>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes, virtual coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition, we're gonna dig into transformations the role of technology in the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, H P. E. Has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years. So it makes a great example in case study and with me is rashmi kumari who is the senior vice president and C. I. O. At HP rashmi welcome come on inside the cube. >>Dave Nice to be here. >>Well, it's been almost a year since Covid changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CEO specifically and generally it has changed. I mean you got digital Zero Trust has gone from buzzword to >>mandate >>digital. Everybody was complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated remote work hybrid. How do you see it? >>Absolutely. As I said in the last discover that Covid has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the company's I. C. C. I O. S role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running that's become a table stick. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience engaged with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end off the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the Covid. Covid hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another. A global company like H. B had to look into its supply chain differently. Had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, But how to create the same level of collaboration coordination as well as delivery or faster uh goods and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So see I. O. And I. T. S. Role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to a different level of employee experience as well as enabling day to day operations of the company's. Ceos have realized that digital is the way to go forward. It does not matter what industry you are in and now see a as have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now, which is a technology company respective you are in oil and gas or mining or a technical product or a card or a mobility company. End of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >>So I want to ask you about that because you've you've been a Ceo and uh you know, leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and where you know non technical technology, you know, selling to I. T. Companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together, everybody is a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the C. I. O. Because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between A C. I. O. And a tech company. You know what I mean by that? And the C. I. O. It's sort of every other company is those two worlds converging. >>Absolutely. And it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma to entertainment to utilities. Um And now at a technology company end of the day um The issues that I. T. Deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have a little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem. Even at H. B. Look I was fortunate um at H. B. Because of Antonio's leadership, we have topped out mandate to transform how we did business. And I talked about my next gen IT program in last year's cube interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer partners experience from ordering to order processing to supply chain to finance. Uh We decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot it's pretty common if it was a technology company or non technology company at HP. We were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us now we are becoming as a service or a subscription company and I. T. Played a major role to enable that quote to cash experience. Which is very different than the traditional experience around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term. Um Digital exhaust which results into data which can result into better insight and you can not only Upsell cross l because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and the foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, there are pills a sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies I. K which is a furniture manufacturer across the board. We have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And and remember when uh hp says edge to cloud platform as a service edges the product, the customers who we deal with and how do we get that? Help them get their data to understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis. Um and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that gets up, >>I think you've been HP now think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades. Hp. Hp then HP is I feel like it's entering now the sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay, we gotta figure out how to deal or or operate as a separate companies. Okay. That took some time and then it was okay. Now how do we align our resources and you know, what are the waves that we're gonna ride? And how do we how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place and and all in on as a service. And now it's like okay how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question. So as I mentioned first your second phase which was becoming a stand alone company was the next N. I. T. Program very broad and um S. Four and 60 related ecosystem application. We're even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 100 20 billion company. We are 30 billion company. We need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line across the globe. And um we I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of next in I. T. Transformation where we have brought in new customer experience through low touch or not touch order pressing. A very strong as four capabilities. Where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together. And I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do other management, supply chain and data and analytics platforms. We also made the pivot to go to as a service now for as a service and subscription selling. It needs a very different quote to Kazakh cash experience for our customers and that's where we had to bring in um platforms like brim to do um subscription building, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data and another X platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior um as well as how they're using our product a real time for our operations teams. >>Well they say follow the money in the cube. We love to say follow the day to day is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage business value. So you talk a little bit more about the role of data. I'm interested I'm interested in where