>> 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.

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World," sponsored by HPE and Intel. Today we're going to discuss the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable process impact on containers and AI. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, and I'm joined by three experts to guide us along. We have Jordan Plum, Senior Director of AI and products for Intel, Bradley Sweeney, Big Data and AI Product Manager, Mainstream Compute Workloads at HPE, and Gary Wang, Containers Product Manager, Mainstream Compute Workloads at HPE. Welcome to the program gentlemen. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. >> Thank you for having us. >> This segment is going to be talking about containers to deploy high performance AI applications. This is a really important area right now. We're seeing a lot more AI deployed, kind of next gen AI coming. How is HPE supporting and testing and delivering containers for AI? >> Yeah, so what we're doing from HPE's perspective is we're taking these container platforms, combining with the next generation Intel servers to fully validate the deployment of the containers. So what we're doing is we're publishing the reference architectures. We're creating these automation scripts, and also creating a monitoring and security strategy for these container platforms. So for customers to easily deploy these Kubernete clusters and to easily secure their community environments. >> Gary, give us a quick overview of the new Proliant DL 360 and 380 Gen 11 servers. >> Yeah, the load, for example, for container platforms what we're seeing mostly is the DL 360 and DL 380 for matching really well for container use cases, especially for AI. The DL 360, with the expended now the DDR five memory and the new PCI five slots really, really helps the speeds to deploy these container environments and also to grow the data that's required to store it within these container environments. So for example, like the DL 380 if you want to deploy a data fabric whether it's the Ezmeral data fabric or different vendors data fabric software you can do so with the DL 360 and DL 380 with the new Intel Xeon processors. >> How does HP help customers with Kubernetes deployments? >> Yeah, like I mentioned earlier so we do a full validation to ensure the container deployment is easy and it's fast. So we create these automation scripts and then we publish them on GitHub for customers to use and to reference. So they can take that and then they can adjust as they need to. But following the deployment guide that we provide will make the, deploy the community deployment much easier, much faster. So we also have demo videos that's also published and then for reference architecture document that's published to guide the customer step by step through the process. >> Great stuff. Thanks everyone. We'll be going to take a quick break here and come back. We're going to do a deep dive on the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable process and the impact on AI and containers. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back. (intense music) Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World" series. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, joined by Jordan Plum with Intel, Bradley Sweeney with HPE, and Gary Wang from HPE. We're going to do a drill down and do a deeper dive into the AI containers with the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable processors we appreciate your time coming in. Jordan, great to see you. I got to ask you right out of the gate, what is the view right now in terms of Intel's approach to containers for AI? It's hot right now. AI is booming. You're seeing kind of next gen use cases. What's your approach to containers relative to AI? >> Thanks John and thanks for the question. With the fourth generation Xeon scalable processor launch we have tested and validated this platform with over 400 deep learning and machine learning models and workloads. These models and workloads are publicly available in the framework repositories and they can be downloaded by anybody. Yet customers are not only looking for model validation they're looking for model performance and performance is usually a combination of a given throughput at a target latency. And to do that in the data center all the way to the factory floor, this is not always delivered from these generic proxy models that are publicly available in the industry. >> You know, performance is critical. We're seeing more and more developers saying, "Hey, I want to go faster on a better platform, faster all the time." No one wants to run slower stuff, that's for sure. Can you talk more about the different container approaches Intel is pursuing? >> Sure. First our approach is to meet the customers where they are and help them build and deploy AI everywhere. Some customers just want to focus on deployment they have more mature use cases, and they just want to download a model that works that's high performing and run. Others are really focused more on development and innovation. They want to build and train models from scratch or at least highly customize them. Therefore we have several container approaches to accelerate the customer's time to solution and help them meet their business SLA along their AI journey. >> So what developers can just download these containers and just go? >> Yeah, so let me talk about the different kinds of containers we have. We start off with pre-trained containers. We'll have about 55 or more of these containers where the model is actually pre-trained, highly performant, some are optimized for low latency, others are optimized for throughput and the customers can just download these from Intel's website or from HPE and they can just go into production right away. >> That's great. A lot of choice. People can just get jump right in. That's awesome. Good, good choice for developers. They want more faster velocity. We know that. What else does Intel provide? Can you share some thoughts there? What you guys else provide developers? >> Yeah, so we talked about how hey some are just focused on deployment and they maybe they have more mature use cases. Other customers really want to do some more customization or optimization. So we have another class of containers called development containers and this includes not just the kind of a model itself but it's integrated with the framework and some other capabilities and techniques like model serving. So now that customers can download just not only the model but an entire AI stack and they can be sort of do some optimizations but they can also be sure that Intel has optimized that specific stack on top of the HPE servers. >> So it sounds simple to just get started using the DL model and containers. Is that it? Where, what else are customers looking for? What can you take a little bit deeper? >> Yeah, not quite. Well, while the customer customer's ability to reproduce performance on their site that HPE and Intel have measured in our own labs is fantastic. That's not actually what the customer is only trying to do. They're actually building very complex end-to-end AI pipelines, okay? And a lot of data scientists are really good at building models, really good at building algorithms but they're less experienced in building end-to-end pipelines especially 'cause the number of use cases end-to-end are kind of infinite. So we are building end-to-end pipeline containers for use cases like media analytics and sentiment analysis, anomaly detection. Therefore a customer can download these end-to-end containers, right? They can either use them as a reference, just like, see how we built them and maybe they have some changes in their own data center where they like to use different tools, but they can just see, "Okay this is what's possible with an end-to-end container on top of an HPE server." And other cases they could actually, if the overlap in the use case is pretty close, they can just take our containers and go directly into production. So this provides developers, all three types of containers that I discussed provide developers an easy starting point to get them up and running quickly and make them productive. And that's a really important point. You talked a lot about performance, John. But really when we talk to data scientists what they really want to be is productive, right? They're under pressure to change the business to transform the business and containers is a great way to get started fast >> People take product productivity, you know, seriously now with developer productivity is the hottest trend obviously they want performance. Totally nailed it. Where can customers get these containers? >> Right. Great, thank you John. Our pre-trained model containers, our developmental containers, and our end-to-end containers are available at intel.com at the developer catalog. But we'd also post these on many third party marketplaces that other people like to pull containers from. And they're frequently updated. >> Love the developer productivity angle. Great stuff. We've still got more to discuss with Jordan, Bradley, and Gary. We're going to take a short break here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll be right back. (intense music) Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier with theCUBE and we'll be discussing and wrapping up our discussion on containers to deploy high performance AI. This is a great segment on really a lot of demand for AI and the applications involved. And we got the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with HP Gen 11 servers. Bradley, what is the top AI use case that Gen 11 HP Proliant servers are optimized for? >> Yeah, thanks John. I would have to say intelligent video analytics. It's a use case that's supplied across industries and verticals. For example, a smart hospital solution that we conducted with Nvidia and Artisight in our previous customer success we've seen 5% more hospital procedures, a 16 times return on investment using operating room coordination. With that IVA, so with the Gen 11 DL 380 that we provide using the the Intel four gen Xeon processors it can really support workloads at scale. Whether that is a smart hospital solution whether that's manufacturing at the edge security camera integration, we can do it all with Intel. >> You know what's really great about AI right now you're starting to see people starting to figure out kind of where the value is does a lot of the heavy lifting on setting things up to make humans more productive. This has been clearly now kind of going neck level. You're seeing it all in the media now and all these new tools coming out. How does HPE make it easier for customers to manage their AI workloads? I imagine there's going to be a surge in demand. How are you guys making it easier to manage their AI workloads? >> Well, I would say the biggest way we do this is through GreenLake, which is our IT as a service model. So customers deploying AI workloads can get fully-managed services to optimize not only their operations but also their spending and the cost that they're putting towards it. In addition to that we have our Gen 11 reliance servers equipped with iLO 6 technology. What this does is allows customers to securely manage their server complete environment from anywhere in the world remotely. >> Any last thoughts or message on the overall fourth gen intel Xeon based Proliant Gen 11 servers? How they will improve workload performance? >> You know, with this generation, obviously the performance is only getting ramped up as the needs and requirements for customers grow. We partner with Intel to support that. >> Jordan, gimme the last word on the container's effect on AI applications. Your thoughts as we close out. >> Yeah, great. I think it's important to remember that containers themselves don't deliver performance, right? The AI stack is a very complex set of software that's compiled together and what we're doing together is to make it easier for customers to get access to that software, to make sure it all works well together and that it can be easily installed and run on sort of a cloud native infrastructure that's hosted by HPE Proliant servers. Hence the title of this talk. How to use Containers to Deploy High Performance AI Applications. Thank you. >> Gentlemen. Thank you for your time on the Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World sponsored by HPE and Intel. Again, I love this segment for AI applications Containers to Deploy Higher Performance. This is a great topic. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay, I'm John. We'll be back with more coverage. See you soon. (soft music)

>>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) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're covering Red Hat Summit 2022. We're going to wrap up now, Dave Vellante, Paul Gillin. We want to introduce you to Stephanie Chan, who's our new correspondent. Stephanie, one of your first events, your very first CUBE event. So welcome. >> Thank you. >> Up from NYC. Smaller event, but intimate. You got a chance to meet some folks last night at some of the after parties. What are your overall impressions? What'd you learn this week? >> So this has been my first in-person event in over two years. And even though, like you said, is on the smaller scale, roughly around 1000 attendees, versus it's usual eight to 10,000 attendees. There's so much energy, and excitement, and openness in these events and sessions. Even before and after the sessions people have been mingling and socializing and hanging out. So, I think a lot of people appreciate these in-person events and are really excited to be here. >> Cool. So, you also sat in some of the keynotes, right? Pretty technical, right? Which is kind of new to sort of your genre, right? I mean, I know you got a financial background but, so what'd you think of the keynotes? What'd you think of the format, the theater in the round? Any impressions of that? >> So, I think there's three things that are really consistent in these Red Hat Summit keynotes. There's always a history lesson. There's always, you know, emphasis in the culture of openness. And, there's also inspirational stories about how people utilize open source. And I found a lot of those examples really compelling and interesting. For instance, people use open source in (indistinct), and even in space. So I really enjoyed, you know, learning about all these different people and stories. What about you guys? What do you think were the big takeaways and the best stories that came out of the keynotes? >> Paul, want to start? >> Clearly the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major rollout. They do that only about every three years. So that's a big deal to this audience. I think what they did in the area of security, with rolling out sigstore, which is a major new, I think an important new project that was sort of incubated at Red Hat. And they're trying to put in to create an open source ecosystem around that now. And the alliances. I'm usually not that much on partnerships, but the Accenture and the Microsoft partnerships do seem to be significant to the company. And, finally, the GM partnership which I think was maybe kind of the bombshell that they sort of rushed in at the last minute. But I think has the biggest potential impact on Red Hat and its partner ecosystem that is really going to anchor their edge architecture going forward. So I didn't see it so much on the product front, but the sense of Red Hat spreading its wings, and partnering with more companies, and seeing its itself as really the center of an ecosystem indicates that they are, you know, they're in a very solid position in their business. >> Yeah, and also like the pandemic has really forced us into this new normal, right? So customer demand is changing. There has been the shift to remote. There's always going to be a new normal according to Paul, and open source carries us through that. So how do you guys think Red Hat has helped its portfolio through this new normal and the shift? >> I mean, when you think of Red Hat, you think of Linux. I mean, that's where it all started. You think OpenShift which is the application development platforms. Linux is the OS. OpenShift is the application development platform for Kubernetes. And then of course, Ansible is the automation framework. And I agree with you, ecosystem is really the other piece of this. So, I mean, I think you take those three pieces and extend that into the open source community. There's a lot of innovation that's going around each of those, but ecosystems are the key. We heard from Stefanie Chiras, that fundamental, I mean, you can't do this without those gap fillers and those partnerships. And then another thing that's notable here is, you know, this was, I mean, IBM was just another brand, right? I mean, if anything it was probably a sub-brand, I mean, you didn't hear much about IBM. You certainly had no IBM presence, even though they're right across the street running Think. No Arvind present, no keynote from Arvind, no, you know, Big Blue washing. And so, I think that's a testament to Arvind himself. We heard that from Paul Cormier, he said, hey, this guy's been great, he's left us alone. And he's allowed us to continue innovating. It's good news. IBM has not polluted Red Hat. >> Yes, I think that the Red Hat was, I said at the opening, I think Red Hat is kind of the tail wagging the dog right now. And their position seems very solid in the market. Clearly the market has come to them in terms of their evangelism of open source. They've remained true to their business model. And I think that gives them credibility that, you know, a lot of other open source companies have lacked. They have stuck with the plan for over 20 years now and have really not changed it, and it's paying off. I think they're emerging as a company that you can trust to do business with. >> Now I want to throw in something else here. I thought the conversation with IDC analyst, Jim Mercer, was interesting when he said that they surveyed customers and they wanted to get the security from their platform vendor, versus having to buy these bespoke tools. And it makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think that's going to happen, right? Because you're going to have an identity specialist. You're going to have an endpoint specialist. You're going to have a threat detection specialist. And they're going to be best of breed, you know, Red Hat's never going to be all of those things. What they can do is partner with those companies through APIs, through open source integrations, they can add them in as part of the ecosystem and maybe be the steward of that. Maybe that's the answer. They're never going to be the best at all those different security disciplines. There's no way in the world, Red Hat, that's going to happen. But they could be the integration point. And that would be, that would be a simplifying layer to the equation. >> And I think it's smart. You know, they're not pretending to be an identity in access management or an anti-malware company, or even a zero trust company. They are sticking to their knitting, which is operating system and developers. Evangelizing DevSecOps, which is a good thing. And, that's what they're going to do. You know, you have to admire this company. It has never gotten outside of its swim lane. I think it's understood well really what it wants to be good at. And, you know, in the software business knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do. Is companies that fail are usually the ones that get overextended, this company has never overextended itself. >> What else do you want to know? >> And a term that kept popping up was multicloud, or otherwise known as metacloud. We know what the cloud is, but- >> Oh, supercloud, metacloud. >> Supercloud, yeah, here we go. We know what the cloud is but, what does metacloud mean to you guys? And why has it been so popular in these conversations? >> I'm going to boot this to Dave, because he's the expert on this. >> Well, expert or not, but I mean, again, we've coined this term supercloud. And the idea behind the supercloud or what Ashesh called metacloud, I like his name, cause it allows Web 3.0 to come into the equation. But the idea is that instead of building on each individual cloud and have compatibility with that cloud, you build a layer across clouds. So you do the hard work as a platform supplier to hide the underlying primitives and APIs from the end customer, or the end developer, they can then add value on top of that. And that abstraction layer spans on-prem, clouds, across clouds, ultimately out to the edge. And it's new, a new value layer that builds on top of the hyperscale infrastructure, or existing data center infrastructure, or emerging edge infrastructure. And the reason why that is important is because it's so damn complicated, number one. Number two, every company's becoming a software company, a technology company. They're bringing their services through digital transformation to their customers. And you've got to have a cloud to do that. You're not going to build your own data center. That's like Charles Wang says, not Charles Wang. (Paul laughing) Charles Phillips. We were just talking about CA. Charles Phillips. Friends don't let friends build data centers. So that supercloud concept, or what Ashesh calls metacloud, is this new layer that's going to be powered by ecosystems and platform companies. And I think it's real. I think it's- >> And OpenShift, OpenShift is a great, you know, key card for them or leverage for them because it is perhaps the best known Kubernetes platform. And you can see here they're really doubling down on adding features to OpenShift, security features, scalability. And they see it as potentially this metacloud, this supercloud abstraction layer. >> And what we said is, in order to have a supercloud you got to have a superpaz layer and OpenShift is that superpaz layer. >> So you had conversations with a lot of people within the past two days. Some people include companies, from Verizon, Intel, Accenture. Which conversation stood out to you the most? >> Which, I'm sorry. >> Which conversation stood out to you the most? (Paul sighs) >> The conversation with Stu Miniman was pretty interesting because we talked about culture. And really, he has a lot of credibility in that area because he's not a Red Hat. You know, he hasn't been a Red Hat forever, he's fairly new to the company. And got a sense from him that the culture there really is what they say it is. It's a culture of openness and that's, you know, that's as important as technology for a company's success. >> I mean, this was really good content. I mean, there were a lot, I mean Stefanie's awesome. Stefanie Chiras, we're talking about the ecosystem. Chris Wright, you know, digging into some of the CTO stuff. Ashesh, who coined metacloud, I love that. The whole in vehicle operating system conversation was great. The security discussion that we just had. You know, the conversations with Accenture were super thoughtful. Of course, Paul Cormier was a highlight. I think that one's going to be a well viewed interview, for sure. And, you know, I think that the customer conversations are great. Red Hat did a really good job of carrying the keynote conversations, which were abbreviated this year, to theCUBE. >> Right. >> I give 'em a lot of kudos for that. And because, theCUBE, it allows us to double click, go deeper, peel the onion a little bit, you know, all the buzz words, and cliches. But it's true. You get to clarify some of the things you heard, which were, you know, the keynotes were, were scripted, but tight. And so we had some good follow up questions. I thought it was super useful. I know I'm leaving somebody out, but- >> We're also able to interview representatives from Intel and Nvidia, which at a software conference you don't typically do. I mean, there's the assimilation, the combination of hardware and software. It's very clear that, and this came out in the keynote, that Red Hat sees hardware as matter. It matters. It's important again. And it's going to be a source of innovation in the future. That came through clearly. >> Yeah. The hardware matters theme, you know, the old days you would have an operating system and the hardware were intrinsically linked. MVS in the mainframe, VAX, VMS in the digital mini computers. DG had its own operating system. Wang had his own operating system. Prime with Prime OS. You remember these days? >> Oh my God. >> Right? (Paul laughs) And then of course Microsoft. >> And then x86, everything got abstracted. >> Right. >> Everything became x86 and now it's all atomizing again. >> Although WinTel, right? I mean, MS-DOS and Windows were intrinsically linked for many, many years with Intel x86. And it wasn't until, you know, well, and then, you know, Sun Solaris, but it wasn't until Linux kind of blew that apart. And the internet is built on the lamp stack. And of course, Linux is the fundamental foundation for Red Hat. So my point is, that the operating system and the hardware have always been very closely tied together. Whether it's security, or IO, or registries and memory management, everything controlled by the OS are very close to the hardware. And so that's why I think you've got an affinity in Red Hat to hardware. >> But Linux is breaking that bond, don't you think? >> Yes, but it still has to understand the underlying hardware. >> Right. >> You heard today, how taking advantage of Nvidia, and the AI capabilities. You're seeing that with ARM, you're seeing that with Intel. How you can optimize the operating system to take advantage of new generations of CPU, and NPU, and CPU, and PU, XPU, you know, across the board. >> Yep. >> Well, I really enjoyed this conference and it really stressed how important open source is to a lot of different industries. >> Great. Well, thanks for coming on. Paul, thank you. Great co-hosting with you. And thank you. >> Always, Dave. >> For watching theCUBE. We'll be on the road, next week we're at KubeCon in Valencia, Spain. We're at VeeamON. We got a ton of stuff going on. Check out thecube.net. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Wikibon.com. We publish there weekly, our breaking analysis series. Thanks for watching everybody. Dave Vellante, for Paul Gillin, and Stephanie Chan. Thanks to the crew. Shout out, Andrew, Alex, Sonya. Amazing job, Sonya. Steven, thanks you guys for coming out here. Mark, good job corresponding. Go to SiliconANGLE, Mark's written some great stuff. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (calm music)

