. Explain the OMG >> Object Management Group. I'm not speaking on behalf of them. It's a membership run organization. You remember? I am a >> member of cold. >> I'm a khalid of it. But I don't represent omg. It's the membership has to collectively vote that this is what we think. Okay, so I can't speak on them, right? I have a pretty significant role with them. I run on behalf of OMG something called the Federated Enterprise Risk Management Group. That's the group which is focusing on risk management for large entities like the federal government's Veterans Affairs or Department offense upstairs. I think talking right now is the Chief date Officer for transportation. OK, that's a large organization, which they, they're instructed by own be at the, um, chief financial officer level. The one number one thing to do for the government is to get an effective enterprise worst management model going in the government agencies. And so they come to own G let just like NIST or just like DARPA does from the defense or intelligence side, saying we need to have standards in this area. So not only can we talk thio you effectively, but we can talk with our industry partners effectively on space. Programs are on retail, on medical programs, on finance programs, and so they're at OMG. There are two significant financial programs, or Sanders, that exist once called figgy financial instrument global identifier, which is a way of identifying a swap. Its way of identifying a security does not have to be used for a que ce it, but a worldwide. You can identify that you know, IBM stock did trade in Tokyo, so it's a different identifier has different, you know, the liberals against the one trading New York. Okay, so those air called figgy identifiers them. There are attributes associated with that security or that beast the being identified, which is generally comes out of 50 which is the financial industry business ontology. So you know, it says for a corporate bond, it has coupon maturity, semi annual payment, bullets. You know, it is an example. So that gives you all the information that you would need to go through to the calculation, assuming you could have a calculation routine to do it, then you need thio. Then turn around and set up your well. Call your environment. You know where Ford Yield Curves are with mortgage backed securities or any portable call. Will bond sort of probabilistic lee run their numbers many times and come up with effective duration? Um, And then you do your Vader's analytics. No aggregating the portfolio and looking at Shortfalls versus your funding. Or however you're doing risk management and then finally do reporting, which is where the standardized business reporting model comes in. So that kind of the five parts of doing a full enterprise risk model and Alex So what >> does >> this mean for first? Well, who does his impact on? What does it mean for organizations? >> Well, it's gonna change the world for basically everyone because it's like doing a clue ends of a software upgrade. Conversion one's version two point. Oh, and you know how software upgrades Everyone hates and it hurts because everyone's gonna have to now start using the same standard ontology. And, of course, that Sarah Ontology No one completely agrees with the regulators have agreed to it. The and the ultimate controlling authority in this thing is going to be F sock, which is the Dodd frank mandated response to not ever having another chart. So the secretary of Treasury heads it. It's Ah, I forget it's the, uh, federal systemic oversight committee or something like that. All eight regulators report into it. And, oh, if our stands is being the adviser Teff sock for all the analytics, what these laws were doing, you're getting over farm or more power to turn around and look at how we're going to find data across the three so we can come up consistent analytics and we can therefore hopefully take one day. Like Goldman, Sachs is pre payment model on mortgages. Apply it to Citibank Portfolio so we can look at consistency of analytics as well. It is only apply to regulated businesses. It's gonna apply to regulated financial businesses. Okay, so it's gonna capture all your mutual funds, is gonna capture all your investment adviser is gonna catch her. Most of your insurance companies through the medical air side, it's gonna capture all your commercial banks is gonna capture most of you community banks. Okay, Not all of them, because some of they're so small, they're not regularly on a federal basis. The one regulator which is being skipped at this point, is the National Association Insurance Commissioners. But they're apparently coming along as well. Independent federal legislation. Remember, they're regulated on the state level, not regularly on the federal level. But they've kind of realized where the ball's going and, >> well, let's make life better or simply more complex. >> It's going to make life horrible at first, but we're gonna take out incredible efficiency gains, probably after the first time you get it done. Okay, is gonna be the problem of getting it done to everyone agreeing. We use the same definitions >> of the same data. Who gets the efficiency gains? The regulators, The companies are both >> all everyone. Can you imagine that? You know Ah, Goldman Sachs earnings report comes out. You're an analyst. Looking at How do I know what Goldman? Good or bad? You have your own equity model. You just give the model to the semantic worksheet and all turn around. Say, Oh, those numbers are all good. This is what expected. Did it? Did it? Didn't you? Haven't. You could do that. There are examples of companies here in the United States where they used to have, um, competitive analysis. Okay. They would be taking somewhere on the order of 600 to 7. How 100 man hours to do the competitive analysis by having an available electronically, they cut those 600 hours down to five to do a competitive analysis. Okay, that's an example of the type of productivity you're gonna see both on the investment side when you're doing analysis, but also on the regulatory site. Can you now imagine you get a regulatory reports say, Oh, there's they're out of their way out of whack. I can tell you this fraud going on here because their numbers are too much in X y z. You know, you had to fudge numbers today, >> and so the securities analyst can spend Mme. Or his or her time looking forward, doing forecasts exactly analysis than having a look back and reconcile all this >> right? And you know, you hear it through this conference, for instance, something like 80 to 85% of the time of analysts to spend getting the data ready. >> You hear the same thing with data scientists, >> right? And so it's extent that we can helped define the data. We're going thio speed things up dramatically. But then what's really instinct to me, being an M I t engineer is that we have great possibilities. An A I I mean, really great possibilities. Right now, most of the A miles or pattern matching like you know, this idea using face shield technology that's just really doing patterns. You can do wonderful predictive analytics of a I and but we just need to give ah lot of the a m a. I am a I models the contact so they can run more quickly. OK, so we're going to see a world which is gonna found funny, But we're going to see a world. We talk about semantic analytics. Okay. Semantic analytics means I'm getting all the inputs for the analysis with context to each one of the variables. And when I and what comes out of it will be a variable results. But you also have semantics with it. So one in the future not too distant future. Where are we? We're in some of the national labs. Where are you doing it? You're doing pipelines of one model goes to next model goes the next mile. On it goes Next model. So you're gonna software pipelines, Believe or not, you get them running out of an Excel spreadsheet. You know, our modern Enhanced Excel spreadsheet, and that's where the future is gonna be. So you really? If you're gonna be really good in this business, you're gonna have to be able to use your brain. You have to understand what data means You're going to figure out what your modeling really means. What happens if we were, You know, normally for a lot of the stuff we do bell curves. Okay, well, that doesn't have to be the only distribution you could do fat tail. So if you did fat tail descriptions that a bell curve gets you much different results. Now, which one's better? I don't know, but, you know, and just using example >> to another cut in the data. So our view now talk about more about the tech behind this. He's mentioned a I What about math? Machine learning? Deep learning. Yeah, that's a color to that. >> Well, the tech behind it is, believe or not, some relatively old tech. There is a technology called rd F, which is kind of turned around for a long time. It's a science kind of, ah, machine learning, not machine wearing. I'm sorry. Machine code type. Fairly simplistic definitions. Lots of angle brackets and all this stuff there is a higher level. That was your distracted, I think put into standard in, like, 2000 for 2005. Called out. Well, two point. Oh, and it does a lot at a higher level. The same stuff that already f does. Okay, you could also create, um, believer, not your own special ways of a communicating and ontology just using XML. Okay, So, uh, x b r l is an enhanced version of XML, okay? And so some of these older technologies, quote unquote old 20 years old, are essentially gonna be driving a lot of this stuff. So you know you know Corbett, right? Corba? Is that what a maid omg you know, on the communication and press thing, do you realize that basically every single device in the world has a corpus standard at okay? Yeah, omg Standard isn't all your smartphones and all your computers. And and that's how they communicate. It turns out that a lot of this old stuff quote unquote, is so rigidly well defined. Well done that you can build modern stuff that takes us to the Mars based on these old standards. >> All right, we got to go. But I gotta give you the award for the most acronyms >> HR 15 30 fi G o m g s b r >> m fsoc tarp. Oh, fr already halfway. We knew that Owl XML ex brl corba, Which of course >> I do. But that's well done. Like thanks so much for coming. Everyone tried to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody, We'll be back with our next guest from M i t cdo I Q right after this short, brief short message. Thank you