I. T. Fits uh you know a lot of companies that have a Chief data officer or Ceo sometimes they're separate. Sometimes they they work you know for each other or Cdo works for C. I. O. How do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of C E O C I O S. Chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is do we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of uh technology and platform and data within I. T. Look. The way I see is that I call the term data torture if we have multiple data lakes, if we have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out of the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights. It's very difficult to have a single version of truth. So HP had two pronged approach. First one was as part of this next gen i. T. Transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity Master Data and Product Master Data Program. These were very very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from code stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was a effort well spent at the same time while we were building this message capability, we also invest the time in our analytics platform because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint. How do we link our data link to R. S. A. P. And Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time, we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making an analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage, around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment. That's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes, the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization worked very, very closely to understand each other needs sometimes out of the possible where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies. This model works where you have focused on insight and analytics without because data without insight is of no value, but at the same time you need clean data. You need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional nonfunctional requirements that are business partners have and that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently. As of now, >>I want to ask you a kind of a harder maybe it's not harder question. It's a weird question around single version of the truth because it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications workloads that require that single version of the truth. The operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR the salesforce. Clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that. But I want to and maybe not the right question for HP. But I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where where it's it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics gotta have that nail down data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom. They need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? And maybe you can help me put that into context. >>Uh, that's a great question. David. I'm glad you asked it. So I think tom Davenport who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality. It's all that most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving company's operations incrementally because you have very clean that I have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing how my products are doing. How am I meeting my sls or how my financials are looking? There's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though, which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data, but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new ones and customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space. But that's this entire data available to our business leader, not real time because the need is not as real time because they're doing more what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business in its we educate them. We tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight insight and foresight hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >>Thank you for that. That's interesting discussion. You know digital transformation. It's a journey and it's going to take many years. A lot of ways, not a lot of ways 2020 was a forced March to digital. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay let's really lean into our strategy the journey and along the way there's gonna be blind spots, there's bumps in the road when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? That's a great question. >>Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer term view on this topic. Right in what's top of my mind um recently is the whole topic of E. S. G. Environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place, right? Because they are either public companies or they're under some kind of uh scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or what not. Even if you're a startup, you need to do things with our customers and what not. It has been there for companies. It continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in in in place. Now we'll talk about cyber security. I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space. However, we have the set up within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company, we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that. And not only the bigger companies leaders at our level, I would say that Between last March and this year, I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic, which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity, which is also very big objective for h P E. And Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in us at the world Economic forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world too, create innovative products and services, we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that, we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that um, equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. Hp has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like uh, The momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones, as you know, in the bay area to create better delivery methods of food or products. Right. The third piece, which is environmental, is extremely important as well as we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental HP recently published its living Progress report. We have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers, um, through those processes. Again, if we do, if our planet is on fire, none of us will exist, right. So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report, I myself as a person, solar panels, battery electric cars, whatever I can do, but I think something more needs to happen right where as an individual