>> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE been profiling the leaders in the technology world, women in technology from developers to the boardroom, everything in between. We have two great guests promoting in from Malaysia. Nancy Wang is the general manager, also CUBE alumni from AWS Data Protection, and founder and board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, awit.org. And of course Kate Watts who's the executive director of Advancing Women in Tech.org. So it's awit.org. Nancy, Kate, thanks for coming all the way across remotely from Malaysia. >> Of course, we're coming to you as fast as our internet bandwidth will allow us. And you know, I'm just thrilled today that you get to see a whole nother aspect of my life, right? Because typically we talk about AWS, and here we're talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. >> Well, Nancy, I love the fact that you're spending a lot of time taking the empowerment to go out and help the industries and helping with the advancement of women in tech. Kate, the executive director it's a 501C3, it's nonprofit, dedicating to accelerating the careers of women in groups in tech. Can you talk about the organization? >> Yes, I can. So Advancing Women in Tech was founded in 2017 in order to fix some of the pathway problems that we're seeing on the rise to leadership in the industry. And so we specifically focus on supporting mid-level women in technical roles, get into higher positions. We do that in a few different ways through mentorship programs through building technical skills and by connecting people to a supportive community. So you have your peer network and then a vertical sort of relationships to help you navigate the next steps in your career. So to date we've served about 40,000 individuals globally and we're just looking to expand our reach and impact and be able to better support women in the industry. >> Nancy, talk about the creation, the origination story. How'd this all come together? Obviously the momentum, everyone in the industry's been focused on this for a long time. Where did AWIT come from? Advancing Women in Technology, that's the acronym. Advancing Women in Technology.org, where'd it come from? What's the origination story? >> Yeah, so AWIT really originated from this desire that I had, to Kate's point around, well if you look around right and you know, don't take my word for it, right? Look at stats, look at news reports, or just frankly go on your LinkedIn and see how many women in underrepresented groups are in senior technical leadership roles right out in the companies whose names we all know. And so that was my case back in 2016. And so when I first got the idea and back then I was actually at Google, just another large tech company in the valley, right? It was about how do we get more role models, how we get more, for example, women into leadership roles so they can bring up the next generation, right? And so this is actually part of a longer speech that I'm about to give on Wednesday and part of the US State Department speaker program. In fact, that's why Kate and I are here in Malaysia right now is working with over 200 women entrepreneurs from all over in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia Philippines, Vietnam, Borneo, you know, so many countries where having more women entrepreneurs can help raise the GDP right, and that fits within our overall mission of getting more women into top leadership roles in tech. >> You know, I was talking about Teresa Carlson she came on the program as well for this year this next season we're going to do. And she mentioned the decision between the US progress and international. And she's saying as much as it's still bad numbers, it's worse than outside the United States and needs to get better. Can you comment on the global aspect? You brought that up. I think it's super important to highlight that it's just not one area, it's a global evolution. >> Absolutely, so let me start, and I'd love to actually have Kate talk about our current programs and all of the international groups that we're working with. So as Teresa aptly mentioned there is so much work to be done not just outside the US and North Americas where typically tech nonprofits will focus, but rather if you think about the one to end model, right? For example when I was doing the product market fit workshop for the US State Department I had women dialing in from rice fields, right? So let me just pause there for a moment. They were holding their cell phones up near towers near trees just so that they can get a few minutes of time with me to do a workshop and how to accelerate their business. So if you don't call that the desire to propel oneself or accelerate oneself, not sure what is, right. And so it's really that passion that drove me to spend the next week and a half here working with local entrepreneurs working with policy makers so we can take advantage and really leverage that passion that people have, right? To accelerate more business globally. And so that's why, you know Kate will be leading our contingent with the United Nations Women Group, right? That is focused on women's economic empowerment because that's super important, right? One aspect can be sure, getting more directors, you know vice presidents into companies like Google and Amazon. But another is also how do you encourage more women around the world to start businesses, right? To reach economic and freedom independence, right? To overcome some of the maybe social barriers to becoming a leader in their own country. >> Yes, and if I think about our own programs and our model of being very intentional about supporting the learning development and skills of women and members of underrepresented groups we focused very much on providing global access to a number of our programs. For instance, our product management certification on Coursera or engineering management our upcoming women founders accelerator. We provide both access that you can get from anywhere. And then also very intentional programming that connects people into the networks to be able to further their networks and what they've learned through the skills online, so. >> Yeah, and something Kate just told me recently is these courses that Kate's mentioning, right? She was instrumental in working with the American Council on Education and so that our learners can actually get up to six college credits for taking these courses on product management engineering management, on cloud product management. And most recently we had our first organic one of our very first organic testimonials was from a woman's tech bootcamp in Nigeria, right? So if you think about the worldwide impact of these upskilling courses where frankly in the US we might take for granted right around the world as I mentioned, there are women dialing in from rice patties from other, you know, for example, outside the, you know corporate buildings in order to access this content. >> Can you think about the idea of, oh sorry, go ahead. >> Go ahead, no, go ahead Kate. >> I was going to say, if you can't see it, you can't become it. And so we are very intentional about ensuring that we have we're spotlighting the expertise of women and we are broadcasting that everywhere so that anybody coming up can gain the skills and the networks to be able to succeed in this industry. >> We'll make sure we get those links so we can promote them. Obviously we feel the same way getting the word out. I think a couple things I'd like to ask you guys cause I think you hit a great point. One is the economic advantage the numbers prove that diverse teams perform better number one, that's clear. So good point there. But I want to get your thoughts on the entrepreneurial equation. You mentioned founders and startups and there's also different makeups in different countries. It's not like the big corporations sometimes it's smaller business in certain areas the different cultures have different business sizes and business types. How do you guys see that factoring in outside the United States, say the big tech companies? Okay, yeah. The easy lower the access to get in education than stay with them, in other countries is it the same or is it more diverse in terms of business? >> So what really actually got us started with the US State Department was around our work with women founders. And I love for Kate to actually share her experience working with AWS startups in that capacity. But frankly, you know, we looked at the content and the mentor programs that were providing women who wanted to be executives, you know, quickly realize a lot of those same skills such as finding customers, right? Scaling your product and building channels can also apply to women founders, not just executives. And so early supporters of our efforts from firms such as Moderna up in Seattle, Emergence Ventures, Decibel Ventures in, you know, the Bay Area and a few others that we're working with right now. Right, they believed in the mission and really helped us scale out what is now our existing platform and offerings for women founders. >> Those are great firms by the way. And they also are very founder friendly and also understand the global workforce. I mean, that's a whole nother dimension. Okay, what's your reaction to all that? >> Yes, we have been very intentional about taking the product expertise and the learnings of women and in our network, we first worked with AWS startups to support the development of the curriculum for the recent accelerator for women founders that was held last spring. And so we're able to support 25 founders and also brought in the expertise of about 20 or 30 women from Advancing Women in Tech to be able to be the lead instructors and mentors for that. And so we have really realized that with this network and this individual sort of focus on product expertise building strong teams, we can take that information and bring it to folks everywhere. And so there is very much the intentionality of allowing founders allowing individuals to take the lessons and bring it to their individual circumstances and the cultures in which they are operating. But the product sense is a skill that we can support the development of and we're proud to do so. >> That's awesome. Nancy, I want to ask you some never really talk about data storage and AWS cloud greatness and goodness, here's different and you also work full-time at AWS and you're the founder or the chairman of this great organization. How do you balance both and do you get, they're getting behind you on this, Amazon is getting behind you on this. >> Well, as I say it's always easier to negotiate on the way in. But jokes aside, I have to say the leadership has been tremendously supportive. If you think about, for example, my leaders Wayne Duso who's also been on the show multiple times, Bill Vaas who's also been on the show multiple times, you know they're both founders and also operators entrepreneurs at heart. So they understand that it is important, right? For all of us, it's really incumbent on all of us who are in positions to do so, to create a pathway for more people to be in leadership roles for more people to be successful entrepreneurs. So, no, I mean if you just looked at LinkedIn they're always uploading my vote so they reach to more audiences. And frankly they're rooting for us back home in the US while we're in Malaysia this week. >> That's awesome. And I think that's a good culture to have that empowerment and I think that's very healthy. What's next for you guys? What's on the agenda? Take us through the activities. I know that you got a ton of things happening. You got your event out there, which is why you're out there. There's a bunch of other activities. I think you guys call it the Advancing Women in Tech week. >> Yes, this week we are having a week of programming that you can check out at Advancing Women in Tech.org. That is spotlighting the expertise of a number of women in our space. So it is three days of programming Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday if you are in the US so the seventh through the ninth, but available globally. We are also going to be in New York next week for the event at the UN and are looking to continue to support our mentorship programs and also our work supporting women founders throughout the year. >> All right. I have to ask you guys if you don't mind get a little market data so you can share with us here at theCUBE. What are you hearing this year that's different in the conversation space around the topics, the interests? Obviously I've seen massive amounts of global acceleration around conversations, more video, things like this more stories are scaling, a lot more LinkedIn activity. It just seems like it's a lot different this year. Can you guys share any kind of current trends you're seeing relative to the conversations and topics being discussed across the the community? >> Well, I think from a needle moving perspective, right? I think due to the efforts of wonderful organizations including the Q for spotlighting all of these awesome women, right? Trailblazing women and the nonprofits the government entities that we work with there's definitely more emphasis on creating access and creating pathways. So that's probably one thing that you're seeing is more women, more investors posting about their activities. Number two, from a global trend perspective, right? The rise of women in security. I noticed that on your agenda today, you had Lena Smart who's a good friend of mine chief information security officer at MongoDB, right? She and I are actually quite involved in helping founders especially early stage founders in the security space. And so globally from a pure technical perspective, right? There's right more increasing regulations around data privacy, data sovereignty, right? For example, India's in a few weeks about to get their first data protection regulation there locally. So all of that is giving rise to yet another wave of opportunity and we want women founders uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity. >> I love it. Kate, reaction to that? I mean founders, more pathways it sounds like a neural network, it sounds like AI enabled. >> Yes, and speaking of AI, with the rise of that we are also hearing from many community members the importance of continuing to build their skills upskill learn to be able to keep up with the latest trends. There's a lot of people wondering what does this mean for my own career? And so they're turning to organizations like Advancing Women in Tech to find communities to both learn the latest information, but also build their networks so that they are able to move forward regardless of what the industry does. >> I love the work you guys are doing. It's so impressive. I think the economic angle is new it's more amplified this year. It's always kind of been there and continues to be. What do you guys hope for by next year this time what do you hope to see different from a needle moving perspective, to use your word Nancy, for next year? What's the visual output in your mind? >> I want to see real effort made towards 50-50 representation in all tech leadership roles. And I'd like to see that happen by 2050. >> Kate, anything on your end? >> I love that. I'm going to go a little bit more touchy-feely. I want everybody in our space to understand that the skills that they build and that the networks they have carry with them regardless of wherever they go. And so to be able to really lean in and learn and continue to develop the career that you want to have. So whether that be at a large organization or within your own business, that you've got the potential to move forward on that within you. >> Nancy, Kate, thank you so much for your contribution. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the organization. What are you guys looking for? Any kind of PSA you want to share with the folks watching? >> Absolutely, so if you're in a position to be a mentor, join as a mentor, right? Help elevate and accelerate the next generation of women leaders. If you're an investor help us invest in more women started companies, right? Women founded startups and lastly, if you are women looking to accelerate your career, come join our community. We have resources, we have mentors and who we have investors who are willing to come in on the ground floor and help you accelerate your business. >> Great work. Thank you so much for participating in our International Women's Day 23 program and we'd look to keep this going quarterly. We'll see you next year, next time. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much John. >> Thank you. >> Okay, women leaders here. >> Nancy: Thanks for having us >> All over the world, coming together for a great celebration but really highlighting the accomplishments, the pathways the investment, the mentoring, everything in between. It's theCUBE. Bring as much as we can. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path, >>Everybody. We're back in Las Vegas. The cube's coverage we're day one at UI Path forward. Five. Pascal Borne is here. He's an expert and bestselling author in the topic of AI and automation and the book Intelligent Automation. Welcome to the world of Hyper Automation, the first book on the topic. And of course, Ray Wong is back on the cube. He's the founder, chairman and principal analyst, Constellation Reese, also bestselling author of Everybody Wants To Rule the World. Guys, thanks so much for coming on The Cubes. Always a pleasure. Ray Pascal, First time on the Cube, I believe. >>Yes, thank you. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you. >>So what is artificial about artificial intelligence, >>For sure, not people. >>So, okay, so you guys are both speaking at the conference, Ray today. I think you're interviewing the co CEOs. What do you make of that? What's, what are you gonna, what are you gonna probe with these guys? Like, how they're gonna divide their divide and conquer, and why do you think the, the company Danielle in particular, decided to bring in Rob Sland? >>Well, you know what I mean, Like, you know, these companies are now at a different stage of growth, right? There's that early battle between RPA vendors. Now we're actually talking something different, right? We're talking about where does automation go? How do we get the decisioning? What's the next best action? That's gonna be the next step. And to take where UI path is today to somewhere else, You really want someone with that enterprise cred and experience the sales motions, the packages, the partnership capabilities, and who else better than Roblin? He, that's, he's done, he can do that in his sleep, but now he's gotta do that in a new space, taking whole category to another level. Now, Daniel on the other hand, right, I mean, he's the visionary founder. He put this thing from nothing to where he is today, right? I mean, at that point you want your founder thinking about the next set of ideas, right? So you get this interesting dynamic that we've seen for a while with co CEOs, those that are doing the operations, getting the stuff out the door, and then letting the founders get a chance to go back and rethink, take a look at the perspective, and hopefully get a chance to build the next idea or take the next idea back into the organization. >>Right? Very well said. Pascal, why did you write your book on intelligent automation and, and hyper automation, and what's changed since you've written that book? >>So, I, I wrote this book, An Intelligent Automation, two years ago. At that time, it was really a new topic. It was really about the key, the, the key, the key content of the, of the book is really about combining different technologies to automate the most complex end to end business processes in companies. And when I say capabilities, it's, we, we hear a lot about up here, especially here, robotic process automation. But up here alone, if you just trying to transform a company with only up here, you just fall short. Okay? A lot of those processes need more than execution. They need language, they need the capacity to view, to see, they need the capacity to understand and to, and to create insights. So by combining process automation with ai, natural language processing, computer vision, you give this capability to create impact by automating end to end processes in companies. >>I, I like the test, what I hear in the keynote with independent experts like yourself. So we're hearing that that intelligent automation or automation is a fundamental component of digital transformation. Is it? Or is it more sort of a back office sort of hidden in inside plumbing Ray? What do you think? >>Well, you start by understanding what's going on in the process phase. And that's where you see discover become very important in that keynote, right? And that's where process mining's playing a role. Then you gotta automate stuff. But when you get to operations, that's really where the change is going to happen, right? We actually think that, you know, when you're doing the digital transformation pieces, right? Analytics, automation and AI are coming together to create a concept we call decision velocity. You and I make a quick decision, boom, how long does it take to get out? Management committee could free forever, right? A week, two months, never. But if you're thinking about competing with the automation, right? These decisions are actually being done a hundred times per second by machine, even a thousand times per second. That asymmetry is really what people are facing at the moment. >>And the companies that are gonna be able to do that and start automating decisions are gonna be operating at another level. Back to what Pascal's book talking about, right? And there are four questions everyone has to ask you, like, when do you fully intelligently automate? And that happens right in the background when you augment the machine with a human. So we can find why did you make an exception? Why did you break a roll? Why didn't you follow this protocol so we can get it down to a higher level confidence? When do you augment the human with the machine so we can give you the information so you can act quickly. And the last one is, when do you wanna insert a human in the process? That's gonna be the biggest question. Order to cash, incident or resolution, Hire to retire, procure to pay. It doesn't matter. When do you want to put a human in the process? When do you want a man in the middle, person in the middle? And more importantly, when do you want insert friction? >>So Pascal, you wrote your book in the middle of the, the pandemic. Yes. And, and so, you know, pre pandemic digital transformation was kind of a buzzword. A lot of people gave it lip service, eh, not on my watch, I don't have to worry about that. But then it became sort of, you're not a digital business, you're out of business. So, so what have you seen as the catalyst for adoption of automation? Was it the, the pandemic? Was it sort of good runway before that? What's changed? You know, pre isolation, post isolation economy. >>You, you make me think about a joke. Who, who did your best digital transformation over the last years? The ceo, C H R O, the Covid. >>It's a big record ball, right? Yeah. >>Right. And that's exactly true. You know, before pandemic digital transformation was a competitive advantage. >>Companies that went into it had an opportunity to get a bit better than their, their competitors during the pandemic. Things have changed completely. Companies that were not digitalized and automated could not survive. And we've seen so many companies just burning out and, and, and those companies that have been able to capitalize on intelligent automation, digital transformations during the pandemic have been able not only to survive, but to, to thrive, to really create their place on the market. So that's, that has been a catalyst, definitely a catalyst for that. That explains the success of the book, basically. Yeah. >>Okay. Okay. >>So you're familiar with the concept of Stew the food, right? So Stew by definition is something that's delicious to eat. Stew isn't simply taking one of every ingredient from the pantry and throwing it in the pot and stirring it around. When we start talking about intelligent automation, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, it starts getting a bit overwhelming. My spy sense goes off and I start thinking, this sounds like mush. It doesn't sound like Stew. So I wanna hear from each of you, what is the methodical process that, that people need to go through when they're going through digital trans transmission, digital transformation, so that you get delicious stew instead of a mush that's just confused everything in your business. So you, Ray, you want, you want to, you wanna answer that first? >>Yeah. You know, I mean, we've been talking about digital transformation since 2010, right? And part of it was really getting the business model, right? What are you trying to achieve? Is that a new type of offering? Are you changing the way you monetize something? Are you taking existing process and applying it to a new set of technologies? And what do you wanna accomplish, right? Once you start there, then it