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back, everyone. You are watching the Cuban. We're kicking off our day two of our live coverage a ws public sector summit here in our nation's capital. I'm Rebecca Knight co hosting with John Fer Yer John. It's great to be here. 18,000 people having important conversations around around governments and cloud computing. Let's extract the signal from the noise. Let's do with the Cube. Does best, >> Yeah, I mean, this is to me a really exciting event because it's got the confluence of what we love tech and cloud computing and all the awesomeness of that and that enables. But even in Washington, D. C. With the backdrop against tech clash on this, you know, narrative run tech for illah tech for bad, bad check whatever you want to call it. Anti trust is a lot of narratives around that there's a huge story around check for good. So I think there's an interesting balance there around the conversations, but this is world of heavy hitters are this week You've got senior people at the government level here, you have senior tech people hear all kind of meddling and trying to figure out howto let the tail winds of cloud computing Dr Change within government against this backdrop of tech for ill as Jay Carney, whose the global marketing policy guy for Amazon on reports to Jeff Bezos, former Obama press secretary. He's super savvy on policy, super savvy on tech. But this is a really big point in time where the future's gonna be determined by some key people and some key decisions around the role of technology for society, for the citizens, United States, for nation states as people start to figure out the role of data and all the impact of this so super exciting at that level, but also dangerous and people are telling a little bit. But I also want to run hard. That's pretty much the big story. >> So let's let's let's get into this tech backlash because you're absolutely right. Through the public, sentiment about technology and the tech behemoths has really soured. The regulators are sharpening their blades and really paying much more attention, uh, particularly because so many people say, Hey, wait a minute, why? How does Google and Facebook know all this stuff about me, but what do you think? What are we hearing on the ground in terms of where regulation is going? Before, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about this idea of regulators working closely with the innovators, observing but not meddling. I mean, do you think that that's that's That's these dollars underwears We're going in? >> Well, not really. I think that that's where people wanted to go in. I think right now the the surprise attack of tech taking over, if you will in the minds of people and or without Israel or not, it's happened, right? So I was talking yesterday around how the Internet, when Bill Clinton was president, really grew a little bit slower than the pace of this today. But they did a good job of managing that they had private sectors take over the domain name system. We saw that grow that created in the open Web and the Web was open. Today it's different. It's faster in terms of technology innovation, and it's not as open. You have Facebook, LinkedIn and these companies that have silos of data, and they're not sharing it with cyber security General Keith Alexander, former head of the NSA and the first commander of cyber command in the U. S. The United States under Obama. He pointed out that visibility into the cyber attacks aren't there because there's no sharing of data. We heard about open data and knishes from a think tank. The role of data and information is going to be a critical conversation, and I don't think the government officials are smart enough and educated enough yet to understand that So regulatory groups want to regulate they don't know how to. They're reaching out the Amazons, Google's and the Facebook to try to figure out what's going on. And then from there they might get a path. But they're still in the early stages. Amazon feels like they're not harming anyone there. Lower prices, fast delivery, more options. They're creating an enablement environment for tons of startups, so they feel like they're not harming anyone. You're the antitrust, but if they're going to being monopolizing the market place, that's another issue. But I still think Amazon still an enabling mode, and I think you know, they're just running so hard. It's going so fast, I think there's gonna be a big challenge. And if industry doesn't step up and partner with government, it's going to be a real mess. And I think it's just moving too fast. It's very complicated. Digital is nuanced. Now. You get the role of data all this place into into into effect there. >> Well, you're absolutely right that it's going fast. Teresa Carlson on the other day talking about eight of US growth, UH, 41% year over year and she said, Cloud is the new normal. The cloud cloud is here more and more governments on state and local, really recognizing and obviously international countries to recognize that this, this is they're adopting these cloud first approach is, >> yeah, I mean, I think the first approach is validated 100%. There's no debate. I think it's not an ah ha moment. Cloud Israel. Amazon has absolutely proven since the CIA deal in 2013 that this is a viable strategy for government to get to value fast, and that is the whole speed of cloud game. It's all about time to value with agility. Eccentric center. We've been talking about that with Dev Ops for a long, long time. The real thing that I think's happening that's going on. That's kind of, you know, to read the tea leaves and we'll hear from Corey Quinn. Our host at large will go on later. This is a new generation of talent coming on board and this new generation. It feels like a counterculture mindset. These are Dev ops, mindset, people not necessarily Dev ops like in the Cloud Computing Way. They're younger, they're thinking differently, and they think like Amazon not because they love Amazon, because that's their nature. Their got their getting content in a digital way, their digital natives. They're born into that kind of cultural mindset. Of what is all this nonsense red tape? What's the bottlenecked in solving these problems? There's really not a good answer anymore, because with cloud computing and machine learning an A I, you can solve things faster. So if you expose the data, smart people go well. That's a problem that could be song. Let's solve it. So I think there's going to be a resurgence is going to be a renaissance of of younger people, kind of in a counter culture way that's going to move fast and an impact society and I think it's gonna happen pretty quickly over the next 10 years. >> Well, that's one of the things that's so inspiring about being at a conference like this one a ws public sector summit, Because we are hearing getting back to what you just said. We're solving problems and these air problems about not just selling more widgets. This's actually about saving lives, helping people, delivery of healthcare, finding Mr Missing Persons and POWs who are missing in action. >> I mean, the problems could be solved with technology now for goodwill, I think will outweigh the technology for Ayla's Jay Carney calls it. So right now, unfortunately, was talking about Facebook and all this nonsense that happened with the elections. I think that's pretty visible. That's painful for people to kind of deal with. But in the reality that never should have happened, I think you're going to see a resurgence of people that's going to solve problems. And if you look at the software developer persona over the past 10 to 15 years, it went from hire. Some developers build a product ship it market. It makes some money to developers being the frontlines. Power players in software companies there on the front lines. They're making changes. They're moving fast, creating value. I see that kind of paradigm hitting normal people where they can impact change like a developer would foran application in society. I think you're gonna have younger people solving all kinds of crisis around. Whether it's open opioid crisis, healthcare, these problems will be solved. I think cloud computing with a I and machine learning and the role of data will be a big catalyst. >> But money, the money, the money is the thing we're going to have Cory Quinn on later talking about this this talent gap because there are people who are, As you said, they're young people who are motivated to solve these problems, and they want to work for mission driving institutions. What better mission, then helping the United States government >> just heard in the hallway? This has been the I've heard this multiple times here. This show I just heard someone saying Yeah, but that person's great. I can't keep them. What's happening is with the talent is the people that they need for cloud computing. Khun, get a job that pays three times Mohr orm or at the private sector. So, you know, Governor doesn't have stock options, >> right? All right, all right. If >> you're, ah, machine learning, >> people call girls in the lounge. >> Eso all kinds of different diners. But I think this mission driven culture of working for society for good might be that currency. That will be the equivalent stock option that I think is something that we were watching. Not haven't seen anything yet, But maybe that will happen. >> Paid in good feelings way. We've got a lot of great guests. Wave already teed up. We've got your E. Quinn. Bill Britain from Cal Poly to talk more about ground station. We have alien Gemma Smith of YSL Itics, uh, and Jameel Jaffer. >> Think ground station. But the biggest surprise for me and the show so far has been ground station that that product has got so much traction. That's ridiculous. I thought it would be kind of cool. Spacey. I like it, but it's turning into a critical need for a I ot I mean, I was just talking with you. Came on about the airplane having WiFi on the plane. We all like Wow, we expected now, but you go back years ago is like, Oh, my God. I got WiFi on the plane. That's a ground station, like dynamic people going. Oh, my God. I can provision satellite and get data back, all for io ti anywhere in the world. So that is pretty killer. >> Excellently. I'm looking forward to digging in with you with many guests today. >> Good. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. For John. For your stay tuned, you are watching the Cube.