I need to pitch in, but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof, which again creates a different kind of uh waste going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have E. S. G. Top of their mind and think of products and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward. And, you know, our customers are investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause uh for for bigger cross section of companies, and I'm most of the time very happy to share with my C I. O cohort around how are H. P E F s capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills are green capabilities, How it reduces the evils going forward as well as our sustainability initiatives, which can help other, see IOS to be more um carbon neutral going forward as well. >>You know, that's a great answer, rashmi, thank you for that because I gotta tell you hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about E S G. But that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think, I think tech companies in particular are have to lead in our leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber. It's obviously, you know, escalated in, in the news the last several months. It's always in the news, but You know, 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. Now we realize, hey, they're gonna get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board level topic, you know? Years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh, you can't have the sec ops team working for the C. I. O. Because that's like the Fox watching the Henhouse, that's changed. Uh it's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening. So the world is now more virtual, you've gotta secure physical uh assets. I mean, any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attack, er they can, they can, they can buy ransomware as a services in the dark, dark web. So that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self forming malware. I mean, it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets, it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the sea? So roll the C. I. O. Roll the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations. >>This is a great question. And this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's as as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think is you, it's no more one organizations, business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where Somebody has compared cyber to 9-11-type scenario that if it happens for a company, that's the level of impact you feel on your on your operations. So, you know, all models are going to change where C so reports to see IO at H P E. We are also into products or security and that's why I see. So is a peer of mine who I worked with very closely who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from a lot of pain in this space going forward. And H. B. E. Itself is investing enormous amount of efforts in time in coming out of products which are which are secured and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is see So role has become extremely critical in every company and the big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why in I. T. V. Propagate def sec ups. Um As we talk about it, we are very very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cyber security architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure The training, not only for individual employees around anti phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cybersecurity means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive ins, we did it for business continuity and disaster recovery. Before now at this time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared as you mentioned. And we all say in tech community, it's always if not when no company can them their chest and say, oh, we are fully secured because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic or earthquake or a natural disaster. And assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when when something like this happen. So I'm here's believer in the framework of uh protect, detect, govern and respond um as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody is aware of the part that they play day today but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of I. T. And cyber practices across the company. There is no more differentiation between I. T. And O. T. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of I. T. And guess what happened? Wanna cry and Petra and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset. People need to go with invest in education, training, um awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customers operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our products and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens, >>Russian, very generous with your time. Thank you so much for coming back in the CUBA is great to have you again. >>Thank you. Dave was really nice chatting with you. Thanks >>for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HP discover 21 This is Dave Volonte, you're watching the virtual cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Be right back. >>Mm hmm, mm.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to London. You're watching The Cube, and we have a special coverage here of the pre-day at AWS headquarters in London. I'm Dave Vellante and The Cube, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Alastair Allen is here, the chief technical officer of Healthcare Kainos Software. It's a Belfast based company, publicly traded company. Alastair, welcome to The Cube. Great to see you, thanks for coming out. You were downstairs earlier addressing the audience, we're gonna talk about that. But first of all, tell us about Kainos. >> So Kainos, Belfast based company, formed in the late '80's a spin out of Queens University in Belfast. We've grown to now over 1300 people and we build digital technology to help people work faster, smarter and better. There's two things we do. We provide digital services, bespoke services for public and private sector organizations across the world, and we provide digital platforms for work day customers and also for healthcare organizations. >> So, when you say digital platforms. What exactly do you mean by that? Tell our audience. >> So, our digital platforms in healthcare is something that we can talk about. So platforms to enable both hospitals to digitize their workflow and also regions, so CCG's , STP's within the NHS. To bring information together using a platform and normalizing that data and making it available to clinicians and patients. >> And this is, your flagship product is called