>>Welcome back to Falcon 2022. This is Dave LAN. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage, JC Herrera. Here's my designated cohost. Who's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former us air force. Thank you for your service. Thank you. And Deel Lauder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Jen, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. Great to be JC set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving the whole student connection and the veterans take us through that. >>Yeah, sure. Yeah. So as, as head of HR, one of the, one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that, we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cyber security. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of 'em in the us alone, we've gotta go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, that are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that is that this partnership with operation motor sport, then we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation motor sport as well, the >>Number 700,000 now, but pre pandemic. I remember number 3 50, 300 50,000. It's it's doubled now just in the us. Amazing. All right, diesel, tell us about the mission of operation motor sport, like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >>So operation motor sport engages ill, injured, wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans, these individuals be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting outta that, you know, outta the dark places where some of them end up going, because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to crowd strike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to, they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cyber security. >>And they're chosen through an application process. You're I'm, I'm inferring. >>Yeah. They just go online and say, you know, through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And our beneficiary trustee, Craig, and calls 'em up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team and Craig, >>You're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >>Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lader, diesel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back, cuz it meant such it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. Can I >>Ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >>That's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know, what that, what that would look like. And she was the one who said, Hey, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for, you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is, I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button and >>What programs are available in operation >>Motorsport? Yeah. So diesel kind of outline outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what diesel described, where we take that veteran. And we actually immerse them in a race team. They're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our emo sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put 'em in our emo sports program where they can do it all virtually we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we, we have veterans racing in that emo sports program. And then we have a, a diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks. So they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds, nothing ridiculous. But we, we did doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be >>Involved. So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond, whereas number ones, the, to like full immersion. Right? Correct. And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean, you're literally changing tires and, and, and you're >>Yeah. You name it. You're >>In the you're you're you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. Right. >>The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car, wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn, then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks, whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for >>'em think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >>Yeah. To understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broken or you don't have some kind of illness or injury, but you add that factor into at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22, a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high. Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a, it's a big jump. But what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military, you experience in that Pata, same exact things, lots of small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military, you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission, then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in >>The process. I mean, yeah. Diesel hearing Craig explained that there are the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? It makes sense now in retrospect, but somebody just said, Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry him or no, not >>Really. And it it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance, which is where we go back to, we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story, but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow, they're changing lives through recovery, you know, through motor sport and the similarities and what they were achieving. >>Our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we stood up an organization. Now I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was, the, the initial vision. This is not where, I mean, I never imagine that we get to this point this day, especially with the announcement this morning, you know, with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us, but we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer, they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds. It's really, really neat. And, >>And JC of course, CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You you've got the safety car at, this is, I think it's called the safety car. Right. That's it? Yeah. So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >>There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time, trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral. At some point I can go, go work on a car, but we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation motor sport win a team up with a crowd striker. So >>Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? No, that's >>A good question. Actually I do from the, from the track to the pits, very slow >>Speeds. They don't let you out in the train. That's right. No, I don't get to go out on the track. Diesel, you ever, you ever drive one >>Of these? I, I, I I've been on, on the track on, on different cars, not in the race cars that, that, that, that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up is that when we do these Patriot corrals, part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And now, you know, a parade lap. Well, what's the fun in that, but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car, following a pace car. That's a pretty cool experience. Cool. >>Yeah, that's very cool guys. Congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers really appreciate you guys coming on the cube and telling me great story. Thanks >>For having, thanks for the opportunity. You're very >>Welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Everybody. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from Falcon 2022 at the area in Las Vegas. You watching the cube.

>> Welcome back to FalCon 2022. This is Dave Vellante. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage. JC Herrera is here, he's my designated cohost. He's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former US air force. Thank you for your service. >> Thank you. >> And Diezel Lodder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Gents, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you, Great to be here >> JC, set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving, the whole student connection, and the veterans, take us through that. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, so as, as head of HR, one of the one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cybersecurity. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of them in the us alone, we've got to go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that, is that this partnership with operation Motorsport then, we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation Motorsport as well. >> The number is 700,000 now, but pre pandemic I remember number 350, 350,000. It's, it's doubled now just in the US, amazing. All right, diezel, tell us about the mission of operation Motorsport like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >> So operation Motorsport engages ill, injured wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans these individuals will be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting out of that, you know out of the dark places where some of them end up going because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to CrowdStrike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cybersecurity. >> And they're chosen through an application process you're, I, I'm inferring. >> Yep. They just go online and say, you know through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And, our beneficiary trustee Craig, and calls them up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team. >> And Craig you're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >> Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lodder, Diezel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back cause it meant such, it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. >> Can I ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >> Oh, that's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know what that, what that would look like and she was the one who say, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button. >> And what programs are available in operation Motorsport? >> And so, Diezel kind of outline, outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what Diezel described, where we take that veteran and we actually immerse them in a race team they're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our E-motor sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so, they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put them in our E-motor sports program where they can do it all virtually. we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we're, we have veterans racing in that E-motor sports program. And then we have a, the diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks so, they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit, pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds nothing ridiculous, but we, we been doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be involved. >> So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond whereas number one's the, like full immersion. >> Yeah, correct, yes. >> And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean you're literally changing tires and, and you're, >> Yeah. You name it. >> In the, you're, you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. >> The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car or wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So, we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks and whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for them. >> Think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >> Yeah, um, to understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle. transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broke and, or you don't have some kind of illness or injury but, you add that factor into it at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22 a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high, Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it's, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a it's a big jump. But, what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military you experience in that paddock, same exact things, lots of, small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you'd deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in the process. >> I mean, yeah. Diezel hear, hearing Craig explained that there are, the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? (Diezel laughs) It makes sense now in retrospect, but, somebody just said Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry them or... >> No, not really. And it, it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in, in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance which is where we go back to we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow they're changing lives through recovery, you know through Motorsport and the similarities and what they were achieving, our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we, stood up an organization. Now, I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was the initial vision, this not where, I mean I never imagine that we get to this point this day especially with the announcement this morning, you know with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us but, we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was, helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds, it's really, really neat. >> And, and JC of course CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You, you've got the safety car at this. I think it's called the safety car, right? >> That's it, yeah. >> So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >> There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral at some point I can go, go work on a car but, we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation Motorsport win a team up with a CrowdStrikers. >> Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? >> No, it's a good question. Actually I do from the from the track to the pits at, you know, very slow speeds. >> They don't let you out on the track? >> That's right, no, I don't get to go out the track. >> Diezel You ever, you ever drive one of these? >> I, I, I, I've been on, on the track on, on different cars not in the race cars that, that, that that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up, is that when we do these Patriot corrals part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And I'll, you know, a parade lap, well, what's the fun in that? but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car following a pace car, that's a pretty cool experience. >> Yeah, that's very cool. Guys, congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers, really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube and telling your story. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for the opportunity. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from FalCon 2022, at the ARIA in Las Vegas. You're watching the cube. (relaxing music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. it's the Cube covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aileen Gemma Smith, the CEO and co-founder of Vizalytics Technology. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> Let's start by telling our viewers a little bit about Vizalytics, there's a story there about how you founded it. >> Thank you, the mission of Vizalytics is enabling change with data and we saw tremendous opportunity in open and public available data to say, let's make a difference for communities and the whole reason why we started was in 2012 Hurricane Sandy hit my home town of Staten Island and I saw firsthand digital divide, people need access to information, it's not put together in a format that they can use, but it actually is there, so I said, we've got to do something to make a difference. Our first product was a mobile app for shopkeepers. We had thousands of users throughout New York City and then that led on to out first enterprise client being the City of New York. >> The mobile app for shopkeepers could do what? What did it do? >> It let you know everything that was going on outside and around your business that could make a difference to your bottom line, so imagine all you had to do is business name, business address, I'm going to tell you here's your risk for fines, here's when there's going to be public works, here's when someone's filed for a different permit, et cetera, and shopkeepers loved it because we didn't have to do anything to get that information, you told me exactly what I needed to know and you made it really easy to share. >> And now you are a woman founder, a female founder with a she builds t-shirt on and an AWS Hero medallion. Tell me more about this. >> Absolutely, it is a distinct privilege to be an AWS Community Hero. Community Heroes are evangelists for the community where we're talking about how can we build and create more diverse and inclusive communities. I'm privileged and honored to be the only female hero in the Australia and New Zealand region, so I'm determined to say, how can we support more women, how can we support more underestimated founders and tech developers? We have this whole series called She Builds on AWS. We've got events in Sydney, Melbourne, soon to be in Perth, et cetera and that's how we're doing more for our community and as a Community Hero how can I find more voices who aren't me, give them a platform to say, we need to hear what you're building and what you're doing and how can we all support one another as we want to build on on AWS. >> What is it to be like at event like this, where as you said you're the only female Community Hero here, how often are you getting together, collaborating, learning, and how are best practices emerging and what are those best practices? >> First off I want to mention that we have the first ever developer's lounge here in the main hall which is great because we need to see that here in public sector and having those opportunities to meet and greet and talk with folks, hey, you're working on this as well? Tell me more about what you're doing, let me surface out what kind of solutions you're doing, that's where all of the energy and the excitement happens because then you start to discover, oh, I didn't know. Folks are working on this and this, hey we've got the same problem and especially in public sector where folks so often have the challenge of different siloes. I didn't know what I didn't know, how can we bring them all together, so seeing that here in public sector where we can champion, you've got all of these different folks who are working together, it's just a wonderful opportunity. >> And what are you hearing? The big theme here is about IT modernization in the public sector, the public sector, for better or for worse has a reputation of being a little slow or a little more antiquated, there's certain divisions of the government in particular and educational institutions that are incredibly innovative. >> Absolutely. >> Rebecca: Where do you think things stand right now? >> There's absolutely positive change and I like to celebrate here are the leaders and here are the folks that are doing more, yes, public sector does, for good reasons in some cases take a long time to say, how do we want to change, do we feel safe for this change, et cetera, but then you see pockets of excellence. I'm currently based in Sydney, Australia. Transport for New South Wales is one of our clients and I am honored and excited by all that they're doing where at the executive level you have buy-in and you have support. You have support for saying we need organizational change. You have support for saying, let's do proof of concept, let's do these explorations, let's actually have a startup accelerator hub so we as public sector can interact with startups and early-stage founders or university students to make that kind of a difference. When you see that, that's part of why, okay great, we're in Australia now because there's this energy and action and a willingness to move so that's where I think look to those centers of excellence and say, how can we do that within our organization and what can we do better. >> But not saying that we're not seeing quite that energy in the US or how did you think about the differences? >> Again, it depends district by district. Different municipalities have different challenges, different size, et cetera. When you look at this, for example, in San Francisco where you have the Startup in Residence program, started off small, cohort, five or six companies, great, now how can we scale that program and make it national where they had something like 700 applications for maybe a cohort of 50 or 60 companies that are working. That's where you start to see there's an energy that's flowing through, so I think the opportunity for change comes in that kind of cross collaboration and if you have an event like this where you've got public sector folks from all over the world saying, really interesting, you feel my pain, how can we work together on this, what's your team doing, how can I learn from that, how can I take that back to my teams or where can we think about some of the harder problems of organizational change and what do we do if we don't have that executive champion, how