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Bahrain, for exclusive Amazon coverage. It's theCUBE's first time in the region, we're excited to be here as AWS Public Sector Summit and commercial opportunities are expanding Amazon has announced and will be up and running in 2019 with a new region here in Bahrain in the middle east. It will generate a lot of activity, we expect it to create a tsunami of innovation, data information is the new oil. We're here covering it, this is going to be the beginning of more coverage here in the area for theCUBE. And we're meeting new people, and then we've run into some luminaries, CUBE alumnus, and our next guest is a CUBE alumna, John Wood is the CEO of Telos, also been on theCUBE many times as you might know, is an expert in cybersecurity, just an overall knowledgeable and visionary entrepreneur, good to see you thanks for joining us today. >> Thanks John, I really appreciate it. >> So you're part of the entourage with Teresa and the team as she comes in a cross-pollinates Amazon Web Services public sector seven, what she's done in Washington DC and beyond, here in the region, it's going to be a new formula that Bahrain and the people here have recognized. Like we were in a meeting yesterday, where you weren't pounding the table, but you looked very clearly at the Chief Executive Officer who reports to the king and the crown prince and you said, you don't really know yet, what you got, and you're a visionary, so and we've talked about this and so I want to get it out here on camera, this is a big freaking deal. >> It is. >> Can you explain why, and what your vision is and what will happen with Amazon, 'cause you've been a partner of AWS with Telos, you've been very successful, you've seen the moving parts, you've seen the impact of innovation. >> Yup, absolutely. >> What's your thoughts? >> So you know, the shot heard around the world back at the end of 2013 John was when the Central Intelligence Agency made the decision that the cloud was just secure enough for them. And that kind of made everybody around the world stand up and notice. So yesterday, when we were talking with all of the various people around economic development in Bahrain, you know I said the shot heard around the Middle East is that Amazon is located here in Bahrain. I think just like what happened in America, it's going to have a massive impact from a socio-economic point of view here in the Middle East and specifically in Bahrain. >> What are some of the things that you might expect to see, that they got to be ready for here? >> Well first of all, one thing I'll say is a marked difference from America is that the government here and the business environment here all has agreed it's important to move to the cloud. That in and of itself is a big, big difference than America. In America it's been a lot more fragmented and it's taken more time. I think here, I think the government and the industry is seeing the value of the cloud globally, and they're going to be able to move that much faster than even we did in America. >> They built a Formula 1 race track in 14 months, they don't have a lot of the baggage that America has in terms of older systems. I mean, more tech baggage, or tech legacy, older systems, older databases, kind of a clean sheet of paper. >> They have a bit of a clean sheet of paper, but they also do have legacy John. What they've also done though, is they've given themselves a two year time frame to move everything to the cloud. Now that in and of itself, having a beginning, a middle, and an end, is a really good thing because the journey's going to be relatively rapid and I think the uptick economically as a result is going to be rapid as well. >> So one of the things that you were also involved in here with Teresa and the local Bahrain government and entrepreneurs is you were here with General Keith Alexander, who had to leave last night, we had hoped to have him on theCUBE, four star general, head of the NSA, he's seen his shares of data and scale, he had a unique perspective. What are some of the things that you and General Alexander were discussing with the government here? Can you share with appropriate, some of the things you were talking about? >> I think we can apply best practices here, just like we applied back in America. I think the fact that they've gone to a cloud first policy is a really good thing, the next step I think is to find a standard that you can actually look to from a security point of view, 'cause with that standard you can then have a common lexicon. And that common lexicon allows you to share data between and amongst each other that much more quickly. >> You know, one of the things I overheard you over here and I kind of observed this, and I'm just going to throw it out there because we think the same way with theCUBE is that when you have a cloud model, the benefit of the cloud is you can just actually spin up another instance or thing. It's horizontally scalable, generally speaking. So as you run your business Telos with Amazon in the US and other areas, this is a new opportunity for you. It's almost rinse and repeat, just kind of plug in. And cloud gives you that benefit, so this kind of opens up the conversation of opportunities that Amazon will pull with them to Bahrain and the region. Do you agree with that? How do you see this pull that Amazon might have? >> I think what Amazon can do more than really any other cloud organizations is because they've been at it for such a long time, so much longer than the other cloud providers, they can bring best practices to the table, they can bring best technologies to the table, they can bring best partnerships to the table, which allows people to actually know with confidence that if they move to the cloud it's going to work, and it's going to be more secure. >> The other thing I will also point out at the end of that is then that Andy Jassy and Teresa also bring expertise. They'll do work here on behalf of citizens. >> Well absolutely, you know when Amazon makes a commitment to build a region over a 10 year period it's anywhere between a two to three billion dollar financial commitment to the region, so that in and of itself drives economic value into the region. >> So I got to ask you the tough question, which is obviously the one that's the elephant in the room, is instability in the region, potentially, how does digital disruption impact, say Bahrain and Middle East, you got Horizon, you got crypto-currency we know that markets kind of frothy and somewhat unethical in some areas, that's a red flag, but wants to be legitimate, cybersecurity, a big thing. This is your wheelhouse, cybersecurity, these new emerging areas, you got A.I. booming, you got cloud booming, got the notion these emerging tech, cybersecurity's at the center of the action. What does that mean for Amazon? What does that mean for stability in the region? What's the impact? What's your view on cybersecurity, Middle East, Bahrain, Amazon, can you share, can you unpack that? >> So John, that's an incredibly broad question, so thank you. So from my point of view, I can't deal with the political situations, what we can deal with is what we can control. And we know we can help control the security automation orchestration, we know it works. We've seen the most security conscious organization in the world adopt the security. We and Amazon are the security for the agencies cloud and we know that works. As it relates to the political situation I think here the ruling party understands that's an issue and they're working on it, and I can just leave that to them. >> But you're independent of that, you allow the scale piece on Amazon. And what do you hope to do in the region? What are some of your goals as a commercial opportunity with Bahrain announcing this partnership at the highest levels, this community here, young people want to work here. >> So I see it as a huge work force opportunity for everybody, number one. Number two, I think we can find a way to make sure that everybody can feel confident that it's going to work, so they can feel confident they can move their workload to the cloud. People in Kuwait can feel confident, people in Saudi Arabia can feel confident, and again, that confidence builds stability. With stability, with economic stability, there becomes political stability. That's the other point I'll make, is that at the end of the day, if you have the benefit of having the financial stability it helps in a lot of different ways. >> So what's your advice to the folks, if I had the king sitting here and the crown prince, we had a round table, what are some of the things that you would advise them from your experience, kind of looking back on your career and what you've done now knowing that the regions got a cultural and more of a different economic dynamic, what's your advice to the crown prince, the king, and folks trying to figure this out? >> From a cybersecurity perspective, I would want to do something similar, maybe not the same, but something similar to what the United States government did. When the US government decided to adopt a cybersecurity policy, the so called Cybersecurity Executive