becomes a whole lot of operational stuff. And it's more than st right? I mean, it, it could be like, well, I can't use those words there. But the point being is it could be a complete like, operational exercise. It could be a complete revenue exercise, it could be a regulatory exercise, it could be something about where you want to take growth into the next level. And each one of those processes, some of it is automation, right? There's a big component of it today. But most of it is really rethinking about what you want things to do, right? How do you actually make things to be successful, right? Do I reorganize a process? Do I insert a place to do monetization? Where do I put engagement in place? How do I collect data along the way so I can build better feedback loop? What can I do to build the business graph so that I have that knowledge for the future so I can go forward doing that so I can be successful. >>The Pascal should, should, should the directive be first ia, then ai? Or are these, are these things going to happen in parallel naturally? What's your position on that? Is it first, >>So it, so, >>So AI is part of IA because that's, it's, it's part of the big umbrella. And very often I got the question. So how do you differentiate AI in, I a, I like to say that AI is only the brain. So think of ai cuz I'm consider, I consider AI as machine learning, Okay? Think of AI in a, like a brain near jar that only can think, create, insight, learn, but doesn't do anything, doesn't have any arms, doesn't have any eyes, doesn't not have any mouth and ears can't talk, can't understand with ia, you, you give those capabilities to ai. You, you basically, you create a cap, the capability, technological capability that is able to do more than just thinking, learning and, and create insight, but also acting, speaking, understanding the environment, viewing it, interacting with it. So basically performing these, those end to end processes that are performed currently by people in companies. >>Yeah, we're gonna get to a point where we get to what we call a dynamic scenario generation. You're talking to me, you get excited, well, I changed the story because something else shows up, or you're talking to me and you're really upset. We're gonna have to actually ch, you know, address that issue right away. Well, we want the ability to have that sense and respond capability so that the next best action is served. So your data, your process, the journey, all the analytics on the top end, that's all gonna be served up and changed along the way. As we go from 2D journeys to 3D scenarios in the metaverse, if we think about what happens from a decentralized world to decentralized, and we think about what's happening from web two to web three, we're gonna make those types of shifts so that things are moving along. Everything's a choose your end venture journey. >>So I hope I remember this correctly from your book. You talked about disruption scenarios within industries and within companies. And I go back to the early days of, of our industry and East coast Prime, Wang, dg, they're all gone. And then, but, but you look at companies like Microsoft, you know, they were, they were able to, you know, get through that novel. Yeah. Ibm, you know, I call it survived. Intel is now going through their, you know, their challenge. So, so maybe it's inevitable, but how do you see the future in terms of disruption with an industry, Forget our industry for a second, all industry across, whether it's healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, automobiles, et cetera. How do you see the disruption scenario? I'm pretty sure you talked about this in your book, it's been a while since I read it, but I wonder if you could talk about that disruption scenario and, and the role that automation is going to play, either as the disruptor or as the protector of the incumbents. >>Let's take healthcare and auto as an example. Healthcare is a great example. If we think about what's going on, not enough nurses, massive shortage, right? What are we doing at the moment? We're setting five foot nine robots to do non-patient care. We're trying to capture enough information off, you know, patient analytics like this watch is gonna capture vitals from a going forward. We're doing a lot what we can do in the ambient level so that information and data is automatically captured and decisions are being rendered against that. Maybe you're gonna change your diet along the way, maybe you're gonna walk an extra 10 minutes. All those things are gonna be provided in that level of automation. Take the car business. It's not about selling cars. Tesla's a great example. We talk about this all the time. What Tesla's doing, they're basically gonna be an insurance company with all the data they have. They have better data than the insurance companies. They can do better underwriting, they've got better mapping information and insights they can actually suggest next best action do collision avoidance, right? Those are all the things that are actually happening today. And automation plays a big role, not just in the collection of that, that information insight, but also in the ability to make recommendations, to do predictions and to help you prevent things from going wrong. >>So, you know, it's interesting. It's like you talk about Tesla as the, the disrupting the insurance companies. It's almost like the over the top vendors have all the data relative to the telcos and mopped them up for lunch. Pascal, I wanna ask you, you know, the topic of future of work kind of was a bromide before, but, but now I feel like, you know, post pandemic, it, it actually has substance. How do you see the future of work? Can you even summarize what it's gonna look like? It's, it's, Or are we here? >>It's, yeah, it's, and definitely it's, it's more and more important topic currently. And you, you all heard about the great resignation and how employee experience is more and more important for companies according to have a business review. The companies that take care of their employee experience are four times more profitable that those that don't. So it's a, it's a, it's an issue for CEOs and, and shareholders. Now, how do we get there? How, how do we, how do we improve the, the quality of the employee experience, understanding the people, getting information from them, educating them. I'm talking about educating them on those new technologies and how they can benefit from those empowering them. And, and I think we've talked a lot about this, about the democratization local type of, of technologies that democratize the access to those technologies. Everyone can be empowered today to change their work, improve their work, and finally, incentivization. I think it's a very important point where companies that, yeah, I >>Give that. What's gonna be the key message of your talk tomorrow. Give us the bumper sticker, >>If you will. Oh, I'm gonna talk, It's a little bit different. I'm gonna talk for the IT community in this, in the context of the IT summit. And I'm gonna talk about the future of intelligent automation. So basically how new technologies will impact beyond what we see today, The future of work. >>Well, I always love having you on the cube, so articulate and, and and crisp. What's, what's exciting you these days, you know, in your world, I know you're traveling around a lot, but what's, what's hot? >>Yeah, I think one of the coolest thing that's going on right now is the fact that we're trying to figure out do we go to work or do we not go to work? Back to your other point, I mean, I don't know, work, work is, I mean, for me, work has been everywhere, right? And we're starting to figure out what that means. I think the second thing though is this notion around mission and purpose. And everyone's trying to figure out what does that mean for themselves? And that's really, I don't know if it's a great, great resignation. We call it great refactoring, right? Where you work, when you work, how we work, why you work, that's changing. But more importantly, the business models are changing. The monetization models are changing macro dynamics that are happening. Us versus China, G seven versus bricks, right? War on the dollar. All these things are happening around us at this moment and, and I think it's gonna really reshape us the way that we came out of the seventies into the eighties. >>Guys, always a pleasure having folks like yourself on, Thank you, Pascal. Been great to see you again. All right, Dave Nicholson, Dave Ante, keep it right there. Forward five from Las Vegas. You're watching the cue.

>>Okay, we're back. My name is Dave Valante and this is the Cube's coverage of AWS storage day. You know, coming off of reinforc I wrote the, the cloud was a new layer of defense. In fact, the first line of defense in a cyber security strategy. And that brings new thinking and models for protecting data, data protection, specifically, traditionally thought of as backup and recovery, it's become a critical adjacency to security and a component of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. We're here in our studios outside of Boston with two cube alums, and we're gonna discuss this in other topics. Wayne do so is the vice president for AWS storage edge and data services, and Nancy Wong as general manager of AWS backup and data protection services, guys. Welcome. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Of >>Course, always a pleasure, Dave. Good to >>See you, Dave. All right. So Wayne, let's talk about how organizations should be thinking about this term data protection. It's an expanding definition, isn't >>It? It is an expanding definition. They, last year we talked about data and the importance of data to companies. Every company is becoming a data company, you know, da the amount of data they generate, the amount of data they can use to create models, to do predictive analytics. And frankly, to find ways of innovating is, is grown rapidly. And, you know, there's this tension between access to all that data, right? Getting the value out of that data. And how do you secure that data? And so this is something we think about with customers all the time. So data durability, data protection, data resiliency, and, you know, trust in their data. If you think about running your organization on your data, trust in your data is so important. So, you know, you gotta trust where you're putting your data. You know, people who are putting their data on a platform need to trust that platform will in fact, ensure it's durability, security, resiliency. >>And, you know, we see ourselves AWS as a partner in securing their data, making their data dur durable, making their data resilient, right? So some of that responsibility is on us. Some of that is on so shared responsibility around data protection, data resiliency. And, you know, we think about forever, you know, the notion of, you know, compromise of your infrastructure, but more and more people think about the compromise of their data as data becomes more valuable. And in fact, data is a company's most valuable asset. We've talked about this before. Only second to their people. You know, the people that are most valuable asset, but right next to that is their data. So really important stuff. >>So Nancy, you talked to a lot of customers, but by the way, it always comes back to the data. We've saying this for years, haven't we? So you've got this expanding definition of data protection, you know, governance is in there. You, you think about access cetera. When you talk to customers, what are you hearing from them? How are they thinking about data protection? >>Yeah. So a lot of the customers that Wayne and I have spoken to often come to us seeking thought leadership about, you know, how do I solve this data challenge? How do I solve this data sprawl challenge, but also more importantly, tying it back to data protection and data resiliency is how do I make sure that data is secure, that it's protected against, let's say ransomware events, right. And continuously protected. So there's a lot of mental frameworks that come to mind and a very popular one that comes up in quite a few conversations is this cybersecurity framework, right? And from a data protection perspective is just as important to protect and recover your data as it is to be able to detect different events or be able to respond to those events. Right? So recently I was just having a conversation with a regulatory body of financial institutions in Europe, where we're designing a architecture that could help them make their data immutable, but also continuously protected. So taking a step back, that's really where I see AWS's role in that we provide a wide breadth of primitives to help customers build secure platforms and scaffolding so that they can focus on building the data protection, the data governance controls, and guardrails on top of that platform. >>And, and that's always been AWS's philosophy, you know, make sure that developers have access to those primitives and APIs so that they can move fast and, and essentially build their own if that that's in fact what they wanna do. And as you're saying, when data protection is now this adjacency to cyber security, but there's disaster recoveries in there, business continuance, cyber resilience, et cetera. So, so maybe you could pick up on that and sort of extend how you see AWS, helping customers build out those resilient services. >>Yeah. So, you know, two core pillars to a data protection strategy is around their data durability, which is really an infrastructure element. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's by and large the responsibility of the provider of that infrastructure to make sure that data's durable, cuz if it's not durable, everything else doesn't matter. And then the second pillar is really about data resiliency. So in terms of security, controls and governance, like these are really important, but these are shared responsibility. Like the customers working with us with the services that we provide are there to architect the design, it's really human factors and design factors that get them resiliency, >>Nancy, anything you would add to what Wayne just said. >>Yeah, absolutely. So customers tell us that they want always on data resiliency and data durability, right? So oftentimes in those conversations, three common themes come up, which is they want a centralized solution. They want to be able to transcribe their intent into what they end up doing with their data. And number three, they want something that's policy driven because once you centralize your policies, it's much better and easier to establish control and governance at an organizational level. So keeping that in mind with policy as our interface, there's two managed AWS solutions that I recommend you all check out in terms of data resiliency and data durability. Those are AWS backup, which is our centralized solution for managing protection recovery, and also provides an audit audit capability of how you protect your data across 15 different AWS services, as well as on-premises VMware and for customers whose mission critical data is contained entirely on disk. We also offer AWS elastic disaster recovery services, especially for customers who want to fail over their workloads from on premises to the cloud. >>So you can essentially centralize as a quick follow up, centralize the policy. And like I said, the intent, but you can support a federated data model cuz you're building out this massive, you know, global system, but you can take that policy and essentially bring it anywhere on the AWS cloud. Is that >>Right? Exactly. And actually one powerful integration I want to touch upon is that AWS backup is natively integrated with AWS organizations, which is our defacto multi account federated organization model for how AWS services work with customers, both in the cloud, on the edge, at the edge and on premises. >>So that's really important because as, as we talk about all the time on the cube, this notion of a, a decentralized data architecture data mesh, but the problem is how do you ensure governance and a federated model? So we're clearly moving in that direction. Wayne, I want to ask you about cyber as a board level discussion years ago, I interviewed Dr. Robert Gates, you know, former defense secretary and he sat on a number of boards and I asked him, you know, how important and prominent is security at the board level? Is it really a board level discussion? He said, absolutely. Every time we meet, we talk about cyber security, but not every company at the time, this was kind of early last decade was doing that. That's changed now. Ransomware is front and center. Hear about it all the time. What's AWS. What's your thinking on cyber as a board level discussion and specifically what are you guys doing around ran ransomware? >>Yeah. So, you know, malware in general, ransomware being a particular type of malware. Sure. It's a hot topic and it continues to be a hot topic. And whether at the board level, the C-suite level, I had a chance to listen to Dr. Gates a couple months ago and super motivational, but we think about ransomware and the same way that our customers do. Right? Cause all of us are subject to an incident. Nobody is immune to a ransomware incident. So we think very much the same way. And you, as Nancy said, along the lines of the, this framework, we really think about, you know, how do customers identify their critical access? How do they plan for protecting those assets, right? How do they make sure that they are in fact protected? And if they do detect the ransomware event and ransomware events come from a lot of different places, like there's not one signature, there's not one thumbprint, if you would for ransomware. >>So it's, it's, there's really a lot of vigilance that needs to be put in place, but a lot of planning that needs to be put in place. And once that's detected and a, a, we have to recover, you know, we know that we have to take an action and recover having that plan in place, making sure that your assets are fully protected and can be restored. As you know, ransomware is a insidious type of malware. You know, it sits in your system for a long time. It figures out what's going on, including your backup policies, your protection policies, and figures out how to get around those with some of the things that Nancy talked about in terms of air gaping, your capabilities, being able to, if you would scan your secondary, your backup storage for malware, knowing that it's a good copy. And then being able to restore from that known good copy in the event of an incident is critical. So we think about this for ourselves and the same way that we think about these for our customers. You gotta have a great plan. You gotta have great protection and you gotta be ready to restore in the case of an incident. And we wanna make sure we provide all the capabilities to do >>That. Yeah. So I'll glad you mentioned air gaping. So at the recent re reinforce, I think it was Kurt kufeld was speaking about ransomware and he didn't specifically mention air gaping. I had to leave. So I might have, I might have missed it cause I was doing the cube, but that's a, that's a key aspect. I'm sure there were, were things on the, on the deep dives that addressed air gaping, but Nancy look, AWS has the skills. It has the resources, you know, necessary to apply all these best practices and, you know, share those with customers. But, but what specific investments is AWS making to make the CISO's life easier? Maybe you could talk about that. >>Sure. So following on to your point about the reinforced keynote, Dave, right? CJ Boes talked about how the events of a ransomware, for example, incident or event can take place right on stage where you go from detect to respond and to recover. And specifically on the recovery piece, you mentioned AWS backup, the managed service that protects across 15 different AWS services, as well as on-premises VMware as automated recovery. And that's in part why we've decided to continue that investment and deliver AWS backup audit manager, which helps customers actually prove their posture against how their protection policies are actually mapping back to their organizational controls based on, for example, how they TA tag their data for mission criticality or how sensitive that data is. Right. And so turning to best practices, especially for ransomware events. Since this is very top of mind for a lot of customers these days is I will, will always try to encourage customers to go through game day simulations, for example, identifying which are those most critical applications in their environment that they need up and running for their business to function properly, for example, and actually going through the recovery plan and making sure that their staff is well trained or that they're able to go through, for example, a security orchestration automation, recovery solution, to make sure that all of their mission critical applications are back up and running in case of a ransomware event. >>Yeah. So I love the game day thing. I mean, we know, well just the, in the history of it, you couldn't even test things like disaster recovery, right? Because it was too dangerous with the cloud. You can test these things safely and actually plan out, develop a blueprint, test your blueprint. I love the, the, the game day >>Analogy. Yeah. And actually one thing I'd love to add is, you know, we talked about air gaping. I just wanna kind of tie up that statement is, you know, one thing that's really interesting about the way that the AWS cloud is architected is the identity access and management platform actually allows us to create identity constructs, that air gap, your data perimeter. So that way, when attackers, for example, are able to gain a foothold in your environment, you're still able to air gap your most mission critical and also crown jewels from being infiltrated. >>Mm that's key. Yeah. We've learned, you know, when paying the ransom is not a good strategy, right? Cuz most of the time, many times you don't even get your data back. Okay. So we, we're kind of data geeks here. We love data and we're passionate about it on the cube AWS and you guys specifically are passionate about it. So what excites you, Wayne, you start and then Nancy, you bring us home. What excites you about data and data protection and why? >>You know, we are data nerds. So at the end of the day, you know, there's this expressions we use all the time, but data is such a rich asset for all of us. And some of the greatest innovations that come out of AWS comes out of our analysis of our own data. Like we collect a lot of data on our operations and some of our most critical features for our customers come out of our analysis, that data. So we are data nerds and we understand how businesses view their data cuz we view our data the same way. So, you know, Dave security really started in the data center. It started with the enterprises. And if we think about security, often we talk about securing compute and securing network. And you know, if you, if you secured your compute, you secured your data generally, but we've separated data from compute so that people can get the value from their data no matter how they want to use it. And in doing that, we have to make sure that their data is durable and it's resilient to any sort of incident and event. So this is really, really important to us. And what do I get excited about? You know, again, thinking back to this framework, I know that we as thought leaders alongside our customers who also thought leaders in their space can provide them with the capabilities. They need to protect their data, to secure their data, to make sure it's compliant and always, always, always durable. >>You know, it's funny, you'd say funny it's it's serious actually. Steven Schmidt at reinforc he's the, the, the chief security officer at Amazon used to be the C C ISO of AWS. He said that Amazon sees quadrillions of data points a month. That's 15 zeros. Okay. So that's a lot of data. Nancy bring us home. What's what excites you about data and data protection? >>Yeah, so specifically, and this is actually drawing from conversations that I had with multiple ISV partners at AWS reinforc is the ability to derive value from secondary data, right? Because traditionally organizations have really seen that as a call center, right? You're producing secondary data because most likely you're creating backups of your mission critical workloads. But what if you're able to run analytics and insights and derive insights from that, that secondary data, right? Then you're actually able to let AWS do the undifferentiated heavy lifting of analyzing that secondary data state. So that way us customers or ISV partners can build value on the security layers above. And that is how we see turning cost into value. >>I love it. As you're taking the original premise of the cloud, taking away the under heavy lifting for, you know, D deploying, compute, storage, and networking now bringing up to the data level, the analytics level. So it continues. The cloud continues to expand. Thank you for watching the cubes coverage of AWS storage day 2022.

