(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering UIPath FORWARD America's 2019. Brought to you by UIPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UIPath FORWARD, here in Sin City, Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Dave Velante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kurt Carlson, Associate Dean for faculty and academic affairs of the Mason School of Business at the college of William and Mary. Thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks you for having me. >> Rebecca: And we have Tom Clancy, the SVP of learning at UIPath, thank you so much. >> Great to be here. >> You're a Cube alum, so thank you for coming back. >> I've been here a few times. >> A Cube veteran, I should say. >> I think 10 years or so >> So we're talking today about a robot for every student, this was just announced in August, William and Mary is the first university in the US to provide automation software to every undergraduate student, thanks to a four million dollar investment from UIPath. Tell us a little bit about this program, Kurt, how it works and what you're trying to do here. >> Yeah, so first of all, to Tom and the people at UIPath for making this happen. This is a bold and incredible initiative, one that, frankly, when we had it initially, we thought that maybe we could get a robot for every student, we weren't sure that other people would be willing to go along with that, but UIPath was, they see the vision, and so it was really a meeting of the minds on a common purpose. The idea was pretty simple, this technology is transforming the world in a way that students, we think it's going to transform the way that students actually are students. But it's certainly transforming the world that our students are going into. And so, we want to give them exposure to it. We wanted to try and be the first business school on the planet that actually prepares students not just for the way RPA's being used today, but the way that it's going to be used when AI starts to take hold, when it becomes the gateway to AI three, four, five years down the road. So, we talked to UIPath, they thought it was a really good idea, we went all in on it. Yeah, all of our starting juniors in the business school have robots right now, they've all been trained through the academy live session putting together a course, it's very exciting. >> So, Tom, you've always been an innovator when it comes to learning, here's my question. How come we didn't learn this school stuff when we were in college? We learned Fortran. >> I don't know, I only learned BASIC, so I can't speak to that. >> So you know last year we talked about how you're scaling, learning some of the open, sort of philosophy that you have. So, give us the update on how you're pushing learning FORWARD, and why the College of William and Mary. >> Okay, so if you buy into a bot for every worker, or a bot for every desktop, that's a lot of bots, that's a lot of desktops, right? There's studies out there from the research companies that say that there's somewhere a hundred and 200 million people that need to be educated on RPA, RPA/AI. So if you buy into that, which we do, then traditional learning isn't going to do it. We're going to miss the boat. So we have a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to democratize RPA learning. Two and a half years ago we made, we created RPA Academy, UIPath academy, and 100% free. After two and a half years, we have 451,000 people go through the academy courses, that's huge. But we think there's a lot more. Over the next next three years we think we'll train at least two million people. But the challenge still is, if we train five million people, there's still a hundred million that need to know about it. So, the second biggest thing we're doing is, we went out, last year at this event, we announced our academic alliance program. We had one university, now we're approaching 400 universities. But what we're doing with William and Mary is a lot more than just providing a course, and I'll let Kurt talk to that, but there is so much more that we could be doing to educate our students, our youth, upscaling, rescaling the existing workforce. When you break down that hundred million people, they come from a lot of different backgrounds, and we're trying to touch as many people as we can. >> You guys are really out ahead of the curve. Oftentimes, I mean, you saw this a little bit with data science, saw some colleges leaning in. So what lead you guys to the decision to actually invest and prioritize RPA? >> Yeah, I think what we're trying to accomplish requires incredibly smart students. It requires students that can sit at the interface between what we would think of today as sort of an RPA developer and a decision maker who would be stroking the check or signing the contract. There's got to be somebody that sits in that space that understands enough about how you would actually execute this implementation. What's the right buildout of that, how we're going to build a portfolio of bots, how we're going to prioritize the different processes that we might automate, How we're going to balance some processes that might have a nice ROI but be harder for the individual who's process is being automated to absorb against processes that the individual would love to have automated, but might not have as great of an ROI. How do you balance that whole set of things? So what we've done is worked with UIPath to bring together the ideas of automation with the ideas of being a strategic thinker in process automation, and we're designing a course in collaboration to help train our students to hit the ground running. >> Rebecca, it's really visionary, isn't it? I mean it's not just about using the tooling, it's about how to apply the tooling to create competitive advantage or change lives. >> I used to cover business education for the Financial Times, so I completely agree that this really is a game changer for the students to have this kind of access to technology and ability to explore this leading edge of software robotics and really be, and graduate from college. This isn't even graduate school, they're graduating from college already having these skills. So tell me, Kurt, what are they doing? What is the course, what does it look like, how are they using this in the classroom? >> The course is called a one credit. It's 14 hours but it actually turns into about 42 when you add this stuff that's going on outside of class. They're learning about these large conceptual issues around how do you prioritize which processes, what's the process you should go through to make sure that you measure in advance of implementation so that you can do an audit on the backend to have proof points on the effectiveness, so you got to measure in advance, creating a portfolio of perspective processes and then scoring them, how do you do that, so they're learning all that sort of conceptual straight business slash strategy implementation stuff, so that's on the first half, and to keep them engaged with this software, we're giving them small skills, we're calling them skillets. Small skills in every one of those sessions that add up to having a fully automated and programmed robot. Then they're going to go into a series of days where every one of those days they're going to learn a big skill. And the big skills are ones that are going to be useful for the students in their lives as people, useful in lives as students, and useful in their lives as entrepreneurs using RPA to create new ventures, or in the organizations they go to. We've worked with UIPath and with our alums who've implement this, folks at EY, Booz. In fact, we went up to DC, we had a three hour meeting with these folks. So what are the skills students need to learn, and they told us, and so we build these three big classes, each around each one of those skills so that our students are going to come out with the ability to be business translators, not necessarily the hardcore programmers. We're not going to prevent them from doing that, but to be these business translators that sit between the programming and the decision makers. >> That's huge because, you know, like, my son's a senior in college. He and his friends, they all either want to work for Amazon, Google, an investment bank, or one of the big SIs, right? So this is a perfect role for a consultant to go in and advise. Tom, I wanted to ask you, and you and I have known each other for a long time, but one of the reasons I think you were successful at your previous company is because you weren't just focused on a narrow vendor, how to make metrics work, for instance. I presume you're taking the same philosophy here. It transcends UIPath and is really more about, you know, the category if you will, the potential. Can you talk about that? >> So we listen to our customers and now we listen to the universities too, and they're going to help guide us to where we need to go. Most companies in tech, you work with marketing, and you work with engineering, and you build product courses. And you also try to sell those courses, because it's a really good PNL when you sell training. We don't think that's right for the industry, for UIPath, or for our customers, or our partners. So when we democratize learning, everything else falls into place. So, as we go forward, we have a bunch of ideas. You know, as we get more into AI, you'll see more AI type courses. We'll team with 400 universities now, by end of next year, we'll probably have a thousand universities signed up. And so, there's a lot of subject matter expertise, and if they come to us with ideas, you mentioned a 14 hour course, we have a four hour course, and we also have a 60 hour course. So we want to be as flexible as possible, because different universities want to apply it in different ways. So we also heard about Lean Six Sigma. I mean, sorry, Lean RPA, so we might build a course on Lean RPA, because that's really important. Solution architect is one of the biggest gaps in the industry right now so, so we look to where these gaps are, we listen to everybody, and then we just execute. >> Well, it's interesting you said Six Sigma, we have Jean Younger coming on, she's a Six Sigma expert. I don't know if she's a black belt, but she's pretty sure. She talks about how to apply RPA to make business processes in Six Sigma, but you would never spend the time and money, I mean, if it's an airplane engine, for sure, but now, so that's kind of transformative. Kurt, I'm curious as to how you, as a college, market this. You know, you're very competitive industry, if you will. So how do you see this attracting students and separating you guys from the pack? >> Well, it's a two separate things. How do we actively try to take advantage of this, and what effects is it having already? Enrollments to the business school, well. Students at William and Mary get admitted to William and Mary, and they're fantastic, amazingly good undergraduate students. The best students at William and Mary come to the Raymond A. Mason school of business. If you take our undergraduate GPA of students in the business school, they're top five in the country. So what we've seen since we've announced this is that our applications to the business school are up. I don't know that it's a one to one correlation. >> Tom: I think it is. >> I believe it's a strong predictor, right? And part because it's such an easy sell. And so, when we talk to those alums and friends in DC and said, tell us why this is, why our students should do this, they said, well, if for no other reason, we are hiring students that have these skills into data science lines in the mid 90s. When I said that to my students, they fell out of their chairs. So there's incredible opportunity here for them, that's the easy way to market it internally, it aligns with things that are happening at William and Mary, trying to be innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial. We've been talking about being innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial for longer than we've been doing it, we believe we're getting there, we believe this is the type of activity that would fit for that. As far as promoting it, we're telling everybody that will listen that this is interesting, and people are listening. You know, the standard sort of marketing strategy that goes around, and we are coordinating with UIPath on that. But internally, this sells actually pretty easy. This is something people are looking for, we're going to make it ready for the world the way that it's going to be now and in the future. >> Well, I imagine the big consultants are hovering as well. You know, you mentioned DC, Booz Allen, Hughes and DC, and Excensior, EY, Deloitte, PWC, IBM itself. I mean it's just, they all want the best and the brightest, and now you're going to have this skill set that is a sweet spot for their businesses. >> Kurt: That's the plan. >> I'm just thinking back to remembering who these people are, these are 19 and 20 year olds. They've never experienced the dreariness of work and the drudge tasks that we all know well. So, what are you, in terms of this whole business translator idea, that they're going to be the be people that sit in the middle and can sort of be these people who can speak both languages. What kind of skills are you trying to impart to them, because it is a whole different skill set. >> Our vision is that in two or three years, the nodes and the processes that are currently... That currently make implementing RPA complex and require significant programmer skills, these places where, right now, there's a human making a relatively mundane decision, but it's sill a model. There's a decision node there. We think AI is going to take over that. The simple, AI's going to simply put models into those decision nodes. We also think a lot of the programming that takes place, you're seeing it now with studio X, a lot of the programming is going to go away. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the business process from the mundane to the more human intelligent, what would currently be considered human intelligence process. When we get into that space, people skills are going to be really important, prioritizing is going to be really important, identifying organizations that are ripe for this, at this moment in time, which processes to automate. Those are the kind of skills we're trying to get students to develop, and what we're selling it partly as, this is going to make you ready of the world the way we think it's going to be, a bit of a guess. But we're also saying if you don't want to automate mundane processes, then come with us on a different magic carpet ride. And that magic carpet ride is, imagine all the processes that don't exist right now because nobody would ever conceive of them because they couldn't possibly be sustained, or they would be too mundane. Now think about those processes through a business lens, so take a business student and think about all the potential when you look at it that way. So this course that we're building has that, everything in the course is wrapped in that, and so, at the end of the course, they're going to be doing a project, and the project is to bring a new process to the world that doesn't currently exist. Don't program it, don't worry about whether or not you have a team that could actually execute it. Just conceive of a process that doesn't currently exist and let's imagine, with the potential of RPA, how we would make that happen. That's going to be, we think we're going to be able to bring a lot of students along through that innovative lens even though they are 19 and 20, because 19 and 20 year olds love innovation, while they've never submitted a procurement report. >> Exactly! >> A innovation presentation. >> We'll need to do a Cube follow up with that. >> What Kurt just said, is the reason why, Tom, I think this market is being way undercounted. I think it's hard for the IDCs and the forces, because they look back they say how big was it last year, how fast are these companies growing, but, to your point, there's so much unknown processes that could be attacked. The TAM on this could be enormous. >> We agree. >> Yeah, I know you do, but I think that it's a point worth mentioning because it touches so many different parts of every organization that I think people perhaps don't realize the impact that it could have. >> You know, when listening to you, Kurt, when you look at these young kids, at least compared to me, all the coding and setting up a robot, that's the easy part, they'll pick that up right away. It's really the thought process that goes into identifying new opportunities, and that's, I think, you're challenging them to do that. But learning how to do robots, I think, is going to be pretty easy for this new digital generation. >> Piece of cake. Tom and Kurt, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE with a really fascinating conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, you guys >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Velante, stay tuned for more of theCUBEs live coverage of UIPath FORWARD. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I've got a great guest here, CUBE alumni and very impressive, inspiring, Rachel Mushahwar Skaff, who's a managing director and general manager at AWS. Rachel, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be here. You all make such a tremendous impact with reporting out what's happening in the tech space, and frankly, investing in topics like this, so thank you. >> It's our pleasure. Your career has been really impressive. You worked at Intel for almost a decade, and that company is very tech, very focused on Moore's law, cadence of technology power in the industry. Now at AWS, powering next-generation cloud. What inspired you to get into tech? How did you get here and how have you approached your career journey, because it's quite a track record? >> Wow, how long do we have? (Rachel and John laugh) >> John: We can go as long as you want. (laughs) It's great. >> You know, all joking aside, I think at the end of the day, it's about this simple statement. If you don't get goosebumps every single morning that you're waking up to do your job, it's not good enough. And that's a bit about how I've made all of the different career transitions that I have. You know, everything from building out data centers around the world, to leading network and engineering teams, to leading applications teams, to going and working for, you know, the largest semiconductor in the world, and now at AWS, every single one of those opportunities gave me goosebumps. And I was really focused on how do I surround myself with humans that are better than I am, smarter than I am, companies that plan in decades, but live in moments, companies that invest in their employees and create like artists? And frankly, for me, being part of a company where people know that life is finite, but they want to make an infinite impact, that's a bit about my career journey in a nutshell. >> Yeah. What's interesting is that, you know, over the years, a lot's changed, and a theme that we're hearing from leaders now that are heading up large teams and running companies, they have, you know, they have 20-plus years of experience under their belt and they look back and they say, "Wow, "things have changed and it's changing faster now, "hopefully faster to get change." But they all talk about confidence and they talk about curiosity and building. When did you know that this was going to be something that you got the goosebumps? And were there blockers in your way and how did you handle that? (Rachel laughs) >> There's always blockers in our way, and I think a lot of people don't actually talk about the blockers. I think they make it sound like, hey, I had this plan from day one, and every decision I've made has been perfect. And for me, I'll tell you, right, there are moments in your life that mark a differentiation and those moments that you realize nothing will be the same. And time is kind of divided into two parts, right, before this moment and after this moment. And that's everything from, before I had kids, that's a pretty big moment in people's lives, to after I had kids, and how do you work through some of those opportunities? Before I got married, before I got divorced. Before I went to this company, after I left this company. And I think the key for all of those is just having an insatiable curiosity around how do you continue to do better, create better and make better? And I'll tell you, those blockers, they exist. Coming back from maternity leave, hard. Coming back from a medical leave, hard. Coming back from caring for a sick parent or a sick friend, hard. But all of those things start to help craft who you are as a human being, not as a leader, but as a human being, and allows you to have some empathy with the people that you surround yourself with, right? And for me, it's, (sighs) you can think about these blockers in one of two ways. You can think about it as, you know, every single time that you're tempted to react in the same way to a blocker, you can be a prisoner of your past, or you can change how you react and be a pioneer of the future. It's not a blocker when you think about it in those terms. >> Mindset matters, and that's really a great point. You brought up something that's interesting, I want to bring this up. Some of the challenges in different stages of our lives. You know, one thing that's come out of this set of interviews, this, of day and in conversations is, that I haven't heard before, is the result of COVID, working at home brought empathy about people's personal lives to the table. That came up in a couple interviews. What's your reaction to that? Because that highlights that we're human, to your point of view. >> It does. It does. And I'm so thankful that you don't ask about balance because that is a pet peeve of mine, because there is no such thing as balance. If you're in perfect balance, you are not moving and you're not changing. But when you think about, you know, the impact of COVID and how the world has changed since that, it has allowed all of us to really think about, you know, what do we want to do versus what do we have to do? And I think so many times, in both our professional lives and our personal lives, we get caught up in doing what we think we have to do to get ahead versus taking a step back and saying, "Hey, what do I want to do? "And how do I become a, you know, "a better human?" And many times, John, I'm asked, "Hey, "how do you define success or achievement?" And, you know, my answer is really, for me, the greatest results that I've achieved, both personally and professionally, is when I eliminate the word success and balance from my vocabulary, and replace them with two words: What's my contribution and what's my impact? Those things make a difference, regardless of gender. And I'll tell you, none of it is easy, ever. I think all of us have been broken, we've been stretched, we've been burnt out. But I also think what we have to talk about as leaders in the industry is how we've also found endurance and resilience. And when we felt unsteady, we've continued to go forward, right? When we can't decide, the best answer is do what's uncomfortable. And all of those things really stemmed from a part of what happened with COVID. >> Yeah, yeah, I love the uncomfortable and the balance highlight. You mentioned being off balance. That means you're growing, you're not standing still. I want to get your thoughts on this because one thing that has come out again this year, and last year as well, is having a team with you when you do it. So if you're off balance and you're going to stretch, if you have a good team with you, that's where people help each other. Not just pick them up, but like maybe get 'em back on track again. So, but if you're solo, you fall, (laughs) you fall harder. So what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this has come up, and this comes up in team building, workforce formation, goal setting, contribution. What's your reaction to that? >> So my reaction to that that is pretty simple. Nobody gets there on their own at all, right? Passion and ambition can only take you so far. You've got to have people and teams that are supporting you. And here's the funny thing about people, and frankly, about being a leader that I think is really important: People don't follow for you. People follow for who you help them become. Think about that for a second. And when you think about all the amazing things that companies and teams are able to do, it's because of those people. And it's because you have leaders that are out there, inspiring them to take what they believe is impossible and turn it into the possible. That's the power of teams. >> Can you give an example of your approach on how you do that? How do you build your teams? How do you grow them? How do you lead them effectively and also make 'em inclusive, diverse and equitable? >> Whew. I'll give you a great example of some work that we're doing at AWS. This year at re:Invent, for the first time in its history, we've launched an initiative with theCUBE called Women of the Cloud. And part of Women of the Cloud is highlighting the business impact that so many of our partners, our customers and our employees have had on the social, on the economic and on the financials of many companies. They just haven't had the opportunity to tell their story. And at Amazon, right, it is absolutely integral to us to highlight those examples and continue to extend that ethos to our partners and our customers. And I think one of the things that I shared with you at re:Invent was, you know, as U2's Bono put it, (John laughs) "We'll build it better than we did before "and we are the people "that we've been waiting for." So if we're not out there, advocating and highlighting all the amazing things that other women are doing in the ecosystem, who will? >> Well, I've got to say, I want to give you props for that program. Not only was it groundbreaking, it's still running strong. And I saw some things on LinkedIn that were really impressive in its network effect. And I met at least half