Order, there were two parts to it John, the first was cloud first which has been done here, and the second was to adopt the NIST Framework, the NIST Framework gave the common lexicon for all the cybersecurity professionals to be able to push their workloads to the cloud and then guys like me, what we do is, we push automation into that framework, which basically means we get out of the way of the mission and we help make the mission happen much more quickly. >> What about training and support? What's your impression of the economic development board, some of the work they're doing? Obviously they have a transition we heard, maybe some of them in a work force not yet mature, but they got programs in place. How do you see that developing? How would you put them on the progress bar vis-a-vis their aspiration? >> I think in general some of the work force issues that they have here are very similar to the work force issues we have in America. You know, in America, often when kids graduate from college there's a gap between what they get in terms of a degree and what we need in terms of a skill set, that kind of happens everywhere. I think that simple programs like apprenticeships; which have been around for a long time, can be very, very effective in terms of narrowing that gap so that when the kids come out we can actually put them to work and they don't have to be re-trained in the work force. I think that's a big opportunity. I also think there's a big opportunity to bring some of the people here into America to teach best practices, and then bring them back, that they can bring those best practices into the environments here, so they can have that work themselves here. >> What's your take on the eco-system, obviously here we heard start-ups are very active but there's a glass ceiling if you will because cloud's not yet here in full throttle, capital markets mechanics have not yet formed, but there's funds of funds they're just putting this in place, your assessment of the entrepreneurial landscape here. >> I think it's a small, but growing landscape. I think a key point to making an entrepreneurial company successful, you know I started the company back in 1991, which is many, many, many, many moons ago, but anyway, what I can remember is I worked so hard, seven days a week, the joke was it was nine to five, 9 am to 5 am, you're not here on Saturday don't bother coming on Sunday. So fundamentally there's a thing you got to do, what is it Ben Franklin used to say? It's about 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. So hard work does help a lot. Not to say that we don't have that culture here, but I think in general-- >> They were hard working here. >> Entrepreneurial is all about making sure you do the work. >> One of my observations, they're hard working here, so I think that's a good sign. >> Absolutely. >> So let's go back and talk about this, your experience, you mentioned 1991, my first start-up was 1997, and so we've seen a few cycles, and as cycles come and go this one seems to be a bigger cycle in the sense of a lot of combining forces going on; you've got cloud scale, the role of data and now A.I. to automate, and honestly traditional stuff is kind of being moved to a whole 'nother operating model. Given that you've seen so many cycles, what have you learned from those cycles that you could apply here if you were an entrepreneur here, you're now going to do some business hopefully here I think with Amazon. And for people in government trying to get out of the way or figure out policy, given your cycle experience, these guys are jumping into a wave that's coming. >> I definitely have a point of view on this. So for years, back in the United States, I would have one customer, I'd go to this customer, and I'd say, hey, this other customer over here, they've done it this way, and this customer would say, I want to do it a different way. And I'm like, well then everybody's going to be out of sync. Well recently the CIA decided to publish a case study that talked about moving to the cloud and why they moved to the cloud. And the reason they published this case study was for something called reciprocity. I think if more governments, if more industries can work together from a standpoint of reciprocity, then we're going to be able to more quickly ascertain the threat, discover what the vulnerability is, and mitigate it. >> What specifically the reciprocity should they be working on? Data transfer, information, what are some of the specifics? >> I think a specific will be the NIST Framework as an example. The NIST Framework is made up of 1100 different controls, which are lots, and lots of different subsets of other controls around the world, whether you're talking about ISO, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA, whatever, they're all derivations of a framework which basically is a common lexicon. So for me that's something that is very specific when I think they should consider here. >> So one of the things I wanted to get your thoughts before we end here, is your observations, as you look around here, you're seeing a cultural shift, a woman's on the supreme court in Bahrain, we went to the women's breakfast that Teresa Carlson held yesterday, packed house, they had to kick us out of our table, us guys. >> They did, they did. >> They got to make room for the workshop, great fireside chat with Mary Camarata, head of Analysts and corporate communication for Andy and Teresa, fireside chat, then they had breakouts, we didn't get kicked out, but we were asked to give up the table for the women to do the workshop. This was a robust, packed house. >> Not just packed John, it was also just positive, optimistic, happy, they see a future, they see possibilities, there was a lot of give and take, I didn't see any of the stuff that you read about, and I tell ya, this is my first time in the Middle East, my first time to come to Bahrain, and I'm so happy I've come, I'm so sad it took me almost 55 years to make it happen. >> Yeah, I feel the same way. I feel like there's an opportunity bubbling that's going to be really big and legit, and I love the diversity here, it surprised me. My daughter, 21 years old, asked me, she said, dad can you, what's the women like over there? Because there's a perception around culture, around the role of women. Packed house yesterday for the Women in Tech Breakfast, inspirational speech by Teresa Carlson, great workshop here, you see women forcing function; cultural shift. >> Cultural shift, but also don't believe everything you read in the paper, right John? So we all know that you got to go sometimes to see what things are really like, and I'm really happy I came. It's a bubbling, growing, active, really active, really cool nightlife, really cool skyline very beautiful beaches, it's a great place. >> The ground truth always trumps fake news and innuendo. Of course theCUBE is bringing you all the action, we are here with entrepreneur, visionary, John Wood, CEO of Telos, a big strategic partner with Amazon, part of the cultural sea change with AWS, Amazon Web Services, announcing a region here in Bahrain, in the Middle East. I'm John Furrier your CUBE co-host, you can reach me on twitter @furrier, F-U-R-R-I-E-R, if you want to reach out and ping me on twitter any time. More coverage live here, in Bahrain, in the Middle East after this short break. (futuristic electronic music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to our nation's capital. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host Dave Vallante. Happy to welcome to the program Matt Olsen, who is the co-founder, president, and chief revenue officer of IronNet cybersecurity, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, great to be here, Stu. Thanks. >> So, obviously, public sector, we've been talking a lot about the cyber, as it were. As a co-founder, always one of the first, give us the why of the company. Why was it founded and a little bit of background. >> Sure, you know, we were founded, I guess out of some frustration. A number of us, including our CEO, Keith Alexander, who was formerly the director of NSA, we came out of the government. And the frustration was, that what we saw happening to companies, big companies, small companies, and the government was getting hit with cyber attacks, you know, consistently and increasingly sophisticated and disruptive, even destructive cyber attacks. So we left the government around the same time, a number of us, and we decided, can we start a company to really take on these threats? What can we do to develop a technology based on the threat landscape that really takes cyber security to the next level? So our mission has always been to protect companies and governments from these types of attacks that are hitting us all the time. >> Yeah, so there's no shortage of security experts inside the government, especially NSA. Actually, I remember Dave and I had talked to, there was a little company called Squirrel that came out of the NSA a little bit later. Oh, what do you know? AWS acquired them last year. So bring us insight a little bit, you know, what's the offering that IronNet has? How do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace? >> Sure, and you're absolutely right. There is a lot of expertise in places like NSA, where I formally worked and a bunch of us formally worked. The offering basically is, network traffic analytics. So we look at the network traffic inside large companies and, right down to the PCAP, so we're looking at the actual network traffic and running analytics. And what that means is not signature-based, but behavioral analytics. Looking for those indicators of malicious activity that we then can alert the SOC operators in these companies that this is something they need to pay attention to right away. Of course the problem always with this area is false positives. You know, how do you make sure that the alerts you're giving to these operators really mean something? So we've done a lot of work to draw down those false positives so that