[Music] hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube conversation where we go in depth of thought leaders from around the industry to bring you the best ideas and insights about how to improve your business with technology one of the many things that CIOs and business leaders have to think about is how are they going to execute digital transformations what will be the priorities we all know the relationship between digital transformation and the use of data differently but different technologies assert themselves a different way and very important different relationships especially with cloud vendors assert themselves in different ways and that's one of the many challenges that CIOs have to deal with today serve the business better attend to those relationships and drive the company forward to achieve its ultimate outcomes and objectives so to have that conversation today we've got a great guest Thor Wallace is the senior vice president and CIO at Netscape door welcome to the cube thank you so tell us a little bit about what the CIO at netskope does sure so let me start by telling you a little bit about net sky so net Scout is a network monitoring and a service assurance company as the CIO I'm obviously responsible for providing the tools and the environment for running the company I'm also heavily involved in for example understanding and the applications and the business direction that we're taking we're also working on improving our customer relationships and experiences for example we have a customer portal that were sort of re-evaluating and sort of improving and we're also obviously trying to drive user productivity worldwide we have very briefly about 33 locations worldwide we're corner here and outside of Boston and have large offices both in Texas and California so you're a traditional supplier of technology services it's trying to make a transition to this new world and as part of that and that's got itself is going through digital transformation so that it can better support its customers digital transformations I got that right exactly so let me tell you a little bit about sort of what we're trying to achieve what some of the Y's are and sort of show where we are at this moment yeah so we're you know we as a company are being challenged by the same sort of environment that everyone else else is being a challenge with which is to be able to move as quickly as we can and provide as much of an impact of our customers as possible so so how I've read that sort of mandate in that remit is to really focus on improving our customer experience as I said you know working with a new sort of new platform and we re platforming and refactoring our application our customer service application but also really focusing on how best to improve user productivity so those are the areas that we've been focusing on direct driving IT productivity is important to me so that's a fairly substantial argument for moving operations to the cloud and we're also part of that is transforming sort of a hardware based environment to a much more of a virtualized and software based environment so that includes cloud that includes virtualization which we've obviously have taken a lot of ground on and for example what we've already done is virtualized all of our operations in the data center over the years we've also moved a lot of workloads to cloud were you know cloud agnostic but you know we have a fairly large environment it was salesforce.com we use office 365 which are obviously major applications on the cloud so we have a workload that's quite mixed for today we can we maintain on Prem data centers we have enough large engineering footprint as well so we will kind of live in all of the worlds so we live obviously on Purim we have cloud and one of the things that I think we've learned over the years is that in order to continue the journey of cloud we need to really worry about a couple things one is we want to make sure that we are we keep our operations in in an excellent place so and I can talk more about that in a few minutes and as I said we we want to continue to maintain our ability to execute and really what I call velocity to be able to add value and so cloud actually presents some of those opportunities for us but it also obviously makes things quite complicated in that we have multiple environments we have to make sure that people still get the services and the applications they need to do their job and provide those you know in a in a very productive way in a cost-effective way so that we can maintain that as an IT organization so you've got salesforce.com you've got office 365 you've got some other objectives movies some other applications up into the cloud each of those applications though has been historically associated with a general purpose network that you get to control so that you can give different quality of service to different classes workload or applications how is that changing and what pressures is that putting on your network as you move to more cloud based operations well I think that's a huge challenge for us and I think frankly for for most people I think you have to rethink how your network is designed fundamentally from the ground up and if you think about networks in the past you know in mainly an on-prem world you basically had a backhaul a lot of traffic in our in our case 33 locations worldwide a lot of back hauling of of services and and transactions back to wherever that application exists so for example historically we've had office excuse me in the Microsoft mail system or exchange on Prem we have you know other services that are on print for example Oracle and our ERP system etc and the challenge was to move all that traffic back to basically our core data center and as you move to the cloud you have an opportunity to actually real to rethink that so we've been in the process of doing over the last say year has been to redesign our network from the ground up and moving away from sort of the central monolithic network to more of a cloud slash edge base network so with that we've also moved from hardware basically a fairly heavy investment at hardware in each of the offices for example and we're now or we've actually in the process very far along in the process of converting all that hardware into a software-defined network that allows us to do some things that we have never been able to do operationally for example we can make deployments sort of from one central location worldwide both for security and patching etc and so what we've also done is we've moved as I said we have a lot of our workloads already in the cloud and we continue to put more on the cloud one of the things that's become important is we've got to maintain and create actually a low latency environment so for example ultimately putting our you know unified communication systems and technologies and the cloud to me where is me without having a low latency environment and a low latency network so that we can actually provide dial tone well worldwide and without worrying about performance so what we've what we've already done is we've transitioned from the centralized network into an edge based Network we've actually happened now a partner that we now are putting in services into a local presence idea have worldwide into firm into three locations for equinox and with that comes the software based network and allows us to move traffic directly to the edge and therefore once we're at the edge we can go very quickly a sort of backbone speeds into whatever cloud service we need whether it's as your AWS or Salesforce or any other provider office 365 we can get that sort of speed and low latency that is created a new environment for us at which is now virtual software base gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility moving what I consider fairly heavy and significant workloads that remain on Prem it gives us the option of moving that to the cloud so and with that one of the key things that comes with that is holding making sure that we can hold our accountable are our vendors very accountable for performance so for example if we experience an issue with office 365 performance whether it's in Pune or Westford or wherever it is we want to be able to make sure that we have the information and the data that says to Microsoft in this case hey you know we're actually the performance isn't great from wherever wherever those users are wherever that office is so we want to provide them information and to basically prove that our network or our insert internal capabilities and network are performing very well but may be that there's an issue with something and performance that on their size so without this sort of fact-based information it's really hard to have those discussions with vendors so one of the things I think is important for everyone to consider when you move more to a cloud is you've got to have the ability to troubleshoot and and make sure that you can actually maintain a very complicated environment so one of the things we have done is we and we continue to do is use our own products actually to give greater visibility that we've ever had before in this new sort of multi this multi sort of cloud multi Prem environment so so which is a very powerful thing for us and a team that is using this technology is sort of seeing visibility things that they've never really been able to see before so that's been quite exciting but I think that's sort of frankly table stakes moving forward into you know deeper more cloud or sort of sort of workload independent model that we're seeking well so one of the government building this because I have conversations like this all the time and I don't think people realize the degree to which some of these changes are really going to change the way that they actually get worked on when there's a problem you have control of the network and the application and the endpoints if there is an issue you can turn to someone who works for you and say here's the deal fix this so I'll find somebody else that can fix it so you have an employment-based almost model of coercion you can get people to do what you want to do but when you move into the cloud you find yourself having to use a contracting approach to actually get crucial things done and problems crop up either way it doesn't matter if you own it all or somebody else owns at all you're going to encounter problems and so you have to accelerate and diminish the amount of back-and-forth haggling that goes on and as you said the best way to do that is to have fact-based evidence-based visibility into what's actually happening so that you can pinpoint and avoid the back-and-forth about whose issue it really is exactly I mean there's so much you know is at the end of the day IT is still responsible for user productivity so whether somebody's having you know an application issue in terms of availability or frankly if it's not performing up to what it should be you're still accountable as an organization and regardless of where the workloads are it could be as you point out you know back in the day you could always go to your data center and do a lot of investigation and really do a lot of troubleshooting within the four walls today you just don't have that visit you don't have that luxury call it and so it's a whole new world and you know we all are relying increasingly on vendors which reads a contracting star which is you know presents an issue and you know sort of having these conversations with a vendor or contractor regardless of your relationship with them you're still again you're on the hook or for doing this so you've got to have some facts you've got to have some story you have to show in terms of hey you know we're good on this side you know the issue really is on you and we've actually had situations whether it was performance issues or service interruptions or bugs from different vendors where they've impacted our you know the net Scout organization and without you know deep understanding of what's going on you really don't have anywhere to go you you really have to have this sort of greater visibility and this is one of the things that you know is a is a is a lesson learned from at least from the journey that we're taking and so I think that's part of the story of the cloud and sort of migration and virtualization story is you really have to have this newfound visibility so I think that's been you know really important for us so I'm gonna I'm gonna see if I can't generalize that a little bit because I think it's great point as you go into a network redesign to support go to operations excellent operations in a cloud you have to also go into a sourcing and information redesign so that you can be assured that you're getting the information you need to sustain the degree of control or approximate the control that you had before otherwise you've got great technology but no way to deal with problems when they arise right exactly and you know as I said we've seen this movie and Minoo without having what we have I think we would have struggle as an organization actually to resolve the issue and that's not good for the company because you know IT part of the minute the mandate and their the remit for us is to make sure that people are as productive as it can be and so not having the ability to provide that environment is actually a huge problem for I think a lot of people and one of the ways we are working with it is to you know have that sort of visibility it also means upgrading the team skills which we've done a lot of work on so you take folks that were in IT that you know may have had a certain set of skills sort of in the on-prem environment call it those skills are quite different in in that in the sort of cloud or the mix exposure environment so I think upskilling you know having more information better information is really as part of the story that we're learning and that part of it at the end of the day it's not about upgrading the network it's about upgrading the network capability exactly yeah and you can't do that if especially the new world if you don't upgrade your ability to get information about how the whole thing is working together exactly all right Thor Wallis senior vice president and CIO at net Scout thanks very much for being on the queue thank you and once again I want to thank you participating in today's conversation until next time

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the cube's coverage here at IBM Think 2018. We are in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay, for IBM Think. Six shows are coming into one packed house. We have two great guests here, Brian Wallace, who's the CTO of Insurance for DXC technologies, and we have, Bala, The Bala, but goes by Bala, banking and capital markets CTO for DXC technologies. Guys, welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It's our pleasure, yeah, thanks. >> So, the innovation sandwich, I'm calling it IBM strategy. You've got in the middle, the meat, is data. And the bread is blockchain and AI. Two really fundamental technologies powered by cloud and a variety of other things. Obviously, AI is disrupted, we know what that looks like. Block Chain now emerging as a viable infrastructure enabler that's creating token economics, a lot of cool things, certainly on the banking side, seeing a lot of controversy. Block Chain really is driving it. You guys are out on the front lines. You're doing a lot crowd chats, been following your digital transformation story that you guys have been putting out there. Really you're on this. So, what's the conversations like that you guys are having with block chain and AI; Share? >> Bala: So, let me begin with a couple of quick points on block chain. DXC has done some fantastic work around the world leveraging both the trust capability that block chain brings to bear in financial banking industry use cases, like KYC for instance, institutional KYC in particular, but also, in simplification of entire value chains such as lending. And we're doing very interesting work in lending where not only are we looking at the up-front origination process of lending but also the downstream securitization. Which is where the tokenization of principle and interest payments and those type of things happen. >> John: Energy too? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So there are a number of these creating type use cases that follow into securitization. And with that, we're doing some very interesting work. >> John: Bala, talk about the globalization because one of the things we're seeing in the US a shrinking middle class, but outside the US in emerging markets, a growing middle class. Thanks to mobile technology, thanks to data, thanks to block chain, you're seeing, you know, countries that "hey, we have infrastructure but we don't have the core and modern infrastructure but you throw in a decentralized capability, You've got all these capabilities, and the killer app in all this is money. You're in, that's your vertical. >> Bala: Yes. >> That's your industry. The killer app is money and marketplaces. Your thoughts? >> Bala: I think, the beauty of what these technologies are doing, is for the first time creating financial inclusion to happen and the very first case of where financial inclusion is enabled, is in payments. So, when we open up the banking system predominantly from a payment perspective, which is what things like blockchain and others enable, if we succeed in doing that, then for the first time we've enabled, that's 2 billion people unbanked or underbanked-2 billion. >> John: Yeah. >> Bringing them into this financial system allows for. >> And some people are discriminated against too because they don't have a track record. Banks can't handle some of the things that others are now filling the void with crypto and blockchain. >> Bala: Right, or they can't service them profitably. But for the first time now, you're looking at the economics that cloud, and AI, and blockchain, these technologies bring, not just into banking and capital markets areas but into insurance and I'd love to have my colleague, Brian, talk with the insurance cases are enabled as well. >> John: Brian, insurance- go. >> Yeah, so it's a slightly different dynamic. There it's the, if you think about the fundamental pattern of blockchain it's around eliminating a central or a middle-man or a central, you know, gatekeeper, if you will. And the entire insurance industry is largely made up of middle-men, right? You've got people with risk at one end and you've got sources of capital at the other end and everybody's playing a role between a broker, and a carrier, and a re-insurer. In sort of facilitating that management and that transfer of risk. >> John: So you've got to extract some efficiencies out of that. Business model opportunity. >> So efficiencies, there's a lot of conversations around efficiencies, around automation, but interestingly, it's around the disruptive business model, right? The technology is mildly interesting but it's the new business models that blockchain will enable. >> John: Yeah, I see banking picking up. The early adopter on blockchain but I see, maybe it lagging a bit in insurance but I definitely see some opportunity there. But short term, data is driving insurance because, you know, I don't have a Tesla but my friend has a Tesla. The insurance company will know exactly who is rolling through those stop signs. They know everything that he's doing, All the data is there, so AI becomes really the low hanging fruit for insurance in that industry. Do you agree with that? Comment, reaction? >> Brian: Yeah, and we're just at the beginning, right? Because as you say, data is the asset that we manage. So we have a lot of data in terms of transactional data, the traditional operational data. What we're discovering, and what we're sort of licking our lips over almost is all of this new unstructured data, whether it's sensor data, behavioral data, and you're right, 'cause the challenge that we had around automation and cognitive computing, if you will. We're here at IBM with the Watson tech, was enough data, and the consistency and quality of that data. So we have that now, and we're making tremendous strides around in particular here, with the Watson brand, and the Watson cognitive. >> John: You know, one of the things I wish, was Dan Hutches was here, he's not, he's the CTO in charge. You've guys have been doing all these crowd chats our software that we wrote. That's pretty interesting. I've personally enjoyed all the conversations and give a shout out to Dan and you guys for really great conversation. You guys know what you're talking about. It's clear in the data you guys are taking an outside-in approach and collaborating. But your topics are on target. You're talking about digital transformation kind of holistically, but then you start to dive down into specific use cases. So, Bala, what is the favorite, or the most popular digital disruptive topic that's being discussed within DXC and your clients and in the marketplace? >> So, at the outset, within DXC, as digital transformation takes hold with our customers and we aim to be the premier provider of that enablement, what we've realized ourselves is that we provide a lot of services to our clients across many industries but there are commonalities across what we provide in terms of service delivery. And so it made sense for us to, number one: look at the commonalities and create a platform that was common across industries, across offerings that we bring to the marketplace. That commonality is what we call internally, and externally now, as bionics. And it's a platform that we are bringing forward that for the first time ties together what we are talking about both here at this event but also with our clients. Ties together intelligence, orchestration, and automation which are the fundamental, >> John: It's called bionics? >> Bionics. And internally we call it platform DXC upon which all of our offerings and services are brought to market. >> John: Well there's disruption going on in your business. So, I want to talk about, double-down on that for a second. I'm seeing a trend, certainly in the public sector market where the use cases are well enough defined. So you're seeing automatic code generation becoming a real part of the delivery process. Now, what that's going to do is essentially, think of provisioning and configuration management in cloud. If you could apply actual process code that you've done before in the commonalities, this is going to change the delivery timeframe. So you're looking at essentially auto-provisioning software. Not just like, configuration management resources. No, I'm saying here's a value chain, here's a block chain, here's some AI, just configure it like a LEGO block, push. That could take months to deliver the old way. >> Bala: Right. >> Your thoughts to that? Are you guys on that? Do you guys see that as something that's going to be an opportunity for you? Some companies, I've seen, Global system integrator, is being disrupted by this, cause they don't have this. New SI's, new system integrators, are thinking this way and that's a DevOps mindset. Are you prepared for that, do you see it coming? And what's your answer to that? >> So we saw that coming about 3 and a half plus years ago. And our shift away from being a pure SI began then. And so we are an SI, but we are a service integrator rather than a systems integrator. And we began that trend in our journey, 3 plus years ago. And the reason we began that trend was what you pointed out. Today, infrastructure is delivered as a code. So not even as a service but as a code, and so imagine provisioning infrastructure and all the capabilities that ride on it, just as code. And that's where this is headed. In that model, we become provider and provisioner of services, rather than just a system. >> John: And the cost structure is completely changed because the services, Amazon has proven, and now IBM is following suit with their power platform and other things, that you can actually have the kind of compute but it's a catalog of services. So this is going to change the price competitiveness. So you know, big bids, that used to be billions of dollars, you guys can compete. I mean, am I seeing it right? >> Brian: That transition's already, that ship's sailed, so to speak, in terms of the large outsourcing deals the large, where there's apps or infrastructure, it's all moving to digital transformation consumption based commercial models. And it's really bionics that Bala mentioned a minute ago, that is our answer to the threat you described a minute ago. It's really about automating and digitizing and building intelligence into the entire, if you will, build, deliver, operate value chain of our business. >> John: Talk about the multi-vendor, multi-choice, technology-choice, as your customers and people in general on this journey of digital transformation. They have to make, they used to make technology decisions. Now they're making business logic decisions around how to reconfigure their value chains to optimize for new efficiencies and extract away inefficiencies. Blockchain is a great example, AI is another, automation is in the middle, all the cloud. So you have now business logic as the risk, technology not so much because infrastructure as code has proven that you can