Evolve. Correct? >> Correct. >> And you're one of the sort of founders or inventors of Evolve. Tell us more about Evolve. >> So Evolve, originated just over ten years ago, our first customer was Ipswich Hospital and Ipswich had a big problem with paper, with a large medical records library and they asked us to come in and help them digitize that and make it available in an easy to view, accessible format for their clinicians. >> So tell me more about that. So you digitize it, you take all this mounds of paper and what does that do? Other than reduce the amounts of paper. Does it make it searchable? >> Yeah, we index the content, we apply metadata whenever we capture it, trying to make it accessible for clinicians. I think when you digitize paper , the one good thing paper had going for it was you could pick it up and it was tactile. So we've done a lot of work to try and make it mobile, make it accessible, make it searchable and increasingly now with some of the services that AWS provide, we're able to look at taking that even further and getting more information out of that content. >> Add some color to that. So how has the AWS cloud affected your ability to deliver these capabilities to your customers? >> Well I think, the breathe and depth of services that AWS provide, enables us to be able to innovate quickly, to use services like I've mentioned like comprehend medical. That take the heavy lifting, away from us and helps us focus on delivering better applications for our customers. >> So part of what you do, is you architected the software that's running on the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about the architecture? What you guys have built. Presumably the cloud allows you to scale. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> And take advantage of more innovations. But discuss the architecture if you would. >> So, the product that I originally talked about in 2009 and about four years ago in 2015, we decided to re-platform for the cloud. And that was in response to a number of problems that we were seeing in the market. And moved to patient centered care, a drive to try and standardize care away from the variable nature that was there and also to get away from closed silos of information. And we decided at that point to create our platform natively in the cloud and using the services of Amazon web services. So we created a microservices based architecture that runs in multi-candidate cloud native way. With a AWS. That allows us to adopt disciplines like continuous delivery and cultures like DeVops. We've been able to release value quickly and often to our customers. >> So it was a total rewrite of the platform? >> Yes. So we started again from scratch and we developed that using the modern cloud services. And we've used that then for all use cases as well so we've moved beyond just settings within a hospital. And been able to take that beyond the walls of a hospital, out into the community, into primary care, mental health. And delivering solutions like that, across regions within the NHS, to join up information. Where before clinicians would simply not have had access to those. >> In a sense you're migrating your existing install base to the cloud based platform, as I presume it's a SAS based platform. Is that right? >> So, Evolve Integrated Care is a platform it's a SAS based platform. So we run it, we monitor it, we maintain it and we deliver that as a service to our customers. >> And so your existing customers now have an opportunity to migrate and how does that all work? >> Yeah, so we're talking to our existing customers, how they can leverage the cloud based platform and the breathe of different services that it provides. We very much see an opportunity for helping to digitize a hospital. So how do you optimize the flow of patients through a hospital and making sure that clinicians have access to the information. Many of customers have hundreds of applications, information spread across their estate, bringing that together and orchestrating the workflow for particular pathways or particular conditions. >> Plus they have to manage their own infrastructure, I presume. >> Absolutely, and we want to build applications quickly, they want to focus on delivering healthcare. They don't want to focus on managing ten and server rooms within their hospitals. So, our move to the cloud really came about because of our customers telling us that they're struggling to manage this infrastructure. They wanted us to take some of that burden away from them and to help them with some of their security challenges, availability challenges. Quite often their local infrastructure was not very resilient. And by moving to AWS, we were able to use native cloud services to address many of those challenges. >> So you're taking away that heavy lifting for them. AWS takes it away for you. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> In a large regard as well. While your engineers can obviously program the infrastructure. But how have you seen the customers that have moved and taken advantage of this. What has it done for their business specifically? What's the impact? >> So, what I think, it frees up people within their organization to scale up in other areas to do other things. It frees up physical space as well in many cases. It takes away risks and we've all heard of some of the recent security incidents. Wanna Cry was a huge thing in the NHS not so long ago. Coming around from just simple things like not patching servers and work stations. So, by taking on that responsibility we're freeing up those hospital systems to focus on what they do best. >> How do they do that? Do they kind of retrain folks? What's that been like? I presume it wasn't frictionless but it's an opportunity for people to advance their careers. Do you have any visibility on how your customers have handled that? >> To be honest, not a huge amount. It has, I agree, there has been some friction there. It's not always an easy journey, there's a whole mindset change of what people used to do before and the types of activity that they'll do tomorrow. And it's something that our customers are still on a journey on. And so we're quite early on in that process. >> But I would say to folks in the IT community of your expertise's of managing storage arase, there's probably a better future for you if you can move up the stack and learn more about applications , data, machine intelligence. >> Absolutely, higher up the value chain and getting closer to the user, closer to the customer. >> I mean, that's where the difference is. And it's particularly in healthcare right? You try to balance the cost of healthcare, everybody's aware of the rising cost of