can we start to get there? I think that's the kind of energy and opportunity of all the things we're seeing here at Public Sector Summit. >> But as you said, it's also looking for the rest of us, looking at these centers of excellence, see what they're doing, see how they're experimenting, getting those proofs of concept and then saying, hey, we've got something there, let's see if we can replicate this. >> Absolutely, and within public sector, when you have that opportunity to say, and look at how we're doing this in London, look at how we're doing this in Toronto, look at how we're doing this in Sydney and how we're doing this in Melbourne then you can suddenly go back to New York and say, okay great, we do have these other examples, it is being done so we can use that as a guide for what we wanted to do as we continue to innovate. >> What are some of the most exciting things that you're seeing here, some new public sector initiatives, technology, services that you think are really going to be game changers. >> How much time do we have? (laughing) First off, the energy to we want to collaborate, we want to be more agile, we want to make a difference. The sense that this event has grown from just a small cohort to 1,000, couple of thousand, now I believe there's something like 15,000 attendees. >> 18,000 according to Theresa Carlson. >> Think about the fact that we're all willing to be here together, that's a line in the sand that we need to be able to do more, so it's not about a particular technology per se, but willingness to say, we need to be here, we need to face these problems. We've got this challenge of should we bring these legacy systems over, should we think about how we want to work together in public product partnerships that we can all come together and start to work at this and also think about, we've got Public Sector Summits throughout the world, please join us at Canberra Summit that's going to be going on in late August. We've got Tokyo Summit going on right now, so it's not just all here in D.C., you're starting to see these clusters move out and that's really wonderful and exciting for us. >> It's wonderful and exciting on the one hand and yet this summit is taking place against a backdrop where we're seeing a real backlash against technology. The public sentiment has really soured, regulators and lawmakers are sharpening their blades and saying, hey, maybe we should pay attention more to what these technology companies are doing and just how powerful they've become in all of our daily lives. What's the sentiment that you're hearing on the ground, particularly as the founder yourself. >> I think that's where knowledge can be powerful. Can we empathize with some of the challenges? I hope that all companies choose to act with integrity, not necessarily that they do, but there are a lot of folks saying, we need to be able to do more. From a policy perspective, how can tech companies partner with policymakers who may not understand how all of these technologies work and what they're capable of or not capable of, we need more clarity on that because I think that's where it becomes a black box of conflict and if you can change it to say, this is challenges that you have with facial recognition or sentiment analysis or what have you, let's really think about do the systems today do, what are the guard rails that we need to put in and how can we work as partners with policymakers so it's not just driven by lobbyists but there's actually an understanding of, this is the implication of these systems. >> Here are the unintended consequences. >> Absolutely and if I can come back to New York for a second, New York City has one of the strongest open data logs in the nation. Part of that is because Gale Brewer, the Borough President of Manhattan said we need to formalize this. How do we put this together? She didn't come from a tech background, but she saw a problem that needed to be solved and she said, how do we put this together and how do we get the right folks to the table to think about doing this in a really scalable, meaningful way, so the more that we see those opportunities in that backdrop of tensions and concerns, that's how we move forward, facing those hard questions. It's not Rome was built in a day, it's not. It's going to take us a lot of time and there's a lot of unanswered ethical questions as well that we have to start really thinking deeply about. >> But it starts, as you said, with making the data visible and then getting more voices who-- >> Making it visible and also understanding what's not included in the data. Coming back to when I started my company, there was a lot of, but this isn't being counted and what happens when you're saying, I'm making a bias based on this particular dataset that leaves out this whole community over here. Can we think about what's not included in that data or how the data collection itself or the organization itself is changing things, so that's why, coming back to, you need more female founders, you need more underrepresented populations to have those voices of have you considered this, have you given representation to this particular group, to this population. Without doing that, then you're just reinforcing the same siloes and the same biases and we have an obligation to our community and to one another to change that. >> I know you have a keen interest in diversity issues and, as you're talking about, bringing in more women and more underrepresented minorities to lend their perspective to these very important issues that are shaping our lives. How do we solve this problem? Technology has such a bro culture and we're seeing the problems with that. >> First off, from a founder's point of view, you have to know when not to listen, you have to know when not to let someone shut you down because they'll say-- >> The noise. >> Oh my goodness, the noise of, we've got ageism, we've got sexism, we've got racism, we've got elitism. I went to Brooklyn College, I'm very proud of that fact. I had venture capitalists say, I don't want to invest in you, you're too old and you didn't go to a pedigree school, well guess what, my company's still here, some of the folks you've invested in, they folded a long time ago, so part of it is a willingness to drive forward but it's also building networks of support. Coming back to being the community hero, how can I elevate these voices and say, we need to give them an opportunity to be here, we need to change this, so part of it is we want more seats at the table, but if that table's not going to welcome me, I'm creating a whole 'nother table over here where we can start to have that cluster effect and that's where the dedication, the tenacity and you see things like we power tech, where we're really looking to elevate those voices. That change can't happen unless we keep doing that and unless the folks who are like, but this is how we've always done it, are willing to say, actually, shortcoming here, let's think about changing this and broadening the conversation. >> Is that changing though? >> We were talking a lot about how there's a new generation of workers coming up who do think differently and they do grow up with this stuff and they say, we don't need this red tape, why is this taking so long? They're impatient and maybe a more willingness to listen to other voices, are you seeing a difference? >> Absolutely, I'm seeing a difference for sure. That doesn't mean sexism, ageism, elitism has gone away. It has not, but you're starting to see, again, clusters of excellence and I think if you really want to make change you focus on where that traction is, use that as your foothold to build and scale and then start to be able to do more because that's the only way. We've got some barriers that for other founders I empathize with how insurmountable it can be, but if you've got that dedication, if you refuse to be defined by what someone else says you are or what your company is capable of being and then you find those great partners to say, let's do this together, the whole conversation changes. >> Aileen Gemma Smith those are great words to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >> Absolute pleasure, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have much more of the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington D.C. coming up in just a bit. (techno music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Bahrain. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Bahrain for the exclusive coverage of the AWS's summit and their announcement and their execution of a new region which should be online here in early 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host with SiliconANGLE Media theCUBE, extracting the signal from the noise, meeting all the people. First time the Middle East and the region should be a big impact, having a digital footprint as size of Amazon Web Services, bringing energy and entrepreneurship and innovation and economic revitalization and enablement. We'd love the coverage, we meet a lot of great people. Our next guest is Simon Martin who's the ambassador of the British embassy here in Bahrain. Simon, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> So, OK, so I want, I want to just kind of get your perspective. I met the US ambassador yesterday the last night at dinner. He's kind of new to the area and the job. >> But he's already, >> You've got experience, >> But he's already well informed, I can tell you (laughs). >> He's well informed (laughs). Birth by fire, thrown in the deep end. You've been here for a few years. >> Yeah, three. >> Take a minute to talk about the environment here, because we're first time here. We're learning or observing. I'm certainly surprised. My daughter was asking me: What are the women like there? We had a women's breakfast yesterday. 70 plus people. The energy, the diversity, interesting culture. Feels like very open, what's your thoughts. >> Well, very much so, I mean, Bahrain has been at the sort of crossroads of international travel for hundreds and hundreds of years. The UK's relationship with Bahrain, the formal one, goes back just over 200. And that was all to do with trade. Manama means the place of sleep. And it was the place that people used to stop to rest on their way across the Arabian subcontinent and towards the Indian subcontinent, and so on. So, it's a place which is naturally welcoming of foreigners and outside ideas. And I think that's what Amazon have found here. So, there is an often lot of change going on in this part of the world. Bahrain is relatively small economy compared to its neighbors. It was the place that oil was first discovered in the Gulf, but, actually, once they discovered it, they realized that she had rather less than most of the neighbors and, therefore, it's an economy which has had to adapt to keep, keep growing. In contrast, >> Mainly, mainly the dependence on oil, other oil-rich areas. >> Yeah. >> Right, is that it? >> Yeah. So, that's been the main stay of the economy for some time, but there is not the, there is not yet the potential for the growth that's needed in order to help develop an economy with its, with the necessary modern infrastructure. A growing population, a need for, for quality employment for young people which is something that we've heard a lot of in the last few years. >> Talk about your history, how long have you been in the job you're in, what's the background, what are some of the things that you've done >> OK >> at the government in the UK. >> Yeah, well, Thank you, so I've been here for three years. Before that, I was working, actually, for His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. And in that role, visited this part of the world on a couple of occasions, and so, and so the impact of that very important part of our relationship, royal family's relationship with the royal families in this part of the Gulf, and it just opened my eyes a bit to the, to the importance of having multifaceted relationships. And, again, this is what we're now, this is what we are now seeing here, that Amazon Web Services with the cloud region that they are building here have brought a new dimension, >> (laughs) The fly got... >> Not surprised, to the Bahraini economy. >> So, tell me about the multifaceted piece of news. What I'm fascinated by is the Dubai dynamic, right. You know, I see Dubai, a lot of events there, Blockchain events, AI events, a lot of tech events. Feels like New York to me, using the American metaphor. It's kind of like a Silicon Valery kind of vibe. But they all work, been working together for years. What's the historical relationships, how have they changed, and how does cloud computing make up for that? How does that play into it? >> Well, of course there've been, it's been a very collaborative and yet competitive relationship between the different, particularly the finance centers of the Gulf for many years. The economic success story of Dubai is very well known. Bahrain has continued to develop, but without the resources that underpin the UAE success, has done so on a more, more progressive way. But this is always be, going to be a much smaller economy and Bahrain has to, has to compete in niches in which it has the competitive advantage. And it's this, what we have now happening here, is creating a wonderful new niche opportunity for Bahrain. But, of course, I don't think am letting out any secrets to say that each of the countries in the Gulf would love to have been hosting the new cloud region. >> Yeah. >> So Bahrain had try incredibly hard to present an environment in which to host this kind of, this kind of investment which requires regulation. It requires openness and ease of doing business and it also requires an openness to developing the labor force to support not only the Amazon, but all of the train of companies that we're expecting to invest along behind it. >> Well, Simon, I really appreciate your experience and candor here on theCUBE. Certainly, for us it's a new area and you have certainly a perspective for, for the Royal Family in the UK, and now being here. But one of the interesting things I'd like to get your perspective on is, you know, you look at globalization and you look at regulations, you look at digital, things like GDPR, you see all traditional things, you mean, you can go back when I was a young kid growing up, I remember the pound and the French franc and all the different currencies going on, and then EU comes together. And now you have Asia and cryptocurrency. So you have a whole another cloud computing generation coming where that might reimagine the political landscape, might imagine the economic relationships. These are opportunities, but also threats. And so how people handle it is interesting. So, how do you, when you look at that kind of dynamic, you got a little bit uncertainty and opportunity at the same time, depending how you look at it, it's the glass half full or the glass half empty. >> Exactly. >> How should executives and government officials start thinking about this new model, this new marketplace. London is certainly the center of the action and connects now into Bahrain, could be a different dynamic, frictionless, digital. >> Mhmm. >> People living across borders. These are new dynamics. What's your thoughts on this new melting pot of digital impact? >> Well, of course, everybody wants a piece of it, everybody wants to be at the center of a new melting pot. And for Bahrain, they're looking to be the of it within, within this region, but of course, the Dubai Finance Center and, you know, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, and so on are also, are also very keen, and no one, no one is expecting to be the dominant player. And certainly from Bahrain's perspective, it's very much about creating the environment in which companies will see, this is a good place to start. The Gulf region is a coherent region with an incipient single market, and so on, within the GCC, and so, naturally, investors from the outside are going to look at one place to start. And so what Bahrain has done, and I think it's, it's been very well founded, it's just taken place over the three years that I've been here, it's to dramatically increase the ease of doing business, and then find proportionate ways in which the government can support new companies to get them established. So, you mentioned GDPR and, you know, how's this going to affect a company in the Gulf. Well, I was at the launch of a very interesting new big data software project by one of the, in fact British owned new startups in the FinTech Bay here which is supported by the Economic Development Board. They're starting point is that the product that we are selling out of Bahrain is GDPR compliant, which gives you an idea of the way, >> Yeah. >> in which even from, from this relatively small island in the Gulf, >> Yeah. >> the global perspective has been taken. >> And certainly with, you know, digital currency, the Know Your Customer Anti Money Laundering is the big thing too, you got to get that right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, they have an opportunity with FinTech. Final question for you, as you look out and see the human capital market and the future of work. >> Yeah. >> It's a big conversation we're always having and certainly I live in Silicon Valley where everyone's, no secret that there's a migration out of Silicon Valley due to the prices of living there, but yet concentration of entrepreneurship. People are going to have engineering teams all over the world. so you have a disperse workforce now crossing borders and not just the domicile issue, that's one, you know, taxes, where to domicile, outside say the US or other countries. So, you have a combination of diverse workforces. >> Mhmm. >> This is big, this is a big opportunity too, challenge and opportunity. >> It is, it is. And, of course, there are not just big changes, now, there's constant fluctuation in the way the workforce and the populations in this part of the world and within the gulf are changing. Look at Vision 2030 in Saudi Arabia, the big increase in the Saudi workforce, both through the policy of Saudization and through the creation of many more opportunities for women in the workforce. That's affecting Bahrain. But Bahrain has always been a place where people come to work and sometimes to work remotely, sometimes to live here and work across in Saudi Arabia. So, the Bahrainis feel that they are very, very attuned to these challenges. But I might just mention as well that this is not just about economics. And what impresses me about the reform program you see going on here is that, the idea is that we will create a broader and wider spread opportunity, particularly through the opportunities for young professionals working in AWS, but also in the environment all the way around it, for all communities in Bahrain, not just the wealthy, not just the sort of Ivy league equivalent graduates. >> Yeah. >> And so that's why the academy that they're setting up here can, >> And then network does emerge in social networking is going to bring people closer together. >> Yeah. >> OK, great to have you on. Final question is, as people look at this moment in time, maybe an inflection point, shot heard around the Gulf, if you will, of Amazon, certainly they did this with CIA in our country, the said success is coming in, and kind of changing how things do, reimagining value creation and value capture. What do you see as the impact of the, a diverse region have been in this area and the geography? Just your thoughts on what the impact's going to be. >> Well, of course, this is a virtual world and a cloud region is the virtual concept, so it's easy to say, well it shouldn't take an Amazon Web Services cloud region to transform the way in which governments work here. In practice, what AWS have seen wherever they have established cloud regions, it's a magnet for other businesses to develop around it, and it provides the reassurance that governments need to take that step forward. I don't know whether you heard Max Peterson and his presentation this morning saying he was amazed at the speed with which the entire Bahraini government system has embraced the move to the cloud which, indeed, my own government is doing as we speak. And this, I think, is going to be one of the really big, the really big impacts which will allow governments to get smaller and more efficient and more transparent >> And serve their citizens in a different way, in a better way. >> But one last thing, John. Because, you may not have heard about this is, we're hearing a lot about the shift towards renewable energy in this part of the world, and people say, why on earth would we need renewable energy which is, you know, so much of the world's petrol carbon resources are based here, but, of course, if you don't burn them, you can sell them. And that's very simple economics. The fact is that it has taken longer than other parts of the world for the transition to renewable energy, even though we have so much sunshine and at times quite a lot of wind. The government here just put out a tender for a 100 megawatt solar farm. And the driving force behind that is because AWS have said: we want to power our cloud region from renewable energy. And this is an example of industry and the big investors actually applying a positive force to speed up the direction of the government policy already. And it's something that has been well. >> It's happened fast, this private partnership public relationship, that's a success story. >> And I think there are lots of other ways we will see this happening, as I say, you can't have over 2000 people here all focusing on the cloud technology without bringing an awful lot of extra attention to and focus on what else is going on in Bahrain. >> Yeah. >> From my perspective, the Bahrain government is saying we welcome, we welcome this, this publicity, and we look forward to explaining ourselves. And I think we'll see a lot of further development in this area. >> Simon that's a great point. Sustainable energy and the trade-off between industry, private industry trying to make money, but contributing technology and a co-creation with the government. >> Yeah. >> I mean, data center, it's hot here, you need cooling, you got sun power, you see, you got to have that solution. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> You can't burn it, you can sell it, so good opportunity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Simon Martin, ambassador, the British ambassador to the embassy here in Bahrain. Thank yo for sharing your insights and color commentary. >> Pleasure to meet you, John. >> Appreciate it. Okay, live coverage here. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE bringing you all the new observations. Our first time in the Middle East region well coherent structure, great economics, great society benefits, cloud computing, Amazon Web Services region opening up in 2019. Exclusive coverage. Stay with us fore more after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Nick White. He is a principal at Deloitte Australia. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube, Nick. >> Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. >> So we've been having great conversations before the cameras were rolling, but tell us a little bit about D.Assist, which is a new technology you're unveiling at this conference. >> Yeah, so it's a solution that we've built, which is essentially a voice-enabled solution to allow patients and nurses to communicate. Essentially we're targeting identifying critical patient needs, critical patient requests, and getting help to them as fast as possible. >> Okay, so tell us a little bit more about the technology behind it. >> Yeah, sure. Well, let me go back and tell you about where it came from. One of my colleagues was in hospital with his father who unfortunately passed away while he was in hospital. And through that experience, he was observing what was going on in the hospital and afterwards he and I sat down and started to go through it and understand where were the challenges that the hospital had in that ward experience and the recovery. And we identified that if you look back at the history of the call bell, it hasn't changed in about 150 years. Florence Nightingale came up with the idea of a bell for patients, but that was in a ward environment where you had 30 or 40 beds in a room and you could look across the room and you could see that patient, okay, I can see what they need. Either I rush to their aid, or I can get to them in a minute. Hospitals today, we've gone and put walls up, curtains, and you've lost that visual cue. But all we've done to support the nurses is we've made that bell electronic. And we put a light above the door. So we looked at that system and we saw at all of the different points where you could have a failure along there, that essentially then would compromise patient care at no fault of the nurses whatsoever, and we thought, how can we better support the nurses to give that care that they work so hard to give? And we came up with the idea of having a voice-based solution that a patient can actually state their request, we could process that request, and we could present it to the nurses and try and give some guidance as to what the next best action for the nurse might be. And allow them to essentially provide accelerated care those people really in need. >> All right, so explain the system. It's fascinating what you guys do. How are you using NLP and ServiceNow. >> Yeah, so the solution is enabled by AWS and ServiceNow. So at the front end of the solution we've got a smart speaker in the room. That essentially passes the speech that the patient has made once they've woken the device through to the AWS platform. From there we pull out the intent. So we convert that speech to text, pull out the intent, and then that intent is passed through to ServiceNow. And once we've got it in ServiceNow, we can do all sorts of things with it. So we can apply a set of business rules, we can smart route it to the most appropriate person to meet the patient's needs. We can look at the prioritization that the hospital wants to give that sort of query and we can push it up or down in the queue based on that prioritization. Then we present that to the nurses using a dashboard on the nurse station, but we've also got the mobile app deployed. So the nurses have actually got a mobile in their pocket, which buzzes when the patient makes a request, they're able to whip the phone out, have a look at what the patient's need is, and make a decision. >> I'm always fascinated when a company like Deloitte comes up with a solution like this. It's not like you went to the client, and the client said, this is what we want. So how did you go about figuring all this out? What was the process you used? >> That's a really good question. For us it was, it's not about us designing the solution. We saw the problem and we're problem solvers. That's really what we do. We went and engaged with one of the local hospitals in Australia. We said to them, listen, is this right? Have we actually cottoned on to something that is a real problem here? And it really resonated with them. And they gave us access to their top 30 nurses and also their simulation hospital. It's a hospital that's used for training and development. And in that environment, we iterated the design with the nurses and built a solution essentially by nurses for nurses. So the idea was that it was as intuitive to use as your iPhone. Because nurses aren't like IT guys. They're not sitting behind computers all day. It's not native to them to use that sort of interface. So we wanted to make it as simple as I touch, drag, drop, and I let go, and I've done the job that I need to do. And so the nurses' feedback from the implementations that we've done so far have been, this is so easy to use. That's the phrase they've given us. This is just so easy to use. >> And then what's the feedback from the patients? How are they using it specifically? >> Yeah so, I'll give you the example of the spinal ward we've gone into at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. The Prince of Wales Hospital Foundation heard about what we were doing and they identified the opportunity to fund us to go into the spinal ward. And when you think about spinal patients' traumatic injury and often these patients are in hospital for months if not years. In a very isolating environment trying to recover from a traumatic injury. Not only that though, they may not have full access to their limbs anymore to be able to press a call button. And the hospital foundation saw this opportunity to place our solution in the hands of these patients or in these patients' rooms. And it has been overwhelmingly successful. We've got 26 beds rolled out in the ward. We've been in there for little over a month now. And on the very first day we had a patient who was in the bathroom in a precarious situation, needed help, couldn't reach the call bell, and was able to wake up the device from the bathroom, ask for help, and have two nurses rush to their aid. We've had a patient who was suffering severe pain after their injury and is now able to alert the nurses that the request that they were making is about pain and they were able to come in a much faster time. We've also seen complaints about nurse response time go from a decent level to nothing. And whether those were real complaints or not, is beside the point. The patients were feeling like they were waiting a period of time and that was uncomfortable for them. Now they're not complaining at all. So that patient experience has really shifted. >> That's great. And it's such a miraculous technology. This is really impressive. Best of luck to you, Nick. This is really fun having you on the show. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge '18 just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Well everyone, welcome back to the live coverage of theCUBE here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon, Kubernetes Con 2018, part of the CNCF, Cloud Native Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, the founder of Spark Labs, breaking down day two, wrapping up our coverage of KubeCon and all the success that we've seen with Kubernetes, I thought it would be really appropriate to bring on the cofounder of KubeCon originally, Joseph Jacks, known as JJ in the industry, a good friend of theCUBE and part of the early formation of what is now Cloud Native. We were all riffing on that at the time. welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you for having me John. >> So, for the story, for the folks out there, you know Cloud Native was really seen by the devops community, and infrastructure code was no secret to the insiders in the timeframes from 2010 through 2015, 16 timeframe, but really it was an open stack summit. A lot of people were kind of like, hey, you know, Google's got Kubernetes, they're going to open it up and this could be a real game changer, container, Docker was flying off the shelves. So we just kind of saw, right, and you were there and we were talking so there was a group of us. You were one of them. And you founded KubeCon, and bolted into the, at that time, the satellite Linux Foundation events, and then you pass it off as a good community citizen to the CNCF, so I wanted to just make sure that people knew that. What a great success. What's your impression? I mean, are you blown away? >> I am definitely blown away. I mean I think the size and scale of the European audience is remarkable. We had something like slightly less than half this in Austin last year. So to see more than that come here in Europe I think shows the global kind of growth curve as well as like, I think, Dan and someone else was asking sort of raise your hand if you've been to Kubecon Austin and very few actually, so there's a lot of new people showing up in Europe. I think it just shows the demand-- >> And Dan's been traveling around. I've seen him in China, some events I've been to. >> Joseph: All over. >> He's really working hard so props to him. We gave him some great props earlier. But he also told us Shanghai is coming online. >> Joseph: Yeah. >> So you got Shanghai, you to Barcelona next year for the European show, and of course Seattle. This is a community celebrating right now because there's a lot of high fives going on right now because there's a lot of cool, we've got some sort of core standard, defacto standard, now let's go to work. What are you working on now? You got a stealth startup? Share a little bit about it. I know you don't want to give the details out, but where is it kind of above the stack? Where you going to be playing? >> Sure, so we're not talking too much in terms of specifics and we're pretty stealthy, but I can tell you what I'm personally very excited about in terms of where Kubernetes is going and kind of where this ecosystem is starting to mature for practitioners, for enterprises. So one of the things that I think Kubernetes is starting to bring to bear is this idea of commoditizing distributed systems for everyday developers, for everyday enterprises. And I think that that is sort of the first time in sort of maybe, maybe the history of software development, software engineering and building applications, we're standardizing on a set of primitives, a set of building blocks for distributed system style programming. You know we had in previous eras things like Erlang and fault tolerant programming and frameworks, but those were sort of like pocketed into different programming communities and different types of stacks. I think Kubernetes is the one sort of horizontal technology that the industry's adopting and it's giving us these amazing properties, so I think some of the things that we're focusing on or excited about involve sort of the programming layer on top of Kubernetes in simplifying the experience of kind of bringing all stateful and enterprise workloads and different types of application paradigms natively into Kubernetes without requiring a developer to really understand and learn the Kubernetes primitives themselves. >> That's next level infrastructure as code. Yeah so as Kubernetes becomes more successful, as Kubernetes succeeds at a larger and larger scale, people simply shouldn't have to know or understand the internals. There's a lot of people, I think Kelsey and a few other people, started to talk about Kubernetes as the Linux kernel of distributed computing or distributed systems, and I think that's a really great way of looking at it. You know, do programmers make file system calls directly when they're building their applications? Do they script directly against the kernel for maybe some very high performance things. But generally speaking when you're writing a service or you're writing a microservice or some business logic, you're writing at a higher level of abstraction and a language that's doing some IO and maybe some reading and writing files, but you're using higher level abstractions. So I think by the same token, the focus today with Kubernetes is people are learning this API. I think over time people are going to be programming against that API at a higher level. And what are you doing here, the show? Obviously you're (mumbles) so you're doing some (mumbles) intelligence. Conversations you've been in, can you share your opinion of what's going on here? Your thoughts on the content program, the architecture, the decisions they've made. >> I think we've just, so lots of questions in there. What am I doing here? I just get so energized and I'm so, I just get reinvigorated kind of being here and talking to people and it's just super cool to see a lot of old faces, people who've been here for a while, and you know, one of the things that excites me, and this is just like proof that the event's gotten so huge. I walk around and I see a lot of familiar faces, but more than 80, 90% of people I've never seen before, and I'm like wow this has like gotten really super huge mainstream. Talking with some customers, getting a good sense of kind of what's going on. I think we've seen two really huge kind of trends come out of the event. One is this idea of multicloud sort of as a focus area, and you've talked with Bassam at Upbound and the sort of multicloud control plane, kind of need and demand out there in the community and the user base. I think what Bassam's doing is extremely exciting. The other, so multicloud is a really big paradigm that most companies are sort of prioritizing. Kubernetes is available now on all the cloud providers, but how do we actually adopt it in a way that is agnostic to any cloud provider service. That's one really big trend. The second big thing that I think we're starting to see, just kind of across a lot of talks is taking the Kubernetes API and extending it and wrapping it around stateful applications and stateful workloads, and being able to sort of program that API. And so we saw the announcement from Red Hat on the operator framework. We've seen projects like Kube Builder and other things that are really about sort of building native custom Kubernetes APIs for your applications. So extensibility, using the Kubernetes API as a building block, and then multicloud. I think those are really two huge trends happening here. >> What is your view on, I'm actually going to put you on test here. So Red Hat made a bet on Kubernetes years ago when it was not obvious to a lot of the other big wales. >> Joseph: From the very beginning really. >> Yeah from the very beginning. And that paid off huge for Red Hat as an example. So the question is, what bets should people be making if you had to lay down some thought leadership on this here, 'cause you obviously are in the middle of it and been part of the beginning. There's some bets to be made. What are the bets that the IBMs and the HPs and the Cisco's and the big players have to make and what are the bets the startups have to make? >> Well yeah, there's two angles to that. I mean, I think the investment startups are making, are different set of investments and motivated differently than the multinational, huge, you know, technology companies that have billions of dollars. I think in the startup category, startups just should really embrace Kubernetes for speeding the way they build reliable and scalable applications. I think really from the very beginning Kubernetes is becoming kind of compelling and reasonable even at a very small scale, like for two or three node environment. It's becoming very easy to run and install and manage. Of course it gives you a lot of really great properties in terms of actually running, building your systems, adopting microservices, and scaling out your application. And that's what's sort of like a direct end user use case, startups, kind of building their business, building their stack on Kubernetes. We see companies building products on top of Kubernetes. You see a lot of them here on the expo floor. That's a different type of vendor startup ecosystem. I think there's lots of opportunities there. For the big multinationals, I think one really interesting thing that hasn't really quite been done yet, is sort of treating Kubernetes as a first-class citizen as opposed to a way to commercialize and enter a new market. I think one of the default ways large technology companies tend to look at something hypergrowth like Kubernetes and TensorFlow and other projects is wrapping around it and commercializing in some way, and I think a deeper more strategic path for large companies could be to really embed Kubernetes in the core kind of crown jewel IP assets that they have. So I'll give you an example, like, for let's just take SAP, I'll just pick on SAP randomly, for no reason. This is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. I would encourage the co-CEOs of SAP, for example. >> John: There's only one CEO now. >> Is there one CEO now? Okay. >> John: Snabe left. It's now (drowned out by talking). >> Oh, okay, gotcha. I haven't been keeping up on the SAP... But let's just say, you know, a CEO boardroom level discussion of replatforming the entire enterprise application stack on something like Kubernetes could deliver a ton of really core meaningful benefits to their business. And I don't think like deep super strategic investments like that at that level are being made quite yet. I think at a certain point in time in the future they'll probably start to be made that way. But that's how I would like look at smart investments on the bigger scale. >> We're not seeing scale yet with Kubernetes, just the toe is in the water. >> I think we're starting to see scale, John. I think we are. >> John: What's the scale number in clusters? >> I'll give you the best example, which came up today, and actually really surprised me which I think was a super compelling example. The largest retailer in China, so essentially the Amazon of China, JD.com, is running in production for years now at 20,000 compute nodes with Kubernetes, and their largest cluster is a 5,000 node cluster. And so this is pushing the boundary of the sort of production-- >> And I think that may be the biggest one I've heard. >> Yeah, that's certainly, I mean for a disclosed user that's pretty huge. We're starting to see people actually talk publicly about this which is remarkable. And there are huge deployments out there. >> We saw Tyler Jewell come on from WSO2. He's got a new thing called Ballerina. New programming language, have you seen that? >> Joseph: I have, I have. >> Thoughts on that? What's your thoughts on that? >> You know, I think that, so I won't make any particular specific comments on Ballerina, I'm not extremely informed on it. I did play with a little bit, I don't want to give any of my opinions, but what I'd say, and I think Tyler actually mentioned this, one of the things that I believe is going to be a big deal in the coming years, is so, trying to think of Kubernetes as an implementation detail, as the kernel, do you interact directly with that? Do you learn that interface directly? Are you sort of kind of optimizing your application to be sort of natively aware of those abstractions? I think the answer to all of those questions is no, and Kubernetes is sort of delegated as a compiler target, and so frankly like directionally speaking, I think what Ballerina's sort of design is aspiring towards is the right one. Compile time abstraction for building distributed systems is probably the next logical progression. I like to think of, and I think Brendan Burns has started to talk about this over the last year or two. Everyone's writing assembly code 'cause we're swimming yaml and configuration based designs and systems. You know, sort of pseudodeclarative, but more imperative in static configurations. When in reality we shouldn't be writing these assembly artifacts. We should be delegating all of this complexity to a compiler in the same way that you know, we went from assembly to C to higher level languages. So I think over time that starts to make a lot of sense, and we're going to see a lot of innovation here probably. >> What's your take on the community formation? Obviously, it's growing, so, any observations, any insight for the folks watching what's happening in the community, patterns, trends you'd see, like, don't like. >> I think we could do a better job of reducing politics amongst the really sort of senior community leaders, particularly who have incentives behind their sort of agendas and sort of opinions, since they work for various, you know, large and small companies. >> Yeah, who horse in this race. >> Sure, and there's, whether they're perverse incentives or not, I think net the project has such a high quality genuine, like humble, focused group of people leading it that there isn't much pollution and negativity there. But I think there could be a higher standard in some cases. Since the project is so huge and there are so many very fast moving areas of evolution, there tends to be sort of a fast curve toward many cooks being in the kitchen, you know, when new things materialize and I think that could be better handled. But positive side, I think like the project is becoming incredibly diverse. I just get super excited to see Aparna from Google leading the project at Google, both on the hosted Saas offering and the Kubernetes project. People like Liz and others. And I just think it's an awesome, welcoming, super diverse community. And people should really highlight that more. 