have server-less, you can have all kinds of coolness that can be managed in an agile way. So the business model aspect is key. How are you guys dealing with that, cause I know you're here at the IBM Think Show, their partner. I see you at the Amazon shows. We see you guys everywhere. So you're horizontally scaling. By design, is that what customers want? What is the DXC view on this? >> So our value proposition has always had partners as the key element of what we do. And so if you look at what we do, you can look at it from two perspectives. One, proprietary ways of thinking, proprietary systems are long since gone. >> And waterfall methodologies, gone, dead. >> Yes, those are all long since gone. >> If you're still doing that, note to self: you're going to be out of business. >> Exactly, so we've actually hinged a lot of what we do on our offerings, our capabilities, and so on around openness, around open source, and so forth. So that's number one. Number Two: In this world, it's no longer about just DXC or just IBM or just somebody, one person bringing everything to our clients. It's about how do you engage proactively and build co-innovation and co-services with our partners and bring that to our clients. >> I mean, IBM just announced that a deal with Google. They've got tensorflow and their deal. So you have all kinds of melting pot. Okay, let's talk about blockchain again. Go back to my favorite topic. So, if you look up that stack, you've got blockchain, you've got cryptocurrency, protocols, and what-not, mentioned securitization, you've got security tokens, you've got utility tokens. You can almost see where this is going. And then you've got on top of that, what's coming, is a mass in-migration of decentralized application developers. Okay, kind of cloud plus. You know, they know cloud, they know DevOps, infrastructure as code, but they're looking at it from a decentralization standpoint, different makeup. And you see, ICOs, initial coin offerings, I think this is an application of you know, inefficiencies around capital markets but that's, you know, put that aside for a second. But blockchain, crypto currency, and decentralized applications, how do you guys see that trend? What are you guys doing? Are you integrating it in? You mentioned token economics, you're in the banking field. Your thoughts on that? >> Bala: Sure, on the blockchain front, as I mentioned to you, there are a number of platforms that are out there. There is the R3 Corda platform. There's a platform that JPMorgan initiated that we're leveraging as well. >> John: Yeah, so they pooh-poohed Bitcoin but then they're back in the game again. (laughter) >> Bala: Yes, that's right. And then there is the Hyperledger Fabric as well. So these platforms are going to take their course of evolution and we are working across all of those platforms. Now, the more interesting thing that you mentioned is people and skills. What we've find today in the marketplace is with our clients is a dramatic shortage of skills in these areas. And so internally, what we have done at DXC is actually open our own service delivery to a vast pool of developers that you talked about earlier as being freelance, independent folks. We open our entire service delivery to them as well. And we look at that global talent pool for our own service delivery. >> Using community as a way to scale. >> Bala: Using communities, yes. And that's exactly what we're doing in our talent process. It's not just about our people, our employees, but our partners as well as what exists in the open marketplace. >> Brian, talk about the insurance area as a way to tease out other trends. Specifically, the question is What is the biggest things that people know they're walking into? What's the tail-wind that they see, that's going to give them hope? And then, What's the head-winds? What are the blockers? And what should they be aware of? What are some of the marketplace dynamics that translate into other industries? >> Brian: Well, let's start with the obvious blocker is legacy debt, right? So you talked about the risk of all that business knowledge, that domain expertise, that's all today encapsulated in existing, what you may call legacy systems, right? So that's the head-wind by far. The tail-wind is that unlike, say 15 years ago, and we were in the last sort of, dot-com boom, when it was all about the front office and customer experience, the customer is way ahead of us. So culturally, the customer is challenging industry to catch up. So that's the tail-wind in my mind. And the real opportunity is to think about it in terms of a dual agenda. So think about it in terms as progressively, simultaneously building new digital capability, whilst ultimately beginning to unbundle and tackle that legacy debt. And I think customers now are starting to see a path forward. We're in the market in both banking and insurance with digital platforms, with industry resource models, API fabrics that can go back in, modernize legacy systems. So there's a real fast time to market. >> And it changes your engagement with clients. It's not a one and done, you're sticking through the service layer. >> Brian: Oh it's a journey, but the difference, I think, between DXC and a lot of other people is that we are in the market, in production, with real assets. And you can show that journey. So it just becomes a conversation around what's your pain point? Where are you starting from? Where do you want to go? >> And you're bringing the community in to help on the delivery side, everyone wins. >> Brian: And that community is a combination of three things. That's our own employees, obviously within the industry, and within our offerings that know banking, that know insurance. It's all of the DXC people in the horizontals. Because we're bringing everything now. These platforms encapsulate infrastructure, security, service management, analytics, mobility, all of that is built into these platforms. And then, it's going out into our partner community. And then, it's going out into the open community. And we're tapping into all of those. >> John: Brian and Bala, thanks so much. 2 power CTOs here on the Cube, having a CTO conversation around how scale, cloud, AI, blockchain, new technologies are enabling new business models at a faster pace of change, with a lower cost structure, and more time to value. Again, it's all about the value creation. The killer app is money and marketplaces and community. Guys, thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018 Cube Studios. More after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017, Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. >> The sun is shining here in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests that we have had on before, Bob Wallace with Nutanix and Wilfredo Sotolongo who's with Lenovo. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, we're gettin' towards the end of another Nutanix .NEXT show. I've had the pleasure of being in all five of the shows, so a lot to kind of go through. Bob, we've had you on the program a couple of times. You've been involved with all the OEM relationships there. Bring us up to speed as to kind of you know, where does OEM fit in the overall Nutanix story? >> It's a big part of how we're going to market now. It really ties in with our interest in providing customers with choice like we do from a hypervisor perspective. We also do from a platform perspective to give customers the ability to, they love the goodness, let's say, of Nutanix and all the things that the Nutanix solution brings and then they get the opportunity to then connect with, connect that with the relationship they may have with Lenovo as a partner to tie in with that to truly work through the Lenovo goodness from a support perspective and everything like that. So, we see it as a broader theme in how Nutanix kind of goes to market which is providing a maximum amount of choice to our customers. >> So, Wilfredo, we've had the pleasure of kind of documenting some of the changes going on. You came in to Lenovo through the IBM X86 acquisition. We've watched Lenovo build out the data center group. I've interviewed Kirk Skaugen three times this year already and you know, have seen partner events at Lenovo events so talk to us just a little bit about how's your role changed and how do we think of Lenovo today, before we even get into the Nutanix piece of it. >> Well, Lenovo has a very different approach to the segment, right. We see a tremendous opportunity in tripling of our addressable market, primarily driven by the shift to software define architectures with Nutanix being one of the primary software define architectures and we see ourselves as having a technology disrupter responsibility, i.e., rather than being the legacy provider with protecting the status quo, we see ourselves as the challengers trying to shift the discussion to the future. And, it actually feeds right in to why we partner with Nutanix almost two years ago now, right. We saw Nutanix as an emerging, aggressive, forward looking provider of technology and new options and with that common vision and common role in the industry we decided to partner with them to accelerate the process. So, different role, new relationship, actually not as new anymore, almost two years, but the same common desire. >> What I think and I'd just build on that, it ties in perfectly with Nutanix disruptive technology and approach and I personally as a sales leader and sales rep myself overtime you should have a perspective and Lenovo has made choices to have a perspective in how they're approaching the market with the technology rather than some of the vendors that have kind of a menu approach and I think it's the right thing that serves the customers needs to be able to be a trusted advisor to the customer and not say, I can offer you anything, but to say, here's what I believe is the right solution for you, and Lenovo does a great job at that. >> Wilfredo, we've heard from Nutanix a lot this week. Their goal is to be an iconic software company. So, that means they're going to need hardware, they're going to need someone to help complete some of the pieces there. Why is Nutanix best in partnership with Lenovo? >> Okay, that's a perfect question, but you said something that triggered a comment that I made to you earlier today. I like the shift I'm seeing in the messaging and the strategy and the product direction that Nutanix has embarked upon the last six to 12 months because aspiring to be much more than a hyperconversion of such a provider is key, right, for the success. This multi-cloud hybrid environments, right, you need to play, to be much more than just the virtual storage player, right. Now, with that said, we got together with Nutanix and we started building our portfolio, right. The first few months of the relationship we were just trying to catch up to what was already there. The good news is we've been investing consistently in this two years and now instead of trying to catch up we're actually leading the transformation. So, to answer your very specific question, point number one, we're the first ones to market with Skylake, Intel Skylake versions of their solution. Even your own is not going to, is coming in a few months. Ours is already in market since last month. Point number two, we recognize the need to virtualize not only the server and the storage capability but also the network. And we invested in software in our switches, in the Lenovo switches that allow us to virtualize all three of them in Nutanix implementations. So, as a Nutanix system administrator you have the choice now with Lenovo, and only with Lenovo, to manage even the network and when there are unfortunate circumstances that create a failure all of that, the migration, all the workloads are completely automated including the networking changes required, right. Number three, this one I didn't even know til one of my Nutanix colleagues pointed it out today, is our latest version of hardware where we run the Nutanix workloads has unique resiliency and availability features that none of my competitors have, like unstoppable fans. Fans are actually the number one item that breaks in infrastructure. So, unstoppable fans makes a big difference for them, right. And then last but not least, there is the one that has characterized us the most over the almost two year long relationship is support, right. We come from a heritage of enterprise great support, right. Things don't go down. The quality of the hardware, the quality of the software, the quality of the support structure, that make sure that the client has peace of mind in terms of if anything goes wrong. Four points. >> Bob, one of the reasons of course Nutanix partners with companies like Lenovo is to help with reach. Can you speak to kind of the global go to market that they help with? >> Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, I've recently also taken on our channel organization from the sales perspective and from my perspective we really have, we have regional partners, we have national partners and we have global partners, and those global partners are OEMs like Lenovo. They had the ability to allow us to engage with global customers that have operations all over the world to not only get the right product in the right place, but also from a support perspective support those customers in place because just like Lenovo, Nutanix and we talk a lot about our NPS score and our support organization, but it really is that ties together in such a good way. Our 90 plus NPS score our customers depend and count on us for that and when they're looking at the underlying hardware platform they need something that keeps that level of commitment to the customer there and that's what Lenovo brings. And, from a global perspective, it gives us a reach frankly a company the size that we've been over the last two years, just couldn't serve some areas of the world. >> In a specific area where I think we can make a big difference together is in global Fortune 500. This is also part of my responsibility inside Lenovo and which I picked up recently, in the last few months, and as the Nutanix technology is maturing and proven into the largest, most complex environments, we're helping support their reach into those biggest accounts where we already tend to be a large provider of either PC or server technology, right. So, and it happens to be by the way, one of the strongest capabilities that Lenovo has as compared to what I expected when I first came in here, right. We're pretty good in terms of the global accounts program. >> Wilfredo, I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit 'cause absolutely goin' up market. You know every company wants to go up market. Is the enterprise, have they just not felt the maturity was there? Are they a little nervous about young companies or why is it now ready for those type of engagements? >> I'm not seeing that much resistance anymore. To be very candid I'm not sure why there was any resistance in the first place, maybe because of a young company. Right now it's more about the discipline to come in, pick a use case, demonstrate into approval concept and execute it flawlessly, right. Where we do that, which by the way, we most of the time do through systems integrators, like IBM, like Capgemini, like APMG, it works very well and we're beginning to see some I'm going to say, fairly large deployments that we hope to build on for the future. >> We had some meetings here this week with some of those, a lot of those customers here, those large organizations that we're partnering up on. >> Any specific verticals or geographies that you're especially excited for kind of catchin' fire lately? >> Well, AMIA, I think we've AMIA for Lenovo is the, if I had to rank the fastest growing market for Lenovo and I think we've had a lot of, Wilfredo and our team, have been working closely together over the last two years to really build that out. So, I'd say AMIA is very strong. I think we're seeing a lot of growth. But, with Lenovo clearly Asia, the Asian region, PRC is a huge market for them. It's, they obviously have a deep legacy there. So, we're doing a lot in Apak as well. >> From an industry perspective I actually don't pick up a pattern. I see your, our, technology quite applicable in almost all industries. I mean, earlier in the conference we had one of our customers speak, right, one of our young customers speak, right, one of the hospital in a server, right. Healthcare, state of the art hospital, state of the art IT infrastructure, running everything, running everything, right, from the hospital information system to the medical imaging OEM software, everything, right and we see more and more institutions, right, making the migration, making the jump to state of the art architectures technologies and running the totality of the workloads. >> And, that's a core government project and very important project for the government of Azerbaijan and having a trusted partner in Lenovo in that scenario not only gives us the reach to reach into Azerbaijan but to have the trust level with an institution that ultimately has to be successful. A hospital, you just, there's no room for error. >> Want to give you both really the final word here. Wilfredo, if somebody didn't come to the event, what might they not know about HX and the offering of that that you'd want to make sure that they dig in and learn a little more about? >> Lenovo is all about disrupting the status quo and helping you get to the future faster. Nutanix is about the same thing. Together we've actually created an offering now that is differentiated against all the OEMs. Come talk to both of us about it. >> I'd say if you weren't here at the show the thing you might have missed is Nutanix bringing our one click simplicity that we're known for to the cloud era and really helping customers manage what we call an enterprise cloud that includes multiple cloud offerings on prem and public cloud with our one click simplicity and removing a lot of the barriers and complexity that customers are dealing with today as they look at how to manage their infrastructure between the different clouds that are out there. >> Bob Wallace, Wilfredo Sotolongo, thank you gentlemen both for joining us again. We're getting towards the end of two days of live coverage but be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage for this and all upcoming shows. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Good morning everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is day four of theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of our Super Bowl, aka AWS re:Invent 2022. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. My name is Dave Vellante. Sanjay Poonen is in the house, CEO and president of Cohesity. He's sitting in as our guest market watcher, market analyst, you know, deep expertise, new to the job at Cohesity. He was kind enough to sit in, and help us break down what's happening at re:Invent. But Paul, first thing, this morning we heard from Werner Vogels. He was basically given a masterclass on system design. It reminded me of mainframes years ago. When we used to, you know, bury through those IBM blue books and red books. You remember those Sanjay? That's how we- learned back then. >> Oh God, I remember those, Yeah. >> But it made me think, wow, now you know IBM's more of a systems design, nobody talks about IBM anymore. Everybody talks about Amazon. So you wonder, 20 years from now, you know what it's going to be. But >> Well- >> Werner's amazing. >> He pulled out a 24 year old document. >> Yup. >> That he had written early in Amazon's evolution about synchronous design or about essentially distributed architectures that turned out to be prophetic. >> His big thing was nature is asynchronous. So systems are asynchronous. Synchronous is an illusion. It's an abstraction. It's kind of interesting. But, you know- >> Yeah, I mean I've had synonyms for things. Timeless architecture. Werner's an absolute legend. I mean, when you think about folks who've had, you know, impact on technology, you think of people like Jony Ive in design. >> Dave: Yeah. >> You got to think about people like Werner in architecture and just the fact that Andy and the team have been able to keep him engaged that long... I pay attention to his keynote. Peter DeSantis has obviously been very, very influential. And then of course, you know, Adam did a good job, you know, watching from, you know, having watched since I was at the first AWS re:Invent conference, at time was President SAP and there was only a thousand people at this event, okay? Andy had me on stage. I think I was one of the first guest of any tech company in 2011. And to see now this become like, it's a mecca. It's a mother of all IT events, and watch sort of even the transition from Andy to Adam is very special. I got to catch some of Ruba's keynote. So while there's some new people in the mix here, this has become a force of nature. And the last time I was here was 2019, before Covid, watched the last two ones online. But it feels like, I don't know 'about what you guys think, it feels like it's back to 2019 levels. >> I was here in 2019. I feel like this was bigger than 2019 but some people have said that it's about the same. >> I think it was 60,000 versus 50,000. >> Yes. So close. >> It was a little bigger in 2019. But it feels like it's more active. >> And then last year, Sanjay, you weren't here but it was 25,000, which was amazing 'cause it was right in that little space between Omicron, before Omicron hit. But you know, let me ask you a question and this is really more of a question about Amazon's maturity and I know you've been following them since early days. But the way I get the question, number one question I get from people is how is Amazon AWS going to be different under Adam than it was under Andy? What do you think? >> I mean, Adam's not new because he was here before. In some senses he knows the Amazon culture from prior, when he was running sales and marketing prior. But then he took the time off and came back. I mean, this will always be, I think, somewhat Andy's baby, right? Because he was the... I, you know, sent him a text, "You should be really proud of what you accomplished", but you know, I think he also, I asked him when I saw him a few weeks ago "Are you going to come to re:Invent?" And he says, "No, I want to leave this to be Adam's show." And Adam's going to have a slightly different view. His keynotes are probably half the time. It's a little bit more vision. There was a lot more customer stories at the beginning of it. Taking you back to the inspirational pieces of it. I think you're going to see them probably pulling up the stack and not just focused in infrastructure. Many of their platform services are evolved. Many of their, even application services. I'm surprised when I talk to customers. Like Amazon Connect, their sort of call center type technologies, an app layer. It's getting a lot. I mean, I've talked to a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are moving off Ayer to Connect. I mean, it's happening and I did not know that. So it's, you know, I think as they move up the stack, the platform's gotten more... The data centric stack has gotten, and you know, in the area we're working with Cohesity, security, data protection, they're an investor in our company. So this is an important, you know, both... I think tech player and a partner for many companies like us. >> I wonder the, you know, the marketplace... there's been a big push on the marketplace by all the cloud companies last couple of years. Do you see that disrupting the way softwares, enterprise software is sold? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, you have to be a ostrich with your head in the sand to not see this wave happening. I mean, what's it? $150 billion worth of revenue. Even though the growth rates dipped a little bit the last quarter or so, it's still aggregatively between Amazon and Azure and Google, you know, 30% growth. And I think we're still in the second or third inning off a grand 1 trillion or 2 trillion of IT, shifting not all of it to the cloud, but significantly faster. So if you add up all of the big things of the on-premise world, they're, you know, they got to a certain size, their growth is stable, but stalling. These guys are growing significantly faster. And then if you add on top of them, platform companies the data companies, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks, you know, Datadog, and then apps companies on top of that. I think the move to the Cloud is inevitable. In SaaS companies, I don't know why you would ever implement a CRM solution on-prem. It's all gone to the Cloud. >> Oh, it is. >> That happened 15 years ago. I mean, begin within three, five years of the advent of Salesforce. And the same thing in HR. Why would you deploy a HR solution now? You've got Workday, you've got, you know, others that are so some of those apps markets are are just never coming back to an on-prem capability. >> Sanjay, I want to ask you, you built a reputation for being able to, you know, forecast accurately, hit your plan, you know, you hit your numbers, you're awesome operator. Even though you have a, you know, technology degree, which you know, that's a two-tool star, multi-tool star. But I call it the slingshot economy. This is like, I mean I've seen probably more downturns than anybody in here, you know, given... Well maybe, maybe- >> Maybe me. >> You and I both. I've never seen anything like this, where where visibility is so unpredictable. The economy is sling-shotting. It's like, oh, hurry up, go Covid, go, go go build, build, build supply, then pull back. And now going forward, now pulling back. Slootman said, you know, on the call, "Hey the guide, is the guide." He said, "we put it out there, We do our best to hit it." But you had CrowdStrike had issues you know, mid-market, ServiceNow. I saw McDermott on the other day on the, on the TV. I just want to pay, you know, buy from the guy. He's so (indistinct) >> But mixed, mixed results, Salesforce, you know, Octa now pre-announcing, hey, they're going to be, or announcing, you know, better visibility, forward guide. Elastic kind of got hit really hard. HPE and Dell actually doing really well in the enterprise. >> Yep. >> 'Course Dell getting killed in the client. But so what are you seeing out there? How, as an executive, do you deal with such poor visibility? >> I think, listen, what the last two or three years have taught us is, you know, with the supply chain crisis, with the surge that people thought you may need of, you know, spending potentially in the pandemic, you have to start off with your tech platform being 10 x better than everybody else. And differentiate, differentiate. 