>>Hi, we're back. We're watching, you're watching the cube coverage of Falcon 2022 live from the aria in Las Vegas, Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson and we, yes, folks, there are females in the cyber security industry. Amanda Adams is here. So the vice president of America Alliance at CrowdStrike. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>We it's, it's fantastic to, to actually, as I was starting to wonder, but we >>Do have females in leadership. >>Wait, I'm just kidding. There are plenty of females here, but this cybersecurity industry in general, maybe if we have time, we can talk about that, but I wanna talk about the, the Alliance program, but before I do, yeah. You know, you, you got a nice career here at CrowdStrike, right? You've kind of seen the ascendancy, the rocket ship you've been on it for five years. Yep. So what's that been like? And if you had to put on the binoculars and look five years forward, what can you tell us in that 10 year span? Oh >>My goodness. What a journey it's been over the last five, six years. I've been with CrowdStrike almost six years and really starting with our first core group of partners and building out the alliances, seen obviously the transformation with our sales organization. And as we scaled, I think of our, of our technology. We started with, I think, two products at that time, we were focused on reinventing how our customers thought about NextGen AB but also endpoint detection response. From there, the evolution is really driving towards that cloud security platform, right? How our partners fit into that. And, and how we've evolved is it's not just resell. It's not just focusing on the margin and transactions. We really have focused on building the strategic relationships with our partners, but also our customers and fitting them in that better together story with that CrowdStrike platform. It's been the biggest shift. Yeah. >>And you've got that. The platform chops for that. It's just, I think you're up to 22 modules now. So you're not a point product. You guys make that, that, that point lot now in terms of the, the partners and the ecosystem, you know, it's, it's, it's good here. I mean, it's, this it's buzzing. I've said it's like service. I've said, number of times, it's like service. Now back in 2013, I was there now. They didn't have the down market, the SMB that you have that's right. And I think you you're gonna have an order. You got 20,000 customers. That's right. I predict CrowdStrike's gonna have 200,000. I, I'm not gonna predict when I need to think about that. But, but in thinking about the, the, the co your colleagues and the partners and the skill sets that have evolved, what's critical today. And, and, and what do you see as critical in the future? >>So from a skill set standpoint, if I'm a partner and engaging with CrowdStrike and our customers, if you think about, again, evolving away from just resell, we have eight routes to market. So while that may sound complicated, the way that I like to think about it is that we truly flex to our partners, go to market their business models of what works best for their organization, but also their customers. The way that they've changed, I think from a skillset standpoint is looking beyond just the technology from a platform, building a better together story with our tech Alliance partners or store, if thinking about the XDR Alliance, which we are focusing on, there's so much great value in bringing that to our customers from a skillset standpoint, beyond those services services, we've talked about every day. I know that this is gonna be a top topic for the week yesterday through our partner summit, George, our CEO, as well as Jim Cidel, that's really the opportunity as we expand in new modules. If you think about humo or log scale identity, and then cloud our partners play a critical role when it comes into the cloud migration deployment integration services, really, we're not gonna get bigger from a services organization. And that's where we need our partners to step in. >>Yeah. And, you know, we we've talked a lot about XDR yeah. Already in day one here. Yeah. With, with the X extending into other areas. That's right. I think that services be, would become even more critical at that point, you know, as you spread out into the, really the internet of things that's right. Especially all of the old things that are out there that maybe should be on the internet, but aren't yet. Yeah. But once they are security is important. So what are you doing in that arena from a services perspective to, to bolster that capability? Is it, is it, is it internally, or is it through partners generally? >>It's definitely, I think we look to our partners to extend beyond the core of what we do. We do endpoint really well, right? Our services is one of the best in the business. When you look at instant response, our proactive services, supporting our customers. If you think to XDR of integration, building out those connect air packs with our customers, building the alliances, we really do work with our partners to drive that successful outcome with our customers. But also too, I think about it with our tech alliances of building out the integration that takes a lot of effort and work. We have a great team internally, which will help guide those services to be, to be built. Right. You have to have support when you're building the integrations, which is great, but really from like a tech Alliance and store standpoint, looking to add use cases, add value to more store apps for our customers, that's where we're headed. Right. >>What about developers? Do you see that as a component of the ecosystem in the future? Yeah, >>Without a doubt. I mean, I think that as our partner program evolves right now working with our, our developers, I mean, there's different personas that we work with with our customer standpoint, but from a partner working with them to build our new codes, the integration that's gonna be pretty important. >>So we were, we sort of tongue in cheek at the beginning of this interview yeah. With women in tech. And it's a, it's a topic that, on the cube that we've been very passionate about since day one yep. On the cube. So how'd you get in to this business? H how did your, your career progress, how did you get to where you are? >>You know, I have been incredibly fortunate to have connections, and I think it's who, you know, and your network, not necessarily what, you know, to a certain extent, you have to be smart to make it long term. Right. You have to have integrity. Do what you're saying. You're gonna do. I first started at Cisco and I had a connection of, it was actually a parent of somebody I grew up with. And they're like, you would fit in very nicely to Cisco. And I started with their channel marketing team, learned a ton about the business, how to structure, how to support. And that was the first step into technology. If you would've asked me 20 years ago, what did I wanna do? I actually wanted to be a GM of an organization. And I was coming outta I come on, which is great, which I'm, it really is right up. >>If you knew me, you're like, that actually makes a lot of sense. But coming outta college, I had an opportunity. I was interviewing with the golden state warriors in California, and I was interviewing with Cisco and that I had two ops and I was living in San Jose at the time. The golden state warriors of course paid less. It was a better opportunity in sales, but it was obviously where I wanted to go from athletics. And I grew up in athletics, playing volleyball. Cisco paid me more, and it was in San Jose. And really the, the golden state warriors seemed that I was having that conversation. They said, one year community is gonna be awful. It's awful from San Jose to Oakland, but also too, like you have more money on the table. Go take that. And so I could have very much ended up in athletics, most likely in the back office, somewhere. Like I would love that. And then from there, I went from Cisco. I actually worked for a reseller for quite some time, looking at, or selling into Manhattan when I moved from California to Manhattan, went to tenable. And that was when I shifted really into channel management. I love relationships, getting snow people, building partnerships, seeing that long term, that's really where I thrive. And then from there came to CrowdStrike, which in itself has been an incredible journey. I bet. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think there's an important thread there to pull on. And that is, we, we put a lot of emphasis on stem, which people, some sometimes translate into one thing, writing code that's right. There are, but would you agree? There are many, many, many opportunities in tech that aren't just coding. >>Absolutely. >>And I think I, as a father of three daughters, it's, it's a message that I have shared with them. Yeah. They are not interested in the coding part of things, but still, they need to know that there are so many opportunities and, and it's always, sometimes it's happenstance in terms of finding the opportunity in your case, it was, you know, cosmic connection that's right. But, but that's, you know, that's something that we can foster is that idea that it's not just about the hardcore engineering and coding aspect, it's business >>That's right. So if, if there was one thing that I can walk away from today is I say that all the time, right? If you look at CrowdStrike in our mission, we really don't have a mission statement. We stop breaches every single day. When I come to work and I support our partners, I'm not super technical. I obviously know our technology and I, I enable and train our partners, but I'm not coding. Right. And I make an impact to our business, our partners, more importantly, our customers, every single day, we have folks that you can come from a marketing operations. There is legal, there's finance. I deal with folks all across the business that aren't super technical, but are making a huge impact. And I, I don't think that we talk about the opportunities outside of engineering with the broader groups. We talk about stem a lot, but within college, and I look to see like getting those early in career folks, either through an intern program could be sales, but too, if they don't like, like sales, then they shift into marketing or operations. It's a great way to get into the industry. >>Yeah. But I still think you gotta like tech to be in the tech business. Oh, you >>Do? Yeah. You do. I'm >>Not saying it's like deep down is like, not all of us, but a lot of us are kind of just, you know, well, at least you, >>At least you can't hate it. >>Right. Okay. But so women, 50% of the population, I think the stat is 17% in the technology. Yeah. Industry, maybe it's changed a little bit, but you know, 20% or, or less, why do you think that is? >>I, you know, I always go back to within technology, people hire from their network and people that they know, and usually your network are people that are very like-minded or similar to you. I have referred females into CrowdStrike. It's a priority of mine. I also have a circle that is also men, but also too, if you look at the folks that are hired into CrowdStrike, but also other technology companies, that's the first thing that I go to also too. I think it's a little bit intimidating. Right. I have a very strong personality and I'm very direct, but also too, like I can keep up with our industry when it comes to that stereotypes essentially. And some people maybe are introverted and they're not quite sure where they fit in. Right. Whether it's marketing operations, et cetera. So they, they're not sure of the opportunities or even aware of where to get started. You know what I mean? >>Yeah. I mean, I think there is a, a, a stereotype today, but I'm not sure why it's, is it unique to the, to the technology industry? No. Is it not? Right? It happens >>Thinking, I mean, there's so many industries where healthcare, >>Maybe not so much. Right. Because you know, >>You have nurses versus doctors. I feel like that is flipped. >>Yeah. That's true. Nurses versus doctors. Right. Well, I, I know a lot of women doctors though, but >>Yeah. That's kind of flipped. It's better. >>Yeah. Says >>Flipped over. Yeah. I think it's more women in medical school now, but than than men. But, >>And, and I do think in our industry, you know, when you look at companies like IBM, HPE, Cisco, Dell, and, and, and many others. Yeah. They are making a concerted effort for on round diversity. They typically have somebody who's in charge of diversity. They report, you know, maybe not directly to the CEO, but they certainly have a seat at the table. That's right. And you know, maybe you call it, oh, it's quotas. Maybe the, the old white guys feel, you know, a little slighted, whatever. It's like, nobody's crying for us. I mean, it's not like we got screwed. >>See, I know problema we can do this in Spanish. Oh, oh, >>Oh, you're not a old white guy. Sorry. We can do >>This in Spanish if you want. >>Okay. Here we go. So, no, but, but, but I, so I do think that, that the industry in general, I talked to John Chambers about this recently and he was like, look, we gotta do way better. And I don't disagree with that. But I think that, I think the industry is doing better, but I wonder if like a rocket ship company, like CrowdStrike who has so many other things going on, you know, maybe they gotta get you a certain size. I mean, you've reached escape velocity. You're doing obviously a lot of corporate, you know, good. Yeah. You know, and, and, and, and we just had earlier on we, you know, motor motor guides was very cool. Yeah. So maybe it's a maturity thing. Maybe these larger companies with you crowd size $40 billion market cap, but maybe the, the hundred plus billion dollar market cap companies. I don't know. I don't know. You guys got a bigger market cap than Dell. So >>I, I don't think it's necessarily related to market cap. I think it's the size of the organization of how many roles are open that we currently write. So we're at just over 6,000 employees. If you look at Cisco, how many thousands of employees they have there's >>Right. Maybe a hundred thousand employees. >>That's right. There's >>More opportunities. How many, what's a headcount of crowd strike >>Just over 6,000, >>6,000. So, okay. But >>If you think about the, the areas of opportunity for advancement, and we were talking about this earlier, when you look at early and career or entry level, it's actually quite, even right across the Americas of, we do have a great female population. And then as progression happens, that's where it, it tees off from a, a female in leadership. And we're doing, we're focusing on that, right? Under JC Herrera's leadership, as well as with George. One of the things that I always think is important though, is that you're mindful as, as the female within the organization and that you're out seeking somebody, who's not only a mentor, but is a direct champion for you when you're not in the room. Right. This is true of CrowdStrike. It's true of every organization. You're not gonna be aware of the opportunities as the roles are being created. And really, as the roles are being created, they probably have somebody in mind. Right. And so if you have somebody that's in that room says, you know what, Amanda Adams would be perfect for that. Let's go talk to her about it. You have to have somebody who's your champion. Yeah. >>There there's, there's, there's a saying that 80% of the most important moments in your life happen in your absence. Yeah. And that's exactly right. You know, when they're, when someone needs to be there to champion, you, >>Did that happen for you? >>Yes. I have a very strong champion. >>So I mean, I, my observation is if, if you are a woman in tech and you're in a senior leadership position, like you are, or you're a, you're a general manager or a P and L manager or a CEO, you have to be so incredibly talented because all things being equal, maybe it's changing somewhat in some of those companies I talked about, but for the last 30 years, all takes be equal. A, a, a woman is gonna lose out to a man who is as qualified. And, and I think that's maybe slowly changing. Maybe you agree with that, maybe you don't. And maybe that's, some people think that's unfair, but you know, think about people of color. Right. They, they, they, they grew up with less op opportunities for education. And this is just the statistics that's right. Right. So should society overcompensate for that? I personally think, yes, the, the answer is just, they should, there should still be some type of meritocracy that's right. You know, but society has a responsibility to, you know, rise up all ships. >>I think there's a couple ways that you can address that through Falcon funds, scholarship programs, absolutely. Looking at supporting folks that are coming outta school, our internship program, providing those opportunities, but then just being mindful right. Of whether or not you publish the stats or not. We do have somebody who's responsible for D I, within CrowdStrike. They are looking at that and at least taking that step to understand what can we do to support the advancement across minorities. But also women is really, really important. >>Did you not have a good educational opportunity when you were growing up where you're like you had to me? Yeah, no, seriously, >>No. Seriously. I went to pretty scary schools. Right. >>Okay. So you could have gone down a really bad path. >>I, a lot of people that I grew up with went down really, really bad paths. I think the inflection point at, at least for me what the inflection point was becoming aware of this entire universe. Yeah. I was, I was headed down a path where I wasn't aware that any of this existed, when I got out of college, they were advertising in the newspaper for Cisco sales engineers, $150,000 a year. We will train. I'm a smart guy. I had no idea what that meant. Right. I could have easily gone and gotten one of those jobs. It was seven or eight years before I intersected with the tech world again. And so, you know, kind of parallel with your experience with you had someone randomly, it's like, you'd be great at Cisco. Yeah. But if, if you're not around that, and so you take people in different communities who are just, this might as well be a different planet. Yes. Yeah. The idea of eating in a restaurant where someone is serving you, food is uncomfortable, right? The idea of checking into a hotel, the idea of flying somewhere on an airplane, we talk about imposter syndrome. That's right. There are deep seated discomfort levels that people have because they just, this is completely foreign, but >>You're saying you could have foreign, you could have gone down a path where selling drugs or jacking cars was, was, was lucrative. >>I had, I had, yeah. I mean, we're getting, we're getting like deep into societal things. I was, I was very lucky. My parents were very, very young, but they're still together to this day. I had loving parents. We were very, very poor. We were surrounded by really, really, really bad stuff. So. >>Okay. So, so, okay. So this, >>I, I don't, I don't compare my situation to others. >>White woman. That's I guess this is my point. Yeah. The dynamic is different than, than a kid who grew up in the inner city. Yes. Right. And, and, and they're both important to address, but yeah. I think you gotta address them in different ways. >>Yes. But if they're, but if they're both completely ignorant of this, >>They don't know it. So it's lack of >>A, they'll never be here. >>You >>Never be here. And it's such a huge, this is such a huge difference from the rest of the world and from the rest, from the rest of our economy. >>So what would you tell a young girl? My daughters, aren't interested in tech. They want to go into fashion or healthcare, whatever Dave's daughters maybe would be a young girl, preteen, maybe teen interested in, not sure which path, why tech, what would advice would you give? >>I think just understanding what you enjoy about life, right? Like which skills are you great at? What characteristics about roles and not really focusing on a specific product. Definitely not cybersecurity versus like the broader network. I mean, literally what do you enjoy doing? And then the roles of, you know, from the skillset that's needed, whether that be marketing, and then you can start to dive into, do I wanna support marketing for a corporate environment for retail, for technology like that will come and follow your passion, which I know is so easy to say, right? But if you're passionate about certain things, I love relationships. I think that holding myself from integrity standpoint, leading with integrity, but building strong relationships on trust, that's something I take really pride in and what I get enjoyment with. It's >>Obviously your superpower. >>It, >>It is. >>But >>Then it will go back to OST too, just being authentic in the process of building those relationships, being direct to the transparency of understanding, like again, knowing what you're good at and then where you can fit into an organization, awareness of technology opportunities, I think will all lend that to. But I also wouldn't worry, like when I was 17 year old, I, I thought I would be playing volleyball in college and then going to work for a professional sports team. You know, life works out very differently. Yeah. >>Right. And then, and for those of you out there, so I love that. Thank you for that great interview. Really appreciate letting us go far field for those of you might say, well, I don't know, man. I don't know what my passion is. I'll give you a line from my daughter, Alicia, you don't learn a lot for your kids. She said, well, if you don't know what your passion is, follow your curiosity. That's great. There you go. Amanda Adams. Thanks so much. It was great to have you on. Okay. Thank you. Keep it right there. We're back with George Kurtz. We're to the short break. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson. You watching the cube from Falcon 22 in Las Vegas.

