a theme that I heard here that definitely resonated is we have complexity we need to deal with interoperability everybody has a lot of things and that's the future work hybrid multi cloud world that you have and that's really the state of open source it's not a thing if there's lots of things you take the pieces you need because you know when we think about what we are as a community I talked about how we're a community of people who build and operate open infrastructure and it's really about solving problems and if you want to if you're as open community collaboration you want to solve problems you can't be afraid to stand up and say we have problems and sometimes maybe that build off just about connecting branch office together it's not about just connecting application in the data center it's actually connecting the users in the branch office with the applications in the data center or in the public cloud and since of a stack is a big application with a lot of moving parts kubernetes actually becomes a very powerful - or any other container orchestration scheme becomes a very powerful tool for saying that you drop OpenStack on top of that and then all of a sudden you have a public cloud that's available for you know for the users within your organization or you could invent a public cloud and providing these services for other people and then suddenly that becomes a great platform for hosting kubernetes applications technology goes on the edge we still need to account for as they're excited by the economics of that edge pay a big big part of their of that game right so there is scale it's it's in the thousands of the forms of presence and the hundreds of thousands of positive presence or four different buildings where you can put a like an edge clamp right also the use case are still being defined but its scale on a different organ book

(introductory riff) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the "AWS Startup Showcase." This is Season 2, Episode 3 of our ongoing series that features great partners in the massive AWS partner ecosystem. This series is focused on, "MarTech, Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences." I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got two guests here with me to talk about this. Please welcome Daisy Urfer, Cloud Alliance Sales Director at Algolia, and Jason Lang, the Head of Product for Apply Digital. These folks are here to talk with us today about how Algolia's Search and Discovery enables customers to create dynamic realtime user experiences for those oh so demanding customers. Daisy and Jason, it's great to have you on the program. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Daisy, we're going to go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of Algolia, what you guys do, when you were founded, what some of the gaps were in the market that your founders saw and fixed? >> Sure. It's actually a really fun story. We were founded in 2012. We are an API first SaaS solution for Search and Discovery, but our founders actually started off with a search tool for mobile platforms, so just for your phone and it quickly expanded, we recognize the need across the market. It's been a really fun place to grow the business. And we have 11,000 customers today and growing every day, with 30 billion searches a week. So we do a lot of business, it's fun. >> Lisa: 30 billion searches a week and I saw some great customer brands, Locost, NBC Universal, you mentioned over 11,000. Talk to me a little bit about some of the technologies, I see that you have a search product, you have a recommendation product. What are some of those key capabilities that the products deliver? 'Cause as we know, as users, when we're searching for something, we expect it to be incredibly fast. >> Sure. Yeah. What's fun about Algolia is we are actually the second largest search engine on the internet today to Google. So we are right below the guy who's made search of their verb. So we really provide an overall search strategy. We provide a dashboard for our end users so they can provide the best results to their customers and what their customers see. Customers want to see everything from Recommend, which is our recommended engine. So when you search for that dress, it shows you the frequently bought together shoes that match, things like that, to things like promoted items and what's missing in the search results. So we do that with a different algorithm today. Most in the industry rank and they'll stack what you would want to see. We do kind of a pair for pair ranking system. So we really compare what you're looking for and it gives a much better result. >> And that's incredibly critical for users these days who want results in milliseconds. Jason, you, Apply Digital as a partner of Algolia, talk to us about Apply Digital, what it is that you guys do, and then give us a little bit of insight on that partnership. >> Sure. So Apply Digital was originally founded in 2016 in Vancouver, Canada. And we have offices in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, LA, San Francisco, Mexico city, Sao Paulo and Amsterdam. And we are a digital experiences agency. So brands and companies, and startups, and all the way from startups to major global conglomerates who have this desire to truly create these amazing digital experiences, it could be a website, it could be an app, it could be a full blown marketing platform, just whatever it is. And they lack either the experience or the internal resources, or what have you, then they come to us. And and we are end-to-end, we strategy, design, product, development, all the way through the execution side. And to help us out, we partner with organizations like Algolia to offer certain solutions, like an Algolia's case, like search recommendation, things like that, to our various clients and customers who are like, "Hey, I want to create this experience and it's going to require search, or it's going to require some sort of recommendation." And we're like, "Well, we highly recommend that you use Algolia. They're a partner of ours, they've been absolutely amazing over the time that we've had the partnership. And that's what we do." And honestly, for digital experiences, search is the essence of the internet, it just is. So, I cannot think of a single digital experience that doesn't require some sort of search or recommendation engine attached to it. So, and Algolia has just knocked it out of the park with their experience, not only from a customer experience, but also from a development experience. So that's why they're just an amazing, amazing partner to have. >> Sounds like a great partnership. Daisy, let's point it back over to you. Talk about some of those main challenges, Jason alluded to them, that businesses are facing, whether it's e-commerce, SaaS, a startup or whatnot, where search and recommendations are concerned. 'Cause we all, I think I've had that experience, where we're searching for something, and Daisy, you were describing how the recommendation engine works. And when we are searching for something, if I've already bought a tent, don't show me more tent, show me things that would go with it. What are some of those main challenges that Algolia solution just eliminates? >> Sure. So I think, one of the main challenges we have to focus on is, most of our customers are fighting against the big guides out there that have hundreds of engineers on staff, custom building a search solution. And our consumers expect that response. You expect the same search response that you get when you're streaming video content looking for a movie, from your big retailer shopping experiences. So what we want to provide is the ability to deliver that result with much less work and hassle and have it all show up. And we do that by really focusing on the results that the customers need and what that view needs to look like. We see a lot of our customers just experiencing a huge loss in revenue by only providing basic search. And because as Jason put it, search is so fundamental to the internet, we all think it's easy, we all think it's just basic. And when you provide basic, you don't get the shoes with the dress, you get just the text response results back. And so we want to make sure that we're providing that back to our customers. What we see average is even, and everybody's going mobile. A lot of times I know I do all my shopping on my phone a lot of the time, and 40%-50% better relevancy results for our customers for mobile users. That's a huge impact to their use case. >> That is huge. And when we talked about patients wearing quite thin the last couple of years. But we have this expectation in our consumer lives and in our business lives if we're looking for SaaS or software, or whatnot, that we're going to be able to find what we want that's relevant to what we're looking for. And you mentioned revenue impact, customer churn, brand reputation, those are all things that if search isn't done well, to your point, Daisy, if it's done in a basic fashion, those are some of the things that customers are going to experience. Jason, talk to us about why Algolia, what was it specifically about that technology that really led Apply Digital to say, "This is the right partner to help eliminate some of those challenges that our customers could face?" >> Sure. So I'm in the product world. So I have the wonderful advantage of not worrying about how something's built, that is left, unfortunately, to the poor, poor engineers that have to work with us, mad scientist, product people, who are like, "I want, make it do this. I don't know how, but make it do this." And one of the big things is, with Algolia is the lift to implement is really, really light. Working closely with our engineering team, and even with our customers/users and everything like that, you kind of alluded to it a little earlier, it's like, at the end of the day, if it's bad search, it's bad search. It just is. It's terrible. And people's attention span can now be measured in nanoseconds, but they don't care how it works, they just want it to work. I push a button, I want something to happen, period. There's an entire universe that is behind that button, and that's what Algolia has really focused on, that universe behind that button. So there's two ways that we use them, on a web experience, there's the embedded Search widget, which is really, really easy to implement, documentation, and I cannot speak high enough about documentation, is amazing. And then from the web aspect, I'm sorry, from the mobile aspect, it's very API fort. And any type of API implementation where you can customize the UI, which obviously you can imagine our clients are like, "No we want to have our own front end. We want to have our own custom experience." We use Algolia as that engine. Again, the documentation and the light lift of implementation is huge. That is a massive, massive bonus for why we partnered with them. Before product, I was an engineer a very long time ago. I've seen bad documentation. And it's like, (Lisa laughing) "I don't know how to imple-- I don't know what this is. I don't know how to implement this, I don't even know what I'm looking at." But with Algolia and everything, it's so simple. And I know I can just hear the Apply Digital technology team, just grinding sometimes, "Why is a product guy saying that (mumbles)? He should do it." But it is, it just the lift, it's the documentation, it's the support. And it's a full blown partnership. And that's why we went with it, and that's what we tell our clients. It's like, listen, this is why we chose Algolia, because eventually this experience we're creating for them is theirs, ultimately it's theirs. And then they are going to have to pick it up after a certain amount of time once it's theirs. And having that transition of, "Look this is how easy it is to implement, here is all the documentation, here's all the support that you get." It just makes that transition from us to them beautifully seamless. >> And that's huge. We often talk about hard metrics, but ease of use, ease of implementation, the documentation, the support, those are all absolutely business critical for the organization who's implementing the software, the fastest time to value they can get, can be table stakes, and it can be on also a massive competitive differentiator. Daisy, I want to go back to you in terms of hard numbers. Algolia has a recent force or Total Economic Impact, or TEI study that really has some compelling stats. Can you share some of those insights with us? >> Yeah. Absolutely. I think that this is the one of the most fun numbers to share. We have a recent report that came out, it shared that there's a 382% Return on Investment across three years by implementing Algolia. So that's increase to revenue, increased conversion rate, increased time on your site, 382% Return on Investment for the purchase. So we know our pricing's right, we know we're providing for our customers. We know that we're giving them the results that we need. I've been in the search industry for long enough to know that those are some amazing stats, and I'm really proud to work for them and be behind them. >> That can be transformative for a business. I think we've all had that experience of trying to search on a website and not finding anything of relevance. And sometimes I scratch my head, "Why is this experience still like this? If I could churn, I would." So having that ability to easily implement, have the documentation that makes sense, and get such high ROI in a short time period is hugely differentiated for businesses. And I think we all know, as Jason said, we measure response time in nanoseconds, that's how much patience and tolerance we all have on the business side, on the consumer side. So having that, not just this fast search, but the contextual search is table stakes for organizations these days. I'd love for you guys, and on either one of you can take this, to share a customer example or two, that really shows the value of the Algolia product, and then also maybe the partnership. >> So I'll go. We have a couple of partners in two vastly different industries, but both use Algolia as a solution for search. One of them is a, best way to put this, multinational biotech health company that has this-- We built for them this internal portal for all of their healthcare practitioners, their HCPs, so that they could access information, data, reports, wikis, the whole thing. And it's basically, almost their version of Wikipedia, but it's all internal, and you can imagine the level of of data security that it has to be, because this is biotech and healthcare. So we implemented Algolia as an internal search engine for them. And the three main reasons why we recommended Algolia, and we implemented Algolia was one, HIPAA compliance. That's the first one, it's like, if that's a no, we're not playing. So HIPAA compliance, again, the ease of search, the whole contextual search, and then the recommendations and things like that. It was a true, it didn't-- It wasn't just like a a halfhearted implementation of an internal search engine to look for files thing, it is a full blown search engine, specifically for the data that they want. And I think we're averaging, if I remember the numbers correctly, it's north of 200,000 searches a month, just on this internal portal specifically for their employees in their company. And it's amazing, it's absolutely amazing. And then conversely, we work with a pretty high level adventure clothing brand, standard, traditional e-commerce, stable mobile application, Lisa, what you were saying earlier. It's like, "I buy everything on my phone," thing. And so that's what we did. We built and we support their mobile application. And they wanted to use for search, they wanted to do a couple of things which was really interesting. They wanted do traditional search, search catalog, search skews, recommendations, so forth and so on, but they also wanted to do a store finder, which was kind of interesting. So, we'd said, all right, we're going to be implementing Algolia because the lift is going to be so much easier than trying to do everything like that. And we did, and they're using it, and massively successful. They are so happy with it, where it's like, they've got this really contextual experience where it's like, I'm looking for a store near me. "Hey, I've been looking for these items. You know, I've been looking for this puffy vest, and I'm looking for a store near me." It's like, "Well, there's a store near me but it doesn't have it, but there's a store closer to me and it does have it." And all of that wraps around what it is. And all of it was, again, using Algolia, because like I said earlier, it's like, if I'm searching for something, I want it to be correct. And I don't just want it to be correct, I want it to be relevant. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And I want it to feel personalized. >> Yes. >> I'm asking to find something, give me something that I am looking for. So yeah. >> Yeah. That personalization and that relevance is critical. I keep saying that word "critical," I'm overusing it, but it is, we have that expectation that whether it's an internal portal, as you talked about Jason, or it's an adventure clothing brand, or a grocery store, or an e-commerce site, that what they're going to be showing me is exactly what I'm looking for, that magic behind there that's almost border lines on creepy, but we want it. We want it to be able to make our lives easier whether we are on the consumer side, whether we on the business side. And I do wonder what the Go To Market is. Daisy, can you talk a little bit about, where do customers go that are saying, "Oh, I need to Algolia, and I want to be able to do that." Now, what's the GTM between both of these companies? >> So where to find us, you can find us on AWS Marketplace which another favorite place. You can quickly click through and find, but you can connect us through Apply Digital as well. I think, we try to be pretty available and meet our customers where they are. So we're open to any options, and we love exploring with them. I think, what is fun and I'd love to talk about as well, in the customer cases, is not just the e-commerce space, but also the content space. We have a lot of content customers, things about news, organizations, things like that. And since that's a struggle to deliver results on, it's really a challenge. And also you want it to be relevant, so up-to-date content. So it's not just about e-commerce, it's about all of your solution overall, but we hope that you'll find us on AWS Marketplace or anywhere else. >> Got it. And that's a great point, that it's not just e-commerce, it's content. And that's really critical for some industry, businesses across industries. Jason and Daisy, thank you so much for joining me talking about Algolia, Apply Digital, what you guys are doing together, and the huge impact that you're making to the customer user experience that we all appreciate and know, and come to expect these days is going to be awesome. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you >> For Daisy and Jason, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," our "AWS Startup Showcase, MarTech Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences." Keep it right here on "theCUBE" for more great content. We're the leader in live tech coverage. (ending riff)

(digital music) >> My, what a difference 10 years makes in the tech industry. At the beginning of the last decade, the cloud generally in AWS specifically ushered in the era where leading developers they tapped into a powerful collection of remote services through programmable interfaces you know, out there in the cloud. By the end of the decade this experience would shape the way virtually every IT professional thinks about acquiring, deploying, consuming and managing technology. Today that remote cloud is becoming ubiquitous, expanding to the "edge" with connections to on-premises, data centers and other local points throughout the globe. One of the most talked about examples of this movement is AWS Outposts, which brings the Amazon experience to the edge wherever that may be. Welcome everyone to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to explore the ever expanding cloud and how two companies are delivering on customer needs to connect their data center operations to the cloud and the cloud to their on-prem infrastructure and applications. And with me are Joshua Burgin who's the General Manager of AWS Outposts and Michael Sotnick who's the VP at Global Alliances at Pure Storage. Gents, welcome come inside theCUBE. >> Right on. Well, thrilled to be here Dave. >> Great. >> Pleasure is mine, thank you. >> Awesome to have this conversation with you it's really our pleasure. So Joshua, let's start with Outpost. Maybe you could for the audience describe what it is maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing you're heard by narrative upfront maybe you can course correct anything I missed. >> Oh sure. I mean, I think you got it right on. AWS Outpost is a fully managed service that allows you to use AWS, API systems, tools, technology, hardware software innovation in your own data center or a colocation facility. And coming later this year as you put the edge in quotes at almost any edge site, as we announced the small form factor one you and two you Outposts at this last year's re-invent. >> I was excited when I saw Outpost a couple of years ago we were doing theCUBE at reinvent and I said, wow, this is truly going to be interesting. And I'm wondering like, how's Amazon, how are they going to partner? Where do some of the ecosystem get folks fit in? So Michael, you're an AWS Outpost ready partner. You know, what is that program all about? What does that mean for customers? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, like you, Dave, I think we're as a vendor in technology we're inspired by what AWS has done. And when we look at Pure and see the opportunity we have you know, shared customer obsession, focused on outcomes, focused on NPS, great customer experience seeing AWS deliver the cloud to the edge, deliver the cloud to the data center that's just a great fit for us. So we rallied internally across our flash array of block storage solution a unified fast file and object flash plate solution and our container solution Portworx and, you know, across the entire portfolio we're the first to be in our segment the first to be service ready with AWS Outposts. And to us, it's an opportunity to link arms with AWS and cover some ground that's very familiar to us in the data center and clearly cover some ground that's very familiar to AWS in terms of great customer relationships across the board. >> Right, and, you know, I got to say, I've been a student of of Andy Jassy I always have listened to all his talks and go back and read the transcripts and Joshua I've learned that I never say never when it comes to AWS. And you see you guys moving into that, whatever you call it, the hybrid cloud, the on-premises really leaning in in a big way with Outposts and I wonder if you could talk about what's behind that expansion strategy? >> Sure, I mean, the way we looked at it obviously is always kind of working backwards from our customers. We have people tell us that they had some applications with low latency needs or where data resonancy or sovereignty was driven by regulations or in some cases where they needed to do local data processing something like an autonomous vehicle workload or in a factory or a healthcare facility. And they really wanted to say like, look, we're going to move all of our applications, you know the bulk of them to one of your regions in the fullness of time, but what's holding us back is that we want a consistent environment on-prem and in what you call the cloud. So we wanted a continuum of offerings from AWS to be able to serve all those needs. And that's really where Outpost came from. And, you know, we're seeing a lot of traction across financial services with companies like Morningstar and First Abu Dhabi bank, the iGaming space as you can imagine highly regulated industry, every city and, you know, municipality around the world wants to get in on that but they have their own regulations and they really require the infrastructure to be in a specific location and run a certain way. A company like TYPICA, which is based out of Europe they don't want to deliver different solutions depending on whether something's deployed in Minnesota or Germany or, you know, Vancouver. So that's where AWS Outpost comes in and it kind of fits that it works the same way as the things do in the region they can use the same tooling. >> Yeah, so Michael I'm going to ask you this question and maybe Joshua, you can chime in as well. I mean, you've got this, it's sort of a, win-win-win you know, Pure, AWS, you bringing that experience to on-premises, the customer gets that experience that Joshua just explained. I wonder if you could, I mean, you've been out now for a little bit testing the market learning here and there. What are the big takeaways in the learnings you're getting from customers? >> Yeah, I'll start and I'm sure Joshua can compliment quite a bit. And like Joshua hit on, right. You know, I think we take our cues from our customers, Dave, and you know what the customers are looking for, you know is a commercial relationship and so in addition to the technological inspiration we've got from AWS we offer the solution for Outposts and a Pure as a service model. So it's 100% subscription-based for the customer and they're able to consume it, you know the same way that they would all of their services from AWS including Outposts and it's also available on the AWS marketplace. So you've got to meet the customer where they want to be met first and foremost and so they appreciate that. And they see that as a great value in the relationship. You know, the growth of object, you know, I think is another one of those macro trends that's happening in our space. And as customers are deploying locations that are putting out petabytes of object storage requirements there's an increasing need for high-performance object. And that's where we can really compliment an Outpost implementation and deliver high performance and that kind of ubiquitous experience, that hybrid experience to allow the customer on a policy based way to maximize that on-prem performance with Outpost and Pure around that object data set. And then also manage the life cycle of that data and the economics of that data in the cloud. >> So, but Joshua, so you guys obviously you invented that, you know, the modern subscription model for infrastructure but it's different, you're actually installing hardware. So you had to sort of rethink how you did that. What have you learned and how has that model... How do you get it substantially similar as possible to the public cloud? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you called it a win-win-win earlier. And as much as we like to innovate we also like to make things feel kind of comfortable and familiar to people 'cause you think about there's both the developer who's using the APIs and the tools and also the CFO and the people in finance or procurement who are looking at the spending. So with Outposts, it actually feels very similar to the region. If you're used to purchasing our compute savings plans or what people used to call reserved instances or RIs the underlying infrastructure on the Outpost works in a very similar way. You're not going to be deploying a multi-rack Outpost and then ripping it out three weeks later so on demand doesn't really make sense there. But for all the services that are deployed on top of Outposts whether it's application load balancer or elastic cash or Elastic MapReduce, those have the same kind of on demand service model, the pricing model that they do in the region. And so very similarly, the Outpost ready program which lets you use trusted and certified third-party solutions, such as ones from Pure those are also going to feel familiar, whether you're coming from the on-prem world and you're already that technology for your storage, your network monitoring, your security or if you're using that solution from the marketplace in the AWS region, it's going to be a totally seamless deploy on the Outpost. So you're going to get something that's kind of the best of both worlds, familiar to you economically and from an installation perspective but also removing all that undifferentiated heavy lifting of having to patch and manage firmware upgrades and you asked this earlier, what customers really want is that there's this whole world of innovation, things that haven't even been invented yet. A few years ago, we hadn't invented Outposts. People want to know that as those innovations get released to the market they can take advantage of them without having to redeploy and so that's what having an AWS Outpost means. That as third parties or Amazon innovates new services can be made available without shipping a DVD or kind of spinning up an entire staff to manage that. >> Yeah, it's kind of interesting watching this equilibrium you know, take place. And I think it's going to continue to evolve. Obviously AWS has a huge impact on how people think about price, as I said upfront. And it seems like, you know, culturally, Michael, there's a fit. I mean, you guys have always sort of been into that you know, your evergreen model, for the first one that subscription sort of mindset. So it's sort of natural for you whereas, you know, maybe a a legacy company might not (chuckles) be able to lean in as hard as you guys are. Maybe some quick thoughts on that. >> Yeah, look, I love the way you framed that up and couldn't agree more. I think AWS is famous for a lot of things some of the values that they embrace and putting the customer at the center of everything they do couldn't be more shared, you know, with Pure. I think, you know, we talk about our company as one that runs two fires right, to give the customer a great experience. And so we know our way around the data center and I think the opportunity to give that customer, you know a consistent experience with AWS as they deliver Outpost to the data center is a really powerful combination. You know, I think one thing, just look at the backdrop of the pandemic, Dave, you know, every part of a company's organization is going through significant change. And I think the data center is absolutely at the center of some of those changes. And I think every one now as they look at the next generation data center they're asking themselves what are containers what does Kubernetes mean to my business? And I think the opportunity that, you know we see jointly with EKS as a partner is really to help customers achieve that goal of, you know the application deployments anywhere and the ability to drive that application, you know modernize that next generation application cycle. So I love the way you framed it up, giving us credit for being highly differentiated from our legacy competitors and we take great pride in that and really want to give a cloud-like experience to our customers. And I think what we're able to do with AWS Outpost is kind of bring that cloud-like experience that they have come to love from AWS into the data center and at the same time shine a light on what we've always done in terms of a cloud-like experience for the Pure customer. >> There's a lot of ways to skin a cat but when you've invented the cloud and you don't have a lot of legacy baggage you can kind of move faster. And I think that, you know, we're really excited about what's occurring here because take the term digital transformation I mean, before the pandemic (groaning) it's like, yeah okay, it had some meaning but you really had to squint through it and a lot of people were complacent about it. Well, we know what digital means now if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. And so it was kind of this forced march to digital I call it and as a result it really increases the need for things like automation and that cloud experience on-prem because I don't have time to be provisioning LUNs anymore. It's just what you guys call it undifferentiated heavy lifting that is really a no-no these days I just absolutely can't afford it. Let's close on what's next. I mean, we've got new form factors coming we're like super excited about when we see things like what Amazon is doing with custom Silicon we see these innovations coming out with processing power going through the roof. Everybody says Moore's law is dead but processing power is increasing faster than it ever has when you combine all these innovations of GPU's and NPUs and accelerators, it's just, it's amazing. And the costs are coming down so you're going to be able to take advantage of that. Outpost will take advantage of that, Pure will, New Designs but specifically as it relates to Outpost, you got one you, you got two you, you coming optimizing for the edge what do customers need to know about these solutions? Why should they consider this combination of Pure and AWS? Maybe Joshua you can start and Michael you can bring us home. >> Yeah, I mean, you hit a lot of the reasons that people should consider it, right. The pace of innovation is not going to slow down here at AWS or of course, with Pure. Whether you have the need for a single server, or you're somebody like dish rolling out a new cloud enabled, you know cloud native 5G network you want to work with somebody who can deploy all the way at the Telco edge right, with hardware innovation up to a local zone all the way up to a region. You don't want to be working with different providers for that and you don't know what you're going to need in three or five years and frankly, I'm not sure that we know everything yet either but we're going to continue to listen to our customers and as you mentioned, deliver things like graviton and inferential and trainium which are our innovations in custom Silicon. Those are delivering 40% price performance improvements for people who are migrating, that's really an enormous benefit. And we're bringing all of those to the Outpost as well so you don't have to choose between moving to the cloud and that being your only modernization option, you can move to the cloud and at the same time still operate on-prem, you know, at a colo facility or all the way at the edge using all of the same tooling. And you can work with best-in-breed third-party technologies like what's offered by Pure. >> Well, and Michael, I'm going to cut you off before you get a chance to close, but I'll let you close. The Portworx acquisition was really interesting to us because it brings that kind of portability, new programming model and something that Joshua said struck in my mind is when I think about the edge word to me what's going to win the edge you know, obviously the flexibility, the agility but the programmability and the customization. So many different use cases. We're not just going to take general purpose boxes and throw them over the fence and say, here you go. You know, the general purpose, that's not what's going to win the edge it's really going to take a lot more thought than that. But, so I just wanted to put that in there. Michael, bring us home, please. (laughing) >> Right on. Well, look you two, and no surprise here right, you two covered so much great ground there. From first principles you know, what does Pure look at? Like what we did being first in terms of service ready across Portworx, for EKS, for flash plate across unified fast file on object and flash ray, you know for block storage, being first with Outposts we want to be first for the one you and to you solutions. So I think customers can expect, you know that our partnership is going to continue to deliver that cloud-like experience, that cloud experience in the AWS context, that cloud-like experience in the Pure context, you know for their on-prem and hybrid workloads. And I think you hit it up so well like if you're not digital business, you're not in business. And so I think one thing that everyone learned over the last year is exactly that. The other thing they learned is they don't know what they don't know. And so they need to make bets on partners that are modern that are delivering simple solutions that solve complex problems that are automated and that are being delivered with the customer first mindset. And I think in the combination of AWS, Outposts and Pure, we're doing exactly that. >> Great point, so a lot of unknowns out there. Hey guys, congratulations on the progress you've made. It's a great partnership, two super innovative companies and really pleasure to have you in theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled. Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition. Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event. Is the biz Opps Manifesto unveiling? So the biz Opps manifesto and the biz Opps coalition have been around for a little while, But today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling are excited to have some of the foundational people that put their put their name on the dotted line, if you will, to support this initiative to talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest, we're excited to have his doctor, Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Task Top. Make great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think. Right. >>Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. >>I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us a couple a couple of weeks back, so hopefully things air, uh, getting a little better. And we get those fires under control? >>Yeah, Things have cleared up now, so yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U. S. And it's gonna have the Arabic clean as well. >>Absolutely. So let's let's jump into it. So you you've just been an innovation guy forever Starting way back in the day and Xerox Park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox Park for the first time last year. I mean that that to me represents along with Bell Labs and and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers. That's got to be one of the greatest one. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox Parc. You know, some of the lessons you learn and what you've been ableto kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah, I was fortunate. Joined Xerox Park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then, and the computer science lab where some of the inventions around programming around software development names such as Object of programming and ah, lot of what we had around really modern programming levels construct. Those were the teams that had the fortune of working with and really our goal waas. And of course, there's a Z. You know, this, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really, it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write. Code like this is back in 99 we were looking at new ways of expressing especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are who want to innovate for their business, to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. So we created a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie that former chief actor Microsoft, who is responsible for I actually got a Microsoft word as a out of Xerox Parc and into Microsoft and into the hands of Bill Gates and the company I was behind the whole office suite and his vision and the one I was trying to execute with working for him was to, you know, make Power point like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else fundamentally wrong that programming languages or new ways of building software like Let's try to do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of Dev ops and really this kind of embracing of of, of sprints And, you know, getting away from M. R. D s and P. R. D s and these massive definitions of what we're gonna build and long billed cycles to this iterative process. And that's been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the Biz Ops Coalition? Why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the programming language levels of teams can have. Effective languages deployed softened the club easily now right and at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades decades ago was formed. We were adopting all the all the teams I was involved with on. It's really become a solved problem. So agile tools, agile teams actually of planning are now very mature and the whole challenges when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that Agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the Technology Party organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things. One set of metrics, one set of tools and the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a a whole different set of measures. It's pretty interesting because I think it's >>pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver, because they've got a feature set right and they've got bugs and it's easy. It's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is is disconnect on the business side in terms of, you know, is it the right investment you know. Are we getting the right business? R o I on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or shall we building a completely different products? That so it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resource is you can't Nobody has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to dio. It sounds like that's a really big piece of this of this whole effort. >>Yeah, Jeff, that's exactly it. Which is the way that the adult measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are. Are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of, ah, rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market and those are those are all around the customer. And so what? I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them trying to apply those principles vigilant develops that those are not enough. Those measures technical practices, those measures, technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we needed to go. So I want to shift gears >>a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a best selling author project a product, and and you you brought up this concept in your book called The Flow Framework. And it's really interesting to me because I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow in the process flow, and you know that's how things get done and and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in a little higher level, existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort. Which floor you talking about in your book, or is it a little bit of both. >>That's a great question, is it's not what I gotta ask very often, cause me, it's It's absolutely both. So the thing that we want to get that we've learned how toe and, uh, master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me Holly teachings mentality. There's a beautiful Ted talk about him as well, about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project surprise, How can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How come we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the bazaar manifesto? It says, I focus on Out comes on using data to drive, whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics such as How quickly did we implement this feature? And now it's really how much value did the customs of the future and how quickly did we learn? And how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really, that with companies like Netflix on, like Amazon, have mastered, how do we get that every large organization, every idea, organization and make everyone be a softer innovator. So it's to bring that on the concept of flow to these entering value streams. And the fascinating thing is, we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster developers actually become more happy. So things like that implying that promotes course rise. And we've got empirical data for this. So that beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able thio, combine these two things and and see the results in the data that you increased flow to the customer, your development or more happy. I >>love it. I love it, right, because we're all more. We're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive winner in the flow. So I that is a great melding of two concepts. But let's jump into the into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you know, that took this approach really of having kind of four key values, and he gets 12 key principles and I just want to read a couple these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead, right? Of course. Right. Of course, you should focus on business outcomes. Of course, you should have trust and collaboration. Of course, you should have data based decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever is the loudest person in the room on toe, learn and respond and pivot. But >>what's the >>value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper? Because again, this is not this. These are all good positive things, right? When when somebody reads these to you or tells you these or sticks it on the wall? Of course. But unfortunately, of course, isn't always enough. >>No, I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifested two decades ago. The whole Dev ops movement of the last decade off flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing transformations, have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology innovation is through costs For many organizations, the way that they actually are looking at at their moving to cloud is actually is a reduction in costs, whereas the right way of looking at moving the cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how could quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So, really, the key thing is to move away from those old ways of doing things that funding projects and call centers to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback for how quickly you're innovating for your customer. So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing. To focus on these, you need to actually have accurate real time data off how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not given on data. If you don't know what your bottle like, it's. And this is something that in the decades of manufacturing car manufacturers, other manufacturers master. They always know where the bottom back in their production processes you ask, uh, random. See, I all want a global 500 company where the bottleneck is, and you won't get it there. Answer. Because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you follow like is because that's what's making your developers miserable and frustrated on having them context, which on thrash So it. The approach here is important, and we have to stop doing these other things right. >>There's so much. They're a pack. I love it, you know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as a cost saving device as opposed to an innovation driver, and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And, you know, I think the same thing always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting riel tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors. But the real power, I think in Moore's laws, is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what will you build and design? E think it's funny to your your comment on the flow in the bottleneck, right? Because because we know manufacturing assumes you fix one bottleneck. You move to your next one, right, You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know you're not. You're not increasing that speed down the line unless you can identify where that bottleneck is, or no matter how Maney improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly, and you also make it sound so simple. But again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottleneck is. And but these bottlenecks are just as you said, if it's just lack, um, all right, so we need to understand is the bottleneck, because our security use air taking too long and stopping us from getting like the customer. If it's that automate that process and then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploy yourself through the clouds is taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first rather than again the sort of way cost production first you have taken approach of customer centric city, and you only focus on optimizing cost. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one, these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value your flow time from six months to two weeks or 21 week or two event as we see with tech giants, you actually could both lower your costs and get much more value. Of course, get that learning going. So I think I've I've seen all these cloud deployments and modernizations happen that delivered almost no value because there was such a big ball next up front in the process. And actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going flow first rather than costs. First, there are projects versus Sochi. >>I love that and and and and it begs, repeating to that right within a subscription economy. You know you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customers. It's it's such a different kind of relationship, that kind of the classic, you know, Big Bang with the maintenance agreement on the back end really important. >>Yeah, and I think in terms of industry ship, that's it. That's what catalyzed this industry shift is in this SAS that subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is that divide their customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much. How about how many quality improvements or scaler performance improvements you delivered? So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto was was the forefront of touch on is, if you can't measure how much value delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just back again measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value to survive in in the subscription economy. Mick, >>we could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization. Because right day has been talked about for a long time. The huge big data mean with with Hadoop over over several years and data warehouses and data lakes and data, oceans and data swamps and you go on and on, it's not that easy to do right. And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially were just around the corner from from I, O. T and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale again this is gonna overwhelm, and one of the really interesting principles that I wanted to call out and get your take right is today's organizations generate mawr data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can again, you've got some great historical perspective reflect on how hard it is to get the right data to get the data in the right context and then to deliver to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs, making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah, and Jeff, I think the front part of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into these swamps. As you mentioned, because if you don't have the data and the right format, you can connect, collected that the right way, you're not. Model it that way the right way. You can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there have been the number of data, warehouses and a typical enterprise organization, and the sheer investment is tremendous. But the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've known this is that if you can model your value streams so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery value and how long that takes. What is your time to value through these metrics? Like for the time you can actually use both. You know the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that balance as it the assay, far as you can to the organization. But you can actually start using that those models to understand, find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, Right? Well, you can detect interesting bottle next one you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that we're not intuitive to me that had to do with more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually organization. That was very good at working from home because of our open source route. So the data is highly complex. Software Valley streams are extremely complicated, and the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front, part of what you said, is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all the tools, but not modeled in the right way. >>Well, all right, so before I let you go, you know? So you get a business leader he buys in. He reads the manifesto. He signs on the dotted line. He says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with With the development teams, you know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data driven. How do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early winds, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative, >>right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website. Uh, on the is a manifesto, but the key thing is just it's exactly what you said, Jeff. It's to get started and get the key wins. So take a probably value stream. That's mission critical. It could be your new mobile Web experiences, or or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analysts pipeline. But take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the entire inflow of value. Make sure you have a volumetric that everyone is on the same page on, right. The people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO and one of the where I encourage you to start is actually that enter and flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization. That is the one metric that even Cockcroft when people I respect tremendously put in his cloud for CEOs Metric 11 way to measure innovation. So basically, take these principles, deployed them on one product value stream measure into and flow time on. Then you'll actually you well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and develops all the way to the business to the way in your operating model. >>Well, Mick, really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and and get into this, because I just I just love the perspective. And, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox parc. And it's, you know, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So the to incorporate that and to continue to spread that wealth, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>Alright. And go to the biz ops manifesto dot org's Read it. Check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the Cube. I'm Jeffrey. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition >>Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz. Opps manifesto Unveil Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's a formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto Authors of the manifesto, if you will joining us again. We've had them all on individually. Now we're gonna have a great power panel. First up, we have met Kirsten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Task Top make good to see again. Where you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >>Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also, we've got Tom Davenport coming from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see. And I think you said you're a fund Exotic place on the East Coast. >>Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. >>Nice. Great to see you again. And also joining surge. Lucio. He is the VP and general manager Enterprise Software division at Broadcom Surge. Great to see you again. Where you coming in from? >>From Boston. Right next to kick off. Terrific. >>So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations. On this day I know it's It's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. Biz Opps Manifesto What was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition way, bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you could do better stuff within your own company Surge. Why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so? So I think we are really a critical juncture, right? Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the the Business Society collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people or whether we're talking about vendors or system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing a lot these different players together assed part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a busy office manifesto. We can really start to have kind of a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts. And we can really start to provide kind of a much better support for large organizations to transform eso, whether it is technology or services or trading. I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together >>and Mick to you. Why did you get involved in this in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the actual movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto, and I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level. And I think, as started just noted, we really need to improving. At the business level, every companies trying to become a software innovator trying to make sure that they can pick them, adapt quickly in the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers. Sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that these metrics these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole, and that just hasn't happened. Organizations are agile. Transmissions are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile. Have teams air functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move. Asked that. And that's exactly what the buzz off there's also manifested. Provides, >>right? Right And Tom to you. You've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and and a lot of work around analytics and data on data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you kind of share your perspective of of what you got excited Thio to sign on to this manifesto? >>Sure. Well, I have. You know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI. But before that, I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy and a in general. I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized at too narrow a level. Whether you're talking about agile or Dev ops or, um, ml ops. Any of these kind of obs oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, But we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>That's great, uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time, and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along. And then Cove it hit, and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then you're employees. When if you could share how that really pushed this all along, right, because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you've got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly. When maybe revenues are down on. Do you really have Thio prioritize and get it right? >>Yeah. I mean, I'll just start by quoting city An Adele basically recently said that there's bean two years of digital transformation just last two months, and in many ways that's true. Um, but But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with kind of a changes in culture that they really need Thio drive to be able to describe themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right. About 40% of the personal loans today are being origin dated by Finn tax of a like of Sophie or or ah Lendingclub, right, Not your traditional brick and worked for bank. And so the while there is kind of ah, much more of an appetite, and it's it's more of a survival type driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on these digital transformation, they need to start to really aligned the business 90 you know, in many ways and make cover that actually really emerge from the court desire to really improve software predictability, but we've which we have really missed is all the way. Start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continuously continuous improvement and measurement off business outcomes. So by lining, but of this dis kind of inward metrics that I t is typically being using to business outcomes, we think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There is an imperative to act now, um, and and results. I think it's kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation, >>right? I want to follow up on the culture comment with Utah because you've talked before about kind of process, flow and process flow throughout a whore, unorganized ation. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time, and I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think and then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just a tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah, you know, I've always found that the soft stuff the you know, the culture of the behavior of the values is the hard stuff to change and mawr and mawr. We we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation, you have tow change, people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures, and in many cases, there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we if we build a system, you know, if if we build it, they won't necessarily come right, >>right? So I want to go toe to you, Nick, because, you know, we're talking about work flows and flow. Andi, you've written about flow both in terms of, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical because you have a lot less ah, wiggle room in tough times. But you also talked about flow from the culture side on the people's side. So I wonder if you could just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things to get the answers better? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom just said. If you're optimize, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business into the customer. Now what we've noticed in the data since that that we've learned from customers value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams is that what's taking six months and to and to deliver that value, the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers. Unhappy customers, when you're innovating, have so high performing organizations we can measure their intent flow time in days. All of a sudden, that feedback loop the satisfaction your developers measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context switching last year, delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these thes other approximately six that we use, which is how efficient my annual team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility, of fast learning, of adaptability, of the business. And that's exactly what the bishops manifesto pushes your organization to. You need to put in place this new operate model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before, >>right? I love that. I'm gonna go back to Utah, him on that to follow up, because I think I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Because, you know, if you're optimizing for a vs B, you know you could have a very different product that that you kick out. You know, my favorite example with With Clayton Christensen and Innovator's Dilemma talking about the three inch our drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing. If you optimize it for vibration is another thing, and sure enough, you know they missed it on the Palm because it was the it was the game council which which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we're here with cloud all the time people optimizing for cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them? Kind of rethink and really, you know, forced them to to look at the at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that. What do you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's it's a difficult aspect toe of the decision toe frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there. It's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue. But if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly too narrowly, say, or you frame it as an either or situation when you could actually have some of both, um, it's very difficult for the process toe work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think mawr at the beginning about how we frame this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think. Think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right? >>Surge. I wanna go back to you and talk about the human factors because we just discussed you could put in great technology. But if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know it's not gonna be successful. And that's going to reflect poorly on the technology. Even if I had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the best hopes manifesto, you know a big one is trust and collaboration. You know, learn, responded pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift s so that you can have success with the people or excuse me with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. >>So I think I think at the ground level, it really starts with the realization that we were all different. We come from different backgrounds. Oftentimes we tend Thio. Blame the data. It's not uncommon my experience that we spend the first, you know, 30 minutes of any kind of one hour the conversation to debate the ability of the data on DSO, one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had. Our revelations as we start to engage with our customers is by just exposing high Fidelity data set two different stakeholders from their different lands. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data, but that's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when when when we think about kind of the types of changes were trying Thio truly affect around data driven decision making? It's all about bringing the data in context the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders. Whether we're talking about an operator developed for a business analyst, so that's that's the first thing. The second layer, I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. So I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business k p i. Whether you are accounting, you know, with sales per hour or the engagement of your users on your mobile application, whatever it is, if you start to connect that k p I business K p I to the key piece that developers might be looking at, whether it is now the number of defects or velocity or whatever over metrics that they are used to to actually track, you start to be able to actually contextual eyes in what we are. The affecting, basically metric that that is really relevant. And what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, You know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to to drive engagement, right? So, you know, if you look at zoom, for instance, Zoom giving away, it's service thio education is all about. I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams and because now they're doing something for good, and many organizations are trying to do that. But you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink? Oh, you connect everybody kind of business objective fruit data. And I always start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lands and collaborating on the data. Right? >>Right. That's good. Uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying I t for a long time writing lots of books and and getting into it. Um, Why now? You know what? Why now? Are we finally aligning business objectives with objects? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now? The time for this. This this move with the with the biz ops. >>Well, in much of the past, I t waas sort of a back office related activity. You know, it was important for, um, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it. Now, every organization needs to be a software business of data business. A digital business. The anti has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it. You run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally so. And even if you're in a new industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our I T projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well, almost every time, >>right. And I just I just wanna fall by that time, in terms of the you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data analytics, from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the ai driven stage. What I find interesting about all the stages you always put a start date. You never put it in date. Um, so you know, is the is the big data. I'm just gonna use that generically moment in time. Finally, here. Where were, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, But actually could start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seem to go away. The three artisanal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisanal. We can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift Mawr and Mawr of it to be done through automation and be to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanal e anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are We are making progress, >>right? Right. And make back to you in terms of looking at agile because you're you're such a student of agile. When when you look at the opportunity with biz ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? you know, taking this approach will enable >>Yeah, I think both surgeon Tom hit on this. Is that in agile? What's happened is that we've been, you know, measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there, developers air working on these tools of delivering features. The foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer, and when I was really happy when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker is able to do that. The fewer impediments are in my way, the quicker was deployed and running the cloud, the happier I waas and that's exactly what's happening if we could just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented and delivering value to customers. None of these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from a nightie, came from where for I t being a cost center and something that provided email on back office systems. So we need thio rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics, their customer and business centric. And make sure that every development organization is focused on those as well as the business itself that we're measuring value. And they were helping that value flow without interruption. >>I love that because if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it. And you gotta but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So, gentlemen, thank you again for for your time. Uh, congratulations on the on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot. And you're not wasting resource is where you're not gonna get the r. O. I. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the Cube. Thank >>you. All >>right, So we have surged. Tom and Mick. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Yeah,

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel. First up. We're gonna have Mitt Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoes. That's on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to Cape Cod. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognized that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. That, and if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to, to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, or training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And mic to you. Why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the agile movement since it started two decades with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think that was just no. Did we really need to improve at the business level? Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the manifesto provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea, that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant Lightswitch. Everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. They really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today are being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. >>Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business nightie, you know, in many ways and make cover. Does agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all the way we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability, and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these, uh, discuss inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP, uh, different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with you, Tom, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build system, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to you Nick. Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating half so high performing organizations, we can measure third and 10 float time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Cause you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you, when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or, um, attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect of the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured, right >>Surgery. I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. I wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Um, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spike, just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, it's all about bringing the data in context, in the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to the business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know, metrics that they are used to to actually track you start to, to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that DC is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating, uh, some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what w why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of the past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, um, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and, uh, even if you're in a, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to follow up by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here, where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less than less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are, we are making progress. Right, >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a, a student of agile when, when you look at the opportunity with ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both Sergeant Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for, for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an ITK, from where, for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and that we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and together this coalition >>Of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. Alright, so we had surge, Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube, it's a biz ops manifesto and unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of BizOps manifesto, unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition and welcome back Friday, Jeff Frick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios. And we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto, unveil exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest to share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why the biz ops manifesto, why the biz optical edition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, uh, why this coalition? >>Yeah, so, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right. Well, you know, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to, you know, the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud, you know, this whole movement, right. And, um, in resonates with me, because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we've talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that, that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations. And then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with Deb, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to it. And it's a great way to catalyze that conversation. That I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customers, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments. Cause you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talked about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plant. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're going to, we're going to adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, all sudden the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammering up the, uh, the thing in the Lutheran church with their, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways you bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster and everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote unquote, where we were lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time. >>And right. A lot of our customers still do that, but you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. We've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training and investment. Um, and then, you know, I think, uh, leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we, we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people got to make trade offs. They got to make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project and product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking about, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience is delivered through a product or a service. That's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models yeah. With software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before COBIT hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now we're in October and this is going to be going on for a while. And it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders LeanKit immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just gonna be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue, uh, or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also, you know, none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of lock in, uh, and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yep. Like you said, this is all, it's all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity and inclusion. Right. And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words that goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terra firma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative. Right. And, uh, and it's happening, both of those things right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it. And at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. We're Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad to be a part of it. >>All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil you're on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling, or we're excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a fairly early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development games, such as object programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I had the fortunate of working with, and really our goal was. And of course, there's, as, as you noticed, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we can make it 10 times easier to white coat. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are wanting to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking from Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a sparking into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates and that company that was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language to make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the biz ops coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed to soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of the organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of measures. Pretty >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, nobody has unlimited resources. And ultimately you have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, roughly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, uh, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author from project to product and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book? Or is it a little bit of both? >>That's a great question. It's not one I get asked very often cause to me it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get, that we've learned how to master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me, how you teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with question replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the future? >>And how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that, that concept of flow to these end to end value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like that and point out promoter scores, rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So that the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results and the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more, >>I love it. I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto in two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value, uh, in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things of funding projects and cost centers, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value you fund to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your bottleneck is. And this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated, then having them context, which I'm trash. So the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving a device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And I, you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say, it's just whack-a-mole right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud was taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of that approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with, with tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value that for us to get that learning loop going. >>So I think I've seen all of these cloud deployments and one of the things that's happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float for us rather than costs where we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month, but once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's it that's, what's catalyzed. This interesting shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how big, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements you delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the full frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring cost to measuring value, to survive in the subscription economy. >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and, and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps, and can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and 5g. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, this is going to overwhelm and one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect collected at the right way. You want that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning effectively. And there've been the number of data warehouses in a typical enterprise organization. And the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so yes, you understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes. What is your time to value these metrics like full time? You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? >>Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that had to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So that data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analyst and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with, with the development teams. You know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engaging with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, there's the manifesto, but the key thing is just to get you set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a probably value stream that's mission critical. It could be your new mobile and web experiences or, or part of your cloud modernization platform or your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on the people, on the development teams, the people in leadership all the way up to the CEO. And one of the, what I encourage you to start is actually that content flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that Adrian Cockcroft. When the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream, measure, sentiment, flow time, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the business, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come due from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for awhile and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry, uh, the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, uh, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. >>Um, so the, the, the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach and many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, I've been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, uh, the BizOps concept and the business manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which have been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also, uh, tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's seeking. >>Right, right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result could have a traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, um, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. >>And, and he talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of beavers. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze this system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume variety of philosophy of the data, uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today to really help organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their blog. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention in our survey, we did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand how many we're tracking business outcomes I'm going to do with the software executives. It executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of a software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take, you know, another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the, it teams, whether it's operations, software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with what the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and, and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamic on the, on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifesto to exist. >>So, uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might still my all time favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change because that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an, an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time, and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, there, they have estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So, so that's one dimensional portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are, we're really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality and I've always believed that the fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for a core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yeah, if you look at our, it, operations are operating there, we're using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database off time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptight, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social, a mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric. And some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to, um, Charles you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, like for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that super insightful, but I guess you just got to get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind in these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really wrong requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong, uh, kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I were to remember correctly, over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach these core requirements to be completely defined before software development starts, let me pause there we're 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering on the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria? And so that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the, the, um, you know, various Doris dilemna the key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of, uh, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered the length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. >>All right. I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos. Cause you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including either your, your competition and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, these values, these principles. >>So first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, DS concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors such as desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, fall years, people would have been LP, large organizations, do digital transformation vendors. We're providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in, in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story and again, congrats to you and the team. >>Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. >>Oh, my pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps manifest to go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by bill. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that we'll actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. Uh, and we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. Right. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the biz ops coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly, um, no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data-driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that's evolved over, over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is, this is going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before Hey, asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on a former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, it's suggested we need, um, data and, um, the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current. And we, we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we called it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. Yeah. >>I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but it turned out 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything thought we knew, but I wanna, I wanna follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the BizOps when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve double down they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic, on digital projects. It's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to, um, cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. >>Right, right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they are, the projects that are working well are, you know, when I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't want to be driving around on them very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? That's funny you bring up contract management. >>I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and was like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts contractor in people's drawers and files and homes, and Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar projects. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with, with digital, you know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>Yeah. I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, and you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. I agree. Totally. Alright, Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. Take care. Alright. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vale. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core of founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel first up. We're gab Mitt, Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoe sits on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to kickoff. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's, it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognize that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, we're training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And Nick to you, why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So Ben close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. >>And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think as satisfies noted, uh, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, uh, trying to make sure that they can adapt quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver the customer sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the that's manifested provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're >>Still struggling with the kind of a changes in culture that they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today, or being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage with this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business. And it, you know, in many ways, uh, make covered that agile really emerged from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all that we, we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning kind of these, uh, kind of inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to act now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with Utah, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of the behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that, um, most organizations still don't have data-driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build a system, >>If we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to, to you Nick cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure at antenna flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction, your developers measurably, it goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these, these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my adult team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm gonna back to you Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for, because you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that, that you kick out. And, you know, my favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for a cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect to have the decision to confirm it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame >>That decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right, >>Sir, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if that had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond, and pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people, or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Uh, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spoke just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, he told about bringing the data in context and the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is all the number of defects or velocity or whatever over your metrics that you're used to, to actually track you start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are, the effecting, basically a metric of that that is really relevant. And then what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's, it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and many organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in the limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what, why, why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of a past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and even if you're in, uh, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to fall by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date, you never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and, and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but we are, we are making progress. Right. >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a student of agile. When, when you look at the opportunity with biz ops and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both search and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really this, these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics. So when, from where for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value. And that will help you that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Uh, congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition, uh, of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. >>Thank you. >>Alright, so we had surge Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. Variety. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios, and we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto unveil some exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest is share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why >>The biz ops manifesto, why the biz ops coalition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, why this coalition? >>Yeah. So, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something that I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right? Well, no, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud this whole movement. Right. And, um, it resonates with me because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we have talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether, you know, I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with dev, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to. And I, and it's a great way to catalyze that conversation that I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And, and as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customer, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments because you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talk about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as opposed to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities, and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plan. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're gonna, we're gonna adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model to, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, also the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and, you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammer and up the, a, the thing in the Lutheran church with it, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster in everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote, unquote work. We lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time, and right. >>A lot of our customers still do that, but, you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core to the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. I mean, we've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training investment. Um, and then, you know, I think a leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people gotta make trade offs. They gotta make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project, the product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking to Mick, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience, that's delivered through a product or a service that's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models, you know, with software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before covert hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But th the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now, we're in October, and this is going to be going on for a while, and it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders leaned to immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just going to be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, when we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the, you would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And, and so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also know none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of, of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yeah, like you said, this is all, this all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity inclusion. Right? And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words and goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terrafirma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative, right. And, uh, and this happening, both of those things, right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it, and at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. Well, Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad >>That'd be part of it. All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil here on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling or excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development teams, such as object oriented programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I have the fortune of working with, and really our goal was. And of course there's as, as you know, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model back then was all about changing the way that we work, uh, was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write code. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are, who want to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a spark and into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates on that company. I was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working in that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the BizOps coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of advisors. >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, no one has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author, a project, a product, and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book or is it a little bit about, >>Well, that's a great question. It's not what I get asked very often. Just to me, it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get to, we've learned how to master individual flow. That is this beautiful book by me, how he teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the feature and how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? >>Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that co that concept of flow to these entwined value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like the employee net promoter scores rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results in the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more happy. >>I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And, you know, I love that, you know, took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones that are undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things, a funny projects and cost centers, uh, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your boggling like is, and this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So let's, you actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated around having them context, which on thrash. So it, the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal and the, and you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where that bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say defense just whack them. All right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud. It's taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of the approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. >>Whereas if you focus on getting closer to the customer and reducing your cycles out on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with the tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value for us to get that learning loop going. So I think I've, I've seen all these cloud deployments and one of the things happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float us rather than costs when we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's, it that's, what's catalyzed. This industry shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's, and they're winning the business, not you. So, one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experience as well. That really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how much, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements we delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the flow frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you deliver to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value, to survive. And in the subscription economy, >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and a data driven decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps. And you can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, is this gonna overwhelm? And one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect, collected that the right way you want it, that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there've been the number of data where, how has this in a typical enterprise organization and the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes, what is your time to value through these metrics like full time? >>You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that have to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So the data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader. He, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with the, with the development teams. I know I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, for the manifesto. But the key thing is just, it's definitely set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a product value stream. That's mission critical if it'd be on your mobile and web experiences or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on, but the people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO, and one of the, where I encourage you to start is actually that end to end flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that when the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream measure, Antonin flow time, uh, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube for our ongoing coverage of the big unveil. It's the biz ops manifesto manifesto unveil. And we're going to start that again from the top three And a Festo >>Five, four, three, two. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for a while and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>Absolutely. So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry of the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, a, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard >>Business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. Um, so the, the, the key challenge that we're faced with is really that we need a new approach. And many of the players in the industry, including ourselves have been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, a, the BizOps concept and the BizOps manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which has been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's taking. >>Right. Right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March, and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of a, the traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, uh, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises and end. >>He talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of behaviors. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze the system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required, uh, as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume of variety of philosophy of the data. Uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today, truly out organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their block. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention an hour survey. We did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand only we're tracking business outcomes. I'm going to get the software executives, it executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the it teams, whether it's operation software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with the, the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamics on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifestor to exist, >>Uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might steal my all time. Favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change cause that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, they're, they've estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So that's one dimension on portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality. And so I've always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yet, if you look at our, it, operations are operating, they were using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database of time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And, uh, and so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric, and what's hard, the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric and some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate, um, the key challenges you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, right, for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we've talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that, uh, super insightful, but I guess you just gotta get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you've got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really role requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach is for requirements to be completely defined before software development starts. Let me pause there where 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering all the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria. And so that, that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the innovator's dilemma. The key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of a, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered at length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. Right. >>I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos because you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your, your competition and, and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, values, these principles. >>So, first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that, um, things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies, or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, these concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change, uh, some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors and suggest desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our, our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, thought leaders, people who have been LP, larger organizations do digital transformation vendors, were providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on these digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story. And again, congrats to you and the team. Thank you. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it, and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled and brought to you by >>This obstacle volition. Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He's a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. And we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution, the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there had been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the BizOps coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I, I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data-driven decisions, which is the number three of four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that evolved over over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is this going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support, but the problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least, um, recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system. And that I believe would add to, um, the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before I asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on the former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, as I suggested we need, um, data and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we call it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. >>Yeah. I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but I turned down 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything and thought we knew, but I want to, I want to follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We've got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and, and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve doubled down, they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out, um, in the pandemic on digital projects, it's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. Right, >>Right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that, that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they, I, the projects that are working well are, you know, what I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while, and we really don't want to be driving around on, um, and then very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny you bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and I've like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts are in people's drawers and files and homes. And Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar project. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on, on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can, most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity, and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. >>I agree. Totally >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I got to dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one. And to me, I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vail. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Brought to you by BizOps Coalition. >> Hey, welcome back everybody ,Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto, authors of the manifesto, if you will. And joining us again, we've had them all on individually, now we're going to have a great power panel. First up, we're going to have Mik Kersten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Tasktop. Mik, good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >> Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >> Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport, coming in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun exotic place on the East Coast. >> From Massachusetts, Cape Cod. >> Nice, great to see you again. And also joining Serge Lucio. He is the VP and General Manager Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom. Serge, great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >> From Boston right next to Cape Cod. >> Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil. But let's just jump into it. BizOps Manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company initiative that you know, you can do better stuff within your own company? Serge, why don't we start with you? >> Yeah, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right. Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the business (indistinct) collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or system decorators, consulting firms, are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together as part of the coalition and formalizing, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps Manifesto, we can really start to kind of have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. So whether it is technology or services or training, I think that's really the value of bringing all of these players together. >> Great. And Mik to you. Why did you get involved in this effort? >> So I've been close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level and I think as Serge has noted, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot that quickly and then changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the BizOps Manifesto provides. >> Right, great And Tom to you, you've been covering tech for a very very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to sign onto this manifesto. >> Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level whether you're talking about agile or DevOps or MLops, any of these kind of ops oriented movements. We're making individual project performance and productivity better but we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the BizOps idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >> That's great. Serge back to you, right. I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been you know, kind of trucking along and then COVID hit and it was instant light switch. Everyone's working from home, you've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, both within your customer base and your partner base but also then your employees. One of you can share how that really pushed this all along, right. Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down and you really have to prioritize and get it right. >> Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello, basically recently said that there's been two years of digital transformation just last two months. And in any many ways that's true. But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. That they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? About 40% of the personal loans today, are being originated by fintechs of a like of Sophie or LendingClub, right? Not to traditional brick and mortar for a bank. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a more of a survival type of driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation they need to start to really align the business in IT. You know, in many ways and make cover that agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability which we've really missed is all that we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these discuss inward metrics that's, IT is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now and resolves I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. >> Great. I want to follow up on the culture comment with you, Tom because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >> Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. We haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we build system. You know, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. >> Right. So I want to go to you Nick. 'Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical 'cause you have a lot less wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So, I wanted if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure their end flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the BizOps Manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. >> Right. I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up 'cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for 'cause you know if you're optimizing for A versus B, you know you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christensen and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the game console which drove that whole business. So when you when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time people optimizing for a cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool. How do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to look at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said what are you optimizing for? >> Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And you know, it's a difficult aspect to the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. There, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, it's very difficult for the process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think carefully about how the decision has been structured. >> Right. Serge, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors, because as we've just discussed, you could put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the Bezos Manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. One of you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. >> So I think, at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Often times we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first you know 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. And so one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is like just exposing high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when we think about kind of the types of changes that we're trying to truly effect around data driven decision making it's all about bringing the data in context, the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or a developer or a business analyst. So that's, the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI whether you are counting you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is. You can start to connect that KPI to business KPI to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know metrics that they are used to actually track. You start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to drive engagements, right? So if you look at zoom for instance, zoom giving away it's service to education, is all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that. But you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to everybody's kind of a business objective through data and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. >> Right, great That's a good. Tom I want to go back to you. You've been studying IT for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Why now, you know, what why now (laughs) are we finally aligning business objectives with IT objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this move with the BizOps? >> Well, much of a past, IT was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for producing your pay check and capturing the customer orders but the business wasn't built around it. Now, every organization needs to be a software business data business a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it you run a pretty big risk of, you know going out of business or losing out to competitors totally. So, and even if you're you know, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our IT projects or building things that don't really work for the business. It's mission critical that we do that well almost every time. >> Right. And I just want to follow up by that, Tom In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. So, you know, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically moment in time, finally here, where we're you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >> Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The artisanal stuff is still being done but we would like for less and lesser of it to be artisanal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, you know at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet but you know, we are making progress. >> Right And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile 'cause you're such a student of agile, when you look at the opportunity with BizOps and taking the lessons from agile, you know what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >> Yeah. I think both Serge and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been you know measuring tiny subsets of the value stream right. We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way the quicker was deployed and running in the cloud the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an IT, for IT being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every developer the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >> I love that Mik 'cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it but you got to be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, thank you again for your time. Congratulations on the unveil of the BizOps Manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And you know there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you from Vancouver. >> Alright, so we had Serge, Tom and Mik. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. It's a BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the cue with digital coverage of out systems. Next step 2020 brought to you by Out systems. Welcome back. I'm stupid, man. In this, the cubes coverage of out systems next step always love when you get to come to the conference is to be able to talk to the practitioners, understand what they're doing. Give us some recommendations that they have for their peers. So happy to welcome to the program. First time guests make eye Spruce es, which is the global vice president of information technology at Colliers International coming to us from Vancouver because I thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you for having me great to be here. >>All right, if you could just set up for us. First of all, uh, collars. If you know, how should people be thinking about all yours in 2020 and just a little bit briefly about you know, your role there. >>Okay. So, Colliers International, it's a leading commercial real estate for more in 69. 0, sorry. 68 countries. We have over 18,000 professionals around the globe. My role, it's who coordinated the information technology globally. We are very much distributor to decentralized organization. So we have technology groups all around the globe, and, ah, my role is pretty much toe set a direction. And to make sure that we were following on that direction appropriately, >>All right, so the theme we hear it the show, it's about building it. You hear from out system building fast, Build it right, build it for the future. Lots of discussion in the industry about how you need to modernize. And a lot of that is building new applications. So if you could, you know, how does that application portfolio modernization fit in your environment? What are some of the business things that are driving you to build new applications? >>Well, you know, thank you for asking me what of the things that are driving cause that that's one of the teams that I am. Keep bringing up that you have to start with. With that, you have to start with. Why? Why do you even build applications? So what's happening in my mind, or at least I can tell these days is that the environment of business environment, not necessarily the technology environment, but the business environment is changing and it's changing very fast, and we need to adapt to that. We need to adopt a new ways off, engaging with the clients, for example, or providing a service or who you know. Sometimes we just call it and say we digitize and and that's the whole, you know, digital transformation story that. But that's the reason why you need applications because applications are end of the day. What makes us more efficient in What are we doing? That's where the machine interacts with with humans right behind that you have the infrastructure and all that stuff that nobody sees. But what you see it is that application in your phone. It's application that makes you better make you more efficient on the time. That's why it's very important to be able to do it. And if you're just gonna buy everything, you're not gonna derive any competitive advantage out of it. You just gonna, you know, use what's available so more and more these days, we recognize that ability create something specific for the industry or for the organization is extremely important. So I think that's where the ability toe build this application fits for us as well >>All right. Well, you know, we've seen in general that that digitization is something that happened for a lot of years. I have to imagine 2020 has had some specific impacts. Ah, on the marketplace. You know, everybody that interested in real estate, there was probably a brief pause. But now things need to be more online. You mentioned mobile. Um, you know, I would think that being able to react fast is something that it has been driving your activity. Take us inside that. And, you know, how is 2020 impacted your activity specific? >>Well, uh, 2020 has really put Ah, you know, something which is always in my mind to the test and watch in my mind is, well, you know, the business agility that I'm talking about many times. And it's not necessarily that 2020 has forced tested. But in the first half of 2020 I don't think that the ability to create application was tested immediately. First off, all, it was tested. The ability to work in a different environment, work from home or work from somewhere else where you are not, you know, in ah exposed the Corbett 19. Um pandemic eso So that was the first part that was was tested. And, you know, I'm I'm extremely proud of our organization that for us, that was not too much off initial. I mean, our our system has has, uh, um, you know, help us do that. Transmission Very quick and very smooth as we are moving through 2020. Now it's not toe get ah, get our footing again. And you know, people are referring to this as but he would I want the new normal ease. And as we figured out what the new normally is, we start shifting again back to the application. So how are we going to do things in the new normal? What is becoming more important now that it was before, right? It's all of the sudden my ability toe capture, infrared term, our cameras has become a priority. And I'm not saying that the necessary has by just as an example thing that I haven't thought about necessarily before. Now I need to switch very fast in tow that my ability to track my ability toe, you know, Ah, let people in the office, you know, in a certain way, toe to figure out how many people are in the office. Was the density those things before Cove in There were kind of Well, that's very interesting. Yeah, we kind of have a lot off office. We can cram lots of people in their noticeable Ah, well, that's gone. So all of the sudden, those technologies that were called, you know, emerging are becoming very fast mainstream. So our ability to incorporate them it's critical. >>Wonderful, not another. We've laid out some of, ah, you know, the business drivers and some of the urgent needs. They have helped us connect the dots, your usage of out systems. Maybe if you could take us back how long you've been using it on and what that's enabled for your business, >>right? Ah, we They were doctored out systems about three years ago. And wait didn't necessarily take the the most successful pattern did the most successful Parton seems to be or taking a low code platform. All systems on this case and you start with something small and you grow from there. We actually had a mission critical system in our hands, which waas obsolete was the legacy was was a time bomb off technical debt, and we knew that we need to change this, but we didn't want to do it in a traditional way. We didn't want to create another monolithically application. Another stovepipe, um, so So? So that's when we look for something that we call the digital platform. Andi. That's how we got toe out systems. And we adopted it for that particular systems. Now the byproduct, of course we delivered on that, and it's fantastic and it's great, and we had lots of experience, and I can tell you what to do and what not to do under our duty parent, but, um, the by product off that is, that created what we were really after strategically created that capability to do things very fast, right? And it's not only your doing it fast, but your chances to do it passed and well has increased dramatically. You know, from the perspective that chances are that you're gonna be on brand, which it's a struggle, let me tell you that with the developers don't really care about the colors, Ana, and that it's you know it's following your security patterns and whatever it is in there. All this have have increased dramatically by putting, uh, putting it in this platform. >>So when you say, do it fast and do it well, did you have metrics internally as how you measure that? Is it you know, cycle time, time to market, you know, some, you know, percentage of quality of code. How do you kind of measure that it is demonstrably better today faster today? More agile today. Then what you were doing? Four. >>So, first off, all of those are KP eyes that a non technical organization probably has not have in the past. Okay, so that s so this is something that Microsoft will measure or Intuit will measure and stuff like that, which is just a background, because it's interesting. Now we start measuring, but for us, it's very simple. So how many new applications did we develop in the last? I don't know. 10 years. Um, zero way. We had a moment 10 years ago. We developed a lot of things and and and then we were kept going and going. And that's how they get legacy. How many did we developed in the last 18 months? Well, about 19 I think, keep growing, so I think we just start to learn what the KP I should be. I really I don't know any is 19. Good is it is too much. Maybe you should be. Should be only eight eso we learn on the escapee eyes one one KP Eido or one measurement is not the KP I cause I didn't really make it okay. Yeah, yeah, but it's a measurement. In the past, an application was build and then, you know, sporadically. There were efforts to bring it up to date and the business behavior Aziz relates toe that was very specific. They tried to cram everything during the project time because the chances that nothing will ever be reviewed in the next couple of years were close to zero. Well, let me tell you how the new application that we created the core one that mission critical. It's on a release cycle, a weekly release cycle. This is unheard for our organization. And I were gonna I gonna tell you that in my 25 years off managing applications and I d in various industries, non technical industry, that that that's that's critical. I will never achieved with anything that kind off pace. So do I have clear Kate guys to tell you this is way better? No, but I can tell you that there are a whole bunch of things that are emerging, and we will start measuring in in the future that are clear indication that we're in a better sport than we used to be. >>Well, well, well, right it is. It's the measurements that are important to your business That matters. Obviously clear. You've unlocked new capabilities that you didn't have before. It was zero applications on. Now, as you said, you know that why you're delivering value to the business. You understand what it takes to do that. And you know that that general discussion of like, well, everybody is becoming a software business? I think you've laid out some of that, at least in where you are. Right out. You know why that's important for your business. So you mentioned Ah, some things you've learned along the way. I'd love to hear you know, your journey of three years Looking back, certain best practices you've seen out there share a little bit of that wisdom that you've gained, You know? What would you recommend? Piers that are starting down this journey or maybe need to take a new look at how they look at their software development. What would you share with them? >>Yes. Ah, we learned quite a bit. Um, the fact that to get the tool in place, it's ah, it's it's it's really really not. Not enoughto see the benefit way grossly underestimated the resistance to change inside off. I t um so you know, if I would give somebody advice, I would say, Well, if you are, you know, in a typical North American organization where you know, people matters and what they think and what they do matters and you can't just be a, you know, some kind off. Ah, dictatorial. Ah, leader. Then then then you have to give yourself time because people need toe, understand the benefits or off the platform, the local It is not something that is necessarily yeah, immediately embraced by even the brightest devil locals. And unfortunately, we we've seen great people. Um, you know, leaving us eventually because they simply didn't give them by in the concept. So you know anybody who starts this journey, I would say, Do not underestimate the psychological change that needs to happen in order to become efficient at at this. Then it's another the interesting one. There are many, but, you know, the dough. So I think are interesting. You gonna be for the first time, probably way faster than the business respond. And this is something that again I haven't seen in the past in my career where you know you're developing things and you have a question. You come something and you ask the business. So how should this be? It's, you know, it's left or its right and the question is straightforward and the businesses scratching their head is like, Well, like, this is not a simple answer. I really I don't know. I need to think about it. And the business may think a couple of days, and in that time you are You're not putting if you don't plan properly. So So you are so fast that if you're not managing your pipeline and you are not accounting for the fact that the business won't be able to keep up with you and will need to have time to think about certain things, you're gonna have a whole bunch off, uh, off death times now you can fill them with all kinds of things. You can pay technical debt that you build in your previous are jive cycles. It's a whole bunch of things to do, but you need to account for that. And I said, I never seen it before and I always I was trying to catch up to the business. It was for the first time now they actually see this thing reversed and it's uncomfortable. It's It's I saw this becoming uncomfortable actually, for the business. It was perceived that only you are putting a lot of pressure on me right now. Well, yeah, but you know what? If you want me to be fast, we need to respond fast. It's kind of dynamic that is changing in a very interesting way. Eventually, I would say, and it doesn't take a long time, but eventually everybody is generally happier. I was just talking that of day with, uh, you know, our V p off, not American account. It was one of the stakeholders on this product and she said, Well, yeah, this is This is so much. Ah, better than anything we waded before from from an experience perspective, not necessarily from a you know, feature by feature, which is also extremely before rental, and much better, but yes, two things. Psychology off the developer and the velocity that the business can provide. When you're developing on this higher productivity platform, it's something you keep in mind. >>Well, maybe high it makes me It makes me laugh a little bit. I think back to in the early days of cloud computing rolling out there was that discussion that, you know, maybe I t won't matter anymore. It will just become a utility. And the discussion mostly iose that I talk to people in i t is that I t needs to be responsive to the business and actually can reach a point where it is a major driver for that. And so that agility, that speed that you talk about is helping Teoh, you know, really bring things together. Ah, and help. Have you know you need to have that common vision. Um great. What? Want to give you final word? You've worked without systems number year. We're watching them as they you know, Anting, their products Seymour machine learning and ai baked into it for those coming, you know, watching the next step show. You know what final words would you give them from from this event? >>Oh, I wasn't prepared for that. And I guess keep up, the good work would be done. The thing we we made a big bet on ah, on out systems. We want to see them growing. Want to see the community off, local developers growing. I want toe. And I don't know if I want to tell out system, but I want to tell the development community you still need to be a great developer to be able to deliver great applications in low court. It doesn't diminish anybody's value in the in the market is just a different way was gonna make the developer community more productive. We're automating our own tools. That's a normal way to go. And I think out system is doing a fantastic job. Ah, ah dot And I'm looking forward, though, to see growing. I think the next iteration I'm off this thing. I want to see a little bit more off the You know, in our case, I hope to see a little bit more off the citizen developer, uh, coming, coming out and and continue to enhance this. This Ah, Julia tedious. This flexibility, the ability to create and off the day. You know, it's all about competitive advantage for the organization we're in. It's you can part a phrase you and say I t really doesn't matter but creating value out of the technology. It's it's really what matters, and and that's everybody should get the ice on that. >>May I really appreciate you sharing your perspective? Thanks so much >>for joining us. Well, thank you for having me >>stay tuned for more coverage from out systems. Next, step on spew minimum and thank you for watching the Cube.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Everyone welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public sector summit. Virtual, of course, is the Cube virtual. We're here sheltered in place in our quarantine studio. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Got a great guest here? Cube Alumni. Can Eisner, Who's the director of worldwide education programs for AWS Amazon Web services? Ken, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. This could be a great segment. Looking forward to chatting. >>Thanks so much, John. Great to talk to you again. >>You know, I'll say, Cube Virtual public sector summit Virtual. We've been virtualized as a society. I'll see the pandemic and all the things that is going on around has been pretty crazy. And one of the things that's most notable is the impact on Education. New York Times This morning and many published reports around the impact College education. Not only economics on the campus aside, the state of the people in the society and Covert 19 is pushed schooling online for the foreseeable future. What's your reaction is you're in charge you've done a lot of work on the foundational level to get Amazon educational programs out there. Take a minute to explain how how this has impacted you guys and your ability to bring that educational stuff to the to the foreseeable future. >>Yeah, the first thing I'd say is this This truly is an absolutely unprecedented time There. Move from virtual instruction. Excuse me from in person classroom instruction into the virtual world at such amazing scale, rapidity is something that educational institutions weren't ready for that couldn't be ready for at this time. We had to enter it with amazing lump levels of empathy for what was going on on the ground in K 12 schools and higher ed schools with our educational technology and publisher providers. So I think the first thing was we had or for the speed at which it happened, we did have to step back and look at what was going on. There are some changes that are happening in the immediacy, and there are some things that Corbett, 19 is has sped educational institutions around the world to look at. An AWS is working with those K 12 providers, higher educational providers teachers and so on on that switch, whether it's providing infrastructure that move into online learning, helping teachers as they prepare for this sort of new normal you some of examples of what has happen. We've been working with the University of Arizona. Help them stand up contact centers with the onset of of cove it and students and teachers. It's being pushed into their home environment or into virtual environments to give instruction to receive instruction. There have been a lot of calls that happen in virtual environments to staff to help them support this. And so we stood up with the University of Arizona and Amazon Amazon Connect help staff provide mobile solutions through the cell phone or computer for for students. >>I want to get your thoughts. Absolutely. I talked to Andy Jassy about this as well as well about agility. This is the Amazon wheelhouse, and you guys have gone into the I T world now developers. You went cloud native, you in that market. He won the enterprise I t market. But the reason why is that you took an old school outdated, antiquated system of I t and made it agile. That seems enough This is the country with Teresa and Andy about education in public sector. The modernization is happening, but there's also the triage and you guys have to do now in terms of getting people online. So what specifically are you doing to help education customers continue their instruction online? Because they still got to execute. They still need to provide this discussion around the fall window Coming up. You got to have the foundational things. I know you've done that, but it is hard. So what's the downstream triage when you come out of this mode of Okay, here you go. And how do you get people set up and then how they transform and re invent? >>Yeah, at this time, the disaster recovery from how do you get in that phase one with this immediate move was so prominent. And we're trying to work through that phase one and sort into sort of phase two delivery of education, which is you're moving with scale moving with agility into this world, speed and agility are really going to be the new normal for education. There were some advances that just weren't happening quick enough. Students should always have access to 24 7 learning, um, and access into that mobile arena. And they weren't having that several things that we did was we looked at our infrastructure were some of those key infrastructure elements that helped with both learning and work remotely. There were things such as Amazon, your work Doc's, which enables thieves virtual our workspaces, which enable virtual desktop environments, and appstream, which enables it APs to be streamed through virtual arena onto your removal or your desktop. Yeah, Amazon connect as I. As I mentioned before, there were services that were vital in helping speed into the cloud that was quick burst into the cloud. And so we enabled some of those services to have special promotional free rates or a given time period, and we have actually now extended that offer a into the fall into September 30th. So first we have to help people really quickly with educators. So I run this program AWS Educate, which is Amazon's global program. To provide students and educators around the world with resource is needed, help them get into cloud learning. But what we saw was that teachers around the world we're not prepared for this massive shift what we did to help that preparedness is we looked at our educators. We found that we did a survey over the weekend and found that 68% of them had significant experience or enough experience in teaching distance or online virtual education, too. Potentially leverage that for other educators around the world. So we and the other thing is teachers are really eager to help other teachers in this move, especially as they saw and they empathize with With her was the panic. Our confusion are best practices and moving into that online arena. So we saw both that they had that experience in a mass willingness to help other people, and we immediately spun up a Siri's of educator and educator help tools, whether it was a Morris Valadez are No a gift, and Doug Berman providing webinars and office hours for other educators around the world. We also did a separate tech talks offering for students. So there were there was the helping scale, whether it's getting blackboard as they ramped up to over 50 x of their normal load in 24 hours to help them deliver on that scale, whether it waas the Egyptian ministry that was trying to had to understand. How could they help students access the information that they need it in speed? And they worked with thinkI, which is a net educational technology provider, to provide access to 22 million students who needed to get access online or whether it was the educator mobilization initiative that we ran. Threat US of AWS Educate Helps Teachers have the resource is that they need it with the speed that they needed to get online. This is we are working. We're learning from our customers. As this happens, this is a moving target. But when I move from this immediacy of pushing people into the virtual space into what's gonna happen this summer, as students need toe recapture, learning that they might have lost in the spring are depending where you are worldwide. There's getting to your point all K 12 higher ed and educational technology providers into the position where they can act with that agility and speed. And it's also helping those educators as they go through this. We're learning from our customers every day. >>Yeah, I want to get into those some of those lessons, but one of things that will say, You know, I'm really bullish about what you do. Getting cloud education, I think, is going to change the literacy and also job opportunities out there. I'm a huge believer that public sector is the next growth wave, just like I t was. And it's almost the same movie, right? You have inadequate systems. It's all outdated. You need these workloads, need to run and then run effectively, which you guys have done. But the interesting thing with Cove it is it essentially exposes the scabs and the uh out there because, you know, online has been an augmentation to the physical space. So when you pull that back, people like me go, wait a minute. I have kids. I'm trying to understand their learning impact. Everyone sees it now. It's almost like it's exposed. Whether it's under provisioned VP ends or black boys networking and everyone's pointing their fingers. It's your fault and its the end. So you brought this up. There's now stakeholders whose jobs depend upon something that's now primary that wasn't primary before. Whether it's the presenter, the content presented the teacher certainly high availability. I t. Um >>all these things >>are just under huge pressure. So I gotta ask you, what are the key lessons and learnings that you have seen over the past few months that you could share because people are shell shocked and they're trying to move faster? >>Yeah. So first of all is speed and agility and education are the new normal. They should have been here for a while. They need to be here now when you've got a 30 year textbook, your ruling over education when students need to get the skills of tomorrow. Today we need to be adapting quickly in order to give those students the skills to give educational institution those opportunities. Every institution needs to be enable virtual education. Every institution needs to have disaster recovery solutions and they weren't in place. These solutions need to be comprehensive. Students need access to devices. Teachers need access to professional