'Cause in a crowded market, but even in a market that's getting tougher, if you're not differentiating constantly through technology innovation, you're going to get left behind. So you named a few places, they're all technology innovators, but even if some of them are having challenges, and then I think you're constantly asking yourselves, how do you move from being a point product to a platform with more and more services where you're getting, you know, many of them moving really fast. In the case of Roe, I like him a lot. He's probably one of the most savvy operators, also that I respect. He calls these speedboats, and you know, his core platform started off with the firewall network security. But he's built now a very credible cloud security, cloud AI security business. And I think that's how you need to be thinking as a tech executive. I mean, if you got core, your core beachhead 10 x better than everybody else. And as you move to adjacencies in these new platforms, have you got now speedboats that are getting to a point where they are competitive advantage? Then as you think of the go-to-market perspective, it really depends on where you are as a company. For a company like our size, we need partners a lot more. Because if we're going to, you know, stand on the shoulders of giants like Isaac Newton said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders giants." I need to really go and cultivate Amazon so they become our lead partner in cloud. And then appropriately Microsoft and Google where I need to. And security. Part of what we announced last week was, last month, yeah, last couple of weeks ago, was the data security alliance with the biggest security players. What was I trying to do with that? First time ever done in my industry was get Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Wallace, Tenable, CyberArk, Splunk, all to build an alliance with me so I could stand on their shoulders with them helping me. If you're a bigger company, you're constantly asking yourself "how do you make sure you're getting your, like Amazon, their top hundred customers spending more with that?" So I think the the playbook evolves, and I'm watching some of these best companies through this time navigate through this. And I think leadership is going to be tested in enormously interesting ways. >> I'll say. I mean, Snowflake is really interesting because they... 67% growth, which is, I mean, that's best in class for a company that's $2 billion. And, but their guide was still, you know, pretty aggressive. You know, so it's like, do you, you know, when it when it's good times you go, "hey, we can we can guide conservatively and know we can beat it." But when you're not certain, you can't dial down too far 'cause your investors start to bail on you. It's a really tricky- >> But Dave, I think listen, at the end of the day, I mean every CEO should not be worried about the short term up and down in the stock price. You're building a long-term multi-billion dollar company. In the case of Frank, he has, I think I shot to a $10 billion, you know, analytics data warehousing data management company on the back of that platform, because he's eyeing the market that, not just Teradata occupies today, but now Oracle occupies or other databases, right? So his tam as it grows bigger, you're going to have some of these things, but that market's big. I think same with Palo Alto. I mean Datadog's another company, 75% growth. >> Yeah. >> At 20% margins, like almost rule of 95. >> Amazing. >> When they're going after, not just the observability market, they're eating up the sim market, security analytics, the APM market. So I think, you know, that's, you look at these case studies of companies who are going from point product to platforms and are steadily able to grow into new tams. You know, to me that's very inspiring. >> I get it. >> Sanjay: That's what I seek to do at our com. >> I get that it's a marathon, but you know, when you're at VMware, weren't you looking at the stock price every day just out of curiosity? I mean listen, you weren't micromanaging it. >> You do, but at the end of the day, and you certainly look at the days of earnings and so on so forth. >> Yeah. >> Because you want to create shareholder value. >> Yeah. >> I'm not saying that you should not but I think in obsession with that, you know, in a short term, >> Going to kill ya. >> Makes you, you know, sort of myopically focused on what may not be the right thing in the long term. Now in the long arc of time, if you're not creating shareholder value... Look at what happened to Steve Bomber. You needed Satya to come in to change things and he's created a lot of value. >> Dave: Yeah, big time. >> But I think in the short term, my comments were really on the quarter to quarter, but over a four a 12 quarter, if companies are growing and creating profitable growth, they're going to get the valuation they deserve. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Do you the... I want to ask you about something Arvind Krishna said in the previous IBM earnings call, that IT is deflationary and therefore it is resistant to the macroeconomic headwinds. So IT spending should actually thrive in a deflation, in a adverse economic climate. Do you think that's true? >> Not all forms of IT. I pay very close attention to surveys from, whether it's the industry analysts or the Morgan Stanleys, or Goldman Sachs. The financial analysts. And I think there's a gluc in certain sectors that will get pulled back. Traditional view is when the economies are growing people spend on the top line, front office stuff, sales, marketing. If you go and look at just the cloud 100 companies, which are the hottest private companies, and maybe with the public market companies, there's way too many companies focused on sales and marketing. Way too many. I think during a downsizing and recession, that's going to probably shrink some, because they were all built for the 2009 to 2021 era, where it was all about the top line. Okay, maybe there's now a proposition for companies who are focused on cost optimization, supply chain visibility. Security's been intangible, that I think is going to continue to an investment. So I tell, listen, if you are a tech investor or if you're an operator, pay attention to CIO priorities. And right now, in our business at Cohesity, part of the reason we've embraced things like ransomware protection, there is a big focus on security. And you know, by intelligently being a management and a security company around data, I do believe we'll continue to be extremely relevant to CIO budgets. There's a ransomware, 20 ransomware attempts every second. So things of that kind make you relevant in a bank. You have to stay relevant to a buying pattern or else you lose momentum. >> But I think what's happening now is actually IT spending's pretty good. I mean, I track this stuff pretty closely. It's just that expectations were so high and now you're seeing earnings estimates come down and so, okay, and then you, yeah, you've got the, you know the inflationary factors and your discounted cash flows but the market's actually pretty good. >> Yeah. >> You know, relative to other downturns that if this is not a... We're not actually not in a downturn. >> Yeah. >> Not yet anyway. It may be. >> There's a valuation there. >> You have to prepare. >> Not sales. >> Yeah, that's right. >> When I was on CNBC, I said "listen, it's a little bit like that story of Joseph. Seven years of feast, seven years of famine." You have to prepare for potentially your worst. And if it's not the worst, you're in good shape. So will it be a recession 2023? Maybe. You know, high interest rates, inflation, war in Russia, Ukraine, maybe things do get bad. But if you belt tightening, if you're focused in operational excellence, if it's not a recession, you're pleasantly surprised. If it is one, you're prepared for it. >> All right. I'm going to put you in the spot and ask you for predictions. Expert analysis on the World Cup. What do you think? Give us the breakdown. (group laughs) >> As my... I wish India was in the World Cup, but you can't get enough Indians at all to play soccer well enough, but we're not, >> You play cricket, though. >> I'm a US man first. I would love to see one of Brazil, or Argentina. And as a Messi person, I don't know if you'll get that, but it would be really special for Messi to lead, to end his career like Maradonna winning a World Cup. I don't know if that'll happen. I'm probably going to go one of the Latin American countries, if the US doesn't make it far enough. But first loyalty to the US team, and then after one of the Latin American countries. >> And you think one of the Latin American countries is best bet to win or? >> I don't know. It's hard to tell. They're all... What happens now at this stage >> So close, right? >> is anybody could win. >> Yeah. You just have lots of shots of gold. I'm a big soccer fan. It could, I mean, I don't know if the US is favored to win, but if they get far enough, you get to the finals, anybody could win. >> I think they get Netherlands next, right? >> That's tough. >> Really tough. >> But... The European teams are good too, but I would like to see US go far enough, and then I'd like to see Latin America with team one of Argentina, or Brazil. That's my prediction. >> I know you're a big Cricket fan. Are you able to follow Cricket the way you like? >> At god unearthly times the night because they're in Australia, right? >> Oh yeah. >> Yeah. >> I watched the T-20 World Cup, select games of it. Yeah, you know, I'm not rapidly following every single game but the World Cup games, I catch you. >> Yeah, it's good. >> It's good. I mean, I love every sport. American football, soccer. >> That's great. >> You get into basketball now, I mean, I hope the Warriors come back strong. Hey, how about the Warriors Celtics? What do we think? We do it again? >> Well- >> This year. >> I'll tell you what- >> As a Boston Celtics- >> I would love that. I actually still, I have to pay off some folks from Palo Alto office with some bets still. We are seeing unprecedented NBA performance this year. >> Yeah. >> It's amazing. You look at the stats, it's like nothing. I know it's early. Like nothing we've ever seen before. So it's exciting. >> Well, always a pleasure talking to you guys. >> Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you. Love the expert analysis. >> Sanjay Poonen. Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. re:Invent 2022, day four. We're winding up in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lighthearted soft music)

well hello everybody John Wallace here on thecube he's continuing our segments here on the AWS Global startup showcase we are at day three of Reinventing irking Zhang is joining us now he is the CEO co-founder of Jupiter one um first off before we get going talking about you know security and big world for you guys I know what's your take on the show what's been going on out here at re invent yeah yeah ring event has been one of my favorite shows there's a lot of people here there's a lot of topics of course it's not just cyber security a lot of cloud infrastructure and just technology in general so you get a lot you know if you go walk the floor you see a lot of vendors you look at us go into sessions you can learn a lot but you're the Hot Topic right everybody's focused on Cyber yeah big time and with good reason right because as we know the Bad actors are getting even smarter and even faster and even more Nimble so just paint the landscape for me here in general right now as you see uh security Cloud Security in particular and and kind of where we are in that battle well we are clearly not winning so I think that in itself is a bit of a uh interesting problem right so as a it's not just Cloud security if you think about cyber security in general as an industry it has it has not been around for that long right but if you just look at the history of it uh we haven't done that while so uh pick another industry say medicine which has been around forever and if you look at the history of Medicine well I would argue you has done tremendously well because people live longer right when you get sick you get access to health care and yeah exactly you have Solutions and and you can see the trend even though there are problems in healthcare of course right but the trend is is good it's going well but not in cyber security more breaches more attacks more attackers we don't know what the hell we're doing with that many solutions and you know that's been one of my struggles as a former CSO and security practitioner for many years you know why is it that we're not getting better all right so I'm going to ask you the question yeah okay why aren't we getting better you know how come we can't stay ahead of the curve on this thing that for some reason it's like whack-a-mole times a hundred every time we think we solve one problem we have a hundred more that show up over here exactly and we have to address that and and our attention keeps floating around yeah I think you said it right so because we're taking this guacamole approach and we're looking for the painkiller of the day and you know we're looking for uh the Band-Aids right so and then we ended up well I I think to be fair to be fair to your industry the industry moves so quickly technology in general moves so quickly and security has been playing catch-up over time we're still playing catch-up so when you're playing catch-up you you can almost only uh look at you know what's the painkiller of what's the band name of the day so I can stop the bleeding right but I do think that we're we're to a point or we have enough painkillers and Band-Aids and and we need to start looking at how can we do better fundamentally with the basics and do the basics well because a lot of times the basics that get you into trouble so fundamentally the foundation I if I hear you right what you're saying is um you know quick changing industry right things are moving rapidly but we're not blocking and tackling we're not doing the X's and O's and so forget changing and we we got to get back to the basis and do those things right exactly you can only seem so simple it seems so simple but it's so hard right so you can you can think about you know uh even in case of building a starter building a company and and in order at one point right so we're blocking uh blocking tackling and then when we grow to a certain size we have to scale we have to figure out how to scale the business this is the same problem that happens in security as an industry we've been blocking happening for so long you know we're the industry is so young but we're to a point that we got to figure out how to scale this scale this in a fundamentally different way and I'll give you some example right so so what when we say the basics now it's easy to to think that say users should have MFA enabled is one of the basics right or another Basics will be you have endpoint protection on your devices you know maybe it's Cloud strike or Sentinel one or carbon black or whatever but the question being how do you know it is working 100 of the time right how do you know that how do you know right you find out too exactly that's right and how do you know that you have 100 coverage on your endpoints those Solutions are not going to tell you because they don't know what they don't know right if it's not enabled if it's not you know what what's the negative that you are not seeing so that's one of the things that you know that's in the basic state that you're now covering so the fundamentals it really goes to these five questions that I think that nobody has a really good answer for until now so the five questions goes what do I have right is it important what's important out of all the things I have you have a lot right you could have millions of things what important now for those that are important does it have a problem and if it has a problem who can fix it because the reality is in most cases security teams are not the ones fixing the problems they're they're the ones identical they're very good at recognizing but not so good exactly identifying the owner who can fix it right right could be could be business owner could be Engineers so the the asset ownership identification right so so these four questions and and then over time you know whether it's over a week or a month or a quarter or a year am I getting better right and then you just keep asking these questions in different areas in different domains with a different lens right so maybe that's endpoints maybe that's Cloud maybe that's you know users maybe that's a product and applications right but it really boils down to these five questions that's the foundation for any good security program if you can do that well I think we cover a lot of bases and we're going to be in much better shape than we have been all right so where do you come in man Jupiter one in terms of what you're providing because obviously you've identified this kind of pyramid yes this hierarchy of addressing needs and I assume obviously knowing you as I do and knowing the company as I do you've got Solutions that's exactly right right and and we precisely answer those five questions right for uh any organization uh from a asset perspective right because all the the answers to all those these five questions are based in assets it starts with knowing what I have right right so the the overall challenge of cyber security being broke broken I I believe is fundamentally that people do not understand and cannot uh probably deal with the complexity that we have within our own environments so again like you know using uh medicine as an example right so in order to come up with the right medicine for either it's a vaccine for covid-19 or whether it is a treatment for cancer or whatever that case may be you have to start with the foundations of understanding both the pathogen and to the human body like DNA sequencing right without those you cannot effectively produce the right medicine in modern uh you know Medicine sure right so that is the same thing that's happening in cyber security you know we spend a lot of times you know putting band days in patches right and then we spend a lot of time doing attacker research from the outside but we don't fundamentally understand in a complete way what's the complexity within our own environment in terms of digital assets and that's that's almost like the DNA of your own work what is that kind of mind-blowing in a way that if again hearing you what you're talking about is saying that the first step is to identify what you have that's right so it seems just so basic that that I should know what I what's under my hood I should know what is valuable and what is not I should prioritize what I really need to protect and what maybe can go on the second shelf yeah it has been a tough problem since the beginning of I.T not just the beginning of cyber security right so in the history of I.T we have this thing called cmdb configuration management database it is supposed to capture the configurations of it assets now over time that has become a lot more complex and and there's a lot more than just it asset that we have to understand from a security and attack service perspective right so we have to understand I.T environments we have to understand Cloud environments and applications and users and access and data and as and all of those things then then we have to take a different approach of sort of a modern cmdb right so what is the way that we can understand all of those complexity within all of those assets but not just independently within those silos but rather in a connected way so we can not only understand the attack surface but only but also understand the attack path that connect the dots from one thing to another right because everything in the organization is actually connected if if there's any one thing that sits on an island right so if you say you have a a a a server or a device or a user that is on an island that is not connected to the rest of the organization then why have it right and it doesn't matter so it's the understanding of that connect connected tissue this entire map where this you know DNA sequencing equivalent of a digital organization is what Jupiter one provides right so that visibility of the fundamental you know very granular uh level of assets and resources to answer those five questions and how does that how do I get better at that then I mean I have you to help me but but internally within our organization um I mean I don't want to be rude but I mean do I have do I have the skill for that do I have um do I have the the internal horsepower for that or or is there some need to close that Gap and how do I do it you know I'll tell you two things right so so one you mentioned the worst skills right so let me start there so because this one is very interesting we also have a huge skills shortage in cyber security we will we've all heard that for years and and and and for a long time but if you dig deeper into it why is that why is that and you know we have a lot of you know talented people right so why do we still have a skills shortage now what's interesting is if you think about what we're asking security people to do is mind-boggling so if you if you get a security analyst to say hey I want to understand how to protect something or or how to deal with an incident and what you're asking the person to do is not only to understand the security concept and be a domain expert in security you're also asking the person to and understand at the same time AWS or other clouds or endpoints or code or applications so that you can properly do the analysis and the in the response it's it's impossible it's like you know if you have you have to have a person who's an expert in everything know everything about everything that's right it's impossible so so so that's that's one thing that we have to to resolve is how do we use technology like Jupiter one to provide an abstraction so that there's Automation in place to help the security teams be better at their jobs without having to be an expert in deep technology right just add the abstract level of understanding because you know we can we can model the data and and provide the analysis and visual visualization out of the box for them so they can focus on just the security practices so that's one and the second thing is we have to change the mindset like take vulnerability management as an example right so the mindset for vulnerability management has been how do I manage findings now we have to change it to the concept of more proactive and how to manage assets so let's think about uh you know say log4j right that that happened and uh you know when it happened everybody scrambles and said hey which which devices or which you know uh systems have log4j and you know it doesn't matter what's the impact we can fix it right going back to those questions that that I mentioned before right and then um and then they try to look for a solution at a time say well where's that silver bullet that can give me the answers now what what what we struggle with though is that you know I want to maybe ask the question where were you six months ago where were you six months ago where you could have done the due diligence and put something in place that help you understand all of these assets and connections so you can go to one place and just ask for that question when something like that you know hit the fan so so if we do not fundamentally change the mindset to say I have to look at things not from a reactive findings perspective but really starting from an asset-centric you know day one perspective to look at that and have this Foundation have this map build we can't get there right so it's like you know if I need direction I go to Google Maps right but the the reason that it works is because somebody has done the work of creating the map right right if you haven't if you don't have the map and you just at you know when the time you say I gotta go somewhere and you expect the map to magically happen to show you the direction it's not going to work right right I imagine there are a lot of people out there right now are listening to thinking oh boy you know and that's what Jupiter one's all about they're there to answer your oh boy thanks for the time of course I appreciate the insights as well it's nice to know that uh at least somebody is reminding us to keep the front door locked too that's just the back door the side doors keep that front door and that garage locked up too definitely um all right we'll continue our coverage here at AWS re invent 22 this is part of the AWS Global startup showcase and you're watching the cube the leader in high-tech coverage foreign