>>Thank you for joining us for accelerate next event. I hope you're enjoying it so far. I know you've heard about the industry challenges the I. T. Trends HP strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we wanna do is focus on going deep on workload solutions. So in the most important workload solutions, the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices, some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you. All right with that. I'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler, who's the vice president and general manager of the element. Chris has extensive solution expertise, he's led HP solution engineering programs in the past. Welcome chris and Mark Nickerson, who is the Director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings, making sure we have the right solutions for our customers. Welcome guys, thanks for joining me. >>Thanks for having us christa. >>Yeah, so I'd like to start off with one of the big ones, the ones that we get asked about all the time, what we've been all been experienced in the last year, remote work, remote education and all the challenges that go along with that. So let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environments. >>Uh So I I really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about V. D. I. Um first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why, but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics. One is scale. Um it's one thing to say, I'm going to enable V. D. I. For a part of my work force in a pre pandemic environment where the office was still the central hub of activity for work. It's a completely different scale. When you think about okay I'm going to have 50, 60, 80, maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe. Um Whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning, Whether that's in the area of things like Formula one racing, where we had the desire to still have events going on. But the need for a lot more social distancing. Not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real time experience. This really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that I think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into. Initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the V. D. I. Experience was planned out with very specific workloads are very specific applications in mind. And when you take it to a more broad based environment, if we're going to support multiple functions, multiple lines of business, there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side. And so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are. Uh one customer that comes to mind would be Tyler I. S. D. Who did a fairly large rollout pre pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort, what they uncovered was even just changes in standard Windows applications Had become so much more graphically intense with Windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like Adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than they had counted on. So, um, in addition to planning for scale, you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users? How graphically intense those might be. What's the logging experience going to be as well as the operating experience. And so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users is kind of really two of the biggest, most important things that I've seen. >>You know, Mark, I'll just jump in real quick. I think you covered that pretty comprehensively there and it was well done. The a couple of observations I've made, one is just that um, V. D. I suddenly become like mission critical for sales. It's the front line, you know, for schools, it's the classroom, you know, that this isn't Uh cost cutting measure or uh optimization in IT. measure anymore. This is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation. One aspect of about 1000 aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does. And I think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error, right? You know, you really need to to deploy this in a way that that performs, that understands what you're trying to use it for. That gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be, whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom. Right? So what we do in the engineering side of things when it comes to V. D. I. R. Really understand what's a tech worker, What's a knowledge worker? What's the power worker? What's a gP really going to look like? What time of day look like, You know, who's using it in the morning, Who is using it in the evening? When do you power up? When do you power down? Does the system behave? Does it just have the, it works function and what our clients can can get from H. P. E. Is um you know, a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to, making sure that the solution delivers on its promises. So we're seeing the same thing you are christa, We see it all the time on beady eye and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business. >>Yeah. It's funny because when I talked to customers, you know, one of the things I heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you can really get a good sense of what the experiences before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise. Um It's not like every other workload that people have done before. So if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way. Okay. One of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge. So now I'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time I'll start with chris. >>All right Hey thanks. Okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for every customer and every client and every single client that I've ever spoken to of. H. P. S. Has an edge somewhere. You know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge. But I think the industry when we're talking about edges talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not too not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything is getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry? And I think Mark is going to be able to talk through a a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive. But what we're learning about Edge is it's not just how do you make the Edge work? It's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing? And nobody's just the edge. Right. And so if it's if it's um ai ml dl there that's one way you want to use the edge. If it's a customer experience point of service, it's another, you know, there's yet another way to use the edge. So, it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like HP does, um, to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together, including the ones that are running at the, at the edge. Often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline. What information is at the edge? How does it flow to the data center? How does it flow? And then which data center, which private cloud? Which public cloud are you using? Um, I think those are the areas where we, we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things. And so, for example, Red Bull, and I know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark, um the racing company, you know, for them the edges, the racetrack and, and you know, milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races, but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for the cars and how do they get quick access? So, um, we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge. And this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software. And we also have great containerized software with our admiral container platform. So we're really becoming um, a perfect platform for hosting edge centric workloads and applications and data processing. Uh, it's uh um all the way down to things like a Superdome flex in the background. If you have some really, really, really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse reliance that can be configured to support almost every combination of workload you have. So I know you started with edge christa but and and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors, but let's make sure, you know, if you're listening to this, this show right now, um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrated with um with the rest of your operation, Mark, you know, what did I miss? >>Yeah, to that point chris I mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here at the Edge has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work, changes and evolves. And the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected. Um, to your point talking about where that edge exists, that edge can be a lot of different places. Um, but the one commonality really is that the edge is an area where work still needs to get accomplished. It can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center back to some other area for the work. It's where the work actually needs to get done. Whether that's edge work in a used case like V. D. I. Or whether that's edge work. In the case of doing real time analytics, you mentioned red bull racing, I'll bring that up. I mean, you talk about uh, an area where time is of the essence, everything about that sport comes down to time. You're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds. And that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track, but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car, adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself. And so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that, you're right. It can't just be, here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data, ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days, you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time. When we pull together a solution involving our compute products are storage products or networking products. When we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge, what you see results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to real time test and track conditions. >>Yeah, really great point there. Um, and I really love the example of edge and racing because I mean that is where it all every millisecond counts. Um, and so important to process that at the edge. Now, switching gears just a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about um some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing the workload for maximum outcome for business agility. Let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that >>mark, give it a >>shot. >>Uh, So when we, when we think about business agility, what you're really talking about is the ability to implement on the fly to be able to scale up and scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations. And I think the last year has been, has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that. Um I think one of the areas that I think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds. Um if you take a look at the need that customers have to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments, app development environments that may be hosted on site or maybe in the cloud, the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up, having the ability to have some of that. Um some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers. >>All right, well, we could keep going on and on, but I'll stop it there. Uh, thank you so much Chris and Mark. This has been a great discussion. Thanks for sharing how we help other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads. I thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on demand sessions. If you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today, you can learn a lot more in those sessions. And I thank you for your time. Thanks for tuning in today.

>>from >>Around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to IBM Think 2021 we're gonna dig into the intersection of finance and business strategy. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of IBM thinking with me is brian Hoffman is the chief operating officer of IBM Global financing, brian, thanks for coming on the cube today. >>Good morning, Great to be here. >>Hey, good morning. So I think we've heard a lot about the impact of hybrid cloud ai digital transformation and I wonder as a finance person in a former CFO, what do you see? And how do you think about some of the key considerations and financials and strategies that are supporting these major projects? Right? We got to come to the CFO and say, hey, we want to spend some money and here's the benefit, here is the cost. How can see IOS and their teams work with CFOs to try to really accelerate that digital transformation. >>Great question. And actually that question, I think I might have answered it a little bit differently, like two years ago, a year ago before the pandemic, I think it's actually changed a little bit with pandemic in my experience is the CFO people would come into me for projects and there's three ways you can justify it, but you can justify short term immediate, quick payback kind of hitters, you can justify it with, you know, improving our efficiency or effectiveness, um you know, reducing costs in the long run, making the client experience better or more from a strategic point of view, um you know, growing revenue getting to new clients, improving margins right? And so the the hybrid cloud transformation journey really still addresses those three things and when we come in, a lot of people focus like I said, on that third strategic point, but but all three of those come into play, and what's really interesting now is is as I'm dealing with it, I'm talking to other Cfos. The pandemic is really, if you will throw in a wrinkle in here, right? So the clients that I'm talking to, the IBM clients, they have to operate their business very differently and and their business models, some of them are changing clearly. Their clients, their business models are changing their operating differently as well. Um So, so our clients have to react to that and Hybrid Cloud and that that that type of of a structure really can support that. So there's really an emphasis here now to act with much more speed on this journey to get moving on it to get there because you have to make these changes and doing those two things in concert really has a ton of business value. >>Yeah I mean the cfos that I've talked to in the C. I. O. S. It's really kind of industry dependent, right? If you're in airlines or hospitality was like uh we got to cut costs. A lot of organizations said okay we're gonna support remote workers put in V. D. I. Or deal with endpoint security or whatever it was. But we're actually gonna double down on our digital transformation. This is we're gonna lean into an opportunity for us to come out stronger. How did you guys approach it in terms of your own internal digital >>transformation? Yeah. We we we were working on our digital transformation uh a little bit before the pandemic and it kind of followed those those three uh those three items when they when they first started implementing it, they came in and said hey if we can if we can move to a cloud platform, our infrastructure savings will be pretty significant. You know the I. T. Infrastructure savings will be 30 to 40%. So you know, quick payback CFO types love that. So you know, we went forward with that. Um but then quickly we saw the real benefits of moving to a hybrid cloud strategy. So just as an example as we were making some of these changes, we found a workflow tool in one of our markets in europe, that was a great tool and uh if we wanted to implement that across the business um in the old days, You know, we're in 40 countries, we've got 2500 employees, three lines of business. It would have been very complex because our operating structure is is very robust, very complex. Um Probably have taken a year, two years to do that. But since we are now on a cloud platform we got that rolled out that workflow tool rolled out across our business in months, Saving 20-30 of of workload. Being much more um efficiently getting to our clients and reacting quickly to them. And in fact that tool got adopted across IBM because that cloud platform enabled that to happen. And then the great thing which I didn't even realize at the time but now thinking more strategically um are my I. T. Resource earlier was running at about 50 50 50 people working on maintenance. The kind of things with 50 on development as we've now transition to this cloud. My I. T. Resources now 70 plus percent dedicated to new development. So now we can go attack new things that really provide customer value in the pandemic. You know the first thing to look at is can we get into more um you know electronic contracts, E signatures, things that would provide value to customers anyway. But in the pandemic is like really a significant, you know differentiator for us. So all those things were enabled by that journey that we've been taking, >>interesting. I mean most of the CF I uh in fact every CFO I know of a public company took advantage of cheap debt and improving their balance sheets. And liquidity is not the problem today, especially in the tech industry at the same time. You know I'm interested in how companies are using financing. They don't want to necessarily build out data centers but they do want to fund their digital transformation. So what are you seeing in terms of how your customers are using financing? You know, what's the conversation like? What advice are you giving? >>Yeah. So um you know, it depends a little bit on the type of customer, like you said, you know, we we deal with a lot of the biggest, strongest customers in the world. And, and as we deal with them, financing really helps the return on their investment, right, aligning the payments of those cash flows for when they're getting the benefits. Uh And and we see a real good value in improving the return on those investments in helping, you know, if it's something that's going to go to the board that really makes a difference to them. Uh So, you know, that that's always been a value proposition. It continues to be. Um The other thing that's helping now, like you said, is even in this environment, people want to accelerate this transition. Um but it's a, it's a, it's a big time of uncertainty. So, you know, some of the smaller clients, some of the more uh you know, the industries that are a little more cash constrained airlines, et cetera, you know, they're looking for the the immediate cash flow benefits. Um But many of the cfos are saying, hey, listen, you know, I can I want to go as fast as I can help me put together a structure that lets me, you know, get this in place as quick as possible, but not below my budget is not make me take too much risk in this time of uncertainty, but keeps me moving and I think that's where financing really comes in as well. Um And we're kind of talking much more about that value proposition than just if you will be improved ri proposition that we've had all along. >>I want to talk a little bit more about IBM global financing. I mean, people, a lot of times people misunderstand it. You know when you look at I. B. M. S. Debt, you gotta you gotta take out the piece that IBM global financing because that's a significant portion and that's sort of self self fulfilling. But what do people need to know about IBM global financing, >>We actually run three