[Music] okay we're back my name is dave vellante and this is thecube's coverage of aws storage day you know coming off of reinforce i wrote that the cloud was a new layer of defense in fact the first line of defense in a cyber security strategy that brings new thinking and models for protecting data data protection specifically traditionally thought of as backup and recovery it's become a critical adjacency to security and a component of a comprehensive cyber security strategy we're here in our studios outside of boston with two cube alums and we're going to discuss this and other topics wayne dusso is the vice president for aws storage edge and data services and nancy wong as general manager of aws backup and data protection services guys welcome great to see you again thanks for coming on of course always a pleasure dave good to see you dave all right so wayne let's talk about how organizations should be thinking about this term data protection it's an expanding definition isn't it it is an expanded definition dave last year we talked about uh data and the importance of data to companies every company um is becoming a data company uh you know the amount of data they generate uh the amount of data they can use to uh create models to do predictive analytics and frankly uh to find ways of innovating uh is is growing uh rapidly and you know there's this tension between access to all that data right getting the value out of that data and how do you secure that data and so this is something we think about with customers all the time so data durability data protection data resiliency and you know trust in their data if you think about running your organization on your data trust in your data is so important so you know you got to trust where you're putting your data you know people who are putting their data on a platform need to trust that platform will in fact ensure its durability security resiliency and you know we see ourselves uh aws as a partner uh in securing their data making their data they're built durable making their data resilient all right so some of that responsibility is on us some of that is on amazon responsibility around data protection data resiliency and you know um we think about forever you know the notion of um you know compromise of your infrastructure but more and more people think about the compromise of their data as data becomes more valuable in fact data is a company's most valuable asset we've talked about this before only second to their people you know the people who are the most valuable asset but right next to that is their data so really important stuff so nancy you talk to a lot of customers but by the way it always comes back to the data we've been saying this for years haven't we so you've got this expanding definition of data protection you know governance is in there you think about access etc when you talk to customers what are you hearing from them how are they thinking about data protection yeah so a lot of the customers that wayne and i have spoken to often come to us seeking thought leadership about you know how do i solve this data challenge how do i solve this data sprawl challenge but also more importantly tying it back to data protection and data resiliency is how do i make sure that data is secure that it's protected against let's say ransomware events right and continuously protected so there's a lot of mental frameworks that come to mind and a very popular one that comes up in quite a few conversations is in this cyber security framework right and from a data protection perspective it's just as important to protect and recover your data as it is to be able to detect different events or be able to respond to those events right so recently i was just having a conversation with a regulatory body of financial institutions in europe where we're designing a architecture that could help them make their data immutable but also continuously protected so taking a step back that's really where i see aws's role in that we provide a wide breadth of primitives to help customers build secure platforms and scaffolding so that they can focus on building the data protection the data governance controls and guardrails on top of that platform and that's always been aws philosophy make sure that developers have access to those primitives and apis so that they can move fast and essentially build their own if that that's in fact what they want to do and as you're saying when data protection is now this adjacency to cyber security but there's disaster recoveries in there business continuance cyber resilience etc so so maybe you could pick up on that and sort of extend how you see aws helping customers build out those resilient services yeah so you know two uh core pillars to a data protection strategy is around their data durability which is really an infrastructural element you know it's it's it's by and large the responsibility of the provided that infrastructure to make sure that data is durable because if it's not durable and everything else doesn't matter um and the second pillar is really about data resiliency so in terms of security controls and governance like these are really important but these are a shared responsibility like the customers working with us with the services that we provide are there to architect the design it's really human factors and design factors that get them resiliency nancy anything you would add to what wayne just said yeah absolutely so customers tell us that they want always on data resiliency and data durability right so oftentimes in those conversations three common themes come up which is they want a centralized solution they want to be able to transcribe their intent into what they end up doing with their data and number three they want something that's policy driven because once you centralize your policies it's much better and easier to establish control and governance at an organizational level so keeping that in mind with policy as our interface there's two managed aws solutions that i recommend you all check out in terms of data resiliency and data durability those are aws backup which is our centralized solution for managing protection recovery and also provides an audit audit capability of how you protect your data across 15 different aws services as well as on-premises vmware and for customers whose mission-critical data is contained entirely on disk we also offer aws elastic disaster recovery services especially for customers who want to fail over their workloads from on-premises to the cloud so you can essentially centralize as a quick follow-up centralize the policy and as you said the intent but you can support a federated data model because you're building out this massive you know global system but you can take that policy and essentially bring it anywhere on the aws cloud is that right exactly and actually one powerful integration i want to touch upon is that aws backup is natively integrated with aws organizations which is our de facto multi-account federated organization model for how aws services work with customers both in the cloud on the edge at the edge and on premises so that's really important because as we talk about all the time on the cube this notion of a decentralized data architecture data mesh but the problem is how do you ensure governance in a federated model so we're clearly moving in that direction when i want to ask you about cyber as a board level discussion years ago i interviewed dr robert gates you know former defense secretary and he sat on a number of boards and i asked him you know how important and prominent is security at the board level is it really a board level discussion he said absolutely every time we meet we talk about cyber security but not every company at the time this was kind of early last decade was doing that that's changed um now ransomware is front and center hear about it all the time what's aws what's your thinking on cyber as a board level discussion and specifically what are you guys doing around ransomware yeah so you know malware in general ransomware being a particular type of malware um it's a hot topic and it continues to be a hot topic and whether at the board level the c-suite level um i had a chance to listen to uh dr gates a couple months ago and uh it was super motivational um but we think about ransomware in the same way that our customers do right because all of us are subject to an incident nobody is uh uh immune to a ransomware incident so we think very much the same way and as nancy said along the lines of the nist framework we really think about you know how do customers identify their critical access how do they plan for protecting those assets right how do they make sure that they are in fact protected and if they do detect a ransomware event and ransomware events come from a lot of different places like there's not one signature there's not one thumb print if you would for ransomware so it's it's there's really a lot of vigilance uh that needs to be put in place but a lot of planning that needs to be put in place and once that's detected and a we have to recover you know we know that we have to take an action and recover having that plan in place making sure that your assets are fully protected and can be restored as you know ransomware is a insidious uh type of malware you know it sits in your system for a long time it figures out what's going on including your backup policies your protection policies and figures out how to get around those with some of the things that nancy talked about in terms of air gapping your capabilities being able to if you would scan your secondary your backup storage for malware knowing that it's a good copy and then being able to restore from that known good copy in the event of an incident is critical so we think about this for ourselves in the same way that we think about these for our customers you've got to have a great plan you've got to have great protection and you've got to be ready to restore in the case of an incident and we want to make sure we provide all the capabilities to do that yeah so i'm glad you mentioned air gapping so at the recent reinforce i think it was kurt kufeld was speaking about ransomware and he didn't specifically mention air gapping i had to leave so i might i might have missed it because i'm doing the cube but that's a that's a key aspect i'm sure there were things in the on the deep dives that addressed air gapping but nancy look aws has the skills it has the resources you know necessary to apply all these best practices and you know share those as customers but but what specific investments is aws making to make the cso's life easier maybe you could talk about that sure so following on to your point about the reinforced keynote dave right cj moses talked about how the events of a ransomware for example incident or event can take place right on stage where you go from detect to respond and to recover and specifically on the recover piece he mentioned aws backup the managed service that protects across 15 different aws services as well as on-premises vmware as automated recovery and that's in part why we've decided to continue that investment and deliver aws backup audit manager which helps customers actually prove their posture against how their protection policies are actually mapping back to their organizational controls based on for example how they tag their data for mission criticality or how sensitive that data is right and so turning to best practices especially for ransomware events since this is very top of mind for a lot of customers these days is i will always try to encourage customers to go through game day simulations for example identifying which are those most critical applications in their environment that they need up and running for their business to function properly for example and actually going through the recovery plan and making sure that their staff is well trained or that they're able to go through for example a security orchestration automation recovery solution to make sure that all of their mission critical applications are back up and running in case of a ransomware event yeah so i love the game date thing i mean we know well just in the history of it you couldn't even test things like disaster recovery be right because it was too dangerous with the cloud you can test these things safely and actually plan out develop a blueprint test your blueprint i love the the game day analogy yeah and actually one thing i love to add is you know we talked about air gapping i just want to kind of tie up that statement is you know one thing that's really interesting about the way that the aws cloud is architected is the identity access and management platform actually allows us to create identity constructs that air gap your data perimeter so that way when attackers for example are able to gain a foothold in your environment you're still able to air gap your most mission critical and also crown jewels from being infiltrated that's key yeah we've learned you know when paying the ransom is not a good strategy right because most of the time many times you don't even get your data back okay so we we're kind of data geeks here we love data um and we're passionate about it on the cube aws and you guys specifically are passionate about it so what excites you wayne you start and then nancy you bring us home what excites you about data and data protection and why you know we are data nerds uh so at the end of the day um you know there's there's expressions we use all the time but data is such a rich asset for all of us some of the greatest innovations that come out of aws comes out of our analysis of our own data like we collect a lot of data on our operations and some of our most critical features for our customers come out of our analysis that data so we are data nerds and we understand how businesses uh view their data because we view our data the same way so you know dave security really started in the data center it started with the enterprises and if we think about security often we talk about securing compute and securing network and you know if you if you secured your compute you secured your data generally but we've separated data from compute so that people can get the value from their data no matter how they want to use it and in doing that we have to make sure that their data is durable and it's resilient to any sort of incident event so this is really really important to us and what do i get excited about um you know again thinking back to this framework i know that we as thought leaders alongside our customers who also thought leaders in their space can provide them with the capabilities they need to protect their data to secure their data to make sure it's compliant and always always always durable you know it's funny you'd say it's not funny it's serious actually steven schmidt uh at reinforce he's the the chief security officer at amazon used to be the c c iso of aws he said that amazon sees quadrillions of data points a month that's 15 zeros okay so that's a lot of data nancy bring us home what's what excites you about data and data protection yeah so specifically and this is actually drawing from conversations that i had with multiple isv partners at aws reinforce is the ability to derive value from secondary data right because traditionally organizations have really seen that as a cost center right you're producing secondary data because most likely you're creating backups of your mission critical workloads but what if you're able to run analytics and insights and derive insights from that secondary data right then you're actually able to let aws do the undifferentiated heavy lifting of analyzing that secondary data as state so that way you as customers or isv partners can build value on the security layers above and that is how we see turning cost into value i love it you're taking the original premise of the cloud taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for you know deploying compute storage and networking now bringing up to the data level the analytics level so it continues the cloud continues to expand thank you for watching thecube's coverage of aws storage day 2022

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, covering Coupa Insp!re 2022. theCUBE is really happy to be here at this event. About 2,500 folks are here, which is great to see. I have two guests from Microsoft with me. Please, welcome Jonathan Allen, the director of global network modeling design and planning, and Cassie Wang, senior global network model and design engineer. Guys, thanks so much for joining me today. >> No problem. Thanks Lisa for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's talk about what's going on at Microsoft, the Microsoft supply chain. Supply chain is a term that's on everyone's lips these days for some interesting reason, but talk to me a little bit about the Microsoft supply chain and how does it scale to meet the needs of business? >> Yeah, Lisa, it's really an interesting design at Microsoft. When you look at all the products we service, from Xbox consoles, controllers, Xbox games, Xbox Live cards, service devices for retail customers, for consumer customers and commercial customers. And then the way we go to market through distributors, retailers, and direct to consumer homes, we have to have a supply chain that actually executes across all the products and customer needs based on seasonality. When you think about our products, Xbox console heavy Christmas, heavy consumer, heavy retail commercial devices for service, heavy quarter ends, heavy periods of time back to school. So, we have to have a supply chain that effectively works across all of our products, all of our customers, and all the differences analogies that we have to manage. >> And do so globally? >> And do so globally. >> So talk to me about the transformation. That's a word that we talk a lot about digital transformation, right? >> Yes. >> Before COVID, now we've seen the acceleration of digital transformation during COVID, we've seen challenges with the supply chain. Talk to me about Microsoft supply chain journey from a digitalization perspective, what you guys have gone through. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is the key. And I have a philosophy which is around managing a business by facts and figures. And so, when Cassie first came on about a year and a half ago, our focus was on digitizing our supply chain. So how do you take our physical supply chain, digitize it in a way that you have a digital mapping and a duplication of what's happening physically in a digital way across the supply chain. So about every single day, we're grabbing in about 500 gigabytes of data, that then allows us to understand the physical and the virtual world of our supply chain, to understand how it's moving, how it's executing and how it's delivering. As for example, we were able to, when the war began in Ukraine, to understand where our trains were, how they were moving, and if they were continuing to move versus stopping. On the second side, we're leveraging that data now to make decisions about where our supply chain is today, which is really focused in the changing environments that are real time occurring. That's driving opportunities, whether it's about reducing carbon, whether it's driving cost down or whether it's servicing the customers to make real time decisions, while at the same time planning for three to five years out based on our growth, our projections, and making sure we'll have the right infrastructure partner supply chain in place to service with those changes in growth. >> Basically you need a crystal ball? >> Basically. >> Essentially? >> Yes. >> And Cassie, it sounds like from what Jonathan just said, you joined the team during the pandemic? >> Yes. >> So, during a time of massive change? >> Fully remote, yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that and some of the opportunities that you saw in helping the supply chain modernization. >> Yeah, definitely. So when I joined Microsoft, it's great time. And it's all the risks and challenges and dynamic changing environment that's really involved. So we spent a long time, like from the time I joined Microsoft, we spent the time to set up this digital chain of our supply chain. So really to transform what is happening physically to how do we see it digitally. So just to bring the visibility of the supply chain. So the great thing is we are able to leverage the tool from Coupa, the digital transformation and also supply chain design optimization tool to help us really build the digital twin, and also the model for Microsoft device supply chain. >> Now, interesting comment. So when I met Casie, the first time I met her, was in person when I interviewed her. Second time I met her in person was here at Coupa, and I was afraid I wouldn't recognize her. (all laughing) >> Of course, challenges of last year. Talk to me about speaking of challenges, talk to me about some of the challenges that Microsoft saw and said, "We need a partner like Coupa to help us eliminate these challenges. We don't have time. Real time is no longer nice to have. We've got to be able to transform, so we have that visibility in real time." >> Absolutely. When you think about time, time and decisions, overnight, cities get locked down in China, cities get locked down in Europe. And if you wait days or wait hours, that could be the difference between product on a boat, product on a plane, or product not arriving to support your customer needs. >> Right. And then the question is knowing that with that real time, how are you making decisions real time to change, to alternate airports? Making changes on the products you're making to make sure that, I was making this but now I should make this, because I have a risk of getting product to show. >> And you've got to do all that with very limited amount of time. And of course, cause there's the consumer. I mean, we think about the Microsoft on the business side but the consumer side, you mentioned some of the consumer products you don't offend the Xbox, the service consumers. One of the things that was really in short supply during the pandemic and probably still is to some degree, is patience. >> Yes. >> The consumer experience is so critical for a brand. >> Correct. >> And as is the employee experience. >> Yes. >> Talk to me a little bit about, from a supply chain digitization perspective, what was some of the executive sponsorships? Who were some of those executive sponsors that were involved in going, "Yeah, we need to move in this direction with Coupa, and it's got to be now."