>>Well, hello everybody at John Wallace here on the Cube, and glad to have you along here for day two of our coverage here at AWS Reinvent 22. We're up in the global startup program, which is part of AWS's Startup Showcase, and I've got Kevin Farley with me. He is the director of Strategic Alliances with Maria Day db. And Kevin, good to see you this morning. Good to see you, John. Thanks for joining us. Thank >>You. >>Appreciate it. Yeah. First off, tell us about Maria db. Sure. Obviously data's your thing. Yep. But to share that with some folks at home who might not be familiar with your offering. >>Yeah. So Maria DB's been around as a corporate entity for 10 plus years, and we have a massive customer base. You know, there's a billion downloads from Docker Hub, 75% of the Fortune 500. We have an enormous sea of really happy users. But what we realize is that all of these users are really thinking about what do we, what does it mean to transform it? What does cloud modernization mean? And how do we build a strategy on something we really love to drive it into the cloud and take it to the future. So what we launched about two years ago, two and a half years ago, is Skye. It's our database as a service. It leverages all the best elements, what we provide on the enterprise platform. It marries to the AWS cloud, and it really provides the best of both worlds for our >>Customers. So in your thought then, what, what problem is that solving? >>I think what you see in the overall database market is that many people have been using what we would call legacy technology. There's been lots of sort of stratification and mixes of different database solutions. All of them come with some promise, and all of 'em come with a lot of compromise. So I think what the market is really looking for is something that can take what they know and love, can bring it to the cloud and can survive the port drive the performance and scale. That completely changes the landscape, especially as you think about what modern data needs look like, right? What people did 10 years ago with the exponential scale of data no longer works. And what they need is something that not only can really deliver against their core business values and their core business deliverables, but gets 'em to the future. How do we drive something new? How do we innovate? How do we change the game? And I think what we built with AWS really delivers what we call cloud scale. It's taking something that is the best technology, and I as a V can build, marrying it to, you know, Kubernetes layer, marrying it to global availability, thinking about having true global high availability across all of your environments and really delivering that to customers through an integrated partnership. >>Could we see this coming? I mean, because you know data, right? I mean, yeah, we, we, everybody talked about the tsunami of growth, you know, >>Back 10 >>Sure. 11 years ago. But, but maybe the headlights didn't go far enough or, or, but, but you could see that there was going to be crunch time. >>There's no doubt. And I think that this has been a, there's, there's been these sort of pocket solutions, right? So if you think at the entire no sequel world, right? People said, oh, I need scale, I can get it, but what do I have to give up asset compliance? So I have to change the way I think about what data is and how I, I can govern it. So there's been these things that deliver on half the promise, but there's never been something that comes together and really drives what we deliver through CIQ is something called expand. So distributed SQL really tied to the SQL Query language, having that asset data. So having everything you need without the compromise built on the cloud allows you to scale out and allows you to think about, I can actually do exponential layers of, of data, data modeling, data querying, complete read, write, driving that forward. And I think it gives us a whole nother dynamic that we can deliver on in a way that hasn't been before. And I think that's kind of the holy grail of what people are looking for is how am I building modern applications and how do I have a database in the cloud that's really gonna support >>It? You know, you talk about distributed, you know, sequel and, and I mean, there's a little mystery behind it, isn't there? Or at least maybe not mystery. There's a little, I guess, confusion or, or just misunderstanding. I mean, I, how, nail that down a little bit. I >>Would say the best way to say it, honestly, this is the great thing, is it people believe it's too good to be true. And I think what we see over and over >>Again, you know, what they say about that. >>But this is the great part is, you know, you know, we've just had two taste studies recently with aws, with HIT labs and Certified power, both on expand, both proof in the pudding. They did the POCs, they're like, oh my God, this works. If you watch the keynote yesterday, you know, Adam had a slide that was, you know, as big as the entire room and it highlighted Samsung and they said, you know, we're doing 80,000 requests per second. So the, you know, the story there is that AWS is able as, as an entity with their scale and their breadth to handle that kind of workload. But guess what that is? That's MariaDB expand underneath there driving all of that utilization. So it's already there, it's already married, it's already in the cloud, and now we're taking it to a completely different level with a fully managed database solution. Right? >>How impressive is that? Right? I mean, you would think that somebody out there who, I mean that that volume, that kind of capacity is, is mind blowing. >>I mean, to your kind of previous point, it's like one of those things, do I see what's coming and it's here, right? You know, it's, is it actually ever gonna be possible? And now we're showing that it really is on a daily basis for some of the biggest brands in the world. We're also seeing companies moving off not only transitioning from, you know, MariaDB or myse, but all of the big licensed, you know, conversions as well. So you think about Oracle DBS Bank is one of our biggest customers, one of the largest Oracle conversions in the world onto MariaDB. And now thinking about what is the promise of connecting that to the cloud? How do you take things that you're currently doing, OnPrem delivering a hybrid model that also then starts to say, Hey, here's my path to cloud modernization. Skye gives me that bridge. And then you take it one layer farther and you think about multi-cloud, right? That's one of the things that's critical that ISVs can really only deliver in a meaningful way, is how can we have a solution for a customer that we can take to any availability zone. We can have performance, proximity, cost, proximity. We're always able to have that total data dexterity across any environment we need and we can build on that for the future. >>So if, if we're talking about cloud database and there's so many good things going forward here. You're talking about easy use and scalability and all that. But as with ever have you talked about this, there's some push and there's some pull. Yeah. So, so what's the, what's the other side that's still, you know, you that you think has to be >>Addressed? And I think that's a great question. So there's, we see that there's poll, right? We've seen these deals, this pipeline growth, this, there's great adoption. But what I think we're still not at the point of massive hockey stick adoption is that customers still don't fully understand the capabilities distributed SQL and the power they can actually deliver. So the more we drive case studies, the more we drive POCs, the more we prove the model, I think you're gonna see just a massive adoption scale. And I also think customers are tired of doing lots of different things in lots of different pockets. So neither one of the key elements of Sky SQL is we can do both transactional and analytical data out of the same database driven by the same proxy. So what, instead of having DBAs and developers try to figure out, okay, I'm gonna pull from this database here. >>Yeah. That there, it's, it's this big spaghetti wire concept that is super expensive and super time intensive. So the ability to write modern applications and pull data from both pockets and really be able to have that as a seamless entity and deliver that to customers is massive. I mean, another part of the keynote yesterday was a new deliverable, like kind of no etl. Adam talked about Aurora and Redshift and the massive complexity of what used to exist for getting data back and forth. You also have to pay for two different databases. It's super expensive. So I think the idea that you can take the real focus of AWS and US is customer value. How do you deliver that next thing that changes the game? Always utilizes AWS delivers on that promise, but then takes a net new technology that really starts to think about how do we bring things together? How do we make it more simple? How do we make it more powerful? And how do we deliver more customer value as we go forward? >>But you know, if, if I'm, I'm still an on-prim guy, just pretend I'm not saying I am. Just pretend I just for the sake of the discussion here, it's like I just can't let it go. Yeah. Right. I, I still, you know, there's control, there's the known versus the unknown. The uncertain. Yeah. So twist my arm just a little bit more and get me over the hum. >>Well, first of all, you don't have to, right? And there's gonna be some industries and some verticals that will always have elements of their business that will be OnPrem. Guess what? We make the best based in the world. It can be MariaDB, but there's those that then say, these, these elements of our business are gonna be far more effective moving to the cloud. So we give you Skye, there's a natural symbiotic bridge between everything we do and how we deliver it. Where you can be hybrid and it's great. You can adopt the cloud as your business needs grow. And you can have multi-cloud. This is that, that idea that you can, can have your cake and eat it too, right? You can literally have all these elements of your business met without these big pressure to say, you gotta throw that away. You gotta move to this. It's really, how do you kind of gracefully adopt the cloud in a way that makes sense for your business? Where are you trying to drive your business? Is it time to value, right? Is it governance? Is it is there's different elements of what matters the most to individual businesses. You know, we wanna address those and we can address >>Those. So you're saying you don't have to dive >>In, you don't have to dive >>In. You, you can, you can go ankle deep, knee deep, whatever you wanna >>Do. Absolutely. And you know, some of the largest MariaDB users still have massive, massive on-prem implementations. And that's okay. But there's elements that are starting to fall behind. There's cost savings, there's things that they need to do in the cloud that they can't do. OnPrem. And that's where expand Skye really says, okay, here is your platform. Grow as you want to, migrate as you want to. And we're there every step along the way. We, we also provide a whole Sky DBA team. Some guys just say, I wanna get outta the database world at all. This is, this is expensive, it's costly and it's difficult to be an expert. So you can bring in our DBA team and they'll man and run, they'll, they'll run your entire environment. They'll optimize it, you know, they'll troubleshoot it, they'll bug fix, they'll do everything for you. So you can just say, I just wanna focus on building phenomenal applications for my customers. And the database game as we knew it is not something that I know I want to invest in anymore. Right. I wanna make that transition >>That makes that really, yeah. You know, I mean really attractive to a lot of people because you are, you talk about a lot of headache there. Yeah. So let's talk about AWS before Sure. I let you go just about that relationship. Okay. You've talked about the platform that it provides you and, and obviously the benefits, but just talk about how you've worked with AWS over the years Yep. And, and how you see that relationship allowing you to expand your services, no pun intended. >>For sure. So, I mean, I would start with the way we even contemplated architecture. You know, we worked with the satisfactory team. We made sure that the things that we built were optimized in their environment. You know, I think it was a lot of collaboration on how does this combined entity really make the most value for our customers? How does it make the most sense for our developers as we build it out? Then we work in the, in the global startup team. So the strategic element of who we are, not all startups are created equal, right? We have, right, we have 75% of the Fortune 100, we've got over a billion downloads. So, you know, we come in with promise. And the reason this partnership is so valuable and the reason there's so much investment going forward is cuz what really, what do the cloud guys care about? >>The very, very most, they want all of these mission critical, big workloads that are on prem to land in their cloud. What do we have a massive, massive TAM sitting out there, these customers that could go to aws. So we both see, like if we can deliver incredible value to that customer base, these big workloads will end up in aws. They'll use other AWS services. And as we scale and grow, you know, we have that platform that's already built for it. So I think that when you go back to like the tenants, the core principles of aws, the one that always stands out, the one that we always kind of lean back on is, are we delivering customer value? Is this the best thing for the customer? Because we do have some competition just like many other, other partners do, right? So there is Aurora and there is rds and there is times when that's a great service for a customer. But when people are really thinking about where do I need my database to go? Where do I really need to be set for the future growth? Where am I gonna get the kind of ROI I need going forward? That's where you can go, Hey, sky sql, expand distributed sql. This is the best game in town. It's built on aws and collectively, you know, we're gonna present that to a customer. I'm >>Sold. Done. >>I love it. Right? >>Maria db, check 'em out, they're on the show floor. Great traffic. I know at at the, at the booth. They're here at AWS Reinvent. So check 'em out. Maria db. Thanks >>Kevin. Hey, thanks John. Appreciate your >>Time. Appreciate Great. That was great. Right back with more, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hi everybody, John Wallace here and welcome to theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. Glad to have you aboard here as we continue our coverage here at re:Invent 2022. We're out at The Venetian in Las Vegas. A lot of energy down on that exhibit floor, I promise you. We're a little bit away from the maddening crowd, but we're here with the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. I've got two guests I want to introduce you to. Jason Beyer who is the vice president of Data and Analytics at Bridgestone Americas. Jason, good to see you, sir. >> Hello, John. >> And Josh von Schaumburg, who is the managing director and North America lead for AWS Security at Accenture. Josh, good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, first off, just quick take on the show. I know you've only been here about a day or so, but just your thoughts about what you're seeing on the floor in terms of energy, enthusiasm and, I think, turnout, right? I'm really impressed by it. We've got a lot of people down there. >> Yeah, I've been certainly impressed, John, with the turnout. But just as you say, the energy of the crowd, the excitement for the new things coming, it seems like it's a really pivotal moment for many organizations, including my own, and really excited to see what's coming over the next couple days. >> Let's jump into Bridgestone then. I kind of kidded you before we started the interview saying, all right, tires and golf balls, that's what I relate to, but you have a full array of consumer products and solution you're offering and your responsibility is managing the data and the analytics and making sure those business lines are as efficient as possible. >> Absolutely, John. So in my role, I have the privilege of being in an enterprise position. So I get to see the vast array of Bridgestone, which it is a large, highly vertically integrated company all the way from raw material sourcing of natural rubber to retail services in the automotive industry. We're at scale across those areas. The exciting thing about the company right now is we're going through this business transformation of becoming, you know, building on that heritage and that great legacy of having high quality high performance, highly focused on safety products to becoming a product and solutions company, and particular a sustainable solutions company. So what that means is we're bringing not only those great products to market, tires, golf balls, hoses, all kinds of rubber, air springs products to market, but thinking about how do we service those after they're in the market, how do we bring solutions to help fleets, vehicle owners, vehicle operators operate those in a sustainable way, in a cost effective way? So those solutions, of course, bring all new sets of data and analytics that come with it, and technology and moving to the cloud to be cloud native. So this new phase for the organization that we refer to as Bridgestone 3.0, and that business strategy is driving our cloud strategy, our technology strategy, and our data strategy and AWS and Accenture are important partners in that. >> Yeah, so we hear a lot about that these days about this transformation, this journey that people are on now. And Josh, when Bridgestone or other clients come to you and they talk about their migrations and what's their footprint going to look like and how do they get there, in the case of Bridgestone when they came to you and said, "All right, this is where we want to go with this. We're going to embark on a significant upgrade of our systems here," how do you lead 'em? How do you get 'em there? >> Yeah, I think there are a couple key cloud transformation value drivers that we've emphasized and that I've seen at Bridgestone in my time there. I mean, number one, just the rapid increase in the pace of innovation that we've seen over the last couple years. And a lot of that is also led by the scalability of all of the cloud native AWS services that we're leveraging, and in particular with the CDP platform. It really started off as a single-use case and really a single-tenant data lake. And then through the strategic vision of Jason and the leadership team, we've been able to expand that to 10 plus tenants and use cases. And a big reason behind that is the scalability of all these AWS services, right? So as we add more and more tenants, all the infrastructure just scales without any manual provisioning any tuning that we need to do. And that allows us to go really from idea, to POC, to production in really a matter of months when traditionally it might take years. >> So- >> If I can build upon that. >> Please do, yeah. >> The CDP, or central data platform, is part of a broader reference architecture that reflects that business strategy. So we looked at it and said, we could have taken a couple of different approaches to recognize the business challenges we're facing. We needed to modernize our core, our ERP, our manufacturing solutions move to smart factory and green factories, our PLM solutions. But at the same time, we're moving quickly. We have a startup mindset in our mobility solutions businesses where we're going to market on our customer and commerce solutions, and we needed to move at a different pace. And so to decouple those, we, in partnership with Accenture and AWS, built out a reference architecture that has a decoupling layer that's built around a data fabric, a data connected layer, integrated data services as well. A key part of that architecture is our central data platform built on AWS. This is a comprehensive data lake architecture using all the modern techniques within AWS to bring data together, to coalesce data, as well as recognize the multiple different modes of consumption, whether that's classic reporting, business intelligence, analytics, machine learning data science, as well as API consumption. And so we're building that out. A year ago it was a concept on a PowerPoint and just show and kind of reflect the innovation and speed. As Josh mentioned, we're up to 10 tenants, we're growing exponentially. There's high demand from the organization to leverage data at scale because of the business transformation that I mentioned and that modernization of the core ecosystem. >> That's crazy fast, right? And all of a sudden, whoa! >> Faster than I expected. >> Almost snap overnight. And you raise an interesting point too. I think when you talk about how there was a segment of your business that you wanted to get in the startup mode, whereas I don't think Bridgestone, I don't think about startup, right? I think in a much more, I wouldn't say traditional, but you've got big systems, right? And so how did you kind of inject your teams with that kind of mindset, right? That, hey, you're going to have to hit the pedal here, right? And I want you to experiment. I want you to innovate. And that might be a little bit against the grain from what they were used to. >> So just over two years ago, we built and started the organization that I have the privilege of leading, our data and analytics organization. And it's a COE. It's a center of expertise in the organization. We partner with specialized teams in product development, marketing, other places to enable data and analytics everywhere. We wanted to be pervasive, it's a team sport. But we really embraced at that moment what we refer to as a dual speed mindset. Speed one, we've got to move at the speed of the business. And that's variable. Based on the different business units and lines of lines of business and functional areas, the core modernization efforts, those are multi-year transformation programs that have multiple phases to them, and we're embedded there building the fundamentals of data governance and data management and reporting operational things. But at the same time, we needed to recognize that speed of those startup businesses where we're taking solutions and service offerings to market, doing quick minimum viable product, put it in a market, try it, learn from it adapt. Sometimes shut it down and take those learnings into the next area as well as joint ventures. We've been much more aggressive in terms of the partnerships in the marketplace, the joint ventures, the minority investments, et cetera, really to give us that edge in how we corner the market on the fleet and mobility solutions of the future. So having that dual speed approach of operating at the speed of the business, we also needed to balance that with speed two, which is building those long term capabilities and fundamentals. And that's where we've been building out those practical examples of having data governance and data management across these areas, building robust governance of how we're thinking about data science and the evolution of data science and that maturity towards machine learning. And so having that dual speed approach, it's a difficult balancing act, but it's served us well, really partnering with our key business stakeholders of where we can engage, what services they need, and where do we need to make smart choices between those two different speeds. >> Yeah, you just hit on something I want to ask Josh about, about how you said sometimes you have to shut things down, right? It's one thing to embark on I guess a new opportunity or explore, right? New avenues. And then to tell your client, "Well, might be some bumps along the way." >> Yeah. >> A lot of times people in Jason's position don't want to hear that. (laughs) It's like, I don't want to hear about bumps. >> Yeah. >> We want this to be, again, working with clients in that respect and understanding that there's going to be a learning curve and that some things might not function the way you want them to, we might have to take a right instead of a left. >> Yeah, and I think the value of AWS is you really can fail fast and try to innovate and try