(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) >> Once a staid and boring business dominated by IBM, Oracle, and at the time newcomer Microsoft, along with a handful of wannabes, the database business has exploded in the past decade and has become a staple of financial excellence, customer experience, analytic advantage, competitive strategy, growth initiatives, visualizations, not to mention compliance, security, privacy and dozens of other important use cases and initiatives. And on the vendor's side of the house, we've seen the rapid ascendancy of cloud databases. Most notably from Snowflake, whose massive raises leading up to its IPO in late 2020 sparked a spate of interest and VC investment in the separation of compute and storage and all that elastic resource stuff in the cloud. The company joined AWS, Azure and Google to popularize cloud databases, which have become a linchpin of competitive strategies for technology suppliers. And if I get you to put your data in my database and in my cloud, and I keep innovating, I'm going to build a moat and achieve a hugely attractive lifetime customer value in a really amazing marginal economics dynamic that is going to fund my future. And I'll be able to sell other adjacent services, not just compute and storage, but machine learning and inference and training and all kinds of stuff, dozens of lucrative cloud offerings. Meanwhile, the database leader, Oracle has invested massive amounts of money to maintain its lead. It's building on its position as the king of mission critical workloads and making typical Oracle like claims against the competition. Most were recently just yesterday with another announcement around MySQL HeatWave. An extension of MySQL that is compatible with on-premises MySQLs and is setting new standards in price performance. We're seeing a dramatic divergence in strategies across the database spectrum. On the far left, we see Amazon with more than a dozen database offerings each with its own API and primitives. AWS is taking a right tool for the right job approach, often building on open source platforms and creating services that it offers to customers to solve very specific problems for developers. And on the other side of the line, we see Oracle, which is taking the Swiss Army Knife approach, converging database functionality, enabling analytic and transactional workloads to run in the same data store, eliminating the need to ETL, at the same time adding capabilities into its platform like automation and machine learning. Welcome to this database Power Panel. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm so excited to bring together some of the most respected industry analyst in the community. Today we're going to assess what's happening in the market. We're going to dig into the competitive landscape and explore the future of database and database platforms and decode what it means to customers. Let me take a moment to welcome our guest analyst today. Matt Kimball is a vice president and principal analysts at Moor Insights and Strategy, Matt. He knows products, he knows industry, he's got real world IT expertise, and he's got all the angles 25 plus years of experience in all kinds of great background. Matt, welcome. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Holgar Mueller, friend of theCUBE, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research in depth knowledge on applications, application development, knows developers. He's worked at SAP and Oracle. And then Bob Evans is Chief Content Officer and co-founder of the Acceleration Economy, founder and principle of Cloud Wars. Covers all kinds of industry topics and great insights. He's got awesome videos, these three minute hits. If you haven't seen 'em, checking them out, knows cloud companies, his Cloud Wars minutes are fantastic. And then of course, Marc Staimer is the founder of Dragon Slayer Research. A frequent contributor and guest analyst at Wikibon. He's got a wide ranging knowledge across IT products, knows technology really well, can go deep. And then of course, Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Director Research Director at Futurum Research, great all around product trends knowledge. Can take, you know, technical dives and really understands competitive angles, knows Redshift, Snowflake, and many others. Gents, thanks so much for taking the time to join us in theCube today. It's great to have you on, good to see you. >> Good to be here, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, let's start with an around the horn and briefly, if each of you would describe, you know, anything I missed in your areas of expertise and then you answer the following question, how would you describe the state of the database, state of platform market today? Matt Kimball, please start. >> Oh, I hate going first, but that it's okay. How would I describe the world today? I would just in one sentence, I would say, I'm glad I'm not in IT anymore, right? So, you know, it is a complex and dangerous world out there. And I don't envy IT folks I'd have to support, you know, these modernization and transformation efforts that are going on within the enterprise. It used to be, you mentioned it, Dave, you would argue about IBM versus Oracle versus this newcomer in the database space called Microsoft. And don't forget Sybase back in the day, but you know, now it's not just, which SQL vendor am I going to go with? It's all of these different, divergent data types that have to be taken, they have to be merged together, synthesized. And somehow I have to do that cleanly and use this to drive strategic decisions for my business. That is not easy. So, you know, you have to look at it from the perspective of the business user. It's great for them because as a DevOps person, or as an analyst, I have so much flexibility and I have this thing called the cloud now where I can go get services immediately. As an IT person or a DBA, I am calling up prevention hotlines 24 hours a day, because I don't know how I'm going to be able to support the business. And as an Oracle or as an Oracle or a Microsoft or some of the cloud providers and cloud databases out there, I'm licking my chops because, you know, my market is expanding and expanding every day. >> Great, thank you for that, Matt. Holgar, how do you see the world these days? You always have a good perspective on things, share with us. >> Well, I think it's the best time to be in IT, I'm not sure what Matt is talking about. (laughing) It's easier than ever, right? The direction is going to cloud. Kubernetes has won, Google has the best AI for now, right? So things are easier than ever before. You made commitments for five plus years on hardware, networking and so on premise, and I got gray hair about worrying it was the wrong decision. No, just kidding. But you kind of both sides, just to be controversial, make it interesting, right. So yeah, no, I think the interesting thing specifically with databases, right? We have this big suite versus best of breed, right? Obviously innovation, like you mentioned with Snowflake and others happening in the cloud, the cloud vendors server, where to save of their databases. And then we have one of the few survivors of the old guard as Evans likes to call them is Oracle who's doing well, both their traditional database. And now, which is really interesting, remarkable from that because Oracle it was always the power of one, have one database, add more to it, make it what I call the universal database. And now this new HeatWave offering is coming and MySQL open source side. So they're getting the second (indistinct) right? So it's interesting that older players, traditional players who still are in the market are diversifying their offerings. Something we don't see so much from the traditional tools from Oracle on the Microsoft side or the IBM side these days. >> Great, thank you Holgar. Bob Evans, you've covered this business for a while. You've worked at, you know, a number of different outlets and companies and you cover the competition, how do you see things? >> Dave, you know, the other angle to look at this from is from the customer side, right? You got now CEOs who are any sort of business across all sorts of industries, and they understand that their future success is going to be dependent on their ability to become a digital company, to understand data, to use it the right way. So as you outline Dave, I think in your intro there, it is a fantastic time to be in the database business. And I think we've got a lot of new buyers and influencers coming in. They don't know all this history about IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and you know, whoever else. So I think they're going to take a long, hard look, Dave, at some of these results and who is able to help these companies not serve up the best technology, but who's going to be able to help their business move into the digital future. So it's a fascinating time now from every perspective. >> Great points, Bob. I mean, digital transformation has gone from buzzword to imperative. Mr. Staimer, how do you see things? >> I see things a little bit differently than my peers here in that I see the database market being segmented. There's all the different kinds of databases that people are looking at for different kinds of data, and then there is databases in the cloud. And so database as cloud service, I view very differently than databases because the traditional way of implementing a database is changing and it's changing rapidly. So one of the premises that you stated earlier on was that you viewed Oracle as a database company. I don't view Oracle as a database company anymore. I view Oracle as a cloud company that happens to have a significant expertise and specialty in databases, and they still sell database software in the traditional way, but ultimately they're a cloud company. So database cloud services from my point of view is a very distinct market from databases. >> Okay, well, you gave us some good meat on the bone to talk about that. Last but not least-- >> Dave did Marc, just say Oracle's a cloud company? >> Yeah. (laughing) Take away the database, it would be interesting to have that discussion, but let's let Ron jump in here. Ron, give us your take. >> That's a great segue. I think it's truly the era of the cloud database, that's something that's rising. And the key trends that come with it include for example, elastic scaling. That is the ability to scale on demand, to right size workloads according to customer requirements. And also I think it's going to increase the prioritization for high availability. That is the player who can provide the highest availability is going to have, I think, a great deal of success in this emerging market. And also I anticipate that there will be more consolidation across platforms in order to enable cost savings for customers, and that's something that's always going to be important. And I think we'll see more of that over the horizon. And then finally security, security will be more important than ever. We've seen a spike (indistinct), we certainly have seen geopolitical originated cybersecurity concerns. And as a result, I see database security becoming all the more important. >> Great, thank you. Okay, let me share some data with you guys. I'm going to throw this at you and see what you think. We have this awesome data partner called Enterprise Technology Research, ETR. They do these quarterly surveys and each period with dozens of industry segments, they track clients spending, customer spending. And this is the database, data warehouse sector okay so it's taxonomy, so it's not perfect, but it's a big kind of chunk. They essentially ask customers within a category and buy a specific vendor, you're spending more or less on the platform? And then they subtract the lesses from the mores and they derive a metric called net score. It's like NPS, it's a measure of spending velocity. It's more complicated and granular than that, but that's the basis and that's the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is what they call market share, it's not like IDC market share, it's just pervasiveness in the data set. And so there are a couple of things that stand out here and that we can use as reference point. The first is the momentum of Snowflake. They've been off the charts for many, many, for over two years now, anything above that dotted red line, that 40%, is considered by ETR to be highly elevated and Snowflake's even way above that. And I think it's probably not sustainable. We're going to see in the next April survey, next month from those guys, when it comes out. And then you see AWS and Microsoft, they're really pervasive on the horizontal axis and highly elevated, Google falls behind them. And then you got a number of well funded players. You got Cockroach Labs, Mongo, Redis, MariaDB, which of course is a fork on MySQL started almost as protest at Oracle when they acquired Sun and they got MySQL and you can see the number of others. Now Oracle who's the leading database player, despite what Marc Staimer says, we know, (laughs) and they're a cloud player (laughing) who happens to be a leading database player. They dominate in the mission critical space, we know that they're the king of that sector, but you can see here that they're kind of legacy, right? They've been around a long time, they get a big install base. So they don't have the spending momentum on the vertical axis. Now remember this is, just really this doesn't capture spending levels, so that understates Oracle but nonetheless. So it's not a complete picture like SAP for instance is not in here, no Hana. I think people are actually buying it, but it doesn't show up here, (laughs) but it does give an indication of momentum and presence. So Bob Evans, I'm going to start with you. You've commented on many of these companies, you know, what does this data tell you? >> Yeah, you know, Dave, I think all these compilations of things like that are interesting, and that folks at ETR do some good work, but I think as you said, it's a snapshot sort of a two-dimensional thing of a rapidly changing, three dimensional world. You know, the incidents at which some of these companies are mentioned versus the volume that happens. I think it's, you know, with Oracle and I'm not going to declare my religious affiliation, either as cloud company or database company, you know, they're all of those things and more, and I think some of our old language of how we classify companies is just not relevant anymore. But I want to ask too something in here, the autonomous database from Oracle, nobody else has done that. So either Oracle is crazy, they've tried out a technology that nobody other than them is interested in, or they're onto something that nobody else can match. So to me, Dave, within Oracle, trying to identify how they're doing there, I would watch autonomous database growth too, because right, it's either going to be a big plan and it breaks through, or it's going to be caught behind. And the Snowflake phenomenon as you mentioned, that is a rare, rare bird who comes up and can grow 100% at a billion dollar revenue level like that. So now they've had a chance to come in, scare the crap out of everybody, rock the market with something totally new, the data cloud. Will the bigger companies be able to catch up and offer a compelling alternative, or is Snowflake going to continue to be this outlier. It's a fascinating time. >> Really, interesting points there. Holgar, I want to ask you, I mean, I've talked to certainly I'm sure you guys have too, the founders of Snowflake that came out of Oracle and they actually, they don't apologize. They say, "Hey, we not going to do all that complicated stuff that Oracle does, we were trying to keep it real simple." But at the same time, you know, they don't do sophisticated workload management. They don't do complex joints. They're kind of relying on the ecosystems. So when you look at the data like this and the various momentums, and we talked about the diverging strategies, what does this say to you? >> Well, it is a great point. And I think Snowflake is an example how the cloud can turbo charge a well understood concept in this case, the data warehouse, right? You move that and you find steroids and you see like for some players who've been big in data warehouse, like Sentara Data, as an example, here in San Diego, what could have been for them right in that part. The interesting thing, the problem though is the cloud hides a lot of complexity too, which you can scale really well as you attract lots of customers to go there. And you don't have to build things like what Bob said, right? One of the fascinating things, right, nobody's answering Oracle on the autonomous database. I don't think is that they cannot, they just have different priorities or the database is not such a priority. I would dare to say that it's for IBM and Microsoft right now at the moment. And the cloud vendors, you just hide that right through scripts and through scale because you support thousands of customers and you can deal with a little more complexity, right? It's not against them. Whereas if you have to run it yourself, very different story, right? You want to have the autonomous parts, you want to have the powerful tools to do things. >> Thank you. And so Matt, I want to go to you, you've set up front, you know, it's just complicated if you're in IT, it's a complicated situation and you've been on the customer side. And if you're a buyer, it's obviously, it's like Holgar said, "Cloud's supposed to make this stuff easier, but the simpler it gets the more complicated gets." So where do you place your bets? Or I guess more importantly, how do you decide where to place your bets? >> Yeah, it's a good question. And to what Bob and Holgar said, you know, the around autonomous database, I think, you know, part of, as I, you know, play kind of armchair psychologist, if you will, corporate psychologists, I look at what Oracle is doing and, you know, databases where they've made their mark and it's kind of, that's their strong position, right? So it makes sense if you're making an entry into this cloud and you really want to kind of build momentum, you go with what you're good at, right? So that's kind of the strength of Oracle. Let's put a lot of focus on that. They do a lot more than database, don't get me wrong, but you know, I'm going to short my strength and then kind of pivot from there. With regards to, you know, what IT looks at and what I would look at you know as an IT director or somebody who is, you know, trying to consume services from these different cloud providers. First and foremost, I go with what I know, right? Let's not forget IT is a conservative group. And when we look at, you know, all the different permutations of database types out there, SQL, NoSQL, all the different types of NoSQL, those are largely being deployed by business users that are looking for agility or businesses that are looking for agility. You know, the reason why MongoDB is so popular is because of DevOps, right? It's a great platform to develop on and that's where it kind of gained its traction. But as an IT person, I want to go with what I know, where my muscle memory is, and that's my first position. And so as I evaluate different cloud service providers and cloud databases, I look for, you know, what I know and what I've invested in and where my muscle memory is. Is there enough there and do I have enough belief that that company or that service is going to be able to take me to, you know, where I see my organization in five years from a data management perspective, from a business perspective, are they going to be there? And if they are, then I'm a little bit more willing to make that investment, but it is, you know, if I'm kind of going in this blind or if I'm cloud native, you know, that's where the Snowflakes of the world become very attractive to me. >> Thank you. So Marc, I asked Andy Jackson in theCube one time, you have all these, you know, data stores and different APIs and primitives and you know, very granular, what's the strategy there? And he said, "Hey, that allows us as the market changes, it allows us to be more flexible. If we start building abstractions layers, it's harder for us." I think also it was not a good time to market advantage, but let me ask you, I described earlier on that spectrum from AWS to Oracle. We just saw yesterday, Oracle announced, I think the third major enhancement in like 15 months to MySQL HeatWave, what do you make of that announcement? How do you think it impacts the competitive landscape, particularly as it relates to, you know, converging transaction and analytics, eliminating ELT, I know you have some thoughts on this. >> So let me back up for a second and defend my cloud statement about Oracle for a moment. (laughing) AWS did a great job in developing the cloud market in general and everything in the cloud market. I mean, I give them lots of kudos on that. And a lot of what they did is they took open source software and they rent it to people who use their cloud. So I give 'em lots of credit, they dominate the market. Oracle was late to the cloud market. In fact, they actually poo-pooed it initially, if you look at some of Larry Ellison's statements, they said, "Oh, it's never going to take off." And then they did 180 turn, and they said, "Oh, we're going to embrace the cloud." And they really have, but when you're late to a market, you've got to be compelling. And this ties into the announcement yesterday, but let's deal with this compelling. To be compelling from a user point of view, you got to be twice as fast, offer twice as much functionality, at half the cost. That's generally what compelling is that you're going to capture market share from the leaders who established the market. It's very difficult to capture market share in a new market for yourself. And you're right. I mean, Bob was correct on this and Holgar and Matt in which you look at Oracle, and they did a great job of leveraging their database to move into this market, give 'em lots of kudos for that too. But yesterday they announced, as you said, the third innovation release and the pace is just amazing of what they're doing on these releases on HeatWave that ties together initially MySQL with an integrated builtin analytics engine, so a data warehouse built in. And then they added automation with autopilot, and now they've added machine learning to it, and it's all in the same service. It's not something you can buy and put on your premise unless you buy their cloud customers stuff. But generally it's a cloud offering, so it's compellingly better as far as the integration. You don't buy multiple services, you buy one and it's lower cost than any of the other services, but more importantly, it's faster, which again, give 'em credit for, they have more integration of a product. They can tie things together in a way that nobody else does. There's no additional services, ETL services like Glue and AWS. So from that perspective, they're getting better performance, fewer services, lower cost. Hmm, they're aiming at the compelling side again. So from a customer point of view it's compelling. Matt, you wanted to say something there. >> Yeah, I want to kind of, on what you just said there Marc, and this is something I've found really interesting, you know. The traditional way that you look at software and, you know, purchasing software and IT is, you look at either best of breed solutions and you have to work on the backend to integrate them all and make them all work well. And generally, you know, the big hit against the, you know, we have one integrated offering is that, you lose capability or you lose depth of features, right. And to what you were saying, you know, that's the thing I found interesting about what Oracle is doing is they're building in depth as they kind of, you know, build that service. It's