'Cause I think it's a unique asset of the project. >> Well you're involved in some deep history. I think we're going to be looking this as moment where there was once a KubeCon that was not part of the CNCF, and you know, you did the right thing, did a good thing. You could have kept it to yourself and made some good cash. >> It's definitely gotten really big, and it's way beyond me now at this point. >> Those guys did a good job with CNCF. >> They're doing phenomenal. I think vast majority of the credit, at this scale, goes to Chris Anasik and Dan Conn, and the events team at the Linux Foundation, CNCF, and obviously Kelsey and Liz and Michelle Noorali and many others. But blood, sweat, and tears. It's no small feat pulling off an event like this. You know, corralling the CFP process, coordinating speakers, setting the themes, it's a really huge job. >> And now they got to deal with all the community, licenses, Lauren your thoughts? >> Well they're consistent across Apache v2 I believe is what Dan said, so all the projects under the CNCF are consistently licensed. So I think that's great. I think they actually have it together there. You know, I do share your concerns about the politics that are going on a little bit back and forth, the high level, I tend to look back at history a little bit, and for those of us that remember JBoss and the JBoss fork, we're a little bit nervous, right? So I think that it's important to take a look at that and make sure that that doesn't happen. Also, you know, open stack and the stuff that we've talked about before with distros coming out or too many distros going to be hitting the street, and how do we keep that more narrow focused, so this can go across-- >> Yeah, I started this, I like to list rank and iterate things, and I started with this sheet of all the vendors, you know, all the Kubernetes vendors, and then Linux Foundation, or CNCF took it over, and they've got a phenomenal sort of conformance testing and sort of compliance versioning sheet, which lists all the vendors and certification status and updates and so on and I think there's 50 or 60 companies. On one hand I think that's great, because it's more innovation, lots of service providers and offerings, but there is a concern that there might be some fragmentation, but again, this is a really big area of focus, and I think it's being addressed. Yeah, I think the right ones will end up winning, right? >> Joseph: Right, for sure. >> and that's what's going to be key. >> Joseph: Healthy competition. >> Yes. >> All right final question. Let's go around the horn. We'll start with you JJ, wrapping up KubeCon 2018, your thoughts, summary, what's happened here? What will we talk about next year about what happened this week in Denmark? >> I think this week in Denmark has been a huge turning point for the growth in Europe and sort of proof that Kubernetes is on like this unstoppable inflection, growth curve. We usually see a smaller audience here in Europe, relative to the domestic event before it. And we're just seeing the numbers get bigger and bigger. I think looking back we're also going to see just the quality of end users and the end user community and more production success stories starting to become front and center, which I think is really awesome. There's lots of vendors here. But I do believe we have a huge representation of end users and companies actually sharing what they're doing pragmatically and really changing their businesses from Financial Times to Cern and physics projects, and you know, JD and other huge companies. I think that's just really awesome. That's a unique thing of the Kubernetes project. There's some hugely transformative companies doing awesome things out there. >> Lauren your thoughts, summary of the week in Denmark? >> I think it's been awesome. There's so much innovation happening here and I don't want to overuse that word 'cause I think it's kind of BS at some point, but really these companies are doing new things, and they're taking this to new levels. I think that hearing about the excitement of the folks that are coming here to actually learn about Kubernetes is phenomenal, and they're going to bring that back into their companies, and you're going to see a lot more actually coming to Europe next year. I also true multicloud would be phenomenal. I would love that if you could actually glue those platforms together, per se. That's really what I'm looking for. But also security. I think security, there needs to be a security seg. We talked to customers earlier. That's something they want to see. I think that that needs to be something that's brought to the table. >> That's awesome. My view is very simple. You know I think they've done a good job in CNCF and Linux Foundation, the team, building the ecosystem, keeping the governance and the technical and the content piece separate. I think they did a good job of showing the future state that we'd like to get to, which is true multicloud, workload portability, those things still out of reach in my opinion, but they did a great job of keeping the tight core. And to me, when I hear words like defacto standard I think of major inflection points where industries have moved big time. You think of internetworking, you think of the web, you think of these moments where that small little tweak created massive new brands and created a disruptor enabler that just created, changed the game. We saw Cisco coming out of that movement of IP with routers you're seeing 3Com come out of that world. I think that this change, this new little nuance called Kubernetes is going to be absolutely a defacto standard. I think it's definitely an inflection point and you're going to see startups come up with new ideas really fast in a new way, in a new modern global architecture, new startups, and I think people are going to be blown away. I think you're going to see fast rising growth companies. I think it's going to be an investment opportunity whether it's token economics or a venture backer private equity play. You're going to see people come out of the wood work, real smart entrepreneur. I think this is what people have been waiting for in the industry so I mean, I'm just super excited. And so thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for everything you do for the community. I think you truly extract the signal from the noise. I'm really excited to see you keep coming to the show, so it's really awesome. >> I appreciate your support, and again we're co-developing content in the open. Lauren great to host with you this week. >> Thank you, it's been awesome. >> And you got a great new venture, high five there. High five to the founder of KubeCon. This is theCUBE, not to be confused with KubeCon. And we're theCUBE, C-U-B-E. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. It's a wrap of day two global coverage here exclusively for KubeCon 2018, CNCF and the Linux Foundation. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to theCUBE We continue our coverage here live. We are in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. Big show, 14,000 plus they're expecting here. 4,000 just in the business partners summit alone. So a very impressive turnout here in day one, as I said, of three days of coverage on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Lee Caswell who's a VP of Products at VMWare. Lee, good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here, yes. >> John: Every year we get together like this, right? >> Well, you know, there's always something new to talk about, right? >> John: Absolutely, and we're also joined by Chris Stanley here, who's the IT Manager at the Celtic Manor Resorts in Newport, Wales. Chris, the first person from Wales I think I've ever met, as a matter of fact. >> Chris: (laughs) A privilege; thank you. >> For me it is, but thank you for being here. We appreciate the time. So we're talking about your migration, and, really, it wasn't a migration, it was like your head-first dive into the hyper-converged environment. You didn't tiptoe around it, you didn't wade into the water, You guys just dove right in. >> Chris: We're fearless, yes. >> What was the driver of that decision to be so fearless? >> Chris: As an organization, we've grown very quickly the last few years, and we've got significant growth in new hotels and a new conference center coming on board. And we're bursting at the seams in our existing environment, so we needed a platform that we could grow into this new environment very quickly and with predictive costs as best as we could. >> And so, Lee, walking them through this, >> Yeah, >> I mean, there's no convincing to be done here, but you do have to inspire some confidence, right? So somebody who's making a pretty bold move like this how did you approach that, and what did you do as far as assigning? >> Lee: You know, our partnership with Dell EMC is just a great testament here, right? I mean, you've taken the latest of 14G servers, for example, as part of VxRail. So you've got the best in hardware combined with VMWare underlying VCN software packaged up together, right, in a single point of support in a way that really makes us able to drop in and get started. Right, when you think about this, this is also interesting, in that here's a customer you know, in this case, you were using converged infrastructure in the past. >> It really is. Yeah. >> That's very common, right? So people who are looking for the advantage of like, how did I get the operational efficiencies? And now what you find is hyper-converge changes the operational model, and so it's around speed and agility, right? More than cost, right? And so, together, that's kind of the, our partnership is so powerful for customers looking to go and basically drive that kind of efficiency. >> Chris: Definitely, yeah. >> Keith: So, Chris, talk to us about that decision process. In typical organizations, this is Wired U, You're on theCUBE and it's so special. It's easy to talk about use cases on the edge VDI, specific, non-mission critical applications. But when it comes to stuff that runs the business, if it's down, the CIO, the CFO is at someone's desk asking when it's going to be back up. How did this discussion start? Was it from the bottom up, or was it from the top down? Exactly which teams said, "You know what? We need more agility, HCI, go!" >> Chris: Definitely from a bottom up perspective, but supported from top down when we came for it. We could see it in our environment, in our growing environment. We're a 24 hour business in a resort hotel, and we have little downtime Or, sorry, little time to do any upgrades, etc. So resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime, so failing over with VMWare we use, with the VxWare we get now DRS and the Enterprise version which it comes with which we hadn't in our converged. So there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time so that has freed up a lot of time for my guys. Going forward there will be a lot more free time as well so we've got more time to concentrate on the guests and how we can make their experience better. >> So the story behind Converged systems, you know you have SAP, Oracle, BASSP, all these mission critical apps mission critical runs on CI and then everything else to run on, even from a vendor support, you know you talk to all the major software vendors, they say you all CI is the best opportunity. How did that conversation go with vendors when you said you know what, we're going to run mission critical on, I'm assuming vSAN? >> Lee: This is on vSAN in VxRail. >> vSAN, you know, we can't see your TR1 software providers and you know what, we're all vSAN, global size and scope, global? >> What, as an environment? >> Yes. >> It's a global environment really of over four hotels at the moment but growing into a bigger environment. We're going for an international conference center so kind of this sort of size, not quite as big as this but we're definitely not support from the hyper converged. And all our core systems are written on it, yes. Big Oracle databases, SQL, and our exchange service and there was a split between two clusters now in VxRail so we can, we can fail over to a node in VxRail, we can fail over to a cluster as well so as an SLE for up time we're business critical and the guys at the top of Celtic Manor have seen how that is for business you know. If we're not serving people or taking money then we're giving money back in a case for disruption. >> All right so you've been into this for a little bit less than a year now, correct? >> Correct, yes. >> I know Lee's sitting right next to you but let's just for a moment. I'm sure there has been at least a troubling moment of that transition or at least a hiccup somewhere that you had to settle, you had a problem, right? Something came up, if someone's watching this, thinking I wonder what they got hit with and how they handled it, how did you work around that, how did you adapt that, what would that be? What was the, maybe the one little hiccup right now that you've successfully- >> With deployment? >> Yeah. >> Nothing much but when we were migrating from a Converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged we added on the SANs to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over. A couple of servers didn't take too well to that one being motioned over. Nothing of the critical ones thankfully. But they, it was either a Windows update or once they restarted, it was only two of the servers but, we used the recover point then within VxRail and literally go back five, 10 minutes, which we did and up and running again, switched over, and we were you know, back up and running, but it was we had the decision there of, how long do we troubleshoot it for or do we just, that was our first instance of using recover point so we hadn't done it in a live environment so it was kind of, okay and pretty much out but it worked and it filled us with a lot of confidence now that we could do, we have that resilience going forward in an environment. >> Well let's talk about day two. >> I was just going to comment Ray, that this is part of the partnership that's so powerful for us right, is, you know I think VMWare learn that supporting storage systems, as we know, it's a little different than just computing. You know this, right, I mean, you know the idea of like, hey listen, a purple screen isn't the worst that can happen, 'cause you can reboot, right? It's really about, like, my data. And so when you start thinking about that, the ability for us to partner with Dell AMC who understands what it means to be supporting in a datacentric world, like that element, right is so powerful for us, right, because we've got a partner here who really understands the ability and that's part of the powerful concept of VxRail. >> So we had Tom Burns earlier and we were talking about VI and the importance of CI and there's still a great, I think, desire and temptation, and valid that CI gets you on the ground, running quickly, complex systems, easily deployed relative to traditional architectures. Talk to me about the practical of HCI, Day 2 Operations, CI, relatively easy to deploy but you still have some traditional operations concerns. What specifically did you guys see as the advantage Day two once you went to ACI? What's saving you all this time? >> Purely I think the time saver is the management of the system or the lack of management that we now need to do. There's, you've got one pane of glass to see everything which is very nice, you haven't got something separate for your SANs, your SX hosts, your networking and that support that you have, you know, there's one of them to call. You're not fighting between different entities saying it's your fault, it's your fault, there you go, sort it, so again that has freed up a lot of time, you know not knowing who to call or where to call but, you know, having one person who's going to sort it out and take ahold of that and fix it for you. And the remote support then, which is very good you know, you've got someone else monitoring your systems if you enable it, so you've got Dell support there and they can potentially see something before you do so I kind of gained another IT person for in this solution which is very nice. >> Yeah, we kind of joke you know, that a lot of people talk about hyperconvergence as if it's about us, but hyperconvergence is about you. When you think about it, right, it's about hyperconverging the IT staff. If you can hyperconverge the staff, right, that's when hyperconvergence does well, when we have one team, it's a converged team and people are like, hey listen, I'm going to go to a VMcentric management model. Now I can go and debug things right from a single console which is V center. That model works really fast, right? And where Converged still does a good job, right, is where I've got storage scaling at big scale but separate from compute separate. Hyperconvergence is about, it's about the organizational environment right? >> Very much so, bringing it all together, yeah. And it's simplistic in VMWare being so tightly integrated with VxRail was our main call against the other vendors, as a big call to, while they, you know, it's the best chef with the best ingredients, let's use that, not a dessert chef with the best ingredients >> Yeah, we have 500,000 customers who are familiar with V Center, right, and if you know V Center you know V SAN, you know VxRail, right? >> You can get simplistic again, so you already know it. >> Yeah, right. >> Well we could talk about this til we're blue in the face. I think we need to go see it in operation, don't you Keith? >> We'll set you up with some golf >> Now we're talking, be careful Chris, what you offer. Lee, Chris, good to see you guys. Thanks for being with us, we appreciate you sharing the story. Thank you very much. Back with more, here from Dell Technologies World we are live on theCUBE in Las Vegas.