different use cases out. You don't have any enormous upfront capital expenditure to start building all these servers in your data center for all of your use cases. You can spin something up easily based in idea and then fail fast and move on to the next idea. And I also wanted to emphasize I think how critical top-down executive buy-in is for any cloud transformation. And you could hear it, the excitement in Jason's voice. And anytime we've seen a failed cloud transformation, the common theme is typically lack of executive buy-in and leadership and vision. And I think from day one, Bridgestone has had that buy-in from Jason throughout the whole executive team, and I think that's really evident in the success of the CDP platform. >> Absolutely. >> And what's been your experience in that regard then? Because I think that's a great point Josh raised that you might be really excited in your position, but you've got to convince the C-suite. >> Yeah. >> And there are a lot of variables there that have to be considered, that are kind of out of your sandbox, right? So for somebody else to make decisions based on a holistic approach, right? >> I could tell you, John, talking with with peers of mine, I recognize that I've probably had a little bit of privilege in that regard because the leadership at Bridgestone has recognized to move to this product and solutions organization and have sustainable solutions for the future we needed to move to the cloud. We needed to shift that technology forward. We needed to have a more data-driven approach to things. And so the selling of that was not a huge uphill a battle to be honest. It was almost more of a pull from the top, from our global group CEO, from our CEOs in our different regions, including in Bridgestone Americas. They've been pushing that forward, they've been driving it. And as Josh mentioned, that's been a really huge key to our success, is that executive alignment to move at this new pace, at this new frame of innovation, because that's what the market is demanding in the changing landscape of mobility and the movement of vehicles and things on the road. >> So how do you two work together going forward, Ben? Because you're in a great position now. You've had this tremendous acceleration in the past year, right? Talking about this tenfold increase and what the platform's enabled you to do, but as you know, you can't stand still. Right? (laughs) >> Yeah. There's so much excitement, so many use cases in the backlog now, and it's really been a snowball effect. I think one of the use cases I'm most excited about is starting to apply ML, you know, machine learning to the data sets. And I think there's an amazing IoT predictive maintenance use case there for all of the the censored data collected across all of the tires that are sold. There's an immense amount of data and ultimately we can use that data to predict failures and make our roads safer and help save lives >> Right. >> It's hard to not take a long time to explain all the things because there is a lot ahead of us. The demand curve for capabilities and the enabling things that AWS is going to support is just tremendous. As Josh mentioned, the, the AI ML use cases ahead of us, incredibly exciting. The way we're building and co-innovating things around how we make data more accessible in our data marketplace and more advanced data governance and data quality techniques. The use of, you know, creating data hubs and moving our API landscape into this environment as well is going to be incredibly empowering in terms of accessibility of data across our enterprise globally, as well as both for our internal stakeholders and our external stakeholders. So, I'll stop there because there's a lot of things in there. >> We could be here a long time. >> Yes, we could. >> But it is an exciting time and I appreciate that you're both sharing your perspectives on this because you've got a winning formula going and look forward to what's happening. And we'll see you next year right back here on the Executive Summit. >> Absolutely. >> To measure the success in 2023. How about that? >> Sounds good, thank you, Jim. >> Is that a deal? >> Awesome. >> Sounds good. >> Excellent, good deal. You've been watching AWS here at Coverage of Reinvent '22. We are the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture and you are watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. 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>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave ante, we're covering snowflake summit 22. This is Dave two of our wall to wall cube coverage of three days. We've been talking with a lot of customers partners, and we've got some more partners to talk with us. Next. Informatica two of our guests are back with us on the program. Rick TA Daniels joins us the G P global ecosystems and technology at Informatica and Peter COO vice president and chief strategist banking and financial services. Welcome guys. >>Thank you guys. Thanks for having us, Peter, >>Talk to us about what some of the trends are that you're seeing in the financial services space with respect to cloud and data and AI. >>Absolutely. You know, I'd say 10 years ago, the conversation around cloud was what is that? Right? How do we actually, or no way, because there was a lot of concerns about privacy and security and so forth. You know, now, as you see organizations modernizing their business capabilities, they're investing in cloud solutions for analytics applications, as well as data data being not only just a byproduct of transactions and interactions in financial services, it truly fuels business success. But we have a term here in Informatica where data really has no value unless it's fit for business. Use data has to be accessible in the systems and applications you use to run your business. It has to be clean. It has to be valid. It has to be transparent. People need to understand where it comes from, where it's going, how it's used and who's using it. It also has to be understood by the business. >>You can have all the data in the world and your business applications, but people don't know what they need it to use it for how they should use it. It has no value as well. And then lastly, it has to be protected when it matters most what we're seeing across financial services, that with the evolution of cloud now, really being the center of focus for many of the net new investments, data is scattered everywhere, not just in one cloud environment, but in multiple cloud environments, but they're still dealing with many of the on premise systems that have been running this industry for many, many years. So organizations need to have the ability to understand what they need to do with their data. More importantly, tie that to a measurable business outcome. So we're seeing the data conversation really at the board level, right? It's an asset of the business. It's no longer just owned by it. Data governance brings both business technology and data leaders together to really understand how do we use manage, govern and really leverage data for positive business outcomes. So we see that as an imperative that cuts across all sectors of financial services, both for large firms, as well as for the mid-market so >>Quick follow up. If I, may you say it's a board level. I totally agree. Is it also a line of business level? Are you seeing increasingly that line of businesses are leaning in owning the data, be building data products and the like >>Absolutely. Because at the end of the day business needs information in order to be successful. And data ownership now really belongs in the front office. Business executives understand that data again is not just a bunch of zeros and ones. These are critical elements for them make decisions and to run their business, whether it's to improve customer experience, whether it's to grow Wallace share, whether it's to comply with regulations, manage risks in today's environment. And of course being agile business knows that data's important. They have ownership of it and technology and data organizations help facilitate that solutions. And of course the investments to ensure that business can make the decisions and take the appropriate actions. >>A lot of asks and requirements on data. That's a big challenge for organizations. You mentioned. Well, one of the things that we've mentioned many times on this program recently is every company has to be a data company. There is no more, it's not an option anymore. If you wanna be successful, how does Informatica help customers navigate all of the requirements on data for them to be able to extract that business value and create new products and services in a timely fashion? >>So Informatica announced what we call the intelligent data management cloud platform. The platform has capabilities to help organizations access the data that they need, share it across to applications that run their business, be able to identify and deal with data, quality issues and requirements. Being able to provide that transparency, the lineage that people need across multiple environments. So we've been investing in this platform that really allows our customers to take advantage of these critical data management, data governance and data privacy requirements, all in one single solution. So we're no longer out there just selling piecemeal products. The platform is the offering that we provide across all industries. >>So how has that affected the way Informatica does business over the last several years? Snowflake is relatively new. You guys have been around a long time. How has your business evolved and specifically, how are you serving the snowflake yeah. Joint customers with >>Informatica? Yeah, I think then when I've been talking with folks here at the event, there are two big areas that keep coming up. So, so data governance, data governance, data governance, right? It's such a hot topic out there. And as Peter was mentioning, data governance is a critical enabler of access to data. In fact, there is an IDC study for last year that said that, you know, 80, 84% of executives, you know, no surprise, right? They wanna have data driven outcomes, data driven organizations, but only 30% of practitioners actually use data to make decisions. There's a huge gap there. And really that's where governance comes in and creating trust around data and not only creating trust, but delivering data to and users. So that's one big trend. The other one is departmental user adoption. We're seeing a, a huge push towards agility and rapid startup of new projects, new data driven transformations that are happening at the departmental level, you know, individual contributors, that sort of thing. So Informatica, we did a made announcement yesterday with snowflake of a whole host of innovations that are really targeting those two big trend areas. >>I wanna get into the announcements, but you know, the point about governance and, and users, business users being reluctant, it's kind of chicken and egg, isn't it. If, if I don't have the governance, I'm, I'm afraid to use it. But even if I do have it, there's the architecture of my, my, my company, my, my data organization, you know, may not facilitate that. And so I'm gonna change the architect, but then it's a wild west. So it has to be governed. Isn't that a challenge that company companies >>Absolutely, and, and governance is, is a lot more than just technology, right? It's of a people process problem. And there really is a community or an ecosystem inside every organization for governance. So it's really important that when you think about deploying governance and being successful, that every stakeholder have the ability to interact with this common framework, right. They get what they need out of it. It's tailored for how they wanna work. You've got your it folks, you got your chief data officer data stewards, you have your privacy folks and you have your business users. They're all different personas. So we really focus on creating a holistic, single pane of glass view with our cloud data governance and catalog offering that that really takes all the way from the raw technical data and actually delivers data in, in a shopping cart, like experience for actual enterprise users. Right? And, and so I think that's when data governance goes from historically data, governments was seen as an impediment. It was seen as a tax, I think, but now it's really an accelerator, an enabler and driving consumption of data, which in turn for our friends here at snowflake is exactly what they're looking for. >>Talk about the news. So data loader, what does that do? >>Well, it's all in the name. We say, no, the data loader it, it's a free utility that we announced here at, at snowflake summit that allows any user to sign up. It's completely free, no capacity limits. You just need an email address, three simple steps start rapidly loading data into snowflake. Right? So that first step is just get data in there. Start working with snowflake. Informatica is investing and making that easy for every single user out there. And especially those departmental users who wanna get started quickly. >>Yeah. So, I mean, that's a key part point of getting data into the snowflake data cloud, right? It's like any cloud, you gotta get data in. How does it work with, with customers? I mean, you guys are, are known, you have a long history of, you know, extract transform ETL. How does it work in the snowflake world? Is it, is it different? Is it, you remember the Hadoop days? It was, it was E LT, right? How are customers doing that today in this environment? >>Yeah, it's different. I mean, there, there are a lot of the, the same patterns are still in play. There's a lot more of a rapid data loading, right. Is a key theme. Just get it into snowflake and then work on the data, transform it inside of snowflake. So it's, it's a flavor of T right. But it's really pushing down to the snowflake data cloud as opposed to Hado with spark or something like that. Right. So that, that's definitely how customers are using it. And, you know, majority of our customers actually with snowflake are using our cloud technology, but we're also helping customers who are on premise customers, automate the migration from our on-premises technology to our cloud native platform as well. Yeah. >>And I'd say, you know, in addition to that, if you think about building a snowflake environment, Informatica helps with our data loader solution, but that's not enough. Then now you need to get value out of your data. So you can put raw data into the snowflake environment, but then you realize the data's not actually fit for business use, what do we need to do actually transform it to clean it, to govern it. And our customers that use Informatica with snowflake are managing the entire data management and data governance process so that they can allow the business to get value out of the snowflake investment. >>How quickly can you enable a business to get value from that data to be able to make business decisions that can transform right. Deliver competitive advantage? >>I think it really depends on an organization on a case by case basis. At the end of the day, you need to understand why are you doing this in the first place, right? What's the business outcome that you're trying to achieve next, identify what data elements do you actually need to capture, govern and manage in order to support the decisions and the actions that the business needs to take. If you don't have those things defined, that's where data governance comes into play. Then all you're doing is setting up a technical environment with a bunch of zeros in ones that no one knows what to do with. So we talk about data governance more holistically, say, you need to align it to your business outcomes, but ensure that you have people, processes, roles, and responsibilities, and the underlying technology to not just load data into snowflake, but to leverage it again for the business needs across the organization. >>Oh, good, please. >>I just wanted to add to that real quickly. Yeah. One of the things Informatica we're philosophically focused on is how do you accelerate the entire business of data management? So with our, our cloud platform, we have what's called our clear AI engine, right? So we use AI techniques, machine learning recommendations to accelerate with the, the knowledge of the metadata of what's gone on the organization. For example, that when we discover data assets figure out is this customer data, is it product data that dramatically shortens the time to find data assets deliver them? And so across our whole portfolio, we're taking things that were traditionally months to do. We're taking 'em down to weeks and days and even hours, right? So that's the whole goal is just accelerate that entire journey and life cycle through cloud native approaches and AI. Yeah, >>You kind of just answered my question. I think Rick, so you have this joint value statement together. We help customers. This is informatic and snowflake together. We help customers modernize their data. Architecture enable the most critical workloads, provide AI driven data governance and accelerate added value with advanced analytics. I mean, you definitely touched on some of those, but kind of unpack the rest of that. What do you mean by modernize? What is their data architecture? What is that? Let's start there. What does that look like? Modernizing a data. Yeah. >>So, so a lot with so many customers, right? They, they built data warehouses, core data and analytics systems on premises, right? They're using ETL technology using those, those either warehouse, appliances or databases. And what they're looking for is they wanna move to a cloud native model, right. And all the benefits of cloud in terms of TCO elasticity, instant scale up agility, all those benefits. So we're looking, we're looking to do with our, our modernization programs for our, for our current customer base that are on premises. We automate the process to get them to a fully cloud native, which means they can now do hybrid. They can do multi-cloud elastic processing. And it's all also in a consumption based model that we introduced about about a year and a half ago. So, so they're looking for all those elements of a cloud native platform and they're, but they're solving the same problems, right? We still have to connect data. We still have to transform data, prepare it, cleanse it, all those things exist, but in a, in a cloud native footprint, and that's what we're helping them get to. >>And the modern architecture these days, quite honestly, it's no longer about getting best breed tools and stitching them together and hoping that it will actually work. And Informatica is value proposition that our platform has all those capabilities as services. So our customers don't have to deal with the costs and the risks of trying to make everything work behind the scenes and what we've done with IDMC or intelligent data management cloud for financial services, retail, CPG, and healthcare and life sciences. In addition to our core capabilities and our clear AI machine learning engine, we also have industry accelerators, prebuilt data, quality rules for certain regulations in within banking. We've got master data management, customer models for healthcare insurance industry, all prebuilt. So these are accelerators that we've actually built over the years. And we're now making available to our customers who adopt informatic as intelligent data management cloud for their data management and governance needs. >>And then, and then the other part of this statement that that's interesting is provide AI driven data governance. You know, we are seeing a move toward, you know, decentralized data architectures and, and, and organizations. And we talk to snowflake about that. They go, yeah, we're globally distributed cloud. Okay, great. So that's decent place, but what we see a lot of customers doing to say, okay, we're gonna give lines of business responsibility for data. We're gonna argue about who owns what. And then once we settle that here's your own, here's your own data lake. Maybe they they'll try to cobble together a catalog or a super catalog. Right. And then they'll try to figure out, you know, some algorithms to, to determine data quality, you know, best, you know, okay. Don't use. Right, right. So that, so if I understand it, you automate all that. >>So what we're doing with AI machine learning is really helping the data professional, whether in the business, in technology or in between not only to get the job done faster, better, and cheaper, but actually do it intelligently. What do we mean by that? For example, our AI engine machine learning will look at data patterns and determine not only what's wrong with your data, but how should you fix it and recommend data quality rules to actually apply them and get those errors addressed. We also infer data relationships across a multi-cloud environment where those definitions were never there in the beginning. So we have the ability to scan the metadata and determine, Hey, this data set is actually related to that data set across multiple clouds. It makes the organization more productive, but more importantly, it increases the confidence level that these organizations have the right infrastructure in place in order to manage and govern their data for what they're trying to do from a business perspective. >>And I add that as well. I think you're talking a lot about data mesh architectures, right? That, that are really kind of popular right now. And I think those kind of, they live or die on, on data governance. Right? If you don't have data governance to share taxonomy, these things, it's very hard to, I think, scale those individual working groups. But if you have a platform where they, the data owners can publish out visibility to what their data means, how to use it, how to interpret it and get that insight, that context directly to the data consumers that's game changing. Right. And that's exactly what we're doing with our cloud data governance and catalog. >>Well, the data mesh, you talk about data mesh, there's four principles, right? It's like decentralized architecture data products. So if, once you figure out those two yep. You just created two more problems, which is the other two parts of the Princip four, two parts of the four principles, self service infrastructure, and computational governance. And that's like the hardest part of federated, federated, computational governance. That's the hardest part. That's the problem that you're solving. >>Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, think about the whole decentralization and self-service, well, I may be able to access my data in mesh architecture, but if I don't know what it means, how to use it for what purpose, when not to use it, you're creating more problems than what you originally expected to solve. So what we're doing is addressing the data management and the governance requirements, regardless of what the architecture is, whether it's a mesh architecture, a fabric architecture or a traditional data lake or a data store. >>Yeah. Mean, I say, I think data mesh is more of an organizational construct than it is. I, I'm not quite sure what data fabric is. I think Gartner confused the issue that data fabric was an old NetApp term. Yeah. You're probably working in NetApp at the time and it made sense in the NetApp context. And then I think Gartner didn't like the fact that Jamma Dani co-opted this cool term. So they created data fabric, but whatever. But my, my point being, I think when I talk to customers that are they're, they're trying to get more value outta data and they recognize that going through all these hyper specialized roles is time consuming and it's not working for them. And they're frustrated to your points and your joint statement. They want to accelerate that. And they're realizing, and the only way to do that is to distribute responsibility, get more people involved in the process. >>And, and that's, it kind of dovetails with some, the announcements we made on data governance for snowflake, right, is you're taking these, these operational controls of the snowflake layer that are typically managed by SQL and you, and that decentralized architecture data owner doesn't know how to set those patterns and things like that. Right. So we're saying, all right, we're, we're creating these deep integration so that again, we have a fit for persona type experience where they can publish data assets, they can set the rules and policies, and we're gonna push that down to snowflake. So when it actually comes to provisioning data and doing data sharing through snowflake, it's all a seamless experience for the end user and the data owner. Yeah. >>That's great. Beautiful, >>Seamless experience absolutely necessary these days for everybody above guys. Thanks so much for joining David me today, talking about Informatica what's new, what you're doing with snowflake and what you're enabling customers to do in terms of really extracting value from that data. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Yep. >>Thank you for having us >>For our guests and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of snowflake summit day two of the cubes coverage stick around Dave. And I will be right back with our next guest.