? >> The real supporter behind that is, my manager, Jeff Davidson, and then his leader, which is Donna Wharton, where they are truly about what are we doing next? How are we going to leverage the tools and the capabilities that are provided by others that allow us to do our job? So let's be clear on, let's use those that are designed to do what they're supposed to do, and then build where we need to. And that was the big difference, the digitization of the data, create the data, create the information so that we could then leverage the tools to create the information, right? And that information is then about bringing the facts, the information and the data forward, to have very fact-based conversations, which is back to manage the business by facts and figures. >> Right. Well, Cassie, one of the things that we've also learned in the last couple years, is that every company is a data company. If they're not a data company they're probably not going to be around. I even think of my grocery store and all that data that they have on me to be able to surface up. What did I buy last time, and I want to buy that again? Talk to me a little bit about why was Coupa the right choice to help facilitate this data strategy so that the visibility and the supply chain and the ability to tweak things on demand is there? >> Yeah. So, the main stuff that we are leveraging from Coupa are the data group and also the supply chain group. So data group enable us to really, for the people who do not have a intensive data manipulation backgrounds, they can use data group very straightfowardly to work on the data so they can build, they can grab the data transactional level and aggregate to the leadership level to see data in different aspects, tell the trends to get the key information. So that's the power of getting the massive data on a level that's like everybody can say, "Oh, wow! This is what it means." And another is definitely leveraging the data to get into a model, which is what we just talked about, the digital twin of our physical supply chain. So, we are able to like make analysis based on very easy design, like sensitive analysis, what-if analysis, to test out what our future supply chain can be. And what is the cost benefits? What is all the impacts on the on the lead times? On the carbons? So, yeah. So that's the power of leveraging the data. >> Speaking of carbons, how is Microsoft working towards being carbon negative, zero waste? What's some of the things that are going on there from a corporate responsibility perspective? >> Yeah, that's a really important one. As known about two years ago, we came out with a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. >> 2030. >> And so, the company as a whole is doing massive initiatives from different groups, but specifically in supply chain, we're constantly focusing on cutting our carbon footprint, whether it's the way we're making the products and designing the products, whether it's the way that we're designing our warehouses. So for example, just recently, we launched a Carbon Neutral DC in Europe, which is all solar panel based. We're about to do that as well in one of our US operations. We're working on other things that allow us to think about alternative pallets that eliminate the weight of wood, to a much lighter pallet that has a huge carbon reduction when you think about shipping things via the air and the carbon impact there. So, everything that we work on is really around three things; service, cost and sustainability. And our biggest objective is really taking all three of those objectives and trying to bring them closer to each other so that the decisions aren't as large against each other when you make one versus the other. That's our objective. So, how do we continue to move that ball forward, challenge the paradigms of the old, that we're so accustomed to and really move forward to changing? >> How does Coupa help with that? >> Oh, I can't say that, yeah. >> Yeah, so one of the actual dimensions, Microsoft our goal is to achieve carbon neutral by 2030. So traditionally, the trade off might be between cost and service, right? >> Okay. And now, the carbon is the most important priority. So the trade off, the balance, are between cost, service, time and carbon. So one of the great thing that Coupa can help us is in the network modeling. There is actually objective for lowering the carbon emissions. So that can be the top priority that you wanted to solve through your network modeling like in parallel to cost, to service. So you can just like very straightforwardly put more weight into carbon when you're making your decisions, like that can be a higher penalty cost when you have more carbon emissions. It's like a very straightforward way to translate the carbon goal into some quantifiable goal into the modeling and data. >> Jonathan, I'm curious from a Microsoft strategic partnership perspective, how important is it from Microsoft to partner with companies that have that strong commitment to help facilitate being carbon neutral by 2030, having a strong ESG initiative? >> It's critical. Microsoft for the most part is an outsourced supply chain in which we measure partners across the network. We have our partners run our distribution and centers, we have outsource manufacturing, we have outsourced logistics. And it's important that we're working with them about what their plans are, because they're just simply an extension of the Microsoft supply chain. >> Right. >> Right. They're not not just companies we work with, they're companies we partner with, to think about how can we change the future? What are the alternatives that we can do? How do we think about alternative fuels? How do we think about alternative shipping ways? How do we think about creating density in the network? So one of the biggest things when you really think about optimization is really around creating deensity. How do I create more with less, and make sure I'm taking, for every dollar spent, for every shipment made, I maximize it to its fullest, and leave no waste behind it? That's the goal. And so, partners challenging us is probably the most important piece because they're on the front line. They actually see our shipments, they see our loads, they see the work we're doing and how it's translating to their environment. And it's important that they give us that hard feedback back that allows us know where we're not meeting the bar. >> Got it. Cassie, you guys are giving a presentation in about a couple of hours. Talk to me about some of the things that the audience, like if you had to summarize the top three takeaways that the audience is going to learn from the top, what would they be? >> I think the first is sustainability. So we want everybody to know that this is the key mission for Microsoft. That's one of the priorities for the next eight years for Microsoft to achieve. And the second is just how Coupa can help us achieve that goal. And how do we leverage the the applications, the tools, the cutting edge technologies for us to achieve a sweet balance between sustainability and technology supplychain? >> I think one of the greatest things about conferences like this, is that Coupa is great with that customer centricity, is it the opportunity to hear from the voice of the customer? What challenges you had? Why you chose Coupa? How you resolved them? And that crystal ball that you talked about in terms of where we're going from here. I think that there's so much value. I'm sure in what you're going to share today with the audience. Jonathan, last question for you, for other folks in any industry that are about to embark on, or are in the midst of a supply chain, digital transformation, what's your advice? What recommendations would you give? >> For me, it's really about two things. First and foremost is about creating data. Focus on data, not an answer, not a conversation. What is the information that you require? And then the second piece about that is then how do you make sure you stitch it together? And how you create, whether it's manufacturing data, whether it's purchase order data, whether it's sales order data, whether it's shipment data, whatever it is, making sure that you can stitch end-to-end together, because each individual decision by itself, may be right, but could be wrong, because ultimately, it's about the decision for the whole, not the decision for the one. And then making sure you focus on the cultural change, which is around, it's just not my area, it's just not my thing, it's about the end, it's about the planet, it's about Microsoft, it's about the customer, it's about the future, and making sure you're really really focused on making that change, right? Not my change. >> Right, and Rob Bernstein even alluded to that a little bit this morning in his keynote talking about one of the things that Coupa breaks is silos. >> Yes. >> Organizations that, cause to your point, something might be really good for sales or operations, but not good for marketing or logistics, for example, need to be able to have that visibility across, but also another thing that Coupa is famous for is collaboration. >> Correct. >> Being able to enable that collaboration across lines of business, across teams, across partners. >> Yep. And an important statement of that is, when you think about change, think of it like a stream, right? Streams, they create pathways with persistence. When you believe in something and you're truly behind it, just stay the path, right? There'll be a time and a place, cause sometimes the decisions just aren't now, but they will become. There's a lot of things that, for example, myself and Cassie are constantly working on, that might not be right now, but they will be right in the future. And it takes sometimes, just the right opportunity, the right situation, but the key is making ysure you understand those things so when those opportunities present themselves, you can just step in. >> Yep. Another thing we've learned, I think in the last two years, I'm losing count, is it's not a matter of if, but when. >> Correct. >> And you can apply that general statement to pretty much anything these days. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about Microsoft's transformation of the supply chain, the digital twin that you've created. Have a great time in your session. I'm sure folks are going to learn a lot from you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, my pleasure. For Jonathan Allen and Cassie Wang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the the CUBE's coverage of Coupa Insp!re 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around, be right back with my next guest. (upbeat msuic)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm pleased to welcome Nancy Wong, the general manager of Data Protection and Governance at AWS to the program. Nancy, it's great to have you. >> Thanks so much for having me Lisa, and you know, I really hope that this is hopefully the last year that we'll be celebrating International Women's Day all virtually. >> I agree. I agree. Well, we're going in that right direction globally. So let's cross our fingers. Talk to me a little bit about your role at AWS and what you do there. >> Sure. So as a GM of AWS Data Protection and Governance, a lot of, we tackle quite a few problems that our biggest customers face, right? When they think about, "How do I manage my data?" Right. Especially in this digital world. And speaking of the pandemic, how much data has been generated by consumers, by devices, by systems, by servers? How do you protect all of that data? Right. Especially we hear about cyber crime, cyber attacks. Right. Data breaches. It's really important to make sure that all of our customers have a coherent strategy around not just management, right, but also protection and really how you govern your data. Right. And there's just so many awesome conversations that my team and I have had lately with CSOs or chief technology officers on this topic, as it evolves. >> Data protection is so critical. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about, cybersecurity as well. Talk to me about what it means though if we keep this at a bit of a different level to be an operator within the the big ecosystem that is AWS. >> Yeah. And that's actually one of the the favorite aspects of my role. Right. Which is, you know, I get to innovate every day on behalf of my customers. For example, I love having one-on-one dialogues. I love having architecture conversations where we brainstorm. Right. And so those type of conversations help inform how we deliver and develop products. And so in an operator role, right, for the the women in the audience today, is it really gives you that perspective into not just how, what type of products do you want to build that delight your customers but also from an engineering. Right. And a bottom line perspective of, well how do you make this happen? Right. How do you fund this? And how do you plan out your development milestones? >> What are, tell me a little bit about your background and then what makes women in technology such an important initiative for you to stand behind? >> Absolutely. So I'm so proud today to see that the number of women or the percentage of women enrolled at engineering curriculums just continue to rise. Right. And especially as someone who went through an engineering degree in her undergraduate studies, that was not always the case. Right. So oftentimes, you know, I would look around the classroom and be the only woman on the lab bench or only woman in a CS classroom. And so when you have roles in tech, specifically, that require an undergraduate degree in computer science or a degree in engineering, that helps to, or that only serves to really reduce the population of eligible candidates. Right. Who then, if you look at that pool of eligible candidates who then you can invest and accelerate through the career ladder to become leaders in tech, well that's where you may end up with a representation issue. Right. And that's why we have, for example, so few women leaders in tech that we can look up to as role models. And that's really the problem or the gap that I'm very passionate about solving. And also, Lisa, I'm really excited to tell you a little bit more about advancing women in tech, which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that I started to tackle this exact problem. >> Talk to me about that, cause it's one of the things that you bring up is, you know, we always say when we're having conversations like this, we can't be what we can't see. We need to be able to see those female leaders. To your point, there aren't a ton in comparison to the male leaders. So talk to me about advancing women in technology, why you founded this, and what you guys are accomplishing. >> Absolutely. So it's been such a personal journey as well. Just starting this organization called Advancing Women In Tech because I started it in 2017. Right. So when I really was, you know, just starting out as a product manager, I was at another big tech company at the time. And what I really realized, right, is looking around you know, I had so many, for example, bosses, managers, peer leaders, who were really invested in growing me as a product manager and growing my tech and career. And this is right after I'd made the transition from the federal government into big tech. What that said though, looking around, there weren't that many women tech leaders that I could look up to, or get coffee, or just have a mentoring conversation. And quickly I realized, well, it's not so much that women can't do it. Right. It's the fact that we're not advancing enough women into leadership roles. And so really we have to look at why that is. Right. And we, you know, from a personal perspective, one contribution towards that angle is upskilling. Right. So if you think about what skills one needs as one climbs a career ladder, whether that's your first people management role, or your first manager manager's role, or obviously for bigger leaders when they start managing thousands, tens of thousands of individuals, well all of that requires different skills. And so learning those skills about how to manage people, how to motivate your teams effectively, super, super important. And of course on the other side, and one that I'm, you know, near to dear to me is that of mentorship and executive sponsorship because you can have all the skills in the world, right. And especially with digital learning and AWIT is very involved with Coursera and AWS in producing and making those resources readily available and accessible. Well, if you don't have those opportunities, if you don't have mentors and sponsors who are well to push you or give you a step ladder to those roles, well you're still not going to get there. Right. And so, that's why actually, if you look at the AWIT mission, it's really those two pillars working very closely together to help advance women into leadership roles. >> The idea of mentorship and sponsorship is so critical. And I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. How do you define that difference and how do you bring them into the organization so that they can be mentors and sponsors? >> Yeah, absolutely. And there's, you know, these two terms are often used today so interchangeably that I do get a lot of questions around, well, what is the difference? Right. And how does, let's say a mentor become a sponsor? So, maybe just taking a few steps back, right. When you have let's say questions around compensation or, "Hey I have some job offers, which ones do I consider?" And you ask someone a question or advice, well that person's likely your mentor. Right? And typically a mentor is someone who you can ask those questions on a repeated basis. Who's very accessible to you. Well, a sponsor takes that a few steps forward in the sense that they are sponsoring you into a role or into a project or initiative that you on your own may not be able to achieve. And by doing so, I think what really differentiates a sponsor from a mentor is that the sponsor will actually put their own reputation on the line. Right. They're using their own political capital in order to make sure that you get into that role, you get into that room. Right. And that's why it's so key, for example, especially if you have that relationship already with a person who's your mentor, you're able to ask questions or advice from, to convert them into a sponsor so that you can accelerate your career. >> Great definition, description, and great recommendations for converting mentors to sponsors. You know, I only learned the difference about a mentor and a sponsor a few years ago at another women in tech event that I was hosting. And I thought, "It's brilliant. It makes perfect sense." We need more people to understand the difference, the synergies, and how to promote mentors to sponsors. Talk to me now about advancing women in tech plus the power of AWS. How are they helping this nonprofit to really accelerate? >> Sure. So from an organization perspective, right, there's many women, for example, across the the tech companies who are part of Advancing Women In Tech, obviously Amazon of course as an employee has a very large community within who's part of AWIT. But we also have members across the tech industry from startups to VC firms to of course, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. You name it. With that said, you know, what AWS has done with AWIT is actually very special in the sense that if you go to the Coursera platform, coursera.org/awit you can see our two Coursera specializations. Four courses each that go through the real world product management fundamentals. Or the business side, the technical skills, and even interviewing for mid-career product management roles. And the second specialization, which I'm super excited to share today, is actually geared towards getting folks ramped up and prepared to successfully pass the Cloud Practitioner's Exam, which is one of the industry recognized standards about understanding the AWS Cloud and being functional in the AWS Cloud. This summer, of course, and I'm sharing kind of a sneak peek announcement that I'll be making tomorrow with the University of Pennsylvania, is that we're kicking off a program for the masters of CIS program, or the Computer Information Systems Master students, to actually go through this Coursera specialization, which is produced by AWIT, sponsored by AWS, and AWS Training and Certifications has so generously donated exam vouchers for these students so that they can then go on and be certified in the AWS Cloud. So that's one just really cool collaboration that we are doing between AWS and AWIT to get more qualified folks in the door in tech jobs, and hopefully at jobs in AWS. >> That's a great collaboration. What are some of the goals in terms of metrics, the number of women that you want to get into the program and complete the program? What are some of those on your radar? >> Absolutely. So one of the reasons, of course, that the Master's of CIS Program, the University of Pennsylvania caught my eye, not withstanding, I graduated from there, but also that just the statistics of women enrolled. Right. So what's really notable about this program is it's entirely online, which as a university creating a Master's degree fully online, well, it takes a ton of resources from the university, from the faculty. And what's really special about these students is that they're already full-time adult professionals, which means that they're working a full-time job, they might be taking care of family obligations, and they're still finding time to advance themselves, to acquire a Master's degree in CS. And best of all, 42% of these students are women. Right. And so that's a number that is multiples of what we're finding in engineering curriculums today. And so my theory is, well if you go to a student population that is over 40%, 42 to be exact percent women, and enable these women to be certified in AWS Cloud, to have direct interview prep and mentorship from AWS software development leaders, well, that greatly increases their chances of getting a full-time role, right, at AWS. Right. At which then we can help them advance their careers to further and further roles in software development. >> So is this curriculum also open to women who aren't currently in tech to be able to open the door for them to get into tech and STEM fields? >> Absolutely. And so in my bad and remiss in mentioning, which is students of this Master's in CS Program are actually students not from tech already. So they're not in a tech field. And they did not have a degree in CS or even engineering as part of their undergraduate studies. So it's truly folks who are outside of tech, that are 42% women, that we're getting into the tech industry with this collaboration between AWS, AWIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. >> That's outstanding to get them in from completely different fields into tech. >> Absolutely. >> How do you help women have the confidence to say, "I want to try this." Cause if we think about every company today is a tech company. It's a data company. It has to be to be competitive. You know, the pandemic taught us that everything we're able to do online and digitally, for example, but how do you help women get the confidence to say, "Okay, I'm going to go from a completely different field into tech." >> Absolutely. So if we, you know, define tech of course as big tech or, you know, now the main companies, right, I myself made that transition, which is why it is a topic near and dear to me because I can personally speak to my journey because I didn't start my career out in tech. Right. Yes. I studied engineering. But with that said, my first full-time job out of college was with the federal government because I wanted to go and build healthdata.gov, right, which gave folks a lot of access to the healthcare data, roles, right, that existed within the U.S. government and the CMS, NIH, you know, CDC, so on and so forth. But that was quite a big change from then taking a product management job at Google. Right. And so how did I make that change? Well, a lot of it came from, you know, the mentors that I had. Right. What I call my personal board of directors who gave me that confidence. And sure, I mean even today, I still have imposter syndrome where, you know, I think, "Am I good enough." Right. "Should I be leading this organization," right, "of data protection and governance." But I think what it boils down to is, you know, inner confidence. Right. And goes back to those two pillars of having the right skills and also the right mentors and sponsors who are willing to help sponsor you into those opportunities and help sponsor you to success. >> Absolutely. Great advice and recommendations. Thanks for sharing your background, Nancy, it's outstanding to see where you started to where you are now and also to what you're enabling for so many other females to get into tech with the AWIT program combined with AWS and UPenn. Exciting stuff. Can't wait to talk to you next year to see where you guys go from here. >> Absolutely Lisa. And what I'm really looking forward to sharing with you next year is the personal testimonials of other women who have gone through the AWIT, the AWS, the UPenn Program and have gotten their tech jobs and also promotions. >> That sounds like a great thing to look forward to. I'm looking forward to that. Nancy, thanks so much for your time and the insight that you shared. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> My pleasure. For Nancy Wong, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase 2022. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference, WiDS 2022, live from Stanford Uni&versity. I'm Lisa Martin. I have a guest next here with me. Maggie Wang is here, Autonomy Engineer at Skydio. Maggie, welcome to the program. >> Thanks so much. I'm so happy to be here. >> Excited to talk to you. You are one of the event speakers, but this is your first WiDS. What's your take so far? >> I'm really excited that there's a conference dedicated to getting more women in STEM. I think it's extremely important, and I'm so happy to be here. >> Were you always interested in STEM subjects when you were growing up? >> I think I've always been drawn to STEM, but not only STEM, but I've always been interested in arts, humanities. I'm getting more interested in the science as well. And I think STEM robotics was really my way to express myself and make things move in the real world. >> Nice. So you've got interests, I was reading about you, interests in motion planning, control theory, computer vision and deep learning. Talk to me about those interests. It sounds very fascinating. >> Yeah. So I think what really drew me into robotics was just how interdisciplinary the subject is. So I think a lot goes into creating a robot. So not only is it about actually understanding where you are in the world, it's also about seeing where you are in the world. And it's so interesting, because I feel like humans, you know, we take this all for granted, but it's actually so difficult to do that in an actual robot. So I'm excited about the possibilities of robotics now and in the future. >> Lots of possibilities. And you only graduated from Harvard last May, with a Bachelor's and a Masters? >> Yeah. >> Tell me a little bit about what you studied at Harvard. >> Yeah, so I studied Physics as my undergrad degree. And that was really interesting, because I've always been interested in science. And, actually, part of what got me interested in STEM was just learning about the universe and astrophysics. And that's what gets me excited. And I think I also wanted to supplement that with computer science and building things in the real world. And so that's why I got my Masters in that. And I always knew that I wanted to kind of blend a lot of different disciplines and study them. >> There's so much benefit from blending disciplines, in terms of even the thought diversity alone, which just opens up the opportunities to be almost endless. So you graduated in May. You're now at Skydio. Autonomy Engineer. Talk to me a little bit, first of all, tell me a bit about Skydio as a company, the products, what differentiates it, and then talk to me about what you're doing there specifically. >> So Skydio is a really amazing company. I'm super-fortunate to work there. So what they do is create autonomous drones, and what differentiates them is the autonomy. So in typical drones, it's very difficult to actually make sure that it has full understanding of the environment and obstacle avoidance. So what happens is we fly these drones manually, but we aren't able to harness the full potential of these drones because of lack of autonomy. So what we do is really push into this autonomous sphere, and make sure that we're able to understand the environment. We have deep learning algorithms on the drone, and we have really good planning and controls on the drone as well. So yeah, our company basically makes the most autonomous drones in the market. >> Nice. And tell me about your role specifically. >> Yeah. So as an autonomy engineer, I write algorithms that run on the drone, which is super-exciting. I can create some algorithms and design it, and then also fly it in simulation, and then fly it in the real world. So it's just really amazing to see the things I work with actually come to life. >> And talk to me about how you got involved in WiDS. You were saying it was your first WiDS, and Margot Gerritsen found you on LinkedIn, but what are some of the things that you've heard so far? I mean, I was in one of the panels this morning before we came out to the set, and I loved how they were talking about the importance of mentors and sponsors. Talk to me about some of your mentors along the way. >> Yeah, I had so many great mentors along the way. I definitely would not be here had it not been for them. Starting from my parents, they're immigrants from China, and they inspire me in so many ways. They're very hard-working, and they always encourage me to fail, and just be courageous, and, you know, follow my passions. And I think beyond that, like in high school, I had great mentors. One was an astrophysics professor. >> Wow. >> Yeah. So it was very amazing that I was able to have these opportunities at a young age. And even in high school, I was involved in all girls robotics team. And that really opened my eyes to how technology can be used and why more women should be in STEM. And that, you know, STEM should not be only for males. And it's really important for everyone to be involved. >> It is, for so many reasons. If we look at the data, and the workforce is about 50-50, but the number of women in STEM positions is less than 25%. It's something that's new to the tech industry. What are some of the things that... Do you see that, do you feel that, or are you just really excited to be able to focus on doing the autonomous engineering that you're doing? >> Well, I think that it's kind of easy to try to separate yourself and your identity from your work, but I don't necessarily agree with that. I think you need to, as best as possible, bring yourself to the table and bring your whole identity. And I think part of growing up for me was trying to understand who I was as a woman and also as an Asian American, and try to combine all of my identities into how I bring myself to the workplace. And I think as we become more vulnerable and try to understand ourselves and express ourselves to others, we're able to build more inclusive communities, in STEM and beyond. >> I agree. Very wise words. So you're going to be talking on the career panel today. What are some of the parts of wisdom are you going to leave the audience with this afternoon? >> Well, wisdom. I think everyone should be able to know, and have intuitive understanding of what they actually bring to the table. I think so many times women shy away from bringing themselves and showing up as themselves. And I think it's really important for a woman to understand that they hold a lot of power, that they have a voice that need to be heard. And I think I just want to encourage everyone to be passionate and show up. >> Be passionate and show up. That's great advice. One of the things that was talked about this morning, and we talk about this a lot when we talk about data or data science, is the inherent bias in data. Talk to me about the importance of data in robotics. Is there bias there? How do you navigate around that? >> Yeah, there's definitely bias in robotics. There's definitely a lot of data involved in robotics. So in many cases right now in robotics, we work in specialized fields, so you can see picking robots that will pick in specific factory locations. But if you bring them to other locations, like in your garage or something, and make it clean up, it's really difficult to do so. So I think having a lot of different streams of data and having very diverse sets of data is very important. And also being able to run these in the real world I think is also super-important, and something that Skydio addresses a lot. >> So you talked about Skydio, what you guys do there, and some of the differentiators. What are some of the technical challenges that you face in trying to do what you're doing? >> Well, first of all, Skydio's trying to run everything on board on the drone. So already there's a lot of technical challenges that goes into putting everything in a small form factor and making sure that we trade off between compute and all of these different resources. And yeah, making sure that we utilize all of our resources in the best possible way. So that's definitely one challenge. And making sure that we have these trade-offs, and understand the trade-offs that we make. >> That's a good point. Talk to me about why robotics researchers and industry practitioners, what should be some of the key things that they're focusing on? >> Yeah, so I think right now, as I said, a lot of robotics is in very specialized environments, and what we're trying to do in robotics is try to expand to more complex real world applications. And I think Skydio's at the forefront of this. And trying to get these drones in all different types of locations is very difficult, because you might not have good priors, you might not have good information on your data sources. So I think, yeah, getting good, diverse data and making sure that these robots can work in multiple environments can hopefully help us in the future when we use robots. >> Right. There's got to be so many real world a applications of that. >> Yeah, for sure. >> I imagine. Definitely. So talk to me about being a female in the drone industry. What's that like? Why do you think it's important to have the female voice in mind in the drone industry? >> Well, I think first of all, I think it's kind of sad to see not many women in the drone space, because I think there's a lot of potential for drones to be used for good in all the different areas that women care about. And for instance, like climate change, there's a lot of ways that drones can help in reducing waste in many different ways. Search and rescue, for instance. Those are huge issues, and potential solutions from drones. And I think that if women understand these solutions and understand how drones can be used for good, I think we could get more women in and excited about this. >> And how do you see your role in that, in helping to get more women excited, and maybe even just aware of it as a career opportunity? >> Yeah. So I think sometimes robotics can be a very niche subject, and a lot of people get into it from gaming or other things. But I think if we come to it as a way to solve humanity's greatest problems, I think that's what really inspires me. I think that's what would inspire a lot of young women, is to see that robotics is a way to help others. And also that it may not, if we don't consciously make it so that robotics helps others, and if we don't put our voices into the table, then potentially robotics will do harm. But we need to push it into the right direction. >> Do you feel it's going in the right direction? >> Yes, I think with more conferences like this, like WiDS, I think we're going in the right direction. >> Yeah, this is a great conference. It's one of my favorite shows to host. And you know, it only started back in 2015 as a one-day technical conference. And look at it now. It's a global movement. They found you. You're now part of the community. But there's hundreds of events going on in 60 countries. You have the opportunity there to really grow your network, but also reach a much bigger audience, just based on something like what Margot Gerritsen and the team have done with WiDS. What does that mean to you? >> It means a lot. I think it's so amazing that we're able to spread the word of how technology can be used in many different fields, not just robotics, but in healthcare, in search and rescue, in environmental protection. So just seeing the power that technology can bring, and spreading that to underserved communities, not just in the United States, I love how WiDS is a global community and there's regional chapters everywhere. And I think there should be more of this global collaboration in technology. >> I agree. You know, every company these days is a technology company, or a data company, or both. You think of even your local retailer or grocery store that has to be a technology company. So for women to get involved in technology, there's so many different applications of that. It doesn't have to be just coding, for example. You're doing work with drones. There's so much potential there. I think the more that we can do events like this, and leverage platforms like theCUBE, the more we can get that word out there. >> I agree. >> So you have the career panel. And then you're also doing a tech vision talk. >> Yeah, a tech talk. >> What are some of the things you're going to talk about there? >> Yeah, so I'm going to talk about... So at the career panel, just advice in general to young people who may be as confused and starting off their career, just like I am. And at the tech talk, I'll be talking about some different aspects of Skydio, and a specific use case, which is 3D scanning any physical object and putting that into a digital model. >> Ooh, wow. Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, so 3D scan is one of our products, and it allows for us to take pictures of anything in the physical world and make sure that we can put it into a digital form. So we can create digital twins into digital form, which is very cool. >> Very cool. So we're talking any type of physical object. >> Mm hm. So if you want to inspect a building, or any crumbling infrastructure, a lot of the times right now we use helicopters, or big snooper trucks, or just things that could be expensive or potentially dangerous. Instead, we can use a drone. So this is just one example of how drones can be used to help save lives, potentially. >> Tremendous amount of opportunity that drones provide. It's very exciting. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to this year? We are very early in calendar year 2022, but what are you excited about as the year progresses? >> Hmm. What am I excited about? I think there's a lot of really interesting drone-related companies, and also a lot of robotics companies in general, a lot of startups, and there's a lot of excitement there. And I think as the robotics community grows and grows, we'll be seeing more robots in real life. And I think that's just extremely exciting to me. >> It is. And you're at the forefront of that. Maggie, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing what you're doing at Skydio, your history, your past, and what you're going to be encouraging the audience to be able to go and achieve. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much. >> All right. From Maggie Wang. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference, WiDS 2022. Stick around. I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, we're here in downtown Seattle covering AWS storage day. My name is Dave Vellante with the Cube, and we're really excited. We're going to talk about rethinking data protection in the 2020s. I'm here with Nancy Wong, who is the general manager of AWS backup, and Satish Lakshmanan, the director of storage business development at AWS. Folks, welcome. Good to see you again. So let's talk about the evolution of data protection. You've got three major disruptors going on. There's obviously the data explosion. We talk about that all the time, but there's cloud has changed the way people are thinking about data protection and now you've got cyber. What's AWS's point of view on all this. >> Great question, Dave. You know, in my role as the global head of storage business development and solution architecture for storage, I have the privilege of working with customers all around the globe, in every geography and every segment. And we recently talked to thousands of customers and we did a survey for about 5,000 customers. And many of them told us that they expect to see a ransomware attack once every 11 seconds. So it's top of mind for almost every customer so much so that if you remember earlier this year, the white house issued an executive order, you know, making the nation aware of across public and private sector about cybersecurity and the need for, for, for us to be prepared. Customers as a result, largely think of not only ransomware protection, but also recovery. And they have largely allocated budgets across every geography to make sure that they're well protected. And in the, in the event of an attack, they can recover from it. That's where Nancy's, you know, data protection services and backup services come into play. And maybe she'll add a few comments about how she approaches it from a technology perspective. >> Yeah, sure. Thanks, Satish yeah, as a general manager of AWS backup and our data protection services, it's really my team and my charter to help our customers centralize, automate, and also protect themselves from attacks like ransomware. Right? And so for example, you know, across our many services today we offer AWS backup as a secondary data collection and management across our many AWS regions and also across the aid of many AWS accounts that a single customer must manage, right. And if you recall having multiple copies of your data exist in backups is a core part of any customers ransomware protection strategy. And lastly, I just want to say something that we just launched recently called AWS backup audit manager also helps you operationalize and monitor your backups against any ransomware attack. >> So, the adversary, obviously, as we know, was well-equipped and they're quite sophisticated. And anybody who has inside access can become a ransomware attacker because of things like ransomware as a service. So, what are you specifically doing to address ransomware? >> Yeah. So, in talking to several thousand of our customers, what we have learned is customers are typically vulnerable in one or more of three scenarios, right? The first scenario is when they're not technically ready. What that means is either their software patches are not up to date, or they have too many manual processes that really prevent them from being prepared for defending against an attack. The second is typically around a lack of awareness. These are situations where IT administrators leveraging cloud-based services are recognizing that, or not recognizing per se, that they're easy to instances, Lambda instances have public access and same applies to S3 buckets. And the third is lack of governance and governance based practices. The way we are educating our customers training in enabling them and empowering them, because it's a shared security model, is really through our well-architected framework. That's the way we shared best practices that we have learned across all our customers, across our industries. And we enable it and empower them to not only identify areas of vulnerability, but also be able to recover in the event of an attack. Nancy. >> Yeah, and to add to that right, our team, and now my team and I, for example, watch every ransomware incident and because it really informs the way that we plan our product roadmap and deliver features that help our customers protect, detect, and also recover from ransomware. So there's an ebook out there, suggest you go check it out, of securing your cloud environment against ransomware attacks. And aside from the technical maintenance suggestions that Satish provided, as well as the security awareness suggestions, there's really two things that I usually tell customers who come to me with ransomware questions. Which is one, right, don't rely on the good will of your ransomware attacker to restore your data. Because I mean, just studies show over 90% of ransom payers actually don't successfully recover all of their data because, hey, what if they don't give you the full decryption utility? Or what if your backups are not restorable? Right? So, rather than relying on that good will, make sure that you have a plan in place where you can recover from backups in case you get ransomed. Right? And two, is make sure that in addition to just taking backups, which obviously, you know, as a GM of AWS backup, I would highly recommend you do, right. Is make sure that those backups are actually restorable, right? Do game day testing, make sure that it's configured properly because you'd be surprised at the, just the number and the sheer percentage of customers who when, let's say the attack happens, actually find that they don't have a good set of data to recover their businesses from. >> I believe it. Backup is, one thing as they say, recovery is everything. So you've got the AWS well-architected framework. How does that fit in, along with the AWS data protection services into this whole ransomware discussion? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, the AWS wall architected framework actually has four design approaches that I usually share with customers that are very relevant to the ransomware conversation. And one is, you know, anticipate where that ransomware attack may come from. Right? And two, make sure that you write down your approaches whereby you can solve for that ransomware attack, right? Three, just like I advocate my teams and customers to do, right. Then look back on what you've written down as your approach and reflect back on what are the best practices or lessons learned that you can gain from that exercise. And make sure as part four, is you consistently plan game days where you can go through these various scenario tests or ransomware game day attacks. And lastly, just as a best practice is ransomware recovery and protection isn't just the role of IT Professionals like us, right. It's really important to also include HR, professional, legal professionals. Frankly, anyone in a business who might come and be compromised by ransomware attack, and make sure that they're involved in your response. And so Satish, I'd love to hear as well, how you communicate to customers and what best practices you offer them. >> Yeah, thanks Nancy. I think in addition to the fantastic points you made, Nancy, Dave, the well architected framework has been built on eight to 10 years worth of customer engagements across all segments and verticals. And essentially it's a set of shared best practices, tools, training, and methodology that we, you know, exchange with customers in order to help them be more prepared to fight ransomware attacks and be able to recover from them. Recently, there've been some enhancements made where we have put industry or use case specific lenses to the well architected framework. For example, for customers looking to build IOT applications, customers who are trying to use server less and Lambda functions, customers who may be within the financial services or healthcare life sciences, where to go, looking to understand best practices from other people who've implemented, you know, some of the technologies that Nancy talked about. In addition, as I talked about earlier, training and enablement is extremely critical to make sure that if companies don't have the skillset, we are basically giving them the skillset to be able to defend. So we do a lot of hands-on labs. Lastly, the well architected framework tool has been integrated into the console, and it gives customers who are essentially managing the workloads, the ability to look at access permissions, ability to look at what risks they have through malware and ransomware detection techniques. Machine learning capability is built into all the services that are native to AWS that allow them to then react to them. If companies don't have the skills, we have a vast network of partners who can help them basically implement the right technologies. And they can always reach out to our technical account manager for additional information as well. >> I love the best practice discussion. For customers, it's a journey. I mean, CSOs tell us their one problem is lack of talent and so they need help. So, last question is what can people expect from AWS? You're the experts. In particular, how you can help them recover from ransomware? >> Yeah, and that conversation is ever evolving, right? As hackers get more sophisticated then clearly we have to get more sophisticated as well. And so one of our mental models that we often share with customers is defense in depth, right? So if you consider all of the layers, including all of the constructs that exist natively on AWS, right? The first layer is through identity access management constructs. So building a trust radius around your workloads, around your applications, whereby you can deny permissions or access permissions to individuals who are not authorized to access your mission critical applications, right. Then beyond that first layer of defense, the second layer should be automated monitoring or observability. For example, if individuals were to penetrate within your security perimeter, and often times I, you know, that could be done through a delayed response where it gives your CSO or your security operations team, the ability to react to such a unauthorized access, for example. And so the third line of defense is if someone were to penetrate both first layer, as well as the second layer, is actually through backups. And this is where it goes back to what I was mentioning earlier is make sure that your backups are ready and able to be restored and have the RTO and SLA guarantees that help your business remain functional even after an attack. >> Excellent. Guys, we got to go. I love that, zero trust layer defenses, got to have the observability in the analytics and then the last resort RTO, and of course, RPO. Guys, thanks so much, really appreciate your insights. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from AWS storage day. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We have a cube conversation today talking about an exciting announcement coming out of our friends over it at V M, where it's the second generation via VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. And to tell us more about it, we've got a couple Cube alumni that we're always happy to have on. First off, we're joined by Matt Morgan. He is the VP of marketing at VMware. Matt, Great to see you. Great CTO. And then Wei Wang, She's the product or director of product marketing of the VMware way. Great to see you as well. >>Nice to see you, Jeff. >>So, first off, hope you guys were getting through. Ah, the stay at home and work from home and family. Everything good >>thes air. Unprecedented times for sure, But we're fortunate and we're doing fine. I hope everything is going well with you and your family. >>Yeah, Thank you. I mean, we are lucky to be an IT space. So we can We can flip the digital much easier than some industries. Let's jump into this announcement. Second generation via VMware Cloud on Dell, EMC. You guys only announced this in production like a year ago. So, Matt, what? What kind of drove a second generation already know What were some of the drivers and what what is the essence of the second generation? >>Yeah, the space is moving really fast. As you know, Public Cloud has captured the imagination of practically every IT organization on the planet. Because the public cloud provides a new way of doing business. It allows you to consume technology on demand, allows you to have the elasticity, allows you to have op ex financial treatment. But more importantly, it takes you out of the core management business. No more hardware refreshes. No more operational control of the core infrastructure. This is all delivered as a service. The problem is, in order to get this value, you have to turn to the public cloud. You have to actually replace your workload in the data center that someone else managed, and that data center might be far away from the data that is being generated. And so in many cases, It's just simply not practical to move all of your workloads there. So on premise, technology is still going to be important. What VMware announced way back in 2000 and 18 I think it was August 2018 at VM World is Project Dimension, and the whole concept was about delivering the cloud to the data center but truly allowing you to run your data center or data center infrastructure in a truly manage, cloud centric way. We then commercialized it when we announced via VMware Cloud on Dell, EMC, the product and the uptake has been off the hook. We've seen industry analysts like you saw with Rick. We've seen our customers really embrace this technology, and we've got an enormous feedback and that feedback is also driven a new set of requirements. And the truth is, while we envisioned this technology to clearly be an edge play, our customers are telling us it's a data center play. They believe that they can reimagine their data center to operate just like a cloud, and by deploying via VMware cloud on Dell EMC. This facilitates their needs to do that, but they needed a new class of system something a lot more powerful than our first generation, something that could take on all of the workloads. In fact, there's a slide. If you want to pull it up, we kind of illustrate this. The second generation solution is all about turning the volume up to 11. We are enabling organizations to put two times as many VMS on this technology. They, in effect, can run twice as many workloads. More importantly, for a nightie architect, they can design a system that will take on the most demanding, most complex business critical applications with largest set of data and be able to manage that as a entity but in a cloud model on premises. >>Now, Matt I'm struck a little bit because, you know, first if you talk about edge and this was really, you know, kind of a response to growth of the edge and the anticipated growth of edge and I ot and then at the now you're saying really, you know, there's this great opportunity in the data center, and I think we had Rick on from IDC, talked about local cloud as a service, so that's spanning a pretty wide range of environments, workloads, all types of demand. So what are the real critical, you know, kind of functional capabilities of a local cloud as a service and specifically with VMware Cloud. >>So we partnered with Rick when he was defining this category. And if you look at what Rick's research, he sees this category growing. I think too close to $5 billion all in revenue, that all in revenue is coming in the next 2.5 years. That's a faster scale out than we saw HCI. And in his research he's finding the same information that we found when we did our early customer surveys. We have identified a real need at the edge, but let's not underplay that. If you look at a 5G cell tower, typically they need compute that's local. They're gonna be tons of these erected over the next few years, and they don't have on-premise IT infrastructure people to manage that technology, so there's an opportunity to have a managed approach where the compute is local, but it's managed as a cloud. Clearly, the solution is custom designed for that, but I can look at a dozen other IoT centric opportunity. Let's talk about energy production. An offshore oil rig. Again, no IT Staff. The need for compute lots of sensor data, the opportunity to deliver a managed approach gives you that capacity. Let's look at agriculture again, pushing out compute to the edge. So this edge component is another hyper growth area or information technology, and we have a great solution. Custom built for that. However, as I had mentioned right, the growth of use cases includes the most important, the most significant business critical apps that are really big gaps that live in the data center. This can include a variety of different use cases. Think about a hospital. They have data centers in each of the regions. That's all perfect fit for this. Talk about a technology base for virtualized desktop infrastructure. Think about having to deploy an SAP application. There's a dozen more I can think of right off the top of my head. But what we did with the second generations we listen >>to the customer. >>The customers wanted more power. They wanted more capacity. They wanted the opportunity to have a full rack that could beat their expectations on the capacity and power side so that they can fulfill their requirements, and that's what this >>is all about. >>So that's great, Matt way, you're You're a little bit more in the weeds in the product development. What are some of the things that you're excited about in this second gen offering that maybe people aren't as aware of or maybe is a little bit below the radar, >>Right? Okay, so let me first and talk about that. This is truly, as Matt pointed out, is not an insignificant release, right? This is not incremental. We, for example, that our customer we're rolling out a full 40 to argue rack that is support the traditional use cases and also that more than use cases and thinking about also a brand new eastern type that we call internal people Montt medium that in which we doubled not the sock account, but also the CPU moving from a to 24 CPUs to a 48 total and double our realm Rama 368 to 700 before and also doubling to introducing all flash like envy. MB based flash secondary storage for, um, 11 point half to 23 terabytes. And all these is really to honing in what might have pointed out that enterprise class. You know, the hi workloads, very density work clothes, right? You can put into the area 12 to 15. This kind of notes offer development and allows you to have that in the data center and to making sure that you have that kind of capacity for performance. We have that. The second thing I want to mention, as you can imagine, is the VD I I think virtual desktop infrastructure cannot be more important have this environment. Everybody is looking at it, and especially for the highly regulated industries like healthcare. So VMware right? We help for where the market leader with our offerings as a VM or horizon solution. So what happens in this release is we actually 35? We'll be certified on the VM or as horizon solution to making sure that we offer that enterprise distributed capacity to the industry that we really want to run up fast and also to making sure that they obviously cannot have actually support to have that capacity to offer the remote workers to front line healthcare workers and other business continuity type off use cases to that capacity for video. The last one is actually as you can imagine. Also in this environment is data backup and recovery. Right? The the enterprises are looking for a solution that in which they can not only backup protect and also search for search for the things that they can actually, for historical reasons. So in this release, we're actually certified to solutions for back up the 1st 1 of course, with our friends at Dell. Right, Dell data protect solution. The 2nd 1 is that's an industry leading solution right there. And the 2nd 1 is actually the beam, though so but with both solutions now, we can truly offer our customers who are looking for enterprise strength a backup solution to for the continuity and also for this to continue to operate in this environment. >>So I'm just curious. Before we let you go, you talked about this being a pretty significant release and we've talked about markets basis from edge back into the data center. Ah, and really kind of enterprise class heavy workloads, critical workloads, applications running this so as you look forward, you know, not give me any secrets out in terms of roadmap. But Where do you see this? This class of application evolving. >>So I think that you can imagine the week we talked to a variety of customers there different ways. We can actually expand this many off our retail customers has talked about their suggestions and 5G towers. Not only we can expand it to a data center, we probably will actually offer this type of solutions into, for example, a substantial retail shop or a back of pizza shop that's going small on one end. The other end is, I think, that many of our customers have expressed interest off off colocators, right. They're working with in other geographical areas that they're actually working with local providers that that they don't they don't own themselves. They do not even wanted to purchase right the cooling and managing the space. So they want us to provide an integrated solution with many of the large colocators, but as well as some of the niche colocators, so that we can offer that end to end and offer that together a city platform to our partners. So that's where we're going >>very exciting space, and you guys do. Move quick, Matt. I'll give you the last word before we sign out where people get more information. Wouldn't g A Or I guess, or is it is G. I think we are, Um, give us the last word. >>Yes, so yes, the services available. People can get more information BMR dot com And I think you know the truth of the matter is the cloud is an operating model. It's not an individual data center location, right? And the idea of a cloud. A cloud operating model that could be hybrid that can move from public cloud data centers to your own own data centers to the edge to everywhere in between, including MSC's VMware provides a great platform that standardizes across that on one of the things that is a driver for VMware customers is their ability to eat their existing workloads without having to modify re factor or rework the right. I have a workload that I sit in a data center in a public cloud of VM where simply V motion or use HC X to move that workload, and I could be up and running instantly on that consistency as a lot of flexibility, agility and, you know, it helps people do things faster. So I think those of my final comments it was really good to see you, Jeff. Thanks for having us. You >>do. Thanks for checking in. Ah, I think it's the first time we've done one of these, But certainly we've spent lots of time together around the Cube set. So Ah, I'm glad everybody's healthy and this to show passed. So keep working hard to keep delivering great products. And thanks again for stopping by. >>Thank you. >>Alright, He's Matt and way. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE! Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. We are at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Stu Miniman, of course. We are joined by a good friend of theCUBE, Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Hey, how you doing? Good morning! >> Good morning, good morning! >> Good morning! (laughing) >> Good morning! >> I don't know. I get all my accents wrong out here. >> (laughing) So, you got a shout out on the main stage this morning, from Monica Kumar, congratulations on that. She talked about you and your research on the infinite role of computing. You also do a lot with the future of work. I know that that is really right in your wheelhouse right now. What are you hearing, what are you seeing, what kinds of conversations are you having that are interesting you? >> Yeah, so, this infinite computing option, it's one of the that we're talking about, the fact that you can scale out forever, right? And the problem that's holding us back has been technical debt, right? So all that legacy that everyone's got to figure out. It's like, my connections, my server, my disk-rack recovery, my disaster recovery, my backup, everything. It's a pain in the butt. And I'm still trying to get onto the cloud. So on that end, we're like, okay, all this stuff is holding us back, how do we get there? Now, the future of work is a little bit different. We're seeing a very very different set of work. People have talked about where we are the gig economy, but that's just one aspect of it. Everything is being decomposed into microservices. Large processes are becoming smaller and smaller microservices, they're being reusable, well our work and tasks are following the same way. We're getting smaller and smaller tasks, some are more repetitive, some are going to be automated, and it's really about where we actually find the difference between augmentation of humanity, and full automation, and that's where the next battle's going to be. >> Yeah, Ray, some of the discussions we've been having this week, is how do we really simplify the environment? The balance I hear from customers, on the one hand, they're always like, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough personnel, on the other hand, oh my gosh, that full automation sounds like you're going to put me out of a job. We know we're not putting everybody out of work in the next couple of years. There are challenges; we worry about the hollowing out of the center of the economy, but here, what Nutanix is trying to do, of course, is, I don't want to have to thrive in that complexity anymore, I want to be able to drive innovation, keep up with that, take advantage of that unlimited resources out there, so, where do you see, you've been here at the show, what are you hearing from the customers here? Anything different in Europe versus back in North America that you'd share about that journey onto the changing roles? >> Oh it's a great point. It's about simplifying everything where you can, it's about areas of automation where they make sense. Here in Europe it's slightly different because a lot of the focus in Europe has been about cost and efficiency, followed by of course regulatory. Those have been the two drivers. And they've been battling that in order to be, even they will look at some level of innovation. Where in the US, people are head on doing innovation, regulatory and operational efficiency at the same time. So that creates a very very different environment. But what we have noticed are some patterns, especially when we look at automation and AI; there are four areas out of seven where we see a lot more automation that's happening. The first one is massively repetitive tasks, those are things, yeah, got to get that out of the way, we don't do this very very well. The second one is really thinking about massive nodes of interaction. When you're connected to multiple places, multiple organizations, multiple instances, that's something where we start to get overwhelmed, and then of course, there's lots of volume. If you've got lots of volume or requests that are coming through, you can't possibly handle that, and that's a place where we see a lot of machine scale. And the last piece is really when you have to scale, humans don't scale very well. However, it's actually not a hollowing out of the middle; it's actually a hollowing out of the ends in a very, very real end, because really really simple tasks go away, super complex tasks go away, and the middle actually remains, and the middle is things that are complex that cannot be recreated by math, they're also areas that require a lot of creativity, humans make the rules, we break the rules, and then the last part is really fine motor skills and presence, the machines still aren't as good. So we still have some hope. So the middle stays, it's the hollowing out of the ends, the high end jobs and the low end jobs are the ones where we're going to see a lot of risk. >> So what does that mean? So we have, leaving the middle there, and as you said, the high end jobs and the low end jobs go away, but what does that mean in terms of the skills? In terms of what employers are looking for, in terms of what they need in their prospective applicants and hirees. >> That's a great point. Soft skills are important; it's the qualitative skills that become even more important, it's also being able to manage and orchestrate the hard skills; because you don't necessarily have to know how to do the calculation, you have to just know which algorithm to apply. >> Okay, and then also, these soft skills of managing people, I'm assuming too? Because computers are not so good at that either. >> Yes. Soft skills are managing people, but also manage the human and machine equation that's going to happen. Because we have to train the machines, the machines aren't going to know that level of intuition, and there's a large amount of training that's going to happen over time. >> All right. So, Ray, one of the things Nutanix is doing is, as they've been transforming to not only subscription, software's always been at their core, but they're starting to do not just infrastructure software, but application software. I know you live in that world quite a lot, so when you hear Nutanix talking about building databases, delivering these services, it's something that I look at, Amazon does some of that, but for the most part they're infrastructure and build on top of us. How do you think, how is Nutanix doing, what are some of the challenges for them, going up against some of the bellwethers out there in tech, and all the open source projects that are out there. >> So the challenge is always going to be, there is a one dominant player in every market. And what they're providing is an alternative to allow the orchestration of not having that, not only that dominant player, but a choice. So in every single market, they're focused on giving users choice, and giving the ability to aggregate, and bring everything into one single plane. That is tough to do, right? And the fact that they see that as their big hairy audacious goal, that's impressive. If you said they were going to do this three years ago, I wouldn't have believed them. >> Well yeah, I think back to, remember almost 10 years ago, VMware tried to get into applications, they bought Zimbra, they bought a few others. Cisco did like 26 adjacencies, they were going to take over video and do all these things, and we've seen lots of failures over the years. They refocused on their core, was a big thing that I heard, that the users seem to be excited about. Are there areas that you're find especially interesting as to where Nutanix is poking? >> So, I would say that Nutanix three years ago was a little bit sleepy. They got comfortable, they did the stuff that they did really well, and it feels like, maybe about 12 months ago, Dheeraj had a different vision. Like something snapped, something hit, he said this isn't working, we're going to change things, and we've seen a whole bunch of new talent come into play. We've also seen a huge expansion of what they're trying to do, and a cleanup of all those side projects that were all going on before. So I think they've actually honed in on, okay, if we can simplify this piece, this is a money-winning business for some time, and they're talking about 80% margins last quarter, I mean that's huge, and that's just trying to save customers money, and make their lives simpler. >> Do you think that they have the messaging right? Because, I mean, they're going to this Thoreauvian/Emersonian idea of simplify, simplify, simplify, and it does resonate, of course! What customer doesn't want a simpler computing experience? But do you think that they are reaching the right people, and they have obviously very passionate customers, but are they getting into new businesses. >> I think they're getting to the businesses that their customers are asking them to, those adjacencies are huge, I think and when you think about cleaning up technical debt, all that legacy debt that you actually have to fix, I mean, this is where you begin. It's so hard to make that cloud journey to begin with, it's even harder to carry all that legacy with you. And we're going to see a lot more of this going forward. >> All right. So, Ray, talk a little bit about, I loved an event you did last year, the people's centered digital future. Help explain to our audience what this is about, and where you're taking it again this year. >> So that event was a one-time event. We were celebrating the 70th anniversary of the United Nations founding, we were celebrating almost 50 years of the internet, and 50% of the world being connected to the internet. And part of the reason that was an important event was, we really felt that there was a need to get back to the roots of where the internet had begun, and more importantly, talk about where we are today in the world of privacy. One of the biggest challenges we have in the a digital world is that your personal data, your genomics, all this information about you is being brokered for free. And what we have to do is take that back. And by taking that back, what I mean is, we've got to make all these rights, property right. If we can make that a property right, we can leverage the existing rules and legislation that's there, and we can actually start paying people for that data through consent, and giving people that ability, on consent to data, could create lots of things, from universal basic income, to a brand new set of data economy that equalizes the playing field, while keeping the large tech giants. >> There's some of those big journeys that we went on, you talk about the internet, this year's 50th anniversary of the first walking on the moon, and you look at how entire countries rallied together, so much technology was-- >> Yeah, look at India. >> Spun off of what they've done there, it's like we need some rallying cries in today's day and age to solve some of these big day and age. Is that AI? Where are some of the big areas that you see tech needing to drive forward in the next decade? >> I think the big area's going to be around decentralization, giving individuals more empowerment. We've got large, big tech companies, that are, I'd say, imbalanced. We start companies right away, building monopolies on day one, and we don't open up those markets. And the question is, how do we create a level playing field for the individual to be to compete, to bring a new idea, and to innovate, if that's continuously stifled by big technology companies without an opportunity, we're in trouble. And so that starts by making data a property right, to the personal data. It starts by also creating marketplaces for that data, and those marketplaces have to have regulations, similar to capital market flows. The way treat exchanges, we treat marketplaces, we need to do the same thing with the way we do with data, and then the third piece, there has to be some level of a tax, that goes to all these data economies, so that they can fund the infrastructure and the watch dogs that are there. Now this is coming from a free market, I'm a free market capitalist, okay? I can't stand regulation, but I also realize that it's so important that we have a fair market. >> But do you, we know so much about how Americans are so much more cavalier about their privacy than even Europeans, what will it take to galvanize Americans to care about those little crumbs that they're leaving on the internet, that is the data that you say should be a property right, that we should be paid for? >> I think it's going to start with companies actually take, and do the right thing, where they actually give them that opportunity to monetize that information. >> Will they do that? >> I think the new set of startups are starting to do that, because they're looking at the risk that's being posed, at Facebook and Google and Amazon, on the anti-trust, DOJ, FCC, they're all coming in at the same time, the FTC, they're all wondering, do we break these companies up or not? The short answer is, I don't think they're going to, because we're competing with China, and when you're looking at that scale of data, where Amazon's transactions are only 1/10 of Ali Baba's? That's huge. So the consolidation has to happen, but we need to create a layer that actually democratizes and creates a fair trading play. >> And those startups, you think, can compete with established players? >> I think once we set the roles, and the ground rules, I think people are going to be able to do that, but once you free that data, what are we competing on now? You have to pay for my consent, you have to earn my business, you can't trade it for free, or just say, "Hey look, you are the product." That changes everything. >> Rebecca: Yeah, that's a good point. >> Ray, I know you spend a lot of time talking to, and giving advice to some of the leaders in technology, you're welcome to get into some specifics about Nutanix, or some of the cloud players, but what are some of the key themes, what are people getting right, and what are they still doing wrong? >> Okay, so theme number one, this is going to be a multicloud hybrid world for a long time. Anybody that's bucking the multicloud trend, they've missed the point, right? Because we want portability in data, there's only two or three players in every single market, if I can't move my data, my workloads, and my IO in and out, then you've actually created vendor lock-in from hell. And I think customers are going to protest against that. The second one, and you guys are probably following this trend a lot, is really about AI ethics and design principles for AI. So what is ethical AI? We've got five things that are important: The first one is make sure it's transparent. See the algorithms, see what they write. Second one, make sure it's explainable. Hey, bias is not a bad thing, so if I'm discriminating against redheads, with, left-handed, and that happened to like, I don't know, Oracle, fine. But, if that was unintended, and you're discriminating against that, then we have to get rid of that, right? And so we have to figure out how to reduce that kind of bias, if it's unwanted bias. If you discover that you're discriminating, and not being inclusive, you've got to make sure that you address that. So then the next part is, it's got to be reversible. And once you have that reversibility, we also make sure that we can train these systems over time. And then the last piece is, Musk could be right! Musk could be right, the machines might take over, but if you insert a human at the beginning of the process, and at the end of the process, you won't get taken over. >> I want to hear about what the future of work looks like for Ray Wang. You are on the road constantly, you are (laughs) you are moving your data from one place, you are everywhere, all the time. So what do you have on next, what's exciting you about your professional life? >> I think the challenge's that we are living in a world where there's too much information, too much content. And you guys say this all the time, right? Separating the signal from the noise. And people are willing to pay for that signal. But that is a very very tough job, right? It's about the analysis, the insights, and when you have that, people don't want to read through your reports. They don't want to watch through the videos. They just want to call you up and say, "Hey, what's going on?" And get the short version of it. And that's what's making it very interesting, because you would expect this would be in a chat bot, it'd be in a robo advisor, doesn't work that way. People still want the human connection, especially given all that data out there, they want the analysis and insights that you guys provide, that's very very important, but even more important right now, it's really about getting back to those relationships. I think people are very careful about the relationships they're keeping, they're also curating those relationships, and coming back to spending more time. And so we're seeing a lot more of in-person meetings, in-person events, very very small, curated conversations, and I think that's coming back. I mean that's why we do our conference every year, as well, we try to keep 200 to 300 people intimately together. >> Those human connections, not going away. (laughs) >> Nope, not going away, in an automated, AI, digital world! This is our post-digital future. >> That's excellent. Well Ray, thanks you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's always so much fun to talk to you. >> Hey, thanks a lot. >> High energy guy (laughs). >> Low energy. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from the Bella Center at Nutanix.NEXT coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering the Churchills 2019 brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube. We're in Santa Clara, California At the Churchills. It's the ninth annual kind of awards banquet at the Church O Club. It's on, and the theme this year is all about leadership. And we're excited to have not one of the winners, but one of the newest board members of the church, Oh, club. And someone is going to be interviewing some of the winners at a very many time. Cuba LEM Ray Wong, You know, from Constellation Research of founder, chief analyst >> and also >> a new board member for the Churchill Club Brigade, is >> also being back here. I love this event. There's one my favorite ones. You get to see all the cool interviews, >> right? So you're interviewing Grandstand from Pallet on for the life changer award. >> Yeah, so this is really incredible. I mean, this company has pretty much converge right. We're talking, It's media, It's sports, It's fitness. It's like social at the same time. And it's completely changed. So many people they've got more writers than soul cycle. Can you believe that? >> Yeah. I like to ride my bike outside, so I'm just not part of this whole thing. But I guess I guess on those bikes you can write anywhere >> you can write anywhere, anywhere with anyone. But it's not that. It's the classes, right? You basically hop on. You see the classes. People are actually pumping you up there. Okay, Go, go, go. You can see all the other riders are in the space. It's kind >> of >> addictive. Let's let's shift gears. Talk about leadership more generally, because things were a little rough right here in the Valley right now. And people are taking some hits and black eyes. You talk to a lot of leaders. She go to a tonic, shows you got more shows. A. We go to talk to a lot of CEOs when you kind of take a step back about what makes a good leader, what doesn't make a good leader? What are some of the things that jump into your head? >> You know, we really think about a dynamic leadership model. It's something conceit on my Twitter handle. It's basically the fact that you got a balance. All these different traits. Leaders have to perform in different ways in different situation. Something like Oh, wow, that's a general. They've done a great job commanding leadership. Other times we had individuals, a wonderful, empathetic leader, right? There's a balance between those types of traits that have to happen, and they curve like seven different dimensions and each of these dimensions. It's like sometimes you're gonna have to be more empathetic. Sometimes you got to be more realistic. Sometimes you're going to be harder. And I think right now we have this challenge because there's a certain style that's being imposed on all the leaders that might not be correct >> theater thing. The hypothesis for you to think about is, you know, when a lot of these people start the Silicon Valley companies the classic. It's not like they went to P and G and work their way up through the ranks. You know, they started a company, it was cool. And suddenly boom. You know, they get hundreds of millions of dollars, the I po and now you've got platforms that are impacting geopolitical things all over the world. They didn't necessarily sign up for that. That's not necessarily what they wanted to do, and they might not be qualified. So, you know, Is it? Is it fair to expect the leader of a tech company that just built some cool app that suddenly grew into, ah, ubiquitous platform over the world that many, many types of people are using for good and bad to suddenly be responsible? That's really interesting situation for these people. >> Well, that's what we talked about the need for responsive and responsible leadership. Those are two different types of traits. Look, the founding individual might not be the right person to do that, but they can surround themselves with team members that can do that. That could make sure that they're being responsive or responsible, depending on what's required for each of those traits. You know, great examples like that Black Mirror episode where you see the guru of, like, some slasher meet a guy. Some guys like Colin is like, you know, he wants to make sure that you know someone's paying attention to him. Well, the thing is like a lot of times, at least folks are surrounded by people that don't have that empathetic You might not have had what a founder is looking at, or it could be the flip side. The founder might not be empathetic. They're just gung ho, right, ready to build out the next set of features and capabilities that they wanted to d'oh! And they need that empathy that's around there. So I think we're going to start to see that mix and blend. But it's hard, right? I mean, going through a start up as a CEO and founder is very, very different than coming in through the corporate ranks. There's a >> very good running a company, you know. It's funny again. You go to a lot of shows. We get a lot of shows, a lot of key, knows a lot of CEO keynotes, and it's just interesting. Some people just seem to have that It factor one that jumps off the top is Dobie. You know, some people just seemed >> like the have it >> where they can get people to follow, and it's it's really weird. We just said John W. Thompson, on talking about Sathya changing the culture at Microsoft, with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world. What a creative and amazing job to be able to turn that ship. >> Oh, it is. I mean, I can turn on the charm and just, like, get your view Lee excited about something just like that, right? And it's also about making sure you bring in the input and make people feel that they're inclusive. But you gotta make decisions at some point, too. Sometimes you have to make the tough choices. You cut out products, you cut out certain types of policies, or sometimes you gotta be much more responsive to customers. Right? Might look like you're eating crow. But you know what? At the inn today, cos they're really built around customers or state Kohler's stay close air bigger today than just shareholders. >> Right. Last question. Churchill Club. How'd you get involved? What makes you excited to jump on board? >> You know, this is like an institution for the valley, right? This is you know, if you think about like the top interviews, right? If you think about the top conversations, the interesting moments in the Valley, they've all happened here. And it's really about making sure that you know, the people that I know the people that you know there's an opportunity to re create that for the next set of generations. I remember coming here when it's like I go back, I think give Hey, just I don't hear anybody in 96 right? And just thinking like, Hey, what were the cool activities? What were the interesting conversations and the church? The club was definitely one of those, and it's time to give back. >> Very good. All right, well, congrats on that on that new assignment. And good luck with the interview tonight. Hey, thanks a lot. All right. He's Ray. I'm Jeff. You wanted the Cube with that? Churchill's in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Live, from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019. Here in Moscone, we're talking so much multi clouds. It's been raining all day, really windy. To help us wrap up our third day, what we call theCUBE Insights, I have our co-CEO, Dave Vellante. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome back to the program. It's been at least 15 times on the program, I think our counter is breaking as to how many you've been on, Ray Wang, who is the founder, chairman and analyst with Constellation Research, also the host of dDsrupTV who was gracious enough to have me on the podcast earlier this year, Ray. >> Little reciprocity there, Stu. >> Hey, we got to get you back on, this is awesome! Day three is wrap-up and this is going to be fun. >> Ray, as we say, theCUBE is everywhere, except it's really a subset of what you and the Constellation Research team do, we see you all over the place so thanks for taking time to join us. Alright, so tell us what's going on in your world, Ray. >> So what we're seeing here is actually really interesting, we've got a set of data-driven business models that are being lit up, and you see IBM everywhere in that network. And it's not about Cloud, it's not about AI, it's not about security, it's not about Blockchain. It's really about companies are actually building these digital networks, these business models, and they're lighting them up. IBM-Maersk, we saw things with insurance companies, you see it with food trust, you see it with healthcare. It's happening, and it's the top customers that are doing this. And so it's like we see a flicker of hope here at IBM that they're turning around, they're not just selling services, they're not just selling software, they're actually delivering these business models to executives and companies, and the early adopters are getting it. >> Ray that was one of the questions we had, is what's the theme of the show and-- >> There is no theme! >> You're giving us the theme here of what it should be because we talk digital, we talk cognitive, we talk all these other big thought-y words because we need to think while we're here, right? >> We need to think, we need to think! No, but the thing is this is a theme-less show, people can't figure it out but the main thing is, look, I've got a problem, this digital disruption is happening, my business models are changing. Help me be part of that shift, or I may go away! And people realize that and that's what they're starting to get, and you see that in all the reference customers the people that were on stage. The science slams were also really great. I don't know if you had a chance to catch those but the science slams were kind of a flicker into research, IBM research which is the heart of IBM, is coming up. They're going from concept to commercialization so much faster than they used to be, used to be research would do a project people are like, that's kind of cool, maybe I'll adopt it. They're now saying hey, let's get this into the market, let's get into academia, let's get early adopters on board. >> So Ray, what do you make of the Red Hat deal? What does it say about IBM's strategy? Do you like the deal? What does it say about the industry at large? >> It's a great question. The Red Hat deal to me was overpaid, however, at 20x multiples, that's what PE firms are paying. So every vendor is now competing with PE firms for assets. Red Hat, at about 9x, 10x? Makes a lot of sense, at 20x? It's kind of like, okay, is this the Hail Mary or is this the future strategy or is this basically what the new company is? I would have rather taken that money and put it into venture funds to continue what they're doing with these network models. That would have been a better strategy to me but Red Hat's a great company, you get a great team, you get great COs you get great tooling. >> So you would've rather seen tuck-ins to actually build that network effect that you've been alluding to. Of course that would have taken longer you know, wouldn't have solidified Ginni's legacy. So, it's a big move, a big move on the chessboard. >> Well the legacy's interesting, last year the stock was down some 20-some percent, it's up 20% since January so we're going to see what happens, but it's a doubt component. >> Well I've always said she inherited a bag of rocks from Palmisano at the peak of 2012 and then it got hit hard and she had to architect the transformation. It took, I don't know, five years plus, so, you know, she was dealt a tough hand, in my opinion. >> She had a bad hand, but we've had seven years to play this. I think that's what the market's saying. >> So it's on her, is what you're saying. >> It's now on her. She's got to turn this around, finish the legacy, but you've got a great CEO in waiting with the Red Hat guy. >> Jim Whitehurst you're saying? >> Yeah, he's good >> So she's what, Ginni is 60, 61? Is that about right? >> She's past the retirement age. Normally IBM CEOs would have gone through. >> 61 to 63 I think, is that range maybe, hey, women live longer so maybe they live longer as the CEO of IBM, I don't know. >> She did get a bad hand, but I think when you execute the strategy that money, here's the tough part. Investors are saying, hey, we'd rather take your money, back away from you through stock buybacks, dividends and mergers and acquisitions, and we don't trust you to do the innovation. That's happening to every company, including all of IBM's customers. The problem is if you do that, they're hedging against those companies too. The same investors are taking 50, 100 million, giving it to three kids in a start-up anywhere in the world and saying, hey, go disrupt these guys, so they're betting against their own investments and hedging. So that's the challenge she's up against. >> We talked about in our open for the show here. It's developers, though, that's the business model. We saw IBM struggle for years to get any real traction there, there's little pockets there, they've got great legacy in open source, but Red Hat's got developers. Ray, you go and see a lot of shows, who's doing well with developers out there? >> Microsoft redid their developer network by going younger with GitHub, whole bunch of other acquisitions, this is a great developer buy in that percent. But the other piece that we noticed here was it's the partner developers that are coming in in force. It's not your average developer. I'm going to build a coding and do a mobile app, it's people that work for large system integrators, large networks, small midsize VARs, those are where the developers are coming from and now they have a reason, right? Now they have a reason to build and I think that's been a good turnaround. >> How about Salesforce with the developer angle, what's your radar say there? >> It's not about the developer angle on the Salesforce side, what's interesting about the Salesforce side is Trailhead. This is, like, learning management meets gamification meets a whole LinkedIn training program in the back end. This is the way to actually take out LinkedIn without going after LinkedIn, by giving everyone a badge. There's a couple of million people actually on this thing. Think about this, all getting badges, all training each other, all doing customer support and experience, that's amazing! They crowd-source customer experience and learning right there. And they're building a community and they're building a movement. That's the thing, Salesforce is about a movement. >> Couple of others, SAP and Oracle, give us your update there. >> I think SAP's in the middle of trying to figure out what they have to do to make those investments. We see a lot of partnerships with Microsoft and IBM as they're doing the Cloud upgrades, that's an area. The acquisition of Qualtrics is another great example, 20x. 20x is the number people are now paying for for acquisitions and for assets on that end. And Oracle's going to be interesting to watch, post-Kurian to see how they come at it. They have a lot of the assets, they've got to put them together to get there, and then we've got all these interesting things like ServiceNow and Adobe on the other end. Like, ServiceNow is like, great platform! Awesome, people are building and extending the Cloud in ServiceNow, but no leadership! Right? I mean, you've got a consumer CEO trying to figure out enterprise, a consumer CMO trying to figure out enterprise, and they don't know if am I a platform or am I an app? You've got to figure that out now! People want to work with you! >> Well it is a company in transition at the top, for sure. >> But they can do nothing and still make a ton of money on the way out. >> And they've kicked butt since Donahoe came on, I mean just from a performance standpoint, amazing. >> Oh yeah, performance? You can do nothing and I think it's still going to coast but the thing is at some point it's going to come bite you, you got to figure that out. >> How do you think that Kurian will fit at Google, what's your take there? >> You know, early reactions on Kurian at Google is good, right? The developers are embracing him, he understands what the problems are. Let's be honest, I've said this many times to you guys in private and also in public, you know. It was a mess, it was a cluster before. I mean, you had three years, and you lost traction in the market, right? And it's because you didn't get enterprise, you couldn't figure out partners and, I mean, you paid sales people on consumption! Who does that? You're a sales rep, you're like, I'm not going to do this on consumption! Makes no sense! >> Ray, Kurian had been quoted that no acquisition is off the table, you know, they didn't buy GitHub, they didn't buy Red Hat, do you see them making a 10, 20 million dollar acquisition to get them into the enterprise space? >> Billion. >> Yeah, sorry, 20 billion. >> I think there's a lot that they go after. I know there's rumors about ServiceNow, there's a couple of other things. I think the first acquisition, if I were to make it would be Looker. I mean I love that thing that's on there and buy Snowflake too while you're at it. But we'll see what they do. I think the strategy is they've got to win back the trust of enterprises. People need to know, I'm buying your relationship, I have a relationship, I can count on you to be successful as opposed to, hey, you know, you can get this feature for less and if you do this on a sustained unit or, I want to know I can trust you and build that relationship and I think that's what they're going to focus on. >> Well, come on, isn't Google's business still ads? I mean, that's still where all their revenue is. >> It is, but the other category is $10 billion. That other category of devices and Cloud and all that? That's still a big category and that's where all the growth is. I mean look at this, it's a full frontal assault between Amazon and Google, Amazon Alexa versus Google Home, right? Amazon in ads, $10 billion in ads, going after Google's ad business. Amazon doing an AWS versus Google Cloud. Google's under assault right now! >> Give us the update on Constellation, your conference is really taking off, you've got great buzz in the industry, and congratulations on getting that off the ground. >> And the Tech for Good stuff, loved it. >> Thank you. We had great event, December 10th, talking about the future of the Internet. What it means in terms of, you know, digital rights, human rights in a digital age, was really that conference. Our big flagship conference is November 4th through 7th, it's at Half Moon Bay. We get about 250 CXOs together, about 100 vendors and tech folks that are visionaries and bring them together, that's doing well, and we do our healthcare summits. We brought on a new analyst, David Chou. David Chou, and if you've seen him before, he's like one of the top analysts for CIOs and chief data officers in the healthcare space, he's at HIMSS right now. >> He's awesome, we know him from Twitter. He's been on, he's great. >> Yeah, so we do healthcare summits twice a year and that's been picking up, some of the top thinkers in healthcare. We bring them in to Las Vegas, we do a brainstorming session, we work with them. They think about ideas and then we meet again, so. >> Alright, Ray, we want to give you the final word. We're halfway through IBM Think, what have you been thinking about this and any final musings on the industry? >> So I was very upset last year at how it was run. And I think this has run much better than last year. I think they did a good job. February in San Francisco? Never again, don't do that. I know it's May next year, is when this event's going to be. But I think the main thing is IBM's got to do more events than once a year. If you get enterprise marketing you realize it's at the beginning of the year, it's still sales kick-off and partners. March? March is like closing the quarter, so you do an event in April or May, and you do it in April or May but you have multiple events that are more targeted. This theme-less approach is not working. Right, partners are a little confused but they're here because it's once a year. But more importantly, build that pipeline over the quarters, don't just stop at a certain set of events, and I think they'll get very successful if they do that. >> Alright well, Ray, next time you come on the program, can you please bring a little bit of energy? We'll try to get you on early in the show when you're not so worn down. >> I know. >> Thanks as always. >> Appreciate you coming back on, man. >> Hey thanks, man, it's theCUBE! I love being on this thing.. >> Always a pleasure. >> Alright and, yeah, we always love helping you extract the signal from the noise. We're Dave Vellante, John Furrier, Lisa Martin. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching day three of theCUBE at IBM Think. Join us tomorrow, thanks for watching. (light music)

[Music] hi I'm Peter burns and welcome to another cube conversation we are here in our Palo Alto studios with Chen C Wang Chen C is the founder and General Partner of rain capital and an old colleague Chen see you've been around for a long time we're very happy to have you here in a cube at least in my opinion one of the leading thinkers and security what's happening in ite data security digital business security we were colleagues at four store many years ago what are you doing now well I'm doing this new fund I just started rain capital it's an early-stage venture fund focusing on cyber security innovation so very excited about that and very specific yes I was security and AI as well but the core focus is cyber security so let's talk about what that actually means because there's a lot of new practices new processes new groups with NIT that are being spawned as a consequence of this memoriae agile devops one of the groups or one of the practices or expertise centers it's especially underrepresented in the security world somewhat surprisingly is DevOps what do we need to do to bring more security into DevOps right that's a really good question and that's one of the areas that I've been focusing on in the last two three years is looking at the impact of DevOps practices to IT or including security and it's a huge impact because initially or originally what we have is security is a practice that that is gatekeeper right so you got applications being developed and then you you test them and then you go through security tests at the end and before you could deploy DevOps practices disrupt all of that what DevOps set says is I'm a developer I can deploy my application directly onto a production productionserver without going through all those gates because business agility demands it right once you have developers or testers touching your production servers directly some of the old security practices go away right you cannot do that anymore because too heavy-handed there's also the notion of portability so today it's very common for companies to want move their workloads from the internal data center to AWS or maybe next month I want to move to Google Cloud or Azure and I don't want to go through all the testing and pre-implementation practices I want to do it right away and the portability also disrupts existing security practices right so if your security policy depends on you instrumenting the server to put some kind of module on there tomorrow the server is not not there anymore right so what do you do so it engenders hosts loads of issues and also is a catalyst for innovation so that's why I'm very very excited about that so when you talk to customers users because I know you still have work with a lot of relationships I'm sure that's going to be one of the distinctions that you bring to bear when you think about what rain capital does what are say the three things that you tell them you've already mentioned you got a you got to ensure that the practices are in place that portability is at least made more obvious and that you don't bind security down to a particular device because it device may not be there that's three what are some of the kind of organizational institutional things that DevOps folks have to do to make sure that everybody gets the security profile with the need right so what we're seeing in terms organizationally or culturally the change is that in a in a DevOps led organization the the boundaries are going away right so some of the companies that I'm seeing cloud native to start with they may not have an ops team right what they do is that IT there their infrastructure team is embedded with the applications team it really the application demand and knowing what the application wants to do and then works with the developers to establish policies and deployment practices as opposed to being arms and lands from the the developers which you know creates all kinds of tension so it's an organizational shift as well and mindset shift right so the mindset shift is that you're no longer somebody who enforces