>> Presenter: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018! Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube! We are live at Day One of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we are joined by two guests. We have Shannon Champion, Product Marketing of HCI at Dell EMC, and we have her customer, from Celtic Manor, Chris Stanley, IT Manager. Hey Chris! >> Hi. >> Welcome to the Cube, you guys! >> Thank you, thank you very much! >> And we just timed this perfect music intro for you! >> They knew, they knew! >> So Chris, Celtic Manor, you're based in Wales, talk to us about Celtic Manor, what it is that you do, before we start talking about your IT and Digital Transformations. >> Yeah sure, so we're a collection of hotels, four, in South Wales. Within that four, there is a resort hotel, with a conference center. We offer lots of facilities to our guests, golf courses, spas, all the niceties, bars, restaurants, and as well as the conference business being quite a big side of that. And we've got a lot of growth coming on with new hotels and a new convention center. Yeah, and we've got a staff of around about a thousand at the moment, half of those being PC end-users, and a small IT team of eight supporting all those people. >> So a lot of locations, a lot of stuff, a lot of data. Talk to us about what you're doing with Dell EMC, where did you start from, infrastructure-wise? And where are you now? >> Infrastructure-wise, we've been a Dell Partner probably since 2014. That was, we were the previous vendor before, and now at Dell EMC House, always good news, eh! (chuckles) And, our VxRail journey has begun, probably the last eight months, with a new convention center opening, which is an international one, International Convention Center Wales, a joint venture with the Welsh government there. And it's something that's, whereas we've got a lot of conference business now, we do very well at it, we have to turn away a lot of conference business because we're not big enough. So this facility can offer up to 4,000 people in the main room, 1,500-seat auditorium, as well as other breakout rooms. So sort of 6,000 potential guests on-site. And we needed some technology to support that, so we engaged with Dell EMC, and VxRail was our choice. We briefly evaluated others, but Dell EMC, we had a proven past with a great support and strategic partnership, so it was an easy decision. >> So we're going to get into sort of the details there, but Shannon, let me bring you into the conversation. Last time we really spent any time together was in the 14G Launch. You helped orchestrate a lot of the messaging of that, so give us the update on HCI and VxRail, did that awesome marketing package that you put together, is it living up to the marketplace! (all laughing) >> Well thank you for that softball, Dave! Yes, yeah! So in November we were talking to you about HCI and 14th-generation PowerEdge servers, and how PowerEdge is really designed with software-defined storage in mind, and how that really set itself up well for HCI. And what it does is open up doors to being applicable for even more mainstream workloads and applications because of the power and predictability that provides, and Celtic Manor is a perfect example of that, in terms of, initially, using VxRail to scale quickly and reliably for a majority of their workloads and applications, actually. And now, are moving to VDI where, historically, VDI has really been the entry point for HCI. So it's really exciting to see that sort of flip-flop use case here. >> Right, it was like the obligatory workload or use case, right? >> Chris: We like to be different. (laughing) >> Well, I mean, your business is different, right? >> Yes! >> I wonder if you could start with some of the business drivers, right? I mean, obviously, very competitive industry, but you've got some unique differentiators, right, experiences that you're offering customers is somewhat different. But what's driving your business? Speed, digital disruption, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Organizational growth was a key one. With new hotels and conference centers coming on we were bursting at the seams with our current environment. >> Good problem! >> Yeah, so we're all very good. But it was supporting that for customers going forward as well as our staff, supporting with the systems and reliability that we can, to ensure that we get the businesses doing, you know, its utmost. And then, yeah, going on from there, we offer all these different kinds of facilities on-site, golf, bedrooms, spas, all needing different systems, from booking systems through to your VOIP systems, your big databases, Oracle databases, on these servers. So quite a hard workload on them. And we're looking for something that was easy for us to manage, you know, going forward. >> So Chris in terms of IT transformation, Michael Dell talked this morning about these four transformative elements that a company should take to be successful. Digital, IT, workforce, security, talking about the opportunity for IT innovation, to really convert IT into a profit center. And where IT innovation is successful is where customers are looking at it as a business strategy. Talk to us about the stakeholders, maybe, from the CFO's perspective, of, "Hey, we have a great opportunity here "to capture more business and be more competitive." What was that conversation like, the IT folks to the CFO to get budget and approval to help transform? >> Always a tough conversation. (chuckling) Going from the past experience where we'd initially gone with a converge solution back in 2014 with Dell, that alone saved us a significant amount in power alone, so it was something that paid for itself. >> So the CFO was already like, "Alright guys"-- >> Yeah, you know what you're doing, so yeah. We took that, we could see where our pain points were in the environment we currently had, and with it, all the additional hotels, conference centers, coming on, we were at a key stage where we needed to, from the core, build outwards. So VxRail was and obvious-er choice, I should say, in the end. But it was key to transformation, because it enables us now to look at other methods. It's freed up a lot of time for IT staff, so we're looking at deploying a virtual desktop solution now which we don't currently have. And that could be initially anything from up to 300 virtual desktops, so big load, but we now have the core capacity there to do it. And we're looking at other things for our guests, where we can give them a better experience. So Artificial Intelligence, AI, is very big on the agenda, so we look at everything. There's face recognition systems now that can recognize the guests when they come in, ping a message, we haven't deployed these yet, we're still looking at them. But it's enabled us to look at these now with the power behind us of the 14G service. So it's all, it's a key enabler for us, the VxRail solution. >> Opening up the potential for emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning... >> Yes, very much so. >> How do you differentiate from your HCI competition? What are some of the touchpoints there? >> Well, from a VMware focus perspective, you know, Celtic Manor has deployed VxRail. Our differentiator is that we're the only provider through our strategically-aligned business relationship that is jointly engineered with VMware. And so what that means, from a customer point of view, is a more seamless experience, right. Familiar tools they already know and love, that they use day to day, from a VMware perspective, for day-to-day management. But then also the automation that's built in. Automated deployment, ability to upgrade with one click, seamless process to scale quickly when you have new hotels coming online, for example. And then have a single point of support. So we take one single call, whether it's hardware or software, for VxRail. If there's an issue, call Dell EMC and a lot of customers find a lot of value in that. >> So, okay, Chris, now I've got to ask you. So you heard that from Dell EMC, but a lot of companies would say, "Well, we get along great with VMware, "we get the SDKs early, "yeah, those guys overplay all that stuff." What, from your perspective, how important is what Shannon just laid out? And how real is it? >> It's very real. And Shannon basically, yeah, all those points there were literally what we were struggling with. We had the one support telephone company to call, imperative to us. We'd been ringing, in the past we'd be ringing Sand Storage, we were ringing ESX, VMware, all blaming each other, and you're going back and forth and you're wasting key time. With one support number now, you know, you've one call, you've got a one-stop-shop to sort it. So that was a big, big call for us. The 14G service as well, we also get the recover points which enables us to have two environments where we can lose one, and one total environment lost, but still operate as a business. So all of these, keeping, giving us uptimes to close to 100% as we can. >> Have your had to test that yet? Or, when I say test, has it actually, have you had to fail over? I mean, you probably tested it, hopefully you tested it, but-- >> We have-- >> Dave: Has it tested you yet, let me put it that way! >> Yeah, we have failed over servers. We haven't failed over a whole cluster, because you hope it's one of the things you hope you never have to do. (Shannon laughing) We've tested the procedure between nodes, as you would, and there is, we have tested recently with the Recover Point software, where we have lost servers, and it's a decision then, do we try to troubleshoot the problem or do we just go back a few minutes when it was working and we just, we gave it an hour to sort it out, it was impacting, so we just rolled back as if it never happened! >> It worked! >> Yeah, which was a nice reaffirmation that what we did was right! >> So Shannon you talked about resiliency, speed. There was an analyst report, recently, that I'd like you to kind of enlighten us on. And kind of look at one of the thing Chris said, in terms of getting back to the business cost savings. How does Celtic Manor's achievement so far kind of align with what you're seeing in terms of customers being able to leverage HCI to be more budget friendly? >> Yeah, so, I think you're referring to our IT Maturity Study. And what we're seeing is that the majority of customers, almost all of them, are telling us that if they don't transform in their industry, then they'll no longer be competitive. So I think all of our customers are kind of coming to that realization. One of the key aspects to that is that a year ago, when we asked the same question, a significantly lower number was mentioned. So I think that just speaks to the speed and the urgency that customers are coming to the realization that it's really important to transform, and we need to do it sooner rather than later. We have a lot of proof points around VxRail, particularly, in terms of the automation. You know, 73% faster to deploy, that means value to customers. That's money that they're saving, directly. And lower serviceability costs overall, over 40% lower. So that translates into real TCO, goes back to the CFO, you know, that helps understand the investment that they're making, lets them reprioritize in other areas of the business that helps them transform and stay innovative in their industry. >> I want to follow up on that last point that Shannon just made. And a lot of times, when you're bringing in some kind of consolidation, the staff says, "Uh oh, "that means I'm going to lose my job, "because I'm really good at revisioning LANs" or whatever it is. How did you address that, was there organizational tension, what did you do with the time that was freed up? >> Yeah, I think it's helped transform the IT team. If anything, it's freed up time, but that time is now taken, it's given us more time to look at innovative products and going forwards. There is, our staff has a tendency to specialize more as opposed to generalize, which is nice. As in, the VxRail has sat there, and it's pretty much doing what you would do with minimal amounts of watching over them, with the remote support, who also watch your environment, if you enable it. If you have any outages there, they can potentially draw your attention to it before you even know. So lots of time's been freed up, and now you can see the staff are embracing it there, they're happy they've got this additional time not to be doing the not-so-important stuff, as we say, although it is very important, to keep it going. But they have more time now to specialize in what they mostly enjoy. So it's brought it on full circle now, so it's really, yeah, we're really seeing some positives. >> And hang out with their families on the weekends. (everyone speaking at once in agreement) So since they're not doing that, and they have more time to innovate, where are you on this data center modernization journey? And where, we talked about VDI, but where do you think you are in that journey? >> With respect to, with VDI, we are imminently doing it. We finished deploying the second VxRail cluster, the five S Series nodes, probably only a couple weeks ago, after a full migration of all the existing VMs. So it's now enabling us to look at VDI, which, ironically, when we get back, the week I get back, we have a meeting with Dell EMC on, do we need another node, all flash, or do we, we have specced within five nodes, some capacity for virtual desktops. But it's, again, something that, with all these additional hotels coming on, the conference centers, virtual desktop is the way to go. Even centralizing the data more so people aren't taking all data off of their laptops, so we're a more secure environment. So again, a great enabler for us, and finally, after four or five years, I get the virtual desktop! Done it the other way around, but-- >> Do you golf? >> I used to golf a lot. >> Okay, so you know what a mulligan is. >> Yeah. >> So, if you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? >> Um, what would I do differently? Good question! >> I mean, specific to this project. (chuckling) >> Nothing, really. I think everything pretty much has been done as I would expect. When we first deployed the conference center, the new conference center environment, it was a bit disjointed, because the conference center wasn't built and in full use. It kind of gave us some time to test the environment fully, which we also did with the Dell VxRail test drives, which I know the guys offer you were you can go into a classroom facility for a day and see it in action before you actually purchase and use it. >> Same question, different spin. Advice for your peers. Because obviously you had some successes. What would you tell them, to be successful? >> Just go for it! If you're thinking it, I mean, it is, as far as I can see, it is the future product, and it's not going to go in any other direction. The management side of things is far more simplistic than everything else we've experienced in the past. And it's baked-in VMware so, you know, you have the best chef and the best ingredients with the best thing as opposed to another chef taking the best ingredients and trying to do something. So yeah, it's just seamless integration now, and it gives us a lot of confidence that we have everything there with Dell, and this environment, to go forward and grow even bigger as a business. >> And then we've cued your outro music. >> Perfect! >> Timed that perfectly! Chris, thank you so much for sharing what you're doing at Celtic Manor to innovate, making your IT transformation. Shannon, thank you for sharing what's new with HCI. Dave, thank you for sharing with me the word "mulligan", I just looked it up. In case you don't know what a mulligan is, it is an extra stroke allowed after a poor golf shot. I probably would be like the mulligan queen. >> You get a few. (chuckles) >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube, we are live on Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's The Cube. Covering BlockChain Unbound. Brought to you by BlockChain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to our exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico. This is The Cube covering BlockChain Unbound, two days of wall to wall coverage. Got videos flying all over the internet. We're here with Patrick Moynihan, who is with BlockChain Unbound, but conference producer, BlockChain Industry CEO. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Thanks for having me John. >> And thank you for producing this conference. It is actually a big event, headlining all the top news stories on Wall Street Journal, CNBC's here, The Cube is here, but more impressive is this rebound in Puerto Rico. This event kind of turned into a flash mob of global players, investors, Bitcoin billionaires, Wales they call 'em, entrepreneurs, a real movement. You even had some folks here from the government in Puerto Rico. A real, not just insider event, this is like a bridging the insider world, and the global community. Congratulations. >> Well thank you. It's been an amazing turn out. I really commend the Puerto Rican government officials for stepping up and there are, you know, the department of economic development is our partner in this and they wanted to really promote this. And as you know, there's many crypto currency holders who are migrating to the island for tax purposes, and the seas and their tax based, which is all fully compliant, and have been in the laws for awhile. But the governor, you know, has really stepped up with his team. We've got Secretary Manuel Laboy who spoke yesterday, and had marvelous words to say. Really supportive of the overall industry. He's an engineer by training. So he's not a politician. So he gets kind of business and structure, if you will, and logic. He's great and also George Joyner, the banking commissioner was here and spoke lovely. So the banking commissioner is also forming a formal working group, as is Manuel Laboy. >> So this is actually a really big movement. I'm reporting here, yesterday and today, that it's not a culture clash. The local island residents, and now governments absolutely are on board with bringing together new a new ecosystem for a lot of reasons. One, they are motivated, there's a rebound going on, the hurricane hit. But now you have a new opportunity to be a digital nation. Digital island, probably in the U.S. I mean really be a player in an economic revitalization. Not only the island, but as an epicenter for all this money movement, all this opportunity with BlockChain. So talk a little bit about that dynamic because I think a lot of mainstream people don't understand actually what's going on in Puerto Rico and how it intersects with this global phenomenon. >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, I think think the people of the crypto currency world believe that the technology is so robust, they want to use Puerto Rico as a test bed for infrastructure, for, you know, internet, for all sorts of different things in terms of building the best infrastructure, the newest best in class. And there's real energy here because there's a social movement underneath the entire crypto currency movement. And that's to basically help your fellow man, or women. That's what this is all about. And leveling the playing field. Taking, you know, big brother largely out of it. And just making it fair and transparent. So, I mean, that movement is huge. If people, if people want to understand crypto currency, they kind of need to understand the social impacts and the ability to really improve people's lives. >> I mean, this is not a tech conference. We do hundreds of tech conferences a year, and in our 10th year with The Cube, and you know what a tech conference looks like. This is not a tech conference. This feels like a tech conference, a developer conference, and the world economic forum kind of rolled in to one. Talk about a little bit about the stats. I mean, you guys sold out early. You weren't expecting this kind of a response here. Give some color into, behind the scenes around the event, BlockChain Unbound. >> Yeah, thank you. So we had an idea to kind of bring the dialogue onto Puerto Rico and really build a prepotency of information. An you know, through the process, and this has been a five an a half week process, we had over 800 attendees here today. It's been sold out for several weeks. We're getting calls from everybody. So you can imagine to get a ticket. But at the end of the day, there's a great mix of finance years, technologists, government people, just regular citizens who want to understand this space and how they can get involved in it. And one thing that we're trying to do is bring an education piece here because the BlockChain is about the next generation, and developing the skills and software for them to prosper and understand, and frankly, just you know, grow the space. Because they're the ones that's going to grow it is the next generation. >> Patrick, I want to get your reaction because one of the things I've observed, I've seen many ways in my day, my age, but this one is massive. And everyone compares to the dot com bubble, which there is some comparisons, more accelerated, obviously, more community that the dot com bubble didn't have, but in those big early days of those major inflection points, the business development, the ecosystem is so early, the nurturing is really important and you see a pattern, you see some emerging entrepreneurs. Boom, lucky strike or good hustling. Do something great. Then you see the PR firms come in, promoting it. You had this kind of promotion, entrepreneur, kind of euphoria, and then you got service providers come in, and then you got investors come in. That then takes to the next step. We've seen that. So we got a lot of PR out there. You see PR firms out there, you know, just pumping a lot of ICO's. The service providers are coming in helping entrepreneurs. Now the institutional investors are coming in with hedge funds. Then it goes to the next level. Real industry leadership, which takes that to the next level That's money, that's connecting different ecosystems. What is your reaction to that? Do you see it the same way and if so, what is that next level growth look like from an architecture standpoint? There's also some government participation. But there's competitions, I mean, Estonia wants to be, I heard France wants to be the ICO city I hear Armenia, you've got Bahrain. I mean, every country wants to be that country. >> They do, and we work closely. >> So what's the leader require to go to that next level? >> That's a great question. You know, we're actually in touch and working with many sovereign governments who have a deep interest in this and want to bring either sovereign wealth coin, or some type of crypto currency play, some type of virtual currency asset into their own system. I mean, what I'm seeing is nothing short of remarkable. The speed of technology and energy into this market is frankly just breathtaking. So what we're