>>Everyone welcome back to the cubes, unstoppable domains partner showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. This segment, this session is about expansion into Asia, Pacific and Europe for unstoppable domains. It's a hot start-up in the web three area, really creating a new innovation around NFTs crypto, single sign-on and digital identity giving users the power like they should. We've got two great guests, the Jod ramen head of Europe and Neil Katz on is Neil I, our head of Asia. So John Neil, welcome to this cube and let's talk about the expansion. It's not really expansion. The global economy is global, but showcase here about unstoppable was going to Europe. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. >>So we're living in a global world, obviously crypto blockchain, decentralized applications. You're starting to see mainstream adoption, which means the shift is happening. There are more apps coming and it means more infrastructure and things got to get easier, right? So, you know, reduce the steps it takes to do stuff makes the Wallace better. Give people more secure. Access can control the day. This is what unstoppable is all about. You guys are in the middle of it. You're on this wave. What is the potential of web three with unstoppable and in general in Asia and in Europe, >>I can go first. So now let's look at the Asia market. I mean, typically we see the us market, the Europe markets for typical web two.zero software and infrastructure is definitely the larger markets with us, typically accounting for about 60% and you know, Europe about 20 to 30% and Asia has always been small, but we see in this whole world of blockchain, crypto web three.zero Asia already has about 116 million users. They have more than 35 local exchanges. And if you really look at the number of countries in terms of the rate of adoption of many of the Asian countries, which probably would have never even heard of like Vietnam actually topping the list, right? One of the reasons that this is happening again, if you go through the Asian development banks, latest report, you have these gen Z's and millennials of that's 50% of the Asian population. >>And if you really look at 50% of the Asian population, that's 1.1 billion people out of the total, 1.8 billion gen Z and millennials that you have in the world. And these folks are digital native they're people. In fact, our mobile first and millennials. Many of us like myself at least are people who are digital. And 20% of the world's economy is currently digital and the rest 40 to 50%, which is going to happen. It's going to happen in the web three dot four world. And that's going to be driven by millennials and gen Zs. I think that's why this whole space is so exciting because it's being driven by the users by the new generation. I mean, that's my broad thought on this little thing. >>I want to just comment on Asia also in the other areas where mobile first came, you had the end, the younger demographics, absolutely driving the change because they're like, well, I don't want the old way. They've got, they can write, write from scratch at the beginning, they're using the technologies that has propelled the crypto world. I mean, that is absolutely true. Everyone's kind of seeing that. And that's now influencing some of these developer nations, like say in Europe, for instance, and even north America, I think years more advanced than north America in my opinion, but we'll get to that. Oh, so potential in Europe. So John could take us through your thoughts on as head of Europe for >>Absolutely so news, right? I think the issue is way ahead in terms of gen Z user golfing, critical Jordan was actually a distant second, but it's a rising tool that actually has the highest transaction. Like they will be retro or last year and a half. And you know, if you dig a bit deeper, I'd say, arguably, I think the opportunity in web three is perhaps the largest and perhaps it can mean the most withdrawal Jora for the last decade has been trailing behind Asia and north America when it comes to. But I think unicorns and I think that we can provide a step change opportunity. This belief for me, stems from the fact that Jordan on a seat, right? Like for example, GDPR is focused on enabling real data ownership. And I think I recently read a paper out of Stanford by Patrick Henson speaks about being the best bot paper, enabling patient sovereign. >>So what that means is you just spend tool the data they've been to the internet and they harness the value from it. And on one hand while, you know, verb is enabling that regulation that could bring that forward when she actually brings it into action. So I think with what enablement better regulation, and we'll see more hubs like the crypto valley in Switzerland popup that we're bring, I think normal regulation, the right regulation. We can expect what info capital for builder talent that then drives more adoption. So I think the prospects for Europe in terms of usage, as well as builders are quite right. >>Yeah. And I think also you guys are in areas where the cultural shift is so dramatic. You mentioned Asia that they have demographics. Even the entrepreneurial culture in Europe right now is booming. You look at all the venture back startups and the young generation building companies. And again, cloud computing is a big part of that as obviously. But look at compared to the United States, you go back 15 years ago, Europe was way behind on, on the startup scene. Now it's booming and pumping on all cylinders and kind of points at this cultural shift. It's almost like a generational, you know, it's like the digital hippies changing the world. You know, they're web three. It's kinda, I don't want to be web to web two is so old. You know, I don't want to do that. And it's all because it's changing, right? And there are things that inadequate with web two on the naming system, also the arbitrage around fake information, bots users being manipulated, and also, you know, merchandise and monetize through these portals. And that's, that's kind of ending. So talk about the dynamic of web two, three at those areas. You've got users and you've got companies who build applications, they're going to shift and be forced in our opinion, and want to get a reaction to that. Do you think applications are going to have to be web three or users will reject them? >>Yeah, I think I jumped in and I'm not Neil's sport. I think the, the back is built on Q principles, right? Decentralization or ship and compostability. And I think these are binary. So, you know, if, if I look far down the future, I don't see a future where you have just whipped V I think there's gonna be a coexistence or cooperation between bamboo companies. I think there's going to be a sliding scale to decentralization versus PlayStation similarity, you know, ownership. And I think users will find what works best for them in different contexts. I think what installed this link is potentially providing the identity system correctly and that's, we were powerful that account being better on blockchains, then the naming system we had for web, right? The, the identity system serve focus, Paul, taking that you as a personal identifier that, so blockchain to me mean they're attaching all kinds of attributes that define who you are, the physical and digital world, and then filling out information that you can transact on the basis of. And I think that users would as the or future, right with, you know, InBev to more of the users were essentially consumers or readers of the internet and in bed with more technology platforms taking shape and getting proliferation that you would see more than just being actually writers, publishers, and developers on the internet. And they were value owning the data and to harness the most model valuable. So I think a basketball with bonds, and I think that's the future. I see that >>Well, I think you put it very, very nicely. So the other thing you've covered most of the points, I think, but I'm seeing a lot of different things that are happening in the ground. I think a lot of the garments, a lot of the web two.zero players, the traditional banks, these guys are not sitting quiet on the blockchain space. There's a lot of pilots happening in the blockchain space, right? I'm mean I can give you real life examples. I mean, one of the biggest example is in my home state of Maharashtra and Mumbai is they actually partnered with the polygon MarTech, right? Actually built a private blockchain based capability to, you know, kind of deliver your COVID vaccination certificates with the QR code it. And that's the only way they could deliver that kind of volumes in that shorter time. But the kind of user control the user control the user has on the data that could only be possible because of blockchain. >>Of course, it's still private because it's healthcare data. Now, they still want to keep it, or, you know, something that's not fully on a blockchain, but that is something, a similarly view. There is a consortium of about nine banks who have actually been trying to work on making things like remittances or trade finance, much, much easier. I mean, remittances through a traditional web two.zero world is very, very costly. And especially in the Asian countries, but a lot of people from Southeast Asia work across the world and send back money home. It's a very costly and a time taking affair. So they have actually partnered and built a blockchain based capability. Again, in a pilot stage, we kind of reduce the transaction costs. Like for example, if we just look at the trade finance space where there are 14 million traders who do 2.4, $5 trillion of transaction, now they were able to actually reduce the time that it takes from eight to nine days to about two to three days. So to add onto what you're saying, I think these two worlds are going to meet and meet very soon. And when they meet what they need is a single digital identity, a human readable way of being able to send and receive and do commerce. I think that's where I see unstoppable domains, very nicely positioned to be able to integrate these two worlds. So that's, that's my thought on >>Great point. I was going to get into which industries and kind of what areas you see in your air and geographies, but it's a good point about saving time. I liked how you brought that up because in these new waves, you either got to reduce the steps. It takes to do something or save time, make it easy. And these are the, this is the successful formula in anything, whether it's an app or UI or whatever, but what specifically are they doing in your areas? And, and what about unstoppable? Are they attracted to, is it because of the identity? Is it because of the, the apps is because of the single sign on what is that? What is the reason that they're leaning in and unpacking this further into their pilots? >>Do you want to take that because >>I am having these dumping it'd be warranted. So I think, and let me clarify the question, John you're, you're talking about companies looking at departments of our production partner. >>Yeah. What are they seeing and what are they seeing as the value that these pilots we heard from Neil Canada around the, the, the financial industry and obviously gaming gaming's one it's obvious, huge financial healthcare. I mean, these are obviously verticals that are going to be heavily impacted in a positive way. Where, what are they seeing as the value what's getting them motivated to do these pilots? Why they, why they jumping in with, with both feet, if you will, on these projects, is it because it's saving money? Is it time? What, or, or both, is it ease of use? Is it the, is it the user's expectations trying to tease out how you guys see that evolving? >>Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think the, the, this is still spaces. The movement is going very fast, but I think the space has been young. And right now a lot of these companies are seeing the potential that, that few offers. And I think the key dimensions, like the possibility isn't leadership ownership. So I think the key thing I'm seeing in you is these web companies seeing the momentum and looking to harness that book by enabling bridges web. One of the key trends in water has been FinTech. I think over the last five to six years, we'll have the Revolut and 26 platforms, new banks and super finance. So perhaps rising to the forefront and they are all enabling or connecting a page with them in some shape and form either any of them creating a crypto, some are launching their own native wallets. And these are essentially ways that they can one crack users. >>So the gen Z who are looking for war with finance to get them on board, but also to look to, you know, enable more adoption by data on users, one, not using these services that potentially create new revenue streams and, and create allocation of capital that they could not access to have access to otherwise. So I think that's one brand I'm seeing over here. I think the other key trend is in your use has been games. And again, that links are damaged. We have to, that is called the MetAware. So a lot of game companies are looking to step into game five, which is again, completely different. This is more work traditional game companies use use similarly metal versus we, again, worship creates a different business model and they see that users and gamers of the future were born to engage with that versus just being more eyes on the business of question or our ads. And I think that's something that they're, you know, becoming a bit off and quickly the space launching the one better versus, or are gained by applications or creating a comfortability with these, these, these, >>You know, I wanted to get it to this point, but I was going to ask about the community empowerment piece of this equation because she's identity is about the user's identity, which implies they're part of a community. Web three is very convenient community centric, but you mentioned gaming. I mean, people who have been watching the gaming world like ourselves, know that communities and marketplaces have been very active for years, many years, you know, over 15 years community, you know, games, currency in game activity has been out there. Right. But siloed within the games themselves. So now it seems that that paradigm is coming in and empowering all communities. Is this something that you guys see and agree with? And if so, what's different about that? What, how are our, how our communities being empowered? I guess that's the question. >>Yeah. I can maybe take that too. So, I mean, I've also heard of vaccine I'm in a 40% of their user base in Vietnam. And the average earning that a person makes in a month out of playing this game is more than the, you know, national daily or, you know, minimum wage that is there. Right. So that's the kind of potential actually going back as a combination of actually answering your earlier question, I think, or, and about what Sadat said, what's really unique in Asia is we still have a lot of unbanked people, right? So if you really look at the total unbanked population of the world, it's 1.6 billion and 24% of that as a nation, almost 375 million people are an issue. So these are people who do not have access to finance or credit. So the whole idea is how do we get these people on to a banking system on to peer peer, to peer lending out kind of peer to peer finance kind of capabilities? >>I think, you know, again, unstoppable domains kind of helps in that, right? If you just look@thepurethatthree.zero world and the complex, you know, technical way in which, you know, money or other crypto is transferred from one wallet to the other, it's very difficult for an un-banked person who probably cannot even do basic communication, cannot read and write, but actually be able to do it, but something that's very human readable, something that's very easy for him to understand something that's visual, something that he can see on his mobile with, you know, two G network. We are not talking of the world is talking about 5g, but there are parts of Asia which are still using two G and you know, two point 5g kind of network. Right? So I think that's one key use case. I think the banks are trying to solve because for them, this is a whole new customer segment. >>And sorry, I actually went back a little bit to your earlier question, but you know, coming back to this whole community building, right? So on March 8th, we're launching something called us women of web 3.0, that is three. This is basically to again, empower. So if you, again, look at Asia, you know, women, you know, need a lot of training. They need a lot of enablement for them to be able to leverage the power of that three.zero. I can talk about India because being from India, a lot of the women do not, you know, they, they do all the, you know, small businesses, but the money is not taken by middlemen or taken by their husbands, but fundamentally the money comes to them because that's what they use to educate their children. And it's the same thing in a lot of other, Southeast Asian countries as well. I think it's very important to build those communities or communities of women entrepreneurs. I think this is a big opportunity to really get the section of society, which probably, you know, will take 10 more years. If we go for the normal one to web two.zero progression where the power is with corporations and not with the individual. >>And that's a great announcement, by the way, you mentioned the $10 million worth of domains being issued out for this is democratization is what it's all about. Again, this is, you know, a new revolution. I mean, this is a new thing, so great stuff, more education, more learning, and can get the banks up and running, get those people banking because once they're banking, they get wallets, right? So they need the wallet. So let's get to the real meat here. You guys are in the territory, Europe and Asia, where there's a lot of wallets. There's a lot of exchanges because that's, they're not in the United States is few of them there, but most of them outside the United States and you got a lot of di apps developing, you know, decentralized applications. Okay. So you've got all this coming together and your territory, what's the strategy is that what's the strategy. How are you gonna attack that? You've got the wallets, you've got the exchanges and you've got D applications. You, >>Yeah. so I think just quickly there, I think one point is the Neil very expressive, beautifully is the final conclusion that that is something that has been inspired me, how better we can make it more inclusive that inspired mine. Yeah. I think for us, I think when a bit at the base star, when it comes to your right and the, the key focus in, in, in terms of our approach would be that the more do two dates, one, we want increase the utility of these domains. And the second thing is we weren't via proliferation with, with, with our partners. So when I speak on utility, I think utility is when you have a universe like depart, which is a domain name, and then you have these attributes around it, right? What, what that defines your identity. So in, in the context in Europe, we would look to find partners to help us enrich that identity around the domain name. >>And that adds value for users in terms of acquiring new leads and new blinds. And all the other element comes proliferation. I think it's about working with all those crypto and participants, as well as the adjacent companies, parents services who can help us educate current and future upcoming three users about the utility of domain names and help us onboard them to the, the. So I think that's going to be the general focus. I think the key is that as well, and hopefully it will be having watch regulation, you that allow us to do this at a visual level, but at the outset, I think it's going to be tackling it. Can't be by, can't be identified on this where there's deeper, better patient for and then making sure that we are partnering with local project partners that are demanding for local communities there. So, yeah, that's my view in, >>Oh, I think, yeah. So again, in Asia, once you have a significant part of Manatee living in Asia, right? So obviously I know obviously all the other challenges and the opportunities that we talk about, I think the first area of focus would be educating the people on the massive opportunity that they can not, they have, and if you're able to get them in early, I think it's great for them as well, right? Because by the time, you know, governments regulations and a large banking financial companies move, but if we can get the larger population or, you know, into this whole space, it's, it's good for them. So they are first movers in that space. I think we're doing a lot of things on this worldwide. I think we have done more than a hundred Pasco podcast, just educating people on water's web feed or, or, you know, waters, what are NFP domains, what is defy and, you know, so on and so forth. >>I think it would need some bit of localization customization in Asia, given that, you know, India itself has about 22 languages. And then there are the other countries which each of them have their own local languages and, you know, syntax, semantics and all those things. So I think that that is very important to be able to disseminate the knowledge or though it's it's global. But I think to get the grassroot people to understand the opportunity, I think it would need some amount of work that I think also building communities. I think John, you talked about communities so that such I'd talk about communities. I think it's very important to build communities because communities create ideation. It talks about people share their challenges so that people don't repeat the same mistakes. Also. I think it's very important to build communities based on impressed. I think we all know in the technology world, you can build communities and on telegram, telegram, discard, Twitter spaces and all those things. >>But, you know, again, when we're talking about financial inclusion, we're talking of a different kind of community building. I think that that would be important. And then of course I will, you know, kind of primarily from a company perspective, I think getting the 35 odd exchanges in Asia, the wallets to partner with us, just as an example, you know, they hired till September of last year, about 3,500 apps in just one quarter at double two, 7,000 tabs on their platform. But that is the pace or the speed of innovation that we are seeing on this whole, you know, three dot old space. I think it's very important to get those key partners. We're developing those dots or see the power of single sign on having a human readable, digital identity, being able to seamlessly transfer your assets, digital assets across multiple crypto's across multiple NFT when the market places and so on. So >>Yeah, and I think the whole community thing too is also you seeing the communities being part of certainly in the entertainment area and the artistry creator world, the users are part of the community own it too. So it goes both ways, but this brings up the marketplace too, as well, because you ha you guys have the opportunity to have trust built into the software layer, right? So now you can keep the reputation data. You don't, you can be anonymous, but it's trustworthy versus bots, which we all know bots can be killed and then started again with, and no one knows what the timeline has been around. So, you know, the whole inadequacy of web too, which is just growing pains, right? This is what it'll evolution looks like, you know, next to them, traction layer. So I love that vibe. How advanced do you think that thinking is where people are saying, Hey, we need this abstraction layer. We need this digital identity. We need to start expanding our applications so that the users can move across these and break down those silos where the data is cause that's, this is like the problem, right? It's the data silos that are holding it back. What'd you guys' reaction to that? The, the killing the silos and making it horizontally scalable. >>Yeah, I think it's, it's not problem. It is a problem of people who understand technology. It's a problem of a lot of the people in the business who want to compete effectively against those giants, which are holding all the data. So I think those are the people who will innovate and move again, coming back to financial inclusion, coming back to the unbanked and those guys just want to do their business. They want to live their daily life. I think that's not where you'll see, you will see innovation in a different form, but they're not going to disrupt the disruptors. I think that would be the people that are fintechs. I think they would be the first to move on to something like that. I mean, that's my humble opinion. >>Absolutely. I, I got you on creators, right? So like I said earlier, right, we are heading for a future where more creators on the internet, whether you're publishing, writing something, you're creating video content. And that means that the data they own, because that's their data, they're bringing it to the internet. That's more powerful, more useful, and they should be reprocessed on that basis. So I think people are recognizing that and they've been using the proposal and as they do that, they were warranties systems that enabled them to work permissions with data. They will want to be able to control what the permission and what they want to provide, adapt. And at the end of the day, you know, these applications have to work backwards from customers and keep the customers looking for, but that then, and ask where passport for >>The users want freedom. They want to be able to be connected and not be restricted. They want to freely move around the global internet and do whatever they want with the friends and apps that they want to consume and not feel arbitrage. They don't want to feel like they're kind of nailed into a walled garden and, you know, stuck there and having to come back. It's the new normal. If >>They don't want to be the, they don't want to be the product. They >>Don't want to be the perfect gentlemen. Great to have you on great conversation. We're going to continue this later. Certainly want to keep the updates coming. You guys are in a very hot area in Europe and Asia Pacific. That's where a lot of the action is happening. We see the entrepreneurial activity, the business transformation, certainly with the new paradigm shift and this big wave that's coming. It's here. It's mainstream. Thanks for coming on, sharing your insights. Appreciate it. >>Thanks for the opportunity. >>Great conversation. All the actions moving and happening real fast. This is the cube unstoppable debates partner showcase with I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