a dozen new people I never would have met before through some of that content interaction and engagement. And this is like the power of the current world. I mean, getting the voices out there creates momentum. And it's good for Amazon. It's not just personal brand building for my next job or whatever, you know, reason. It's sharing and it's attracting others, and it's causing people to connect and meet each other in that world. So it's still going strong. (laughs) And this program we did last year was part of Rachel Thornton, who's now at MessageBird, and Mary Camarata. They were the sponsors for this International Women's Day. They're not there anymore, so we decided we're going to do it again because the impact is so significant. We had the Amazon Education group on. It's amazing and it's free, and we've got to get the word out. I mean, talk about leveling up fast. You get in and you get trained and get certified, and there's a zillion jobs out (laughs) there in cloud, right, and partners. So this kind of leadership is really important. What was the key learnings that you've taken away and how do you extend this opportunity to nurture the talent out there in the field? Because when you throw the content out there from great leaders and practitioners and developers, it attracts other people. >> It does. It does. So look, I think there's two types of people, people that are focused on being and people who are focused on doing. And let me give you an example, right? When we think about labels of, hey, Rachel's a female executive who launched Women of the Cloud, that label really limits me. I'd rather just be a great executive. Or, hey, there's a great entrepreneur. Let's not be a great entrepreneur. Just go build something and sell it. And that's part of this whole Women of the cloud, is I don't want people focused on what their label is. I want people sharing their stories about what they're doing, and that's where the lasting impact happens, right? I think about something that my grandmother used to tell me, and she used to tell me, "Rachel, how successful "you are, doesn't matter. "The lasting impact that you have "is your legacy in this very finite time "that you have on Earth. "Leave a legacy." And that's what Women of the Cloud is about. So that people can start to say, "Oh, geez, "I didn't know that that was possible. "I didn't think about my career in that way." And, you know, all of those different types of stories that you're hearing out there. >> And I want to highlight something you said. We had another Amazonian on the program for this day earlier and she coined a term, 'cause inside Amazon, you have common language. One of them is bar raising. Raise the bar, that's an Amazonian (Rachel laughs) term. It means contribute and improve and raise the bar of capability. She said, "Bar raising is gender neutral. "The bar is a bar." And I'm like, wow, that was amazing. Now, that means your contribution angle there highlights that. What's the biggest challenge to get that mindset set in culture, in these- >> Oh. >> 'Cause it's that simple, contribution is neutral. >> It absolutely is neutral, but it's like I said earlier, I think so many times, people are focused on success and being a great leader versus what's the contribution I'm making and how am I doing as a leader, you know? And when it comes to a lot of the leadership principles that Amazon has, including bar raising, which means insisting on the highest standards, and then those standards continue to raise every single time. And what that is all about is having all of our employees figure out, how do I get better every single day, right? That's what it's about. It's not about being better than the peer next to you. It's about how do I become a better leader, a better human being than I was yesterday? >> Awesome. >> You know, I read this really cute quote and I think it really resonates. "You meditate to upgrade your software "and you work out to upgrade your hardware." And while it's important that we're all ourselves at work, we can't deny that a lot of times, ourselves still need that meditation or that workout. >> Well, I hope I don't have any zero days in my software out there, so, but I'm going to definitely work on that. I love that quote. I'm going to use that. Thank you very much. That was awesome. I got to ask you, I know you're really passionate about, and we've talked about this, around, so you're a great leader but you're also focused on what's behind you in the generation, pipelining women leaders, okay? Seats at the table, mentoring and sponsorship. What can we do to build a strong pipeline of leaders in technology and business? And where do you see the biggest opportunity to nurture the talent in these fields? >> Hmm, you know, that's great, great question. And, you know, I just read a "Forbes" article by another Amazonian, Tanuja Randery, who talked about, you know, some really interesting stats. And one of the stats that she shared was, you know, by 2030, less than 25% of tech specialists will be female, less than 25%. That's only a 6% growth from where we are in 2023, so in seven years. That's alarming. So we've really got to figure out what are the kinds of things that we're going to go do from an Amazon perspective to impact that? And one of the obvious starting points is showcasing tech careers to girls and young women, and talking openly about what a technology career looks like. So specifically at Amazon, we've got an AWS Git IT program that helps schools and educators bring in tech role models to show them what potential careers look like in tech. I think that's one great way that we can help build the pipeline, but once we get the pipeline, we also have to figure out how we don't let that pipeline leak. Meaning how do we keep women and, you know, young women on their tech career? And I think big part of that, John, is really talking about how hard it is, but it's also greater than you can ever imagine. And letting them see executives that are very authentic and will talk about, geez, you know, the challenges of COVID were a time of crisis and accelerated change, and here's what it meant to me personally and here's what we were able to solve professionally. These younger generations are all about social impact, they're about economic impact and they're about financial impact. And if we're not talking about all three of those, both from how AWS is leading from the front, but how its executives are also taking that into their personal lives, they're not going to want to go into tech. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you mentioned there about getting people that get IT, good call out there, but also, Amazon's going to train 30 million people, put hundreds of millions of dollars into education. And not only are they making it easier to get in to get trained, but once you're in, even savvy folks that are in there still have to accelerate. And there's more ways to level up, more things are happening, but there's a big trend around people changing careers either in their late 20s, early 30s, or even those moments you talk about, where it's before and after, even later in the careers, 40s, 50s. Leaders like, well, good experience, good training, who were in another discipline who re-skilled. So you have, you know, more certifications coming in. So there's still other pivot points in the pipeline. It's not just down here. And that, I find that interesting. Are you seeing that same leadership opportunities coming in where someone can come into tech older? >> Absolutely. You know, we've got some amazing programs, like Amazon Returnity, that really focuses on how do we get other, you know, how do we get women that have taken some time off of work to get back into the workforce? And here's the other thing about switching careers. If I look back on my career, I started out as a civil engineer, heavy highway construction. And now I lead a sales team at the largest cloud company in the world. And there were, you know, twists and turns around there. I've always focused on how do we change and how do we continue to evolve? So it's not just focused on, you know, young women in the pipeline. It's focused on all gender and all diverse types throughout their career, and making sure that we're providing an inclusive environment for them to bring in their unique skillsets. >> Yeah, a building has good steel. It's well structured. Roads have great foundations. You know, you got the builder in you there. >> Yes. >> So I have to ask you, what's on your mind as a tech athlete, as an executive at AWS? You know, you got your huge team, big goals, the economy's got a little bit of a headwind, but still, cloud's transforming, edge is exploding. What's your outlook as you look out in the tech landscape these days and how are you thinking about it? What your plans? Can you share a little bit about what's on your mind? >> Sure. So, geez, there's so many trends that are top of mind right now. Everything from zero trust to artificial intelligence to security. We have more access to data now than ever before. So the opportunities are limitless when we think about how we can apply technology to solve some really difficult customer problems, right? Innovation sometimes feels like it's happening at a rapid pace. And I also say, you know, there are years when nothing happens, and then there's years when centuries happen. And I feel like we're kind of in those years where centuries are happening. Cloud technologies are refining sports as we know them now. There's a surge of innovation in smart energy. Everyone's supply chain is looking to transform. Custom silicon is going mainstream. And frankly, AWS's customers and partners are expecting us to come to them with a point of view on trends and on opportunities. And that's what differentiates us. (John laughs) That's what gives me goosebumps- >> I was just going to ask you that. Does that give you goosebumps? How could you not love technology with that excitement? I mean, AI, throw in AI, too. I just talked to Swami, who heads up the AI and database, and we just talked about the past 24 months, the change. And that is a century moment happening. The large language models, computer vision, more compute. Compute's booming than ever before. Who thought that was going to happen, is still happening? Massive change. So, I mean, if you're in tech, how can you not love tech? >> I know, even if you're not in tech, I think you've got to start to love tech because it gives you access to things you've never had before. And frankly, right, change is the only constant. And if you don't like change, you're going to like being irrelevant even less than you like change. So we've got to be nimble, we've got to adapt. And here's the great thing, once we figure it out, it changes all over again. And it's not something that's easy for any of us to operate. It's hard, right? It's hard learning new technology, it's hard figuring out what do I do next? But here's the secret. I think it's hard because we're doing it right. It's not hard because we're doing it wrong. It's just hard to be human and it's hard to figure out how we apply all this different technology in a way that positively impacts us, you know, economically, financially, environmentally and socially. >> And everyone's different, too. So you got to live those (mumbles). I want to get one more question in before we, my last question, which is about you and your impact. When you talk to your team, your sales, you got a large sales team, North America. And Tanuja, who you mentioned, is in EMEA, we're going to speak with her as well. You guys lead the front lines, helping customers, but also delivering the revenue to the company, which has been fantastic, by the way. So what's your message to the troops and the team out there? When you say, "Take that hill," like what is the motivational pitch, in a few sentences? What's the main North Star message in today's marketplace when you're doing that big team meeting? >> I don't know if it's just limited to a team meeting. I think this is a universal message, and the universal message for me is find your edge, whatever that may be. Whether it is the edge of what you know about artificial intelligence and neural networks or it's the edge of how do we migrate our applications to the cloud more quickly. Or it's the edge of, oh, my gosh, how do I be a better parent and still be great at work, right? Find your edge, and then sharpen it. Go to the brink of what you think is possible, and then force yourself to jump. Get involved. The world is run by the people that show up, professionally and personally. (John laughs) So show up and get started. >> Yeah as Steve Jobs once said, "The future "that everyone looks at was created "by people no smarter than you." And I love that quote. That's really there. Final question for you. I know we're tight on time, but I want to get this in. When you think about your impact on your company, AWS, and the industry, what's something you want people to remember? >> Oh, geez. I think what I want people to remember the most is it's not about what you've said, and this is a Maya Angelou quote. "It's not about what you've said to people "or what you've done, "it's about how you've made them feel." And we can all think back on leaders or we can all think back on personal moments in our lives where we felt like we belonged, where we felt like we did something amazing, where we felt loved. And those are the moments that sit with us for the rest of our lives. I want people to remember how they felt when they were part of something bigger. I want people to belong. It shouldn't be uncommon to talk about feelings at work. So I want people to feel. >> Rachel, thank you for your time. I know you're really busy and we stretched you a little bit there. Thank you so much for contributing to this wonderful day of great leaders sharing their stories. And you're an inspiration. Thanks for everything you do. We appreciate you. >> Thank you. And let's go do some more Women of the Cloud videos. >> We (laughs) got more coming. Bring those stories on. Back up the story truck. We're ready to go. Thanks so much. >> That's good. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. It's not just going to be March 8th. That's the big celebration day. It's going to be every quarter, more stories coming. Stay tuned at siliconangle.com and thecube.net here, with bringing all the stories. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Again, all day wall-to-wall coverage, just had a great interview with Walmart, we've got a Next interview coming up, you're going to hear from Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, two experts, both experienced entrepreneurs, executives in technology. We're here to break down what just happened with Walmart, and what's coming up with George Gilbert, former colleague, Wikibon analyst, Gartner Analyst, and now independent investor and expert. George, great to see you, I know you're following this space. Like you read about it, remember the first days when Dataverse came out, we were talking about them coming out of Berkeley? >> Dave: Snowflake. >> John: Snowflake. >> Dave: Snowflake In the early days. >> We, collectively, have been chronicling the data movement since 2010, you were part of our team, now you've got your nose to the grindstone, you're seeing the next wave. What's this all about? Walmart building their own super cloud, we got Bob Muglia talking about how these next wave of apps are coming. What are the super apps? What's the super cloud to you? >> Well, this key's off Dave's really interesting questions to Walmart, which was like, how are they building their supercloud? 'Cause it makes a concrete example. But what was most interesting about his description of the Walmart WCMP, I forgot what it stood for. >> Dave: Walmart Cloud Native Platform. >> Walmart, okay. He was describing where the logic could run in these stateless containers, and maybe eventually serverless functions. But that's just it, and that's the paradigm of microservices, where the logic is in this stateless thing, where you can shoot it, or it fails, and you can spin up another one, and you've lost nothing. >> That was their triplet model. >> Yeah, in fact, and that was what they were trying to move to, where these things move fluidly between data centers. >> But there's a but, right? Which is they're all stateless apps in the cloud. >> George: Yeah. >> And all their stateful apps are on-prem and VMs. >> Or the stateful part of the apps are in VMs. >> Okay. >> And so if they really want to lift their super cloud layer off of this different provider's infrastructure, they're going to need a much more advanced software platform that manages data. And that goes to the -- >> Muglia and Handy, that you and I did, that's coming up next. So the big takeaway there, George, was, I'll set it up and you can chime in, a new breed of data apps is emerging, and this highly decentralized infrastructure. And Tristan Handy of DBT Labs has a sort of a solution to begin the journey today, Muglia is working on something that's way out there, describe what you learned from it. >> Okay. So to talk about what the new data apps are, and then the platform to run them, I go back to the using what will probably be seen as one of the first data app examples, was Uber, where you're describing entities in the real world, riders, drivers, routes, city, like a city plan, these are all defined by data. And the data is described in a structure called a knowledge graph, for lack of a, no one's come up with a better term. But that means the tough, the stuff that Jack built, which was all stateless and sits above cloud vendors' infrastructure, it needs an entirely different type of software that's much, much harder to build. And the way Bob described it is, you're going to need an entirely new data management infrastructure to handle this. But where, you know, we had this really colorful interview where it was like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em, but they weren't really that much in opposition to each other, because Tristan is going to define this layer, starting with like business intelligence metrics, where you're defining things like bookings, billings, and revenue, in business terms, not in SQL terms -- >> Well, business terms, if I can interrupt, he said the one thing we haven't figured out how to APIify is KPIs that sit inside of a data warehouse, and that's essentially what he's doing. >> George: That's what he's doing, yes. >> Right. And so then you can now expose those APIs, those KPIs, that sit inside of a data warehouse, or a data lake, a data store, whatever, through APIs. >> George: And the difference -- >> So what does that do for you? >> Okay, so all of a sudden, instead of working at technical data terms, where you're dealing with tables and columns and rows, you're dealing instead with business entities, using the Uber example of drivers, riders, routes, you know, ETA prices. But you can define, DBT will be able to define those progressively in richer terms, today they're just doing things like bookings, billings, and revenue. But Bob's point was, today, the data warehouse that actually runs that stuff, whereas DBT defines it, the data warehouse that runs it, you can't do it with relational technology >> Dave: Relational totality, cashing architecture. >> SQL, you can't -- >> SQL caching architectures in memory, you can't do it, you've got to rethink down to the way the data lake is laid out on the disk or cache. Which by the way, Thomas Hazel, who's speaking later, he's the chief scientist and founder at Chaos Search, he says, "I've actually done this," basically leave it in an S3 bucket, and I'm going to query it, you know, with no caching. >> All right, so what I hear you saying then, tell me if I got this right, there are some some things that are inadequate in today's world, that's not compatible with the Supercloud wave. >> Yeah. >> Specifically how you're using storage, and data, and stateful. >> Yes. >> And then the software that makes it run, is that what you're saying? >> George: Yeah. >> There's one other thing you mentioned to me, it's like, when you're using a CRM system, a human is inputting data. >> George: Nothing happens till the human does something. >> Right, nothing happens until that data entry occurs. What you're talking about is a world that self forms, polling data from the transaction system, or the ERP system, and then builds a plan without human intervention. >> Yeah. Something in the real world happens, where the user says, "I want a ride." And then the software goes out and says, "Okay, we got to match a driver to the rider, we got to calculate how long it takes to get there, how long to deliver 'em." That's not driven by a form, other than the first person hitting a button and saying, "I want a ride." All the other stuff happens autonomously, driven by data and analytics. >> But my question was different, Dave, so I want to get specific, because this is where the startups are going to come in, this is the disruption. Snowflake is a data warehouse that's in the cloud, they call it a data cloud, they refactored it, they did it differently, the success, we all know it looks like. These areas where it's inadequate for the future are areas that'll probably be either disrupted, or refactored. What is that? >> That's what Muglia's contention is, that the DBT can start adding that layer where you define these business entities, they're like mini digital twins, you can define them, but the data warehouse isn't strong enough to actually manage and run them. And Muglia is behind a company that is rethinking the database, really in a fundamental way that hasn't been done in 40 or 50 years. It's the first, in his contention, the first real rethink of database technology in a fundamental way since the rise of the relational database 50 years ago. >> And I think you admit it's a real Hail Mary, I mean it's quite a long shot right? >> George: Yes. >> Huge potential. >> But they're pretty far along. >> Well, we've been talking on theCUBE for 12 years, and what, 10 years going to AWS Reinvent, Dave, that no one database will rule the world, Amazon kind of showed that with them. What's different, is it databases are changing, or you can have multiple databases, or? >> It's a good question. And the reason we've had multiple different types of databases, each one specialized for a different type of workload, but actually what Muglia is behind is a new engine that would essentially, you'll never get rid of the data warehouse, or the equivalent engine in like a Databricks datalake house, but it's a new engine that manages the thing that describes all the data and holds it together, and that's the new application platform. >> George, we have one minute left, I want to get real quick thought, you're an investor, and we know your history, and the folks watching, George's got a deep pedigree in investment data, and we can testify against that. If you're going to invest in a company right now, if you're a customer, I got to make a bet, what does success look like for me, what do I want walking through my door, and what do I want to send out? What companies do I want to look at? What's the kind of of vendor do I want to evaluate? Which ones do I want to send home? >> Well, the first thing a customer really has to do when they're thinking about next gen applications, all the people have told you guys, "we got to get our data in order," getting that data in order means building an integrated view of all your data landscape, which is data coming out of all your applications. It starts with the data model, so, today, you basically extract data from all your operational systems, put it in this one giant, central place, like a warehouse or lake house, but eventually you want this, whether you call it a fabric or a mesh, it's all the data that describes how everything hangs together as in one big knowledge graph. There's different ways to implement that. And that's the most critical thing, 'cause that describes your Uber landscape, your Uber platform. >> That's going to power the digital transformation, which will power the business transformation, which powers the business model, which allows the builders to build -- >> Yes. >> Coders to code. That's Supercloud application. >> Yeah. >> George, great stuff. Next interview you're going to see right here is Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, they're going to unpack this new wave. Great segment, really worth unpacking and reading between the lines with George, and Dave Vellante, and those two great guests. And then we'll come back here for the studio for more of the live coverage of Supercloud 2. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2 this is Dave Vellante. We're here exploring the intersection of data and analytics and the future of cloud. And in this segment, we're going to look at the evolution of cloud, and try to test some of the Supercloud concepts and assumptions with Brian Gracely, is the founder and co-host along with Aaron Delp of the popular Cloudcast program. Amazing series, if you're not already familiar with it. The Cloudcast is one of the best ways to keep up with so many things going on in our industry. Enterprise tech, platform engineering, business models, obviously, cloud developer trends, crypto, Web 3.0. Sorry Brian, I know that's a sore spot, but Brian, thanks for coming >> That's okay. >> on the program, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, great to be with you, Dave. Happy New Year, and great to be back with everybody with SiliconANGLE again this year. >> Yeah, we love having you on. We miss working with you day-to-day, but I want to start with Gracely's theorem, which basically says, I'm going to paraphrase. For the most part, nothing new gets introduced in the enterprise tech business, patterns repeat themselves, maybe get applied in new ways. And you know this industry well, when something comes out that's new, if you take virtualization, for example, been around forever with mainframes, but then VMware applied it, solve a real problem in the client service system. And then it's like, "Okay, this is awesome." We get really excited and then after a while we pushed the architecture, we break things, introduce new things to fix the things that are broken and start adding new features. And oftentimes you do that through acquisitions. So, you know, has the cloud become that sort of thing? And is Supercloud sort of same wine, new bottle, following Gracely's theorem? >> Yeah, I think there's some of both of it. I hate to be the sort of, it depends sort of answer but, I think to a certain extent, you know, obviously Cloud in and of itself was, kind of revolutionary in that, you know, it wasn't that you couldn't rent things in the past, it was just being able to do it at scale, being able to do it with such amazing self-service. And then, you know, kind of proliferation of like, look at how many services I can get from, from one cloud, whether it was Amazon or Azure or Google. And then, you know, we, we slip back into the things that we know, we go, "Oh, well, okay, now I can get computing on demand, but, now it's just computing." Or I can get database on demand and it's, you know, it's got some of the same limitations of, of say, of database, right? It's still, you know, I have to think about IOPS and I have to think about caching, and other stuff. So, I think we do go through that and then we, you know, we have these sort of next paradigms that come along. So, you know, serverless was another one of those where it was like, okay, it seems sort of new. I don't have to, again, it was another level of like, I don't have to think about anything. And I was able to do that because, you know, there was either greater bandwidth available to me, or compute got cheaper. And what's been interesting is not the sort of, that specific thing, serverless in and of itself is just another way of doing compute, but the fact that it now gets applied as, sort of a no-ops model to, you know, again, like how do I provision a database? How do I think about, you know, do I have to think about the location of a service? Does that just get taken care of for me? So I think the Supercloud concept, and I did a thing and, and you and I have talked about it, you know, behind the scenes that maybe the, maybe a better name is Super app for something like Snowflake or other, but I think we're, seeing these these sort of evolutions over and over again of what were the big bottlenecks? How do we, how do we solve those bottlenecks? And I think the big thing here is, it's never, it's very rarely that you can take the old paradigm of what the thing was, the concept was, and apply it to the new model. So, I'll just give you an example. So, you know, something like VMware, which we all know, wildly popular, wildly used, but when we apply like a Supercloud concept of VMware, the concept of VMware has always been around a cluster, right? It's some finite number of servers, you sort of manage it as a cluster. And when you apply that to the cloud and you say, okay, there's, you know, for example, VMware in the cloud, it's still the same concept of a cluster of VMware. But yet when you look at some of these other services that would fit more into the, you know, Supercloud kind of paradigm, whether it's a Snowflake or a MongoDB Atlas or maybe what CloudFlare is doing at the edge, those things get rid of some of those old paradigms. And I think that's where stuff, you start to go, "Oh, okay, this is very different than before." Yes, it's still computing or storage, or data access, but there's a whole nother level of something that we didn't carry forward from the previous days. And that really kind of breaks the paradigm. And so that's the way I think I've started to think about, are these things really brand new? Yes and no, but I think it's when you can see that big, that thing that you didn't leave behind isn't there anymore, you start to get some really interesting new innovation come out of it. >> Yeah. And that's why, you know, lift and shift is okay, when you talk to practitioners, they'll say, "You know, I really didn't change my operating model. And so I just kind of moved it into the cloud. there were some benefits, but it was maybe one zero not three zeros that I was looking for." >> Right. >> You know, we always talk about what's great about cloud, the agility, and all the other wonderful stuff that we know, what's not working in cloud, you know, tie it into multi-cloud, you know, in terms of, you hear people talk about multi-cloud by accident, okay, that's true. >> Yep. >> What's not great about cloud. And then I want to get into, you know, is multi-cloud really a problem or is it just sort of vendor hype? But, but what's not working in cloud? I mean, you mentioned serverless and serverless is kind of narrow, right, for a lot of stateless apps, right? But, what's not great about cloud? >> Well, I think there's a few things that if you ask most people they don't love about cloud. I think, we can argue whether or not sort of this consolidation around a few cloud providers has been a good thing or a bad thing. I think, regardless of that, you know, we are seeing, we are hearing more and more people that say, look, you know, the experience I used to have with cloud when I went to, for example, an Amazon and there was, you know, a dozen services, it was easy to figure out what was going on. It was easy to figure out what my billing looked like. You know, now they've become so widespread, the number of services they have, you know, the number of stories you just hear of people who went, "Oh, I started a service over in US West and I can't find it anymore 'cause it's on a different screen. And I, you know, I just got billed for it." Like, so I think the sprawl of some of the clouds has gotten, has created a user experience that a lot of people are frustrated with. I think that's one thing. And we, you know, we see people like Digital Ocean and we see others who are saying, "Hey, we're going to be that simplified version." So, there's always that yin and yang. I think people are super frustrated at network costs, right? So, you know, and that's kind of at a lot of, at the center of maybe why we do or don't see more of these Supercloud services is just, you know, in the data center as an application owner, I didn't have to think about, well where, where does this go to? Where are my users? Yes, somebody took care of it, but when those things become front and center, that's super frustrating. That's the one area that we've seen absolutely no cost savings, cost reduction. So I think that frustrates people a lot. And then I think the third piece is just, you know, we're, we went from super centralized IT organizations, which, you know, for decades was how it worked. It was part of the reason why the cloud expanded and became a thing, right? Sort of shadow IT and I can't get things done. And then, now what we've seen is sort of this proliferation of little pockets of groups that are your IT, for lack of a better thing, whether they're called platform engineering or SRE or DevOps. But we have this, expansion, explosion if you will, of groups that, if I'm an app dev team, I go, "Hey, you helped me make this stuff run, but then the team next to you has another group and they have another group." And so you see this explosion of, you know, we don't have any standards in the company anymore. And, so sort of self-service has created its own nightmare to a certain extent for a lot of larger companies. >> Yeah. Thank you for that. So, you know, I want, I want to explore this multi-cloud, you know, by accident thing and is a real problem. You hear that a lot from vendors and we've been talking about Supercloud as this unifying layer across cloud. You know, but when you talk to customers, a lot of them are saying, "Yes, we have multiple clouds in our organization, but my group, we have mono cloud, we know the security, edicts, we know how to, you know, deal with the primitives, whether it's, you know, S3 or Azure Blob or whatever it is. And we're very comfortable with this." It's, that's how we're simplifying. So, do you think this is really a problem? Does it have merit that we need that unifying layer across clouds, or is it just too early for that? >> I think, yeah, I think what you, what you've laid out is basically how the world has played out. People have picked a cloud for a specific application or a series of applications. Yeah, and I think if you talk to most companies, they would tell you, you know, holistically, yes, we're multi-cloud, not, maybe not necessarily on, I don't necessarily love the phrase where people say like, well it happened by accident. I think it happened on purpose, but we got to multi-cloud, not in the way that maybe that vendors, you know, perceived, you know, kind of laid out a map for. So it was, it was, well you will lay out this sort of Supercloud framework. We didn't call it that back then, we just called it sort of multi-cloud. Maybe it was Kubernetes or maybe it was whatever. And different groups, because central IT kind of got disbanded or got fragmented. It turned into, go pick the best cloud for your application, for what you need to do for the business. And then, you know, multiple years later it was like, "Oh, hold on, I've got 20% in Google and 50% in AWS and I've got 30% in Azure. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's been evolution. I don't know that it's, I don't know if it's a mistake. I think it's now groups trying to figure out like, should I make sense of it? You know, should I try and standardize and I backwards standardize some stuff? I think that's going to be a hard thing for, for companies to do. 'cause I think they feel okay with where the applications are. They just happen to be in multiple clouds. >> I want to run something by you, and you guys, you and Aaron have talked about this. You know, still depending on who, which keynote you listen to, small percentage of the workloads are actually in cloud. And when you were with us at Wikibon, I think we called it true private cloud, and we looked at things like Nutanix and there were a lot of other examples of companies that were trying to replicate the hyperscale experience on Prem. >> Yeah. >> And, we would evaluate that, you know, beyond virtualization, and so we sort of defined that and, but I think what's, maybe what's more interesting than Supercloud across clouds is if you include that, that on Prem estate, because that's where most of the work is being done, that's where a lot of the proprietary tools have been built, a lot of data, a lot of software. So maybe there's this concept of sending that true private cloud to true hybrid cloud. So I actually think hybrid cloud in some cases is the more interesting use case for so-called Supercloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think there's a couple aspects too. I think, you know, if we were to go back five or six years even, maybe even a little further and look at like what a data center looked like, even if it was just, "Hey we're a data center that runs primarily on VMware. We use some of their automation". Versus what you can, even what you can do in your data center today. The, you know, the games that people have seen through new types of automation through Kubernetes, through get ops, and a number of these things, like they've gotten significantly further along in terms of I can provision stuff really well, I can do multi-tenancy, I can do self-service. Is it, you know, is it still hard? Yeah. Because those things are hard to do, but there's been significant progress there. I don't, you know, I still look for kind of that, that killer application, that sort of, you know, lighthouse use case of, hybrid applications, you know, between data center and between cloud. I think, you know, we see some stuff where, you know, backup is a part of it. So you use the cloud for storage, maybe you use the cloud for certain kinds of resiliency, especially on maybe front end load balancing and stuff. But I think, you know, I think what we get into is, this being hung up on hybrid cloud or multi-cloud as a term and go like, "Look, what are you trying to measure? Are you trying to measure, you know, efficiency of of of IT usage? Are you trying to measure how quickly can I give these business, you know, these application teams that are part of a line of business resources that they need?" I think if we start measuring that way, we would look at, you know, you'd go, "Wow, it used to be weeks and months. Now we got rid of these boards that have to review everything every time I want to do a change management type of thing." We've seen a lot more self-service. I think those are the things we want to measure on. And then to your point of, you know, where does, where do these Supercloud applications fit in? I think there are a bunch of instances where you go, "Look, I have a, you know, global application, I have a thing that has to span multiple regions." That's where the Supercloud concept really comes into play. We used to do it in the data center, right? We'd had all sorts of technologies to help with that, I think you can now start to do it in the cloud. >> You know, one of