different businesses and we've been transforming our strategy over time. So you know right now with with IBM being all in on hybrid, we are very focused on helping IBM and IBM clients on this digital journey on IBM growing their revenue. Um you know, we we in the past have been more of if you're really full service. It finance are doing a lot more than just IBM but we are really focused now on on helping IBM. So I think the best thing for for IBM clients to know is as you're talking to IBM about the total solution, the total value profit IBM brings that financing, that cash flow solution should be embedded in what they're looking at and can provide a lot of value. Um You know, the second thing I think most people know is we provide financing for IBM s channel, so you know, distributors, resellers etcetera, if you're an IBM distributor or reseller, you know about us, because just about 100% of IBM partners use us to provide that working capital financing, uh you know, we have a state of the art platforms were just so integrated with them. Again, I don't have to I don't have to do a sales pitch on that because they don't know us. Um and the third one just because people might not realize this is, we do haven't we call it an asset recovery business, um it's a pretty small business, you know, it's bringing back equipment that comes off lease, so that uh is used by IBM internally. Um and while, you know, it's not, it's not as well known, I'm pretty proud of it because it really does help with the focus that the world that IBM has on sustainability and reuse and um and making sure that, you know, we're treating the planet fairly here, so that that's a small but powerful piece of our business well, >>You're quite broader than leasing mainframes in the 80s, >>that's for sure. >>Talking more about give, you can double click on that sort of hybrid cloud and obviously machine intelligence is a big piece of those digital transformation. So, so how specifically are you, are you helping clients really take advantage of things like hybrid cloud? >>So yeah, so um what we have typically had been doing and I can give you a couple different examples if you will, you know, for larger clients. What we tend to be doing is helping them like I said, accelerate their business. So um, you know, they're looking to modernize their applications but they still have a big infrastructure in place and so they'll run into uh you know, budget constraints and and you know, cash is still be careful to managed. So for them we are much more typically focused on, you know, if you will project based financing that allows those cash flows to line up with the savings. Again, those are tend to be bigger projects that often go to boards that return benefit is very important. Ah a little bit different value proposition for more mid market customers. So, you know, as I was kind of just looking recently, we have a couple of different customers like form engineering um or or Novi still there to smaller uh compared to some of the other customers we use uh they are again much more focused on how do I, how do I conserve and best use my cash immediately? But they want to get this, they want to get this transformation going. So you know we provide flexible payment plans to them so they can go at the rate and pace that they need to, they can align up those cash deals with their budgets for their business cycles etcetera. So again, where smaller customers where timing of the cash flow in their business cycle is very important. We provide that benefit as well. >>You know, I wonder if I could ask you. So you remember of course the early days of public cloud, one of the first tail winds for public cloud was the pen was not the pandemic, the for the financial crisis of 2007. And a lot of CFO said, Okay let's shift to uh to an apex model. And now you can always provide financial solutions to customers. But it seems like today when I talk to clients, it's it's much more integrated, it's not just the public cloud, you can do that for on premises and again you always could do that. But it seems like there's much more simpatico uh in the way in which you provide that that that solution is that >>fair? Absolutely. And this might be a little to finance geeky, I don't know. But if you go back, well if you go back to the financial crisis and all that and at that time um a lot of people were looking to financing for you call that ah please. But you know if if I was talking about off balance sheet transactions right? Um and and you know between regulation etcetera etcetera, that that off balance sheet thing. First of all, people are seeing through it that much more clearly. But second, you know the the uh financial disclosure say you kind of have to show that stuff so that that if you will, window dressing benefit has gone away. So now which is great for me, we really get to talk about what's the real benefit, what is the, you know, what is the real benefit of? You know, you want to make sure that you have known timed expenditures. You know that if your business grows that your your expenses can grow evenly with those with that business growth, you don't have to take big chunky things and so you know uh financing under the covers of an integrated solution and IBM has a lot of those integrated solutions allows businesses to have that, you know, known timing known quantities. Most of the benefits that people were looking for from that affects cloud model. Um without, you know, some of the problems that you have, when you try to have to go straight to a public cloud for very, you know, big sensitive businesses, confidential confidential data etcetera. >>Thanks for that. So, okay, we're basically out of time. But I wonder if you could give us the bumper sticker and key takeaways, maybe you could summarize for our audience. >>Yeah. For those that noah global financing or dealing with IBM, my view would be in the past we might have been a little more, you know, out there with our own with our own banner etcetera. In the future. I think that you should expect to see us very well integrated into anything you're doing. I think our value proper is clear and compelling and and and will be included uh in these hybrid con transformations to the benefit of our clients. So that's that's our objective and we're well on our way there. >>Great. Anywhere, anywhere I'm gonna go for more, more familiar, obviously IBM dot com. You got some resources there. But there is >>there any Absolutely dot com? There's there's a thank you. Just probably a slash financing. But yeah, there's >>were >>loaded with information of people. >>Excellent brian thanks so much for coming to the cube. Really great to have you today. >>I appreciate the time. >>My pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody's day. Volonte for the Cuban. Our coverage of IBM think 2021, the virtual edition right back.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage here for eight of us. Reinvent 2020. Virtual normally were on the show floor getting all of the interviews and talking about the top newsmakers and we have one of them here on the Cube were remote. I'm John for your host of the Cube. George Ellis Eros, GM and director of product manager for AWS. Talking about Wavelength George. Welcome to the remote Cube Cube. Virtual. Thanks for coming on. >>Good to be here. Thanks for having a John >>Eso Andy's Kino. One of the highlights last year, I pointed out that the five g thing is gonna be huge with the L A Wavelength Metro thing going on this year. Same thing. Mawr Proofpoint S'more expansion. Take us through what was announced this year. What's the big update on wavelength? >>Yes, so John Wavelength essentially brings a W services at the edge of the five G network, allowing our AWS customers and developers to reach their own end users and devices. Five devices with very low latency enabling a number off emerging applications ranging from industrial automation and I O. T. All the way to weigh AR VR smart cities, connected vehicles and much more this year we announced earlier in the year the general availability of wavelength in two locations one in the Bay Area and one in the Boston area. And since then we've seen we've been growing with Verizon or five D partner in the U. S. And and increasing that coverage in multiple off the larger U. S cities, including Miami and D. C in New York. And we launched Las Vegas yesterday at Andy's keynote with Verizon. We also announced that we are going toe to have a global footprint with K d D I in Japan launching a wavelength in Tokyo with SK detail SK Telecom in in South Korea or launching indigestion and with Vodafone in London >>so significant its expansion. Um, we used to call these points of presence back in the old days. I don't know what you call them now. I guess they're just zones like you calling them zones, but this really is gonna be a critical edge network, part of the edge, whether it's stadiums, metro area things and the density and the group is awesome. And everyone loves at about five gs. More of a business at less consumer. When you think about it, what has been some of the response as you guys had deployed mawr, What's the feedback? Um, can you take us through what the response has been? What's it been like? What have been some of the observations? >>Yeah, customers air really excited with the promise of five G and really excited to get their hands on these new capabilities that we're offering. Um, And they're telling us, you know, some consistent feedback that we're getting is that they're telling us that they love that they can use the same A W s, a P I S and tools and services that they used today in the region to get their hands on this new capabilities. So that's being pretty pretty consistent. Feedback these off use and the you know, Sometimes customers tell us that within a day they are able to deploy their applications in web. So that's a that's pretty consistent there. We've seen customers across a number of areas arranging, you know, from from manufacturing to healthcare to a ar and VR and broadcasting and live streaming all the way to smart cities and and connected vehicles. So a number of customers in these areas are using wavelength. Some of my favorite you know, examples are in in actually connected vehicles where you really can see that future materialized. You get, you know, customers like LG that are building the completely secularized vehicle, tow everything platform, and customers like safari that allow multiple devices to do, you know, talkto the Waveland, the closest Waveland Zone process. All of those device data streams at the edge. And then, um, it back. You know messages to the drivers, like for emergency situations, or even construct full dynamic maps for consumption off the off the vehicle themselves. >>I mean, it's absolutely awesome. And, you know, one of things that someone Dave Brown yesterday around the C two and the trend with smaller compute. You have the compute relationship at the edge to moving back and forth so I can see those dots connecting and looking forward to see how that plays out. Sure, and it will enable more capabilities. I do want to get your your thoughts, or you could just for the audience and our perspective just define the difference between wavelength and local zones because we know what regions are. Amazon regions are well understood all around the world. But now you have this new concept called locals owns part of wavelength, not part of wavelengths. Are they different technology? Can you just explain? Take him in to exclaim wavelength versus local zones how they work together? >>Yeah, So let me take a step back at AWS. Basically, what we're trying to do is we're trying to enable our customers to reach their end users with low latency and great performance, wherever those end users are and whatever network they're they're using to get connected, whether that's the five g mobile network with the Internet or in I o t Network. So we have a number of products that help our customers do that. And we expect, like, in months off other areas of the AWS platform, that customers are gonna pick and twos and mix and match and combine some of these products toe master use case. So when you're talking about wavelength and local zones, wavelength is about five g. There is obviously a lot off excitement as you said yourself about five g about the promise off those higher throughput. They're Lowell agencies. You know, the large number of devices supported and with wavelengths were enabling our customers toe to make the most of that. You know, of the five G technology and toe work on these emerging new use cases and applications that we talked about When it comes to local zones, we're talking more about extending AWS out two more locations. So if you think about you mentioned AWS regions, we have 24 regions in another five coming. Those are worldwide and enabled most of our customers to run their workloads. You know all of their workloads with low latency and adequate performance across the world. But we are hearing from customers that they want AWS in more locations. So local zones basically bring a W S extend those regions to more locations by bringing a W s closer to population I t and industrial centers. You know, l A is a great example of that. We launched the lay last year toe to local zones in L. A and toe toe a mainly at the media and entertainment customers that are, you know, in the L. A Metro, and we've seen customers like Netflix, for example, moving their artist workstations to the local zones. If they were to move that somewhere, you know, to the cloud somewhere further out the Laden's, he might have been too much for their ass artists work clothes and having some local AWS in the L. A. Metro allows them to finally move those workstation to the cloud while preserving that user experience. You know, interacting with the workstations that's happened. The cloud. >>So just like in conceptualizing is local zone, like a base station is in the metro point of physical location. Is it outpost on steroids? Been trying to get the feel for what it is >>you can think off regions consisting off availability zones. So these are, you know, data center clusters that deliver AWS services. So a local zone is much like an availability zone. But instead of being co located with the rest of the region, is in another locations that, for example, in L. A. Rather than being, you know, in in Virginia, let's say, um, they are internally. We use the same technology that we use for outpost, I suppose, is another great example of how AWS is getting closer to customers for on premises. Deployments were using much of the same technology that you you probably know as Nitro System and a number of other kind of technology that we've been working on for years, actually, toe make all this possible. >>You know, anyone who's been to a football game or any kind of stadium knows you got a great WiFi signal, but you get terrible bandwidth that is essentially kind of the back hall component for the telecom geeks out there. This is kind of what we're talking about here, right? We're talking about more of an expansionary at that edge on throughput, not just signal. So there's, you know, there's there's a wireless signal, and it's like really conductivity riel functionality for applications. >>Yeah, and many. Many of those use case that we're talking about are about, you know, immersive experiences for for end users. So with five t, you get that increasing throughput, you can get up to 10 GPS. You know, it is much higher with what you get 40. You also get lower latents is, but in order to really get make the most out of five G. You need to have the cloud services closer to the end user. So that's what Wavelength is doing is bringing all of those cloud services closer to the end user and combined with five G delivers on these on these applications. You know, um, a couple of customers are actually doing very, very, very exciting things on immersive application, our own immersive experiences. Um, why be VR is a customer that's working on wavelength today to deliver a full 3 60 video off sports events, and it's like you're there. They basically take all of those video streams. They process them in the waving zone and then put them back down to your to your VR headset. But don't you have seen those? We are headsets there, these bulky, awkward, big things because we can do a lot of the processing now at the edge rather than on the heads of itself. We are envisioning that these headsets will Will will string down to something that's indistinguishable potential from, you know, your glasses, making that user experience much better. >>Yeah, from anything from first responders toe large gatherings of people having immersive experiences, it's only gonna get better. Jorge. Thanks for coming on. The Cuban explaining wavelength graduates on the news and expansion. A lot more cities. Um, what's your take for reinvent while I got you? What's the big take away for you this year? Obviously. Virtual, but what's the big moment for you? >>Well, I think that the big moment for me is that we're continuing to, you know, to deliver for our customers. Obviously, a very difficult year for everyone and being able to, you know, with our help off our customers and our partners deliver on the reinvent promised this year as well. It is really impressed for >>me. All right. Great to have you on. Congratulations on local news. Great to see Andy pumping up wavelength. Ah, lot more work. We'll check in with you throughout the year. A lot to talk about. A lot of societal issues and certainly a lot of a lot of controversy as well as tech for good, great stuff. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thanks for having me. Thanks. >>Okay, That's the cube. Virtual. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more coverage from reinvent 2023 weeks of coverage. Walter Wall here in the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah. Welcome to the cubes. Virtual coverage of 80 was reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube virtual not there in person, but we're doing remote, as is a W s. Although there there on stage live. And we're here with Dave Brown, Vice President of the Sea, to compute. Great to see you again. Great keynote last night, kicking off everything for the opening night. Great stuff. >>Yeah, well, John, it's always good to be on the Cuban. Thanks for having me back. >>You know, you're in the hot seat these days in the sense of there's so much going on. I mean, Andy, that could do a three week announcement. Keynote. It was like in three hours of nonstop you take a break to go The bathroom. You missed two announcements, right? So, so much going on. You opened up reinvent 2020 with your announcement ec2 of mac instances. And there was a ton of compute. And the theme was really you know, reinventing and reimagining compute both. I want to get into that. But let's start with the hard news. Tell me about the Mac instances. Um, you had a great use case there, That kind of illustrated in your talk. But where is this coming from? It's obviously Mac developers are big, but is this market something that you guys saw from customers or was a necessity? Take us through the thinking around the Mac instance. Easy to for Mac instances, um are going for >>absolutely absolutely So I mean me personally Matthews, a longtime Matthews that we've often thought about. Could we ever bring Mac OS to AWS? Right This thing we've spoken about on and off for many, many years and, you know, it was about a year and a half about two years ago. You know, we're always hearing new use cases from customers, and that's kind of what we're doing. So we're saying what a customer is trying to do that we don't support today, and how would we support them in that? And we started a year from customers that they have been able to successfully migrate all of the AWS workloads to AWS. So most of the server workloads to AWS and then they've got this Mac bold workload that they just weren't able to bring to us. We just didn't support Max into. It was a great example who I had on stage with me last night where you know, they over the last couple of years have been moving Ah, lot of their workloads to AWS. And and then they had these Mac money sitting around that they had to manage themselves. And so we said, could we actually do this? And so that was the one thing the customer ask. And the other thing that we realized was with the nitro system in the work that we've been doing there over the last, you know, six years, seven years since 2012, Really? And just where we are from the From nitro system point of view, we were able to wrap a Mac money without making any changes to it with nitro cards plugging a FireWire to the thunderbolt port and and and actually control that device. And so it means that you get the best of Apple hardware, which is what Apple's all about is the hard way that they make and the way that their software works with it. together with the nitric system and the cards around that inte integrating with the rest of AWS. So we're giving you, you know, high speed secure networking. We're giving you great access to elastic block store Was just integrates natively into the magma Nias? Well, a So we realized that the technology was there, the customer asked, was there and then obviously went to Apple and worked with them very closely to make it happen. And so that's kind of how it all came together. And I was incredibly excited to announce it last night. And the feedback today has just been amazing. A lot of excitement. >>Yeah, take me through the use case because, you know, obviously there's two trends going on. There's custom chips and server list kind of thing happening where you guys, I mean, really doing a good job of the eye as layer, innovating there and then platform as a service. All that software on top. I totally get that. You could see that happening. Chips custom ships to Intel, A, M, D. And others. Now you got Mac hardware. Where's the innovation use case because one would start would say, Hey, why don't you care about whether it's Mac hardware or not. Because I'm server lists. I should be programming the infrastructure actually be getting compute generically. Where does the Mac tying come in? Because that's the first question I was thinking of was, I'm a Mac user. I love Mac, but I'm also got some windows actually going on now. And ultimately, do I really care if it's compute? What's your reaction to that? Yeah, >>absolutely. I mean, if you look at Apple's ecosystem today, right, they have millions of applications in the APP store. They have 28 million developers worldwide, actually building those applications just incredible. And many of those applications, all these millions in the In the APP store itself, there's many more applications that are both by enterprises and companies, right? We have an application that we use internally at Amazon is available on my phone. That's not in the APP store, and you know, many companies are doing that and to build applications for the ecosystem, they have to be built on Mac hardware. And that's just how Apple works, right? So if you wanna build for iPad or iPhone or even Apple TV and Apple watch, you have to build those applications on a Mac. And so what we see companies doing is, you know, the old develop a meme off. Well, it works on my computer, right when you build something, you don't wanna be bullied on your local laptop for production. So they typically have a fleet of machines that they either under somebody's desk or in a data center somewhere that they use for for building these Mac applications. And so it's not possible to build a Mac application on anything other than a Mac itself. And we when we looked at it, we really didn't feel that virtualization made sense, right? Apple? I mean, they have some some virtualization that they're able to do within Mac OS itself. But if you think about how do we solve the customer use case, it's really bringing apple hardware too easy to to solve the problem and giving customers that exactly same exact same experience that they have on prep. And if you look into it like that, models just worked right. We gave them better access. Uh, you know, they've been using that data which you normally say, Hey, don't don't run production workloads on a beta. But you know, I found out if I interview with the BPS at Intuit critique that they've actually moved 80% of their production pulled wear clothes too easy to already to run on the Mac instances. And so that, and that's in the space of two months. And so, just as seamless ability to move because it's the same hardware is kind of what we were going >>after. Great, thanks for sharing that and say, one thing I wanna point out is Mac does have their own chips as well. They're going custom chips. Amazon's going custom chips. And I think I think you nailed what I was trying to understand, which is this developer community for Mac. And there's some things that are purpose built for Mac devices. So on Mac ecosystem, get the marketplace as well as you know, that that was the hardware PCs and devices, and they're only doing more and more. So this brings me to the i o t. Um, piece of it, because Apple does make devices that people wear and I watch is, um, iPhones. I mean, they're not computers anymore. They're everything. So this kind of brings up the edge conversation. So whether it's an iPhone or a five G in a Metro or I'm a stadium watching a football game and there's some sensor camera vision industrial thing there, this is the new normal. This is where you guys are kind of eating, eating up the software side that that business, because there's new capabilities here. Can you explain how compute he's, particularly C two gets to the edges because no one wants to move data around. They wanna move, compute, not data, because data is expensive and it's and it's fat. So we we talked about that we keep on years ago, but you gotta move. Compute. So how does that work Take us through your vision? >>Absolutely. And this is This is a massively growing area for us. I mean, you mentioned Apple's new M one silicon Apple silicon that they just launched a swell, and we're super excited about Apple's been doing there. We've been doing the same thing with our grab. It's on two processor and really saving customers. An incredible amount on price performance. Tried customers moving and getting 40% improvement and price performance just by moving to grab it on too. It's just incredible. Um, in terms of the edge, you know, we started this journey. We started this journey quite some time ago and bringing, you know, Lambda functions to cloudwatch and things like that. How do we bring compute to the edge? We took a look at five G, which I think it's gonna feel a lot of this right if if we look at our cell phones today was actually just talking to the Apple team yesterday with the iPhone, only came out, you know, 13 years ago. It's kind of amazing to think just how much progress we've had and what four g did for the device that's in our pocket in terms of, you know, just how much we rely on that today and what we get. Well, five g is just a step function in both in terms of latency, but also in terms of throughput. And so, you know, one of the projects we announced last year with Verizon and we now Andy announced this morning we're also gonna be rolling out with Katy D I and SK Telecom and Vodafone next year. Um is a project always like that brings aws compute to the edge of the telco network. And so with Verizon, we now have eight locations around the U. S. Where we have AWS compute capacity. And what I mean by that is literally C five instances uh, G four GPU instances for customers that want to do influence and graphics processing on the edge. And that's embedded into the five G network on DSO customers. You know, we've got a number of customers that are doing a lot of interesting things with five G in the sports area, where they have five G cameras that are, you know, submitted directly to wavelength. We no longer need to drive a truck to a stadium to record a game. You just have five G cameras, um, to, you know, automated factories where they doing robotics in factories and yet really low latency. And they don't want the computer, the factory they wanted in five G and so just exciting area for us. That's growing really, really quickly. Thea Other thing we did is obviously with local zones. We launched our first local zones in L a X last year, Los Angeles on that's being used by the movie industry, so you know right now is a lot of exciting up and running off the covert and shut down for a period of time and filming the next release of all of our favorite episodes and across all of these various streaming platforms. And a lot of that work is actually the post production is being done on on AWS on G four instances within the Los Angeles region. So, you know, very low agency for colorization animation, special effects, all that sort of things happening there. What we heard from a lot of customers was they loved outposts as well, which is our offering to put a server into a data center. And you heard from riot games in Andy's Keynote, where they actually bought a number of outposts and put them all over the U. S. And also other places of the world to really lower the Leighton see for their latest game. And so what Andy also just announced is the availability off three additional local zones. So Atlanta, Miami and Houston Sorry, Boston Miami in Houston available today, and then additional 12 available local zones next year, and what that does is that sort of spreads AWS capacity compute capacity at the edge in all of our major metropolitan hubs all of their capacities on the AWS backbone as well, but brings customers that low latency connectivity that they're looking for. Gaming developers were, you know, every every millisecond counts in terms of gameplay on so super excited to be going after that use case, which I think, you know, it's difficult to tell what the next 10 years is gonna be like. But I think Layton's he's gonna have a big part to play in the types of applications we see on our phones going forward. >>Great stuff, final question for you as we wrap up, obviously with virtualization with virtualization. But you know, the cove it is. And he pointed out, People are gonna change, is gonna be winners and losers. He kind of clearly pointed out, But the people who do lean into the cloud who have been on the cloud or taking advantage of the tail winds of cove in because of the capabilities there are two bills air higher, and you should be happy for that. But they're also gonna have more demand for you to say, Hey, I need more services. So How do you speak to those people who are leaning in who are leveraging, more, compute? What should they be looking at? What kinds of services should be connecting into compute? How should they be thinking about the future of compute so that they can take advantage of those capabilities? The lower costs, higher performance? What things are complementary for these customers as they come in, not toe dip in the water kind of things against really driving. And what do they need? >>Yeah, absolutely. And this has been a big focus on us. You know, things has bean, as I cover in my keynote, which leadership session that I'm doing tomorrow Wednesday. You know, a lot of this year has been helping customers through covert and what covert is meant for their business. Whether that is cost savings for many of them or whether it's just demand, you know that they've never experienced are expected before. I mean, we've been incredibly hard at work in servicing those customers, right? I actually catch up with Scott Sikora. In my keynote. He leads our capacity team. We talked through what it meant and how we actually provided the capacity that our customers needed during Colbert Times. But for a customer moving to us, the first thing is obviously we wanna find ways to make them very successful in the cloud, but more importantly, lower price performance for them. So what we wanted to do is give them the best possible performance that's available at the lowest possible cost. And if you look at a number of the announcements that Andy made today, you know whether it's our latest graviton processor where you can, you know, when you move to arm. I think customers often overestimate how much work it will be to move to arm. And when I talked to them after they have moved, that's ahead. Wasn't actually that much work. We actually got it up and running relatively quickly. So what's simpler than people expect? But that's an opportunity to save 40% on price performance. You know these new newer workloads like our graphics. We just launched a new G four a D, which is an AMG based GPU solution, the first time we have had an AMG GPU on the EEC too. And that's also looking to say, if you know upwards of 40% price performance of other GPU offering so just incredibly exciting for graphics, work, clothes and then in the machine learning space. Like I think, if you know, machine learning is just become the new normal, like everybody is doing it. And you know, just three years ago, everybody was thinking about whether they should do it. How would how they would use it Now that it's a lot of companies are doing it. It's really How do you How do I use it more? And that comes down to again saving costs. And so what we know with without Inferential Chip and then the new Habbaniya chip we just announced it with with the work with Intel that we're doing and then a new trainee, um, ship for training, training. We're really working to lower the cost of machine learning. And so, like we've seen many customers like Alexa was a great use case the other day. Being able to lower the cost of inference for Alexa by 35% again just helps customers, you know, move to the cloud. But I mean, just generally, you know, we're trying to support customers everywhere where there were, you know, if there are many customers are in their own data centers looking to move to AWS. You know, we have great models that can support them with our existing compute. A new savings plan offering we announced last year just great for saving costs on getting the price down So a lot. You can look at it. You know, I could go on forever. Really. It >>Certainly it's certainly is MAWR. We'll we'll do a deeper dive follow up after reinvent, but it is a wake up call. As I wrote in my post, um, for a cloud on Finally, I've been saying this for years. Horizontal scalability is a disruption on the infrastructure side, but you've got vertical specialization with data to create great modern apse of machine learning. And I actually playing out in full display here is Andy said, um, net right now. So all this benefits and all these opportunities to disrupt horizontally and then leverage the data all tied together, all coming together. You're clear. Leading the team. Great Brown, vice president of E C. Two in charge of the team that's driving the future. Compute. Thanks for coming on The Cube Cube Live coverage. Thanks. >>Thanks for having me. >>Okay. I'm John for the Q back for more live coverage after this short break

>>live from Washington, D. C. >>It's the Cube >>covering Bumi World 19. Do you buy movie? >>Hey, welcome back to the Cube. We've got candy. That's right. I am Lisa Martin in Washington, D. C. At booming World 19 with John Ferrier and John and I are excited to be talking next with a chief technology officer of candy dot com. Gary, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you for having me great to be here. >>So tell our audience about candy dot com Guinea all that you want dot com cool stuff. >>It is cool stuff. It is the endless. I'll just like going to the supermarket and never runs. Oh, it's absolutely perfect. That's actually how we started knowing that there was so much candy out there that people wanted in the lines just weren't long enough to put him in, no matter where you checked out, and we started off being the online candy store, which was a foot in the door, but it was a very small opening at that time. >>One of the things you said when I met you today whilst eating candy that you guys brought thank you very much for that was very appropriate. Um, was that candy? Is recession proof? >>It is. It's it's ah, you know, good times, bad times. You know, people are gonna have birthday parties. People get married holidays. They're going to come. You know, you've had a really great day. It's a candy bar. You know, you've had a really bad day. It's the candy bar. That's just it's an impulse buy, but it's an impulse buy with your favorite. I mean, it's something to comfort more than anything else, actually. And the technology side talk about how you guys were organized. What? Some of the challenges and how does Bumi fit in? Take us through the journey. Sure, when we started out, we thought, How hard could it be doing? Data entry will get the orders. They'll come across, we'll have some people. Instrument to the system will start filling up, you know, and then everything else will take care of itself. And within about a few minutes, we realized that that was probably not going to work. It was not scalable because first of all, data entry is air pro. You know, if you have someone actually trying to do with their, it's not gonna work for us. So we realized that there was a mechanism out there with Edie I and we went to 1/3 party provider to help us with the FBI. And that's how we started with the first couple of integrations and it was good. It got us off the ground and got us further into that door. >>So you started with, um, how many different partners trading partners take us back to kind of the last 10 years of candy dot com and how that Trading Partner Network has grown. >>Oh, it's like the journey. It's still we starts with the first step. We had one that was interested, one that wanted to work with Austin, and we started to do the work with them and figure out how to handle it. But they had multiple divisions, so, you know, there was only one that was 32 actual integrations that had to be done on being a traditional brick and mortar. It's very competitive. So once the word got out that they were work with us, there was a couple other. So we had six pretty big ones lined up early on that we needed to have integrated in up and running very quickly. >>And from a digital perspective, what were some of the initial system's applications that you implemented just start being able to manage and track those trading partner interactions to ensure that you're able to deliver? You know what? The candy, the candy demand that you need to fill? >>It was, sadly, a lot of C S V. A lot of email, a lot of phone calls back and forth. There was a lot of hours, and it was one those ones where we would really just bring in temps and try to keep up with it did not really have a