healthcare with the patient outcomes. And technology is a way to address that problem. Isn't it? >> Absolutely, and I think never before. I think it's just a great time to work in health IT. We've now got access to some fantastic services the rise of artificial intelligence, the machine learning has never before been so available. And really having organizations such as ourselves to really solve those problems that our customers have and introduce those efficiencies and ultimately better patient outcomes. >> So how are you using the data that lives in Evolve, I presume you're looking at applying artificial intelligence and the like, talk about that. But also, how do you ensure security, privacy, etcetera? >> So, a couple things on data, I think one of the things we've done recently is the adoption of the FHIR standard within healthcare and all the data that we aggregate from the various clinical systems, we normalize that down into a single FHIR data profile and that really helps us then have a common data model that our application can use. But that's only the start, that creates the potential then to use that for secondary usage, such as publishing health data analytics and ultimately machine learning. And we're looking at a number of errors in machine learning, I think there are some ethical challenges there to be aware of and we've started with a recent examples of understanding how we can use machine learning to try and get that structured data out of the documents, that's something that we're working on with data with the AWS team at the minute, to leverage a lot of that scanned content that we have and evolve and be able to create the structured outcome. Really to make it easier for clinicians to find information within the medical record. >> So the AWS reinvent last fall, you know Sage Maker was of course buzzing. Is that something that you're looking at? >> It's something, so we haven't used it in Evolve so far but within Kainos we have an AI practice and we have a group of guys that are focused on the AI capability. Evaluating those tools, working with AWS and helping us understand how we can use that technology to solve the problems of our customers. >> Yeah, it's early days. So you talk about helping solve the problems of the customers. Summarize for us the key problems that you see machine intelligence, AI solving. >> I think there's probably different categories of how you could use it. There's the diagnostic sort of use case where you could use AI to help process imagery, to help with the diagnostic process. There's being able to add personalization to whether that be to patients or to clinicians, helping to provide insight into whatever the use case may be and all the use cases similar to that. >> Last words, so you're addressing the pre-day healthcare reform that's going on here at AWS. What's that like, what's going on downstairs, what did you tell the audience? >> Yeah, great day. So we had a group of healthcare professionals across the NHS in Ireland, very interesting group. We spoke this morning, I spoke with our customer Gloucester CC chief and we talked about the shared care record solution that we've delivered into Gloucester. So that's bringing information together for over 600,000 patients across the region and providing information in a single joined up view that was not available before. So great feedback, great interaction, lots of questions afterwards so looking forward to going back down and chatting some more to the group. >> Excellent. Hard to do that without the cloud I would imagine , accommodating all of the 600,000 customers right. >> Not possible. >> Alastair thanks so much for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Appreciate having you. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching The Cube from AWS headquarter in London. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering artists. A conference twenty nineteen brought to you by for scout. >> Hey, welcome back already, Geoffrey here with the Cube were in downtown San Francisco at the brand new Open. I think it's finally complete. Mosconi Center for our conference. Twenty nineteen were really excited this year. For the first time ever in the four Scout booth, we've been coming to our say for a long time. We had Mike on last last year by Caesar. President Seo >> for scout. I appreciate you having me >> because we had the last year and you're so nice. You You invited us to the way we must both done something right? Absolutely it Also, before we get too far into it, Congratulations. Doing some homework. The stock is going well. You're making acquisitions, You said it's the anniversary of going out in public. So things are things are looking good for Four. Scout >> things have been good. We've been public company now for four quarters. We've beaten, raised on every metric we had out there. So we're feeling good about >> life. So I don't think the security threats are going down. I don't think you're Tamas is shrinking by any stretch of the imagination. Definitely >> does not feel like the threat landscape is getting less challenging these days, right? I mean, when you look at all the geopolitical stuff going on between the US and China and Russia, that that usually spills into the cybersecurity world and kind of makes things a little bit more tense, >> right? So the crazy talk and all confidence now is machine learning an a I and obviously one of the big themes that came up, we had a great interview. A googol is you just can't hire enough professionals regardless of the field, especially in this one to take care of everything So automation, really key. Hey, I really key. But the same time the bad guys have access to many of the same tools so that you're in the middle of this arm raise. How are you? You kind of taken a strategic view of machine learning an A I in this world. >> So what's amazing about cyber security in two thousand nineteen is the fact that the pace of innovation is exploding at an unprecedented rate, Right? I mean, we're bringing Maur devices online every quarter now, then the first ten years of the Internet combined. So the pace of adoption of new technologies is really what is driving the need for machine learning and a I a human being. Historically, in the cybersecurity world, most corporations approach was, I'm gonna have a whole bunch of different cyber products. They all have their own dashboards. I'm going to build this thing called a cyber Operations Center of Sock. That is going to be the input of all those. But a human being is going to be involved in a lot of the research and prioritization of attacks. And I think just the volume and sophistication of the breaches these days and attacks