development. We need contact centers. We worked with Los Angeles Unified School District not just to stand up a contact center, which we did with yeah, Amazon connect. But we also connected their high school seniors too, with headphones. I think we provide 132,000 students with headphones. We are helping to source with through our Amazon business relationship devices for everybody. Every student needs access in their home. Every student needs access to great learning and they needed on demand. Teachers need that readiness. I think the other thing that's happening is the whole world is again speeding through changes that probably should have happened to the system already that virtual learning is vital. Another thing that's vital is lifelong learning. We're finding that and we probably should have already seen. This is everybody needs to be a student throughout their entire life, and they need to be streaming in and out of education. The only way that this could be properly done is through virtual environments through the cloud and through an access to on demand learning. We believe that this that the work that's being done I was actually talking to some people in Australia the other day and they're saying, You know, the government is moving away from degree centrist city and moving into a more modular stackable education. We've been building AWS educate to stack to the job to stack to careers, and that type of move into education, I think, is also being spent So were you were seeing the that move Apple absolutely accelerate. We're also seeing the need to accelerate the speed to research. Obviously with what's going on going on with Kobe 19 there is a need for tools to connect our researchers two cures to diagnostic, um, opportunities. We worked with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver General Hospital and the Vancouver I Get this thing, the Vancouver Coastal Health Research UNE Institute to develop to use Amazon sage maker to speed ai diagnostic tool so that pushed towards research is absolutely vital as well. We just announced a $20 million investment in helping you speak that that research to market so education needs to operate at scale education needs to operate at speed, and education needs to deliver to a changing customer. And we've got to be partners on that journey. >>And I think I would just add reinvent a word. You guys name your conference after every year. This is a re invention opportunity. Clearly, um, and you know, I was talking to some other parents is like, I'm not going to send my kids to school online learning for zoom interview, zoom, zoom, zoom classes. I'm like, Hey, you know, get a cloud data engineering degree from Amazon educate because they'll have a job like that. Once you put on linked in the job skills are out there. The jobs are needed. Skills aren't so. I got to ask you, you know, with this whole re Skilling, whether it's a Gap year student in between semesters, while this takes care of our up Skilling people on the job, this is huge world economic form said by 2020 half of the employees will need to be re skilled up skilled. This is a huge impact and even more focus with covert 19. >>That's absolutely correct. Yeah, I think one thing that's happening is we're cloud computing has been the number one Lincoln skill for the past four or five years. The the skill. Whether it's software development in the cloud cloud architecture, your data world, our cyber security and other operational rules, those are going to be in the most demand. Those are the skills that are growing. We need to be able prepare people for rules in technology. The lifelong worker, the re skill up skill opportunities, absolutely vital Gap year is going to be available for some students. But we also got a look at you know how the this that how covert 19 can accelerate gaps between students. Every student needs access to high quality education. Every teacher needs to be equipped with the latest professional development. We've got focused like a laser, not just on. The people could afford a gap. Here are the people who who are going to be some schools who actually had solutions that could immediately push there kids into their their youth, their students in college or even employees. You need those re skills. We're all home. But it also needs to extend into the middle of the middle of Los Angeles and and you're into low income students. And in Egypt, I was really excited. We we've been working with Northern Virginia community colleges as I think you know, they were one of the lead institutions. On launching an associate degree in the cloud, they took their courses and offer what they call a jump year to 70,000 high school senior. Our high school students in Northern Virginia in the northern Virginia area, including enabling some of our cloud computing horses, are the work courses that we worked on with them to the students. So yeah, those new partnerships, that extension of college into high school and college into re skill up skills, absolutely vital. But institutions need to be able to move fast with the tools that the cloud provides you into those arena. >>Well, you know, I think you've got a really hard job to do there. It's foundational in love, what you're doing and you know me. I've been harping people who watch the Cube know that I'm always chirping and talking about how the learning is non linear. It's horizontally scalable. There's different application. You can have an application for education. It's a Siri's of different things. The workload of learning is completely different. I think to me what you guys are doing right now setting that basics foundation infrastructure. It's like the E. C two s three model. Then you got more on top of it platform, and I think ultimately the creativity is going to come from the marketplace. Whoever can build those workloads in a very agile, scalable way to meet the needs, because, let's face it, it can't be boring. Education is gonna be robust, resilient and got to deliver the payload and that's gonna be customized applications that have yet to be invented. Reinvented >>absolutely. Hopefully were jump starting that next wave of innovation spreading the opportunities Teoh all students. Hopefully we are really looking at those endemic issues and education and following leaders like University of Arizona. What the Ministry of Education, um in in Egypt has done and Northern Virginia community. Hopefully we are really taking this the opportunity of this disaster to invent on behalf of our students. Bring in you forward to the 21st century as opposed to yeah, just looking at this naval gazing way we do wrong and the past. This is an exciting opportunity, albeit a obviously scary one is we're all dealing with this with this and >>there's no doubt once we've retrenching and get some solid ground postcode 19. It's a reinvention and a reimagine growth market opportunity because you got changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are needed. These are three major things going down right now. >>Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, the retraining of workers, the up skill that the great thing is that governments realize this imperative as do educational institutions and obviously yet students. This is, and we seem like what educators can do when they want to help. Yeah, other educators, this is This is an opportunity in our society to really look at every everybody is a constant learner were a constant learning from our customers. But everybody, there is no end to education. It cannot be terminal. And this is an opportunity to really provide the students learners with skills that they need in an on demand fashion at all times and re think re innovate, reinvent the way we look at education in general. >>Well, a man, Jeff Bezos says Day one. It's a new day, one, right? So you know that there is going to reinvent Ken. You doing great work. Director of worldwide education programs Ken Eisner with Amazon Web services, Certifications and degrees and cloud computing will be the norm. It's gonna happen again. If you're a cloud data engineer. Data says you're going to get a job. I mean, no doubt about it. So thanks so much for sharing your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you, >>John. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. >>Can guys They're here Inside the Cube. Virtual coverage of AWS Public sector Online Summit. We've been virtualized. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's the Cube, covering KubeCon andCloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you buy Red Hat, the CloudNative computing foundation and it's ecosystem partners. (background crowd chatter) >> Okay welcome back everyone, live here in Seattle forKubeCon and CloudNativeCon. This is the Cube's coverage, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got two great guests, Chris Wright CTO of Red Hat, Scott Sneddon who's the senior director ofcloud at Juniper Networks, breaking down, windingdown day one of three days of coverage here. Rise of kubernetes, rise of cloudnatives, certainly impacting IT,open source communities, and developers. Guys, thanks for coming on the Cube. Appreciate it. It's good to see you. >> Yeah, good to see you. >> Welcome to the Cube. Okay, so, talk aboutthe relationship between Red Hat and Juniper. Why we're here, what are we talking about? >> Well, we're here to talkabout a combined solution. So, Red Hat's bringingkind of the software platform infrastructure piece and Juniper's bringinga networking component that ties it together.>> Yeah. >> So, we do have a fairly, well, in tech terms arelatively long history of working together. We've had a partnership for a little more than two years on sometelco Cloud initiatives around OpenStack, using the right OpenStackplatform with Contrail Juniper's contrail solutionas an SDN layer for these telco Cloud deployments. And have had a lot of successwith that partnership. A lot of large and smallto medium telco's around the world have deployed that. Earlier this year at theOpenStack summit in Vancouver, we announced an expandedpartnership to start to address some enterprise use cases. And, you know, naturallyopen shift is the lead technology that we wanted to tie in with around enterpriseadoption of cloud and some alternatives to someof the legacy platforms that are out there. >> And we were talkingearlier in the Cube here, we always get kind ofthe feel of the show, kubernetes maturing? But it kind of two worlds colliding and working together. A systems kind of view,almost like operating systems. The network systems, allkind of systems thinking. And then just apps. Okay, the old app thing. So these old legacy worldthat we all lived in kind of happening in really dynamic ways with the apps aren't thinkingabout what's below it. This is really kind of whereyou guys have a tailwind with Juniper.>> Yeah. Because you still gotto make things dynamic, you still got latency, onpremises not going away. You got IOT, so networkingplays a really big thing as software starts figuringthings out as kubernetes. Let's talk about that. Where is that value? How's it expanding? Cause clearly you stillneed to move packets from A to B.>> Yeah. Be more efficient with it. Apps going to have policy. >> The, well, I mean you've still got to, the network is always been the foundation of technology or at least for the last 20 plus years. And as cloud has been adopted, really we've seen network scale drive in different ways. The mega scalers thathave built infrastructure that we've been enabling for quite a while and have been working withthose customers as well. We've been developing a lot of simplified architecture just forthe physical plumbing to connect these things together. But what we've seen andis more and more important is, you know, it's all about the app, the app is the thing that'sgoing to consume these things. And the app developerdoesn't necessarily want to worry about IP addresses and port numbers and firewall rules and things like that, so how could we justmore simply extract that? And so, you know, we'vebeen developing automation and aimed at the networkfor quite a while, but I think more andmore it's becoming more important that theapplication can just consume that without having to directthe automation at the app. And so, you know, groupslike CloudNative foundation and a lot of the workwith kubernetes are on network policy, let's us use CloudNativeprivatives and then we can translate into the network primitives that we need to deploy to move packets, you know, IP addresses and subnets. >> And Chris, talk aboutthe multi cloud dynamic here because again, the dayof things are moving around the standardizationaround those core value propositions, youmentioned about networking and software networks, all kinds of software, you know, venations under the covers. I'm a customer, I havemultiple clouds now. This is going to be a core requirement. So you got to have a a clean integration between it. >> There's really two things. If you look at a modern application, you got your traditionalmonolithic application and as you tease itapart and into components and services, there's only one thingthat reconnects them and that's the network and so insuring that that's as easy to use as an applicationdevelopers focus is around the app and not aroundnetwork engineering is fundamental to a single cluster. And then if you have multiple clusters and you're trying to take advantage of different specialtiesin different clouds or geo replication or things like this that also require thenetwork to reconstitute those applications across thedifferent multiple clouds. If you expect your applicationengineers to become experts in networking, you're just sort ofsetting everybody up with misset expectations. >> It slows things down,requires all these other tasks you got to do. I mean it's like a rock fetch. You don't want to do it. Okay, stack a bunch of rocks, move them from there to there. I mean, this is whatthe holy grail of this infrastructure's code really is. >> Yeah.>> Yeah. I mean, that's the goal. >> Help connect the dots for us. When you look at multicloud networking obviously is a very critical component, what're your customers looking for? How does this solution goto market for your company? >> Absolute ease ofuse is top of the list. So, it can't be overly complicated. Because we're alreadybuilding complex systems, these are big distributive systems and you're adding multipleclusters and trying to connect them together. So ease of use is important. And then something that'sdynamic and reflects the current application requirements, I think is also really important. So that you don't over utilize resources in a cloud to maintainsort of a static connection that isn't actually needed at that moment. I'm sure you probably havea different perspective. >> Yeah, I mean, this isthe whole concept of SDN and network virtualization, a lot of the buzzwordsthat have been around for a few years now, is the ability to deliveron demand network services that are turned on whenthe application asks for it and are turned off when the application's done with it. We can create dynamic connectionsas applications scale. And then with a lot of thenewer things we've been doing around contrailand with Red Hat are the ability to extend thoseapplications environments with networking andsecurity into various cloud platforms. So, you know, if it's runningon top of an openstack environment or in a public cloud or, some other bare metal infrastructure, we're going to make surethat the network and security primitives are inplace when the application needs it and then get deepervisioned or pulled out when they go away. >> Being at a show like this, I don't think we need to talktoo much about open source, because that's reallycore and fundamental, but what we're doing here, but I guess, how doesthat play into customers? We've been watching the slow change in the networking world, you know, I'm a networking guy by background, used to measure changesin networks in decades and now it feels like we'removing a tiny bit faster, >> Little bit. >> What're we seeing is--? >> Well, I mean the historyof openness in networking was the ITF>> Standards. >> and IEEE and standards bodies, right? How do we interact? We're going to have ourlittle private playground and then we'll makesure to protocol layer, we can interact with each otherand we call that openness. But the new openness is open source and transparency into the platform and the ability tocontribute and participate. And so Juniper shifted a lot of our focus, I mean we still haveour own silicone and the operating system we built on our routers and switches, but we'vealso taken the contrail platform, open sourced it a few years ago, it's now called thetungsten fabric project under the Linux foundation. And we're activeparticipants in a community. And our customers really demand that. The telco's are drivingtowards an open source model, more and more enterpriseswant to be able to consume open source software with support, which is where we come in, but also be able to have an understanding of what's going on under the covers to participate if that's a possibility. But really drivinginteroperability through a different way then justa protocol interaction and a standards body. >> I can see how kubernetescan be a great fit for you guys at Juniper, clearly out of the boxyou have this kind of inter cloud, inter networking, paradigm that you're used to, right? How does the relationshipof Red Hat take it to the next level? What specifically areyou guys partnering on, where's that, what'sthat impact on customers? Can you just give a quick explanation, take a minute to explainthe Juniper Red Hat-- >> Well a lot of itcomes down to usability and ease of use, right? I mean what Red Hat's done with open shift is developed a platformleveraging kubernetes heavily, to make kubernetes easierto use with the great support model and a lot of tooling built on top of that to make thatmore easily deployable, more easily developersto develop on top of. What we're doing withcontrail is providing a supported version ofour open source project and then by tying thesethings together with some installation tools and packaging and most importantly a support model, that let's a customer have the proverbial single throat to choke. >> Have you ever hadcustomers that can run beautifully on your platform? >> Yeah yeah, and theinstallation process is seamless, it's a nob that installtime to consume contrail or some other networking stack and they can call Red Hat for support and they'll escalate toJuniper when appropriate and vice versa. And we've got all those things in place. >> I think one of the things that we have like shared vision on is, the ease of use andthen if you think about two separate systems with a plug in, there's going to be someintegration that needs to happen and we're lookingat how much automation can we do to keep thoseintegrations always functional so that ifwe need to do upgrades, we can do those together instead of abandoning one side or the other. And I think another areawhere we have shared vision is the multi cloud space where we really see the importance for our customer base toget applications deployed to the right locations. And that could be takingadvantage of different pricing structures in different clouds or it could be hardwarefeatures of functionality. Especially as we getinto edge computing and really creating a differentview of computing fabric, which isn't quite so, you know, client serveror cloud centralized, but much more distributed. >> I like how you said that Chris, earlier about how when you decomposethat monolithic app it connects with the network. That's also the other way around. Little pieces can cometogether and work with the network and then form in real time, whether it's an IOT datacoming into the data center, or pushing computdata to the edge, you got to have that network interaction. This is a real CloudNative evolution, this is the core. >> Yeah, and I think anotherpiece that we haven't touched on as much, Scott mentioned it, was the security component. >> Yeah, explain that. >> Again, with as youdecompose that application into components, you surface those components with APIs, those were internal APIswhen they're now exposed externally security really matters. And having simple policythat describes not just the connectivity topologybut who can speak to whom is pretty fundamentally important. So that you maintainsecurity posture and a risk profile that's acceptable. >> And then I think it'sreally important is, your traditionalenterprise starts to adopt these CloudNative models. You've got a securityteam there that might not necessarily be up to speed or on board. So you've got to havetooling and visualization and analytics to beable to present to them that policies are being enforced correctly and are compliant and all those things so. >> Yeah and they're tough customers too. They're not going to, they expectreally rock solid capability. >> They don't let youjust deploy a big flat network with no policy-- >> Hey what about the APIs? Service areas exposed in the IOT space. >> Yeah.>> Right. >> You got to nail it down. >> Yeah absolutely, sothat's a lot of what we're bringing to the table here, is a lot of Juniper'shistory around developing security products. >> Take a minute to explain,I want to give you some time to get a plug in for Juniper. I've been following youguys for a long time. Junos back on the old days, contrail. Juniper's has had a software, big time software view. >> Yeah. >> Explain the DNA of software at Juniper. >> You know the earlydays of Juniper were, we weren't the first networkvendor on the market. There was already somebodyon the market in the mid 90s that had a pretty solid stronghold on carrier and enterprise networking. We had to come in with a better model. Let's make the box easierto use and simpler. Let's make the interfacea little more structured and understandable. Let's make it programmable, right? I mean the first feature request for Junos was to have a CLI becausethe first interaction to it was just an API call. And that was out of the box from day one. We had to write a user interface to it just to fit in to theexisting network world in the mid 90s. And so we've alwaysbeen really proud of the Junos operating systemthat runs on our boxes. We've really been proudthat we've had this one Junos concept of a commonoperating system on every network device that we deliver. As we've started tovirtualize those network devices for NFE and things like that, it's again that same operatingsystem that we deliver. Contrail came to us through acquisition, so it's not Junos in and of itself, but still leveraging a lot of those same fundamentals around,model driven configuration management, understandableAPIs, and openness that we've always had. >> Cloud operating modelthat everyone's going to, the common operating modelfits in that unification vision that you guys have had. >> Yeah absolutely. >> And really early, by the way, was before SDN was SDN, I think that was SDN's kind of like-- >> I like to dry, I-- >> Should have called it SDN. >> Right, I described SDN as just a big distributed router andreally we've had big distributed routers for a long time. >> John, we are in Seattle, everything we're talkingabout in tech is hipster. >> Chris, great stuff. Great to have you on, Scott. Great smart commentary. CTO Red Hat, you guys are winning. Congratulations on the betsyou made at kubernetes early, >> Yeah. >> CoreOS great acquisition,great team there, and some news there aboutsome dealings out back into the C and CF, soI mean, you've got it-- >> A lot going on. >> A lot going on. And yeah, big news with that other things, I can't remember what it was, it was some big-->> Something in there. >> Something for a million dollars. >> Great news out there. Thanks for coming out, appreciate it. Good to see you.>> Good to see you. >> Alright, breakingdown day one coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Day two starts tomorrow. Three days of wall towall coverage of KubeCon. And they're shutting down the hall. Be right back and see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Toronto, for the Untraceable event. Here in the industry, it's called Blockchain Futurist. It's where all the industry elite are getting together here in Canada, to talk about the future of blockchain, crypto, and everything. It's theCUBE's specific coverage. As we continue 2018, kicking off event coverage with our CUBE brand. But right now we've got two great guests from Start-up, and they're called Quantum EXchange and Bank, QuantEXchange. Manie Eagar, Executive Chairman. And, John Willock, who's the CEO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So you guys got some hard news to talk about. >> We do. >> But, you guys are doing an exchange model, bringing something really cool to the market. >> Yep. >> Which, we need to kind of get this figured out. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, the problem you're solving, and then we'll get to the news. Absolutely. So, I think the lot of people are doing exchanges. You see them coming all the time, and most of them don't really have any specific differentiation or value add. We are not like that at all. We have spent our careers as part of most of the team, in traditional financial services. And, we're coming from the securities exchange business to bring the learnings from NASDAQ, the learnings from the like of that sort to the Crypto Exchange space. And, to be able to facilitate not only a regulated exchange venue, but also one that is institutional grade in terms of tools and the client experience, as well as the trust factor with the platform itself. So, that's really what we're trying to get done with the Quantum Exchange that we're building right now. >> And how old's the company? How long you been around? When do you guys start? How funded are you? What's happening there? >> So, I'll refrain from discussing funding at this point. But, I will say we've started this year. I left the Toronto Stock Exchange specifically to pursue this in conjunction with Manny. And, we've been batting this idea around for the last couple of years. And, the market reached the stage in maturity and size, that we said now is the time to get going and do it. And, so far, fanfare has been fantastic. Reactions from people in the Crypto Ecosystem, people in the Securities Ecosystem, has been equally positive. >> Yeah. >> There's a strong desire to see something like this come to market. And, we're very excited to be able to launch. >> Before we get to the news, Manie, I want to ask you a question. One of the things that we've seen is two types of behavior. The other guy's got to lose for me to win, and then, or both parties can win. We're seeing trends where people are taking a posture against regulations. Oh, they're evil, they're causing all the problems. They kind of don't know what they're doing, kind of, they're evolving. Maturity levels are different based on countries. But, where the success is happening, like Gabriel with Bit. Okay, there's collaboration. Because the regulars actually want to do a good job most cases. They just can't get there fast enough. This is the new model. This is what people are looking at. This is the kind of solution ... >> Absolutely. >> A bridge between industry, and the slow but, yet want to change regulators. Your thoughts? >> Very, very good point. The good news is we're all talking to each other. I think there's dialogue at the moment, but it's not maybe as open as it should be. Because it's all day one. What I bring to the community, and have for the ... since I got engaged in launching the first Bitcoin ATM in the world, in Vancouver, part of that team. And, I think Anthony Bold from Bit is for an alliance. And, blockchain association in the block forum, which we'll announce tomorrow. 'Cause I worked for Blockhouse. I worked for Vodafone. I was involved in the Empasa project. And, I can see and understand what does it take for people to start using technologies. I think what everybody is hoping for is this golden moment. Like when the first iPhone arrived on the scene. >> Yeah. >> People queued around the block through the night to get ahold of that first device. We haven't had that moment yet. For Blockchain and Crypto. We've had the wild enthusiasm, which is all speculation as far as most of us are concerned. But, maturity is coming, these technology if Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies want to succeed, there needs to be another converging technology with what's already out there. The internet, your financial ecosystem, and so forth. >> Yep. >> In my view, there'll be a coming together. There'll be new models altogether. Incumbents will have to pick up the pace in terms of how they go about it. >> Yeah. >> But, we see the opportunity for ourselves, for Quantex. And the industry as a whole is where the convergence takes place, the dialogue becomes more mature, and open, and transparent. Regulators become aligned. At the moment, we hear of a lot of jurisdictions announcing this, announcing that. But, when you start investigating or assessing, it's different flavors, different cultures, different economies. >> Yeah. >> There's the Commonwealth Block. There's the North American Block. There's the Asian Block. Europe is a whole different ball of wax. >> Yeah, I agree with you and I just want to ... >> So, this is where it gets interesting . That's where we come into the boat. >> Absolutely. >> Well, I agree with you, I just want to make a point. During the dotcom bubble, during that internet wave, there was some over-speculation. But at the end of the day, the forcing function of reality was the growth of the online users was growing every day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, the demand and the commerce dollars were still real. Now, certainly there was an exuberance. Irrational, in some cases. But, it all ended up happening. I think here in this market, the forcing function is the reality that there's demand, and there's money, and there's impact. >> There is now, we now know that. >> This is coming. It's not like Doomsday. Well, it was fake. No, not really. >> No, we are still in the first inning of seeing what is actually coming out of all of this. I think last year's price speculation runoff obviously was set to decline at some point. But, there has been a long series of momentum coming out of that, where people have realized that this is something much more important and significant than what it looked like three years ago, perhaps. And, a lot of that talent is now coming to this space. Bringing, the capital, bringing the know-how, us included, to deliver something for the next generation of platform, tools, and ecosystem to really grow this massively. And, bring it much more to the mainstream. >> And, I think the idea of aligning with regulars, help them move faster. You mentioned adopt technology, but, still in the phase of deploying operational infrastructure. You mentioned some of the things, the projects you've worked on. Vodafone, that's cellular, that's towers, that's infrastructure. So, I think we're still in this hybrid model of, in parallel, capital formation, building companies, and then, just, we got to get the roads built. >> Well, and understand the posture that a lot of people are taking on. We need to decentralize, we need to open this thing up. But, at the end of the day, the consumer votes. You and I know if we don't have viewers, we don't have a channel. If we don't have users, people actually using the technology, not only investing, but actually using it. It aint going to happen. Decentralize, centralize to a hybrid. And, that's the part that we need to open ourselves. >> Let me ask you guys a question before we get to the news. This exciting news you get to share. How do you standardize something? Because, one common thread of all these major deflection points, at least, with the major cycles I've lived through, has been standards. >> Absolutely. But, it's not going to be your grandfather's standards.So, TCPIP was different. The OSI model is a different generation. The internet was different. Web social is different. What may happen may be different. So, but, standards play an important role. But, no one has clear visibility yet what will be standardized, what should be standardized. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? >> Well last year John comes in, and he's learned the world of standards at NASDAQ, and TMX, and elsewhere. >> That's true. >> Now, we need to bring it to this world. >> How do we scale operational lead to get a cohesive exchange that can scale and demure value? Where do the standards focus need to be? What should the emphasis ... where does the light get shined on, and where's the energy go to? >> I think, you know, you want to look at standards, think about something like this ETF debate that's been going on. Huge speculation about whether or not that's coming. I think a lot of people who are looking at that ETF debate, specifically, don't actually understand some of the economics and the mechanisms behind the scenes. So, for example, what is a fork? When you think about traditional securities, you got corporate actions like a stock split or dividend. A fork is an entirely different concept with entirely different results. Those are the sorts of things that need to be discussed, standardized, and brought to an industry cohesion to be able to successfully deal with some of these events as the market progresses. And, to bring some normalcy to some of this as well, especially if you want to bring institutions to the plate. And, I think that comes to one of the other initiatives that we're working on ... Which is the industry body, called block forum, which we're going to be discussing in a moment. That can really help be that joining voice >> Hold on, hold on a second. This is the news. >> behind everything. >> This is the news. You guys are announcing, let's get to the news. >> Okay. >> You're announcing a couple things. Start with what you were just talking about. You guys are announcing a forum. Can you explain? >> Correct, correct. So, we're launching, officially, to the remainder of the crowd here tomorrow, block forum. Which is an industry association that will be especially behind driving adult thinking behind all this, putting regulation into place, discussing commonalities around policy, around how to standardize, and how to really make all of this interoperable. And, I think that's the key word. If you have individual pillars of, islands of activity, that's not going to be the same as having a cohesive global solution. And, that's what we really want to drive. >> An exchange solution? >> Well, in our case in Quantex, absolutely. But, an exchange in the services we can offer is one part of the whole puzzle. There's a whole series of inter-connected affairs that have to work together. And, that's what block forum is going to drive, is this assembly of different connected parties who are all working for the greater benefit of the Prio ecosystem. >> Who is going to be involved in the forum? Who is the stakeholders? Who can join? Is it a membership? Is it a consortium? >> It is a membership. There will actually be a token that will have very interesting membership related tokenomics attached that we can disclose at a later date. And, that economic alignment between the parties who are staking effectively their interests in the certain topics that they want back or the certain efforts will be a completely unique model compared to what we've seen in the industry today, where generally speaking, it is a committee who drives something on behalf of members. This is really fundamental for all members, democratically from individuals all the way up to institutions, to be able to participate and voice their interests. >> So you will see governments as members. >> Yes, yes, absolutely. >> You will see industry leading stakeholders and practitioners. The whole idea of the body is not to create new policy or reinvent the wheel. We're getting policy, we're receiving regulation. So, how do we put this in practice? Where are the success stories? How can we show the industry as a whole? Governments across jurisdictions to align around their spacing. >> So a melting pot of people to get a conversation going. >> Right. >> To start shaping an agenda or just start talking? >> So, we're talking to governments at premier and cabinet level. We're talking to boardrooms of banks. We're talking to think of your top 40 leaders in blockchain and crypto. We're talking to all of them and engaging with them. >> And, what's the vision of the outcome that you can envision in your mind? What is that outcome for this group? What do you hope to accomplish? What is the end result, if you can kind of assume things go in a good way, what happens? >> I think this is a unifying voice for leadership in the industry to discuss what the outside, outside of crypto world that is, and really bridge that gap between those who are within and understand natively and those who need to be brought in to be able to interact with this and really grow all of this industry. >> And, promote the role models. >> And, exactly that. Exactly that. To bring the best to the front. And, really show that there is actually serious opportunity, serious business. This is not just a series of hackers or whatever nefarious activity these people casually may think the block chain industry is. This is something very serious and very real. And, we want to be a voice for that. >> Awesome. And, you guys had some other news on the fundraising front. >> Industry first. >> You guys are raising some money, you're doing a private sale, and new gear as much as you can, it's pretty invested, so, I think you can promote it. >> I will say with a caveat as you say, it's pertinent to investors only, and we have not completed our discussions with our legal counsel. Having said that, we are taking the model of a traditional securities exchange membership, seats on an exchange, which can be purchased, which have rights attached, which are a titled asset separately from equity of the exchange, for example, separately from a utility token as you would have seen with many other exchanges. This is something that we feel is a very unique model. We are very excited to be able to launch this, and come to market first with this concept. Which again, is blending the best of the old and new. We're taking tokenization, we're taking a concept that have existed in the previous markets and previous worlds, and blending them together for something that is somewhat unique and wholly new in this application. >> Well, I hope you guys raise a lot of money. We need more harmony between regulating and government entities to bring the whole world together. And, certainly from the money-making standpoint, what the liquidity and exchanges can provide as the world starts to understand where the groove swing is and where those swim lanes are, especially with security tokens. >> You bet, you bet. And, the success is going to be measured in ability to scale sustainably. And, we want to demonstrate that with this model. >> We need some leadership there. So, good luck. Best of luck. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, thank you. >> We are here live in Toronto, Canada for the Blockchain Futurists Conference. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Describing the single millers, talking to the most important people, the hottest stories. Here are the most colorful people, people traveling around the world sharing that insights with you. Stay with us for more day coverage here. The first day of two day coverage of Blockchain Futurists. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by RedHat, the OpenStack foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host for the week John Troyer. And helping us to bring it on home we have Roman Alekseenkov who's the co-founder of Aptomi. Brand new start up, I feel we've got the exclusive here to help you know, we have some blog posts out there and the like, but help to introduce you to our community and some of the broader world. Thanks for joining us. >> Yep, my first time at theCUBE. >> Alright so Roman, give us a little bit about your background and you know, we need with any, you know, founder the why of your company. >> Okay so I guess let's start with a background. So I used to work for one of the cloud infrastructure startups called Mirantis. And I worked there for a very long time. And last year I decided to start something on my own. Right, so now I am one of the main guys and one of the core contributors to the project called Aptomi. So and, I don't know if it's relevant, but before Mirantis, I've been doing a lot of the programming competitions like Google Code Jam, ACMICPC and Top Coder. My team ended up winning ACMICPC world finals. So I have like a decent background in algorithms, computer science, data structures, and things like that. >> Yeah. >> So that's me. >> We always see people are always humble there. It's, we know Mike Dvorkin is on your team. >> He is. >> People in the networking world, you know, might have run across Mike, and so super smart people. Give us the you know, the problem statement that your company's looking to solve. >> Right, so... I think it's going to be not one sentence answer. It's going to be a slightly longer answer. So when we talk to a number of companies who are using Kubernetes and who are building apps on top of Kubernetes, we looked into CI space and the CD space. And we looked at the CI, and in the CI for the most part, most of the problems seem to be solved, right. Everything that starts from your source code and then Docker file, how you build your artifacts, how you test it, and how you publish the binary to the repo, all that part seems to be streamlined. You take Jenkins, you take Docker, you take all the tools. You write some Kubernetes key, so this part, packaging components, it's not a big deal. And what we saw is where all the people are struggling is actually in the CD space, right. Once you start putting multi-container complex applications out of those pieces once you start wiring those pieces together, maybe microservices, maybe not, but once you start wiring things together, once you start running them across multiple environments, multiple clusters, right, that's where the things become really, really difficult for people who just rely on the tool set that we have today. Right, and that's where we saw an opportunity to build this service abstraction which allow people to wire things together and run them and operate them in a controllable way across multiple clusters and multiple environments integrated obviously with the continuous delivery pipelines. >> So if people weren't using Aptomi, what would they be using now? Or what kind of, what kinds of tools and processes are they bringing together if they're not doing this? Are they doing everything by hand, or how do you compare it to some of the other tools? >> Right, so a lot of people, they use some homegrown frameworks right now on top of Kubernetes and Helm. Or maybe on top of Kubernetes and YAML files. Or maybe Kubernetes and JSON is also one of the ways to do this. But there are some drawbacks in, in the approaches, right? Because we think that you want to start reasoning about those as actually applications and services not as like as a bunch of YAMLs and containers right? And so once you start talking about this as services as well as rules around those services, right maybe I want to say like hey everything that goes in my production environment should be secure or I want all my services with label "X" deployed to the dev environment or to cluster US east right? I mean the things become easier for you, 'cause you don't have to deal with the YAML file. >> Kind of from the abstraction layer up to maybe up, say to in other part of IT you might say it's policy driven almost, it's declarative, intent driven; I want this to happen rather than writing this kind of crazy YAML. Actually one of the Kubernetes founders, I dunno recently on Twitter or somewhere I was reading was saying that YAML was never supposed to be written by humans, that was kind of a mistake we meant for it to be under the covers but here we are. >> Roman: Right, but you are exactly right. It's services as well as intent around the services. >> Stu: Roman, I want to get your thoughts on just the Kubernetes ecosystem itself, you know for years here at OpenStack it was "Oh wait there's a lot of different distributions", you know, moving between one or the other wasn't necessarily easy. Kubernetes seems like we're a little bit better, a little further along, might've learned from some of the issues that we've had here. There's, last I saw it was getting around 40 different options but you know the thing I also wonder about is Kubernetes tends to get baked into platforms so you've got people that will build their own, just take the code, but you know Red Hat has a platform, all the public clouds have a platform, then there's a number of startups there. What's that like from your standpoint kind of being in this ecosystem is it, and maybe give us a little comparison compared to what it would have been like in the OpenStack world? >> Roman: Sounds good, so for us we actually we don't really care on what Kubernetes we run because we run, we help people to deliver apps and services on top. But if you talk about Kubernetes itself, we don't actually last year we haven't seen a lot of issues with Kubernetes right because we run a cluster in our lab, it just works. JKE always doesn't let me down, we also run things on Azure so speaking about the Kubernetes infrastructure I think the state of Kubernetes right now it's pretty reliable. So we don't see a lot of issues with that. But you also mentioned the platform, right so Kubernetes is part of the platform and that's the interesting part because a couple of years ago everyone was talking about Pass. It's Pass, Pass, Pass, Pass everywhere. Now you see a lot of conversations about Pass because Pass is like a monolith platform, doesn't exist anymore because it basically gets decomposed into what people call I guess containers of service and the modular tool set. And container orchestration is one part, and there is like 15 or 16 different parts from ad definition, to orchestration, and CD pipelines and security components, right? And that's why you see so many products out there with overlapping functionality. >> I mean do you think that the concept of Pass is going away at this point? Will we continue to redefine what a Pass is? I think every few years maybe that's the pattern. >> My personal opinion is that the concept of Pass is gone. There's is no more Pass. The future is the modular stack and the modular tool set. >> Stu: Yeah, so absolutely the future is becoming more distributed. I'm curious your thoughts then on something like Serverless which tends to change that even a little bit more than what we've been looking at. >> Roman: Sure well Serverless is, I guess it's not for everyone. It also depends on the type of workload that you run. If you want to run something compute intensive I guess it's still going to be containers or even VMs but likely containers. But if you have some stateless front-end or API, something that you sometimes make a call to and have to do something and get a response back sure Serverless is great, and Serverless actually fits quite well into what Mike and are tying to do with Aptomi. >> John: Roman I also wanted to ask about dependency mapping and visualizing dependencies. Hybrid cloud has been a big theme this week. It's actually a big theme in enterprise and elsewhere. When that happens when you have separate components whether they are monolithic components that are talking to each other down to microservices, dependencies are huge at that, the application level dependencies, especially as you move to hybrid cloud because you might be moving some component away from the rest and you better know what's talking to the other components. Any thoughts on how that is developing as architecture, application architectures and what you guys are doing to help there? >> Roman: Yeah so there's basically two ways how you can approach this so one way is the traditional way where you just open up your Kubernetes to a bunch of developers and people just run their things in different namespaces. If you use that approach I think those dependencies between different components, what relies on what, who's talking to whom, they become non-obvious, it's really hard to discover them once you got things deployed. So we are taking a slightly different approach because we require a little bit more information upfront about dependencies between components so once you deploy things through Aptomi we kind of already know what exists on the clusters and why, and who owns the resources, and who asked for certain services to be deployed. So we do provide some contextual visibility into that. And what's really nice is we're trying to build this, or we are building this on top of the community standards, we are not reinventing the whole platform, or trying to invent a new language, it's basically build ontop of Kubernetes and Helm. It's just a simple declarative service based abstraction and it rules. >> Stu: Last thing I wanted to ask, Aptomi itself, you know what's the state of the project? Is it a 1.0, are you looking for contributors, where are you with customers, help round off the understanding of the company and project. >> Sounds good, so we are one year into the project. The project is completely open source, it's on Github. It has 4 contributors right now and close to 2,000 commits maybe a little bit more. 100 star, 100+ on Github, so we're getting some traction, in the open source. Speaking about the readiness I think it's we're not 1.0 yet but we're getting close to 1.0. And the core of it, and the whole project is completely open source right, it's 100% Apache 2.0, but what we also do we also offer a hosted version with support. Right so when people come and they can just get the complete CD system with the service based layer and abstraction through our hosted version with support and that's what we are charging money for and revenue wise we do have paying customers, but it's only a year in so. Not a big amount but, there's going to be more. >> Stu: Alright well, Roman Alekseenkov really appreciate you sharing with us. Congratulations on the progress so far, seen an item I'd like working for us and for John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman, we thank you for joining for 3 days of live wall-to-wall coverage of big final shout-out to the OpenStack Foundation and the supports of theCUBE for the whole crew here. Thank you for watching theCUBE. >> (electro-dance music) >> (soft piano) >> Astronaught: I recommend you activate my bit-ray over.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome back a company we've spoken to a few times at events, Paddy Power Betfair. First time guest coming to us from across the pond, Dave Buckley who is the automation engineer with Paddy Power Betfair, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so first of all, you've been to a couple summits and we've talked to Paddy Power about OpenStack. Before we get into your specific implementation, tell us about your experience here this week and any compare, contrast to previous years. >> Yeah so I'm very lucky, I got to come to the previous two summits in North America. I guess what I've enjoyed this week, it's kind of a slight tilt towards, it's away from being purely OpenStack, kind of towards this open infrastructure kind of thing, 'cause like I said, especially last year in Boston, Q and NEs was becoming a big thing. Yeah, and kind of, the OpenStack Foundation becoming kind of more, not that it wasn't before, but more community-based and being part of the ecosystem. So, yeah, I think it's been quite interesting seeing that. >> Not to put words in your mouth but, it was even, the last year or two, it's more aware of some of the complimentary things and adding pieces. You know, we had, one of the interviews we did this week was person who's the SIC lead for the Kubernetes stuff, that sits under another Foundation, things like that. Yeah, exactly. It's been quite interesting this week, I guess, sort the Kata Container project, which wasn't something I'd been aware of before Monday morning basically. I remember we were sitting in the keynotes, and they were like, you can have this container-like thing which has all the speed of a container, but it's as secure as a BM. And you're thinking, how, how is that even possible? So I've really enjoyed, I got to go to one of the sessions yesterday, one of the technical introductions on that. >> Yeah, I always love, there's certain things where, okay, this is what I'm going to do with my schedule, and turns into, this got announced, or I didn't know about this, and you knew, blow up my schedule, let me change everything else. Yeah, exactly, I think you always, you can't, you have to be flexible, right? Adaptable, and as the week goes on you just go to what you think is interesting. >> John: So Dave, you and your company have been working with OpenStack for quite a while. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And you obviously run a system that needs to be stable. Right, needs to, you take care of betting and people's money. >> Dave: Exactly. >> So that needs to be solid. But I understand you recently went though an upgrade and have some experiences talking about that? Can you talk a little bit about where you are with your OpenStack implementation and that sort of migration? >> Sure. So, I guess it's about three years ago, it was Betfair at the time, so this was before the merger of the two companies. So Betfair started using OpenStack, and I think it was actually the last time the summit was here, in Vancouver. So a couple of my colleagues who were kind of the technical leads at the time. Steve Armstrong and Steve Perera, they flew out here, to kind of get a feel for OpenStack, what it was, talk to people who'd had experiences with it. I actually think that conference back then was very informative of what the platform today now looks like. So some of the conversations they had there with people like New Age Networks and Arista, which we used for the switching, but conversations they had there kind of ended up being now what we're using in production. I guess over the past couple of years, so the big thing that happened obviously was this merger between Paddy Power and Betfair, following that they had an exercise which they called the single customer platform, which is annoyingly, for a sys-admin guy, kind of like me, they, it's always been abbreviated to SCP, but you have to ignore that. So that was to kind of consolidate and integrate the Paddy Power and Betfair co-bases and put it on a single platform, which was our OpenStack and Nuage platform. So that kind of completed in January this year, so that's live, so basically the Paddy Power sports book has an entirely new website, all running on OpenStack. A lot quicker and more efficient then the previous version. So that's been a real success. And as part of that, I should say that stability is really vital, so kind of in our business. If the site is down we don't make any money, and if it happens during a big sporting event you have a big problem. >> Do you have a metric around that? What a minute or an hour of down time would be? >> So I guess it always depends, so the nature of our traffic is very spikey. So obviously when you have a big, it's on a Saturday in Europe, the football, soccer, maybe I should say, is like a very big deal. >> We have a global audience, football's okay. >> I'll stick with football then. >> We were all watching the royal wedding. >> I don't want to talk about that. The football, if you, we just get peak traffic on that day. And, even within the year, there's a thing called the Grand National, which is a big event in the UK, big horse racing, I guess like the Kentucky Derby. It's kind of when we get our maximum traffic in the year. Yeah, you always need to be prepared for that. So one of the things as you mentioned, we kind of look into upgrade OpenStack from Kilo to Newton. So we've been on Kilo from the start. We're using Red Hat's distribution of OpenStack, so what Red Hat offer is this, they have like every three releases I think it is? They have this long release life-cycle. So that's kind of the reason we're going to Newton, cause we have kind of the, then the support will go to 2021. [Stu] - But if I remember, it's Red Hat the OpenStack Platform 10. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And 13 is going to be queened as their next one that's going to be released. >> Exactly, so I think they just announced that this week, right? So I think at some point in the next year or two we'd be going to queens. >> How do you determine when you make that jump and anything around the upgrade process, you know, good and bad that you could share. >> Dave: Yeah, so I guess going from, we were overdue an upgrade in this case, Kilos, you know, pretty old now. What we're lucky that we can do is because we have Nuage, it's like an external SDM provider, so the entire data plane is controlled by Nuage, and you can kind of plug as many OpenStacks as you like really into Nuage, and you offload all the networking to Nuage. So what's that's allowed us to do is basically we'd have had a lot of trouble if we'd had to do an in place upgrade, so I've actually been to one of the groups this week, quite a lot of people were talking about upgrades and just like all the nightmares it's caused. I know it's getting better as like the releases come out, but what we were able to do is kind of building new, an entirely new OpenStack cloud on the side of, so we've kind of turned it kind of an immutable OpenStack, so your OSB 7 cloud is there, we built this new OSB 10. But they're both circ into the same networking, so the same Nuage SDN. And the way our developers deploy their applications, I guess you want to see this in more detail, we've done presentations at these summits in the past, but kind of in short, every deployment we do immutable deployments as well, so for every deployment we'll create a new subnet within Nuage, and kind of do rolling update of your VMs that are on that new subnet into like a VIP which is kind of where the constant is, so all the traffic's come in to that VIP then you just flip things in and out below it when you do a deployment, so what that basically means is from a developers point of view, when they're migrating from OSB 7 to OSB 10 they'll essentially spin up new networks and new VMs in OSB 10 and that deployment pipeline will kind of just seamlessly, everything else will stay the same because the networking doesn't change. So we don't have to have any downtime on the data plane or the control plane. Which is really beneficial for us 'cause the way, I guess this is I'll just describe the way developers do deployments like we rely heavily on the OpenStack API being available. You pay a cost in that you, so you need extra hardware to do that I guess, but yeah we found it is something that's worked for us. >> John: Anything else with the networking and specifically that you all are running, the load balancing or resiliency that you need to have for your apps? >> Dave: Yeah so one of the things was, so it's kind of another problem there were trying to solve with this whole project, this new OpenStack platform is that historically Betfair, as it was at the time, had always run out of a single data-center. But we had another site, but it was mainly kind of a development environments right in there. So the company thought why don't we just have, we should just have both DCs for resiliency, try and run things in like an active-active configuration. Which is fine for external customer facing applications where we've had an external load balance server that can point traffic between the two DCs. But then the question is what do you do with internal apps? So this is what led us to use Avi Networks, which is kind of a cloud native load balancing technology, so we've been using to provide like GSLB internal laps, so basically we'll load balance traffic between the two data-centers so it gets deployed within your OpenStack environment, has a really neat integration with Nuage, the Nuage SDN layer, and will resolve you to whichever data-center is appropriate at that time. So if you have a full data-center outtage, you should be able to go "Okay, point stuff over there". >> John: So it makes you and the networking team or the IT team into the heroes not the villains, you're usually the people saying "No" or "We can't do that". >> I guess so, I guess so yeah you're probably right. It's cool technology though. I guess that we're very lucky and that we're given the opportunity by the people at the company to experiment with new things, so even though we're about stability but we're also about trying to push things forward in terms of what technology to use. >> Stu: Dave I'm curious how kind of the hybrid or multi-cloud type of environments fit into what you're doing today, give us the update there. >> Dave: Yeah so that's something very in our radar at the moment I guess it's, yeah it's what everybody's doing, looking to how you can have this hybrid cloud model. So I think, going back three years again, at that time, being like an online betting company, it's a highly regulated business and only at that point it was really possible to kind of put some of this stuff into the public cloud, it seems like things have come a long way, so it's something we're looking at at the moment, we're evaluating different solutions, different vendors like the Googles, AWSs, and seeing or even like some OpenStack public clouds and seeing maybe how could we migrate some workloads out into the public cloud, how do we want to that, to give us more resiliency, and also as I was saying about our spiky traffic, it just makes a lot of sense to be able to say burst out into whichever public cloud vendor on a Saturday when the football's on to deal with that peak load. So it's something we're very much looking at at the moment. But yeah no formal decisions as of yet. Unless they've done something while I've been away. >> John: With containers here at the show, lots of different threads right? Containers, Edge, the OpenDev track, things like that. Anything else, we've talked about Kata, anything else that came up that was interesting here that you just watch Kubernetes and container track as well? >> Dave: So I guess in terms of containers it's, sitting in the Keynotes on Monday you would, if you weren't watching if you were just listening, you probably wouldn't know you were at an OpenStack Summit right since there's as much Kubernetes container stuff as there is OpenStack. It's interesting so we've kind of been doing... Again, similar to the public cloud conversation, it's something that's very relevant to us at the moment, we've done kind of a few proof-of-concept ideas, evaluating different solutions, so we have like running a Cube cluster ourself, obviously we have a strong relationship with Red Hat that we've kind of explored to using OpenShift maybe, and then come the networking layer you can integrate with Nuage which would be really cool for us so it'll allow us to do kind of the all the networking, access control mechanisms as we do for our virtual machines. And again this is also something in the whole public cloud conversation is well if wanted to containers in the public cloud as well like you have all the different offerings, would we want to run our own, in like an AWS or something? Or maybe go to someone like Google where you have that supported self-service model I suppose. But yeah at the moment it's kind of at those stages so I think Steve did a presentation on the Kubernetes stuff like a PCO we done at the last Summit. But yeah still at the moment still want to make some firm decisions about which direction we're going to go but a lot of the developers a very keen for this and obviously for guys like us we all know the value of it so I think at the moment because we had that focus on stability we should now have a period of time where we're able to kind of look at all this stuff a bit more, hopefully get some container solutions into production which would be awesome. >> Stu: Dave Buckley we really appreciate you giving us the update, love to be able to do some of those longitudinal case studies as to where you've been where you're going, what you're thinking about. Be sure to check out thecube.net, you can actually search for Patty Power Betfair, see some of those previous interviews from Dave's peers. Loads more interviews there as well as all the shows we're going to be at in the future where hope you come by and say "Hi". For John Troyer I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> (electro-dance music) >> (soft piano)