repeatable process or a good technical footprint of what we needed to d'oh way didn't know what we didn't know when we started, and we very rapidly came to become aware of what we needed to do. >>So starting with air P Net sweet brought net Sweden two years ago. Tell us about that and what you thought was gonna solve all of our problems. Well, that's why it's >>a great package because it brought us both order management and it brought us here. Pee in. There were so many models and so much technology behind it and they have a warehouse module. There's, like all we could grow forever With this, it will never be bounded. This is gonna be fantastic. But what we forgot is that it was only as good as the data in there. And if we're using as a manual data entry, it's not going to meet our needs. We needed to come up with a better way in a more efficient way to get the data in. And this was still back in the day when we're trying to fulfill something within a week, much less where we're at today. >>Okay, so where does Bumi fit into play? >>We realized, unfortunately that even when you have an integration up and running and as good as the integration is, some of your trading partners will have changes. They're going to give you a different reference number. They're gonna give you a different requirement. They're gonna make something that was optional now mandatory. So we had problems because it wasn't just also that was impacting everyone that was doing an integration with that trading partner had it. So if I had outsourced it and there was 100 people that had that map. We were one of 100. Sometimes we were one, and sometimes we were as far away from one is possible and you understand that, and you appreciate it because there's only a finite number of hours to get things done. So we understood that to be really profitable and get to the level of service we needed to control the data. And that's when we decided that we needed to bring the E. D I and house. >>So when you were looking for the right integration partner, what was it about Bhumi from a technology perspective and a business perspective that really differentiated it. >>First and foremost, the number one requirement had to talk to nets. We had a have a native nets. We'd integration if it did not talk to net sweet. It wasn't gonna make it onto our plate because we weren't gonna spend the time to reinvent the wheel when obviously the wheel was out there. We had actually done that once before, and it was successful but painful. And there's people out there who build a connection and work to silver partners like blooming in the platinum partners that can go out and they can actually keep up with the release before it comes out. And you're being proactive by the reactive from a business need. It was We can't drop data. We need to be efficient. We need to be timely. We need visibility. And looking at Bumi, it met all those needs. We had a connection into nets. We had a reporting tool. We had error messages coming back. We had everything that we needed to manage our own world and take control of it. Or so we thought >>that look. Okay, so get this implemented. What sort of opportunities is the start opening up? You talked about control there, or so we thought. What have you been able to unlock where control is concerned? In the last few years, >>what we didn't realize with what we were doing is that way. We're just basically turning on everything and trying to run this efficiently and fast as possible. And that was really the wrong approach to take what we needed to do it as some governance to it as some logic to it, too, you know, not compete with jobs. There's there's a finite number of avenues into the back end system, you need to utilize it. But there was also tools that we found out inside this system that handled things like error trapping and retrial, logic and time outs and stuff like that. And as we worked with the subject matter experts at Boom, as we worked with the people at Nets, we in our account managers who would show us things and help us long. We learned a lot more about him. When we went live back in February of 2016 we were very excited. We did 1000 orders into our system and one day and we thought, How phenomenal is this? I mean, 1000 orders. How many more orders could you actually look for? And we very soon realized that there was a lot more orders willing to come into our system if we could handle it. >>So what? So when you first started with Bhumi went from some number 2 1000 orders today. What was that original number that you guys were able to handle when it was more of a manual process? >>It depend on how many attempts we could hire that sometimes it was 100 orders we got in. Sometimes it was 100% dependent on people. Also depend on someone, Remember, understands the spreadsheet. >>The Sun's painful, >>painful and not really easy to plan for. >>But you discovered pretty quickly you went from I won't say 0 to 1000. But somewhere in between that realized tha the capabilities, though of this system was gonna allow you to get 20,000 orders per day. Where was the demand coming from? Was it coming from trading partners was coming from their customers? Was it coming from your internal team seeing Hey, guys, I think there's a lot more power here than we originally thought. >>Well, success begets success because we were able to get an order in now in a timely fashion and ship it out there. All of a sudden, I realized we were shipping orders within 48 to 72 hours. It wasn't taking 10 days anymore, so we had repeat customers, which obviously makes your numbers go up. And then, as you know, your experience is good and you share it because social media is the weight of the world All the sudden, you know if if you tell two friends and they tell two friends we start getting more volume. Damn white starts happening is someone realizes they're losing market share of their brick and mortar website. And who was fulfilling the orders for them if they're doing so well and we're losing business and they start knocking on the door saying what? We'd like to work with you as well. And the other thing, too, is just timing. In the United States, it's pretty warm between April and October, and the bulk of perishable and heat sensitive product will ship through one of our warehouses because we have the thermal controls in the programs in place to give a good experience to make sure the product arrives the way it's supposed to be treated. >>Yeah, you were mentioning that when you were on stage this morning with Mandy Dolly Well, Mami CMO and Jason Maynard from Net Sweet that there are obviously, if you order some chocolate. I wanted to get there in the exact state in which I saw it online, right? But there's you've gotta have a lot of access, invisibility and systems to be able to help you facilitate that temperature control, depending on the type of product. >>Absolutely. So we're very proud of the fact that, you know, we're temperature controlled where humidity controlled were suf certified. We've done everything the right way to make sure that what we do is gonna be the best experience that your food is safe. Because, Paramount, the last thing we ever want to do is to keep a product of someone's gonna make your child sex because, you know, you don't want anyone to get sick. But the worst feeling is apparent is when your kid doesn't feel well. So we understand that Andi have a phenomenal staff. Are Q A team will go through and we have ways to test the product to get to the melting point. And we know different products melted different temperatures, and we determine what those temperatures are. We build those thresholds we do calls out to get the weather. No, I'm shipping it from my location to you. What's the temperature of my It doesn't matter if it's cold at your place. It is 90 where I'm shipping it from. So we look at what is it now? Where is it going? What's it gonna be the next few days? How big is it? You know how much product is in there with that? That isn't heat sensitive. And we have a pretty complex algorithm that we put in place That has really enabled us to handle the summer months and give a good product because, I mean a lot of people like s'mores, but they don't want the pre melted chocolate showing up at their house. >>Would agree. That takes the fun out of the bonfire part, right? Exactly. So let's talk about the people transformation because you were saying your 100% dependent on manual Somebody even sending the spreadsheet little into star inputting data to process X number of orders per day went from almost 0 to 1000 overnight with Bhumi, then saw this capacity for 20,000. How have has your team has other business units within candy like finance? How are they benefiting from all of this? What a presume is massive workforce productivity gains that you're giving everybody? >>Absolutely. It was a great problem tohave because as we got bigger and we started getting more and more orders than we got more and more invoices and you know, we got more and more checks in which we always think it's a good thing, but those checks need to be reconciled. They have to be reconciled against the transaction Inside the Nets week. It's no exaggeration that we would have pages printed out with a ruler going down and highlighting one by one on the invoice to make sure nothing was omitted. And we were spending an individual spent an eight hour day, three days a week, just going through direct missile. One invoice that was coming in and we would get two or three a week from them. So it was painful and again also error prone. And these people are very creative, very smart, and they offer so much more to the business that it was a waste of their time in a waste of their intellect. S o del. Booming, we found out, is not just any eyes phenomenal, Aditi, I but it has all these other tools and won. The tools we had was to be able to take the remittance file from the financial institution, reconcile it against the invoice is in the system and create a C S V import that would run that we have a script for that created a cash payment in our system that would actually close out the invoices and be paid so that we don't take care of it. It was done, and finance would basically get the file and e mail to us. We would file it back and they'd run an import. So instead of 250 hours a week, it was five minutes of file. >>That's a dramatics saving hundreds of hours a month, but also faster time to revenue recognition. >>That's a big one, you know, because when you try to get people discounts or give them brakes or if your terms are out there, it's nice to get it in there and keep your system's clean, because you also have to answer to the end of the month. You know you want to close the books and everything in manual processes. Air one the few things that you can't just throw more horsepower at. >>I'm glad you brought up, though from a resource kind of reallocation. Perspective is, these folks, in particular areas of the business, have value that they're not able before weren't able to really unlock and deliver. Now, with the technology in place, they're able to probably focus on more strategic areas of the business or more strategic projects. I also imagine your sales. We said faster time to revenue in revenue recognition, but big boost to candy dot comes sales. Since you've implemented the technology >>direct, I mean the sales numbers have just grown. I mean, as much as we do. No do are forecasting and think where it's going to go. Wee wee drastically underestimated this year. The summer was very, very good to us. Our first year under booming, we ran for 11 months. We did a little over 600,000 orders for that first year. In comparison, in June, July and August this year, we did over a 1,000,000 orders. That's a lot of chocolate. So a >>lot of candy, >>most certainly >>busier time, period. I mean Halloweens in a few weeks, Christmas is coming. How does that compare in terms of like the Flux >>way? Have a peek? Obviously, Halloween Halloween is obviously the time, of course. November 1st, our orders are zero because everyone walks in with a pillowcase of candy from their kids to the office, so it literally goes from a 1,000,000 miles an hour or two nothing, and it's it's kind of eerie. But throughout the summer we stay very, very busy because a lot of the market places don't have the facility and listen, they're great, you know, it's one stop shopping. They have everything, but everything is in a warehouse in that entire warehouse is not properly controlled to handle food products. So they decided it was an advantageous for them to ship, you know, during the summer, and it's poorly monitored as a summer Shipp program. But it's really more of a heat sensitive program because we'll add the thermal product to protect the thermal packaging to protect the product, even in February. I mean, there's some spots in Florida in Texas at a pretty one that you want to protect the item. So it's a heat sensitive program that we're very proud of, and we keep advancing and we keep growing. And, you know, I have. I'm very fortunate. I have a great team. I mean, we're not gonna call out, you know, like Jim and Scott, because that would be wrong to deal with. These guys have been with me from the start, and they put the E. T. I in place. They put the scripting in place that the guys were just, you know, rock stars on. Do I look good because of their effort? And I'm very, very proud of the team we've assembled that does this to make sure that you're and satisfaction is always met. >>Awesome story. So I imagine you know, when we hear like, four out of five dentists recommend this kind of bet. Is the fifth dentist recommending candy dot com? Is that where that guy's been? >>Yeah, he's got four kids >>going through college and >>everything, so he figures candy dot com to go. Way to make the money to make sure those tuition skip. >>All right. Well, Gary, it's been a pleasure to have you on the keys. Thank you for sharing what you're doing with bhumi at candy dot com. We appreciate and thanks for all the candy. >>Oh, our pleasure. Thank you very much for having been a great couple of days. I'm glad to be part of it. >>All right. Our pleasure for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Bhumi World 19. Thanks for watching

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back. I'm your host Sonia Tagare with my cohost Dave Vellante, and we're here at theCUBE NYC covering everything big data, AI, and the cloud. And this week is also New York Fashion Week, and with us today we have a guest who intersects both of those technologies, so Billie Whitehouse, CEO of Wearable X, thank you so much for being on. >> It's a pleasure, thank you for having me. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> So your company Wearable X, which intersects fashion and technology, tell us more about that. >> So Wearable X started five years ago. And we started by building clothes that had integrated haptic feedback, which is just vibrational feedback on the body. And we really believe that we can empower clothing with technology to do far more than it ever has for you before, and to really give you control back of your life. >> That's amazing. So can you tell us more about the haptic, how it works and what the technology is about? >> Absolutely. So the haptics are integrated with accelerometers and they're paired through conductive pathways around the body, and specifically this is built for yoga in a line called NadiX. And Nadi is spelled N-A-D-I. I know that I have a funny accent so sometimes it helps to spell things out. They connect and understand your body orientation and then from understanding your body orientation we pair that back with your smartphone and then the app guides you with audio, how to move into each yoga pose, step by step. And at the end we ask you to address whether you made it into the pose or not by reading the accelerometer values, and then we give you vibrational feedback where to focus. >> And the accelerometer is what exactly? It's just a tiny device... Does it protrude or is it just...? >> I mean it's as invisibly integrated as we can get it so that we can make it washable and tumble-dryable. >> So I know I rented a car recently, big SUV with the family and when I started backing up or when I get close to another car, it started vibrating. So is it that kind of sensation? It was sort of a weird warning but then after a while I got used to it. It was kind of training me. Is that-- >> Precisely. >> Sort of the same thing? And it's just the pants or the leggings, or is it the top as well? >> So it's built in through the ankles, behind the knees and in the hip of the yoga pants, and then we will release upper body work as well. >> Alright, so let's double click on this. So if I'm in a crescent pose and I'm leaning too far forward, will it sort of correct me or hit me in the calf and say, "Put your heel down," or how would that work? >> Exactly. So the audio instructions will give you exactly the kind of instructions you would get if you were in a class. And then similarly to what you would get if you had a personal instructor, the vibrations will show you where to isolate and where to ground down, or where to lift up, or where to rotate, and then at the end of the pose, the accelerometer values are read and we understand whether you made it into the pose or whether you didn't quite get there, and whether you're overextended or not. And then we ask you to either go back and work on the pose again or move forward and move on to the next pose. >> That is amazing. I usually have to ask my daughters or my wife, "Is this right?" And then they'll just shake their heads. Now what do you do with the data? Do you collect the data and can I review and improve, feed it back? How does that all work? >> So the base level membership, which is free, is you don't see your progress tracking as yet. But we're about to release our membership, where you pay $10 a month, and with that you get progress tracking as a customer. Us on the back end, we can see how often people make it into particular poses. We can also see which ones they don't make it into very well, but we don't necessarily share that. >> And so presumably it tracks other things besides, like frequency, duration of the yoga? >> Exactly. Minutes of yoga, precisely right. >> Different body parts, or not necessarily? >> So the accelerometers are just giving us an individual value, and then we determine what pose you're in, so I don't know what you mean by different body parts? >> In other words, which parts of my body I'm working out or maybe need to work on? >> Oh precisely. Yeah if you're overextending a particular knee or an ankle, we can eventually tell you that very detailed. >> And how long have you been doing this? >> It's five years. >> Okay. And so what have you learned so far from all this data that you've collected? >> Well I mean, I'm going to start from a human learning first, and then I'll give you the data learnings. The human learning for me is equally as interesting. The language on the body and how people respond to vibration was learning number one. And we even did tests many years ago with a particular product, an upper body product, with kids, so aged between eight and 13, and I played a game of memory with them to see if they could learn and understand different vibrational sequences and what they meant. And it was astounding. They would get it every single