we're giving them alerts that are actionable and meaningful in the context of, you know, a very difficult threat landscape. So that's the basic offering. >> So what's underneath the covers? I mean, what's the secret sauce? Are you using machine intelligence? Share with us. >> Yeah, sure, I think the secret sauce is really a combination of two things. It's analytics algorithms that our data scientists develop. We've got some world-class folks that came out of places like the Defense Research Agency and universities that develop the analytics, the algorithms, but we combine those, that math with real life operators, people who themselves were on the offense at one point, right? They were working to, you know, break into other networks. They were the hackers who understand how the adversary operates like nobody else does. Combining the mathematics, the analytics with real life operators, that I'd say, you know, Dave, is the secret sauce because those are how we develop the analytics and the expert system to produce the alerts and draw down those false positives. >> Yeah, it was interesting. Last week, we were at Cisco Live, talking a lot about networking, and one of the biggest things for networking people is a lot of the network that they own, they don't actually own it anymore. It's in Amazon, it's in, you know, I've got my SAF stuff, public clouds, all that I'm dealing with. So, you know, where do you sit, are you mostly focused on public clouds like AWS or, you know, where in the network? >> So its a great question because there's clearly a movement, right, from on PRAM solutions to cloud solutions. AWS is part of that. So we're partners with AWS. So we've developed our analytics to run in AWS as one of our key cloud providers. So, we, with some of our customers, we're all on PRAM, we're in their data center. These are companies that want us there inside their perimeter, right? But then, with others, we have the ability to have sensors in their network but then do all the analytics, all the backend work in AWS, in the cloud environment. And that makes a lot of sense for many companies, especially when you talk about companies that are a little smaller maybe or, you know, we're not talking about the biggest companies. So they do, a lot of their applications are running in the cloud, so that's been a key transition for us as we've developed our product. >> Matt, what would you say are the biggest threats to organizations that they should be aware of? >> Yeah, you know, the biggest threats are the obvious ones in some ways, but there's no doubt that the nation-states that are carrying out attacks, whether we're talking about China or Iran or North Korea or Russia, are increasingly active and are especially dangerous in a volatile geopolitical landscape like we face today. So we're concerned in working with our customers to make sure that we're taking on the level of threat that we see from nation-states. And that's something, I think, at IronNet we understand particularly well, given that we were operating at that nation-state level when we were all in government. Of course, the most pervasive problem is the criminals. And you see that in all manner of hacks in cyber attacks, that the most common type of attack, including ransomware are occurring at the hands of criminals. >> So rewarding. But, your behavioral analytics can help with that problem. What about, like, the weaponization of social media? I mean, what do you make of that? And, I don't know, is there an answer to that that you can help with? >> You know, the way that social media has been used, you know, for example in the election in 2016, it's obviously a problem that we all are concerned about as citizens. And part of that is, I think there's a combination of the government working together with the private sector, in particular, the social media companies, to come up with better ways to take on that problem to make sure that people who are using those platforms are actually people, and not bots, not Russian trolls. We need to do an education campaign for American citizens, who are coming into this election cycle that were, you know, better prepared for what we saw happen in 2016. I mean, it's a big effort and, you know, I'm not sure, to be honest, that as a country we've totally come to grips with the nature of that problem. >> Yeah, I think you're right. We're just trying to get our heads around it. I interviewed Robert Gates one time and I asked him this question, and I've asked other security practitioners, and I get all kinds of different responses. He said, I want to tell you what he said and then maybe you can respond. I'm paraphrasing, of course, for Dr. Gates. He said we have to be really careful. I was asking him offense or defense, you know. Should we, we probably have some of the best security people in the world, we could go on offense, is that the future of warfare? He said we have to be really careful because we have a lot to lose as well in critical infrastructure. Others have said, no, we should go on the offense to flex our muscles. What do you think the right posture is there? >> You know, I think that's a great point, Dave. There clearly is a balance. I mean, it begins with defense, right. It begins with hardening our defenses, having the right people with the right experience and the right expertise in place to protect our networks because, you know, the best offense really is a good defense and protecting our networks. But we do need to have the capability, and we do have the capability to take offensive action when warranted. One of the challenges, I think, in this space is that we haven't necessarily developed the rules of engagement. You know, under what circumstances should the United States government take action on offense in cyber? You know, we saw this in going after ISIS. You know, going after some of their capability as a terrorist group, targeting people in the United States and taking out some of that capability. That's one way I think that we've clearly done the right thing in going on the offense. Harder to say when you have some of the cyber attacks going after a critical infrastructure. What's the right role for the government in going on the offense? I think, again, the first step is a good defense. And one element of a good defense is working better together. Companies working together, as well as companies working in close coordination and cooperation with the government. >> So it's not so much the technology. Obviously the technology is there, but it's the process around that, the collaboration with, whether it's within agencies or organizations. >> I think that's right. I think there's a lot of good technology. We're, our company, we provide a common defense platform for companies to work together. That's what we do at IronNet. And we're doing that with a number of energy companies right now. But the, I think it's getting that policy in place so that companies understand the technology exists to be faster and better working together. How can we then break down whatever barriers there are to sharing information and having that sort of collaborative approach? And we see that happening more and more across the critical infrastructure, whether we're talking finance or healthcare or energy. >> Matt, what's IronNet's relationship with Amazon? Are you part of the market place? How do you go to market together? >> Yeah, we're a registered partner with Amazon. Amazon is our, one of our cloud providers for our, as I mentioned, for where we run our analytics. I also mentioned this common defense platform. We run the correlations that we do for companies working together. That's all done in AWS, in the cloud. We've found Amazon to be a, really an extraordinary partner as an industry leader and a cloud provider. And so we're very close to, and with Amazon, in both going to market but also in developing our product, so it's been a great partnership for us. >> What do you think of the show? I mean, it's insane, isn't it? >> Yeah, it's amazing, right? Just the parking, finding a parking space was incredible. But once I got in. >> We didn't have to park. >> Yeah, once I got in, it's a fantastic show. >> We did have to register. (laughter) >> Likewise. No, congratulations, it's a great show and Amazon has been terrific for us at IronNet. >> Well, we're glad to cover it and we appreciate you joining us, Matt, for this segment. Be back with more coverage here from the AWS Public Sector show. For Dave Vallante, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks again for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Here, live, in Palo Alto, California, the Silicon Angle Studio for the Silicon Valley coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. I'm John Furrier. We're in theCube. We're here with Cube alumni and one of our favorite guests, Alan Cohen, the Chief Commercial Officer of Illumio, hot security startup, coming in to share his commentary on Mobile World Congress. Alan's a veteran in the industry. Great to have you. Been in the Silicon Valley Friday Show a few weeks ago. Great to see you. >> Thrilled to be back. Beautiful environment. You know, party. >> It was great to see you on the Silicon Valley Friday Show because after our segment the New York Times ran that story Friedman had that the cross where they took our content. >> We're going to Freeport next. >> Exactly. (laughing) And great content, we're serving it up. So I want to say thank you, it was great coverage. Thanks to the New York Times for picking up our content, taking it to the next level. Always great to have a conversation. You've got a good way to put the finger on the pulse. Mobile World Congress, two days of coverage for us. I'll just give you a quick Reader's Digest summary of what we're seeing. It's a bipolar show. It's a device show and a telco trying-to-figure-things-out show. Then in the middle is a lot of money to be had by whoever can help sort out the counseling of the telco business. Intel certainly is a big player in that with 5G. And there's a lot