not like you're losing a lot of capabilities, because you're going to one integrated service versus having to use A versus B versus C, and I love that idea. >> You're right. Yeah, not only you're not losing, but you're gaining functionality that you can't get by integrating a lot of these. I mean, I can take Snowflake and integrate it in with machine learning, but I also have to integrate in with a transactional database. So I've got to have connectors between all of this, which means I'm adding time. And what it comes down to at the end of the day is expertise, effort, time, and cost. And so what I see the difference from the Oracle announcements is they're aiming at reducing all of that by increasing performance as well. Correct me if I'm wrong on that but that's what I saw at the announcement yesterday. >> You know, Marc, one thing though Marc, it's funny you say that because I started out saying, you know, I'm glad I'm not 19 anymore. And the reason is because of exactly what you said, it's almost like there's a pseudo level of witchcraft that's required to support the modern data environment right in the enterprise. And I need simpler faster, better. That's what I need, you know, I am no longer wearing pocket protectors. I have turned from, you know, break, fix kind of person, to you know, business consultant. And I need that point and click simplicity, but I can't sacrifice, you know, a depth of features of functionality on the backend as I play that consultancy role. >> So, Ron, I want to bring in Ron, you know, it's funny. So Matt, you mentioned Mongo, I often and say, if Oracle mentions you, you're on the map. We saw them yesterday Ron, (laughing) they hammered RedShifts auto ML, they took swipes at Snowflake, a little bit of BigQuery. What were your thoughts on that? Do you agree with what these guys are saying in terms of HeatWaves capabilities? >> Yes, Dave, I think that's an excellent question. And fundamentally I do agree. And the question is why, and I think it's important to know that all of the Oracle data is backed by the fact that they're using benchmarks. For example, all of the ML and all of the TPC benchmarks, including all the scripts, all the configs and all the detail are posted on GitHub. So anybody can look at these results and they're fully transparent and replicate themselves. If you don't agree with this data, then by all means challenge it. And we have not really seen that in all of the new updates in HeatWave over the last 15 months. And as a result, when it comes to these, you know, fundamentals in looking at the competitive landscape, which I think gives validity to outcomes such as Oracle being able to deliver 4.8 times better price performance than Redshift. As well as for example, 14.4 better price performance than Snowflake, and also 12.9 better price performance than BigQuery. And so that is, you know, looking at the quantitative side of things. But again, I think, you know, to Marc's point and to Matt's point, there are also qualitative aspects that clearly differentiate the Oracle proposition, from my perspective. For example now the MySQL HeatWave ML capabilities are native, they're built in, and they also support things such as completion criteria. And as a result, that enables them to show that hey, when you're using Redshift ML for example, you're having to also use their SageMaker tool and it's running on a meter. And so, you know, nobody really wants to be running on a meter when, you know, executing these incredibly complex tasks. And likewise, when it comes to Snowflake, they have to use a third party capability. They don't have the built in, it's not native. So the user, to the point that he's having to spend more time and it increases complexity to use auto ML capabilities across the Snowflake platform. And also, I think it also applies to other important features such as data sampling, for example, with the HeatWave ML, it's intelligent sampling that's being implemented. Whereas in contrast, we're seeing Redshift using random sampling. And again, Snowflake, you're having to use a third party library in order to achieve the same capabilities. So I think the differentiation is crystal clear. I think it definitely is refreshing. It's showing that this is where true value can be assigned. And if you don't agree with it, by all means challenge the data. >> Yeah, I want to come to the benchmarks in a minute. By the way, you know, the gentleman who's the Oracle's architect, he did a great job on the call yesterday explaining what you have to do. I thought that was quite impressive. But Bob, I know you follow the financials pretty closely and on the earnings call earlier this month, Ellison said that, "We're going to see HeatWave on AWS." And the skeptic in me said, oh, they must not be getting people to come to OCI. And then they, you remember this chart they showed yesterday that showed the growth of HeatWave on OCI. But of course there was no data on there, it was just sort of, you know, lines up and to the right. So what do you guys think of that? (Marc laughs) Does it signal Bob, desperation by Oracle that they can't get traction on OCI, or is it just really a smart tame expansion move? What do you think? >> Yeah, Dave, that's a great question. You know, along the way there, and you know, just inside of that was something that said Ellison said on earnings call that spoke to a different sort of philosophy or mindset, almost Marc, where he said, "We're going to make this multicloud," right? With a lot of their other cloud stuff, if you wanted to use any of Oracle's cloud software, you had to use Oracle's infrastructure, OCI, there was no other way out of it. But this one, but I thought it was a classic Ellison line. He said, "Well, we're making this available on AWS. We're making this available, you know, on Snowflake because we're going after those users. And once they see what can be done here." So he's looking at it, I guess you could say, it's a concession to customers because they want multi-cloud. The other way to look at it, it's a hunting expedition and it's one of those uniquely I think Oracle ways. He said up front, right, he doesn't say, "Well, there's a big market, there's a lot for everybody, we just want on our slice." Said, "No, we are going after Amazon, we're going after Redshift, we're going after Aurora. We're going after these users of Snowflake and so on." And I think it's really fairly refreshing these days to hear somebody say that, because now if I'm a buyer, I can look at that and say, you know, to Marc's point, "Do they measure up, do they crack that threshold ceiling? Or is this just going to be more pain than a few dollars savings is worth?" But you look at those numbers that Ron pointed out and that we all saw in that chart. I've never seen Dave, anything like that. In a substantive market, a new player coming in here, and being able to establish differences that are four, seven, eight, 10, 12 times better than competition. And as new buyers look at that, they're going to say, "What the hell are we doing paying, you know, five times more to get a poor result? What's going on here?" So I think this is going to rattle people and force a harder, closer look at what these alternatives are. >> I wonder if the guy, thank you. Let's just skip ahead of the benchmarks guys, bring up the next slide, let's skip ahead a little bit here, which talks to the benchmarks and the benchmarking if we can. You know, David Floyer, the sort of semiretired, you know, Wikibon analyst said, "Dave, this is going to force Amazon and others, Snowflake," he said, "To rethink actually how they architect databases." And this is kind of a compilation of some of the data that they shared. They went after Redshift mostly, (laughs) but also, you know, as I say, Snowflake, BigQuery. And, like I said, you can always tell which companies are doing well, 'cause Oracle will come after you, but they're on the radar here. (laughing) Holgar should we take this stuff seriously? I mean, or is it, you know, a grain salt? What are your thoughts here? >> I think you have to take it seriously. I mean, that's a great question, great point on that. Because like Ron said, "If there's a flaw in a benchmark, we know this database traditionally, right?" If anybody came up that, everybody will be, "Oh, you put the wrong benchmark, it wasn't audited right, let us do it again," and so on. We don't see this happening, right? So kudos to Oracle to be aggressive, differentiated, and seem to having impeccable benchmarks. But what we really see, I think in my view is that the classic and we can talk about this in 100 years, right? Is the suite versus best of breed, right? And the key question of the suite, because the suite's always slower, right? No matter at which level of the stack, you have the suite, then the best of breed that will come up with something new, use a cloud, put the data warehouse on steroids and so on. The important thing is that you have to assess as a buyer what is the speed of my suite vendor. And that's what you guys mentioned before as well, right? Marc said that and so on, "Like, this is a third release in one year of the HeatWave team, right?" So everybody in the database open source Marc, and there's so many MySQL spinoffs to certain point is put on shine on the speed of (indistinct) team, putting out fundamental changes. And the beauty of that is right, is so inherent to the Oracle value proposition. Larry's vision of building the IBM of the 21st century, right from the Silicon, from the chip all the way across the seven stacks to the click of the user. And that what makes the database what Rob was saying, "Tied to the OCI infrastructure," because designed for that, it runs uniquely better for that, that's why we see the cross connect to Microsoft. HeatWave so it's different, right? Because HeatWave runs on cheap hardware, right? Which is the breadth and butter 886 scale of any cloud provider, right? So Oracle probably needs it to scale OCI in a different category, not the expensive side, but also allow us to do what we said before, the multicloud capability, which ultimately CIOs really want, because data gravity is real, you want to operate where that is. If you have a fast, innovative offering, which gives you more functionality and the R and D speed is really impressive for the space, puts away bad results, then it's a good bet to look at. >> Yeah, so you're saying, that we versus best of breed. I just want to sort of play back then Marc a comment. That suite versus best of breed, there's always been that trade off. If I understand you Holgar you're saying that somehow Oracle has magically cut through that trade off and they're giving you the best of both. >> It's the developing velocity, right? The provision of important features, which matter to buyers of the suite vendor, eclipses the best of breed vendor, then the best of breed vendor is in the hell of a potential job. >> Yeah, go ahead Marc. >> Yeah and I want to add on what Holgar just said there. I mean the worst job in the data center is data movement, moving the data sucks. I don't care who you are, nobody likes it. You never get any kudos for doing it well, and you always get the ah craps, when things go wrong. So it's in- >> In the data center Marc all the time across data centers, across cloud. That's where the bleeding comes. >> It's right, you get beat up all the time. So nobody likes to move data, ever. So what you're looking at with what they announce with HeatWave and what I love about HeatWave is it doesn't matter when you started with it, you get all the additional features they announce it's part of the service, all the time. But they don't have to move any of the data. You want to analyze the data that's in your transactional, MySQL database, it's there. You want to do machine learning models, it's there, there's no data movement. The data movement is the key thing, and they just eliminate that, in so many ways. And the other thing I wanted to talk about is on the benchmarks. As great as those benchmarks are, they're really conservative 'cause they're underestimating the cost of that data movement. The ETLs, the other services, everything's left out. It's just comparing HeatWave, MySQL cloud service with HeatWave versus Redshift, not Redshift and Aurora and Glue, Redshift and Redshift ML and SageMaker, it's just Redshift. >> Yeah, so what you're saying is what Oracle's doing is saying, "Okay, we're going to run MySQL HeatWave benchmarks on analytics against Redshift, and then we're going to run 'em in transaction against Aurora." >> Right. >> But if you really had to look at what you would have to do with the ETL, you'd have to buy two different data stores and all the infrastructure around that, and that goes away so. >> Due to the nature of the competition, they're running narrow best of breed benchmarks. There is no suite level benchmark (Dave laughs) because they created something new. >> Well that's you're the earlier point they're beating best of breed with a suite. So that's, I guess to Floyer's earlier point, "That's going to shake things up." But I want to come back to Bob Evans, 'cause I want to tap your Cloud Wars mojo before we wrap. And line up the horses, you got AWS, you got Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Now they all own their own cloud. Snowflake, Mongo, Couchbase, Redis, Cockroach by the way they're all doing very well. They run in the cloud as do many others. I think you guys all saw the Andreessen, you know, commentary from Sarah Wang and company, to talk about the cost of goods sold impact of cloud. So owning your own cloud has to be an advantage because other guys like Snowflake have to pay cloud vendors and negotiate down versus having the whole enchilada, Safra Catz's dream. Bob, how do you think this is going to impact the market long term? >> Well, Dave, that's a great question about, you know, how this is all going to play out. If I could mention three things, one, Frank Slootman has done a fantastic job with Snowflake. Really good company before he got there, but since he's been there, the growth mindset, the discipline, the rigor and the phenomenon of what Snowflake has done has forced all these bigger companies to really accelerate what they're doing. And again, it's an example of how this intense competition makes all the different cloud vendors better and it provides enormous value to customers. Second thing I wanted to mention here was look at the Adam Selipsky effect at AWS, took over in the middle of May, and in Q2, Q3, Q4, AWS's growth rate accelerated. And in each of those three quotas, they grew faster than Microsoft's cloud, which has not happened in two or three years, so they're closing the gap on Microsoft. The third thing, Dave, in this, you know, incredibly intense competitive nature here, look at Larry Ellison, right? He's got his, you know, the product that for the last two or three years, he said, "It's going to help determine the future of the company, autonomous database." You would think he's the last person in the world who's going to bring in, you know, in some ways another database to think about there, but he has put, you know, his whole effort and energy behind this. The investments Oracle's made, he's riding this horse really hard. So it's not just a technology achievement, but it's also an investment priority for Oracle going forward. And I think it's going to form a lot of how they position themselves to this new breed of buyer with a new type of need and expectations from IT. So I just think the next two or three years are going to be fantastic for people who are lucky enough to get to do the sorts of things that we do. >> You know, it's a great point you made about AWS. Back in 2018 Q3, they were doing about 7.4 billion a quarter and they were growing in the mid forties. They dropped down to like 29% Q4, 2020, I'm looking at the data now. They popped back up last quarter, last reported quarter to 40%, that is 17.8 billion, so they more doubled and they accelerated their growth rate. (laughs) So maybe that pretends, people are concerned about Snowflake right now decelerating growth. You know, maybe that's going to be different. By the way, I think Snowflake has a different strategy, the whole data cloud thing, data sharing. They're not trying to necessarily take Oracle head on, which is going to make this next 10 years, really interesting. All right, we got to go, last question. 30 seconds or less, what can we expect from the future of data platforms? Matt, please start. >> I have to go first again? You're killing me, Dave. (laughing) In the next few years, I think you're going to see the major players continue to meet customers where they are, right. Every organization, every environment is, you know, kind of, we use these words bespoke in Snowflake, pardon the pun, but Snowflakes, right. But you know, they're all opinionated and unique and what's great as an IT person is, you know, there is a service for me regardless of where I am on my journey, in my data management journey. I think you're going to continue to see with regards specifically to Oracle, I think you're going to see the company continue along this path of being all things to all people, if you will, or all organizations without sacrificing, you know, kind of richness of features and sacrificing who they are, right. Look, they are the data kings, right? I mean, they've been a database leader for an awful long time. I don't see that going away any time soon and I love the innovative spirit they've brought in with HeatWave. >> All right, great thank you. Okay, 30 seconds, Holgar go. >> Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that we see is really that trend to autonomous as Oracle calls or self-driving software, right? So the database will have to do more things than just store the data and support the DVA. It will have to show it can wide insights, the whole upside, it will be able to show to one machine learning. We haven't really talked about that. How in just exciting what kind of use case we can get of machine learning running real time on data as it changes, right? So, which is part of the E5 announcement, right? So we'll see more of that self-driving nature in the database space. And because you said we can promote it, right. Check out my report about HeatWave latest release where I post in oracle.com. >> Great, thank you for that. And Bob Evans, please. You're great at quick hits, hit us. >> Dave, thanks. I really enjoyed getting to hear everybody's opinion here today and I think what's going to happen too. I think there's a new generation of buyers, a new set of CXO influencers in here. And I think what Oracle's done with this, MySQL HeatWave, those benchmarks that Ron talked about so eloquently here that is going to become something that forces other companies, not just try to get incrementally better. I think we're going to see a massive new wave of innovation to try to play catch up. So I really take my hat off to Oracle's achievement from going to, push everybody to be better. >> Excellent. Marc Staimer, what do you say? >> Sure, I'm going to leverage off of something Matt said earlier, "Those companies that are going to develop faster, cheaper, simpler products that are going to solve customer problems, IT problems are the ones that are going to succeed, or the ones who are going to grow. The one who are just focused on the technology are going to fall by the wayside." So those who can solve more problems, do it more elegantly and do it for less money are going to do great. So Oracle's going down that path today, Snowflake's going down that path. They're trying to do more integration with third party, but as a result, aiming at that simpler, faster, cheaper mentality is where you're going to continue to see this market go. >> Amen brother Marc. >> Thank you, Ron Westfall, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> Well, thank you. And I'm loving it. I see a wave of innovation across the entire cloud database ecosystem and Oracle is fueling it. We are seeing it, with the native integration of auto ML capabilities, elastic scaling, lower entry price points, et cetera. And this is just going to be great news for buyers, but also developers and increased use of open APIs. And so I think that is really the key takeaways. Just we're going to see a lot of great innovation on the horizon here. >> Guys, fantastic insights, one of the best power panel as I've ever done. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for coming on today. >> Great job, Dave, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

(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)

>>Mm. Every CEO is trying to get hybrid, right? Most people, they've been working remotely for the better part of two years now, and we've spent a lot of time and thought on how to accommodate remote workers and providing tools to make them feel connected and more productive. We've also built remote and hybrid models into our hiring ethos, making it a feature, not a drawback. But what about the underlying infrastructure that powers hybrid work? How is that evolving to be as flexible, scalable and cost effective with the lowest latency possible? Recent survey data from Enterprise Technology Research shows that 56% of executives believe productivity continues to improve, with only 14% citing recent declines in productivity. 26% say it's holding steady. The question is, how do we maintain those positives and minimise the negatives? And what role does the network and underlying infrastructure play in evolving new work models? Welcome to the network powering hybrid work on the Cube, made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be your host today. In this programme, you're gonna hear from experts that are going to discuss and introduce new innovations that are specifically designed to energise and support hybrid work. My first guest is Lawrence Wang, who's the vice president of product management at Cisco. And we're going to dig into WiFi six e and what it all means to the future of work. Lawrence, welcome. Good to see you. >>Hey, great to be here. Dave. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today. >>You bet. Okay. My first big question is what's the big rush? It feels like we were just talking about the shift from y 55 to WiFi six just a few years ago. What's going on there? >>Yeah. I mean, you're right, right. We assets at Cisco. We introduced our first WiFi six access points back in 2019, and one of the things that we've seen is a tremendous rate of adoption moving from WiFi five to WiFi six over the past couple of years. In fact, it's one of our fastest transitions that we've seen between wireless standards. And a lot of the drivers, you know, for that were really just about, you know, making sure that there's better WiFi experiences for, you know, people in the office making sure that they can support. You know more of that. Have you got a set of clients? Reduce the amount of congestion. And over time, what we've seen is that migration has been tremendous. But it also means that we're starting to reach that capacity where five gigahertz is starting to become more crowded and so many of our customers are looking at. Well, what can I actually do to continue to expand? You know that you know that traffic, the number of lanes that I can actually support for wireless traffic And for many of them, they're looking to WiFi succeed as the answer to help them do that simply because six gigahertz as part of that standard introduces a whole new spectrum or a whole new highway that we can get client devices as long as >>well, So it sounds like you're thinking about a different role for offices and campuses going forward. So what your listeners expect to see kind of in the in the near term and the midterm and even a long term near term when they get back into the office and in the long term, how do you see this playing out? >>Yeah, that's an interesting question, right When you think about this context of hybrid work, work is not a place that you go to, but it's really a place that you could be where ultimately you are trying to get work done. It really is reporting that quality of experience, no matter where you choose to work from. And, yes, while the campus is going to evolve and play a different role, it is a critical part of that hybrid work future. And the way I see it here is that the role of the campus is going to change over time. It's not going to be the same that we saw prior to two years ago, and I think for many of our customers about what does it mean to invest in that infrastructure for us to continue to adapt, to support the ways that their employees that are expected or want to work? And a big part of that is investing in infrastructure to support new ways of working? >>Well, you know, Lawrence, I mean, I've personally been lucky because we go to studio and I've been able to come into the office since the pandemic started, but I know a lot of people. They're really excited to get back, to work in person and face to face events and the like. And I know others that say, You know what? I'm moving and I'm always gonna work remotely. I'll never work for another company that forces me to go in the office again. So this sounds like a tall order for it organisations to accommodate that diversity. How do you think they will be able to plan for and manage all this new complexity? >>Yeah. I mean, I think the reality is, you know, talent. It doesn't know any zip codes, right? And I think one of the boons of being able to support a more distributed workforce is to be able to bring in great talent no matter where they're based out of. And I think for I t team. So I think the interesting thing will be what are the drivers to bring people back into the office right? There has to be a purpose that's more meaningful than simply It's a place that I go to every single day. You know, what are the tools and applications I bring in to help support collaboration, And I think important part of making this a great experience in the context of hybrid work is that you do have to make the office a meaningful place for employees to gather, but also making sure that as you connect people around the world as part of the global employee workforce that they still have an equitable experience. So for it teams, it is about thinking about how do I actually manage this infrastructure that's more distributed? But I start to invest in my central campuses and at the same time making sure that I have great quality experiences for everyone. Unified security policies, visibility across all the clients and applications. But there's also increasing pressure from their its core constituency. We know that people are asking more of it. They want them to support you, use cases like safe return office that they want to help you contributor to global corporate initiatives like driving towards zero greenhouse gas emissions. So any number of these activities or initiatives is putting more pressure on teams. >>Interesting. I mean, so I gotta ask you, please don't hate me for this question. But was this just luck on Cisco's part that you got solutions ready for this sort of hybrid work model so quickly. In other words, was it something that you were maybe planning that was going to take years for the market to be ready for And it just got compressed because of the pandemic? Or was this architecture that allows you to be flexible? How did you land here and what appears to be a pretty strong position? >>Yeah, I mean, at Cisco, I think one of the things that we think about is, you know, it's always amazing when you look back at something and then you write the story. But I think if we're being honest with ourselves, if you look at what happened from where we were two years ago to where we are today, including our competitors and customers, I think that no one could have predicted the world that we're operating and living in. And so for us, the question becomes, How did we help our customers support this transition? And ultimately it's about investing in architectures and platforms that are flexible, that allows our customers support use cases that they were thinking of, as well as ones that they never anticipated, and I think that's really the exciting thing about what we've been doing here as part of our hybrid work investments now areas that, you know, I think we double down on and in some ways accelerated because of this. When I think about you know what our customers care about when they start bringing people back into the office. It is about some of these emerging use cases, whether it's more dynamic, way finding, be able to understand the density or the air quality of a given environment. And these are some of the technologies that we have embedded in some of our new, you know, WiFi 60 access points along with our management infrastructure era. So I think that it gives our customers and partners a lot more flexibility than what they had before to really adapt to the changing needs of today and even beyond. >>Well, that's something we've certainly learned throughout the pandemic. Is the ability to be flexible is fundamental? I gotta ask you, what's your preferred mode of work? You go back into the office, you're gonna stay remote. >>Great question. You know, I have come to appreciate, you know, working from home. You know, over the past couple years, got to spend a little more time with my kids at lunch. But I will say I am looking forward to the day when I can have the voice of being back in the office a few days a week as well as I continue to be remote as well as continued to visit my customers and partners all over this great country in the world. So looking forward to that, >>so you're a true hybrid. I guess I'm a hybrid, too. I like being in the office, but I'm travelling a lot when the world returns to the new abnormal anyway. Large. Thanks so much for kicking off the programme with me. Now in a minute, we're going to dig into the core of the network and understand the role it plays in supporting new and flexible work models. You're watching the network powering hybrid work made possible by Cisco on the Cube, your leader in global enterprise tech coverage. Mhm. Yeah,

perfect all right we're good uh muhammad you ready yeah i have a watery eyes always so i always tell my interviewers or the producers that sometimes it shouldn't there shouldn't be a problem in the 10-minute window but well yeah so do that while i'm talking you'll see it on the return feed it's a little delayed but and most people have tears when they see dave vellante yeah i i have that effect on people thanks for that okay we all said we good leonard why don't you go alex bye-bye yeah alex got the i just got the thumbs up we're good okay muhammad here we go on dave in five four three we continue now with the network powering hybrid work now we just heard from lawrence wang on the rapid move to wi-fi 6e which is going to increase wi-fi efficiency enable routers and devices to more efficiently use bandwidth and that additional spectrum that lawrence talked about that means more wi-fi channels which is really going to help reduce overlap between networks and make a noticeable difference especially in crowded places we're here now with muhammad imam who's senior director of product management for catalyst switching this is a multi-billion dollar business for cisco if you ever listen to cisco's earnings calls you'll hear the cfo scott heron he'll talk about the catalyst 9000 and double-digit growth and switching this is the fastest ramping product in cisco's history so muhammad that's got to make you feel pretty good yes indeed thank you david and thank you for having me here yeah great to have you so uh look catalyst 9000 it's been really successful what does the 9000x bring to the table for your customers yeah absolutely and um indeed the catalyst 9000 family of switches have been extremely popular with our customers as you said fastest ramping product in cisco's history and the last four or five years we have really evolved the catalyst 9000 family of switches to a very comprehensive product portfolio um addressing the various enterprise use cases that that we that we address but now we see increase in demand on the networks and that really stems from some of the most recent trends that we are seeing right part of it is hybrid workspaces is going to be a video dominant hybrid workspace right a lot of cases is going to be high definition 4k 8k videos we are seeing cloud-based applications everywhere right my spreadsheet is used to be on excel sheet now it's either an office 365 or smartsheets my files used to be on my computer now it's on in the dropbox right so these are trends that are really uh putting pressure on our networks we are also seeing trends where vr headsets are becoming common they are being used for trainings and education use cases webex hologram in certain industries we are seeing robotics are becoming more and more popular and they come with a lot of um applications that are very latency sensitive and as lawrence mentioned earlier wi-fi 6e is really making over the year multi gigabit wi-fi possible right and for all of these different trends and the recent technologies that that are evolving we really need the network that can really address and deliver for these applications and that's where we are bringing the catalyst 9000 x that addresses the increase in network demand we are expanding the catalyst 9000 family with top-of-line premium introductions in the access layer of the switches of the network as well as in the aggregation and core layers so we are bringing 400 gig high-speed core and enterprise core and edge layers of the network we are bringing point-to-point ip ipsec security which will give you 100 gig of ipsec encryption um high density of multi-gigabit which is becoming very common as we evolve our wi-fi networks because we don't want our wired infrastructure to be the bottleneck when the wireless infrastructure is capable of going more than a gig high density of 90 watt powering the smart buildings use cases right right um these are all different use cases that are being enabled by the catalyst 9000 and the new getless 9000x family is really addressing some of these new trends and applications well it's good because the metaverse is coming too and we're going to need some help with that right who knows how much bandwidth will need for metabolism absolutely yeah guarantee will be a lot more but so i want to i want to hear more about the the new products that you've just launched and maybe how these offerings are going to help with this new hybrid work model that we've just been discussing absolutely so let me start with the catalyst 9300 we are introducing the catalyst 9300x which is the highest density full multi-gigabit platform with 100 gig uplinks and 90 watt of power on every port available right that's an industry first that we are bringing on the catalyst 9300 family it is also capable of one terabit per second of a stacking which is also unheard of in the industry this will serve our customers with all the new trends that we talked about including the hybrid world um and some of the new trends that are going to come in the next decade but 9300x is not just a high-end campus switch it can also be a lean branch and a box solution where you don't really need an sd van but you do need an encryption point to point from the catalyst 93 from your front branch with the catalyst 9300x to the data center or to the cloud so for the first time we are introducing the ipsec based encryption natively in the hardware and that means no compromise on performance and you can get up to 100 gig of encrypted traffic with the catalyst 9300x second is the catalyst 9400 we are introducing soup 2 and soup 2 xl with 100 gig uplinks enhancing and the the scale and performance giving our customers options for fully loaded line rate multi give it board on a 10 slot chassis right it will give you two to three times bandwidth boost to your existing line cards since it completely removes the over subscriptions and you know the soup 2 on the catalyst 9400 is coming up with the version of the asic that we used in the past on the catalyst 9600 that means it's also bringing the core capabilities that we used that we today have on 9600 on the catalyst 9400 and that brings high density 10 gig um ports on the catalyst 9400 without over subscription right with the core capabilities then we have the catalyst 9600 where we are introducing is supervisor 2 which really triples the bandwidth per slot on the catalyst 98600 it introduces 400 gig uplink and truly drives the transition to 200 gig in the core get 6k customers uh with excel scale requirements now they can transition to the cat 9k with soup 2. and by the way we are also introducing a combo line card on the catalyst 9600 which means now you don't have to burn a whole slot for your uplink pores in fact you can get up to 400 gig of uplink with this new line card um so that's that's a bunch of things that we are bringing on the catalyst 9600 in line with catalyst 9600 we are also introducing catalyst 9500x 100 gig box with 400 gig uplinks in a fixed form factor and all the benefits that i just talked about on the on the supervisor 2 and 9600 it's also available in a fixed form factor on catalyst 9500x got it so that's in summary kind of the multiple uh product lines that we are introducing yeah it's a lot to unpack there i mean your the big theme there of course is optionality you got a lot of choices for customers i love the encrypt everything without a trade-off you know no performance impact and anytime you can reduce my oversubscription it's going to make me happy you know muhammad we've reported in our breaking analysis segments the importance of custom silicon and not every company has the resources or the expertise to develop their own silicon cisco of course does catalyst 9k is bringing silicon 1 based products with this launch tell us more about that why is this important yeah that's really exciting development that we have on the cad 9k family because you know the silicon one is a powerful asic that enables high performance and high scale with modern silicon architecture bringing the architect a converged architecture for switching as well as routing cad 9k as we know has been running on a uadp asic which has been a programmable asic it has served us really well so far on the cat9k family but with the silicon one we are taking it to another level silicon one brings the capabilities of uadp asic and unlocks the excel scale and high performance in the enterprise switches this is a critical and foundational element to meet the core requirement for the next ticket silicon one is a 12.8 terabits per second chip supports up to 10 million routes supports much deeper buffers brings multi-slice voq architectures with this new architecture silicon 1a6 has paved the way to transition the cad 6k xl deployments to cat 9k right so that's kind of the the um the silicon one uh importance in the ket99k family that we are bringing now yeah and it brings differentiation a lot of people kind of sometimes don't appreciate that but but when you have the control like that you can do things that you might not be able to do with off-the-shelf silicon but so but i i want to ask you what about customers that previously purchased from you as you evolve the portfolio to 9k x how do you protect their investment yeah thank you for asking that question because when we started building the cad 9k we always thought about investment protection for our customers so if you buy today how you will have a very long life for that for that product and you will be able to unlock new powers on that platform that you have purchased maybe five years back right that's exactly what we are doing with the catalyst 199000x talking about modular right on the modular side the supervisors that that that we are introducing now are backward compatible with the line cars that you already have in some cases the lime card throughput is doubling and tripling because now you have a new machine that is going to power these line cards right so you don't have to change your line card you just change your supervisor and you have much higher performance and scale with this new supervisor similarly on the stackables you can stack with the existing catalyst 9300s for example and you will be able to you don't have to rip and replace everything it's not a forklift upgrade for our customers you can continue benefiting from your existing catalyst 9000 deployments and add to the power with the catalyst 9000x components as well as new platforms that we are introducing nice that's key this just speaks to the software content that you guys i know you have a lot of software engineers running around and this is welcome to the 2020s folks new world you know i i muhammad zero trust was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic but it's really become a mainstream topic today we talked about the infrastructure we know security has to be built in from the start it can't be bolted on and zero trust is really top of mind for customers how are their security requirements changing as a result of hybrid work and and how do you make sure that as we shift to hybrid that these new security requirements are addressed what are you doing there absolutely and we know as you said security is top of mind for our customers in fact security has been highlighted as the number one reason why a lot of customers pick cisco and cat9k we have a comprehensive zero truss architecture with software defined access where we started with segmentation and expanded into endpoint classification and visibility now we are taking that to the next level and we are introducing talus powered truss assessment for unmanaged endpoints to further make the the workplace is stronger with zero trust and software defined access truss analytics it detects traffic from end points that are exhibiting unusual um behavior by pretending to be um using a mag spoofing or probe is spoofing or man the metal techniques when truss analytics detects such anomalies it signals endpoint analytics to lower the trusted score so we have a trusted score system when when the trusted score goes down it shows up on the dashboard and the network admin can completely deny or limit the access to the network from these endpoints from other security aspect that we are introducing and i touched on that briefly earlier is um for non-sdvan internet only branches where we are where where services security services might be in the cloud right that's a trend that we are seeing to secure that connectivity from a lean branch to the cloud we are introducing the ipsec capability with the catalyst 9300x and that's built in as as we just talked about and as far as the automation is concerned for these use cases they are we are bringing those automation with our command center the cisco dna center and we are bringing the full life cycle of automation as well as assurance for the secure connectivity that is being provided with the with the cisco dna center well a couple takeaways there for me i mean endpoint security has really become much more important up for obvious reasons when you have remote workers the built-in ipsec just that really emphasizes that you got to have it you know built in from the ground up you can't just bolt it on and the automation is key the number one problem that csos face is you know lack of talent so automation you know definitely helps helps with that so okay muhammad thank you so much really appreciate you coming on in a moment we'll look at private 5g and what's been happening at mobile world congress you're watching cube's coverage of the network powering hybrid work made possible by cisco

good thumbnail for your video all right thank you all for the patience we are now ready to start filming did you want to take a picture alex yes i do lawrence let me get myself prepared for that okay lawrence we're going to take a screenshot of your input for a thumbnail asset if you can look at the screen and give me a big smile in three two one gotcha great excellent okay and with that i am all good to go and you are lawrence we'll do a five count i'll count you down 543 silent 2-1 and then just follow my lead okay sounds great all right leonard we good okay you're off here we go on dave in five four three every ceo is trying to get hybrid right most people they've been working remotely for the better part of two years now and we've spent a lot of time and thought on how to accommodate remote workers and providing tools to make them feel connected and more productive we've also built remote and hybrid models into our hiring ethos making it a feature not a drawback but what about the underlying infrastructure that powers hybrid work how is that evolving to be as flexible scalable and cost effective with the lowest latency possible recent survey data from enterprise technology research shows that 56 percent of executives believe productivity continues to improve with only 14 percent citing recent declines in productivity 26 percent say it's holding steady the question is how do we maintain those positives and minimize the negatives and what role does the network and underlying infrastructure play in evolving new work models welcome to the network powering hybrid work on the cube made possible by cisco my name is dave vellante and i'll be your host today and in this program you're going to hear from experts that are going to discuss and introduce new innovations that are specifically designed to energize and support hybrid work my first guest is lawrence wang who's the vice president of product management at cisco and we're going to dig into wi-fi 6e and what it all means to the future of work lawrence welcome good to see you hey great to be here dave thanks for having me i'm excited to be here today yeah you bet okay my my first big question is you know what's the big rush it feels like we were just talking about the shift from wi-fi you know five to wi-fi six just a few years ago what's going on there yeah i mean you're right right we as since at cisco we introduced our first wi-fi six access points back in 2019 and one of the things that we've seen is a tremendous rate of adoption moving from wi-fi five to wi-fi six over the past couple of years in fact it's one of our fastest transitions that we've seen between wireless standards and a lot of the drivers you know for that we're really just about you know making sure that there's better wi-fi experiences for you know uh people in the office making sure that they can support uh you know more of that you know set of clients reduce the amount of congestion in our time what we've seen is that migration has been tremendous but it also means that you know we're starting to reach that capacity where you know five gigahertz is starting to become more crowded and so many of our customers are looking at well what can i actually do to continue to expand you know that you know that traffic the number of lanes that i can actually support for wireless traffic and for many of them they're looking to wi-fi 6e as the answer to help them do that simply because six gigahertz as part of that standard introduces a whole new spectrum or a whole new highway that we can get client devices on well so it sounds like you're thinking about a different role for offices and campuses going forward so what should listeners expect to see kind of in the in the near term in the midterm and even the long term near term when they get back into the office and in the long term how do you see this playing out yeah i mean that's an interesting question right when you think about you know this context of hybrid work you know work is not a place that you go to but it's really a place that uh you could be where ultimately you are trying to get work done uh it really really is supporting you know that you know quality of experience no matter where you choose to work from and yes yeah while the campus is going to evolve and play a different role it is a critical part of that hybrid work future and the way i see it here is that you know the role of the campus is going to change over time it's not going to be the same that we saw prior to uh you know two years ago and i think for many of our customers about you know what does it mean to invest in that infrastructure for us to continue to adapt to support you know the ways that you know their employees are expected or want to work and a big part of that is investing in infrastructure to support your new ways of working well you know lawrence i mean i've personally been lucky because we go to studio and i've been able to come into the office since the pandemic started but i know a lot of people they're really excited to get back to work in person and face-to-face events and the like and i know others that say you know what i'm moving and i'm always going to remo work remotely i'll never work for another company that forces me to go in the office again so this sounds like a tall order for it organizations to accommodate that diversity how do you think they will be able to plan for and manage all this new complexity yeah i mean i think the reality is uh you know talent it doesn't know any zip codes right and i think one of the boons of you know being able to support a more distributed workforce is to be able to bring in great talent no matter where they're based out of and i think for it teams i think the interesting thing will be you know what are the drivers to bring people back into the office right there has to be a purpose uh that's more meaningful than simply it's a place that i go to every single day you know what are the you know tools and you know applications i bring in to help support collaboration and i think an important part of you know making this a great experience in the context of hybrid work is that you do have to make the office a meaningful place for employees to gather but also making sure that as you connect people around the world as part of your global employee workforce that they still have an equitable experience so for iet teams it is about you know thinking about how do i actually manage this infrastructure that's more distributed but i still have to invest in my you know central campuses and at the same time making sure that i have great quality experiences for everyone unified security policies you know visibility across all the clients and applications but there's also increasing pressure from their it's core constituency we know that people are asking more of it they want them to support new use cases like safe return office that they want it to help you a contributor to you know global corporate initiatives like driving towards uh you know zero uh greenhouse gas emissions so any number of these activities or initiatives is putting more pressure on ig teams yeah interesting i mean so i gotta ask you please don't hate me for this question but was this just luck on cisco's part that you got solutions ready for this sort of hybrid work model so quickly in other words was it something that you were maybe planning that was going to take years for the market to be ready for and it just got compressed because of the pandemic or is this architecture that allows you to be flexible how did you land here in what appears to be a pretty strong position yeah i mean at cisco i think one of the things that you know we think about is you know it's always amazing when you look back at something and then you write the story but i i think if we're being honest with ourselves if you look at what happened from where we were two years ago to where we are today including our competitors and customers i think that no one could have predicted the world that we're operating and living in and so for us the question becomes how did we help our customers support this transition and ultimately it's about investing in architectures and platforms that are flexible that allows our customers support you know use cases that they were thinking of as well as ones that they never anticipated and i think that's really the exciting thing about you know what we've been doing here as part of our hybrid work investments now areas that you know i think you know we double down on and you know in some ways accelerated because of this when i think about you know what our customers care about when they start bringing people back into the office it is about some of these emerging use cases whether it's you know more dynamic way finding being able to understand the density or the air quality of a given environment and these are some of the technologies that we've embedded in some of our you know new uh you know wi-fi 60 access points along with you know our management infrastructure here so i think that it gives our customers and partners a lot more flexibility than what you know they had before to really adapt to the changing needs of today and even beyond well that's something we've certainly learned throughout the pandemic is is the ability to be flexible is fundamental i got to ask you what's your preferred mode of work you going back into the office are you going to stay remote great question you know i have come to appreciate uh you know working from home you know over uh you know the past couple years got to spend a little more time with my kids at lunch but i will say i am looking forward to the day when i can have the choice of being back in the office a few days a week as well as continue to be remote as well as continue to visit my customers and partners uh you know all over this great country in the world so looking forward to that yeah so so you're a true hybrid i guess i'm a hybrid too i like being in the office but i'm traveling a lot when the world returns to the new abnormal anyway lawrence thanks so much for kicking off the program with me now in a minute we're going to dig into the core of the network and understand the role it plays in supporting new and flexible work models you're watching the network powering hybrid work made possible by cisco on thecube your leader in global enterprise tech coverage