time without fail. They would understand what the vibrations meant and they would remember it. For us, we are then trying to replicate that for yoga. And that has been a really interesting learning, to see how people need and understand and want to have audio cues with their vibrational feedback. From a data perspective, the biggest learning for us is that people are actually spending between 13 to 18 minutes inside the app. So they don't necessarily want an hour and a half class, which is what we originally thought. They want short, quick, easy-to-digest kind of flows. And that for me was very much a learning. They're also using it at really interesting times of the day. So it's before seven AM, in the middle of the day between 11 and three, and then after nine PM. And that just so happens to be when studios are shut. So it makes sense that they want to use something that's quick and easy for them, whether it's early morning when they have a big, full day, or late night 'cause they need to relax. >> Sounds like such a great social impact. Can you tell us more about why you decided to make this? >> Yeah, for me there was a personal problem. I was paying an extraordinary amount to go to classes, I was often in a class with another 50 people and not really getting any of the attention that I guess I thought I deserved, so I was frustrated. I was frustrated that I was paying so much money to go into class and not getting the attention, had been working with haptic feedback for quite some time at that point, realized that there was this language on the body that was being really underutilized, and then had this opportunity to start looking at how we could do it for yoga. Don't get me wrong, I had several engineers tell me this wasn't possible about three and a half years ago, and look at us now, we're shipping product and we're in retail and it's all working, but it took some time. >> So you're not an engineer, I take it? >> I am not an engineer. >> You certainly don't dress like an engineer, but you never know. What's your background? >> My background is in design. And I truly think that design, for us, has always come first. And I hope that it continues to be that way. I believe that designers have an ability to solve problems in, dare I say, in a horizontal way. We can understand pockets of things that are going on, whether it's the problem, whether it's ways to solve the solutions, and we can combine the two. It's not just about individual problem solving on a minute level; it's very much a macro view. And I hope that more and more designers go into this space because I truly believe that they have an ability to solve really interesting problems by asking empathetic questions. >> And how does the tech work? I mean, what do you need besides the clothing and the accelerometers to make this work? >> So we have a little device called the pulse. And the pulse has our Bluetooth module and our battery and our PCB, and that clips just behind the left knee. Now that's also the one spot on the body that during yoga doesn't get in the way, and we have tested that on every body shape you can imagine across five different continents, because we wanted to make sure that the algorithms that we built to understand the poses were going to be fair for everybody. So in doing that, that little pulse, you un-clip when you want to wash and dry. >> And is that connected to the app as well? >> Exactly, that's connected via Bluetooth to your app. >> That's great. So you have all your data in your hand and you know exactly what kind of yoga poses you're doing, where you need to strengthen up. >> Exactly. >> That's great. >> And is it a full program? In other words, are there different yoga programs I can do, or am I on my own for that? How does that work? >> So with the base level membership, you can choose different yoga instructors around New York that you'd like to follow, and then you can get progress tracking, you can get recommendations, and they are timed between that 10 to 20 minutes. If you want to pay the slightly more premium membership, you can actually build your own playlists, and that's something that our customers have said they're really interested in. It means that you can build a sequence of poses that is really defined by you, that is good for your body. So that means instead of going to a class where you end up getting a terrible teacher, or music that you don't like, you can actually build your own class and then share that with your friends as well. >> Is it a Spotify-like model, where the teachers get compensation at the back end, or how does that all work? >> Exactly. Yes, precisely. >> And what do you charge for this? >> So the pants are $250, and then the base level membership is $10 a month, and then the slightly more premium is $30 a month. >> If you think about how much you would spend for a yoga class, that actually seems like a pretty good deal. >> And trust me, when you start calculating, when you go to yoga at least once a week, and it's $20 a week and then you're like, "Oh, and I went every week this year," you realize that it racks up very quickly. >> Well plus the convenience of doing it... I love having... To be able to do it at six a.m. without having to go to a class, especially where I live in Boston, when it's cold in the winter, you don't even want to go out. (all laughing) >> So what do you think the future of the wearable industry is? >> This is a space that I get really excited about. I believe in a version of the future, which has been titled "enchanted objects." And the reason I sort of put it in inverted commas is I think that often has sometimes a magical element to it that people think is a little too far forward. But for me, I really believe that this is possible. So not only do I believe that we will have our own body area network, which I like to call an app store for the body, but I believe every object will have this. And there was a beautiful Wired article last month that actually described why the Japanese culture are adopting robotics and automation in a way that western culture often isn't. And that is because the Shinto religion is the predominant religion in Japan, and they believe that every object has a soul. And if in believing that, you're designing for that object to have a soul and a personality and an ecosystem, and dare we call it, a body area network for each object, then that area network can interface with yours or mine or whoever's, and you can create this really interesting communication that is enchanted and delightful, and not about domination. It's not about screens taking over the world and being in charge of you, and us being dominated by them, as often we see in culture now. It's about having this really beautiful interface between technology and objects. And I really believe that's going to be the version of the future. >> And looking good while you do it. >> Precisely. >> You've got visions to take this beyond yoga, is that right? Other sports, perhaps cycling and swimming and skiing, I can think of so many examples. >> Exactly. Well for us, we're focused on yoga to start with. And certainly areas that I would say are in the gaps. I like to think of our products as being very touch-focused and staying in areas of athleisure or sports that are around touch. So where you would get a natural adjustment from a coach or a teacher, our products can naturally fit into that space. So whether it is squats or whether it is Pilates, they're certainly in our pipeline. But in the immediate future, we're certainly looking at the upper body and in meditation, and how we can remind you to roll your shoulders back and down, and everyone sits up straight. And then longer term, we're looking at how we can move this into physiotherapy, and so as you mentioned, you can enter in that you have a left knee injury, and we'll be able to adjust what you should be working on because of that. >> Is there a possibility of a breathing component, or is that perhaps there today? Such an important part of yoga is breathing. >> 100%. That is very much part of what we're working on. I would say more silently, but very much will launch soon. >> Well it sounds like it's going to have such a positive impact on so many people and that it's going to be in so many different industries. >> I hope so. Yeah that's the plan. >> Well Billie Whitehouse, thank you so much for being on theCUBE, and Dave, thank you. We're here at theCUBE NYC, and stay tuned, don't go anywhere, we'll be back. (inquisitive electronic music)

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan at the Automation Everywhere Imagine 2018. About 1,100 people talking about RPA, Robotics Process Automation, bots, really bringing automation to the crappy processes that none of us like to do in our day to day job. And, we're excited to have a practitioner. He's out in the field. He's talking to customers all the time. It's Weston Jones, and he's the global intelligent automation leader for EY. Weston, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you, good to be here. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, you said you've been with these guys for a number of years, so when did you get started, how did you see the vision when nobody else saw it, and here we are five years later, I think, since you first met 'em. >> Oh, I know, it's just funny. I mean, years ago I saw Automation Anywhere at conferences. They were one of the small booths, just like everybody else was, talking about automation. I watched them for several years, and then I decided one year when we were looking at some of our offerings to bring in RPA and talk to our leadership about it, and kinda the light bulbs went off. So, from five, six years ago 'til today we've been working with them, and it's really amazing to see kind of how things have changed, and how the adoption has taken place. >> You know, it's such a big moment in a startup, especially software company, when you get a big global integrator like you guys to jump in, you know, advisory service. It's really hard to do. I've been in that position myself, and you guys don't make the move unless you really see a big opportunity. So, what did you see in terms of the big opportunity that made you, you know, basically bet your career on this vertical? >> Well, so when I went to our leadership, in the meeting I had our global shared services leader. So, we have 7,000 plus people on our shared services, and he was very skeptical. We had to do 20 plus proof of concepts with him, and HR, IT, finance, et cetera, to get him excited about it. Now, he's our biggest fan, and actually we promoted him to run our global internal automation team where now we think we're one of the largest users of automation. We're one of the biggest users within tax. We use Automation Anywhere within tax. We have over 750 bots working, and we have a goal to have 10,000 plus by 2022. So, we're really pushing the bar in scaling. >> From 750 to 10,000, what are we, 2018, in four years. >> In four years. That's our goal. >> So, where did you find the early successes, what kind of bots specifically, what type of processes are kind of right for people that are interested, see the potential, but aren't really sure kinda how to get started, or to get that early success? >> Yeah, I mean, it's just almost like anything else, the quick wins, you know. Start with things that are very rules-based, that have a lot of people, FTs associated with them. You know, our thing wasn't that we were actually eliminating FTs, we were just developing capacity, 'cause we're a company that's growing, so instead of hiring more and more people, we took all that mundane work out of people's jobs and allowed them to focus on things that were more value-added. So, the block and tackle stuff-- >> Like what? Like, give me a couple of, you know, just simple stuff-- >> well, we have like HR onboarding, you know, we onboard 60,000 people a year. HR onboarding is something that's very repetitive activity, logging in and out of multiple systems. And, it was something where we were hiring HR professionals that knew how to do talent management, that knew how to do all these things we really wanted them to do, but we had 'em focused on doing a lot of very transactional type activities. So, we said why don't we use the technology for that. Let's free these people up so they can then focus on developing talent, career ladders, other things that we really wanted them to focus on. Other things like, you know, payments, matching, and payment application, things like that, password resets, you know, a lot of stuff that you, I mean, you can just think of in your head. A lot of stuff in finance, a lot of stuff in HR and IT. Even our supply chain, too. We're doing like T and Es, we're doing a lot of automation in our T and E area. But, that to say, I mean, I've mentioned all back office things. We're also doing a lot of front office. So, for example, in our tax department we use almost exclusively Automation Anywhere to do tax returns for clients. And, we have, I think, over a million plus hours that we've eliminated using Automation Anywhere. >> Now, how do you Automation Anywhere a tax return? >> Well, tax return is a very complex set of rules, and you basically, once you kind of load the rules in for certain activities, it's stuff like pulling data from one system into another, you know, doing multiple taxed jurisdictions. >> Is it just like particular steps within that, you just kinda pick off one little process at a time, one little process at a time? >> True, and then you can also put in, you can do a nice interface in the front, and you can have people giving you the data, and then you let the automation then get the data to the right parts within the tax return. >> So, I'm curious in terms of the people that create the bots. Who are they, kinda what skill sets do they have, and do you see that changing over time as you try to go from 750, whatever it is, a 20x multiple, over four years? Do you see kinda the population of people that are able to create and implement the bots growing? How do you, kinda, managing the supply side on on that? >> We have a philosophy that 70% of it's process, 30% of it's technology. We're fortunate that in our advisory area across all the major functional areas, supply chain, HR, finance, et cetera, we have process experts. So, we use those process experts to get the process down, and then what we do is we have core development teams around the world. We have a big team in India, a big team in Costa Rica. We have a team in China, and elsewhere. And, those are the developers. And, so our process people map out the process and then hand that off to the developer. So, developers, you know, we basically, I mean, with Automation Anywhere's help, we've trained them to do the work and they've made it more and more, as time goes on, they made it easier and easier for them to develop bots. And, so We've been able to take people almost right out of college. We've hired some high school students. We take people that, you know, two thirds of the American population doesn't have a college degree, so we hire non-college degrees and teach them how to do this. Not that it's easy, and to be really good you have to have time and experience, but we can teach them to do these types of activities for us. >> That's amazing. So, I wonder if you can share what are some of the biggest surprises, you know, kind of implementation surprises, or ROI types of surprises that you found in implementing these 750. >> Yeah, so one thing I tell people about is if you talk about the Gartner Hype Curve, you go up and you fall into the valley of disillusionment, and, you know, there's gonna be four or five of those valleys that are gonna happen, and you just need to power through them because the technology is so compelling, and the benefits are so compelling. I mean, there's over a dozen benefits whether it's cost savings, improved security, better accuracy, whatever. So, some of the surprises were scaling. Like, when I talk about the DIPSS, the D-I-P-S-S, DIPPS, the first one is gonna be data. People are gonna realize that their data isn't quite there in order to do the more intelligent activities. The integration, so integrating the RPA with the more intelligent pieces of the IQ bot, and other things, how do you do those integrations, how do you take other tools outside of that and integrate them. The third is penetration. I mean, penetration is very small right now. What happens is people tend to look at a whole process that needs to be automated when what you need to do is you need to think about breaking those processes apart. Like FPNA, for example, may have a couple dozen steps to it, but there are pockets of steps that are very automatable. For example, pulling data, structuring it, normalizing it, getting it into some kind of report, that can all be done by automation, then hand it off to someone to do more cognitive activities. So, the penetration is very small right now, but will continue to grow. The savings, you know, have realistic expectations on savings. When this first came out of the door a lot of people were talking very, very high numbers. I mean, you can get it every once in a while, but, the saving numbers, just be realistic about that. And, the last part is scaling. We found scaling to be something that, you know, at the time when we were doing it, very few people had done it. So, to figure out how do you scale, and how do you develop a bot control room, how do you manage the bots, how do you manage the bots interfacing with people, how do you manage the bots interfacing with other technologies. It's a lot more to it than just putting the bot up and letting it work, because they need care and feeding ongoing, because it's not related to the Automation Anywhere technology, it's more of the other things it touches, like website changes, like upgrades to different systems that the bot has to execute with. Those are gonna constantly change and you just need to make sure you're adjusting the bot to actually work in those environments. So, those are kinda the four or five things that we've seen. And, when we go from 750, to 1,000, to 10,000, I mean, we think we're gonna see much more orchestration type things. You know, how do you orchestrate in a more automated way across the bots, the people, and then the other technology. >> Right, it's funny on the scale issue 'cause they were talking about, you know, how do you go from 10 bots, you got 750 to 10,000, and there's been a concept under it that they are a digital workforce, implying that you have to manage 'em like a workforce. You gotta hire 'em, you gotta train 'em, you gotta put 'em in place, you gotta kinda keep an eye on 'em, you gotta review 'em every now and then, and really it's an active management process, it's not just set and forget. >> Yeah, we're hoping that we'll have, I mean, we have some of this already, but we'll have bots managing bots. Well, bots auditing bots. We'll have bots orchestrating bots. That's all gonna eventually happen. I think we can do some of it today, but it's gonna be more and more common. The orchestration piece is really the thing that is gonna be new, that is gonna drive a lot of people this hard to scale. >> The other two consistent themes that you just touched on that we talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, is Amara's Law, my favorite. You know, we overestimate the short term, which Gartner might call the Hype cycle, but we underestimate in the long term. Really, the other one is kinda just DevOps, and there's DevOps as a way to write code, but I think, more importantly, is DevOps as a culture, which is just look for little wins, little wins, little wins, little wins, little wins, and, before you know it, you've automated a lot and you're gonna start seeing massive returns on that effort versus the, oh, let's throw it in, we're gonna get this tremendous cost savings on day zero, day one, or day 10, or whatever it is. That's really not the strategy. >> Well, I think a lot of people maybe don't like to hear this, but it's a journey. I mean, you start out using the technology where you can. So, it's not a technology play, it's solving your biggest, most complicated problems, that's the key. And, whatever technology you need to do that, use that. So, you do the RPA, then you get more benefit when you add the IQ bots, and the intelligent stuff, and you get more benefit when you start adding, you know, technologies that are even ancillary, like Blockchain, IoT, and things like that. You'll get more and more kind of benefits from this technology. >> All right, Weston, well, thank you for sharing your stories. It's good to get it from the front lines. And, good luck on making 20,000 bots in four years. >> Thank you, thank you. >> He's Weston, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's The Cube! Covering PolyCon 18. Brought to you by PolyMath. >> Welcome back everyone, we're live here in the Bahamas with The Cube's exclusive coverage of PolyCon 18, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, both co-founders of SiliconANGLE. We start our coverage of the crypto-currency ICO, blockchain, decentralized world internet that it is becoming. It's the beginning of our tour, 2018. Our next guest is Hartej Sawhney who's the advisor at Pink Sky Capital, but also the co-founder of Hosho.io. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Hey thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks guys. >> We had a great chat last night, and you do some real good work. You're one of the smartest guys in the business. Got a great reputation. A lot of good stuff going on. So, take a minute to talk about who you are, what you're working on, what you're doing, and the projects you're involved in. >> So first of all, thank you so much for having me, it's really exciting to see the progress of high-quality content being created in the space. So my name is Hartej Sawhney. We have a team based in Las Vegas. I've been based in Las Vegas for about five years. But I was born and raised in central New Jersey, in Princeton. And my co-founder is Yo Sup Quan. We started this company about seven months ago and my co-founder's background was he's the co-founder of Coin Sighter in Exchange out of New York, which exited to Kraken. After that he started Launch Key which exited to Iovation. And prior to this company, my previous company was Zuldi, Z-U-L-D-I .com where we had a mobile point of sale system specifically for high volume food and beverage companies and businesses. So we were focused on Fintech and mobile point of sale and payment processing. So both of us have a unique background in both Fintech and cyber-security and my co-founder Yo, he's a managing partner of a crypto hedge fund named Pink Sky Capital. And he was doing diligence for Pink Sky, and he realized that the quality of the smart contracts he was seeing for deals that he wanted to participate as an investor in, and I'm an advisor in that hedge fund, we both realized that essentially the quality of these smart contracts is extremely low. And that there was nobody in this space that we saw laser focused on just blockchain security. And all the solutions that would be entailed in there. And so we began focusing on just auditing smart contracts, doing a line-by-line code review of each smart contract that's written, conducting a GAS analysis, and conducting a static analysis, making sure that the smart contract does what the white paper says, and then putting a seal of approval on that smart contract to mitigate risk. So that the code has not been changed once we've done an analysis of it, that there's no security vulnerabilities in this code, and that we can mitigate the risks for exchanges and for investors that someone has done a thorough code analysis of this. That there's no chance that this is going to be hacked, that money won't be stolen, money won't be lost, and that there's no chance of a security vulnerability on this. And we put our company's name and reputation on this. >> And what was the problem that is the alternative to that? Was there just poorly written code? Was it updated code? Was it gas was too expensive? They were doing off-chain transactions. I mean what are some of the dynamics that lead you guys down this path? I mean this makes sense. You're kind of underwriting the code, or you're ensuring it or I don't know what you call it, but essentially verifying it. What was the problem? And what were some of the use cases of problems? >> I would say that the underlying problem today in this whole industry, of the blockchain space, is that the most commonly found blockchain is Ethereum. The language behind Ethereum is called Solidity. Solidity is a brand new software language that very few people in the world are sufficient programmers in Solidity. On top of that, Solidity is updated, as a language on a weekly basis. So there are a very limited number of engineers in the world who are full-stack engineers, that have studied and understand Solidity, that have a security background, and have a QA mindset. Everything that I just said does exist on this Earth today and if it does, there's a chance that that person has made too much money to want to get out of bed. Because Ethereum's price has gone up. So the quality of smart contracts that we're seeing being written by even development shops, the developers building them are actually not full-stack engineers, they're web developers who have learned the language Solidity and so thus we believe that the quality of the code has been significantly low. We're finding lots of critical vulnerabilities. In fact, 100% of the time that Hosho has audited code for a smart contract, we have found at least a couple of vulnerabilities. Even as a second or the third auditor after other companies conduct an audit, we always find a vulnerability. >> And is it correct that Solidity is much more easy to work with than say, Bitcoin scripting language, so you can do a lot more with it, so you're getting a lot more, I don't want to say rogue code, but maybe that's what it is. Is that right? Is that the nature of the theory? >> Compared to Bitcoin script, yes. But compared to JavaScript, no. Because Fortune 500 companies have rooms full of Java engineers, Java developers. And now the newer blockchains are being written, are being written on in block JavaScript, right? So you have IBM's Hyperledger program, you have EOS, you have ICX, Cardano, Stellar, Waves, Neo, there's so many new projects that are coming, that all of them are flexing about the same thing. Including Rootstock, RSK. RSK is a project where they're allowing smart contracts to be tied to the Bitcoin blockchain for the first time ever. Right, so Fortune 500 companies may take advantage of the fact that they have Java developers to take advantage of already, that already work for them, who could easily write to a new blockchain, and possibly these new blockchains are more enterprise grade and able to take more institutional capital. But only time will tell. And us as the auditor, we want to see more code from these newer blockchains, and we want to see more developers actually put in commits. Because it's what matters the most, is where are the developers putting in commits and right now maximum developers are on the Ethereum blockchain. >> Is that, the numbers I mean. Just take a step there. So the theory of blockchain. Percentage of developers vis-a-vis other platforms percentages-- >> By far the most is on developed on Ethereum. >> And in terms of code, obviously the efficiencies that are not yet realized, 'cause there's not enough cycles of coding going on, it's evolution, right? >> Yes. >> Seems to be the problem, wouldn't you say? So a combination of full-stack developer requirements, >> Yes. >> To people who aren't proficient in all levels of the stack. >> Yes. >> Just are inefficient in the coding. It's not a ding on the developers, it's just they're writing code and they miss something, right? Or maybe they're not sufficient in the language-- >> It's a new language. The functions are being updated on a weekly basis, so sometimes you copied and pasted a part of another contract, that came from a very sophisticated project, so they'll say to us, well we copied and pasted this portion from EOS, so it should be great. But what that's leading to is either A, they're using a function that's now outdated, or B, by copying and pasting someone else's code from their smart contract, this smart contract is no longer doing what you intended it to do. >> So now Hartej, how much of your capability is human versus machine? >> Yeah I was going to ask that. >> ML, AI type stuff? >> So we're increasingly becoming automated, but because of the over, there's so much demand in the space. And we've had so much demand to consistently conduct audits, it's tough to pull my engineers away from conducting an audit to work on the tooling to automate the audit, right? And so we are building a lot of proprietary tooling to speed up the process, to automate conducting a GAS analysis, where we make sure you're not clogging up the blockchain by using too much GAS. Static analysis, we're trying to automate that as fast as possible. But what's a bit more difficult to automate, at least right now, is when we have a qualified full-stack engineer read the white paper or the source of truth and make sure the smart contract actually does it, that is, it's a bit longer tail where you're leveraging machine learning and AI to make that fully automated. (talking over each other) >> But maybe is that, I'm sorry John. Is that the long term model or do you think you can actually, I mean there's people that say augmented intelligence is going to be a combination of humans and machines, what do you think? >> I think it's going to be a combination for a long time. Every single day that we audit code, our process gets faster and faster and faster because once we find a vulnerability, finding that same vulnerability next time will be faster and easier and faster and easier. And so as time goes on, we see it as, since the bundle of our work today is ICOs, token generation events, there are ERC 20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. And we don't know how long this party will last. Like maybe in a couple years or a couple months, we have a big twist in the ICO space that the numbers will drastically go down. The long tail of Hosho's business for us, is to keep track of people writing smart contracts, period. But we think they are going to become more functional smart contracts where the entire business is on a smart contract and they've cut out sophisticated middle men. Right and it may be less ICOs, and in those cases I mean, if you're a publicly traded company, and you're going from R&D phase where you wrote a smart contract and now actually going to deploy it, I think the publicly traded company's going to do three to five audits. They're going to do multiple audits and take security as a very major concern. And in the space today, security is not being discussed nearly as much as it should. We have the best hedge funds cutting checks into companies, before the smart contract is even written, let alone audited. And so we're trying to partner with all the biggest hedge funds and tell the hedge funds to mandate that if you cut a check into a company that is going to do a token generation event, that they need to guarantee that they're going to at least value security, both in-house for the company and for the smart contract that's going to be written. >> How much do you charge for this? I mean just ballpark. Is it a range of purchase price, sales price? What's the average engagement go for, is it on a scope of work? Statement of work? Or is it license? I mean how does it work? >> So first it depends is it a penetration test of the website or the exchange? Penetration testing of exchanges are far more complex than just a website. Or if it's a smart contract audit, is it an ICO or is it a functional smart contract? In either case for the smart contract audit, we have to build a long set of custom tooling to attack each and every smart contract. So it's definitely very case-by-case. But a ballpark that we could maybe give is somewhere around the lines of 10 to 15 thousand dollars per 100 lines of functional code. And we ask for about three weeks of lead time for both a smart contract audit and a penetration test. And surprisingly in this space, some of the highest caliber companies and high caliber projects with the best teams, are coming to us far too late to get a security audit and a penetration test. So after months of fundraising and a private pre-sale and another pre-sale, and going and throwing parties and events and conferences to increase the excitement for participating in their token sale, what we think is the most important part, the security audit for a smart contract is left to the last week before your ICO. And a ridiculous number of companies are coming to us within seven days of the token sale, >> John: Scrambling. >> Scrambling, and we're saying but we've seen you at seven conferences, I think that we need to delay your ICO by two or three weeks. We can assure you that all of your investors will say thank you for valuing security, because this is irreversible. Once this goes live and the smart contract is deployed. >> Horse is out of the barn. >> It's irreversible. >> Right right. >> And once we seal the code, no one should touch it. >> It's always the case with security, it's bolted on at the last minute. >> It's like back road recovery too, oh we'll just back it up. It's an architectural decision we should have made that months ago. So question for you, the smart contract, because again I'm just getting my wires crossed, 'cause there's levels of smart contracts. So if we, hypothetical ICO or we're doing smart contracts for our audience that's going to come out soon. But see that's more transactional. There's security token sales, >> Yes. >> That are essentially, can be ERC 20 tokens, and that's not huge numbers. It could be big, but not massive. Not a lot transaction costs. That's a contract, right? That's a smart contract? >> People are writing smart contracts to conduct a token generational event, most commonly for an ERC 20 token, that's correct. >> Okay so that's the big, I call that the big enchilada. That's the big-- >> Right now that is the most important, the most common. >> Okay so as you go in the future, I can envision a day where in our community, people going to be doing smart contracts peer-to-peer. >> Sure. >> How does that work? Is that a boiler plate? Is is audited, then it's going to be audited every time? Do the smart contracts get smaller? I mean what's your vision on that? Because we are envisioning a day where people in our audience will say hey Hartej, let's do a white paper together, let's write it together, have a handshake, do a smart contract click, click. Lock it in. And charge a dollar a download, get a million downloads, we split it. >> I envision a day where you can have a more drag and drop smart contract and not need a technical developer to be a full-stack engineer to have to write your smart contract. Yes I totally envision that day. >> John: But that's not today. >> We are very far from that today. >> Dave, kill that project. >> We're so far, we're very far from that. We're light years far from that. >> Okay well look. If we can't eliminate the full-stack engineers, I'm okay with that. Can we eliminate the lawyers? At least minimize them. >> We can minimize them possibly, but we have five stacks of lawyers for our company, I don't see them going anywhere. We need lawyers all the time. >> I see that in the press sometimes, yeah it's going to get disrupted. I don't see it happening. Okay we were having a great conversation off-camera about what makes a good ICO. You see, you have a huge observation space. And you were very opinionated. A lot of companies are out there just floating a token because they're trying to raise money. And they could do the same thing with Ethereum or Bitcoin. >> That's correct. >> Your thoughts? >> My thoughts are that it's very important for companies who are sophisticated, I think, to start by giving away a little bit of equity in the business. And that if you want to be in the blockchain space, and you really firmly believe you have a model to have a token within a decentralized application, I would still start by finding quality investors in the space, in the world. They might be still in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley didn't just disappear overnight now that the blockchain is out. I am all for the fact that Silicon Valley no longer has as much of a grip on tech because of their blockchain world. And they're not seeing as much deal flow, and there's not as much reliance on venture capitalists, that's exciting to me. But let's not forget the value, that top-tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Vinod Khosla. and Fintech VCs like Commerce Ventures and Nyca Partners in New York, Propel VC, these are good Fintech VC arms that continue to time and time again add immense value to companies. >> And they have networks. They add value. >> They have strong-valued networks, but they're just not going to disappear. And those VCs, if they've invested into a company, took a board seat, fostered their growth, taught them what it means to actually be a real business that's growing at 7-15% week over week, maybe two years down the line, after they've given away a board seat to someone like Nyca Partners, I would be interested in understanding what your token economics look like. Now that you have a revenue generating business, how you've placed a token model into this already running business that makes 25 to 50 grand a month and you have a team of 10, self-sustaining themselves off of revenue. Much more intriguing of a conversation. What's happening today in the space is, hey my buddy Jim and Steve and I came up with an idea for this business. There's going to be a token, and we're starting a private pre-sale tomorrow. I'm going to give you 300% bonus and will you be my advisor? And they're going to start raising capital because of an idea. You know what we used to say in the Silicon Valley startup world, you can raise on just a PowerPoint. I think in the blockchain world, you could raise on just an idea? And then maybe a white paper? And the white paper is one page? And so you've raised a bunch of capital, you have a white paper. >> Now you got to build it. >> Now you got to build, you got to write a smart contract, you got to build it, you got to do it, and then everyone loses excitement and it goes back to our previous conversation the development talent. So, another thing not being discussed in the space is company employee retention, right? So if you