the other things, trying to understand, your thoughts on this, do you think that you, you again have talked about this, like I'm with you. It's like, how is it that Google's losing, you know, 3 billion dollars a year, whatever. I mean, because when you go back and look at Amazon, when they were at that level of revenue where Google is today, they were making money, you know, and they were actually growing faster, by the way. So it's kind of interesting what's happened with Google. But, the reason I bring that up is, trying to understand if you think the hyperscalers will ever be motivated to create standards across clouds, and that may be a play for Google. I mean, obviously with Kubernetes it was like a Hail Mary and kind of made them relevant. Where would Google be without Kubernetes? But then did it achieve the objectives? We could have that conversation some other time, but do you think the hyperscalers will actually say, "Okay, we're going to lean in and create these standards across clouds." Because customers would love that, I would think, but it would sub-optimize their competitive advantage. What are your thoughts? >> I think, you know, on the surface, I would say they, they probably aren't. I think if you asked 'em the question, they would say, "Well, you know, first and foremost, you know, we do deliver standards, so we deliver a, you know, standard SQL interface or a SQL you know, or a standard Kubernetes API or whatever. So, in that, from that perspective, you know, we're not locking you into, you know, an Amazon specific database, or a Google specific database." You, you can argue about that, but I think to a certain extent, like they've been very good about, "Hey, we're going to adopt the standards that people want." A lot of times the open source standards. I think the problem is, let's say they did come up with a standard for it. I think you still have the problem of the costs of migration and you know, the longer you've, I think their bet is basically the longer you've been in some cloud. And again, the more data you sort of compile there, the data gravity concept, there's just going to be a natural thing that says, okay, the hurdle to get over to say, "Look, we want to move this to another cloud", becomes so cost prohibitive that they don't really have to worry about, you know, oh, I'm going to get into a war of standards. And so far I think they sort of realize like that's the flywheel that the cloud creates. And you know, unless they want to get into a world where they just cut bandwidth costs, like it just kind of won't happen. You know, I think we've even seen, and you know, the one example I'll use, and I forget the name of it off the top of my head, but there's a, there's a Google service. I think it's like BigQuery external or something along those lines, that allows you to say, "Look, you can use BigQuery against like S3 buckets and against other stuff." And so I think the cloud providers have kind of figured out, I'm never going to get the application out of that other guy's cloud or you know, the other cloud. But maybe I'm going to have to figure out some interesting ways to sort of work with it. And, you know, it's a little bit, it's a little janky, but that might be, you know, a moderate step that sort of gets customers where they want to be. >> Yeah. Or you know, it'd be interesting if you ever see AWS for example, running its database in other clouds, you started, even Oracle is doing that with, with with Azure, which is a form of Supercloud. My last question for you is, I want to get you thinking about sort of how the future plays out. You know, think about some of the companies that we've put forth this Supercloud, and by the way, this has been a criticism of the concept. Charles Fitzer, "Everything is Supercloud!" Which if true would defeat the purpose of course. >> Right. >> And so right with the community effort, we really tried to put some guardrails down on the essential characteristics, the deployment models, you know, so for example, running across multiple clouds with a purpose build pass, creating a common experience, metadata intelligence that solves a specific problem. I mean, the example I often use is Snowflake's governed data sharing. But yeah, Snowflake, Databricks, CloudFlare, Cohesity, you know, I just mentioned Oracle and Azure, these and others, they certainly claim to have that common experience across clouds. But my question is, again, I come back to, do customers need this capability? You know, is Mono Cloud the way to solve that problem? What's your, what are your thoughts on how this plays out in the future of, I guess, PAs, apps and cloud? >> Yeah, I think a couple of things. So, from a technology perspective, I think, you know, the companies you name, the services you've named, have sort of proven that the concept is viable and it's viable at a reasonable size, right? These aren't completely niche businesses, right? They're multi-billion dollar businesses. So, I think there's a subset of applications that, you know, maybe a a bigger than a niche set of applications that are going to use these types of things. A lot of what you talked about is very data centric, and that's, that's fine. That's that layer is, figuring that out. I think we'll see messaging types of services, so like Derek Hallison's, Caya Company runs a, sort of a Supercloud for messaging applications. So I think there'll be places where it makes a ton of sense. I think, the thing that I'm not sure about, and because again, we've been now 10 plus years of sort of super low, you know, interest rates in terms of being able to do things, is a lot of these things come out of research that have been done previously. Then they get turned into maybe somewhat of an open source project, and then they can become something. You know, will we see as much investment into the next Snowflake if, you know, the interest rates are three or four times that they used to be, do we, do we see VCs doing it? So that's the part that worries me a little bit, is I think we've seen what's possible. I think, you know, we've seen companies like what those services are. I think I read yesterday Snowflake was saying like, their biggest customers are growing at 30, like 50 or 60%. Like the, value they get out of it is becoming exponential. And it's just a matter of like, will the economics allow the next big thing to happen? Because some of these things are pretty, pretty costly, you know, expensive to get started. So I'm bullish on the idea. I don't know that it becomes, I think it's okay that it's still sort of, you know, niche plus, plus in terms of the size of it. Because, you know, if we think about all of IT it's still, you know, even microservices is a small part of bigger things. But I'm still really bullish on the idea. I like that it's been proven. I'm a little wary, like a lot of people have the economics of, you know, what might slow things down a little bit. But yeah, I, think the future is going to involve Supercloud somewhere, whatever people end up calling it. And you and I discussed that. (laughs) But I don't, I don't think it goes away. I don't think it's, I don't think it's a fad. I think it is something that people see tremendous value and it's just, it's got to be, you know, for what you're trying to do, your application specific thing. >> You're making a great point on the funding of innovation and we're entering a new era of public policy as well. R and D tax credit is now is shifting. >> Yeah. >> You know, you're going to have to capitalize that over five years now. And that's something that goes back to the 1950s and many people would argue that's at least in part what has helped the United States be so, you know, competitive in tech. But Brian, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for participating in the program. Great to see you. >> Thanks Dave, appreciate it. Good luck with the rest of the show. >> Thank you. All right, this is Dave Vellante for John Furrier, the entire Cube community. Stay tuned for more content from Supercloud2.

(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to AWS re:Invent, here in wonderful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're theCUBE. I am Savannah Peterson. Joined with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Day four, you look great. Your voice has come back somehow. >> Yeah, a little bit. I don't know how. I took last night off. You guys, I know, were out partying all night, but - >> I don't know what you're talking about. (Dave laughing) >> Well, you were celebrating John's birthday. John Furrier's birthday today. >> Yes, happy birthday John! >> He's on his way to England. >> Yeah. >> To attend his nephew's wedding. Awesome family. And so good luck, John. I hope you feel better, he's got a little cold. >> I know, good luck to the newlyweds. I love this. I know we're both really excited for our next guest, so I'm going to bring out, Lena Smart from MongoDB. Thank you so much for being here. >> Thank you for having me. >> How's the show going for you? >> Good. It's been a long week. And I just, not much voice left, so. >> We'll be gentle on you. >> I'll give you what's left of it. >> All right, we'll take that. >> Okay. >> You had a fireside chat, at the show? >> Lena: I did. >> Can you tell us a little bit about that? >> So we were talking about the Rise, The developer is a platform. In this massive theater. I thought it would be like an intimate, you know, fireside chat. I keep believing them when they say to me come and do these talks, it'll be intimate. And you turn up and there's a stage and a theater and it's like, oh my god. But it was really interesting. It was well attended. Got some really good questions at the end as well. Lots of follow up, which was interesting. And it was really just about, you know, how we've brought together this developer platform that's got our integrated services. It's just what developers want, it gives them time to innovate and disrupt, rather than worry about the minutia of management. >> Savannah: Do the cool stuff. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, so you know Lena, it's funny that you're saying that oh wow, the lights came on and it was this big thing. When when we were at re:Inforced, Lena was on stage and it was so funny, Lena, you were self deprecating like making jokes about the audience. >> Savannah: (indistinct) >> It was hilarious. And so, but it was really endearing to the audience and so we were like - >> Lena: It was terrifying. >> You got huge props for that, I'll tell you. >> Absolutely terrifying. Because they told me I wouldn't see anyone. Because we did the rehearsal the day before, and they were like, it's just going to be like - >> Sometimes it just looks like blackness out there. >> Yeah, yeah. It wasn't, they lied. I could see eyeballs. It was terrifying. >> Would you rather know that going in though? Or is it better to be, is ignorance bliss in that moment? >> Ignorance is bliss. >> Yeah, yeah yeah. >> Good call Savannah, right? Yeah, just go. >> The older I get, the more I'm just, I'm on the ignorance is bliss train. I just, I don't need to know anything that's going to hurt my soul. >> Exactly. >> One of the things that you mentioned, and this has actually been a really frequent theme here on the show this week, is you said that this has been a transformative year for developers. >> Lena: Yeah. >> What did you mean by that? >> So I think developers are starting to come to the fore, if you like, the fore. And I'm not in any way being deprecating about developers 'cause I love them. >> Savannah: I think everyone here does. >> I was married to one, I live with one now. It's like, they follow me everywhere. They don't. But, I think they, this is my opinion obviously but I think that we're seeing more and more the value that developers bring to the table. They're not just code geeks anymore. They're not just code monkeys, you know, churning out lines and lines of code. Some of the most interesting discussions I've had this week have been with developers. And that's why I'm so pleased that our developer data platform is going to give these folks back time, so that they can go and innovate. And do super interesting things and do the next big thing. It was interesting, I was talking to Mary, our comms person earlier and she had said that Dave I guess, my boss, was on your show - >> Dave: Yeah, he was over here last night. >> Yeah. And he was saying that two thirds of the companies that had been mentioned so far, within the whole gamut of this conference use MongoDB. And so take that, extrapolate that, of all the developers >> Wow. >> who are there. I know, isn't that awesome? >> That's awesome. Congrats on that, that's like - >> Did I hear that right now? >> I know, I just had that moment. >> I know she just told me, I'm like, really? That's - >> That's so cool. >> 'Cause the first thing I thought of was then, oh my god, how many developers are we reaching then? 