is making those same companies turn towards automation. You have to be willing to let your cyber security products take action on their own and machine learning in a I play a very large roll back. >> Yeah, it's really interesting because there's very few instances where the eye in the M L actually generate an action. Oftentimes will generate a flag, though they'll bring in a human to try to make one of the final analysis. But it's not, not often that way, actually give them the power to do something. Is that changing? Do you see that changing are people more accepting of that when you can't give it up that >> control when you when you look at for scouts kind of core value Proposition the category that were in his device. Visibility in control device visibility. What's on the network control? When I find something that shouldn't be, there are customers. Want to block that so way? Have a front row seat on watching customers that for decades have been unwilling to allow cybersecurity products to actually take action, turning our product on everyday and allowing us to do exactly that. So when we look at the way that they approached the breaches in every one of these scenarios, they're trying to figure out how they can augment the personal staff they have with products that can provide that level of intelligence >> on nothing to >> see over and over is that people are so falih. Fallible interview to Gala Grasshopper A couple of years he was one hundred percent a social engineering her way into any company that she tried. She had a kind of cool trick. She looked at Instagram photos. He would see the kind of browser that you had, and you know the company picnic. Paige won't let me in. Can you please try this? You're one hundred percent success. So you guys really act in a very different way. You're kind of after the breaches happened. You're sensing and taking action, not necessarily trying to maintain that that print Big Mo >> we're actually on the front end were before the breach takes place. So the way our product works is way plug into the network and then we turned that network ten years ago. A CEO would would would control everything on their networks. They would buy servers and load them with products and put them in their data centers. And they bite, you know, end points and they give those to their to their employees. Those same CEOs now need to allow everything to connect and try to make sense of this growing number of devices. So both the role that we play is preventative. We are on the front end. When a device first joins that network, you need to make sure that device is allowed to be there. So before we worry about what credentials that device is trying to log in with, let's make sure that's a device that the company wants to be on the network to begin with. So to your point, exactly your right. I mean, I think my CFO and I probably every week have some very sophisticated email that makes it sound like one of us asked the other to approve a check request. But it's but they're getting good and you're right. They go on the They know that I went to Villanova, where I'm a Phish fan, and they'll leverage some form of thing. All Post online has tried to make that seem a little bit more personalized, but our philosophy is a company is very basic, which is you need situational awareness of what devices are allowed to be on that network to begin with. If you get that in place, there's a lot less examples that what you described a couple of minutes >> ago and that you said to really instinct philosophy, having kind of an agent list methodology to identify and profile everything that's connected to the network, as opposed to having having you know an OS or having a little bug on there, Which would put you in good shape for this operations technology thing, which is such a critical piece of the i O. T and the I O T transfer >> there. Now there's there's no doubt, You know, that's one of the most fourth sight ful things that, for Scout has ever done is we made the decision to go Agent Lis ten years ago, Way saw that the world was moving from you, Nick and and Lenox and Windows and all of these basic operating systems that were open and only a few of them to the world that we're in today, where every TV has a different operating system, every OT manufacturer has their own operating system, right? It's example I uses that is the Google, you know, the nest thermostat where you you, you buy that, you put it on the wall of your house, you pair with your network, and it's sitting right on line next to your work laptop, right? And and there's been Brit breaches shown that attacks can come in through a device like that and get on to a more more trusted asset, right? So just having that situational awareness is a big part to begin with. But, oh, teams, let's talk about OT for a couple of seconds is almost in front of us post Wanna cry? I am seeing almost every sea, so in the world not having had but the cyber responsibilities for OT being pulled into the O. T part of the business. And it makes sense. You know that the when you watch it a cry, a breach like Wanna cry? Most companies didn't think they bought something from Windows. They thought they bought a controller from Siemens or Gear, one of the larger manufacturers. What they realized on wanna cry was that those controllers have embedded versions of an old operating system from Microsoft called X that had vulnerabilities. And that's how it was exploited so that the approach of devices being online, which changing in front of us, is not just the volume of devices. But they're not open anymore. So the Agent Lis approach of allowing devices to connect to the network and then using the network to do our thing and figure out what's on it makes us a really relevant and big player in that world of coyote and don't. So >> do you have to hold their hand when they when they break the air gap and connect the TV into the Heidi to say it'll be okay. We'll be able to keep an eye on these things before you go. You know, you talk about air gaps all the time is such a kind of fundamental security paradigm in the old way. But now the benefits of connectivity are outweighing, you know, the potential cost of very >> difficult, right? I mean, one of the examples I always uses. PG and E are local power company here. We're up until a few years ago, they'd have a human being. A band would come to your house and knock on your door, and all they wanted to do is get in your garage to read your meter, right? So they could bill you correctly. And then they put smart meters on the side of our houses. And I'm sure the roo I for them was incredible because they got rid of their entire fleet as a result, but recognized that