have a growing number of ICOs, that have very large budgets because investors have found a way to sink millions of dollars into a company early, you've got $5 million in the hands of a company to start, well this company can afford to pay someone a very ridiculous salary to come join them to write the smart contract now. So they could offer an engineer 500 Eth a month to come join them for three months. So you have good engineers just bouncing from one ICO to the next and as soon as the ICO goes live, they quit. This is a problem to companies who are-- >> It's migration, out migration. >> How do you retain, even capital? >> Companies like Hosho, ShapeShift, companies that are selling picks and shovels of the industry, that want to be household names in the space, we have to really think about how we're going to retain our employees in the space. >> So the recruitment and bringing on the new generation, we were also talking off camera about Bill Tye and the younger generation and kind of riffing on the notion that, because there is a new set of mission-driven developers and builders, on the business side as well. Your thoughts and reaction to what you see and what you see that's good and what you see that we need more of? >> So the most powerful thing in the blockchain space that I think is so exciting is that you have a lot of people between the age of 25 and 35 that don't come from money, that didn't go to Stanford, didn't go to Y Combinator, they're probably not white, from-- >> John: Ivy League schools. >> Ivy League schools. I'm not trying to make it about race, but if you're a white male and went to Stanford and went to Y Combinator, chances of you raising VC money on sand hill are a lot higher, right? And you have a guy looking like me who didn't go to Stanford, doesn't come from money, running up and down sand hill, I have personally faced that battle and it wasn't easy. And we were based in Vegas and so being based in Vegas, I'd also have to deal with so why do you live in Vegas? When are you going to move to Silicon Valley? And if we invest in you, you're going to open an office in sand hill right? And now in the blockchain world, what's exciting is you have so many heavy-hitters running as founders, some of the most successful companies in the space, who don't come from money and a big prestigious background, but they're honest, they're hard-working, they're putting in 12 to 15 hours of work every single day, seven days a week. And to space, six weeks is like six years. And we all have a level of trust that goes back to times when we were all running struggling startups. And so our bond is, to me, even more significant than what must have been between Keith Rabois and Peter Thiel in the PayPal Mafia. We have our own mafias being formed of much stronger bonds of younger people who will be able to share much more significant deal flow so if the PayPal Mafia was able to join forces to punch out companies like eBay and Square, wait 'til companies in this space, we have young, heavy-hitters right now who are non-reliant on some of the more traditional older folks. Wait 'til you see what happens in the next couple years. >> Hartej, great conversation. And I want to get one more question in. We've seen Keiretsu Forum, mafias, teams more than ever as community becomes an integral part of vetting and by the way trust, you have unwritten rules. I mean baseball, Dave and I used to do sports analogies. >> Self-governance. >> Reggie Jackson talked about unwritten rules and it works. If you beam the batter, the other guy, your best star, your side's going to get beamed. That's an unwritten rule. These are what keeps things going, balanced through the course of a season. What are the unwritten rules in the Ethos right now? >> Honesty, transparency, and that's the key. We need self-governance. This is a very unregulated market. There's rules being broken by people who are ignorant to the rules. The most common rule I've seen being broken is by people who are not broker dealers, running around fundraising capital, they don't even know what an institutional advisor license is. They don't know what a Series 7 and a Series 63 is. I asked a guy just last night, he said I'm pooling capital, I'm syndicating, let me know if you want in on the deal. And I said when did you take your Series 7? He goes what's that? Get away from me. You're an American, you need to look up what US securities laws are and make sure that you're playing by the rules and if someone who doesn't know the rules has entered our inner circle of investors, of advisors, of people sharing deal flow, we have a good network of people that are closing the loop for companies, whether it's lawyers, investors, exchanges, security auditors, people who write smart contracts, dev shops, people who write white papers, PR marketing, people who do the road show, there's a full circle-- >> So people are actually doing work to put into the community, to know your neighbor if you will, know the deals that are going down, to identify potential trip wires that are being established by either bad actors or-- >> KYC, AML, this is a new space that's also attracting people that have a criminal background. Right? And that's just a harsh reality of the space. That in the United States if you have a felony on your record, maybe getting a job has become really difficult and you figured let's do an ICO, no one's going to check my record. That is a reality of the space. Another reality is the money that was invested into this entire ICO clean. Right, that's a massive issue for the US government right now. It's been less than 15 hours since the SEC has issued actually subpoenas to people on this exact topic, today. >> This is a great topic, we'd like to do more on. >> Dozens of them. >> We'd like to continue to keep in touch with you on The Cube. Obviously you're welcome anytime, loved your insight. Certainly we'd love to have you be an advisor on our mission, you're welcome anytime. >> For sure, let's talk about it. Come out to Las Vegas. Hosho's always happy to host you. >> John And Dave: We're there all the time. >> The Cube lives at the sands. >> It's our second home. >> Come by Hosho's office and let us know. Vegas is our home. We are hosting a conference in Vegas after DEFCON. So DEFCON is the biggest security conference in the world. You have the best black hats and white hats show up as security experts in Vegas and right on the tail end of it, Hosho's going to host a very exclusive invite-only conference. >> What's it called? Just Hosho Conference? >> Just Blockchain. It'll be called the just, it'll be by the Just Blockchain Group and Hosho's the main backer behind it. >> Well we appreciate your integrity and your sharing here on The Cube, and again you're paying it forward in the community, that's great. Ethos we love that. That's our mission here, paying it forward content. Here in the Bahamas. Live coverage here at PolyCon 18. We're talking about securitized token, a decentralized future for awesome things happening. I'm Jeff Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by LaFawn Davis, she is the global head of culture and inclusion at Twilio. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So let's start by telling our viewers what you do at Twilio. What does the global head of culture and inclusion do? >> That's a great question, it's kind of a newer title, so the culture piece is around our environment, our workspace, how employees feel, and it also incorporates employee experience, so we want to make sure that all the great talent we get in, we actually keep and develop and grow, and then there's the inclusion piece, the D&I piece, and that's the piece that people typically understand, so that is attracting, recruiting, retaining and developing top talent, it's making sure that we're looking at all of the diverse workforce that we want to have in the company, that we're serving our employees in the right way, and so it's nice that it's going to have both sides of that so it's not just purely about recruiting, it's not purely about numbers. It really is about how employees feel and it's whether or not they feel included, but also belong. >> So how do you do that? I mean, that's what every company wants, is to make employees feel happy about coming to work every morning. How do you do it? >> You have to ask. So it's really important that we have values that we can stand upon, every day. So we have what we call Nine Things, and they really are values, things like draw the owl, which is like you have to start somewhere. >> Rebecca: Draw the owl? >> Draw the owl. It's from an old internet meme that's around the way you draw an owl is you start with two circles, and then you draw the rest of the owl. You have to start somewhere. We have another one that's be humble. No shenanigans, that one you hear a lot, like if you're in a meeting and people are kind of ... thinking of doing things a different way? >> There are a few tech companies that maybe could have benefited from those shenanigans, but yeah. >> We'll call each other out, I mean, you'll hear it around the office. >> Rebecca: Do they, though? >> Oh no, absolutely. They absolutely will, they'll say, "That sounds a little shenanigan-y." or, you know, "We're not supposed to be doing "shenanigans here, so let's really "figure out how to do the right thing." And I think when you have values that are that specific, you can stand on them, you can count on them, and you can call each other out. >> Shenanigan-y? I love it, okay. >> (laughs) So it's like, let's be honest, and let's do what's right. >> But at the same time, I mean, it is, I understand how that can become the sort of safe word, and it's almost funny to say, "Hey, what are you doing here?" But how do you make those employees feel empowered enough to be able to call someone out, particularly if that person is a manager or a white guy that just has more bluster. >> Yeah, it starts from the top down. But even before I got to Twilio, I've only been at Twilio for six months but I did in the space for well over a decade, and what Twilio has is a top down and a bottoms up, so they were doing diversity inclusion and had employee resource groups before I got there. Three years before I got there, and the CEO is fantastic, and it really starts from that, messaging, you can tell the CEO he's being shenanigan-y. He expects you to, so we're hiring in people that espouse our values, we're looking for that, we're making sure that people come in with that understanding of, we don't want shenanigans here, we want you to be humble here, we want you to draw the owl, we want you to really acquire knowledge and thirst after it. Those are the things we look for, and so if you keep hiring people like that that already lend to your values, you're going to have, continue to have that culture. And it's not really about, oh I don't want to say this in front of, like, a C-Suite executive or in front of a leader, it's expected of you that you live those values no matter who you are. >> So as you've said, you've been in this space for a while, you worked for PayPal, Google, Yahoo. What have been the biggest changes you've seen over the course of your career? >> Yeah, so it's really a journey, right? I think the diversity journey especially ten years ago started with diversity, numbers, demographics, and it was really just gender globally and ethnicity U.S., and that's it and that's what people talked about, and those were the efforts that people made. It was really about recruiting, and now it's gone into more of the inclusion space and making sure people feel like they have a voice that can be heard, or they have a seat at the table, but honestly right now where we're at is the belonging space, right? Inclusion is really about making sure other people feel included and that you're hearing other perspectives. Belonging is a personal feeling. I feel like I belong here, and I'll tell you a funny story. When I first started Twilio, probably about two weeks in, I sit on the people team, which is next to the legal team, and the legal team's having this discussion and I'm like, wait a minute, oh my gosh, are you all conspiracy theorists? And they're like yeah! And I go, oh! Oh, you're my people! (Rebecca laughs) 'Cause I'm the one with the whiteboard and the red string and the tinfoil hat, and I immediately felt a sense of, you're my people, I feel like I'm supposed to be here. Everyone wants that feeling, and so the belonging space is really where companies are starting to focus, it's not just about having a seat at the table. Do you want to be here, do teams work well together? Are we working on something that's important to you? Do we have a vision that's inspiring to you? And that's more around belonging. I think the next step in this journey is equality, and we are a long way from that. >> And what do you make of that? I mean, you have been in this space for a while now, at some of the biggest, most respected tech names in the industry, and some of their names have been dragged through the mud around these issues, so I mean, are you discouraged, are you hopeful, what's your feeling now? >> I'm hopeful. I don't think I would still be doing it this long if I wasn't hopeful, and yes, I get tired. (laughs) >> Yeah, that we're still talking about it. >> Definitely get fatigued, but I'm very passionate about it, and that's how I ended up in this career. I started off in operations when I was at Google, and I was one of the founding members of the Black Googler Network, which is an employee's resource group, and I just got really passionate about being strategic. It wasn't just about building a sense of community. It was, no, let's figure out how to attract, recruit, retain and develop talent. Let's figure out like what the company needs and how we can plug in, and not just ... I mean, it lit a fire in me, and so I took lots of different roles within the D&I space and every time I think I'm going to step out, I get sucked back in. (they laugh) And so I think there's so much work to do. I think people inherently want to do the right thing. There's some bad apples that have been dragged through the mud lately, absolutely, but I think for the most part, people are coming from a good place. They may not know what to do, I think we have to change the conversation, because if we continue to do the same things over and over again, and they're not working, that should say something, right? >> So these, in terms of your past companies, Yahoo, Google, PayPal, they are much bigger than Twilio, Twilio is ... >> Less than a thousand employees. >> Less than a thousand people. How would you describe the biggest differences in terms of trying to affect change? >> Yeah, so I think the nice thing is, this is the first company where I don't fee like I have to talk about the business case for diversity. >> Rebecca: They already get it. >> They already get it, it's already got. My CEO will tell the story that when he started this company, he's like, I'm trying to build a company, and people were like, diversity, diversity, he's like, I'm trying to build a company. And then he really thought about it, and said, "Well, when is the right time to think about diversity? Is it when I have a thousand white male engineers?" Right, at that point you're fixing a problem as opposed to just starting with it and hiring people around that, and so it's the first company where I feel like that was already there, which is wonderful because now I can focus on the things that make the greatest impact, instead of starting from scratch, and so a smaller company, especially with more of a startup mentality, they just went public last year, I think it's almost easier in a way to make more progress because of that. >> And just in terms of what your CEO said about having to fix the problem, how do you think Twilio's products, how can you, how would a customer be able to tell that this was made by a diverse group of people, and it wasn't just a bunch of white guys in a room wearing hoodies, developing the Twilio suite? >> Platform. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> The whole goal of the Twilio platform is to power up communication, right? That's the entire goal, and so I think as we're out and about, I mean we have this really cool role and it made this all tour, I just don't know it, and they're called developer evangelists, which I would love to be if I actually coded a little bit more, and they actually are the kind of, the middle of coding and evangelizing kind of what Twilio does, but a little bit of sales too, and so they're actually touching the community. We have community developers, we have, so it's not just people sitting at a desk in a room talking about what's best for people. It's we get out into the community, we understand what developers need, and we're constantly trying to figure out how do we create more doers, that's what we call people who create things. How do we create more doers? We have twilio.org, which is our foundation working with nonprofits, and there are social justice apps built on the platform. There are life-saving apps built on the platform. And we're funding these organizations so they can continue to build more and more on our platforms and change people's lives, and so I think that, and those examples, actually help people understand it's not just 400 white guys sitting in a room creating something for them. We're actually getting out and understanding what people need. >> And the research around diversity shows that diverse teams, it may take them a little slower to get the work done but the work is better, because it has taken in multiple perspectives, it has there's been more sort of fighting, and I don't mean to say fighting in the pejorative sense, but just getting to the ... >> LaFawn: Debating. >> The right answer, yeah, debate, exactly. (LaFawn laughs) To get to the right answer. I mean, would you say that's the experience? And I know you're not on the technical side, but what are you hearing from your ... >> I challenge that. >> Rebecca: Okay, all right. >> Every employee is encouraged to build something on the Twilio platform when they start, no matter what role they're in, and I am not in a technical role, but I know a little bit of coding now. But yes, absolutely, healthy debate is absolutely encouraged. How else are you going to build something for other people? It's really easy to just say, "I think we need to do this feature," right, but if that's not what people need, or you're not getting other perspectives, then you're building an inferior product. And so absolutely, you have to have that healthy debate, it's encouraged, and I see it (laughs) but it's not in a disrespectful way. So I have, being a part of the tech industry for a long time, I have seen some conversations that weren't so great, and people not treating each other well, thinking that that's how you have-- >> A little shenanigan-y. >> That's very shenanigan-y, right? Or calling each other names because they think that's how you get your point across. And I just don't feel that way at Twilio. It's much more respectful. I'm not saying that they don't get into it because I think you have to in order to really innovate. >> Well, LaFawn, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really a lot of fun talking to you. >> Thank you so much, you too. >> We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (electronic music)