of under the covers stuff. SDN, NFV, new networks and new paradigms of how to configure these architectures. Not much mention of security, but that's essentially what's going on. You've got everyone's working out the devices, the new LG, the Yahweh, all this stuff's going on. Then you get the telcos well speeds and feeds and build out and business models. So what's your assessment? >> I've been to the Mobile World Congress 10 times. We never talked about this, but I actually worked the cellular carrier in the 90s. To me the show is the same every year. It's drones, clones, and phones. That's what people really focus on, right? So the 11,000 versions of the Android phone, even though Apple's still taking 89% of the profit at the industry so it actually only one phone you have to pay attention to on one side. Then more bits, less money side of being on the carrier, because what is being an ISP, wireless ISP or a wired ISP. Every year I give you more bits and I make less money. I'm going to make it up in volume. And I keep pouring all this capital into this. So to me, they haven't really yet completely broken out of that paradigm. The key thing is that the mobile network is the primary network. So all the profitability in telco is in the mobile network. Nobody says hey, I'm going to get up and build a wired network and pull some more copper to your house, right? So that is the principle way that people are using it and we have now an entire generation that don't know you can actually plug a phone into a wall or an ethernet connection. I think that's the kind of competitive dynamics that people go with. >> And that's under pressure though, because now the carrier's always in the operating, always controlled the relationship to the user via the contract. Did you buy an iPhone lately? There's no more relationship. You just buy whatever device you want. The subsidy ended ... I'm not talking about subsidy. I'm talking about like I have a contract with AT and T, I can certainly change it to Verizon, so I can certainly swap. But for the most part the carrier views me as a subscriber. Pretty much that's it. They bill me, I'm not really getting anything extra from AT and T. Maybe I'll get some hotspots. But I mean come on, what value? >> You are just our poo. >> Where does it go from here? We had the guys from Datatron on who had an interesting proposition. They had a ton of data. So there really has been this struggle institutionally, as you know, I mean core competency has been provisioning, truck roll, and billing. So what else can they do? What's your thoughts, okay let's change the mental, here's the exercise. We get elected to be the CEO of the biggest telco. >> You're Verizon, I'm A T and T. >> We own the telcos, and what do we do? Do we fire everybody? Do we do what Donald Trump does and just fire everyone and run it the way we want to run it? Or do we build it? What would we do seriously, what would we do if we were telcos and we want to put our business hat on? >> I think you have to kind of deconstruct the value chain of that. So what telcos do is they offer up content, for the most part. These devices, I've had to teach my kids that you can make a call with it. But aside from a call mostly what people do is use some form of internet application. They don't get any other money for the internet application. They don't get any money for hosting it, they don't get any money for managing it. They don't get very much money for making it perform. So to me, the biggest challenge of the telcos is actually Amazon because if you think about it, Amazon is now becoming the supply chain for so much internet delivery content. If the telco wants to be something other than the last mile and the wires connecting that last mile, it takes a lot of wires to build a wireless network, people forget that. They're going to have to start to figure out can I, whether it's cash and data center, can I turn profitable services to the people who are all competing at the edge of that universe and applications. I don't think they really have done that. I mean they are some of the largest data center operators in the world, but they haven't really thought it through. I was in a studio in L.A. a couple weeks ago and it's one of the large national studios. It's an Illumio customer and they've now moved all their content distribution into Amazon. So they don't send the content from their network to the affiliates. They put it in Amazon, and Amazon delivers it. How much longer is it going to before there's actually studio that works out of Amazon? >> Yeah, I mean the head end's dead. This cable is kind of changing. That's the media piece, but also you have all these new use cases, the fantasy autonomous driving cars which you can say it's a data center on wheels, yes I could buy that. Is it going to be uploading data every half mile? Where's the wire? So you have this new construction. Smart cities is another one, smart homes is an echo in there. >> I made my living out of making data centers more secure. But the data center is going to completely evolve. The share perfusion of data that's going to come out of these devices, and a lot of people have talked about the edge architecture, is going to blow up the idea of back hauling it to a centralized server. Process it in a bunch of ways and spit it back out. For me, if I wanted to write a smart or autonomous car management system, let's say I was the city of Palo Alto and I'm responsible for now instead of just the traffic lights, I'm also responsible for how autonomous cars go through Palo Alto, I'm not sending something back to some data center in Virginia for Amazon. I'm going to have to figure out how to process all that data closest to where those cars are. Make intelligent decisions about them while at local, and then send back out instructions. What I think you're going to do is you're going to see a shift from this central model to a much more distributed model and I'm going to have to have mini data centers. So instead of having 10 mega data centers I might have 1,000 mini mega data centers that's going to make all of these things happen. I don't think a lot of people have paid attention to that architectural shift. If you're in the process of, business of selling server networks you're still thinking client-server back haul it into the giant data center next to the nuclear power plant. But it's all going to have to move a lot closer to where something, because I only care about that decision right now with the 50 cars coming down middle field and the streets that feed into it. >> But there's a bigger architecture thing that the Mobile World Congress is trying to point at, which is an ecosystem. Let me take a step back. Is Mobile Congress a relevant show, or is it becoming a CES sideshow, Biz Dev show? I mean Cy Gerli was on yesterday saying look, it's where everyone goes, who's who goes there. It's essentially a Biz Dev show that happens to have a trade show running with it. >> It's the agora, right? The Greek term for marketplace. You go there to do business with people. It's like RSA two weeks ago, right? You guys were up at RSA. It's like is it really fun to walk through 14,000 vendor booths, or is it like everybody who make decisions on buying and selling security stuff happened to be in the same two-square miles of San Francisco. I don't think that part goes away, but I do think ... >> It's a super important part. >> Yeah, but I think the architecture of who plays is going to change. The the question you've got to ask is who's going to be the Amazon of the mobile world and disrupt the network model? The network is now just something glued together with software. I mean years ago they had the same thing, it didn't really work out, that they called the cloud where I would rent my access point in London to people and I'd use their wifi. The stuff that glues it together is always much more important than the infrastructure itself. So if Mobile World Congress can be important there's going to be a track on the people actually glue all of that stuff all together. >> All right, so I've got to get your take on the business conversation, the marketplace that runs there. What are some of the conversations that you could imagine that was happening at Mobile World Congress? I know we're not there, I mean we've been seeing and hearing some of the hallway conversations. Obviously 5G's the big story. What are some of the marketplace hallway conversations or business meetings that are going on in your mind's eye if you had to make a guess on what's happening? >> What are the most important content that people like to use today? Pop quiz, do you know this? >> Yeah, video. >> Video, right? So to me, one of the conversation Netflix was having and Amazon Prime was having because they're not just waiting for you to be in your TV, to consume, right? People are consuming increasing amounts of video content on mobile devices. So I think there's the Hollywood influence or the studio or what is it? The National Association of Programming Executives, NAPE right? What you're doing, if you're a content producer you're looking for eyeballs and people to pay for it. There's nothing more ubiquitous than that piece of glass we're all carrying in front of our nose 17 hours a day. I think that's a big set of business discussions. Your partner was talking about this, is okay, is there just a dramatically different way to build this network? 