policies you actually enable business versus the policy enforcer and it's easy to say but they actually requires a very deep shift in thinking so I got another question on security and I won't move to something else but really quickly as IT organizations or as businesses source their IT capabilities more from public cloud or service providers that means that they also have to have a new approach to how they to institutionalizing the work the practice the process the certainty associated with good security in in your experience what are just a couple of things that businesses have to worry about as they negotiate and monitor and manage relationships with third parties as it pertains to security right that's a good question there possibly a long list of things right but I don't use the the top things is don't get locked in right all the platform providers want to give you all these enriched capabilities as long as you buy into our services right so what you want to do is I want to stay at the level that I can easily move right so then this may mean I have to do a little bit more things or have to compensate with third party technologies as opposed to buying into this vertically integrated notion of the platform providers and that's where you need to stay at because if otherwise you get locked it so that's one second is the the ability to do monitoring has to be real-time has and the the thing about DevOps is real-time visible of the real-time closed loop response right so you cannot like secure the analytics in the past has to usually is you get tons of logs put there and somebody chewing through logs and look for anomalies it's not fast enough it's not good enough anymore so what we want is monitoring capabilities that are able to do it platform in the platform independent way but able to give you real-time visibility and response capability right there and that's where the innovation comes from you know one thing I've noticed we've been talking I've been talking a couple customers and they're starting to discover that some of the cloud service providers are using security as a way to lock in right so so and security I think should be built in right it should be by default secure by default is the way we want to be you always know how to do yeah yeah and and you should be able to get out if if security is the differentiation then maybe it's not the right market rights group yeah all right so ring capital has in addition to looking at the whole DevOps world you bring in your security expertise to bear on potential investments it's got another distinction what's the other distinction about rain capital um it's a woman led venture fund which is a rarity in Silicon Valley right so oh is it I don't know you tell me yeah no it is a rarity there are not a lot of funds that one would associate as being a broadly representative of or very inclusive so as you are moving forward with recap we'll talk a bit about the evolving role of women in technology so so I would say that even though it's a woman led venture fund I don't think of ourselves as different just because woman led I think we are different because we have a deep deep understanding of the market and deep understanding of the technology and also very extensive relationship with end-users but in terms of women in technology and women in security I'm a big advocate um so for the past two years I was the program co-chair for the Grace Hopper conference I put together the security and privacy content for the conference and the the need for a an ecosystem that is inclusive that is enabling for underrepresented either gender or race it is huge right so people go to Grace Hopper conference and they come back and they so inspired because they see all these women representing them and I think in Silicon Valley we need that insecurity we need that even more because if you look at some statistics I think women in general IT is about 24% representative army representation in security is about 11% so we have a long way to go now I'm going to avoid making comments about that because it's smart not to but those are those are numbers that are distressing that's obvious clearly there's a lot of talent you're not the only one there's a lot of talent out there there's clearly got be brought to bear and so you might not be differentiated by the fact that as women you do things differently but it might nonetheless be a more comfortable home for a woman like yourself and have a great idea and want to turn it into a business failure that's one thing all right so Chauncey and by the way I got to say just a quick advertisement for the cube the cube has been a major supporter for for women in tech for a couple years now we've been at a number of these different conferences Jeff Frick who's the general manager john john fourier co co dave one co co put a lot of time and energy so we look forward and give us a point oh absolutely we look forward to more fruitful relationships like that in the future so once again I'm Peter Burris with Wicky bonds looking angle and we've been talking to Chen Zi Wang of rain Capital founder General Partner about a number of different topics Chauncey once again thank you for every much for being on the cube thank you for having me

>> Narrator: Live from New York City, it's theCUBE covering IBM Data Science For All brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE. We are live in New York continuing our coverage here for Data Science for All where all things happen. Big things are happening. In fact, there's a huge event tonight I'm going to tell you about a little bit later on, but Tricia Wang who is our next guest is a part of that panel discussion that you'll want to tune in for live on ibmgo.com. 6 o'clock, but more on that a little bit later on. Along with Dave Vellante, John Walls here, and Tricia Wang now joins us. A first ever for us. How are you doing? >> Good. >> A global tech ethnographer. >> You said it correctly, yay! >> I learned a long time ago when you're not sure slow down. >> A plus already. >> Slow down and breathe. >> Slow down. >> You did a good job. Want to do it one more time? >> A global tech ethnographer. >> Tricia: Good job. >> Studying ethnography and putting ethnography into practice. How about that? >> Really great. >> That's taking on the challenge stretch. >> Now say it 10 times faster in a row. >> How about when we're done? Also co-founder of Sudden Compass. So first off, let's tell our viewers a little bit about Sudden Compass. Then I want to get into the ethnography and how that relates to tech. So let's go first off about Sudden Compass and the origins there. >> So Sudden Compass, we're a consulting firm based in New York City, and we help our partners embrace and understand the complexity of their customers. So whenever there are, wherever there's data and wherever there's people, we are there to help them make sure that they can understand their customers at the end of the day. And customers are really the most unpredictable, the most unknown, and the most difficult to quantify thing for any business. We see a lot of our partners really investing in big data data science tools and they're hiring the most amazing data scientists, but we saw them still struggling to make the right decisions, they still weren't getting their ROI, and they certainly weren't growing their customer base. And what we are helping them do is to say, "Look, you can't just rely only on data science. "You can't put it all into only the tool. "You have to think about how to operationalize that "and build a culture around it "and get the right skillsets in place, "and incorporate what we call the thick data, "which is the stuff that's very difficult to quantify, "the unknown, "and then you can figure out "how to best mathematically scale your data models "when it's actually based on real human behavior, "which is what the practice of ethnography is there to help "is to help you understand what do humans actually do, "what is unquantifiable. "And then once you find out those unquantifiable bits "you then have the art and science of figuring out "how do you scale it into a data model." >> Yeah, see that's what I find fascinating about this is that you've got hard and fast, right, data, objective, black and white, very clear, and then you've got people, you know? We all react differently. We have different influences, and different biases, and prejudices, and all that stuff, aptitudes. So you are meshing this art and science. >> Tricia: Absolutely. >> And what is that telling you then about how best to your clients and how to use data (mumbles)? >> Well, we tell our clients that because people are, there are biases, and people are not objective and there's emotions, that all ends up in the data set. To think that your data set, your quantitative data set, is free of biases and has some kind of been scrubbed of emotion is a total fallacy and it's something that needs to be corrected, because that means decision makers are making decisions based off of numbers thinking that they're objective when in fact they contain all the biases of the very complexity of the humans that they're serving. So, there is an art and science of making sure that when you capture that complexity ... We're saying, "Don't scrub it away." Traditional marketing wants to say, "Put your customers in boxes. "Put them in segments. "Use demographic variables like education, income. "Then you can just put everyone in a box, "figure out where you want to target, "figure out the right channels, "and you buy against that and you reach them." That's not how it works anymore. Customers now are moving faster than corporations. The new net worth customer of today has multiple identities is better understood when in relationship to other people. And we're not saying get rid of the data science. We're saying absolutely have it. You need to have scale. What is thick data going to offer you? Not scale, but it will offer you depth. So, that's why you need to combine both to be able to make effective decisions. >> So, I presume you work with a lot of big consumer brands. Is that a safe assumption? >> Absolutely. >> Okay. So, we work with a lot of big tech brands, like IBM and others, and they tend to move at the speed of the CIO, which tends to be really slow and really risk averse, and they're afraid to over rotate and get ahead over their skis. What do you tell folks like that? Is that a mistake being so cautious in this digital age? >> Well, I think the new CIO is on the cutting edge. I was just at Constellation Research Annual Conference in Half Moon Bay at-- >> Our friend Ray Wang. >> Yeah, Ray Wang. And I just spoke about this at their Constellation Connected Enterprise where they had the most, I would have to say the most amazing forward thinking collection of CIOs, CTOs, CDOs all in one room. And the conversation there was like, "We cannot afford to be slow anymore. "We have to be on the edge "of helping our companies push the ground." So, investing in tools is not enough. It is no longer enough to be the buyer, and to just have a relationship with your vendor and assume that they will help you deliver all the understanding. So, CIOs and CTOs need to ensure that their teams are diverse, multi-functional, and that they're totally integrated embedded into the business. And I don't mean just involve a business analyst as if that's cutting edge. I'm saying, "No, you need to make sure that every team "has qualitative people, "and that they're embedded and working closely together." The problem is we don't teach these skills. We're not graduating data scientists or ethnographers who even want to talk to each other. In fact, each side thinks the other side is useless. We're saying, "No, "we need to be able to have these skills "being taught within companies." And you don't need to hire a PhD data scientist or a PhD ethnographer. What we're saying is that these skills can be taught. We need to teach people to be data literate. You've hired the right experts, you have bought the right tools, but we now need to make sure that we're creating data literacy among decision makers so that we can turn these data into insights and then into action. >> Let's peel that a little bit. Data literate, you're talking about creativity, visualization, combining different perspectives? Where should the educational focus be? >> The educational focus should be on one storytelling. Right now, you cannot just be assuming that you can have a decision maker make a decision based on a number or some long PowerPoint report. We have to teach people how to tell compelling stories with data. And when I say data I'm talking about it needs the human component and it needs the numbers. And so one of the things that I saw, this is really close to my heart, was when I was at Nokia, and I remember I spent a decade understanding China. I really understood China. And when I finally had the insight where I was like, "Look, after spending 10 years there, "following 100 to 200 families around, "I had the insight back in 2009 that look, "your company is about to go out of business because "people don't want to buy your feature phones anymore. "They're going to want to buy smartphones." But, I only had qualitative data, and I needed to work alongside the business analysts and the data scientists. I needed access to their data sets, but I needed us to play together and to be on a team together so that I could scale my insights into quantitative models. And the problem was that, your question is, "What does that look like?" That looks like sitting on a team, having a mandate to say, "You have to play together, "and be able to tell an effective story "to the management and to leadership." But back then they were saying, "No, "we don't even consider your data set "to be worthwhile to even look at." >> We love our candy bar phone, right? It's a killer. >> Tricia: And we love our numbers. We love our surveys that tell us-- >> Market share was great. >> Market share is great. We've done all of the analysis. >> Forget the razor. >> Exactly. I'm like, "Look, of course your market share was great, "because your surveys were optimized "for your existing business model." So, big data is great if you want to optimize your supply chain or in systems that are very contained and quantifiable that's more or less fine. You can get optimization. You can get that one to two to five percent. But if you really want to grow your company and you want to ensure its longevity, you cannot just rely on your quantitative data to tell you how to do that. You actually need thick data for discovery, because you need to find the unknown. >> One of the things you talk about your passion is to understand how human perspectives shape the technology we build and how we use it. >> Tricia: Yes, you're speaking my language. >> Okay, so when you think about the development of the iPhone, it wasn't a bunch of surveys that led Steve Jobs to develop the iPhone. I guess the question is does technology lead and shape human perspectives or do human perspectives shape technology? >> Well, it's a dialectical relationship. It's like does a hamburger ... Does a bun shape the burger or does the bun shape the burger? You would never think of asking someone who loves a hamburger that question, because they both shape each other. >> Okay. (laughing) >> So, it's symbiote here, totally symbiotic. >> Surprise answer. You weren't expecting that. >> No, but it is kind of ... Okay, so you're saying it's not a chicken and egg, it's both. >> Absolutely. And the best companies are attuned to both. The best companies know that. The most powerful companies of the 21st century are obsessed with their customers and they're going to do a great job at leveraging human models to be scaled into data models, and that gap is going to be very, very narrow. You get big data. We're going to see more AI or ML disasters when their data models are really far from their actual human models. That's how we get disasters like Tesco or Target, or even when Google misidentified black people as gorillas. It's because their model of their data was so far from the understanding of humans. And the best companies of the future are going to know how to close that gap, and that means they will have the thick data and big data closely integrated. >> Who's doing that today? It seems like there are no ethics in AI. People are aggressively AI for profit and not really thinking about the human impacts and the societal impacts. >> Let's look at IBM. They're doing it. I would say that some of the most innovative projects that are happening at IBM with Watson, where people are using AI to solve meaningful social problems. I don't think that has to be-- >> Like IBM For Social Good. >> Exactly, but it's also, it's not just experimental. I think IBM is doing really great stuff using Watson to understand, identify skin cancer, or looking at the ways that people are using AI to understand eye diseases, things that you can do at scale. But also businesses are also figuring out how to use AI for actually doing better things. I think some of the most interesting ... We're going to see more examples of people using AI for solving meaningful social problems and making a profit at the same time. I think one really great example is WorkIt is they're using AI. They're actually working with Watson. Watson is who they hired to create their engine where union workers can ask questions of Watson that they may not want to ask or may be too costly to ask. So you can be like, "If I want to take one day off, "will this affect my contract or my job?" That's a very meaningful social problem that unions are now working with, and I think that's a really great example of how Watson is really pushing the edge to solve meaningful social problems at the same time. >> I worry sometimes that that's like the little device that you put in your car for the insurance company to see how you drive. >> How do you brake? How do you drive? >> Do people trust feeding that data to Watson because they're afraid Big Brother is watching? >> That's why we always have to have human intelligence working with machine intelligence. This idea of AI versus humans is a false binary, and I don't even know why we're engaging in those kinds of questions. We're not clearly, but there are people who are talking about it as if it's one or the other, and I find it to be a total waste of time. It's like clearly the best AI systems will be integrated with human intelligence, and we need the human training the data with machine learning systems. >> Alright, I'll play the yeah but. >> You're going to play the what? >> Yeah but! >> Yeah but! (crosstalk) >> That machines are replacing humans in cognitive functions. You walk into an airport and there are kiosks. People are losing jobs. >> Right, no that's real. >> So okay, so that's real. >> That is real. >> You agree with that. >> Job loss is real and job replacement is real. >> And I presume you agree that education is at least a part the answer, and training people differently than-- >> Tricia: Absolutely. >> Just straight reading, writing, and arithmetic, but thoughts on that. >> Well what I mean is that, yes, AI is replacing jobs, but the fact that we're treating AI as some kind of rogue machine that is operating on its own without human guidance, that's not happening, and that's not happening right now, and that's not happening in application. And what is more meaningful to talk about is how do we make sure that humans are more involved with the machines, that we always have a human in the loop, and that they're always making sure that they're training in a way where it's bringing up these ethical questions that are very important that you just raised. >> Right, well, and of course a lot of AI people would say is about prediction and then automation. So think about some of the brands that you serve, consult with, don't they want the machines to make certain decisions for them so that they can affect an outcome? >> I think that people want machines to surface things that is very difficult for humans to do. So if a machine can efficiently surface here is a pattern that's going on then that is very helpful. I think we have companies that are saying, "We can automate your decisions," but when you actually look at what they can automate it's in very contained, quantifiable systems. It's around systems around their supply chain or logistics. But, you really do not want your machine automating any decision when it really affects people, in particular your customers. >> Okay, so maybe changing the air pressure somewhere on a widget that's fine, but not-- >> Right, but you still need someone checking that, because will that air pressure create some unintended consequences later on? There's always some kind of human oversight. >> So I was looking at your website, and I always look for, I'm intrigued by interesting, curious thoughts. >> Tricia: Okay, I have a crazy website. >> No, it's very good, but back in your favorite quotes, "Rather have a question I can't answer "than an answer I can't question." So, how do you bring that kind of there's no fear of failure to the boardroom, to people who have to make big leaps and big decisions and enter this digital transformative world? >> I think that a lot of companies are so fearful of what's going to happen next, and that fear can oftentimes corner them into asking small questions and acting small where they're just asking how do we optimize something? That's really essentially what they're asking. "How do we optimize X? "How do we optimize this business?" What they're not really asking are the hard questions, the right questions, the discovery level questions that are very difficult to answer that no big data set can answer. And those are questions ... The questions about the unknown are the most difficult, but that's where you're going to get growth, because when something is unknown that means you have not either quantified it yet or you haven't found the relationship yet in your data set, and that's your competitive advantage. And that's where the boardroom really needs to set the mandate to say, "Look, I don't want you guys only answering "downstream, company-centric questions like, "'How do we optimize XYZ?"'" which is still important to answer. We're saying you absolutely need to pay attention to that, but you also need to ask upstream very customer-centric questions. And that's very difficult, because all day you're operating inside a company . You have to then step outside of your shoes and leave the building and see the world from a customer's perspective or from even a non existing customer's perspective, which is even more difficult. >> The whole know your customer meme has taken off in a big way right now, but I do feel like the pendulum is swinging. Well, I'm sanguined toward AI. It seems to me that ... It used to be that brands had all the power. They had all the knowledge, they knew the pricing, and the consumers knew nothing. The Internet changed all that. I feel like digital transformation and all this AI is an attempt to create that asymmetry again back in favor of the brand. I see people getting very aggressive toward, certainly you see this with Amazon, Amazon I think knows more about me than I know about myself. Should we be concerned about that and who protects the consumer, or is just maybe the benefits outweigh the risks there? >> I think that's such an important question you're asking and it's totally important. A really great TED talk just went up by Zeynep Tufekci where she talks about the most brilliant data scientists, the most brilliant minds of our day, are working on ad tech platforms that are now being created to essentially do what Kenyatta Jeez calls advertising terrorism, which is that all of this data is being collected so that advertisers have this information about us that could be used to create the future forms of surveillance. And that's why we need organizations to ask the kind of questions that you did. So two organizations that I think are doing a really great job to look at are Data & Society. Founder is Danah Boyd. Based in New York City. This is where I'm an affiliate. And they have all these programs that really look at digital privacy, identity, ramifications of all these things we're looking at with AI systems. Really great set of researchers. And then Vint Cerf (mumbles) co-founded People-Centered Internet. And I think this is another organization that we really should be looking at, it's based on the West Coast, where they're also asking similar questions of like instead of just looking at the Internet as a one-to-one model, what is the Internet doing for communities, and how do we make sure we leverage the role of communities to protect what the original founders of the Internet created? >> Right, Danah Boyd, CUBE alum. Shout out to Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera, the originator of the greatest minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads. Quit Cloudera and now is working at Mount Sinai as an MD, amazing, trying to solve cancer. >> John: A lot of CUBE alums out there. >> Yeah. >> And now we have another one. >> Woo-hoo! >> Tricia, thank you for being with us. >> You're welcome. >> Fascinating stuff. >> Thanks for being on. >> It really is. >> Great questions. >> Nice to really just change the lens a little bit, look through it a different way. Tricia, by the way, part of a panel tonight with Michael Li and Nir Kaldero who we had earlier on theCUBE, 6 o'clock to 7:15 live on ibmgo.com. Nate Silver also joining the conversation, so be sure to tune in for that live tonight 6 o'clock. Back with more of theCUBE though right after this. (techno music)

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.