my house is Theo T grid, now connected back to the side, which is Billy. So there's just so many examples in this connected world that we're in. Companies want to do business online, but online means interconnectivity. Interconnectivity means OT and connected so Yes, you're absolutely right. There's many companies believe they have systems air gapped off from each other. Most of those same cos once they get for Scout Live recognized they actually were not air gapped off from each other to begin with. That's part of the role that we play. >> This cure is to get your >> take. You talk to a lot of sizes about how kind of the the types of threats you know have evolved more recently. You know, we saw the stuff with presidential campaign. The targets and what they're trying to do has changed dramatically over the last several years in terms of what the bad guys actually want to do once they get in where they see the value. So how has that changed? No, it's not directly because you guys don't worry about what they're trying to do bad. You want to protect everything. But how is that kind of change from the size of perspective? >> Our customers are government's financial service companies, health care companies, manufacturing companies. Because every one of those companies, I mean, it sounds basic. But if you knew the bad thing was plugged into your network, doing something bad you would've blocked it. You didn't know it was there to begin with. So we actually have a role in all types of threats. But when you look at the threat landscape, it's shifted your right. I mean, ten years ago, it was mostly I p theft. You were hearing examples of somebody's blueprints being stolen before they got their product into the market. WeII. Then soft financial threat shifted. That's still where the bulk of it is today, right? No, they ransomware attacks. I mean, they're all money motivated. The swift breaches. They're all about trying to get a slice of money and more money moves online that becomes a good hunting ground for cybersecurity attackers. Right? But what? What is now being introduced? A CZ? Well, as all the geopolitical stuff. And I think you know with, with our commander in chief being willing to be online, tweeting that with other organism governments worldwide having a more social footprint, now that's on the table. And can you embarrass somebody? And what does that mean? And can you divide parties? But, yeah, there's there's a lot of different reasons for people to be online. What's amazing is the attacks behind them are actually fairly consistent. The mechanisms used right toe actually achieve those that you know that you know the objectives are actually quite similar. >> I'm curious from the site's perspective >> and trying to measure r A Y and, you know, kind of where they should invest in, not a vest, How the changing kind of value proposition of the things that they that are at risk really got to change the dynamic because they're not just feeling a little bit of money. You know, these air, these are much more complex and squishy kind of value propositions. If you're trying to influence our election or you're trying to embarrass somebody or you know, >> that's kind of different from anything. If it's state funded sheriff, it's believed to be state funded. It typically has a different roo. I model behind it, right, and there's different different organizations. But, you know, like on the OT side that you described a second ago, right? Why is OT so hot right now? Because it's one thing to have a bunch of employees have their laptops compromised with something you don't want to be on their right. It's embarrassing. Your emails get stolen it's embarrassing. It's a very different thing when you bring down a shipping line. When a company can't shift, you know can't ship their products. So the stakes are so high on the OT side for organizations that you know, they are obviously put a lot of energy and doing these days. >> You need talk about autonomous vehicles, you know, misreading signs and giving up control. And you know what kinds of things in this feature? Right, Mike? So if we let you go, you're busy. Guy, get thanks >> for having us in the booth. What do your superiors for twenty nineteen, you know for us at Four Scout, the priorities are continuing to execute. You know, we grow our business thirty three percent. Last year. We achieved free cash flow profitability, which is the first time in the company's history. So way of obligation to our investment community. And we intend to run a good, solid business from a product perspective. Our priorities are right in the category of device visibility and control its one of things. When you look around this conferences, you know cos cos had to be careful. They don't increase their product size too quickly. Before they have the financial means to do so. And we just see such a large market in helping answer that question. What is on my network? That's our focus, and we want to do it across the extent that enterprise at scale. >> Yeah, I've sought interesting quote from you on one of their earnings calls that I thought was was needed. A lot of people complain What, you go public. You're on the ninety day shot clock in that that becomes a focus. But your your take on it was now that everything's exposed country spending an already how much spinning a marketing I'm in shipping, it sails that it forces you to really take a deeper look and to make tougher decisions and to make sure you guys are prioritizing your resource is in the right way, knowing that a lot of other people now are making those judgments. >> You know, Listen, the process of raising money and then going public is that you have to be willing to understand that you have an investment community, but you have an obligation to share a lot of detail about the business. But from the other side of that, I get a chance to sit in front of some of the smartest people on the planet that look att my peer companies and me and then provide us input on areas that they're either excited about are concerned about. That's amazing input for me and helps me drive the business. And again, we're trying to build this into a big, organically large cybersecurity business, which is a rare thing these days. And we're quite were very how aboutthe trajectory that we're on. >> Right? Well, Mike, thank you. Like just out with smart people like, you know, I appreciate it and learned a lot. So you congrats on this very much. >> Sorry. He's Mike. I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube were in the Fourth Scout booth at RC North America. Mosconi Center. Or in the north North Hall. Just find the Seibu. Thanks for watching. >> We'LL see you next time.