5G is going to give you the promise, more is a lot of work. The physics are I'm getting a lot more bandwidth. What am I going to do with it? Well people are going to fill it up. >> There's different use cases. There's the mobility and then with dense areas. Then things that are moving at a hundred miles an hour, 50 miles and hour, planes, trains. >> I think there's an element of that. I think there's the internet of things discussion. I still think five years will take the internet whatever things, right? I call the IOWT, right, because it's like nobody's, it's not really about connecting your lightbulb to the network, but there are a lot of things in motion that people want to better manage. >> We just introduced a research agenda this morning with Peter Burroughs, IOT, IOT people. Things and people. >> Have you gone back to the Furrier family and counted up how many IP addresses you have as a family? The Cohen family has 111 IP addresses. >> John: IPV6 for you. (laughing) >> Yeah, we need a gateway man for the network router that comes into the house. But that is actually ... >> We just bought the new Google access points, the ones that have that little mesh instrument. >> But yes, I'm just kidding you. So there are a lot of things. The other thing is that there is the interaction of the mobile, actually I think Google is a great example. If you think about Google produces the wifi at Starbucks and a lot of retail. They're interested in what's going on. Today we think about the mobile network as a mobile network and we think about the broadband fixed network as a different network. And like the interplay between those two, it's like there's a lot more than Foursquare and Facebook. >> Sure fibers of the home is very capital intensive. We knew it would cost us to do a truck roll, the trench, and connect to the home which we did. Overlay wireless, fixed wireless would be fantastic there. >> So you have the overlay and then when I know that you're coming by, right, because the fixed network is now actually a wifi network, I mean it has wires. So you have the mobile network, you have the wifi network, and you have people moving in and out of those environments. I think I'm seeing a lot of companies getting funded. People actually trying to say how do we monetize that experience? This is obviously was Foursquare and those other location guys started years ago. I mean, look at something like Wayce. Wayce went from a GPS app with social interaction to a car sharing, ride sharing going after Uber, this Google company. >> Well we had an NTD Delcomo VC, Chris McCoo, talk about mapping as a huge app for these telcos. >> Mapping is the killer app. Almost everything on your phone local works off a map which, by the way, is paid for by us as taxpayers. The GPS comes from the United States government. It's free. The most powerful utility in mobility is location, and GPS is free. >> All right, final question. Bumper sticker from Mobile World Congress from your perspective this year. Yawner, golf clap, or standing ovation? >> I say golf clap because more bandwidth is good and I think there's an insatiable demand. We're a long way from ending the bandwidth drought, and there is a bandwidth drought. I think the other thing is there aren't camps anymore. I think people will coalesce very quickly on 5G. So good time to be in that business. One hand clap maybe. >> Yeah, not a hole in one. Certainly more golf analogies coming on theCube. Alan Cohen here, Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio. We didn't get to security, but we'll do that next time. I'm John Furrier, I'll be right back with more Mobile World Congress coverage after this short break. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New York, it's The Cube, covering Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. Nenshad Bardoliwalla is here, he's the co-founder and chief product officer at Paxata, a company that, three years ago, I want to say three years ago, came out of stealth on The Cube. >> October 27, 2013. >> Right, and we were at the Warwick Hotel across the street from the Hilton. Yeah, Prakash came on The Cube and came out of stealth. Welcome back. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to see you guys. Taking the world by storm. >> Great to be here, and of course, Prakash sends his apologies. He couldn't be here so he sent his stunt double. (Dave and George laugh) >> Great, so give us the update. What's the latest? >> So there are a lot of great things going on in our space. The thing that we announced here at the show is what we're calling Paxata Connect, OK? We are moving just in the same way that we created the self-service data preparation category, and now there are 50 companies that claim they do self-service data prep. We are moving the industry to the next phase of what we are calling our business information platform. Paxata Connect is one of the first major milestones in getting to that vision of the business information platform. What Paxata Connect allows our customers to do is, number one, to have visual, completely declarative, point-and-click browsing access to a variety of different data sources in the enterprise. For example, we support, we are the only company that we know of that supports connecting to multiple, simultaneous, different Hadoop distributions in one system. So a Paxata customer can connect to MapR, they can connect to Hortonworks, they can connect to Cloudera, and they can federate across all of them, which is a very powerful aspect of the system. >> And part of this involves, when you say declarative, it means you don't have to write a program to retrieve the data. >> Exactly right. Exactly right. >> Is this going into HTFS, into Hive, or? >> Yes it is. In fact, so Hadoop is one part of, this multi-source Hadoop capability is one part of Paxata Connect. The second is, as we've moved into this information platform world, our customers are telling us they want read-write access to more than just Hadoop. Hadoop is obviously a very important part, but we're actually supporting no-sequel data sources like Cloudant, Mongo DB, we're supporting read and write, we're supporting, for the first time, relational databases, we already supported read, but now we actually support write to relational databases. So Paxata is really becoming kind of this fabric, a business-centric information fabric, that allows people to move data from anywhere to any destination, and transform it, profile it, explore it along the way. >> Excellent. Let's get into some of the use cases. >> Yeah, tell us where the banks are. The sense at the conference is that everyone sort of got their data lakes to some extent up and running. Now where are they pushing to go next? >> Sure, that's an excellent question. So we have really focused on the enterprise segment, as you know. So the customers that are working with Paxata from an industry perspective, banking is, of course, a very important one, we were really proud to share the stage yesterday with both Citi and Standard Chartered Bank, two of our flagship banking customers. But Paxata is also heavily used in the United States government, in the intelligence community, I won't say any more about that. It's used heavily in retail and consumer products, it's used heavily in the high-tech space, it's used heavily by data service providers, that is, companies whose entire business is based on data. But to answer your question specifically, what's happening in the data lake world is that a lot of folks, the early adopters, have jumped onto the data lake bandwagon. So they're pouring terabytes and petabytes of data into the data lake. And then the next question the business asks is, OK, now what? Where's the data, right? One of the simplest use cases, but actually one that's very pervasive for our customers, is they say, "Look, we don't even know, "our business people, they don't even know "what's in Hadoop right now." And by the way, I will also say that the data lake is not just Hadoop, but Amazon S3 is also serving as a data lake. The capabilities inside Microsoft's cloud are also serving as a data lake. Even the notion of a data lake is becoming this sort of polymorphic distributed thing. So what they do is, they want to be able to get what we like to say is first eyes on data. We let people with Paxata, especially with the release of Connect, to just point and click their way and to actually explore the data in all of the native systems before they even bring it in to something like Paxata. So they can actually sneak preview thousands of database tables or thousands of compressed data sets inside of Amazon S3, or thousands of data sets inside of Hadoop, and now the business people for the first time can point and click and actually see what is in the data lake in the first place. So step number one is, we have taken the approach so far in the industry of, there have been a lot of IT-driven use cases that have motivated people to go to the data lake approach. But now, we obviously want to show, all of our companies want to show business value, so tools and platforms like Paxata that sit on top of the data lake, that can federate across multiple data lakes and provide business-centric access to that information is the first significant use case pattern we're seeing. >> Just a clarification, could there be two roles where one is for slightly more technical business user exposes views summarizing, so that the ultimate end user doesn't have to see the thousands of tables? >> Absolutely, that's a great question. So when you look at self-service, if somebody wants to roll out a self-service strategy, there are multiple roles in an organization that actually need to intersect with self-service. There is a pattern in organizations where people say, "We want our people to get access to all the data." Of course it's governed, they have to have the right passwords and SSO and all that, but they're the companies who say, yes, the users really need to be able to see all of the data across these different tables. But there's a different role, who also uses Paxata extensively, who are the curators, right? These are the people who say, look, I'm going to provision the raw data, provide the views, provide even some normalization or transformation, and then land that data back into another layer, as people call the data relay, they go from layer zero to layer one to layer two, they're different directory structures, but the point is, there's a natural processing frame that they're going through with their data, and then from the curated data that's created by the data stewards, then the analysts can go pick it up. >> One of the