looking for next is that netscape moment. That implementation where everyone says, oh my goodness, yes this makes perfect sense. And that largely could be around being on a BlockChain application and having no idea it's BlockChain. And part of that is a technological leap because it is complicated. It's going to take some time to build out and create the speed necessary to make the eubicous behind everything that we do online. And that moments coming, in my opinion. >> You know, one of the things that I'm observing as well, and I think that you're right, I think that there's a new level of leadership. Again, that next level requires new constituents, new stakeholders. I was not happy with the John Oliver greasing of Brock Peters. I thought that was unacceptable. But what that sentiment is about, put that little opinion in there, but I didn't like what he did. I thought that was horrible, but. >> There's no reason to be nasty. >> I mean, they just took him down >> You don't have to be nasty >> Just horrible, John Oliver. I'm coming after you. Only kidding, by the way, he's great, he's funny. But that's kind of a cultural thing. We're hearing conversations in the hallway as, hey, I don't mind the burning man culture. But you can't run an industry like burning man. Although, burning man technically looks like a BlockChain if you look at it from the aerial view. But, you got capital markets coming. You got global governments coming in. So you have that naturation dynamic. So a lot of these early guys are feeling, this is my opinion, I'm seeing this, okay, I don't want to get drowned out. At the same time, we want to go the next level. What is the dynamic, in your opinion, you know, you run a really big firm, you're a senior leader. What is that dynamic? How does everyone win? What are the stakeholders? And what's the formula in your mind? >> You know, I mean, now that's an interesting question because you know, the burning man crew has done incredible things in this space. I think that they're largely viewed as potential anarchists to some government officials and there's a fear factor there So you've got that aspect, and then you've got just straight business people that just simply want to economize and efficiencize and just, you know, be smarter, faster, stronger in their business operation, so, somewhere in the middle, there'll be a blending, and I think, we're all going to have to work together. Competitors, colleagues, everyone working together, with government officials. And again, the regulations are still under flux. The regulators been very clear just saying we think self regulation is a good idea. Step it up. And that's one thing that BlockChain Industries, we're taking extremely seriously. We have our own internal initiatives, as well as several external initiatives. So you're going to be hearing a lot more about our own self regulatory issues in the next several months. >> Well, great point. That's the number one thing we hear is the regulatory issues are what scares people. Because they're out on a limb right now, innovating. >> Yeah. >> They don't want the regulatory regimes and or pressures and signaling stunt the growth of the market. >> Yeah, you know I heard something yesterday that really rung a bell for me. It says, we can accomplish the same thing in the KYCAML does, but just in a different way. In fact, we can use technology to make it easier and more transparent and provide that back to the government officials to keep the bad actors out where needed. And so we're all about that, and we're all about working through a transparent system with full AML. >> So are you guys going to do a lot, you guys in the conference business now? >> Well, you know, I think by mistake we are. We're looking to Tokyo, early October. We'll do a BlockChain Unbound in Tokyo. Very exciting, we've got a great presence in Japan with our local partners, Global Fintech Advisors. They placed a billion six and ICO's in the asian market over the last two an a half years. And so they're very plugged, and they're excited to bring BlockChain Unbound to Tokyo. >> Final question for you. BlockChain Industries, take a minute to explain what you do. What you guys do, obviously you have another business. The conference thing just kind of fell in your lap, lightning in a bottle, congratulations. But, good compliment. What is BlockChain Industries do? >> Thank you. We are a diversified financial holding company. And we invest across the ecosystem BlockChain companies. And that includes, you know, attempted developed crypto bank forming long term mining operations. We do ICO consulting. We invest our own capital in certain deals. And we also have a median education component that really is the brand building globally for us. Because without the education piece, it's very difficult for people to kind of get caught up to speed 'cause there's some technical things you need to understand to really apply this technology into the business world. >> So are people investing in your fund, your company? Is that how it works? >> Yeah, we offer a public vehicle to allow investors access to the private virtual currency markets. In a nutshell, that's what we do. >> It's early days, final observation. What did you learn this week that is going to change your world? >> I learned that average business people and senior business people who have typically been shut off to the idea of BlockChain are now seeing this as very real and here to stay. And I mean, across the board, really technical and sophisticated people across the board, plus even normal citizens. They're hearing about, they're seeing it. It's hear to stay. And the momentum is just beginning. >> And it's a social movement, I agree. Congratulations, you guys did a great job. I know, you know, only a couple weeks to prepare. You pulled it off, congratulations. >> Thanks Boomer, appreciate that man. Good stuff. >> These guys could go all the way. Watch BlockChain Industries of course. BlockChain Unbound is the event. It's The Cube, exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico. I'm John Furrier. Back with more after the short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's the Cube. Covering Polycon '18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage. We're live in the Bahamas, here for day two of our wall to wall coverage of Polycon '18. It's a security token conference, securitizing, you know, token economics, cryptography, cryptocurrency. All this is in play. Token economics powering the world. New investors are here. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Nithin Eapen Who's the Chief Investment Officer for Arcadia Crypto Ventures. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much gentlemen. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for coming out. >> Excited to have you on for a couple reasons. One, we've been talking since day one, lot of hallway conversations. Small, intimate conference, so we've had a chance to talk. Folks haven't heard that yet, so let's kind of get some of the key things we discussed. You are very bullish and long on cryptocurrency and Blockchain. You guys are doing a variety of deals. You're also advising companies and you guys are rolling your sleeves up. So kind of interesting dynamics. So take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, your model. >> Okay. >> And we're going to try to get some of your partners on later. You have a great team. >> Yep. >> Experienced pros in investing. And you got wales, you got pros. So you got a nice balance. >> Yes we do. >> So take a minute to explain Arcadia, your approach and philosophy. >> Okay. Okay. So Arcadia Crypto Ventures primarily we are a private fund. We invest other money. We believe in the whole crypto space. We believe this market is expanding and it is growing and it's going to be the biggest thing that ever happened. It's going to be this fusion of internet and PC and mobile. And everything is going to go batshit, okay. We believe in the whole tokenization world. Everything is going to be tokenized. So as a whole, we believe this space is going to go very big. Okay, so that's one piece and because of that, we invest in the space, the whole space. Not one bitcoin or Ethereum, but everything in the space that makes sense. People who have a use case. Now the second piece of it is we advised great founders. We want to get founders to come out and build these new things because this is the new internet of the new era and people have to come out and build these things. And so many of them are traditional businesses and we have to explain to them why this matters, why you should come to this space and be decentralized and reach the whole world. Because initially, the internet came. The idea of the internet was everybody gets information. Now information did get everywhere. You don't have to worry that the mailman is there to deliver your email anymore. Even if it's a Sunday, your mail will get delivered. So that part was good. But now you have these few companies that's holding all your data. It's okay for most people, but they do censor a lot of people. So that is one point. That censorship. We want a censorship-resistant world where everybody's ideas get out. So that way, we believe that's how this whole internet space itself is going to change because of that. See this is if I explained in one word, this is the greatest sociopolitical economic experimental revolution ever that has happened in humankind. >> In the history of the world. I mean this is important. I'd said that on my opening today. >> Uh-huh. >> Dave and I were riffing and Dave and I have always been studying. We've been entre-- We are entrepreneurs. We live in Silken Valleys in Boston and so you seeing structural change going on. So it's not just make money. >> Nope. >> There's mission-based, younger demographics. So you starting to see really great stuff. So I want to ask you specifically, 'cause you guys are unique in the sense that you're investing in a lot of things. But startups, pure-playing startups? >> Which had only one path before, or two paths. >> Right, yeah. >> Cashflow financing and venture capital. >> Okay. >> So that's a startup model. The growing companies that are transform their growth business with token economics, those would have long odds. Those are the best deals. >> Okay. Then there's like the third deal. Well we're out of business, throw the Hail Mary, repivot. (laughs) Right, so categorically, you're starting to see the shape of the kinds of swim lanes of deals. >> Okay. >> Okay, pivoting, that Hail Mary. Okay, you can evaluate that pretty much straight up on that. Startups need nurturing, right? >> Yeah. >> So the VC1 al-oc-chew works really well for startups because of the product market fits going to be developed. You got cloud computing so you can go faster. So you guys are nurturing startups. At the same time, you're also doing growth deals. >> We do. >> Explain the dynamic between those kinds of deals, how you guys approach them. What's the dynamic? What are the key things that you're bringing? Is it just packaging? Is it tech? So on, so forth. >> So with a lot of people, when they are on the advisory side. Primarily we look at the founder and the tech. What are they trying to solve? That is key. If it's a turd, you can't package it. No matter how you package it, that's not going to work. >> You can't package dog you-know-what. >> Yeah, exactly, okay. >> So that's one thing that we look at. The founders and their idea. Now their idea, can it be decentralized? Some models are meant to be centralized maybe so it doesn't work, okay. Like, see it all boils down to-- Let me break it down. We look at it. Okay, do you have an asset? Behind the scenes, is there an asset? Is that asset being transferred among parties? If you have an asset and it's being transferred, is there some central mechanism in between? Because if there is a central mechanism in between, that means you're going to be paying rent to that. Okay, all right. You have these things. Okay, great. Now you have your asset. Do you have that in between party? But in some of them, let's say you have money in your pocket. You walk, it falls down. Somebody else pick ups the money. It's his. It's a bearer asset, okay? So that's where bitcoin solved a very big problem. It was bearer asset. >> Unless they hack your wallet, then they take your money. >> Right. That happens in real life too, right? Somebody can take money from your wallet. So it can happen in bitcoin. They can hack your wallet. All right. So bitcoin was solving that problem. Now the second piece is a registered asset. And I mean by registered asset is take your car. You buy your car, you go to the DMV, stand in line, register. There's a record of data at the DMV in their central database. If somebody steals your car, the car is still not his. It's only if they can change the record over there in DMV. Then it becomes his. Now there maybe you do want the DMV to be there. Or maybe we can-- But the DMV being there, now you have a problem. They're going to charge you rent and they can decide, oh you know what? John, I'm not going to give him a license or a car in the state of California. They can decide, right? So that is where now you decide do you want to go the centralized route or the decentralized route? So we break it down to the asset. >> So there could be a fit for decentralized. I get that. >> Yeah. >> Let me ask you a tactical question, because I know a lot of entrepreneurs out there. They're watching and they'll hear this. A big strategic decision up front is, obviously, token selection. >> So it's pretty clear that security token works really well for funding and whatnot. Then there's a role for security tokens. I mean utility tokens. >> Yes. >> So do people, should they start from a risk management standpoint, a new company. So let's just say we had an existing business. Entrepreneur says, "Hey, you know what? We're doing well. We're doing 10 million dollars in revenue and I want to do tokenize 'cause we're a decentralized business. That's a perfect fit." Do they start a new company or do they just use the security token with their existing stable company? >> I would suggest, usually at that time, that's more of a legal question at that time. I don't know if I'm a lawyer to answer that. I tell them, you have a business. The business model is going well. If you're happy with it, let that be there. Make a new company. If your business model was not doing good, you might as well start from there because you figure out it's not working. But again, at that time, we tried to come up with this question. Are you trying to put the old wine in a new bottle kind of thing? If the wine is old, it ain't going to work. You have to get to that realization. So, here. >> People are being sued. So mainly the legal question is do I want to risk being. >> All right, let me hop in here. I wanted to ask, go back to something you said about censorship. I had this conversation with my kid the other day. I was explaining Google essentially censors your search results based on what they think you're going to click on. >> They do that. >> He's like no and then he thought about it and he's like okay, yeah they kind of do that. Okay, so that's an underpinning of we're going to take back the internet, right? >> Yeah. >> Okay, I just wanted to sort of clarify that. From an investment philosophy standpoint, you're technical, yet you don't exclusively vet or invest in infrastructure protocols and dig deep into what-- You read the white papers, but there are some folks out there hedge funds, et cetera. All they do is just invest in utility tokens. They're trying to invest in stuff that's going to be infrastructure for the next internet. Your philosophy is different. You're saying, we talked about this, we don't really know what's going to win, but we make prudent investments in areas that we think will win. We like to spread it around a little bit. Why that philosophy? May reduce your return, but it also reduces your risk. Maybe you could describe that a little bit. >> Sure. See, in general, picking winners in the long run has been-- It's a proved fact that nobody could pick winners. Like if you take active hedge fund managers. Active hedge fund managers, in the long run, if you take 10 to 20 years, they lag the S and P. So if you had money, if you give it to an active hedge fund manager, and so that you just had to buy the S and P, you will have beaten 93%. >> That's Buffet's advice. Buy an S and P 500. >> Buffet made a bet for a billion dollars or something where, you know. So take Warren Buffet for that matter, his fund is lagging too. In reality, all his stock investments are down. He put it in IBM at $200 after eight years, it's at the 143 or something, right? So realistically,-- There's a lot of luck element, okay. You can do all of the analysis and you could still end up buying Enron, Lehman, and Bear Stearns, right? >> Right, yeah. >> And at that time, see they were using some models that they knew 'til then. Most people, investment comes from, you have this background that you know, okay this is what I look at. Cash flow, discounted cash flow. Great. If that is there, price to earnings, I'm going to buy. But then an Amazon came, most of the traditional investors never invested in Amazon. They were like, it's a loss- making company. They never going to survive. But they forgot the fact that companies like that there's this network effect and once the people are there, at any point, Jeff Bezos can just turn off the switch and take off the discount. You're not going to change your shopping from Amazon at that point because this month I lost my 15%. We're so used to it so people missed that. Nowadays they see that, but when it came to Blockchain they're like, oh, no, no, this is a fad. That's what most people said. >> So we talked about discounted cashflow as a classic valuation method. I see guys trying to do DCF on these investments. I mean, we were joking about that. (laughs) How do you-- What's your reaction to that? >> If anybody's saying that if they come to me and I'm like you-- I don't know what Kool-Aid do you drink at that point because what cashflow are they discounting? There's no cashflow. It's not like you're going to get dividends from these tokens. There's no dividends. It's like can you find out how many people are going to use it. What is the network effect? And again, for that, a lot of people are coming with a lot of these matrices or matrix right now. But I think even that, they're trying to retrofit into it. They're like, oh I can use this matrix. But, really we don't know. >> So people tend to want metrics. Dave and I talk about this all the time. When people part with their money, they need to know what they're betting on. So the question is when you look at investments, when you spend cash, when you write checks, what is your valuation technique? Do you look for the l-- How do you play that long game? What's the criteria? Besides like the normal stuff like founders, disruptive, like you got to write the check, let's say. Okay, buying a token. It's got to be worth something in the future, obviously. >> So we look at that space, where invariably they are trying to disrupt. Is there a big market? And even if it's a niche market, okay? So we're doing an error chain token. It's a very niche market. It's just the pilot, the maintenance folks, and the charter people, or the plain charter guys. It's a very small market, but that's good enough. It's very niche. They can have an ecosystem between themselves rather than being incentivized to long game miles and stuff like that, right? It doesn't have to be a very big market. We just look at it, okay. Founder is good, he has an idea, it is a space that can be decentralized and people can come in and they feel that they're part of the ecosystem. See the whole thing with the token economy and a traditional economy like let's say I'm spending money to buy a stock. So I buy stock. As an investor, what do I want? I want maximum returns. The employee, he wants to get maximum pay. And the consumer who's buying the product, he wants to get it at the cheapest price. So there's a-- It start aligned, okay? The moment you give 'em the cheapest price, my profits go down. If I increase the employees' salary, my profits go down. So we are all three of us are totally misaligned. >> If I for an important point, do you favor certain asset classes, you know, token, security tokens, or utility tokens, or you looking for equity? I mean, maybe just ... >> Right now, we've moved away from the whole equity bonds, or any of those things. We are totally concentrated on the utility or security tokens. We don't mind if it's a security token or utility token. >> And if it's a security token, are you looking for dividends, are you looking for >> At that point it's some kind of dividend. >> So you're not expecting equity as part of that security token? >> No, I like to expect equity, but if they are saying okay my token, if people buy and if they pay me $10, and out of that you're going to get $1 back, okay that's fine. We don't mind that as long as it's legal and all those things we're fine because it just makes the process easier. Earlier you invest and you didn't know when you could get out of your investment. At this point, it's become so liquid, at any point of time within two or three months, the