>>Hello, welcome to the special cube conversation. I'm John for your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. We're still remoting in getting great guests in events are coming back. Next few weeks, we'll be at a bunch of different events and you'll see the cube everywhere, but this conversation's about network challenges in a distributed hybrid workforce era. We've got a team say he principal, product manager, edge networking solutions, a Dell technologies and Rob McBride channel and partner sales engineer at versa networks. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this cube conversation, >>John. Thank you, John. >>So first of all, obviously with the pandemic and now we're moving out of the pandemic, even with Omnichron out there, we still see visibility into kind of back to work and events and it's, but it's clearly hybrid environment cloud hybrid work. This has been a huge opening of everyone's eyes around network security provisioning, you know, unexpected disruptions around everyone being worked at home. Nobody really forecasted that. The fact that the whole workforce would be remote coming in. So again, put a lot of pressure on the network challenges over over the past two years. How is it coming out of this different what's your guys' take on this. >>Yeah, to then when we start looking at it, let's kind of focus a little bit on challenges, you know, you know, when this all kind of started off, obviously, as you stated, right, everyone was kind of taken by surprise in a way, right? What do we do? We don't know what to do at this moment. And you know, I go back and I remember a customer giving me a call, you know, when they were at first looking at, you know, your traditional land transformation and one of the changed their branches to do something from an SD perspective. And then the pandemic hit. And their question to me was Rob, what do I do? Or what do I need to start thinking about now, all of a sudden to your point, right? Everyone now is no longer in the office and how do I get them to connect. >>And more importantly, now that I can maybe figure out a way to connect them, how do I actually see what they're doing and be able to control what they're actually now accessing? Because I no longer have that level of control as of them coming into the office. And so a lot of customers, you know, we're, we're beginning to develop kind of homegrown solutions, look at various different things to kind of quick hot patches, if you will, to address the remote workers coming in and things of that nature. And we'll be seeing kind of progression through all this as a, as, as opposed to just solving, getting a user, to connect into the, into an environment that it can provide, you know, continuity for. They started coming up with other challenges to the point of security. They started, you know, I have other customers calling me up and saying, you know, I I've now got a ransomware problem, right? >>So, you know, what do I do about that? And what are the things I need to kind of consider with respect to now I'm much more vulnerable because my, my, my branch has state has basically become much more diversified and solutions and things that they're looking for, regardless, obviously around security connectivity, there they've been challenged with addressing how do they unify their levels of visibility without over encumbering themselves and how they actually manage now this kind of much more kind of distributed kind of network if you will. Right? So things around, you know, looking at, you know, acronyms around from like a Z TNA or, you know, cloud security and all this fun stuff starts coming into play. But what it, what it points to is that the biggest challenge ideas, how does, how do they converge networking and security together and provide equitable and uniform policy architecture to identify their users, to connect and access the applications that are relevant to the business and be able to have that uniformity between whether it's the branch for them being remote. And that's part of what we've kind of seen as this progression to the last two years and kind of solutions that they're looking for to kind of help them address that. It's almost like >>It's a good thing in a way. It actually opens up the kimono and say, Hey, this is the real world we've got to prepare for this next generation a TIF. I want to get your take because, you know, remember the old days we were like, oh yeah, we've got to prepare for these scenarios where maybe 30% will be dialing on the V land or remotely, you know, it's not 30%. It was like 100%. So budgets aren't out of whack and yet they want more resiliency at the edge. Right. So, so one, I didn't budget for it. They didn't predict it and it's gotta be better, faster, cheaper, more skier. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so John, the difference is, is that, you know, Dell, for instance, as already was already working towards this distributed model, right? The pandemic just accelerated that transformation. So, so when customers came to us and said, oh, we've got a problem with our workforce and our users being so geographically suddenly dispersed, you know, we had some insight that we could immediately lean on. We had already started working on solutions and building those platforms that can help them address those, those problems. Right. Because we'd already done studies before this, right. We had done studies and we'd come back on this whole work from home or remote office scenario. And, and the results were pretty unanimous in that customers were, all users were always complaining about, you know, application performance issues and, and, you know, connectivity issues and, and things like that. So we, we, we kinda knew about this. And so we were able to proactively start building solutions. And so, you know, so when a customer comes, there's like Rob was talking about, you know, their infrastructure, wasn't set up for everybody to suddenly move on day one and start accessing all the corporate resources where the majority of the organization is accessing corporate resources from away from campus. Right? So we, we, we have solutions, we've been building solutions and we have guidance to offer these customers as they try to modernize that network and address these problems. >>Well, that's a great segue to the next topic. Talk track is, you know, what is a network? What is network monetization? Right. So let's, let's define that if you don't mind, well, I got you guys here. You're both pros get that sound bite, but then let's get into the benefits of the outcomes from what that enables. So if you guys want to take a stab at defining what is network modernization mean? >>I think there's a lot of definitions, or it kind of depends on your point, your point of view of where you're, where you're responsible for, from a network or within the stack, you know, are from a take obviously is, you know, working, working from a vendor. And with solutions that we provide modernization is really around solutions that begin to look at more software defined architectures and definitions to begin a level of decoupling between, you know, points of control, hardware and software, and other kinds of points of visibility and automation to the point where, where things are let's, let's kind of put an air quotes in a sense of being more digitized. And in the sense, like even how we're looking at things from a consumerization perspective, but looking at things a much more, more cloud aware cloud specific cloud native in built automation, as well as inbuilt kind of analytics where things are much more in a, in a broader SDN, kind of a construct would be a form of a definition from a, from a, from a, from a monetization perspective. >>Now, do the other element of your, kind of a question in regards to, it's kind of the benefits that come as a result of this. So as customers have been in the last 24 months, looking at different solutions to address part of what we've been talking about, part of it is you want, when you're looking at, whether it's like you're using a word like sassy to kind of define, you know, how are enterprises looking for ZTE and they based solutions or cloud security to augment their, their overall needs. The benefits that they're finding are simplicity of management, because they're now looking for more uniform solutions that can address secure access for remote workers, in addition to their own kind of traditional access, as it relates to their offices to better visibility. Because as this uniformity of this kind of architecture, the now able to actually really see the level of context, right? >>I can see you, John, as far as where you're coming in and access and what applications on what devices. And now I have a means to actually apply a policy to that matters to me as the business, from an IP perspective, to protect me as the business, but also to ensure that you're actually authorized and accessing things that I have from an it regular reg regulations perspective. So benefits and the summary are kind of like Mo in bill automation, better, you know, things get done faster, things repair on their own in a different way, as a result of automation, greater visibility. Now they have much more greater insights into what we are doing as users of the overall it infrastructure and better overall control. That's been ultimately simplified as result of consolidation and unification. >>That's awesome. Insight. I T what's your take on the benefits of ma network modernization? >>So I'd like to sort of double down on, on, you know, something Rob said, right? So the visibility, right? So enhanced visibility in layman's terms, that just means more insight, more insight means the ability to implement best practices around application usage, application performance, more insights means control that it departments are, are meeting. They need that to manage and address security threats, right? To be able to identify an abnormal traffic pattern or unauthorized data movement, to be able to push updates and, and patches quickly. So, so it's really about, you know, that, that manageability, that that level of control gives them the ability to offer a resilient and secure underlying networking infrastructure. And then, you know, finally one of the key benefits is cost savings of, you know, everybody is trying to be more efficient. And so from, from our perspective, it's, it's really about building an open platform. >>You know, we've built a platform or an x86 based platform. We've we chose that because we wanted to tap into a mature ecosystem that, you know, customers can leverage as they, as they build their build towards their modernizing modernization goals. And so we're like tech leveraging technologies, like UCPs so universal customer premise equipments. And so that's really just an open hardware platform, but what you get by consolidating your network functions like routing and firewall, and when optimization you, and when you consolidate it all onto a single device, you get hardware savings, cost savings. You, you get operational savings as well, right? So you've it, common hardware infrastructure means a common deployment model means a streamlined operations means fewer truck rolls, right? So, so there's a tremendous amount of, of, of benefit from the cost standpoint as well, because from our perspective, it's really that what customers are looking for, they need enterprise grade solutions that can scale in a cost-effective manner. >>That's awesome. You guys mentioned sassy earlier. I'm like, first of all, software as a service is very sassy, big modern application movements. Always get my hair sassy. I think, you know, a kind of a term around SAS software as a service, but for you guys, it's talking about secure access service edge, which is a huge category growth right now where, you know, per security and networking, it's a huge discussion SD win fits into that somehow, because it used to be campus networking before now. It's everyone's world is the same. Now it's connected. So sassy is huge. How does that fit into SD when it's in the trend of the SAS at the same? What's the difference? Cause wan has been booming for the past decade as well in terms of trends. How are you guys seeing those converging in what's the difference? >>You know, I like to also agree with you, this thing has been booming the last couple of years, right. You know, kind of, kind of bread and butter part of what we've been doing, but, you know, to your question in regards to kind of its linkage relative to sassy, right. You know, as you articulated, right. It's the sassy secure access service edge from a definition of the acronym. So it's authority is first kind of good to kind of define a little bit, maybe for some of those that may not be overly familiar with it. And I like to kind of dumb it down a little bit into the point of sassy is really an architecture that is around, you know, the convergence of networking and security being put together in a uniform platform or service that is delivered from both the cloud, as well as addressing, you know, their, their kind of traditional land requirements. >>Now digging in sassy is broken to two little buckets, right? It's broken into a network layer and the six security layer and by its definition, right, by, by a particular analyst, the network component, a big portion of that is SD wan. And so SD wan providing that value associated to what does, you know, dynamic lanes, steering automation, application attachments, so on and so forth is a core element of the foundation of the network layer associates, associate sassy. And then the other element of zesty is around the security bit. And so they're very much intrinsically linked, whether, you know, for example, like versus just the kind of mentioned this here, the, the, the sassy cloud that we built for our customers to leverage for private access, public access, you know, secure internet CASBY, DLP type of services is built upon SQM. In addition to our customers that are using Guesty Lampard or traditional land are using SD wan to connect to that cloud. >>So it's very, very much linked and they kind of go hand in hand, depending on your approach to the broader architecture. And, you know, another point I'll bring into that. What, what it also highlights is that whether it's around sassy or not, when we, when in pertinent to everything we'd been other kind of been talking about, the other thing that's coming with sun intrinsically and natively is really the concept of security it's around, whether it's security at the branch, or whether it's around some form of, you know, identity management or a point of improving posture for the, for the enterprise to, you know, obviously the spec traffic at the branch where remotely, but what we're seeing at a trend wise, which, you know, part by customer adoption from our own platform, if you will, is basically security and SD Wang coming together, whether for your traditional land transformation, or as a result of sassy services for a hybrid needs of connectivity, right? Remote workers, hybrid workforce, going into the cloud for, for their connectivity needs and optimizations. In addition to obviously the, the enterprises branch transformations, >>I like that native aspect of it. We used to joke and call SD way in St. Cloud because it's, we're all using cloud technologies. Talk about the security impact real quick. If you don't mind, I want to just double click them what you mentioned there, because I think the cloud effication plus the security piece seems to be a key part of this dynamic. Is that true? Or did they get that right? What's what's this all mean with cloud vacation? Yeah, >>And I, I would, I, I, I agree with, I guess kind of where you're leading into that is, you know, review all of us you're right now. Exactly. In talking with you right now, right. John is, as you stated at the beginning, we're all remote. And so from a business perspective, right, we are accessing, or from an engagement we're accessing a cloud service. Now what's critical for us, as you know, obviously enterprise employees is that our means of accessing this cloud service needs to have some level of hardening. We need to protect, right. Not only our own asset that we're using, right. Our laptops or other machinery that you use to connect to the network, but in addition to protect our company, right? So our company also needs to protect them. So how can we do that? Right? How can we do that in a very fast and distributed way? >>Sure. We can put security endpoints at every location with every user and every home. And that's one means of, of a particular solution. So your point about cloud is now take all of that and bring it to the cloud where you'd have a much more distributed means, right? And much more dynamically, scalable approach to actually doing that level of inspection, posture and, and enforcement. And so that's kind of where the rubber meets the road, right, is for us to access those cloud applications. The cloud that we're using as a conduit for security, as well as network also is now even connected and optimized paths to applications like what we're using right now, right. To, to, to do this conversation. So that's kind of where it meets together. And the security element is because we're so diverse, we just need, we, we, we need to ensure, right. We're all much, we're much more vulnerable. Right? My home network is, you know, maybe arguably maybe not as secure as when I go into an office. Right? >>So most people, because you have worked for virtual networks, >>I can make that argument. Yes. Right. But you know, the average, most of us, remote workers, you know, our homes aren't as hard. And so we point a point of risk, right? And so, as we, as we go to cloud apps, we're more connected to the internet. Right. You know, the, the, the point of being able to do this enforcement from a sassy concept helps provide that improved posture for enterprises to secure their traffic and get visibility into that. >>All my network engineer, friends are secure, as you read about. And I always joked to the malware, you missed, missed the wrong network engineer. If I go after them, their house, spear fishing. And you're trying to get into your network. I'd say, if I want to bring this back, because what we're bringing up here is cloud is actually enabling more on premises because you're working at home. That's a premise, right? So you're also edge is a premise edge and cloud. And a cloud kind of eliminates all this notion of what is cloud and edge, but at the end of the day is where you are. Right. So having the performance and the security and the partnership that same with Dell, I know you guys have been on this for a while because I've been covering it, but the notion of edge completely changes now, because what does that even mean? Home's edge is the camp of data centers and edge the, the cars and edge, the telco monopoles and edge. This is a big deal. This is the unit about the unification. This is all about making it all work. What's your, what's your take on this from the Dell perspective. >>Yeah. And I think, I mean, it that's, I mean, you, you kind of summarize it, right. I mean, what does edge mean to you? Right. It's and then, so every time I have a conversation with, with somebody, I always start with, let's define what your edge is. And so, you know, from, from our perspective, from the Dell perspective is, you know, we believe that we want to provide enterprise grade infrastructure. We want to give our customers the right tools. And we're seeing that with this trend of a hybrid workforce, a geographically dispersed user base, we're seeing a tremendous need for, you know, from it departments for tools, for solutions that can give them the control that they can sort of push out into their networks to ensure a safe and secure external access to corporate resources. Right. And so that's what we're committed to is making sure that, that, that management layer by either developing the solutions, in-house bringing the right partners to the table and just ensuring that our customers have the right tools because this sort of trend, or this, this, this new normal is not going away. And so we have to adapt. >>So thanks for coming on, Rob, we'll give you the final word. What's changed the most, in your opinion, with customers, environments, around how they're handling their networks as we come out of the pandemic, which has proven kind of which projects are working, which ones aren't where to double down on what was screwed up. I mean, come on. This is, we're kind of seeing it all play out. What's your, what's your take on as we come through the pandemic and people come out of this, what's the big learning. Okay. >>Well that you need partners. Right. Okay. So it's not even from a vendor perspective. What I mean by partners is what we're finding and what I think a lot of other customers I've engaged with and others is this ain't easy for even as much as we can within the technology vendor market, right. It's to make things easier to do. There's a lot of technology and the enterprise, it is recognized. They need a lot of these building blocks, right. To, to accomplish a lot of different things, whether it's around automation, to, in other tools as, as auto was leading into. And so we're finding that, you know, a lot of our, our base or our interactions are really trying to identify an appropriate partner that can help not only talk to the technology, but help them actually understand all the various different, you know, multi-colored legal blocks, they've got to put together, but also help help them actually put that into a realization. >>Right. And, you know, and then be able to then give the keys to them so they can eventually drive the car. Right. And so the learning that we're seeing here is this is a lot of tech, there's a lot of new tech, new approaches to existing technology of things that they've actually done. And they're, they're, they're looking for help. Right. And so they're looking for kind of, let's call it like trusted advisor kind of status of people that can help explain the technology to them and then help them understand how do they put it together. So they can then ultimately accomplish our overall kind of, you know, other kinds of objectives from an it perspective. And the other learning that I'll just say, and then I'll, then I'll stop. Here is SD wan isn't dead, right? Yes. The man is actually still driving. And it's actually an impetus for a lot of other things that enterprise is actually doing, whether it's around, you know, sassy, oriented services, remote access, private access, and other things of that nature. >>I totally agree. I think the networking, stuff's still going to be so much innovation going on with the edge exploding as well. That the really great, amazing stuff happening. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation, great conversation, taking it to the edge network challenges in the distributed hybrid workforce era is about moving things around the internet, making them secure. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite the posture from some that big tech generally and Amazon specifically, should be regulated and/or broken apart, recent survey research suggests that Amazon faces many disruption challenges, independent of any government intervention. Specifically, respondents to our recent survey believe that history will repeat itself in that there's a 60% probability that Amazon Inc. will be disrupted by market forces, including self-inflicted wounds. Amazon faces at least seven significant disruption scenarios of varying likelihood and impact, perhaps leading to the conclusion that the government should just let the market adjudicate Amazon Inc's ultimate destiny. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of AWS reinvent, we share the results of our survey designed to assess what if anything, could disrupt Amazon specifically, Amazon Inc. not just AWS. Now here's the background of the survey. Recently, in collaboration with author David Mitchell, the cube initiated a community research project to understand one, what scenarios could disrupt Amazon and two, what's the likelihood that each scenario would occur. We developed the scenarios, we tested them in small samples and then refine the questions and launch the survey. Here are the key findings. The survey asked respondents to rate the likelihood of each scenario disrupting Amazon on a scale of 1-10. As we show here, we have inferred that the ratings are a proxy for probability of disruption. And now in the interest of simplicity, we chose not to have respondents evaluate the impact of the disruption, at this time anyway. Here's the ranking by order of likelihood for each scenario. The end in the survey was just under 600 at 597 respondents. On average, across all scenarios, respondents indicate there's a 60% probability that Amazon will be disrupted. By one of, or some combination of these seven scenarios. Now by a notable margin, respondents felt that complacency, I.e a self-inflicted wound or series of wounds would be the most likely disruption scenario for Amazon. Now history in the industry would support this scenario is leadership in the tech business has proven to be transitory. The likelihood of a technological disruption was rated the lowest at 5.5, although some of the open-ended responses suggested that new models of computing could emerge. Look in the mainframe days, sharing resources in a timeshare model was very popular and then that gave way to a model of dedicated centralized infrastructure. The prevailing model then became distributed computing, which has seeded momentum back to a more centralized cloud. It's not inconceivable that with edge computing, the pendulum could swing back again. Now on balance, the remaining scenarios hovered around 60% likelihood individually, but taken all together The combination of these factors, it could be argued, present a multitude of challenges to Amazon Inc. Now, by looking at the distribution of responses, you can see further evidence of potential to disrupt the company. Here are the distribution results for each scenario and the order of the questions that they were presented. First, was government mandated separation, divestment and/or limits on Amazon's cloud computing, retail, media, credit card, and/or in-house product groups. 47% of the respondents believe there's a 70% or better chance of the government disrupting Amazon. Next question was major companies increasingly choose to do their own cloud computing and/or sell their products directly for competitive costs, security, or other reasons. Think of this as do it yourself cloud. That was not as prominent, but still 42% of respondents gave this a 70% chance or better. So think Walmart, the Walmart cloud or the target cloud. Okay, the next question was environmental policies raise, or the next scenario, environmental policies raise costs, change packaging delivery, recycling rules, and/or consumer preferences. If you think about it Amazon, they ship, you know, they order a toothpaste that comes in a box and every little piece you order every little item that you order comes in its own separate package. So environmental policy intervention showed a similar profile as above with a somewhat less likelihood in that 70% plus range. Okay next scenario was price or trade wars with the U.S and/or China create friction with e-commerce giants. So for instance, the China cloud or/and or e-commerce giants and protectionism would start to favor national players. Think again pricing wars, trade wars, you know, with China and others had a similar profile for likelihood as we just showed you earlier. But you know, what if you went, think about this thought exercise? What if you go on the web to order an item and AWS doesn't have it but Alibaba does. You know, maybe that's not such a huge factor at the U.S because really we don't buy directly from Alibaba but certainly outside of the United States particularly in Asia Pacific, it could be a scenario that disrupts Amazon Inc. Okay, the next scenario, major computing innovations, such as quantum edge or machine-to-machine obsolete today's cloud architectures. Tech disruptions ranked the lowest of all of these scenarios presumably because AWS is seen as on the cutting edge technically. So only 36% of respondents felt there was a 70% or better probability of this scenario disrupting Amazon. Next scenario, software replaces, centralized warehouses as delivery services are directly connected to suppliers and factories. Perhaps this is one of the most interesting scenarios I mean, imagine if Google creates software that upon a search, you can then order the item and have it shipped directly to you, no middle person. You know, like an airline ticket actually is today, except now it's physical goods. This direct model would disrupt Amazon's warehouse approach, but as you can see, it didn't really strike the respondents as highly likely. We think it's actually again, one of the more interesting scenarios, and it's certainly being put to the test by, for instance Alibaba, which really doesn't rely on a massive warehouse infrastructure. Now by far, the most likely scenario as rated by their respondents was this one; Complacency, arrogance, blindness, abusive power, loss of trust, consumer and/or employee backlash/boycotts. Think of it as self-inflicted wounds. More than half of the respondents indicated that there's a better than 70% chance that Amazon Inc. would shoot itself in the foot over time. And again, history would suggest this is consistent in the most likely pattern, especially when new executives come in. I mean, you saw this with famous companies at the time, like Wang, Digital, IBM eventually, Intel going through some of the challenges that we see today, Microsoft under bomber. And you know you see these founder led companies like Dell and Oracle they continue to thrive. Salesforce as well but it could be that today's executives and systems are more tuned to longevity, Andy Jassy is a long time Amazonian, Adam Selipsky the new CEO of AWS, he boomeranged back to AWS from Tableau, he's got a deep understanding of the company and its culture. So it's by no means assured that Amazon is going to trip up, However, taken together in combination, these factors suggest that government intervention may not be necessary. Indeed, the history of government breakups and pressure on big tech has been mixed and arguably futile. AT&T, IBM and Microsoft all came under close government scrutiny. and in the case of AT&T, the company was broken up. Generally these actions led to the US companies being less competitive, certainly was the case with AT&T is international telcos became dominant in the market. And in the case of IBM and Microsoft antitrust actions by the government while a distraction, were less a factor in the challenges that these firms ultimately faced and challenges to their leadership then were market disruptions. Think about an IBM unwittingly and famously handed its monopoly power to Intel and Microsoft in the PC era, and Microsoft under Ballmer, yeah kind of hugged onto its windows past and it became much less relevant in the industry until Satya Nadella initiated Microsoft's current hugely successful strategy, on top of the Azure cloud. The point is, despite the saber rattling of governments, history would suggest that market forces will be much more successful in moderating the power of giants like Amazon. We'll leave you with one last thought. At a $64 billion run rate and a 39% growth rate last quarter, AWS is the profit engine of Amazon. AWS accounts for over a hundred percent of Amazon Incs overall operating profit, so it was surprising to us last quarter when the stock dropped kind of precipitously after Amazon Inc. announced its earnings, its retail business underperformed, but AWS blew away expectations. The profit engine, the stock rebounded since then, and many investors saw it as a buying opportunity by the dip. But the point is that AWS is the most critical part of Amazon Inc. in our opinion. It helps fund Amazon's massive capex investment and gives Amazon a platform to enter other industries like payments, and content and groceries and other industries that Amazon wants to disrupt. So if you look at the ETR data across AWS's vast portfolio, The picture is very solid. This chart shows net score or spending momentum for AWS in its businesses comparing three survey snapshots, October 2020, July 21 and October, 2021, that's the yellow bar. Note, the comments from ETR at every sector, AWS spending velocity's up relative to last year. And we certainly saw that in this year's AWS results, accelerating growth with a much larger revenue base across the board and infrastructure, AI data, database analytics, core cloud, everything is up even chime, which is amazing because chime is horrible compared to other tools that you use of that like, but other than that weak spot, AWS is hitting on all cylinders. So what do you think should the government put the shackles on Amazon Inc? Or should it just let the market forces do their thing? Now, by the way we asked respondents, what else could disrupt Amazon, other than these seven scenarios? And we received some pretty interesting open-ended responses that we'll publish for your enjoyment, including my favorite; God could disrupt the Amazon. Okay, that's it for now, thanks to my colleague, David Mitchell for his excellent work on these scenarios. Don't forget these episodes of Braking Analysis, They're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you're got to do is search Braking Analysis podcast. Don't forget to check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, you can get in touch with me directly David.volante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me at @DVellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Have a great week, be safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the Cubes Coverage of Splunk.com 2021. My name is Dave Atlanta and the Cube has been covering.com events since 2012 and I've personally hosted many of them. And since that time we've seen the evolution of Splunk as a company and also the maturation in the way customers analyzed, protect and secure their organizations, data and applications. But the forced march to digital over the past 19 months has brought more rapid changes to sec UP teams than we've ever seen before. The adversary is capable. They're motivated and they're deploying very sophisticated techniques that have pressured security pros like never before. And with me to talk about these challenges and how Splunk is helping customers respond as jane wang is the vice president of security products that Splunk jane. Great to have you on the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Very nice to meet you. Thank you for having me. >>You're very welcome. So how d how can you think about or how do you think about the fact that the imperative to accelerate digital transformation has impacted security teams? How has it impacted sec ops teams in your view? >>Yeah. Well, just going back to our customers and what I've learned from all the customer conversations I have every every week many of our customers are under a massive digital transformation. They're moving to the cloud and the cloud opens up more attack surface, more attack work surface, there's more threats that come over cloud, new workspaces to attack services, new api is to manage secure and protect and our customers are really struggling to gain the visibility they need to really manage and secure across all that infrastructure. >>Yeah. And we've also seen the whole, obviously the work from home trend, the hybrid work movement, you know, people aren't set up for that. I mean, you remember people were ripping out literally ripping out desktops and bringing them home and you know, the home network had to be upgraded. So lots of changes there. And we've we've talked a lot in the cube jane about the fragmentation of tooling and the lack of qualified talent when we talked to see. So as you ask him, the number one problem, I can't get, I can't hire enough talent in the field of of cybersecurity. So I wonder if you can address how this has made it more difficult for security teams to maintain end to end visibility across their environments. What's the fundamental challenge there? >>Yeah, well you're really you're really nailing this. The fundamental challenges that many security products are not built to integrate seamlessly with one another. When I'm talking to customers, their frontline security operations teams often have 30 different consoles open on their monitor at one time and there really manual disjointed processes, the copying and pasting hash names and iP addresses from one consults the other. It slows them down. It really slows them down in protecting those threats. So because those products aren't assigned to integrate together and all that data from each of those security tools isn't brought into one place. It just exacerbates the challenge for security operations seems makes their job really, really hard to do. Which takes time. It takes time. It makes it harder to detect and respond to threats quickly and today more than ever we need to be able to detect and respond to threats quickly. >>Yeah, I do a weekly program called Breaking Analysis and once a quarter I look at the cyberspace and I use a chart to emphasize this complexity. It's it's a from a company called operative, I don't know if you've ever seen it but it's this eye chart, it's this taxonomy of the security landscape and it's mind blowing how much complexity there is. So how to Splunk help organization organizations address these challenges. >>Yeah, so I think bringing, we have one security operations platform cloud native cloud delivered. There are many parts of being able to streamline workflows for when you're first detect a threat or a potential threat right through to when teams close and immediate that threatened the changes in their environment to ensure they're protected. So the whole thing is helping security teams detects faster, investigate faster and respond faster to threat. There are four parts to that in our security operations, platform Splunk security cloud. The first one is advanced security analytics. So the nature of threats is evolving. They're becoming more sophisticated. We have very smart, well funded Attackers whose day job who spend all their time trying to break into organizations. So you need really advanced security analytics to detect those threats, then we need to automate security operations so that it's not so manual, so you don't have poor folks sitting in front of multiple consoles doing manual tasks to respond to those threats and make sure their organizations are protected. One key thing is that this year Splunk acquired true Star so that we can bring in d do rationalize multiple sources of threat intelligence and apply that threat intelligence both to our analytics and our operations so that you have broader insights from the security community outside Splunk and that intelligence can really help and speed both detection and response. And the last thing that's been true about Splunk since spunk became Splunk many many years ago is that we are committed to partners and we deeply integrate with many other security tools uh in a very seamless way. So whatever investments customers have made within their security operations center, we will integrate and bring together those tools in one workspace. So there's the big advantages I think you get when, when you run your security operations said transplant security cloud, >>that's a nice little description. And having followed Splint for so many years, it's sort of, it tracks the progression of your ascendancy. You know, you started you you we we used to have log analytics that were just impossible. You sort of made that much easier took that to advanced kind of use big data techniques even though Splunk really never used that term. But but you were like the leader and big data um in terms of being able to analyze um uh data to help remediate issues. The automation key is p pieces key the acquisitions. You've made a very interesting um you mentioned around de doop threat intelligence but also you've done some cool stuff in the cloud and we always used to say jane watch for the ecosystem. We early too early, you know, last decade we saw you as a really hot company. We said one of the keys to your growth is going to be the ecosystem. And you've you've clearly made some progress there. I wonder if you could tell us more About the announcements that you're making here at.com. >>Yeah. Well we're going back everything that we do on the security team, every line of code every engineer writes is all around helping detect, investigate and respond faster to really secure organizations. So if I look at those intern I start with faster time to detect what have we done. So bringing in the threat intelligence that I mentioned again, that's really gonna help to take new threats and to take them really, really quickly. You don't have to spend time going and looking manually at external sources of threat intelligence. It will be brought right in to enterprise security at your fingertips. So that that's pretty huge. We're bringing other more advanced content right into our stem enterprise security. So that will help detect threats that our research team sees as emerging again. This is going to just bring bring that intelligence right to customers where they work every day, um faster time to investigate. So this is this is really exciting uh back in november we reduced and we are really something called risk based alerting. That is an amazing new capability that we've iterated on ever since. And we have more iterations that we're announcing um tomorrow actually. And so risk based alerting pulls together what may have been single atomic alerts that can often be overwhelming to a sock brings those together into one overarching alert that helps you see the whole pattern of an attack, the whole series of things that happened over time. That might be an attack on your organization. One customer told us that that reduced the time it took for them to do an investigation from eight hours down to 10 minutes to really helping faster time to investigate. And then the next one is faster time to respond. So we have a new visual playbook editor for our sore security orchestration and response to which is in the cloud but also available on prayer. But that new visual playbook editor really reduces the need for custom code. Makes playbooks more modular, so it can help anyone in the security operations team respond to threats really, really quickly. So faster time to detect, investigate and respond those are, those are really cool for us. And then there's some exciting partnerships that I want to talk about just to really focus on reducing the burden of all those disparate tools on consoles and bringing them down and and integrating them together. So we'll have some announcements. There are new integrations that we're releasing with Mandiant Aziz scalar and detects. I'm personally very excited about a fireside chat that Kevin Mandia, the Ceo and president of Mandiant, we'll be having tomorrow with our Ceo Doug merit. So those are some of the things we're announcing. It's a big year for security. Very excited >>to tell you that's, that's key. I want to just kind of go through and follow up on some of the faster time to detect with the threat intelligence. That's so important because we read about how long it takes sometimes for for organizations to even find out that somebody has infiltrated their environment. This risk based learning, it sounds like and you're so right, it's like paper cuts having a bottoms up analysis. It's almost overwhelming. You don't have a sense as to really where the focus should be. So if you can have more of a top down, hey start here and sort of bucket ties things. It's gonna, it's gonna accelerate and then the faster response time. The thing that strikes me jane with your visual playbook editor is as you well know, the the way in which bad guys get in now they're very stealthy, you almost have to be stealthy in your response. So if you have to write custom code that's going to alert the bad guys that they're they're seeing now seeing code that they've never seen before, they must have detected us and then they escalate, you know, they get you in a harder, tighter headlock. Uh and I love the partnerships, you know, we, we followed the trend toward remote security. Cloud security, where's the scale is a big player, Amanda you mentioned. So that's that's great too. I mean it feels like the puzzle pieces are coming together. It's it's almost like a game of constant, you know, you're never there but you've got to stay vigilant. >>I really think so today. I mean it's been a great 12 months that's blank. We have done so much over the past year leading up to this.com. I'm very excited to talk to folks about it. I think one thing I didn't really mention that I kind of touched on earlier in the talk that we're having was around cloud security monitoring. So holistic cloud security monitoring. We've got some updates there as well with deeper integrations into G C P A W S Azure, one dr SharePoint box net G drive. Like customers are using many, many cloud services today and they don't have a holistic view across all those services I speak to see so every week that tell me they just really need one view. Not to go into each of those cloud service providers or cloud services, one at a time to look at the security posture, they need that all in a central location. So we normalize, we ingest and normalize data from each of those cloud services so you can see threats consistently across each of them. I think that's really, really something different that Splunk is doing um that other security offerings are not doing. >>I think that's a super important point and I do hear that a lot from CsoS where they say look we have so many different environments, so many different tools and they each have their own little framework so we have to go in and and investigate and then come back out and then our teams have to go into a new sort of view and come back out and and they just run out of time and they just don't again, lack of lack of skills to actually do this, can't hire half fast enough, can't train fast enough. So so that higher level view but still the ability to drill down and understand what those root causes. That's it's a it's a it's a top down bottoms up type of approach and and so as opposed to just throwing grains of sand at the second teams and then hoping, you know, they find the pearl, so jane, I'll give you the last word, Maybe some final thoughts. >>No, I just wanted to thank everyone for listening. I want to thank everyone for joining dot com 21. We're very excited to hear from you and speak with you. So thank you very much. >>Excellent. Great having you in the cube, keep it right there, everybody for more coverage of the cube. Splunk dot com 21. We'll be right back, >>Yeah.