>>from >>around the globe. >>It's the cube >>covering Data Citizens >>21 brought to you by culebra. >>Well how everybody john Wallace here as we continue our coverage here on the cube of Data Citizens 21 it is a pleasure of ours to welcome in an award winner here at Data Citizens 21 were with Jacqueline Osborne who is the Managing Director and risk and Finance technology executive at Bank of America and she is also the data citizen of the Year, one of the culebra Excellence Award winners. And Jacqueline congratulations on the honor. Well deserved, I'm sure. >>Thank you so much. It is a true honor and I am so happy to be here and I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Yeah, what is it? >>It's all about just the concept of being a data citizen um in your mind um what is all that about? What are those pillars in terms of being a good data sets? And that gets to the point that you are the data citizen of the year? >>I think that's such a good question and actually is something that I don't even know if I know everything because it's constantly evolving. Being a data citizen yesterday is not what it is today and it's not what it means tomorrow because this field is evolving but with that said I think to me being a data citizen is being is having that awareness that data matters is driving to that data as an asset and really trying to lay the foundation to ensure its the right data in the right place at the right time. >>Yeah, let's talk about that high wire act because it's becoming increasingly more complex as you know, you've been in This realm if you will for what 15 years now? I believe it has evolved dramatically right in terms of capabilities but also complexity. So let's talk about that, about making finding the relevance of data and delivering it on time to the right people within your organization. >>How much >>More challenging is that now than it was maybe five or just you know, 10 years ago? >>I mean it's kind of crazy. There are some areas that make it so much easier and then for your question in some areas that make it so much harder. But if I can, let's start with the easier because I think this is something that really is important is when I started this, I've been in data my entire professional career, I've been achieved data officer since 2013. Um and when I started, I used to joke that I was a used car salesman. I was selling selling something this idea of data quality, data governance that nobody wanted. But now, so the shift of your question is the good if I am now a luxury car salesman selling a product that everybody wants, but shift to the bad nobody wants to pay for. So the complexity of it as data becomes bigger as we talk about big data and unstructured data and social media and facebook feeds. That is hard. It is complex. And the ability to truly manage and govern data to the degree of that perfection is really hard. So the more data we get, the more complexity, the more challenge, the more there is a need to really prioritize align with business strategy and ensure that you are embedding into the culture and the DNA of the corporate and not do it in the silos. >>You know, delivering that data to in the secure environment obviously, critically important for any enterprise, but even more so to put a finer point on financial services in terms of your work in that regard. So, so let's add that layer into this to not only internal, all the communication you have to do in the collaboration, you have to have but you have these external stakeholders to write, you have me, you know, a boa client if you will um that you've got to be aware of and have to communicate with. So so let's talk about that, that kind of merger if you will of not only having to work internally but also externally and making sure that with all the data you've got now that it works >>indeed. And you're kind of moving towards this new one of the newer dimensions, which is privacy, I mean G D p R was the first regulation in the UK, but now you have the C C P A and the California and it's coming and that that right to be forgotten or more importantly, as you said, as a customer of financial issues, that right to understand where your data is is very important because customers do want to know that their information is understood, trusted protected and going to be taken care of. So that ability to really transform back that you have a solid basis and that you are taking the measures and the necessary steps to ensure that that data is air quotes govern is so important. And it really again that shift from that used car salesman to a luxury car salesman. Your question is another example of how that shift is happening. It's no longer a should do or could do. Data governance is really becoming a must do and why you are seeing so many more. Chief data officers. Chief analytics officers, data management professionals. The profession is growing. I mean, incrementally every single day. >>What about the balancing act that you do? Let's just do with the internal audiences that you have to contend with. I shouldn't say content, content has that pejorative term to that you that you that you deal with, you collaborate with. Um you know, governance is also critically important because you want to make data available to the right people at the right time, but only the right people. Right. So what kind of practices or procedures are you putting in a place at B. O. A to make sure that that data is delivered to the right folks, but only to the right people and trying I guess to educate people within your organization as to the need for these strict governance processes. >>Sure. I tend to refer to them as the foundational pillars and if I was to take a step back and say what they are and how we use them. So the first one is metadata management and it is really around that. What data do you have? It's that understanding the information. So I used to refer to it or I still refer to it as when we were going to the library and you used to have to look at the card catalog That metadata manages very similar to the card catalogue for books. It tells you all the information. What's the genre? Who's the author, what the section is, where it is in the library and that is a core pieces. If you don't understand your data you can govern it. So that's kind of Pillar one. Metadata management. Pillar two is what's often referred to his data lineage. But I do think the new buzzword is that a providence? It's really that access low. It's understanding where data comes from the movement along the journey and where it's going. If you don't understand that horizontal front to back you can't govern the information as well because it can be changing hands, it can be altering and so it's that that end to end look at things. This pillar to pillar three is data quality and that's really that measurement of is it the right data and it is made up of a series of data quality dimensions, accuracy, completeness, validity, timeliness, conformity, reasonable nous etcetera. And it's really that fit freezes the data that I have the right data as I said earlier and then last but not least is issue management. At the end of the day there will be problems, there is too much data. It is in too many hands. So it's not we're not trying to remove all data issues but having a process where you can actually log prioritized and ultimately remediate is that that last and final pillar of the data management I would call circle because it has to all come back together and it's rinse and repeat. >>Yeah. And and so you you raise a point, a great point about things are going to go wrong. You know, eventually something happens. We know nothing is foolproof, nothing is bulletproof. Uh and we're certainly seeing that in terms of security now right with breaches pretty well publicized with invasions, ransom, where you name it, right, all kinds of flavors of that. Unfortunately. So from your perspective in terms of being that this data data guardian, if you will um how much of your concerns now have been amplified in terms of security and privacy and and that kind of internal uh communication you have to have or or I guess by in you know to understand the need to make this data ultra secure and ultra private, especially in this environment where the bad actors you know are are prolific, so kind of talk about that it's a struggle but maybe that challenge That you have in this environment here in 2021. >>Yeah, I think what you know the way I would do it is the struggle is again that that need or the desire to to protect everything and at the end of the day that's hard. And so the struggle right now that I have ri faces the prioritization. How do we differentiate what we call the critical few some call it cds chris critical data elements that they call it Katie key dad elements there, there's there's a term but really as that need and that demand grows whether it's for security or privacy or even data democratization, which hopefully we do talk about at some point, all these things are reliance on the right data because like statistics garbage in garbage out. So whether it's because you need the right information because of your analytics and your models or as you talked about its prevention and defensive security reasons that defensive and offensive isn't going away. So the real struggle is not around the driver, but the prioritization. How do you focus to ensure you're spending your time on the right areas and more importantly in alignment with the business priorities? Because one of the things that's critically important for me is ensuring that it's not metadata or data governance or data quality for the sake of it, it is in alignment with that business priority. >>And and and a big part of that is is strategy for the future, right strategy going forward. you know, where you're going to go in the next 18, 24 months and so from uh without, you know, revealing state secrets here. How do you how do you see this playing out in terms of this continual digital transformation? If you will from the B O a side of the fence? Um, you know, what what do you see as being important or in terms of what you would like to accomplish over the next year and a half, two years >>for me? I think it's that and I'm glad you asked that question, cause I wanted to mention that that data democratization I think. And if we if we debunk that or look into that, what do I mean by democratization? It's that real time access, but it's not real time access to the wrong information or to the wrong people as we talked about, it really is ensuring almost like an amazon model that I can simply search for the information I need, I can put it in my shopping cart and I can check out and I am able to that's that data driven, I'm able to use that information knowing it's the right data in the right hands for the right reasons and that's really my future mind where I'm getting to is how do I enable that? How do I democratize it? So data is truly and does become that enterprise asset that everybody and anybody can access, but they can do so in a way that has all of those defensive controls in place, going back to that right data, right place the right time because the shiny toys of ai machine learning all those things is if you're building models off of the wrong data from the wrong place or in the wrong hands, it's going to bite you in about whether it's today, tomorrow, the future. >>Well, exactly. I love that analogy and on that I'm going to thank you for the time. So I'm gonna call you a luxury data salesperson, not a car car salesman. But uh it certainly has paid off and we certainly congratulate you as well on the award that you wanna hear from calabria. >>Thank you so much and thank you for the time. Hopefully you've enjoyed our conversations as much as I have. >>I certainly have. Thank you very much Jacqueline Osborn, joining us on the Bank of America, the data citizen of the Year. Her data citizens 2021. I'm john walls and you've been watching the cube >>mm

>>from around the globe. It's >>The Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM Well hi everybody john Wallace here on the cube. Thanks for joining us here. As we continue our initiative of IBM think a chance to look at what IBM thinks in terms of infrastructure, we're talking to you about a hybrid cloud kind of the new trend. The thought that's going to the hybrid cloud, what's the future look like and help us cover that waterfront. A couple of experts from Deloitte Terry Cobb, the IBM Alliance lead at Deloitte Terry. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to this time together. >>Thank you so much for having me. You >>bet. And also introduced Dave Knight quickly, your colleague who is a senior solution architect and IBM Alliance cloud leader at Deloitte. Dave good to see you as well. Thanks for being with us. >>Thanks for having me. >>Alright, so maybe it's just for the two of you set the table for our viewers here in terms of your specific roles of delight. I talked about IBM and your connections there, but in terms of what you're doing there, how you work together and ultimately what kind of service you're trying to provide your clients terry? Why don't you jump on that first? >>Sure. So I've been with Deloitte for 16 years, I believe, maybe a little longer and focusing on the IBM like our strategic partnership. Um and so what that means is I work day in day out with our practitioners to identify and understand where our clients what are some of the critical business needs. And so I work with are leaders and and collaborate with IBM and we we look for ways to solve really unique critical business issues. Um and so part of my my background, so I've come from, you know, at my 30 year background and strategy management consulting. So it's really exciting. I get to use my uh consulting skills, my strategy skills to, you know, look at where we are in the market, what's what's happening in the market because that's a great example. There was a huge impact on how businesses, you know, work, how they work differently and how they handle their workforce. So it was a very interesting time. And and so bringing these two great firms together to solve some of these critical business issues. As for me, it's, you know, it's it's critical and it has a positive impact on, you know, for our clients. >>All right, dave from your side of the fence. >>Yeah. So um I sit in a similar place within the firm. I actually joined the last century. I've been with the firm for 21 years, so uh in a variety of roles, but all with with sort of a technical last solution architecture um, slant. Right, So, so just like Terry mentioned in the alliance function, we try to find opportunities to work together specifically between IBM and the Deloitte, you know, go to market services, uh my role as a solution architect and then as the cloud lead is to make sure that we've got the right mix of technology that we solve the client's problems uh efficiently and cost effectively. Uh and then, you know, sort of translate those, those business problems into technical solutions and then those technical solutions back into business solutions. So the business sees the value and its valuable not only for Deloitte from the services perspective, but also for IBM. >>He just almost just blew me away when you said you've been there since the last century. I haven't heard it quite put that way. And it's really that was really good, uh >>1999, to be fair, but still, it >>certainly implies a lot of experience. That's for sure. That's it. But that was really, that was a unique twist. So, kudos to you, let's talk about your client's first a little bit. So you talk about problems and we're talking about obviously technology and deployments and what capabilities are. So today, right. You've got on primary got off Premier, you've got private cloud, you've got public cloud, you've got edge technologies, you've got this really just this maelstrom basically of opportunity, but also confusion a little bit right? Um with different kinds of capabilities, different kinds of challenges. So Dave if you would, you know, let's look at it from the macro level then, in terms of how you start dissecting these kinds of decisions that the, the C T O. S and with your within your client list have to make and and how you help them chart their course in terms of determining priorities and what the right steps are for them to take. >>Okay. So I mean you sort of summarized my points actually quite nicely. We we help customers find their path, what's there, right approach to their digital transformation journey. Um We do have assets that help them, you know identify workloads where they might might run the best. Um We certainly have approaches and experience in the market having done this for for years. Uh you know it's the number one cloud professional services firm globally. We we we've garnered a lot of experience working with customers again helping among this journey. Um What we've learned is that one size does not fit all. Um Clearly cloud and more specifically public cloud is a game changer. It's here to stay, but it's not necessarily the right answer for every workload for every customer even. Um And so what we're starting to see is is a shift towards hybrid discussions and hybrid architecture discussions. Um and just as a quick, very simple example, um you wouldn't go purchase a mainframe to be a web server, right, That's that's significant overkill. And similarly, um the cloud is great for its, you know, capacity and and all the things that come with an economics, that sort of thing, but it's not necessarily the best platform for a credit card clearing house. Right. The transactional volume is simply too great. Right? So, um and that sort of very simplified example. Hybrid we think is the answer. And we're seeing lots of customers now that they've shifted a lot of their workloads to cloud that our cloud suitable. Um starting to ask us the more difficult questions, right, the core of my business, it's a high risk move. Can you help me sort this out? And in many cases the answer is don't move it, it's too extended at the edge. It's to augment it with cloud technologies such as AI and and enhance your service rather than replace it or move it to a different location. >>So you recently published a report that you did the mainframe market poll survey where you're looking at really, I guess migration plans or an appetite right to make these evolutions to, to to explore this hybrid cloud model that you've already detailed for us. Um, give me an idea if you would and our our viewers an idea a little bit about some of the key summaries of that in terms of what the appetite is for that, what the desires are, you know, are we ready to cut the court on the mainframe and let it go? Is there too much involved? We want to hang on. Um, you know, what's kind of, what's the mood out there right now? >>Yes, so we, we commissioned the double blind survey, we had a belief that we really wanted to explore it further, um, and that belief was, you know, a little tongue in cheek. The death of the mainframe is greatly over exaggerated. Um, and so again, this double blind survey, we commissioned it and, and we, we found a lot of interesting results. First and foremost, um, the mainframe for many customers is not going away. The vast majority of our survey respondents uh, indicated that was the case. Um, there was a couple of other interesting to, that's that, that we, we found in the results as well. Um uh, the first one is this isn't just a technology issue um It's a human capital um issue as well with the aging workforce. Um You know, mainframe not being quite as sexy in the age of java but coming back to IBM investments in the platform. Um And then another key point that we we found was security continues to be a key concern of business I. T. Uh and business, you know, owners. Um and that mainframe is seen as is the pillar of security sort of, they hold it up as sort of the example of security in the industry. Um Another interesting too that we found was that Um you know, one specific question asked about future growth plans and um over just under 60%. So over half answered three questions um that most people would think are at odds with each other and that is you know, are you expanding your mainframe? Over 60 said Yes. Um, are you advancing into cloud? Just under 60 said yes. And then there was a hybrid question which over half said they were going to look at hybrid. So that sort of marriage of mainframe and cloud in a hybrid way was an interesting thing that we weren't exactly expecting, but still quite interesting to explore. >>So >>when >>you hear this right about these, I mean not conflicting, but certainly, you know, interesting of uh survey findings, um, what do you make of that? What what are you, how are you reading those tea leaves a little bit about what people are saying about not ready to leave, but yet they're interested. And and so the concerns that they've brought up about security, about the asian workforce, I mean, you know, a lot of challenging uh, positions here, they have to be considered for your clients. >>You know, for me it was very interesting and and I believe, you know, one of the reasons we launched the survey was really to find out what is really going on with our clients because we're hearing a lot of, you know, there's a lot of news around clients migrating all their all their applications, >>I say all >>to the cloud and but yet we were spending a lot of time with clients that had mainframes and we were solving some of their mainframe issues and so we we were a little confused, so that was part of the impetus from really getting out and enjoying market sensing and figure out what our clients really doing. And we didn't target, you know, the mainframe, you know, clients, we targeted main from clients but we didn't target mainframe users. We were looking at really the business users of the mainframe and the executives that have mainframes. And so we were, it was surprising to to get the information back and hear how important the mainframe, so us. Uh and and then when you start digging a bit deeper into, you know, what does cloud really mean? Your hybrid cloud comes to the surface and then you have people that have different meanings of hybrid cloud. So, really understanding what is hybrid cloud really mean and what does it mean for your business? And that's what we're solving today. It's like how do we how do we go to market around hybrid cloud and what benefits does it have work for our clients? >>Yeah, so, Dave yeah, to touch up on that, to follow up, I mean, so, how are you a Deloitte then taking these results and and kind of ingesting them and distilling them and deciding. All right, this is how we're going to define hybrid cloud perhaps. I mean, I don't know if that if that's a bold assumption, but I think you're probably trying to draw some parameters around it, Right? This is how our clients see it. So this is how we're gonna talk about it and then this is how we're going to take them on that journey. How instructive was this survey for that and actually what are you doing with it in terms of shaping your practice? >>Yeah, so it's a great question and it is driving um you know, not the survey by itself, but a lot of the market trends and including the surveys is driving um some reevaluation and refocusing quite frankly on on hybrid cloud um as an offering within the firm. Right? We we define hybrid cloud generally is, you know, seamless integration of data and applications across on and off premise. And with with the wave of five G that's coming at us, increasingly we're looking at architecture is that include edge uh into that that hybrid definition? Um you know, I've said this to a lot of folks uh for me, mainframe was the original cloud. So it's only natural that it should be part of solutions now. And what I mean by that is when it was released it was virtualized, it was virtually unlimited. Somebody else managed it for you. You you you you only paid for what you use. Those are all characteristics of the cloud as we know it today, but those were implemented in the 70s, the mainframe um and so, capturing those characteristics and newer technologies and then integrating those into architectures. I think it's going to be sort of the next wave of what we see in the industry and, and Deloitte is certainly positioning to help our customers on that journey. And >>before we sign off, I do want to touch on security issue again because you did bring it up a little bit earlier, but let's just talk about it holistically here, depending upon where you are, doesn't matter right edge on off private public. I mean security's gonna be first and foremost. And so what are you suggesting or what are you saying to your clients? You know, terry and dave on this. In terms of their security concerns, the awareness they have to have in that and the allocation of resources to make sure that, you know, whatever solutions they deploy, their their credible, they have integrity and and they're sustainable. So let's hit on security before we head out terry. If you don't mind jumping >>first, I'd like to address security. But even stepping back a little bit. So as clients for looking at moving applications to the cloud for hybrid cloud, it's really about, you know, making sure you have a strategy unless you address some of the underlying data infrastructure, you're gonna end up with you disparate data everywhere and you're not going to be able to, you're gonna have data silo issues, you're gonna have security issues. You also have complex architectural issues. So, you know, some of the work that we're doing with IBM and internally with our firm is trying to help clients understand like you take a step back and really evaluate their business requirements and making sure that they and your dave can you found on this. But it's really making sure they have the right strategy in place to address, you know, their data, where the data sets, how to innovate some of these applications and of course security, security is a huge concern. We see that from all of our clients and needs to be on prem and secure. Mhm. >>Just a final word. >>Yeah. Thanks. Just to add on to that. Right. So security is absolutely critical. As terry mentioned. Having a strategy is absolutely critical and having security be integral to that strategy is equally critical. Um As you said, it's everywhere, cloud on prem on the edge. I would even go so far as to say, you know, in your personal life and your professional life, it should be as pervasive as we like to think it is. I think the reality is that maybe isn't but that's part of the job of architects like me, is to make sure that it gets built in at its core. It's not an afterthought, it's integral. I've got some fantastic technologies around that, specifically in the Z space. Um you don't wanna get too too wonky here, but you know, Phipps 1 40 dash to level four encryption, which is unique in the market. Um, you know, data privacy, passports, pervasive encryption, all these things. Um, interestingly enough live in the mainframe but extended ideas cloud and um from my perspective, I think it's one of the unique uh, connections intersections where mainframe could actually help drive the growth of cloud um, in that hybrid model and even getting into future looking things like home, um, or fixed encryption, there's a raft of technologies coming out of IBM um, that help us ensure we have, you know, secure transactions, secure hybrid architectures as you put our security everywhere. >>Well, you can get a little wonky. That's okay. David terry, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate it. And thanks for shining light on your work at Deloitte and of course, that partnership you have. It's working so well with IBM. Thank you both. >>Thanks for having us. >>All right. We've been talking about hybrid cloud, the future of a hybrid cloud and the mainframe and it ain't dead yet. All right. John Wallace. Thanks for joining us here on the cube.

>> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

(gentle music) >> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

>>From around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM Well hi everybody john Wallace here on the cube. Thanks for joining us here. As we continue our initiative of IBM think a chance to look at what IBM thinks in terms of infrastructure, we're talking to you about hybrid cloud kind of the new trend. The thought that's going to the hybrid cloud, what's the future look like and help us cover that waterfront. A couple of experts from Deloitte Terry Cobb, the IBM Alliance lead at Deloitte Terry. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to this time together. >>Thank you so much for having me. You >>bet. And also introduced Dave Knight quickly, your colleague who is a senior solution architect and IBM Alliance cloud leader at Deloitte. Dave good to see you as well. Thanks for being with us. >>Thanks for having me. >>Alright, so maybe it's just for the two of you set the table for our viewers here in terms of your specific roles of delight. I talked about IBM and your connections there, but in terms of what you're doing there, how you work together and ultimately what kind of service you're trying to provide your clients terry? Why don't you jump on that >>1? Sure. So I've been with Deloitte for 16 years, I believe, maybe a little longer and focusing on the IBM like our strategic partnership. Um and so what that means is I work day in day out with our practitioners to identify and understand where our clients, what are some of the critical business needs. And so I work with are leaders and and collaborate with IBM and we we look for ways to solve really unique critical business issues. Um and so part of my my background, so I've come from, you know, a 30 year background and strategy management consulting. So it's really exciting. I get to use my uh consulting skills, my strategy skills to, you know, look at where we are in the market, what's what's happening in the market. It's a great example. There was a huge impact on how businesses, you know, work how they work differently and how they handle their workforce. So it was a very interesting time and and so bringing these two great firms together to solve some of these critical business issues. As for me, it's, you know, it's it's critical and it has a positive impact on, you know, for our clients >>dave from your side of the fence. >>Yeah. So um I sit in a similar place within the firm. I actually joined the last century. I've been with the firm for 21 years so uh in a variety of roles but all with with sort of a technical last solution architecture um, slant. Right, So, so just like Terry mentioned in the alliance function, we try to find opportunities to work together specifically between idea and and the Deloitte, you know, go to market services, uh my role as a solution architect and then as the cloud lead is to make sure that we've got the right mix of technology that we solve the client's problems uh efficiently and cost effectively, uh and then, you know, sort of translate those, those business problems into technical solutions and then those technical solutions back into business solutions. So the business sees the value and its valuable not only for Deloitte from the services perspective, but also for IBM, >>he just almost just blew me away when you said you've been there since the last century. I haven't heard it quite put that way. And it's really that was really good, uh >>1999, to be fair, but >>still, it certainly implies a lot of experience. That's for sure. That's it. But that was really, that was a unique twist. So kudos to you. Um let's talk about your client's first a little bit. Um, so you talk about problems and we're talking about obviously technology and deployments and what capabilities are. So today, right. You've got on premier, got off from, you've got private cloud, you've got public cloud, you've got edge technologies, you've got this really just this maelstrom basically of of opportunity, but also confusion a little bit right. Um with different kinds of capabilities, different kinds of challenges. So, dave if you would, you know, let's look at it from the macro level then, in terms of how you start dissecting these kinds of decisions that the, the C T O s and with within your client list have to make and and how you help them chart their course in terms of determining priorities and what the right steps are for them to take. >>Okay. So I mean and you sort of summarized my points actually quite nicely. We we help customers find their path, what's there, right approach to their digital transformation journey. Um We do have assets that help them, you know identify workloads where they might might run the best. Um We certainly have approaches and experience in the market having done this for for years. Uh you know it's the number one cloud professional services firm globally. We we we've garnered a lot of experience working with customers again helping among this journey. Um What we've learned is that one size does not fit all. Um Clearly cloud and more specifically public cloud is a game changer. It's here to stay, but it's not necessarily the right answer for every workload for every customer even. Um and so what we're starting to see is is a shift towards hybrid discussions and hybrid architecture discussions. Um and just as a quick, very simple example, um you wouldn't go purchase a mainframe to be a web server, right. That's that's significant overkill. And similarly, um the cloud is great for its, you know, capacity and and all the things that come with an economics, that sort of thing, but it's not necessarily the best platform for a credit card clearing house. Right. The transactional volume just simply too great. Right. So, um and that sort of very simplified example, Hybrid we think is the answer. And we're seeing lots of customers now that they've shifted a lot of their workloads to cloud, that our cloud suitable. Um starting to ask us the more difficult questions right, the core of my business, it's a high risk move. Can you help me sort this out? And in many cases the answer is don't move it, it's too extended at the edge. It's to augment it with cloud technologies such as AI and and enhance your service rather than replace it or move it to a different location. >>So you recently published a report that you did the mainframe market poll survey where you're looking at really, I guess migration plans or an appetite right to make these evolutions to, to to explore this hybrid cloud model that you've already detailed for us. Um give me an idea if you would and our our viewers an idea a little bit about some of the key summaries of that in terms of what the appetite is for that, what the desires are, you know, are we ready to cut the court on the mainframe and let it go, Is there too much involved? We want to hang on. Um, you know, what's kind of, what's the mood out there right now? >>Yes, so we, we commissioned a double blind survey, we had a belief that we really wanted to explore it further, um and that belief was, you know, a little tongue in cheek. The death of the mainframe is greatly over exaggerated. Um, and so again, this double blind survey, we commissioned it and, and we, we found a lot of interesting results. First and foremost, um, the mainframe for many customers is not going away. The vast majority of our survey respondents indicated that was the case. Um, there was a couple of other interesting tidbits that, that we, we found in the results as well. Um uh the first one is, this isn't just a technology issue, um It's a human capital um issue as well with the aging workforce. Um You know, mainframe not being quite as sexy in the age of java but coming back to IBM investments in the platform. Um And then another key point that we we found was security continues to be a key concern of business I. T. Uh and business, you know, owners. Um And that mainframe is seen as is the pillar of security sort of, they hold it up as sort of the example of security in the industry. Another interesting tip that we found was that Um you know, one specific question asked about future growth plans and um over just under 60%. So over half answered three questions um that most people would think are at odds with each other and that is, you know, are you expanding your mainframe? Over 60 said yes. Um are you advancing into cloud? Just under 60 said yes. And then there was a hybrid question which over half said they were going to look at hybrid. So that sort of marriage of mainframe and cloud in a hybrid way was an interesting thing that we weren't exactly expecting but still quite interesting to explore. >>So when you hear this right about these, I mean not conflicting, but certainly, you know, interesting of uh survey findings, um what do you make of that? What do you how are you reading those tea leaves a little bit about what people are saying about not ready to leave, but yet they're interested. And and so the concerns that they've brought up about security, about the asian workforce, I mean, you know, a lot of challenging uh, positions here that have to be considered for your clients. >>You know, for me it was very interesting and and I believe, you know, one of the reasons we launched this survey was really to find out what is really going on with our clients, because we're hearing a lot of, you know, there's a lot of news around clients migrating all their father applications as they all to the cloud. And but yet we were spending a lot of time with clients that had mainframes and we were solving some of their mainframe issues and so we we were a little confused, so that was part of the impetus from really getting out and do a market sensing and figure out what our clients really doing. And we didn't target, you know, the main frame, you know, clients, we we targeted main from clients but we didn't target mainframe users. We were looking at really the business users of the main brain and the executives that have mainframes. And so we were it was surprising to to get the information back and hear how important the mainframe so us. Uh and and then when you start digging a bit deeper into, you know, what does cloud really mean? Your hybrid cloud comes to the surface and then you have people that have different meanings of hybrid cloud. So, really understanding what is hybrid Cloud really mean and what does it mean for your business? And that's what we're solving today. It's like, how do we how do we go to market around hybrid cloud and what benefits does it have to work for our clients? >>Yeah, so, dave yeah, to touch up on that, to follow up, I mean, so, how are you a Deloitte then taking these results and and kind of ingesting them and distilling them and deciding. All right, this is how we're going to define hybrid cloud perhaps. I mean, I don't know if that if that's a bold assumption, but I think you're probably trying to draw some parameters around it, right? Um this is how our clients see it. So this is how we're gonna talk about it and then this is how we're going to take them on that journey. How instructive was this survey for that and actually what are you doing with it in terms of shaping your practice? >>Yeah, so it's a great question and it is driving um, you know, not the survey by itself, but a lot of the market trends and including the surveys is driving um some reevaluation and refocusing quite frankly on on hybrid cloud um as an offering within the firm, right. We we define hybrid cloud generally is, you know, seamless integration of data and applications across on and off premise. And with with the wave of five G that's coming at us, increasingly we're looking at architecture is that include edge uh into that that hybrid definition, um you know, I've said this to a lot of folks uh for me, mainframe was the original cloud. So it's only natural that it should be part of solutions now. And what I mean by that is when it was released was virtualized, it was virtually unlimited. Somebody else managed it for you. You you you you only paid for what you use. Those are all characteristics of the cloud as we know it today, but those were implemented in the 70s, the mainframe, um and so, capturing those characteristics and and newer technologies and then integrating those into architectures. I think it's going to be sort of the next wave of what we see in the industry and, and Deloitte is certainly positioning to help our customers on that journey. >>And before we sign off, I do want to touch on security issue again because you did bring it up a little bit earlier, but let's just talk about it holistically here, depending upon where you are, doesn't matter right edge on off private public. I mean security's gonna be first and foremost. And so what are you suggesting or what are you saying to your clients? You know, terry and dave on this. In terms of their security concerns, the awareness they have to have in that and the allocation of resources to make sure that, you know, whatever solutions they deploy, their their credible, they have integrity and and they're sustainable. So let's hit on security before we head out terry. If you don't >>mind jumping first, I'd like to address security. But even stepping back a little bit. So as clients are looking at moving applications to the cloud or hybrid cloud, it's really about, you know, making sure you have a strategy unless you address some of the underlying data infrastructure, you're gonna end up with you disparate data everywhere and you're not going to be able to, you're gonna have data silo issues, you're gonna have security issues. You also have complex architectural issues. So, you know, some of the the work that we're doing with IBM and internally with our firm is trying to help clients understand like you take a step back and really evaluate their business requirements and making sure that they and your date, can you found on this. But it's really making sure they have the right strategy in place to address, you know, their data, where the data sets, how to innovate some these applications and of course security, security is a huge concern. We see that from all of our clients and needs to be on prem and secure. Mhm. >>Just a final word. >>Yeah. Thanks. Just add onto that. Right. So security is absolutely critical as terry mentioned. Having a strategy is absolutely critical and having security be integral to that strategy is equally critical. Um As you said, it's everywhere plowed on prem on the edge. I would even go so far as to say, you know, in your personal life and your professional life, it should be as pervasive as we like to think it is. I think the reality is that maybe isn't but that's part of the job of architects like me, is to make sure that it gets built in at its core. It's not an afterthought. It's integral. I've got some fantastic technologies around that, specifically in the Z space. Um you don't wanna get too, too wonky here, but you know, Phipps 1 40 dash to level four encryption, which is unique in the market. Um, you know, data privacy, passports, pervasive encryption, all these things. Um interestingly enough live in the mainframe but extended IBM cloud and um from my perspective, I think it's one of the unique uh, connections intersections where mainframe could actually help drive the growth of cloud um, in that hybrid model and even getting into future looking things like home, um, or fixed encryption. There's a raft of technologies coming out of IBM um, that help us ensure we have, you know, secure transactions, secure hybrid architecture is, as you put our security everywhere. >>Well you can get a little wonky. That's >>okay. >>David terry, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate it. And thanks for shining light on your work at Deloitte and of course, that partnership you have. It's working so well with IBM. Thank you both. >>Thanks for having >>us. All right. We've been talking about hybrid cloud, the future of a hybrid cloud and the mainframe and it ain't dead yet. All right. John Wallace. Thanks for joining us here on the cube.

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>We continue our coverage here on the cube of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm John Wallace, glad to be with you here and glad that you've joined us for an important discussion. You know, a lot of companies and many industries are making a very concerted effort toward promoting greater diversity and inclusion within their various workforces. And the renewable energy industry is certainly a big part of that movement. And here to talk about how AWS is supporting that and what the industry itself is doing. I'm proud to and pleased to welcome three guests. We have Shannon Kellogg with us from AWS. He's the vice president of public policy for the Americas. Shannon, thanks for being with us here on the cube. >>You back. Thank you. And great >>Whetstone, who is the president and CEO of the American council on renewable energy. We're going to call it a core from here on out, and also joining us Colleen Pickford, who was the EVP at ACOR, and welcome to both of you. Glad we could have it here on the cube. Glad to be here. John's great. You bet. Absolutely looking forward to this discussion first off, Shannon, let me, let me turn it over to you. I know, uh, AWS had some fairly significant announcements, uh, very recently about renewable and, um, you know, launching that on, around reinvent 2020, if he would take us through that a little bit about that commitment and what exactly that news was all about. >>Well, thank you on, uh, Amazon overall, uh, made a very, uh, significant announcement, uh, last week of 26, uh, renewable energy projects around the world. Uh, so many of those here in the U S but also, uh, many of those, uh, internationally and, um, the announcements, uh, collectively last week, along with what we've already announced previously in renewable energy projects now makes us the largest, uh, corporate, uh, buyer of renewable energy in the world. And so we're really excited about that. Um, this is part of our longterm, uh, efforts, uh, to be a hundred percent renewable, um, in our, uh, uh, footprint around the AWS infrastructure, uh, footprint, uh, but also a part of the broader, uh, commitment that we have at Amazon, including around climate and sustainability. So, uh, we were really super excited about last week from now. >>Yeah. Can you give me an idea of the flavor of the projects? I mean, you're talking about more than two dozen, uh, and as you said there around the world, so I assumed pretty wide variety of impacts and, and of, uh, initiatives as well, but maybe just to give those watching at home and idea of what the scale at this point. >>Well, it's a mix of, uh, solar and wind, uh, projects. Uh, like I said, both in the U S and abroad. Um, we had previously announced, uh, uh, several, um, solar projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia. For example, with last week's announcements, we added more, uh, solar, uh, in Virginia, we had previously, uh, uh, announced, uh, wind projects in Ohio and we added more, uh, wind, uh, and, um, uh, you know, large scale utility scale projects in Ohio. And so we also included other States of course, are in the U S and in countries as well, including, uh, one of the first offshore, uh, projects, uh, offshore wind projects that we've done, uh, with, uh, in this case with, uh, off of the coast of Germany. >>All right, Greg, when you hear about that kind of commitment that AWS is making, uh, in terms of, uh, not only from a geographical standpoint, but from a variety of standpoint, we're talking about when we're talking about solar, um, I mean, what is, what stands out to you with regard to the, the impact of that kind of commitment and that kind of initiative >>Kale it's really impactful. It's such an impressive thing to be able to bring that many new renewable projects that are that big online in a single year, that the total amount of new clean generation is on the order of 4,000 megawatts. It wasn't that long ago. That would be a great year for the renewable sector as a whole in the United States. If you go back 10, 12 years. So the idea that one company is now procuring so much renewable power is phenomenally exciting, and we're just so proud of Amazon and it's big progress toward Amazon. So a hundred percent goal, uh, and really, uh, toward the broader effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly enough to stay within shouting distance of what scientists say we need to do in order to protect our planet's climate. >>Right. Great point. Uh, Colleen, I know you made an interesting point recently, you were talking about the accelerated membership program, which is, uh, an initiative that you've just launched, uh, in terms of trying to create greater diversity and equity and inclusion within the renewable energy, uh, workforce, uh, AWS big sponsor of that, um, founding partner. Uh, if you would tell us a little bit more about that program, uh, and, and what you see is what you hope it's near term or short term impact might be. And then maybe the long tail of that, you know, what kind of impact you can have eventually? >>Yeah, absolutely a core like toward like many in our industry, we've been looking at how we can play a role in creating a more equitable and just future. Um, and we were lucky because we have board members who went during our normal boring board meetings, and we're looking at our membership, asked me, they said, what are you doing to bring more diversity into a core membership? And I had to say, not enough, and that's really the Genesis for the accelerate program. And we were really fortunate to have Shannon and Amazon and our other board members work with us to develop a program that will create opportunities for companies that are owned or led by women or people of color to access a core in all of our benefits for two years and create additional resources for them to really grow their businesses in a way that they may not otherwise be able to. >>Yeah. Shannon did point out that you are board members, Colleen just, just mentioned, um, uh, of a core. What is it about this particular initiative that you think that has peaked the AWS entrust? >>This is Colleen said, uh, we were discussing at the board level, you know, ways that we could, um, do more as a or, uh, in this companies in this sector, promote diversity and inclusion. And we were brainstorming one day and came up with this, uh, with this idea, you know, it's, I'm really excited about it because, um, we're basically going out and offering a core membership and other services, uh, to entrepreneurs and small businesses in the sector led by, uh, minorities and, um, uh, women leaders. And this is just a fantastic opportunity to assist companies and organizations that are just getting started, uh, in an encourages innovation and encourages obviously diversity and inclusion. And so we're super excited about this effort. >>Is this, is this something that you can direct toward a company of any specific size? I mean, Shannon just touched on it, small business, um, but is, is this applicable? The, the, the accelerate program is this geared toward just the small businesses, larger >>Turn in Britain. Uh, we want to bring more diversity in the sector. We want to help. And it's really the smaller companies that need assistance and making those connections and participating, uh, and gaining the access, uh, and maybe mentoring pro bono services. Uh, we want to help those small companies become bigger, grow this sector and, and help enhance the diversity, the leadership in this sector from underrepresented communities. We want, you know, like much of the economy we recognize the renewable energy sector does not yet look like America looks and that's something we're all fighting to achieve. And it's, uh, incredibly helpful to have an Amazon is really the founding supporter of this program. And after Amazon stepped up, uh, seen a number of other companies join in and helping make this a reality. And we've got a lot of momentum now, very excited about the accelerate program. >>Colleen, I like to hear a little bit more from you on the partnership with AWS in general. Um, I know this isn't the first time that you all have partnered together. So if you would maybe fill in some of the blanks about that history that led us to this initiative, and then for them being the one of the founding partners along with the Berkshire Hathaway foundation. >>Sure. I mean, Amazon's been a member of our board for a number of years now, their commitment to the industry is clear and, you know, Shannon and his whole team actively participate across a core providing us with guidance and with insights like these. I think when you look at what we've done with the accelerate program, you know, it's not the first stop for a new small company organization like eight core, but we can have a measurable impact on their go to market strategies and their ability to grow their business. And Shannon and Amazon gave us that insight and they gave us some additional insights about what we could provide through the accelerate program that could really help make a difference for those companies. >>Hmm. You know, Greg, um, if I could just flip the script just a little bit here or, or, uh, get you back on to the discussion about climate change in general. I know that's just obviously, uh, the, the, a key driver to your organization's mission. Just your thoughts about, you know, where we stand, that you talked about trying to be within shouting distance of certain goals. I know there's been discussion about United States for joining the Paris accord, um, and committing to voluntary, uh, uh, emissions controls, just, I mean, where are we in your mind in terms of, of trying to seriously address the problem >>We're behind? I mean, the surprising thing is the renewable sector has been growing at a booming pace. We had over $60 billion in investment last year and wind and solar power, uh, one of the most important economic drivers for the country. Um, we're going to end up despite all of the difficulties presented by 2020 with a pandemic, we're going to have record renewable energy growth in 2020, we're going to bust through the old record, which was about 23,000 megawatts. And we'll be more like 27,000 megawatts. So that's great, but to get our arms around the climate issue, we know we have to grow much more rapidly. We've set a goal at a core of achieving a trillion dollars and investment by 2030, starting when we launched that program back in 2018, uh, and we made a lot of headway, but we're behind. We need to be investing closer to 90, a hundred billion a year in order to see that growth in logging at growth at a much higher rate, we feel really optimistic about getting a tailwind from the new administration, the desire to build back that, or, uh, the clear focus on policies and that value the ability to generate power, to make our economy grow and grow dramatically without greenhouse emissions, without adding to, uh, climate change. >>So, uh, um, I'm optimistic we can get there, but we know we gotta step it up as much as we've been growing as successful as we've been. It's not enough. And we know that >>Colleen, how does your organization in ACOR trumpet that, um, I know you talked about the nexus of finance and policy and technology. Obviously policy is what, uh, is at the center of this particular discussion, but, but how, how can you in the coming year, especially, um, be a, a key driver in that discussion? >>Well, I think, you know, we bring together a really unique stakeholder group from all across the renewable energy industry. And we take those stakeholders and it gives us a magnified voice to share the message of what's needed to really drive more Watts of renewable energy onto the grid. And what are those barriers in policy to making that possible? So, I mean, that's really how we do it is we bring together the most unique group together, >>But we appreciate the work. Uh, no question about that. It is a dire need that needs to be addressed. And we certainly thank you for that. Uh, Shannon, we thank AWS for their support, not only of this initiative, but of all that you're doing around the world. And, uh, we certainly wish you all the best of success with the accelerate membership program and creating these better hiring opportunities within your industry. So thank you all very much for joining us here on the cube.