>> (Narrator) Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's The Cube, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer and you're watching The Cube, worldwide leader in tech coverage, and this is OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest Melvin Hillsman, who's the governance board member of OpenLab, which we got to hear about in the keynote on Monday. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Melvin, we were given, start us off with a little bit about your background, what brought you to the OpenStack community, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, yeah, so my background is in Linux system administration and my getting involved in OpenStack was more or less seeing the writing on the wall as it relates to virtualization and wanting to get an early start in understanding how things would pan out over the course of some years. So I probably started OpenStack maybe three or four so years ago. I was probably later to the party than I wanted to be, but through that process, started working at Rackspace first and that's how I really got more involved into OpenStack in particular. >> Yeah, you made a comment, though. The writing on the wall for virtualization. Explained that for a sec. >> So for me, I was at a shared hosting company and we weren't virtualizin' anything. We were using traditional servers, dedicated servers, installing hundreds of customers on those servers. And so, at one point, what we started doing was we would take a dedicated server, we would create a virtual machine on it, but we would use most of the resources of that dedicated server, and so what allowed that shared hosting was to tear stuff down and recreate it, but it was very manual process and so, of course, the infrastructure service and orchestration around that OpenStack was becoming the de facto standard and way of doing it, and so I didn't want to try to learn manually, or fix something up internally, I wanted to go where OpenStack was being highly developed a lot and people working on it in their day to day jobs, which is why I went to Rackspace. >> Okay, one of the things we look at, this is a community here, so it takes people from lots of different backgrounds, and some of them do it on their spare time, some of them are paid by larger companies to participate, so to tell us about OpenLab, itself, and how your company participates there. >> Sure, so I started, well I'm at Huawei now, but I was at Rackspace and that's kind of how I got more involved in the community and there I started working on testing things above the OpenStack ecosystem, so things that people want to build on top of OpenStack and during that process Huawei reached out to me and was like hey you know you're doing a great job here, and I was like yeah I would love to come and explore more of how we can increase this activity in the community at large. And so Oakland Lab was essentially born out of that, which the OpenStack community, they deliver the OpenStack API's, and they kind of stop there, you know. Everything above that is, you do that on your own, more or less, and so also, as a chair of the user committee, again, just being more concerned about the people who are using stuff, OpenLab was able, was available to facilitate me having access to hardware and access to people who are using things outside OverStack in use cases, et cetera, where we want to test out more integrated tools working with OpenStack and different versions of OpenStack. And so that's essentially what OpenLab is-- >> So in OpenLab, projects come together and it's basically, it's an Interop, boy, in the networking world, they've had the Interop plug and plug fest for a long time, but, in essence, projects come together and you integrate them and start, you invite them in and they integrate and start to test them. Starting with, I mean, I see, for this release, Terraform and Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so a lot of people want to to use Kubernetes, right? And as an OpenStack operator you essentially, you don't really want to go and learn all the bits of Kubernetes, necessarily, and so, but you want to use Kubernetes and you want to work seamlessly with OpenStack and you want to use the API's that you're used to using with OpenStack and so we work very heavily on the external cloud provider for OpenStack, enabling Cinder V3 for containers that you're spinning up in Kubernetes, so that they have seamless integration, you don't have to try to attach your volumes, they are automatically attached. You don't have to figure out what your load balancing is going to to look like. You use Octavia, which is load balancing service for OpenStack, very tightly integrated and things, you know, as you spin things up, they work as you as you would expect and so then all the other legacy applications and all the things you're used to doing with OpenStack, you bring on Kubernetes and you essentially do things the way you've been doing them before, with just an additional layer. >> Yeah, now I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the providers and the users, you know how do they get engaged, to and give us a little flavor around those. >> Yeah, so you get engaged, you go to OpenLabtesting.org and there's two options. One, is you can test out your applications and tools, by clicking get started, you fill that out. And what's great about open lab is that we actually reach out and we talk with you, we consult with you, per se, because we have a lot of variation in hardware that's available to us and so we want to figure out the right hardware that you need in order to do the tests that you want, so that we can get the output as it relates to that integration that will, of course, educate and inform the community at large of whether or not it's working and been validated. And, again, so as a person who wants to support OpenLab or for a provider, for example, who wants to support OpenLab, you click on the support OpenLab link, you fill out a form and you tell us you know, do you want to provide more infrastructure, do you want to talk with us about how clouds are being architected, integrations are being architected, things that you're seeing in the open source use cases that may not be getting the testing that they need and you're willing to work with engineers from other companies around that, so individual testers and then companies who may bring a number of testers together around a particular use case. >> Now, you're starting to publish some of the results of Interop testing and things like that. How is open lab, how does it produce its results, is it eventually going to be producing white papers and things like that or dashboards or what's your vision there? >> Yeah, so we produce a very archaic dashboard right now, but we're working with the CNCF to, if you go to CNCF.CI, and they have a very nice dashboard that kind of shows you a number of projects and whether or not they work together. And so it's open source, so what we want to do is work with that team to figure out how do we change the logos and the git repos, to how to driving those red and green, success or failure icons that are there, but they're relevant to the test that we're doing in OpenLab, so yeah. So we definitely want to have a dashboard that's very easy to decipher what tests are failing in or passing. >> Looking forward, what kinds of projects are you most interested in getting involved? >> Right now, very much Kubernetes, of course. We're really focusing on multi architecture, again, as a result of our work with Kubernetes and driving full conformance and multi architecture. That's kind of the wheelhouse at this time. We're open for folks to give us a lot of different use cases, like we were starting to look at some edge stuff, how can we participate there, we're starting looking at FPGA's and GPU's, so a lot different, we don't have a full integration in a lot of different areas, just yet, but we are having those conversations. >> So, actually, I spent a bunch of years, when I worked on the vendor side, living in an Interrupt lab, and the most valuable things were not figuring out what worked, but what broke, so what kind of things, you know, as you're working through this, what learnings back do you share with the community, both the providers and users? Big stumbling blocks that you can help people, give a red flag, or say you know, avoid these type of things. >> Yeah, exactly what you just said. You know, what's good is some of our stuff is geographically dispersed, so we can start to talk about if, what's the latency look like? You may, within that few square miles that you're operating and doing things, it works great, but when I'm sending something across the water how, is your product still moving quickly, is the latency too bad that we can't, I can't create a container over here because it takes too long, so one example of looking at something fail as it relates to that is we're talking with Octavia folks to see, if I spin up a lot of containers am I going to therefore create a lot of load balancers and if I create a lot of load balancers I'm creating a lot of VM's, or am I creating a lot of containers or are things breaking apart, so we need to dig a little bit further to understand what is and is not working with the integrations we're currently working on and then again we're exploring GPV, GPUs just landed more or less, that was a part of the keynote as well, and so now we're talking about, well, let's do some of that testing. The software, the code, is there but is it usable? And so that's one area we want to start playing around with. >> Okay, one of the other things in the keynote's got mentioned was Zul, the CIDT tool, how's that fitting into the OpenLab? >> Yeah, we use Zul as our gating, so what's great about Zul is that you can interac6t with projects from different SCM's, so we have some projects that live in github, some that utilize Garrote, some that utilize gitlab, and Zul has applicability where it can talk to different, it can talk across these different SCM's, and if you have a patch that depends on a patch in another another pod, so a patch on one project in one SCM can depend on a patch in another project, in a different SCM, and so what's great about Zul is that you can say, hey I'm depending on th6at, so before this patch lands, check to make sure this stuff works over there, so if it succeeds there and it's a dependency then you basically confirm that succeeds there and then now I can run the test here, and it passes here as well, so you know that you can use both of those projects together again, in an integration. Does it makes sense? Hopefully I'm making it very clear, the power there with the cross SCM integration. >> Yeah, Melvin, you've had a busy week, here, at the show. Any, you know, interesting things you learned this week or something that you heard from a customer that you thought, oh boy we got to, you know, get this into our lab or a road map or, you know-- >> The ARM story, the multi architecture is, I feel like that's really taking off. We've had discussions with quite a few folks around that, so yeah, that for me, that's the next thing that I think we're really going to concentrate a little bit harder on is, again, figuring out if there are some problems, because mostly it's been just x86, but we need to start exploring what's breaking as we add more to multi architecture. >> Melvin, no shortage of new things to test and play with, and every customer always brings some unique spins on things, so appreciate you giving us the update on OpenLab, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're Welcome. Thanks for having me. >> From John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching The Cube. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit, North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018, here in Vancouver. Three days wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, Radhesh Balakrishnan, who is the general manager of OpenStack with Red Hat. Radhesh, great to see you. It's been a week since John talked to you, and always good to have you on at the show. >> Great to be on. Good to be here talking about OpenStack at OpenStack Summit. >> Yeah so, look, OpenStack is in the title of your job. I believe, did we have a birthday cake and a party celebrating a certain milestone? >> That is indeed true; so it's the fifth anniversary of that fact that we've had a product, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, on the market. And so, we've been doing a little bit of a look back at how far we have come in the last five years as well as looking ahead at, you know, how does the next three to five years shape as well. >> Yeah, Radhesh, I'm going to date myself and when I think back to, gosh it was 18 years ago, I was working with Linux, and there were kernels all over the place and things like that. And then, I worked for an enterprise storage company and was like, ugh, like keeping up with Chrome.org was a pain in the neck. There came out this thing called Red Hat Advanced Server that was like, oh wait, we can glom onto this, we can support this with our customers, and that eventually turned into RHEL, which, of course, kind of becomes the main standard for how to do Linux. I feel like we have a lot of similarities. >> Radhesh: Absolutely, absolutely. >> In how we did. RHOSP, I believe, is the acronym, so. >> That's exactly right, and we like to have long names. >> Which are very descriptive, but Red Hat OpenStack Platform, fundamentally, to your point brings the same valid proposition that RHEL brought to Linux, to OpenStack, with the twist that, it's not just curated OpenStack, but it's a co-engineered solution of Linux and Cavium and OpenStack. And along the way we learned that, look, it's not just OpenStack and the infrastructure solution. It's done in conjunction with the software-defined storage solution or it's done in conjunction with software-defined networking. Or, fast-forward all the way now, it's being done in conjunction with cloud-native applications running on top of it, right? But regardless, in five years we've been able to grow to address these different demands being placed at infrastructure level, and at the same time evolved to address new-use cases as well; Telco is an example of that. >> Radhesh, let's spend a couple of minutes, though, on the OpenStack Platform itself from Red Hat. Some of the things, guys, that you were bringing to market, I know we talked about, here at the show, fast-forward upgrades, for instance were, they were just introducing, and maybe some other things in the Queens release that you all are bringing forward and have engineered. >> Yeah, thanks for that question, very topical, in the sense that yesterday we launched OSP 13, which is the latest and greatest version based on Queens release. If you look at the innovation packed in that it fundamentally falls in three buckets. One is the bread part that you talked about, whereby, anybody who is standing on OSP 10, which was the prior, long-release lifecycle product, over to 13, how do you kind of get over there in a graceful manner is the first area that we have addressed. The second area is around security, because how do you make sure that OpenStack-based clouds are secure by default, from the day you roll out all the way to until you retire it, right? I don't know if there's going to be a retirement, but that's the intent of all the security enablements that we have in the product as well. And the third one, how do we make sure that containers in OpenStack can come together in a nice manner. >> Yeah, the container piece is something else that, so a lot of effort, here at the show. They announced Kata containers, which, trying to give the security of a VM, lightweight VM. How does Red Hat look at Kata containers? I know Red Hat, you know Linux's containers, you know, very strong position, fill us in on that. >> Yeah, to maybe pull back a little bit and then look at the larger picture of there is the notion of infrastructure or the open infrastructure that you need and OpenStack is a good starting point for that. And then, you overlay on top of that an application deployment management configuration, lifecycle management solution that's the container platform called OpenShift, right. These are the two centers of gravity for the stack. Now, aspects such as Kata containers or Hubbard, which is for again, similar concept of addressing how do you use virtualization in addition to containers to bring some of the value around security et cetera, right? So we are continuing to engage in all these upstream projects, but we'll be careful and methodical in bringing those technologies into our products as we go along. >> Okay, how about Edge is the other kind of major topic that we're having here, I know I've interviewed some Red Hat customers looking at NFV solutions, so some of the big telcos you know specifically that use various pieces. What do you hear from your customers and help us kind of draw that line between the NFV to the Edge. Yeah, so Edge has become the center is kind of the new joke in the sense that, from an NFV perspective, customers have already effectively addressed the CORD errors and the challenges, now it's about how do you scale that and deploy that on a massive scale, right? That's a good problem to have. Now the goodness of virtualization can be brought all the way down to the radio Edge so that a programmable network becomes the reality that a telco or a carrier can get into. So in that context, Edge becomes a series of use cases. You know, it's not just one destination. Another way to say it is there is Edge an objective and there is Edge as a noun. Edge as the objective is a set of technologies that are enabling Edge, Edge networking, right. Edge management, for example, and then Edge as a destination where you have a series of Edge locations starting from CORD error center going all the way to radio. Now, the technology answers for all these are just being figured out right now. So you can say, you know, put crudely, KBM, OpenStack, containers, and Ansible will be all good elements that will come into the picture when it comes to a solution for all these footprints. >> Nice. Radhesh, maybe let's switch over to talk about the summit here, and the people here, filled with people being productive with OpenStack, right? Either looking at it, upgrading it, inheriting it. We talked to people in a bunch of different scenarios Red Hat, huge installed base, and you are good at helping and supporting, and uplifting, and upskilling a set of operators who started with Linux and now have to be responsible for an entire cloud infrastructure. Plus, now, at this conference, we've been talking about containers, we've been talking about open dev, right. That's again broadening the scope of what an operator might have to deal with. How does Red Hat look at that? How are you and your team helping upskill and enhance the role of the operator? >> Yeah, so I think it comes down to, how do we make sure that we are understanding the journey that the operator himself or herself is taking from a career perspective, right, the skill set of evolving from Linux and core automation-related skills to going to being able to understand what does it mean to live with cloud implementation on a day-to-day basis. What does it mean to live with network function virtualization as the way in which new services are going to be deployed. So, our course curriculum has evolved to be able to address all these needs today. That's one dimension, the other dimension is how do we make sure that the product itself is so easy that the journey is getting to a point where the infrastructure is invisible, and the focus is on the application platform on top. So I think we have multiple areas of focus to get to the point where it's so relevant that it's invisible, if that paradox makes sense. That's what we're trying to make happen with OpenStack. >> Radhesh, Red Hat has a very large presence at the show here; we were noting in the keynote the underlying infrastructure didn't get a lot of discussion because it is more mature, and therefore, we can talk about everything like VGPUs and containers, and everything like that. But Red Hat has a lot in the portfolio that helps in some of those underlying pieces. So maybe you can give us some of the highlights there. >> Absolutely, so we aren't looking at OpenStack as the be-all end-all destination for customers, but rather an essential ingredient in the journey to a hybrid cloud. So when you have that lens it becomes natural to you that a portfolio of our offerings, which are either first-party or in conjunction with our partners --we have over 400 partners with whom we have joint solutions as well -- so you naturally take a holistic view and then say, "How do you optimize the experience of ceph plus OpenStack for example." So we were talking about Edge recently, right, in the context of Edge we realize that there is a particular use-case for hyperconverged infrastructure whereby you need to collocate, compute, and store it in a way that the footprint is so small and easy to manage plus you want to have one life-cycle both for OpenStack and ceph right, so to address that we announced, right at hypercloud infrastructure for cloud, as an offering that is co-engineered between ceph team, or our storage team, and the OpenStack team. Right, that's just an example of how, by bringing the rest of the portfolio, we're able to address needs being expressed by our customers today. Or you look forward in terms of use-case, one thing that we are hearing from all our large customers, such as the Amadeus's of the world is, make the experience of OpenShift on OpenStack, easy to deploy and manage, as well as reduce the penalty of running containers on VMs. Because we understand the benefits of security and all of that, but we want to be able to get that without having any penalty of using a virtual infrastructure so that's why we're heavily focused on OpenShift, on OpenStack, as the form-factor for delivering that while continuing to work on things such as Kata containers as well as, you know, Kuryrs, as technology is evolving to make communities much richer as well as the infrastructure management at OpenStack level richer. >> You brought up an interesting point, we spoke a little bit yesterday with John Allessio and Margaret Dawson, about really that kind of multi-cloud world out there, because pieces like Kubernetes and Ansible, aren't just in the data center with this one stack, it's spanning across multiple environments and when we talk to customers, they do cloud, and cloud is multiple things in multiple places and changing all the time. So I'd love to get your viewpoint on what you hear from customers, how Red Hat's helping them across all those environments. >> Absolutely, so the key differentiation we see in being able to provide to our customers is that unlike some of the other providers out there, they're where they are stitching you with a particular private cloud, with the particular public cloud, and then saying, "Hey, this is sort of the equivalent of the AOL walled gardens, if you will, right, that's being created for a particular private and public cloud. What we're saying is fundamentally three things. First is, the foundation of Linux skills from RHEL that you have is going to be what you can build on to innovate for today and tomorrow, that's number one. Secondly, you can invest in infrastructure that is 100% open using OpenStack so that you can use commodity hardware, bring in multiple use-cases which are bleeding it, such as data lags, big data, Apache Spark, or going all the way to cloud-native application, development on top of OpenStack. And then last but not least, when you are embarking on a multi-cloud journey it is important that you're not tied to innovation speed of one particular public cloud provider, or even a private cloud provider, for that matter, so being able to get to a container platform, which is OpenShift, that can run pretty much everywhere, either on PREM or on a public cloud, and give you that single pane of consistency for your application, which is where business and IT alignment is the focus right now, then I think you've got the best of all the worlds. You know, freedom from vendor-lock in, and a future-proof infrastructure and application platform that can take you to where you need to go, right. So pretty excited to be able to deliver on that consistently as of today, as well as in the coming years. >> All right, we just want to give you the final word, for people out there that ... you know, often they get their opinion based on when they first heard of something. OpenStack's been around for a number of years, five years now, with your platform. Give us the takeaway for 2018 here from OpenStack Summit as to how they should be thinking about OpenStack, in that larger picture. >> The key takeaway is that OpenStack is rock-solid, that you can bring into your environment, not just to power your virtual machine infrastructure, but also baremetal infrastructure on which you can bring in containers as well. So if you're thinking about an infrastructure fabric, either to power your telco network or to power your private cloud in its entirety OpenStack is the only place that you need to be looking at and our OpenStack platform from end to end delivers that value proposition. Now the second aspect to think about is, OpenStack is a step in the journey of a hybrid future destination that you can get to. Red Hat not only has the set of surround products and technologies to round-up the solution, but also have the largest partner ecosystem to offer you choice. So what's your excuse from getting to a hybrid cloud today if not tomorrow? >> Well, Radhesh Balakrishnan, thank you for all the updates appreciate catching up with you once again. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Minimam, getting near the end of three days wall-to-wall coverage here in Vancouver, thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)