>>Good morning from Los Angeles, Lisa Martin here at Qube con cloud native con north America, 2021. This is the cubes third day, a wall-to-wall coverage. So great to be back at an event in person I'm excited to be joined by Vince Wang, senior director of products at 49. We're going to talk security and Kubernetes then welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me. >>So I always love talking to 40 minutes. Cybersecurity is something that is such an impersonal interest of mine. The fording that talks about the importance of integrating security and compliance and the dev sec ops workflow across the container life cycle. Why is this important and how do you help companies achieve it? >>Well, as companies are making digital innovations, they're trying to move faster and as to move faster, or many companies are shifting towards a cloud native approach, uh, rapid integrations, rapid development, and rapid deployment, uh, but sometimes speed, you know, there's a benefit to that, but there's also the downside of that, where, you know, you can lose track of issues and you can, uh, introduce a human error in a problem. So as part of the, as part of the, the, the means to deliver fast while maintaining his six year approach, where both the company and the organizations delivering it and their end customers, it's important to integrate security throughout the entire life cycle. From the moment you start planning and development, and people's in process to when you're developing it and then deploying and running in production, um, the entire process needs to be secured, monitored, and, um, and vetted regularly with good quality, um, processes, deep visibility, and an integrated approach to the problem. Um, and I think the other thing to also consider is in this day and age with the current situation with COVID, there's a lot of, uh, development of employment in terms of what I call NASA dental Baltic cloud, where you're deploying applications in random places, in places that are unplanned because you need speed and that, uh, diversity of infrastructure and diversity of, uh, of clouds and development and things to consider then, uh, produces a lot of, uh, you know, uh, opportunities for security and, and challenges to come about. >>And we've seen so much change from a security perspective, um, the threat landscape over the last 18 months. So it's absolutely critical that the integration happens shifting left. Talk to us about now let's switch topics. Application teams are adopting CIC D uh, CICB workflows. Why does security need to be at the center of that adoption? >>Well, it goes back to my earlier point where when you're moving fast, your organizations are doing, um, you're building, deploying, running continuously and monitoring, and then improving, right? So the idea is you're, you're creating smaller, incremental changes, throwing it to the cloud, running it, adjusting it. So then you're, you're rapidly integrating and you're rapidly developing and delivery. And again, it comes down to that, that rapid nature, uh, things can happen. There's, there's more, uh, more points of touching and there's more points of interactions. And, you know, and again, when you're moving that fast, it's really easy to, um, miss things along the way. So as you have security as a core fundamental element of that DNA, as you're building it, uh, that that's in parallel with everything you're doing, you just make sure that, um, when you do deliver something that is the most secure application possible, you're not exposing your customers or your organizations to unforeseen risks that just kind of sits there. >>Uh, and I think part of that is if you think about cloud infrastructure, misconfiguration is still number one, uh, biggest problem with, uh, with security on the, in the cloud space, there's, uh, tasks and vulnerabilities those, we all know, and there's there's means to control that, but the configurations, when you're storing the data, the registries, all these different considerations that go into a cloud environment, those are the things that organizations need visibility on. And, um, the ability to, to adopt their processes, to be proactive in those things and know what they, uh, do. They just need to know what, what then, where are they're operating in, um, to kind of make these informed decisions. >>That visibility is key. When you're talking with customers in any industry, what are the top three, let's say recommendations to say, here's how you can reduce your exposure to security vulnerabilities in the CIS CD pipeline. What are some of the things that you recommend there to reduce the risk? >>There's a couple, oh, obviously security as a fundamental practice. We've been talking about that. So that's number one, key number. The second thing that I would say would be, uh, when you're adopting solutions, you need to consider the fact that there is a very much of a heterogeneous environment in today's, uh, ecosystem, lots of different clouds, lots of different tools. So integration is key. The ability to, um, have choices of deployment, uh, in terms of where you wanted to play. You don't want to deploy based upon the technology limitations. You want to deploy and operate your business to meet your business needs and having the right of integrations and toolings to, uh, have that flexibility. Now, option is key. And I think the third thing is once you have security, the choices, then you can treat, you create a situation where there's a lot of, uh, you know, process overhead and operational overhead, and you need a platform, a singular cybersecurity platform to kind of bring it all in that can work across multiple technologies and environments, and still be able to control at the visibility and consolidate, uh, policies and nationally consistent across all closet points. >>So we're to the DevOps folks, what are some of the key considerations that they need to take into >>Account to ensure that their container strategy isn't compromising security? Well, I think it comes down to having to think outside of just dev ops, right? You have to, we talk about CIC D you have to think beyond just the build process beyond just where things live. You have to think continuous life cycles and using a cyber security platform that brings it together, such as we have the Fortinet security fabric that does that tying a lot of different integration solutions. We work well within their core, but theirs have the ability to integrate well into various environments that provide that consistent policies. And I think that's the other thing is it's not just about integration. It's about creating that consistency across class. And the reality is also for, I think today's dev ops, many organizations are in transition it's, you know, as, as much as we all think and want to kind of get to that cloud native point in time, the reality is there's a lot of legacy things. >>And so dev ops set ups, the DevSecOps, all these different kind of operational functions need to consider the fact that everything is in transition. There are legacy applications, they are new cloud native top first type of application delivery is using containers of various technologies. And there needs to be a, again, that singular tool, the ability to tie this all together as a single pane of glass, to be able to then navigate emerge between legacy deployments and applications with the new way of doing things and the future of doing things with cloud native, uh, and it comes down again to, to something like the Fortinet security fabric, where we're tying things together, having solutions that can deploy on any cloud, securing any application on any cloud while bringing together that consistency, that visibility and the single point management, um, and to kind of lower that operational overhead and introduce security as part of the entire life cycle. >>Do you have a Vincent example of a customer that 49 has worked with that has done this, that you think really shows the value of what you're able to enable them to achieve? >>We do. We do. We have lots of customers, so can name any one specific customer for various reasons, you know, it's security after all. Um, but the, the most common use cases when customers look at it, that when you, we talked to a CIO, CSO CTO is I think that's a one enter they ask us is, well, how do we, how do we manage in this day and age making these cloud migrations? Everyone? I think the biggest challenge is everyone is in a different point in time in their cloud journey. Um, there's if you talk to a handful of customers or a rueful customers, you're not going to find one single organization that's going to be at the same point in time that matches them yet another person, another organization, in terms of how they're going about their cloud strategies, where they're deploying it at what stage of evolution there are in their organizational transformations. >>Um, and so what they're looking for is that, that that's the ability to deploy and security any application on any topic throughout their entire application life cycle. Um, and so, so the most common things that, that our customers are looking for, um, and, you know, they're doing is they're looking to secure things on the network and then interconnected to the cloud with, uh, to deliver that superior, uh, application experience. So they were deploying something like the security fabric. Uh, again, you know, Fordanet has a cybersecurity approach to that point and securing the native environments. They're looking at dev ops, they're deploying tooling to provide, uh, you know, security posture management, plus a few posture management to look at the things that are doing that, the registries, their environment, the dev environment, to then securing their cloud, uh, networks, uh, like what we do with our FortiGate solutions, where we're deploying things from the dev ops. >>I feel secure in the cloud environment with our FortiGate environments across all the various multitudes of cloud providers, uh, like, uh, AWS Azure, Google cloud, and that time that together with, with some secure, um, interconnections with SD LAN, and then tying that into the liver and productions, um, on the web application side. So it's a very much a continuous life cycle, and we're looking at various things. And again, the other example we have is because of the different places in different, uh, in terms of Tod journeys, that the number one key is the ability to then have that flexibility deployment to integrate well into existing infrastructure and build a roadmap out for, uh, cloud as they evolve. Because when you talk to customers today, um, they're not gonna know where they're going to be tomorrow. They know they need to get there. Uh, they're not sure how they're going to get there. And so what they're doing now is they're getting to cloud as quickly as they can. And then they're looking for flexibility to then kind of adjust and they need a partner like Fordanet to kind of bring that partnership and advisorship to, uh, to those organizations as they make their, their, their strategies clearer and, uh, adjust to new business demands. >>Yeah. That partnership is key there. So afforded it advocates, the importance of taking a platform approach to the application life cycle. Talk to me about what that means, and then give me like the top three considerations that customers need to be considering for this approach. >>Sure. Number one is how flexible is that deployment in terms of, do you, do customers have the option to secure and deploy any application, any cloud, do they have the flexibility of, um, integrating security into their existing toolings and then, uh, changing that out as they need, and then having a partner and a customer solution that kind of grows with that? I think that's the number one. Number two is how well are these, uh, integrations or these flexible options tied together? Um, like what we do with the security fabric, where everything kind of starts with, uh, the idea of a central management console that's, you know, uh, and consistent policies and security, um, from the get-go. And I think the third is, is looking at making sure that the, the, the security integrations, the secure intelligence is done in real time, uh, with a quality source of information, uh, and, and points of, uh, of responsiveness, um, what we do with four guard labs. >>For example, we have swell of large, um, machine learning infrastructure where have supported by all the various customer inputs and great intelligence organizations, but real time intelligence and percussion as part of that deployment life cycle. Again, this kind of really brings it all together, where organizations looking for application security and, and trying to develop in a CSED fashion. And you have the ability to then have security from the get, go hide ident to the existing toolings for flexibility, visibility, and then benefits from security all along the way with real time, you know, uh, you know, leading edge security, that then kind of brings that, that sense of confidence and reassurance as they're developing, they don't need to worry about security. Security should just be part of that. And they just need to worry about solving the customer problems and, uh, and, you know, delivering business outcomes and results. >>That's it, right? It's all about those business outcomes, but delivering that competence is key. Vince, thank you for joining me on the program today, talking through what 49 is doing, how you're helping customers to integrate security and compliance into the dev dev sec ops workflow. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. My >>Pleasure for vents Wang. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from Los Angeles, uh, cube con and cloud native con 21 stick around at Dave Nicholson will join me next with my next guest.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for day two. Live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Velante, Dave. We had a great action packed day yesterday. We're going to have another action packed day today. We've got the CEO coming on. We've got customers coming on, but there's been a lot in the news last 24 hours. Facebook, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, so wall street journal today, headline Facebook hearing fuels call for rain in on big tech. All right, everybody's going after big tech. Uh, for those of you who missed it, 60 minutes had a, uh, an interview with the whistleblower. Her name is, uh, Francis Haugen. She's very credible, just a little background. I'll give you my take. I mean, she was hired to help set Facebook straight and protect privacy of individuals, of children. And I really feel like, again, she, she didn't come across as, as bitter or antagonistic, but, but I feel as though she feels betrayed, right, I think she was hired to do a job. They lured her in to say, Hey, this is again, just my take to say, Hey, we want your help in earnest to protect the privacy of our users, our citizens, et cetera. And I think she feels betrayed because she's now saying, listen, this is not cool. >>You hired us to do a job. We in earnest, went in and tried to solve this problem. And you guys kind of ignored it and you put profit ahead of safety. And I think that is the fundamental crux of this. Now she made a number of really good points in her hearing yesterday and I'll, and we'll try to summarize, I mean, there's a lot of putting advertising revenue ahead of children's safety and, and, and others. The examples they're using are during the 2020 election, they shut down any sort of negative conversations. They would be really proactive about that, but after the election, they turned it back on and you know, we all know what happened on January 6th. So there's sort of, you know, the senators are trying that night. Um, the second thing is she talked about Facebook as a wall garden, and she made the point yesterday at the congressional hearings that Google actually, you can data scientists, anybody can go download all the data that Google has on you. >>You and I can do that. Right? There's that website that we've gone to and you look at all the data Google has and you kind of freak out. Yeah, you can't do that with Facebook, right? It's all hidden. So it's kind of this big black box. I will say this it's interesting. The calls for breaking up big tech, Bernie Sanders tweeted something out yesterday said that, uh, mark Zuckerberg was worth, I don't know. I think 9 billion in 2007 or eight or nine, whatever it was. And he's worth 122 billion today, which of course is mostly tied up in Facebook stock, but still he's got incredible wealth. And then Bernie went on his red it's time to break up big tech. It's time to get people to pay their fair share, et cetera. I'm intrigued that the senators don't have as much vigilance around other industries, whether it's big pharma, food companies addicting children to sugar and the like, but that doesn't let Facebook. >>No, it doesn't, but, but you ha you bring up a good point. You and I were chatting about this yesterday. What the whistleblower is identifying is scary. It's dangerous. And the vast majority, I think of its users, don't understand it. They're not aware of it. Um, and why is big tech being maybe singled out and use as an example here, when, to your point, you know, the addiction to sugar and other things are, uh, have very serious implications. Why is big tech being singled out here as the poster child for what's going wrong? >>Well, and they're comparing it to big tobacco, which is the last thing you want to be compared to as big tobacco. But the, but the, but the comparison is, is valid in that her claim, the whistleblower's claim was that Facebook had data and research that it knew, it knows it's hurting, you know, you know, young people. And so what did it do? It created, you know, Instagram for kids, uh, or it had 600,000. She had another really interesting comment or maybe one of the senators did. Facebook said, look, we scan our records and you know, kids lie. And we, uh, we kicked 600,000 kids off the network recently who were underaged. And the point was made if you have 600,000 people on your network that are underage, you have to go kill. That's a problem. Right? So now the flip side of this, again, trying to be balanced is Facebook shut down Donald Trump and his nonsense, uh, and basically took him off the platform. >>They kind of thwarted all the hunter Biden stuff, right. So, you know, they did do some, they did. It's not like they didn't take any actions. Uh, and now they're up, you know, in front of the senators getting hammered. But I think the Zuckerberg brings a lot of this on himself because he put out an Instagram he's on his yacht, he's drinking, he's having fun. It's like he doesn't care. And he, you know, who knows, he probably doesn't. She also made the point that he owns an inordinate percentage and controls an inordinate percentage of the stock, I think 52% or 53%. So he can kind of do what he wants. And I guess, you know, coming back to public policy, there's a lot of narrative of, I get the billionaires and I get that, you know, the Mo I'm all for billionaires paying more taxes. >>But if you look at the tax policies that's coming out of the house of representatives, it really doesn't hit the billionaires the way billionaires can. We kind of know the way that they protect their wealth is they don't sell and they take out low interest loans that aren't taxed. And so if you look at the tax policies that are coming out, they're really not going after the billionaires. It's a lot of rhetoric. I like to deal in facts. And so I think, I think there's, there's a lot of disingenuous discourse going on right now at the same time, you know, Facebook, they gotta, they gotta figure it out. They have to really do a better job and become more transparent, or they are going to get broken up. And I think that's a big risk to the, to their franchise and maybe Zuckerberg doesn't care. Maybe he just wants to give it a, give it to the government, say, Hey, are you guys are on? It >>Happens. What do you think would happen with Amazon, Google, apple, some of the other big giants. >>That's a really good question. And I think if you look at the history of the us government, in terms of ant anti monopolistic practices, it spent decade plus going after IBM, you know, at the end of the day and at the same thing with Microsoft at the end of the day, and those are pretty big, you know, high profiles. And then you look at, at T and T the breakup of at T and T if you take IBM, IBM and Microsoft, they were slowed down by the U S government. No question I've