token is less to people are either buying and selling. We know, otherwise, earlier when we used to do Ren Chain investments, we would get into our product, have it it's time seven to 10 years to get out. And in the meanwhile, they say great stories. Oh we're doing great. Who do I check with that we are doing great? I'm not getting any dividends. Nobody's buying this from me. How do I know? Where am I? I really don't know. I can make these values up and on my Excel sheet and say okay we valuing this company at a billion. >> So your technique is to say okay look at the equity plays the long game. You need an exit on liquidity, either M and A or IPO. >> Yes. >> Now you have a new liquidity market, so you play the game differently. I won't say spray and pray, but you have multiple bets going on so you can monitor liquidity opportunity. So that's a new calculation. >> And it's a great calculation, also. Because see we're in the market and now we know at any point of time, we don't have things on our books that are like we don't know what the value is. We know what that price is because the market is there, the exchange is there. What other people are willing to pay for us doesn't surprise. It's like saying my house is worth a million dollars. Actually it might be worth to me. It depends on what people are willing to pay me. >> Right exactly. >> If I have to synthesize this, you're taking high frequency trading techniques with classic venture investing, handling token from those two perspectives. >> Yes. >> High frequency trading meaning I'm looking at volatility and then option to abandon and get rid of whatever or whatever. >> The only thing is, we're not exiting our positions. We are in the long game. We believe the score market is supposed to at least reach eight trillion. When we started this whole investing, at that time, the whole market was at six billion and we said okay this market, based on our thesis, is supposed to reach eight trillion. Until then, we keep buying, okay? >> But to your HFT, you're not really arbitraging. >> No, no, we're not doing any of those. Because see >> They're applying real time techniques to token evaluations so they're game is try to get into a winner. >> Yes. >> With some tokens. >> A lot of the funds, they're doing this arbitrage more. They're trying to do arbitrage. But the problem is they're missing the big picture that way. So, arbitrage works in a very tight market. So S and P, let's say, somebody's doing 5% return on S and P. The guy with a arbitrage is coming and saying I made five point three, 5.5% or 6%. That's great in the equity world. Now, I want returns last year are 10 x or 30 x or 50 x. And somebody comes and tells me I made an extra 0.2%, doesn't really matter to me. I'm like instead of wasting that time doing arbitrage and paying taxes, I might just hold it. >> You believe in the fundamentals. >> You guys are in New York. Obviously, Arcadia Crypto Ventures, that's how they get ahold of you guys. Final question for you to end the segment. As new real pros come in, and let's take New York as a since you're in New York. The New York crowd comes in or the Silken Valley comes crowd existing market players other markets come in here. How important is optics packaging and compatibility with the sector, meaning I just can't throw my weight around on the hedge fund scene. We do it this way, I got money. Because people here have money. So what's the dynamic of pros coming in, we're seeing institutional folks come in, we're seeing real pros come in. They've never been to Burning Man. So, you know, they get that Burning Man culture exists, but this is not a Burning Man industry. >> Right, right. >> Business doesn't run like Burning Man. Maybe it should, that's a debate we'll have. Your take. >> So the new funds that are coming in, so they have a fear that they have missed out. They are missing the picture that this is just the beginning. So they've seen that this industry has gone from six billion to 500 billion in a year or year and a half. They're like, oh my god, I missed it. >> It's got to be over. >> So I have to write these big checks to get this. We don't write big checks. We write much smaller checks because we believe that if a founder is raising money, he has to raise it through small checks from everybody. That means all those people are really interested in this. And they're all of them really want the token to go up. Whether it's the investor, the user, and the employee who is working there because all of them they're interests are aligned. The moment you give a big check, so let's say you could raise 10 million from 10,000 people or you could raise it from one person. So when the big check is there, let's say I go to raise my money. There's this fund who's missed it and he says here's 10 million dollars. Okay, now I've got me and the fund and my tokens. Nobody else knows about my tokens. My tokens are as good as valueless. Now the funders looking okay, I need to exit. Nobody knows about my tokens. The fund is the only guy who has my tokens, he's trying to exit. Obviously the market is going to crash. There's no market. And he's like why did I get into this. So he missed that point that you need people around you. It's not just you alone. See, earlier days when ... >> This is your point about understanding how token economics works. >> Yes. >> So having more people in actually creates a game mechanic for trading. >> Because then you know that you're not the only guy interested in this. And earlier venture capital space there were these bunch of few venture capitals who wanted to capture that whole thing and tried to sell it to the next guy. Here, I'm what I'm saying is, we all have to come in together. We all can be together at the same price, which is good because the small person has, the common man has a chance to be a VC right now. Earlier you could never be a VC. I could only see Google, after IPO. I could never get it at what KPCB or Sequoia got it at. I had to wait 'til they got through CDA, CDB, which they bought at five cents. I would get at about $40 maybe. In this case, the big fund has a lot more money than me, but I can have my small 5,000 or 10,000. I can invest in the ICO. >> If you picked the right spot and you were there at the right place, the right time. 'Cause you are seeing guys come in and try to buy up all the tokens early on. >> They're trying to do that. They don't get it, but they will understand. So it is a learning (mumbles). Even they will evolve. They're like okay this is not how it works. And you have to make mistakes. >> Sorry, got to ask you one final, final since you brought it up. More people the better. So we're hearing rumors inside the hallways here that big wales are buying full allocations and then sharing them with all their friends. >> Possible, it is possible. >> We see some of that behavior. Dave calls it steel on steel, you know. Groups, you know. I'm going to take this whole deal down. We see that in venture capital. Used to be syndicates. Now you seeing Andreessen Horowitz doing the whole deals. That kind of creates some alienation, my opinion, but what's your take on that? I'm a big wale. I'm taking down the whole allocation. >> It's okay. Some of those things are going to happen, okay. It is fine. The only problem is usually when that happens the big wale who takes it he will realize very quickly. >> He's got to get more people. >> He needs more people otherwise he might be able to exit to his five buddies who were always taking it from him. Now those guys, they also have to exit at some point. Nobody knows about the product. Might as well just take a small piece, even the founders in this case typically in a token model. Founders who've taken 20% or 10% have done better than founders who took 60% of the whole tokens. >> Right. Nithin, great to have you on. Love your business model. Arcadia Crypto Ventures. They got real pros, they got a wale, they got people who know what they're doing, and they're active. They understand the ethos. I think you guys are well-aligned and you're not trying to come in and saying this is how we did it in New York before. You get the culture. You're aligned and you're making investments. Great perspective. Thanks for sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> This is the Cube, bringing the investor perspective live here in the Bahamas. More exclusive Cube coverage. Token economics, huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors to create value and capture it. That's Blockchain, that's crypto, that's token economics. I'm John with Dave Vallante. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (futuristic digital music)

>> Hi I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to Action Item. (upbeat electronic music) Every week I bring the Wikibon research team together to talk about some of the issues that are most important in the computing industry and this week is no different. This week I'm joined by four esteemed Wikibon analysts, David Floyer, Neil Radon, Jim Kobielus, Ralph Finos, and what we're going to do is we're going to talk a few minutes about some of the predictions that we did not get into, our recent predictions webinar. So, I'd like to start off with Jim Kobielus. Jim, one of the things that we didn't get a chance to talk about yesterday in the overall predictions webinar was some of the new AI frameworks that are on the horizon for developers. So, let's take a look at it. What's the prediction? >> Prediction for 2018, Peter, is that the AI community will converge on an open framework. An open framework for developing, training and deploying deep learning and machine learning applications. In fact, in 2017, we've seen the momentum in this direction, strong momentum. If you were at AWS re:Invent just a few weeks ago, you'll notice that on the main stage, they discuss what they're doing in terms of catalyzing an open API, per building AI, an open model interchange format, and an open model compilation framework, and they're not the only vendor who's behind this. Microsoft has been working with AWS, as well as independently and with other partners to catalyze various aspects of this open framework. We also see Intel and Google and IBM and others marching behind a variety of specifications such as Gluon (mumbles) NNVM and so forth, so we expect continued progress along these lines in 2018, and that we expect that other AI solution provider, as well as users and developers will increasingly converge on this, basically, the abstraction framework that will make it irrelevant whether you build your model in TensorFlow or MXNet or whatever, you'd be able to compile it and run it in anybody else's back end. >> So Jim, one question then we'll move on to Neil really quickly but one question that i have is the relationship between tool choice and role in the organization has always been pretty tight. Roles have changed as a consequence of the availability of tools. Now we talked about some of the other predictions. How the data scientist role is going to change. As we think about some of these open AI development frameworks, how are they going to accommodate the different people that are going to be responsible for building and creating business value out of AI and data? >> Pete, hit it on another level that i didn't raise in my recent predictions document, but i'll just quickly touch on it. We're also seeing the development of open devops environments within which teams of collaborators, data scientists, subject matter experts, data engineers and so forth will be able to build and model and train and deploy deep learning and so forth within a standard workflow where each one of them has task-oriented tools to enable their piece but they all share a common governance around the models, the data and so forth. In fact, we published a report several months ago, Wikibon, talking about devops for data science, and this is a huge research focus for us going forward, and really, for the industry as a whole. It's productionizing of AI in terms of building and deploying the most critical applications, the most innovative applications now in business. >> Great, Jim, thanks very much for that. So Neil, I want to turn to you now. One of the challenges that the big data and the computing industry faces overall is that how much longer are we going to be able to utilize the technologies that have taken us through the first 50 years at the hardware level, and there is some promise in some new approaches to thinking about computing. What's your prediction? >> Well in 2018, you're going to see a demonstration of an actual quantum computer chip that's built on top of existing silicone technology and fabrication. This is a real big deal because what this group in the University of New South Wales came up with was a way to layer traditional transistors and silicon on top of those wacky quantum bits to control them, and to deal with, I don't want to get too technical about that, but the point is that quantum computing has the promise of moving computing light years ahead of where we are now. We've managed to build lots of great software on things that go on or off, and quantum computing is much more than that. I think what you're going to see in 2018 is a demonstration of actual quantum computing chips built on this, and the big deal in that is that we can take these existing machines and factories and capital equipment designed for silicone, and start to produce quantum chips without basically developing a whole new industry. Now why is this important? It's only the first step because these things are not going to be based on the existing Intel i86 instruction set, so all new software will have to be developed, software engineers are going to have to learn a whole new way of doing things, but the possibilities are endless. If you can think about a drug discovery, or curing disease, or dealing with the climate, or new forms of energy to propel us into space, that's where quantum computing is likely to take this. >> Yeah, quantum computing, just to bring a, kind of a fine point on it, allows, at any given time, the machine to be in multiple different states, and it's that fact that allows, in many respects, a problem to be attacked from a large number of directions at the same time, and then test each of them out, so it has a natural affinity with some of the things that we think about in AI, so it's going to have an enormous impact over the course of the next few years and it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. So David Floyer, I now want to turn to you. We're not likely to see quantum computing at the edge anytime soon, by virtue of some of the technologies we face. More likely it'll be specialized processors up in the cloud service provider in the near term. But what are you going to talk about when we think about the role that the edge is going to play in the industry, and the impacts it's going to have on, quite frankly, the evolution of de facto standards? >> Well, I'd like to focus on the economics of edge devices. And my prediction is that the economics of consumer-led volume will dominate the design of IoT devices at the edge. If you take an IoT device, it's made up of sensors and advanced analytics and AI, and specifically designed compute elements, and together with the physical setup of fitting it into wherever you're going to put it, that is the overall device that will be put into the edge, and that's where all of the data is going to be generated, and obviously, if you generate data somewhere, the most efficient way of processing that data is actually at the edge itself, so you don't have to transport huge amounts of data. So the prediction is that new vendors with deep knowledge of the technology itself, using all the tools that Jim was talking about, and deep knowledge of the end user environments and the specific solutions that they're going to offer, they will come out with much lower cost solutions than traditional vendors. So to put a little bit of color around it, let's take a couple of real-world examples where this is already in place in the consumer world, and will be the basis of solutions in the enterprise. If we take the Apple iPhone X, it has facial recognition built-in, and it has facial recognition built-in on their A11 chips, but they're bionic chips. They've got GPUs, they've got neural networks all in the chip itself, and the total cost of that solution is around a hundred dollars in terms of these parts, and that includes the software. So if we take that hundred dollars and put it into what it would actually be priced at, that's around $300. So that's a much, much lower cost than a traditional IT vendor could ever do, and a much, at least an order of magnitude, and probably two orders of magnitude cheaper than an IT department could produce for its own use. So that leaves (mumbles) inclusions, going to be a lot of new vendors. People like Sony, for example, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Honeywell. Possibly people like Apple and Microsoft. Nvidia, Samsung, and many companies that we'll predict are going to come out of India, China and Russia who have strong mathematical educational programs. So the action item is for CIOs, is to really look carefully at the projects that you are looking at, and determine, do I really have the volume to be unique in this area? If that volume, if it's a problem which is going to be industry-wide, the advice we would give is wait for that device to come out from a specialized vendor rather than develop it yourself. And focus investment on areas where you have both the volume of devices and the volume of data that will allow you to be successful. >> All right, David, thank you very much. So let me wrap this week's Action Item, which has been kind of a bridge, but we've looked specifically at some of the predictions that didn't make it into our recent predictions webinar, and if I want to try to summarize or try to bring all these things together, here's what I think what we'd say. Number one, we'd say that the development community has to prepare itself for some pretty significant changes as a consequence of having an application development environment that's more probabilistic, driven by data and driven by AI and related technologies, and we think that there will be new frameworks that are deployed in 2018, and that's just where it's going to start, and will mature over the next few years as we heard from Jim Kobielus. We've also heard that there is going to be a new computing architecture that's going to drive change, perhaps for the next 50 years, and the whole concept of quantum computing is very, very real, and it's going to have significant implications. Now it will take some time to roll out, but again, software developers have to think about the implications of some these new architectures on their work because not only are they going to have to deal with technology approaches that are driven by data, but they're also going to have to look at entirely new ways of framing problems because it used to be about something different than it is today. The next thing that we need to think about is that there still is going to be the economics of computing that are going to ultimately shape how all of this plays out. David Floyer talked about, specifically at the edge, where Wikibon believes it's going to have an enormous implication on the true cost of computing and how well some of these complex problems actually find their way into commercial and other domains. So with a background of those threee things, we think, ultimately, that's an addendum to the predictions that we have and once again, i'm Peter Burris. Thank you very much for joining us for Action Item, and we look forward to working with you more closely over the course of the next year, 2018, as we envision the new changes and the practice of how to make those changes a reality. From our Palo Alto theCUBE studios, this has been Action Item. (bright electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApp. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of The Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media with my cohost, Keith Townsend with CTO Advisors. Our next guest is Jean English. She's the Chief Marketing Officer of NetApp. Great to see you, thanks for having us, and thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Oh, thank you, thank you guys for being here. >> So NetApp is no longer a storage company, we learned. But then last year, now this year, you're a data company. >> Jean: (laughs) That's right. >> The brand promise is still the same. Take us through, as the Chief Marketing Officer, you have to, it's a complex world. One of your concepts here we've been seeing is winning while in a tough environment and IT is a tough environment. I got application development going on. I got DevOps. I got data governance. I got security issues, internet of things. It's a challenging time for our customers. How is your brand promise evolving? >> So we really see that NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud, and the amazing thing is is that what we see is our customers aren't talking to us about storage anymore. They're talking to us about data, and what their data challenges are, and most companies are trying to think through if they're going to transform, how are they going to harness the wealth of the data. What are they going to do to maximize the value of the data? >> And the cloud too is center stage, 'cause the cloud is a forcing function that's changing the relationship of your partners, VARs who has a lot of folks on talking about the dynamics with customers around multiple clouds. We saw on stage the announcement with Microsoft. Congratulations. >> Jean: Thank you. >> So you've been in Amazon for a while. We've been covering that, but the on-premise work still is growing, where you have the data from Wikibon Research came out shows that the on-premise true private cloud, which is defined as cloud operation business model is actually growing. However, the decline in automation of non-differentiated labor is declining by 1.5 billion over the next five years, which means the SAS market is going to continue to explode and grow, so the on-premise is actually growing, as is the cloud. How does that change the narrative for you guys, or does it, or is that a tailwind for NetApp? >> We think it's a complete tailwind in for NetApp. When we think about data today, we see that it's really becoming more distributed across environments. It's definitely more dynamic, as you're looking for the latest source of truth. And the diversity of data, especially with machine learning. I mean, it is exploding. So, how do you start to be able to build that data together? We really think of it as that our customers want to maximize that value and the only way to do that is to start to think about how do they bring it together, and how do they get more insight from that data, and then how do they have more access and control of that data, and then the most questions we usually get from our customers around, how do I make sure it's secure? But the really big point is is that, as we think about what NetApp is doing, it has been about three things that we see with our customers. They have to make sure that they're modernizing what they have today, and that goes to the on-prem environment, so if it's going to be that they got to accelerate applications, they want to make sure that they have that. But this notions of building clouds, even building private clouds. And we think of that as a next-generation data center, especially with DevOp environments. Then harnessing the power of the cloud and hybrid cloud world. And if they are not able to really leverage the cloud for SAS applications, if they're leveraging the cloud for backup, or even disaster recovery, data protection, that's where we see that these three imperatives, when they come together, that they're truly, truly able to unleash the power. >> So we saw on stage, CEO George Kurian talking about his personal situations in light of what's happened in Las Vegas here. Data is changing the world, and your tagline is "Change the world with data." So I got to ask you, obviously, data, we see a lot of examples in society and also personal examples of data being harnessed for value. The cloud can be great there, it's all on-prem. How do you guys position NetApp as a company? I know there's a lot of positioning exercises in marketing you do, but positioning is really important. That's what you do. The tagline is kind of the emotional aspect of it, okay, changing the world, let's change the world with data. I believe that. But what's the positioning of NetApp? How would you say that the positioning- What's the positioning statement of NetApp? >> The positioning statement of NetApp, I think we've really seen a big break in the positioning in the last couple of years. And why is because the customers are demanding something different. They're really looking for more hybrid cloud data services. And what are those data services that accelerate and integrate data, and that notion of on-prem and in the cloud, that's where we see what's going to happen to accelerate digital transformation. And so, this notion of yes, thought about as storage before, customers are demanding more for their data and they need data services, especially in hybrid environments to really be able to drive their business. >> The old expression, "Position it, they will come." And you guys have done a good job with the data. Okay, now let's get to the customer reality. You have to go out and do the tactical marketing. They're busy, right? There's a lot of noise out there. We just came back from New York and our Big Data NYC event that we ran in conjunction with Strata, which is a separate event, and it's clear they don't want the hype. They want reality. The rubber's hitting the road because they're so busy, and with the the security and the governance challenges- GDPR, for instance, in Europe is a huge pressure point for data. A lot of challenges but they want the magic. (laughter) It should be easy, right? But it's not. How do you guys go out day to day and take that to the field message? What's your strategy? >> Well, you talked about changing the world with data. And it feels like a lofty promise, but we really believe that when we come down to the purpose of why NetApp exists, it is to empower our customers to change the world with data and that's something that NetApp has been focused on not just for today, but the 25 years of history, and then also into the future. So what makes that the reality? Well number one, they want something that's simple. And so this notion of simplicity, and no matter how they think about managing or optimizing their data, it's got to be simple and easy to manage. Optimized to protect, I think data protection is critically important. Things about safeguarding data across its life cycle. and I think that NetApp has always been focused on how to make sure data is secure and protected. And that now is what we're seeing in the cloud too. So, all the relationships and partnerships that we've been creating and solidifying, AWS has been for the last couple years, we've had some latest`announcements of what we're doing to really make sure we have stronger data protection in multi-cloud environments. Obviously, today from what we're doing with Microsoft Azure, in really providing- Not even having to know how to manage storage, you can do it easily in Azure, and- >> No, I'm sorry. I really love this, this message from NetApp. As a traditional technologist, I understand NetApp disrupting the original storage CN Market with Fowlers, you guys were one of the first in the cloud with AWS, so from a trusted partner inside of the infrastructure team, I understand the vision of NetApp. But the transformation also means that you're starting to expand that conversation beyond just that single customer of the storage admin, of the infrastructure group. How is that messaging been going towards that new group of customers within your customers who have said, "NetApp? Isn't that a storage company?" How is that transformation been going? >> (laughs) You know, when we talk about reinventing, NetApp is reinventing itself. And that's what we're going through right now. And what we see is, is that the customers that we know and love, the storage admins and the storage architects, those are definitely tried-and-true and we love our relationships with them. But we see that the demands around data are growing and those demands are starting to reach more into DevOps, application developers, definitely into cloud enterprise architects as we think about cloud environments. The CIO is now under more pressure to think through how- They have a mandate to move to the cloud. Now what? But who do they want to move with? Someone that they've trusted before, and by the way, because we've been first, and because we're so open with all our relationships with the cloud providers, why not move with us? Because we can help them think through it. >> So you're keeping the core. You're not pivoting off the core, you're building on top of the core, extending that. Is that what you're saying? >> We're building off of a really great foundation of who we've had as customers all along. We're establishing new relationships, though, as well, with cloud enterprise architects, and today, we actually just had here at Insight our first executive summit, where we brought together CIOs and CTOs and really talked about what's happening with data and organizations, what's happening with data that's being disruptive, what's happening if you want to thrive, based on data as well. >> There used to be an old expression back in the day when Polaroid was around, "What's the new Polaroid picture of something?" Now it's Instagram, so I have to ask this question. What is the new Instagram picture of NetApp with the customers that you have and for customers now in the data space, there's a lot of data conversations happening. What is that picture of NetApp? What should they know about NetApp? >> NetApp is in the cloud. >> Yeah, I love that messaging that NetApp is in the cloud. And how important is that moving forward? Especially as we look at technology such as ONTAP. They have been there from the beginning. I love the NFS on Azure story, but that's powered by ONTAP, which I kind of- It took me a few minutes to kind of get it, because I'm thinking, "ONTAP in Azure, that's bringing the old to the new." But that's not exactly what it is. What messaging do you want customers to get out of something like an NFS in Azure? >> We want them to understand that they don't have to know anything about storage to be able to protect and manage their data. No matter what environment that they're in. >> And by the way, we've been looking at and commenting critically on The Cube many events now that multi-cloud is a pipe dream. Now I say that only as folks know me. It's real. Customers want multi-cloud, but multi-cloud has been defined as, "Oh, I run 365 on Azure, and I got some analytics on Redshift on Amazon, I do some stuff on-prem. That's considered multi-cloud because there happen to be stuff on multiple clouds. You guys are doing something with cloud orchestrate that's quite interesting. It truly is multiple clouds in the sense that you can move data, if I get this right, across clouds. >> Jean: That's right. >> So it's in a complete transparent way, seamless way, so I don't have to code anything. Is that true? If that's true, then you might be one of the first multi-cloud use cases. >> We are one of the first multi-cloud use cases. We have created the data fabric, which is really looking at how do you seamlessly integrate across multiple clouds or on-prem environments? The data fabric, we've been talking about this vision for a couple of years. What we're seeing now is customers are seeing it come to reality. And now that we have more and more relationships expanding, as we mentioned we've been building SAS offerings with AWS for a couple years, we just had the big announcement today with Microsoft Azure. We're working with IBM Cloud. We're also working with Google Cloud, Alibaba, so as we think about a seamless data fabric, they want frictionless movement in and out of the cloud. >> Jean, I got to change gears for a second, because one of the things we've been observing over the past couple of months, certainly we were at the Open Source Summit, Linux Foundation. Open source is growing exponentially now. You've seen the new onboarding of developers in general and enterprise is going to take the bulk of that. Companies are supplying personnel to contribute on open source projects. That's continuing to happen. Nothing new there. But it's starting to change the game. You see Blockchain out there, getting some traction, ICOs and all that hype, but it points to one thing. Communities are really valuable. So as a marketer, I know you were at IBM, very community-oriented, very open source oriented, the role of communities is going to be super important as customers discover- So marketing is changing from batch marketing, you know, surge email marketing to real-time organic with communities. It's not just have a social handle. Really, have you guys looked at the B2B marketing transformation as customers start to make selections and take opinions in the new organic communities, because you have people in these projects, in open source, who are making decisions based on content. What's your view on communities and the importance of communities? >> Well, we believe highly in communities. Our A-Team is a community with us that is so strong, and they're our biggest advocates. They get brought in very, very early on in terms of learning about our new technologies and learning our story and understanding our strategy and where we're moving. I think you may have talked to some of our A-Team members before. >> John: Quite strong, very strong. >> But they are an amazing group of people and we believe highly that their advocacy is what is really going to help us to stay in touch and be really close to these new buyers as well. >> And you've got to really internalize that too in the company. Operationally, any best practices you can share with other CMOs? 'Cause this is a challenge for a lot of marketers is, how do you operationalize something new? >> Yes, well, we're finding that this notion of reinvention and it starts with the company itself. And it starts with their own employees. So when we talk about the shift from storage to data, we're even having our own employees talk about their own data story and how do they connect data. George talked about his data story, actually, on the main stage in our keynote the other day. But connecting to that's been really important. This notion of transforming to think about these new customers and new buyers, it starts with the customer needs, it's not about a product-out discussion. And so, a new story to a new buyer, relevancy, what's happening in their industry, and then engagement, engagement, engagement. >> I've been following NetApp since they were start-up and they went public, great story. They have a DNA of reinvention. David Hitz is going to to come out, I'm sure. We'll talk about that, because he's been an entrepreneur, but he's also had that entrepreneurial DNA. It's kind of still in the company, so my question to you is, from a personal perspective, what have you learned or observed at NetApp during this reinvention, not a pivot, it's not at all. It's more of an inflection point for NetApp and a new way, a new way to engage with customers, a new way to build products, a new way to do software development, a new way to use data. This is a theme we're seeing. What's your personal observation, learnings that you could share? >> Well, in my first month, what I really learned is just the absolute amazing culture of what NetApp has and this notion of we're always embracing what our customers want to where we move. So what our customer wants, we move with it. We embrace it holistically. Years and years ago, you know, Linux and Windows. A couple of years later, virtualization, virtualized environments. Could've killed us. Made us stronger. Now, embracing the cloud. A lot of our customers say, "I would have canceled the meeting with you, but now I understand that you're interested in the cloud and that you're in the cloud, I've totally changed my mind." And we say, "We love the cloud. We embrace the cloud holistically." >> You guys are progressive. I've noticed it's a competitive strategy kind of theory but as the old expression goes, "You got to eat your own to get to the new market. Some companies will milk the market share dry and then can't get to the new model. This is the reinvention challenge. When do you stop making profits to build for the future? It's a tough call. >> It is, but that's why we listen to what our customers say. And so, when they talked about wanting to move to the cloud a few years ago, we said, "We're going to be the first to holistically embrace the cloud." >> Okay, so you got the NetApp Insight 2017 going on in Berlin. Okay, that brings up the question, because it's in Germany, so I have to ask. GDPR has been super hot. The global landscape, how is that going on for NetApp? Obviously you have some experience in outside the US. It's not always the US, North America centric world. What's the global story for NetApp? >> It's not. I lived in China and Singapore, and I know that there are demands that are not just US-centric. When we talk about Germany, I was just there a few months ago, and this notion of how do we start to address the articles that are in GDPR that help to make sure that we have the right compliance and protection for data inside of a country and inside of Europe. We actually have expertise in that area. We've been actually consulting and talking with customers about what they want to do with data compliance and we're being asked now to say, "How does NetApp help address those articles? How do we come back with solutions to help control data and make sure we have the right access of data?" So, we're already consulting with customers. We know it's a top priority, and we have expertise to be able to help. >> We had Sheila FitzPatrick on. She's the Chief Privacy Officer. Very colorful, very dynamic, a lot of energy. >> Jean: She is. (laughs) >> She's going to slap anyone around who says you don't bolt on privacy. Good policy conversations, the policies converging in with that. It's interesting, the global landscape- The Cube will be in China next week for the Alibaba Cloud Conference, so we're going to go report, see what's going on there, so huge international challenge around regulations and policy. Does that affect the marketing at all? Because policy kind of is data privacy and security. Security super hot, obviously. Data security is number- A big thing. How does policy intersect with the technology? How as a CMO do you get that realized and put into action? >> Well, I think basing on the foundation that we're always optimized to protect. That's one of our key foundations of why people choose NetApp. We definitely know that there are other demands that are happening in local markets. I was just in Australia few weeks ago and was meeting with the New South Wales government, which they've had a mandate that all of the agencies need to use their own cloud platform. They've been working with NetApp to ensure that they can have the right data management solutions on that platform. And from a marketing perspective, we embrace that. And so we work with, whether it's Telstar, we're working with New South Wales, we're thinking about how do we ensure that that message is strong, because we know customers there have different demands than just what's in the US. >> So when you get CIOs and and senior executives together at a summit like you guys had over the past few days, ideas start to percolate, problem start to come across. What was some of the biggest policy concerns throughout those conversations? Was it GDPR? Was it something else? What's top-of-mind? >> What we're hearing top-of-mind right now is data governance. And I think that that could be towards data compliance in terms of GDPR for Europe. I think it expands beyond Europe, though. I just heard, like I said, in Australia, where they're having demands based on the government of what's needed to be really driven through a cloud platform. We're hearing through our customers in the last couple weeks about if I'm moving to the cloud, number one, I want to have seamless transition during the move in or out of the cloud, but I got to make sure I've got the right governance model in place. >> So we've heard this repeatedly. Customers moved into the cloud. How many customer are coming to you saying, "You know what, for whatever reason, whether it's cost, agility, the overall capability we thought we'd have available in the cloud, not really what we thought it would be. We need help moving it back." And what is that conversation like? >> Well, it's a conversation that we're able to help with pretty easily. Right now, we have had customers that have either had one, a cloud mandate, so they got to think about how am I going to move all my data to the cloud. Once they actually start getting into the detail, we do a design workshop where we help them think about maybe there's not all workloads going to the cloud. Maybe some workloads go in the cloud. We have had a customer who did move the majority of workloads in the cloud and then decided, actually, we think we'll get better cost performance and better efficiencies if we actually have those back on-prem. We said, "No problem. We can help you with that too." And I think that's the beauty of what we talked about with data fabric is, we're able to help them think through, no matter where they want their data, on-prem or in the cloud, we can help them. >> Jean, thanks for coming up here. I know your time is super valuable. I got to get one more point in, 'cause I want to make sure we get that out there. Public sector. NetApp's position strong, getting better? What's your thoughts? A quick update on public sector. >> We are very, very strong on public sector. We've actually had a strong presence in public sector with our customers for many years. And we're continuing to help them think about too how they start to look at cloud environments. >> All right, Jean English, CMO here on The Cube. Getting the hook here in the time. She's super busy. Thanks for coming. Congratulations- >> Jean: Thank you. >> On great positioning and looking forward to chatting further at The Cube. Live coverage here, Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. I'm John Furrier, Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)