other big challenges that our research is showing, that chief data officers express, is that they get this data in the data lake. So they've got the data sources, you're providing access to it, the other piece is they want to trust that data. There's obviously a governance piece, but then there's a data quality piece, maybe you could talk about that? >> Absolutely. So use case number one is about access. The second reason that people are not so -- So, why are people doing data prep in the first place? They are trying to make information-driven decisions that actually help move their business forward. So if you look at researchers from firms like Forrester, they'll say there are two reasons that slow down the latency of going from raw data to decision. Number one is access to data. That's the use case we just talked about. Number two is the trustworthiness of data. Our approach is very different on that. Once people actually can find the data that they're looking for, the big paradigm shift in the self-service world is that, instead of trying to process data based on transforming the metadata attributes, like I'm going to draw on a work flow diagram, bring in this table, aggregate with this operator, then split it this way, filter it, which is the classic ETL paradigm. The, I don't want to say profound, but maybe the very obvious thing we did was to say, "What if people could actually look at the data in the first place --" >> And sort of program it by example? >> We can tell, that's right. Because our eyes can tell us, our brains help us to say, we can immediately look at a data set, right? You look at an age column, let's say. There are values in the age column of 150 years. Maybe 20 years from now there may be someone who, on Earth, lives to 150 years. But pretty much -- >> Highly unlikely. >> The customers at the banks you work with are not 150 years old, right? So just being able to look at the data, to get to the point that you're asking, quality is about data being fit for a specific purpose. In order for data to be fit for a specific purpose, the person who needs the data needs to make the decision about what is quality data. Both of you may have access to the same transactional data, raw data, that the IT team has landed in the Hadoop cluster. But now you pull it up for one use case, you pull it up for another use case, and because your needs are different, what constitutes quality to you and where you want to make the investment is going to be very different. So by putting the power of that capability into the hands of the person who actually knows what they want, that is how we are actually able to change the paradigm and really compress the latency from "Here's my raw data" to "Here's the decision I want to make on that data." >> Let me ask, it sounds like, having put all of the self-service capabilities together, you've democratized access to this data. Now, what happens in terms of governance, or more importantly, just trust, when the pipeline, you know, has to go beyond where you're working on it, to some of the analytics or some of the basic ingest? To say, "I know this data came from here "and it's going there." >> That's right, how do we verify the fidelity of these data sources? It's a fantastic question. So, in my career, having worked in BI for a couple of decades, I know I look much younger but it actually has been a couple of decades. Remember, the camera adds about 15 pounds, for those of you watching at home. (Dave and George laugh) >> George: But you've lost already. >> Thank you very much. >> So you've lost net 30. (Nenshad laughs) >> Or maybe I'm back to where I'm supposed to be. What I've seen as the two models of governance in the enterprise when it comes to analytics and information management, right? There's model one, which is, we're going to build an enterprise data warehouse, we're going to know all the possible questions people are going to ask in advance, we're going to preprogram the ETL routines, we're going to put something like a MicroStrategy or BusinessObjects, an enterprise-reporting factory tool. Then you spend 10 million dollars on that project, the users come in and for the first time they use the system, and they say, "Oh, I kind of want to change this, this way. "I want to add this calculation." It takes them about five minutes to determine that they can't do it for whatever reason, and what is the first feature they look for in the product in order to move forward? Download to Excel, right? So you invested 15 million dollars to build a download to Excel capability which they already had before. So if you lock things down too much, the point is, the end users will go around you. They've been doing it for 30 years and they'll keep doing it. Then we have model two. Model two is, Excel spreadsheet. Excel Hell, or spreadmarts. There are lots of words for these things. You have a version of the data, you have a version of the data, I have a version of the data. We all started from the same transactional data, yet you're the head of sales, so suddenly your forecast looks really rosy. You're the head of finance, you really don't like what the forecast looks like. And I'm the product guy, so why am I even looking at the forecast in the first place, but somehow I got access to the data, right? These are the two polarities of the enterprise that we've worked with for the last 30 years. We wanted to find sort of a middle path, which is to say, let's give people the freedom and flexibility to be able to do the transformations they need to. If they want to add a column, let them add a column. If they want to change a calculation, let them add a a calculation. But, every single step in the process must be recorded. It must be versioned, it must be auditable. It must be governed in that way. So why the large banks and the intelligence community and the large enterprise customers are attracted to Paxata is because they have the ability to have perfect retraceability for every decision that they make. I can actually sit next to you and say, "This is why the data looks like this. "This is how this value, which started at one million, "became 1.5 million." That covers the Paxata part. But then the answer to the question you asked is, how do you even extend that to a broader ecosystem? I think that's really about some of the metadata interchange initiatives that a lot of the vendors in the Hadoop space, but also in the traditional enterprise space, have had for the last many years. If you look at something like Apache Atlas or Cloudera Navigator, they are systems designed to collect, aggregate, and connect these different metadata steps so you can see in an end-to-end flow, this is the raw data that got ingested into Hadoop. These are the transformations that the end user did in Paxata in order to make it ready for analytics. This is how it's getting consumed in something like Zoom Data, and you actually have the entire life cycle of data now actually manifested as a software asset. >> So those not, in other words, those are not just managing within the perimeter of Hadoop. They are managers of managers. >> That's right, that's right. Because the data is coming from anywhere, and it's going to anywhere. And then you can add another dimension of complexity which is, it's not just one Hadoop cluster. It's 10 Hadoop clusters. And those 10 Hadoop clusters, three of them are in Amazon. Four of them are in Microsoft. Three of them are in Google Cloud platform. How do you know what people are doing with data then? >> How is this all presented to the user? What does the user see? >> Great question. The trick to all of this, of self service, first you have to know very clearly, who is the person you are trying to serve? What are their technical skills and capabilities, and how can you get them productive as fast as possible? When we created this category, our key notion was that we were going to go after analysts. Now, that is a very generic term, right? Because we are all, in some sense, analysts in our day-to-day lives. But in Paxata, a business analyst, in an enterprise organizational context, is somebody that has the ability to use Microsoft Excel, they have to have that skill or they won't be successful with today's Paxata. They have to know what a VLOOKUP is, because a VLOOKUP is a way to actually pull data from a second data source into one. We would all know that as a join or a lookup. And the third thing is, they have to know what a pivot table is and know how a pivot table works. Because the key insight we had is that, of the hundreds of millions of analysts, people who use Excel on a day-to-day basis, a lot of their work is data prep. But Excel, being an amazing generic tool, is actually quite bad for doing data prep. So the person we target, when I go to a customer and they say, "Are we a good candidate to use Paxata?" and we're talking to the actual person who's going to use the software, I say, "Do you know what a VLOOKUP is, yes or no? "Do you know what a pivot table is, yes or no?" If they have that skill, when they come into Paxata, we designed Paxata to be very attractive to those people. So it's completely point-and-click. It's completely visual. It's completely interactive. There's no scripting inside that whole process, because do you think the average Microsoft Excel analyst wants to script, or they want to use a proprietary wrangling language? I'm sorry, but analysts don't want to wrangle. Data scientists, the 1% of the 1%, maybe they like to wrangle, but you don't have that with the broader analyst community, and that is a much larger market opportunity that we have targeted. >> Well, very large, I mean, a lot of people are familiar with those concepts in Excel, and if they're not, they're relatively easy to learn. >> Nenshad: That's right. Excellent. All right, Nenshad, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Congratulations for all the success. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube, we're live from New York City at Big Data NYC. We'll be right back. (electronic music)