in particular had his hands shackled, but it was ultimately their own mistakes that caused their problems. IBM misunderstood. The PC market. It gave its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft for its part. You know, it was hugging windows. They tried to do the windows phone to try to jam windows into everything. >>And then, you know, open source came and, you know, the world woke up and said, oh, there's this internet that's built on Linux. You know, that kind of moderated by at T and T was broken up. And then they were the baby bells, and then they all got absorbed. And now you have, you know, all this big, giant telcos and cable companies. So the history of the U S government in terms of adjudicating monopolistic behavior has not been great at the same time. You know, if companies are breaking the law, they have to be held accountable. I think in the case of Amazon and Google and apple, they, a lot of lawyers and they'll fight it. You look at what China's doing. They just cut right to the chase and they say, don't go to the, they don't litigate. They just say, this is what we're doing. >>Big tech, you can't do a, B and C. We're going to fund a bunch of small startups to go compete. So that's an interesting model. I was talking to John Chambers about this and he said, you know, he was flat out that the Western way is the right way. And I believe in, you know, democracy and so forth. But I think if, to answer your question, I think they'll, they'll slow it down in courts. And I think at some point somebody's going to figure out a way to disrupt these big companies. They always do, you know, >>You're right. They always do >>Right. I mean, you know, the other thing John Chambers points out is that he used to be at 1 28, working for Wang. There is no guarantee that the past is prologue that because you succeeded in the past, you're going to succeed in the future. So, so that's kind of the Facebook break up big tech. I'd like to see a little bit more discussion around, you know, things like food companies and the, like >>You bring up a great point about that, that they're equally harmful in different ways. And yet they're not getting the visibility that a Facebook is getting. And maybe that's because of the number of users that it has worldwide and how many people depend on it for communication, especially in the last 18 months when it was one of the few channels we had to connect and engage >>Well. And, and the whistleblower's point, Facebook puts out this marketing narrative that, Hey, look at all this good we're doing in reality. They're all about the, the, the advertising profits. But you know, I'm not sure what laws they're breaking. They're a public company. They're, they're, they have a responsibility to shareholders. So that's, you know, to be continued. The other big news is, and the headline is banks challenge, apple pay over fees for transactions, right? In 2014, when apple came up with apple pay, all the banks lined up, oh, they had FOMO. They didn't want to miss out on this. So they signed up. Now. They don't like the fact that they have to pay apple fees. They don't like the fact that apple introduced its own credit card. They don't like the fact that they have to pay fees on monthly recurring charges on your, you know, your iTunes. >>And so we talked about this and we talk about it a lot on the cube is that, that in, in, in, in his book, seeing digital David, Michelle, or the author talked about Silicon valley broadly defined. So he's including Seattle, Microsoft, but more so Amazon, et cetera, has a dual disruption agenda. They're not only trying to disrupt horizontally the technology industry, but they're also disrupting industry. We talked about this yesterday, apple and finances. The example here, Amazon, who was a bookseller got into cloud and is in grocery and is doing content. And you're seeing these a large companies, traverse industry value chains, which have historically been very insulated right from that type of competition. And it's all because of digital and data. So it's a very, pretty fascinating trends going on. >>Well, from a financial services perspective, we've been seeing the unbundling of the banks for a while. You know, the big guys with B of A's, those folks are clearly concerned about the smaller, well, I'll say the smaller FinTech disruptors for one, but, but the non FinTech folks, the apples of the world, for example, who aren't in that industry who are now to your point, disrupting horizontally and now going after individual specific industries, ultimately I think as consumers we want, whatever is going to make our lives easier. Um, do you ever, ever, I always kind of scratch my nose when somebody doesn't take apple pay, I'm like, you don't take apple pay so easy. It's so easy to make this easy for me. >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. I, I do think, um, you know, it begs the question when will banks or Willbanks lose control of the payment systems. They seem to be doing that already with, with alternative forms of payment, uh, whether it's PayPal or Stripe or apple pay. And then crypto is, uh, with, with, with decentralized finance is a whole nother topic of disruption and innovation, >>Right? Well, these big legacy institutions, these organizations, and we've spoke with some of them yesterday, we're going to be speaking with some of them today. They need to be able to be agile, to transform. They have to have the right culture in order to do that. That's the big one. They have to be willing. I think an open to partner with the broader ecosystem to unlock more opportunities. If they want to be competitive and retain the trust of the clients that they've had for so long. >>I think every industry has a digital disruption scenario. We used to always use the, don't get Uber prized example Uber's coming on today, right? And, and there isn't an industry, whether it's manufacturing or retail or healthcare or, or government that isn't going to get disrupted by digital. And I think the unique piece of this is it's it's data, data, putting data at the core. That's what the big internet giants have done. That's what we're hearing. All these incumbents try to do is to put data. We heard this from Coca-Cola yesterday, we're putting data at the core of our company and what we're enabling through automation and other activities, uh, digital, you know, a company. And so, you know, can these, can these giants, these hundred plus year old giants compete? I think they can because they don't have to invent AI. They can work with companies like UI path and embed AI into their business and focused on, on what they do best. Now, of course, Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft there may be going to have the best AI in the world. But I think ultimately all these companies are on a giant collision course, but the market is so huge that I think there's a lot of, >>There's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think one of the things that was exciting about talking to one, the female CIO of Coca-Cola yesterday, a hundred plus old organization, and she came in with a very transformative, very different mindset. So when you see these, I always appreciate when I say legacy institutions like Coca-Cola or Merck who was on yesterday, blue cross blue shield who's on today, embracing change, cultural change going. We can't do things the way we used to do, because there are competitors in that review mirror who are smaller, they're more nimble, they're faster. They're going to be, they're going to take our customers away from us. We have to deliver this exceptional customer and employee experience. And Coca-Cola is a great example of one that really came in with CA brought in a disruptor in order to align digital with the CEO's thoughts and processes and organization. These are >>Highly capable companies. We heard from the head of finance at, at applied materials today. He was also coming on. I was quite, I mean, this is a applied materials is really strong company. They're talking about a 20 plus billion dollar company with $120 billion market cap. They supply semiconductor equipment and they're a critical component of the semiconductor supply chain. And we all know what's going on in semiconductors today with a huge shortage. So they're a really important company, but I was impressed with, uh, their finance leaders vision on how they're transforming the company. And it was not like, you know, 10 years out, these were not like aspirational goals. This is like 20, 19, 20, 22. Right. And, and really taking costs out of the business, driving new innovation. And, and it's, it was it's, it's refreshing to me Lisa, to see CFOs, you know, typically just bottom line finance focused on these industry transformations. Now, of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line, but they see technology as a way to get there. In fact, he put technology right in the middle of his stack. I want to ask him about that too. I actually want to challenge him a little bit on it because he had that big Hadoop elephant in the middle and this as an elephant in the room. And that picture, >>The strategy though, that applied materials had, it was very well thought out, but it was also to your point designed to create outcomes year upon year upon year. And I was looking at some of the notes. I took that in year one, alone, 274 automations in production. That's a lot, 150,000 in annual work hours automated 124 use cases they tackled in one year. >>So I want to, I want to poke at that a little bit too. And I, and I did yesterday with some guests. I feel like, well, let's see. So, um, I believe it was, uh, I forget what guests it was, but she said we don't put anything forward that doesn't hit the income statement. Do you remember that? Yes, it was Chevron because that was pushing her. I'm like, well, you're not firing people. Right. And we saw from IDC data today, only 13% of organizations are saying, or, or, or the organizations at 13% of the value was from reduction in force. And a lot of that was probably in plan anyway, and they just maybe accelerated it. So they're not getting rid of headcount, but they're counting hours saved. So that says to me, there's gotta be an normally or often CFOs say, well, it's that soft dollars because we're redeploying folks. But she said, no, it hits the income statement. So I don't, I want to push a little bit and see how they connect the dots, because if you're going to save hours, you're going to apply people to new work. And so either they're generating revenue or cutting costs somewhere. So, so there's another layer that I want to appeal to understand how that hits the income state. >>Let's talk about some of that IDC data. They announced a new white paper this morning sponsored by UI path. And I want to get your perspectives on some of the stats that they talked about. They were painting a positive picture, an optimistic picture. You know, we can't talk about automation without talking about the fear of job loss. They've been in a very optimistic picture for the actual gains over a few year period. What are your thoughts about that? Especially when we saw that stat 41% slowed hiring. >>Yeah. So, well, first of all, it's a sponsored study. So, you know, and of course the conferences, so it's going to be, be positive, but I will say this about IDC. IDC is a company I would put, you know, forest they're similar. They do sponsored research and they're credible. They don't, they, they have the answer to their audience, so they can't just out garbage. And so it has to be defensible. So I give them credit there that they won't just take whatever the vendor wants them to write and then write it. I've used to work there. And I, and I know the culture and there's a great deal of pride in being able to defend what you do. And if the answer doesn't come out, right, sorry, this is the answer. You know, you could pay a kill fee or I dunno how they handle it today. >>But, but, so my point is I think, and I know the people who did that study, many of them, and I think they're pretty credible. I, I thought by the way, you, to your 41% point. So the, the stat was 13% are gonna reduce head count, right? And then there were two in the middle and then 41% are gonna reduce or defer hiring in the future. And this to me, ties into the Erik Brynjolfsson and, and, and, uh, and, and McAfee work. Andy McAfee work from MIT who said, look, initially actually made back up. They said, look at machines, have always replaced humans. Historically this was in their book, the second machine age and what they said was, but for the first time in history, machines are replacing humans with cognitive functions. And this is sort of, we've never seen this before. It's okay. That's cool. >>And their, their research suggests that near term, this is going to be a negative economic impact, sorry, negative impact on jobs and salaries. And we've, we've generally seen this, the average salary, uh, up until recently has been flat in the United States for years and somewhere in the mid fifties. But longterm, their research shows that, and this is consistent. I think with IDC that it's going to help hiring, right? There's going to be a boost buddy, a net job creator. And there's a, there's a, there's a chasm you've got across, which is education training and skill skillsets, which Brynjolfsson and McAfee focused on things that humans can do that machines can't. And you have this long list and they revisited every year. Like they used to be robots. Couldn't walk upstairs. Well, you see robots upstairs all the time now, but it's empathy, it's creativity. It's things like that. >>Contact that humans are, are much better at than machines, uh, even, even negotiations. And, and so, so that's, those are skills. I don't know where you get those skills. Do you teach those and, you know, MBA class or, you know, there's these. So their point is there needs to be a new thought process around education, public policy, and the like, and, and look at it. You can't protect the past from the future, right? This is inevitable. And we've seen this in terms of economic activity around the world countries that try to protect, you know, a hundred percent employment and don't let competition, they tend to fall behind competitively. You know, the U S is, is not of that category. It's an open market. So I think this is inevitable. >>So a lot about upskilling yesterday, and the number of we talked with PWC about, for example, about what they're doing and a big focus on upscaling. And that was part of the IDC data that was shared this morning. For example, I'll share a stat. This was a survey of 518 people. 68% of upscaled workers had higher salaries than before. They also shared 57% of upskilled workers had higher roles and their enterprises then before. So some, again, two point it's a sponsored study, so it's going to be positive, but there, there was a lot of discussion of upskilling yesterday and the importance on that education, because to your point, we can't have one without the other. You can't give these people access to these tools and not educate them on how to use it and help them help themselves become more relevant to the organization. Get rid of the mundane tasks and be able to start focusing on more strategic business outcome, impacting processes. >>We talked yesterday about, um, I use the example of, of SAP. You, you couldn't have predicted SAP would have won the ERP wars in the early to mid 1990s, but if you could have figured out who was going to apply ERP to their businesses, you know what, you know, manufacturing companies and these global firms, you could have made a lot of money in the stock market by, by identifying those that were going to do that. And we used to say the same thing about big data, and the reason I'm bringing all this up is, you know, the conversations with PWC, Deloitte and others. This is a huge automation, a huge services opportunity. Now, I think the difference between this and the big data era, which is really driven by Hadoop is it was big data was so complicated and you had a lack of data scientists. >>So you had to hire these services firms to come in and fill those gaps. I think this is an enormous services opportunity with automation, but it's not because the software is hard to get to work. It's all around the organizational processes, rethinking those as people process technology, it's about the people in the process, whereas Hadoop and the big data era, it was all about the tech and they would celebrate, Hey, this stuff works great. There are very few companies really made it through that knothole to dominate as we've seen with the big internet giants. So you're seeing all these big services companies playing in this market because as I often say, they like to eat at the trough. I know it's kind of a pejorative, but it's true. So it's huge, huge market, but I'm more optimistic about the outcomes for a broader audience with automation than I was with, you know, big data slash Hadoop, because I think the software as much, as much more adoptable, easier to use, and you've got the cloud and it's just a whole different ball game. >>That's certainly what we heard yesterday from Chevron about the ease of use and that you should be able to see results and returns very quickly. And that's something too that UI path talks about. And a lot of their marketing materials, they have a 96, 90 7% retention rate. They've done a great job building their existing customers land and expand as we talked about yesterday, a great use case for that, but they've done so by making things easy, but hearing that articulated through the voice of their customers, fantastic validation. >>So, you know, the cube is like a little, it's like a interesting tip of the spirits, like a probe. And I will tell you when I, when we first started doing the cube and the early part of the last decade, there were three companies that stood out. It was Splunk service now and Tableau. And the reason they stood out is because they were able to get customers to talk about how great they were. And the light bulb went off for us. We were like, wow, these are three companies to watch. You know, I would tell all my wall street friends, Hey, watch these companies. Yeah. And now you see, you know, with Frank Slootman at snowflake, the war, the cat's out of the bag, everybody knows it's there. And they're expecting, you know, great things. The stock is so priced to perfection. You could argue, it's overpriced. >>The reason I'm bringing this up is in terms of customer loyalty and affinity and customer love. You're getting it here. Absolutely this ecosystem. And the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of questions in the, in the event last night, it was walking around. I saw a couple of wall street guys who came up to me and said, Hey, I read your stuff. It was good. Let's, let's chat. And there's a lot of skepticism on, on wall street right now about this company. Right? And to me, that's, that's good news for you. Investors who want to do some research, because the words may be not out. You know, they, they, they gotta prove themselves here. And to me, the proof is in the customer and the lifetime value of that customer. So, you know, again, we don't give stock advice. We, we kind of give fundamental observations, but this stock, I think it's trading just about 50. >>Now. I don't think it's going to go to 30, unless the market just tanks. It could have some, you know, if that happens, okay, everything will go down. But I actually think, even though this is a richly priced stock, I think the future of this company is very bright. Obviously, if they continue to execute and we're going to hear from the CEO, right? People don't know Daniel, Denise, right? They're like, who is this guy? You know, he started this company and he's from Eastern Europe. And we know he's never have run a public company before, so they're not diving all in, you know? And so that to me is something that really pay attention to, >>And we can unpack that with him later today. And we've got some great customers on the program. You mentioned Uber's here. Spotify is here, applied materials. I feel like I'm announcing something on Saturday night. Live Uber's here. Spotify is here. All right, Dave, looking forward to a great action packed today. We're going to dig more into this and let's get going. Shall we let's do it. All right. For David Dante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is the cube live in Las Vegas. At the Bellagio. We are coming to you presenting UI path forward for come back right away. Our first guest comes up in just a second.