'Cause they're the ones. I mean, it's kind of interesting. So my job has kind of grown from, over the years, being the security geek in the back room that nobody talks to, to avoiding me in the lift, to I've got a seat at the table now. We meet with the board. And I think that I can see that that's where the developer mindset is moving towards. It's like, give us the right tools and we'll change your world. >> And let the human capital go back to doing the fun stuff and not just the maintenance stuff. >> And, but then you say that, you can't have everything automated. I get that automation is also the buzzword of the week. And I get that, trust me. Someone has to write the code to do the automation. >> Savannah: Right. >> So, so yeah, definitely give these people back time, so that they can work on ML, AI, choose your buzzword. You know, by giving people things like queriable encryption for example, you're going to free up a whole bunch of head space. They don't have to worry about their data being, you know harvested from memory or harvested while at rest or in motion. And it's like, okay, I don't have to worry about that now, let me go do something fun. >> How about the role of the developer as it relates to SecOps, right? They're being asked to do a lot. You and I talked about this at re:Inforce. You seem to have a pretty good handle on it. Like a lot of companies I think are struggling with it. I mean, the other thing you said said to me is you don't have a lack of talent at Mongo, right? 'Cause you're Mongo. But a lot of companies do. But a lot of the developers, you know we were just talking about this earlier with Capgemini, the developer metrics or the application development team's metrics might not be aligned with the CSO's metrics. How, what are you seeing there? What, how do you deal with it within Mongo? What do you advise your customers? >> So in terms of internal, I work very closely with our development group. So I work with Tara Hernandez, who's our new VP of developer productivity. And she and her team are very much interested in making developers more productive. That's her job. And so we get together because sometimes security can definitely be seen as a blocker. You know, funnily enough, I actually had a Slack that I had to respond to three seconds before I come on here. And it was like, help, we need some help getting this application through procurement, because blah, blah, blah. And it's weird the kind of change, the shift in mindset. Whereas before they might have gone to procurement or HR or someone to ask for this. Now they're coming to the CSO. 'Cause they know if I say yes, it'll go through. >> Talk about social engineering. >> Exactly. >> You were talking about - >> But turn it around though. If I say no, you know, I don't like to say no. I prefer to be the CSO that says yes, but. And so that's what we've done. We've definitely got that culture of ask, we'll tell you the risks, and then you can go away and be innovative and do what you need to do. And we basically do the same with our customers. Here's what you can do. Our application is secure out of the box. Here's how we can help you make it even more, you know, streamlined or bespoke to what you need. >> So mobile was a big inflection point, you know, I dunno, it seems like forever ago. >> 2007. >> 2007. Yeah, iPhone came out in 2007. >> You remember your first iPhone? >> Dave: Yeah. >> Yeah? Same. >> Yeah. It was pretty awesome, actually. >> Yeah, I do too. >> Yeah, I was on the train to Boston going up to see some friends at MIT on the consortium that I worked with. And I had, it was the wee one, 'member? But you thought it was massive. >> Oh, it felt - >> It felt big. And I remember I was sitting on the train to Boston it was like the Estella and there was these people, these two women sitting beside me. And they were all like glam, like you and unlike me. >> Dave: That's awesome. >> And they, you could see them like nudging each other. And I'm being like, I'm just sitting like this. >> You're chilling. >> Like please look at my phone, come on just look at it. Ask me about it. And eventually I'm like - >> You're baiting them. >> nonchalantly laid it on the table. And you know, I'm like, and they're like, is that an iPhone? And I'm like, yeah, you want to see it? >> I thought you'd never ask. >> I know. And I really played with it. And I showed them all the cool stuff, and they're like, oh we're going to buy iPhones. And so I should have probably worked for Apple, but I didn't. >> I was going to say, where was your referral kickback on that? Especially - >> It was a little like Tesla, right? When you first, we first saw Tesla, it was Ray Wong, you know, Ray? From Pasadena? >> It really was a moment and going from the Blackberry keyboard to that - >> He's like want to see my car? And I'm like oh yeah sure, what's the big deal? >> Yeah, then you see it and you're like, ooh. >> Yeah, that really was such a pivotal moment. >> Anyway, so we lost a track, 2007. >> Yeah, what were we talking about? 2007 mobile. >> Mobile. >> Key inflection point, is where you got us here. Thank you. >> I gotchu Dave, I gotchu. >> Bring us back here. My mind needs help right now. Day four. Okay, so - >> We're all getting here on day four, we're - >> I'm socially engineering you to end this, so I can go to bed and die quietly. That's what me and Mary are, we're counting down the minutes. >> Holy. >> That's so sick. >> You're breaking my heart right now. I love it. I'm with you, sis, I'm with you. >> So I dunno where I was, really where I was going with this, but, okay, there's - >> 2007. Three things happened. >> Another inflection point. Okay yeah, tell us what happened. But no, tell us that, but then - >> AWS, clones, 2006. >> Well 2006, 2007. Right, okay. >> 2007, the iPhone, the world blew up. So you've already got this platform ready to take all this data. >> Dave: Right. >> You've got this little slab of gorgeousness called the iPhone, ready to give you all that data. And then MongoDB pops up, it's like, woo-hoo. But what we could offer was, I mean back then was awesome, but it was, we knew that we would have to iterate and grow and grow and grow. So that was kind of the three things that came together in 2007. >> Yeah, and then Cloud came in big time, and now you've got this platform. So what's the next inflection point do you think? >> Oh... >> Good question, Dave. >> Don't even ask me that. >> I mean, is it Edge? Is it IOT? Is there another disruptor out there? >> I think it's going to be artificial intelligence. >> Dave: Is it AI? >> I mean I don't know enough about it to talk about it, to any level, so don't ask me any questions about it. >> This is like one of those ignorance is bliss moments. It feels right. >> Yeah. >> Well, does it scare you, from a security perspective? Or? >> Great question, Dave. >> Yeah, it scares me more from a humanity standpoint. Like - >> More than social scared you? 'Cause social was so benign when it started. >> Oh it was - >> You're like, oh - I remember, >> It was like a yearbook. I was on the Estella and we were - >> Shout out to Amtrak there. >> I was with, we were starting basically a wikibond, it was an open source. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Kind of, you know, technology community. And we saw these and we were like enamored of Facebook. And there were these two young kids on the train, and we were at 'em, we were picking the brain. Do you like Facebook? "I love Facebook." They're like "oh, Facebook's unbelievable." Now, kids today, "I hate Facebook," right? So, but social at the beginning it was kind of, like I say, benign and now everybody's like - >> Savannah: We didn't know what we were getting into. >> Right. >> I know. >> Exactly. >> Can you imagine if you could have seen into the future 20 years ago? Well first of all, we'd have all bought Facebook and Apple stock. >> Savannah: Right. >> And Tesla stock. But apart from, but yeah apart from that. >> Okay, so what about Quantum? Does that scare you at all? >> I think the only thing that scares me about Quantum is we have all this security in place today. And I'm not an expert in Quantum, but we have all this security in place that's securing what we have today. And my worry is, in 10 years, is it still going to be secure? 'Cause we're still going to be using that data in some way, shape, or form. And my question is to the quantum geniuses out there, what do we do in 10 years like to retrofit the stuff? >> Dave: Like a Y2K moment? >> Kind of. Although I think Y2K is coming in 2038, isn't it? When the Linux date flips. I'll be off the grid by then, I'll be living in Scotland. >> Somebody else's problem. >> Somebody else's problem. I'll be with the sheep in Glasgow, in Scotland. >> Y2K was a boondoggle for tech, right? >> What a farce. I mean, that whole - >> I worked in the power industry in Y2K. That was a nightmare. >> Dave: Oh I bet. >> Savannah: Oh my God. >> Yeah, 'cause we just assumed that the world was going to stop and there been no power, and we had nuclear power plants. And it's like holy moly. Yeah. >> More than moly. >> I was going to say, you did a good job holding that other word in. >> I think I was going to, in case my mom hears this. >> I grew up near Diablo Canyon in, in California. So you were, I mean we were legitimately worried that that exactly was going to happen. And what about the waste? And yeah it was chaos. We've covered a lot. >> Well, what does worry you? Like, it is culture? Is it - >> Why are you trying to freak her out? >> No, no, because it's a CSO, trying to get inside the CSO's head. >> You don't think I have enough to worry about? You want to keep piling on? >> Well if it's not Quantum, you know? Maybe it's spiders or like - >> Oh but I like spiders, well spiders are okay. I don't like bridges, that's my biggest fear. Bridges. >> Seriously? >> And I had to drive over the Tappan Zee bridge, which is one of the longest, for 17 years, every day, twice. The last time I drove over it, I was crying my heart out, and happy as anything. >> Stay out of Oakland. >> I've never driven over it since. Stay out of where? >> Stay out of Oakland. >> I'm staying out of anywhere that's got lots of water. 'Cause it'll have bridges. >> Savannah: Well it's good we're here in the desert. >> Exactly. So what scares me? Bridges, there you go. >> Yeah, right. What? >> Well wait a minute. So if I'm bridging technology, is that the scary stuff? >> Oh God, that was not - >> Was it really bad? >> It was really bad. >> Wow. Wow, the puns. >> There's a lot of seems in those bridges. >> It is lit on theCUBE A floor, we are all struggling. I'm curious because I've seen, your team is all over the place here on the show, of course. Your booth has been packed the whole time. >> Lena: Yes. >> The fingerprint. Talk to me about your shirt. >> So, this was designed by my team in house. It is the most wanted swag in the company, because only my security people wear it. So, we make it like, yeah, you could maybe have one, if this turns out well. >> I feel like we're on the right track. >> Dave: If it turns out well. >> Yeah, I just love it. It's so, it's just brilliant. I mean, it's the leaf, it's a fingerprint. It's just brilliant. >> That's why I wanted to call it out. You know, you see a lot of shirts, a lot of swag shirts. Some are really unfortunately sad, or not funny, >> They are. >> or they're just trying too hard. Now there's like, with this one, I thought oh I bet that's clever. >> Lena: It is very cool. Yes, I love it. >> I saw a good one yesterday. >> Yeah? >> We fix shit, 'member? >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> That was pretty good. >> I like when they're >> That's a pretty good one. >> just straightforward, like that, yeah yeah. >> But the only thing with this is when you're say in front of a green screen, you look as though you've got no tummy. >> A portal through your body. >> And so, when we did our first - >> That's a really good point, actually. >> Yeah, it's like the black hole to nothingless. And I'm like wow, that's my soul. >> I was just going to say, I don't want to see my soul like that. I don't want to know. >> But we had to do like, it was just when the pandemic first started, so we had to do our big presentation live announcement from home. And so they shipped us all this camera equipment for home and thank God my partner knows how that works, so he set it all up. And then he had me test with a green screen, and he's like, you have no tummy. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? He's like, come and see. It's like this, I dunno what it was. So I had to actually go upstairs and felt tip with a magic marker and make it black. >> Wow. >> So that was why I did for two hours on a Friday, yeah. >> Couldn't think of another alternative, huh? >> Well no, 'cause I'm myopic when it comes to marketing and I knew I had to keep the tshirt on, and I just did that. >> Yeah. >> In hindsight, yes I could have worn an "I Fix Shit" tshirt, but I don't think my husband would've been very happy. I secure shit? >> There you go, yeah. >> There you go. >> Over to you, Savannah. >> I was going to say, I got acquainted, I don't know if I can say this, but I'm going to say it 'cause we're here right now. I got acquainted with theCUBE, wearing a shirt that said "Unfuck Kubernetes," 'cause it was a marketing campaign that I was running for one of my clients at Kim Con last year. >> That's so good. >> Yeah, so - >> Oh my God. I'll give you one of these if you get me one of those. >> I can, we can do a swapskee. We can absolutely. >> We need a few edits on this film, on the file. >> Lena: Okay, this is nothing - >> We're fallin' off the wheel. Okay, on that note, I'm going to bring us to our challenge that we discussed, before we got started on this really diverse discussion that we have had in the last 15 minutes. We've covered everything from felt tip markers to nuclear power plants. >> To the darkness of my soul. >> To the darkness of all of our souls. >> All of our souls, yes. >> Which is perhaps a little too accurate, especially at this stage in the conference. You've obviously seen a lot Lena, and you've been rockin' it, I know John was in your suite up here, at at at the Venetian. What's your 30 second hot take? Most important story, coming out of the show or for you all at Mongo this year? >> Genuinely, it was when I learned that two-thirds of the customers that had been mentioned, here, are MongoDB customers. And that just exploded in my head. 'Cause now I'm thinking of all the numbers and the metrics and how we can use that. And I just think it's amazing, so. >> Yeah, congratulations on that. That's awesome. >> Yeah, I thought it was amazing. >> And it makes sense actually, 'cause Mongo so easy to use. We were talking about Tengen. >> We knew you when, I feel that's our like, we - >> Yeah, but it's true. And so, Mongo was just really easy to use. And people are like, ah, it doesn't scale. It's like, turns out it actually does scale. >> Lena: Turns out, it scales pretty well. >> Well Lena, without question, this is my favorite conversation of the show so far. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> It's always a pleasure. >> Dave: Thanks Lena. >> Thank you. >> And thank you all, tuning in live, for tolerating wherever we take these conversations. >> Dave: Whatever that was. >> I bet you weren't ready for this one, folks. We're at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Nevada. With Dave Vellante, I'm Savannah Peterson. You're washing theCUBE, the leader for high tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone, welcome to this Cube's special program series Women of the Cloud, brought to you by aws. I'm your host for the series, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Patty Jordan, the VP of enabling processes and technology at Optimus. My next guest, Patty, welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa. Thank you for having me. >>Tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your role so the audience gets that understanding of exactly who you are. >>Sure thing. Hi, my name is Patty Jordan. As we mentioned, I am originally from Cameroon, Central Africa, but I was raised in the DC area. I'm called and what you call a bank brat. My father worked for an international organization, the the World Bank. Lived in, like I said, grew up in dc, moved to Austin, Texas about seven years ago. Been with Optum for the last nine years of my working career. And I've had multiple roles, but currently my role as is with the enabling technologies and processes, which means that I manage teams that support the platform of a lot of analytics products in Optum. >>Got it. All right. Bank Brett, that's a new one to me. I hadn't heard that. I love that you're a bank, Brit and proud of it. I can tell. Talk to me a little bit about your, the career path that you have navigated and what are some of your sort of tactical and also strategic recommendations for the audiences looking to grow their career in tech? >>So the interesting thing is, I did not start in tech. My background is as an economist. I have a bachelor's of economics from the women, from the College of Women, Mary. I also have a financial master's in public policy from American University. However, I did take some IT classes and as a kid I'm probably dating myself a little bit, but I programmed in dos, so I, I was always excited by it and I had internships as a programmer that helped me pay for my master's degree in when I graduated. I just felt like I was having fun and I was getting paid very well and I was able to pay off my graduate schools. So I just stayed with tech. >>Love that. But it sounds like you had that interest from when you were quite young and as a lot of us and end up in tech, we didn't start there originally. There's a lot of zigzaggy paths to get there. Sounds like you had that as well. What are some of your recommendations for people, either those that are in tech now or aren't who want to get into it and really expand and climb that ladder? >>So definitely, so one of the things to understand is tech could be many different things. Like one of the things could be programming, which I started doing and now dislike intensely. And then another thing could be like being in the business analyst in tech, getting the business requirements versus product management or even, you know, management. And what I would encourage people to do is really focus on what you feel happy doing, which for me is problem solving and collaborating and getting the right people together to solve very complex problems. And if you focus on that then you'll find your, your the role for you even in tech. >>I love that problem solving is such an important skill to be able to have and to cultivate regardless of the industry that you're in. But I'd love to know a little bit more about some of the successes that you've had helping organizations really navigate their cloud journeys, their migration to cloud as we've seen the last couple of years, a massive acceleration to the cloud that was really born outta the pandemic. Talk to me about some of the successes that you've been able to achieve. >>So the first, I guess most obvious thing is understanding the technology. What do you have at your disposal? What do you need for your team to succeed in the cloud or even OnPrem? But what I've learned most in the last four to five years with the projects that I work on, whether it was migrating from a host data center to one that we owned ourselves or migrating from that data center to AWS recently was you really need to get the business organization engaged. And that's not just getting the sponsorship and getting them this to write that check, but really helping them understand how this journey to the cloud is a combined journey between both organizations, right? And they will be able to be more successful as well with us going to the cloud with improved processing with revenue protection because we, there's more tools available with revenue expansion because now we can now expand faster address client needs faster. And you know, so there's various different aspects of going to cloud that are more than just we're using the coolest technology. >>You're a problem solver, has there. And one of the challenges with organizations and from a cloud migration standpoint that we often talk about is it's a cultural migration as well, which is really challenging to do for any type of organization regardless of industry. Do you have a favorite example where as a, as the problem solver, you came in and really helped the organization, the business side understand, be able to transform their cultural direction, understand why cloud migration can be such a facilitator of the business from the top line in a bottom line perspective. >>So from a bottom line perspective, I think the hardest thing for them to understand or what does not compute for them is you can't give them a set. This is what you're gonna cost in the cloud, right? Because the benefit of being in the cloud is being able to scale shrink, et cetera. So that's one hurdle that we're still fighting to be a hundred percent candid. But from a a top line perspective, what's what's been great is we've been able to ramp up more clients with the same, right? So we haven't had to go out and procure more servers, more storage, hire more staff because we're in the cloud and we've actually been able to scale our teams as well because we incorporated the DevOps functions and we do not need a team to manage a data center anymore. So that they absolutely understood, you know, savings ratified, but really just how do we get to market faster? How do we get to revenue faster and how do we get more revenue with the same pool of resources is something that they've really, really resonated with. >>Well, you're starting to speak their language so that to your point that resonates well, but there's so much productivity improvements, efficiencies to be gained by leveraging cloud computing that that really hit the bottom line of an organization that businesses, if you put it in the right way. And it sounds like as the problem solver you have, they understand the immense value and competitive advantage that cloud can bring to their organization and become sort of a ah, the blinders are off. I get it. >>Exactly. Exactly. You're just not trying to, to play with the latest toys, you are actually solving a business problem even before it happens. >>And that's the key solving business problems before they happen. Being able to predict and forecast is huge for businesses, especially as we've seen the last couple of years. Everybody racing to digital, to to pivot, to survive Now to be competitive. If they don't do that and embrace that emerging technology suite, there's a competitor that's right back here that if they're more culturally willing and able to, to be more agile, they're gonna take the place of a competing organization. So yeah, so it absolutely is a huge differentiator for organizations. And it sounds like you've had some great successes there in helping organizations really navigate the challenges, the cultural challenges, but the benefits of cloud computing. Yes. I do wanna talk to you a little bit about in your expertise, diversity is something that is talked about in every industry. We talk about it in tech all the time, there's still challenges there. What are, what's, what are your thoughts on diversity? What are you seeing and what are some of those challenges that are still sitting on the table? >>So I guess the first thing I would say is there's multiple facets to diversity, right? The first one we always lean to is gender and race, but there's also diversity of thought. And being in the healthcare industry is very important for us to have a diversity of thought and experiences so that we can target a lot of these health equity issues that are, you know, that, that are ongoing. So that's one thing that we've, we've been trying to do is making sure that I don't just have people that think like me on the team. And typically that also means not having people that look like me. So making sure that we have the right pipelines to hire for partnering with our, with some of our vendors. AWS for example, is a good one where they had avenues and they had non-profits that they worked with and they connected us with some of our staff augmentation people also did the same thing, really just expanding the scope of where we're looking for talent and, and that helps also bring that diversity of thought and the diversity of gender race into the, into the full >>It is. And it and, and there's also, there's so much data if we follow the data and of course in tech we're all about data. Every company these days, regardless of industry needs to be a data company. If we follow the data, we can see that organizations with, for example, females within the C-suite are far more profitable than those organizations that don't have that even that element of diversity. So the data is demonstrating there's tremendous business value, tremendous competitive advantage, faster time to market, more products and services that can be delivered if there is thought diversity among the entire organization, not just the C-suite. >>Exactly. And and since we have an impact on what is being delivered as an engineering organization, we also need that in engineering, right? One of the things that's very keen right now is machine language and ai. If we don't have the right models for example, then we either introduced bias or perpetuate by it. So we definitely need people on our teams as well that understand how these technologies work, how we can leverage 'em on our data sets so that we could run counter to this bias >>And countering that bias is incredibly important. Machine learning ai, so driven by data, the volumes of data, but the data needs to be as clean and and non-biased as possible. And that's a big challenge for organizations to undertake. Is there advice that you have for those folks watching who might be, I, I don't see me in this organization, I don't feel represented. How can I change that? >>Well, one would be to speak up, right? Even if you don't see you apply for the job, right? And one of the things that we're trying to address even in the DEI space is making sure that our job descriptions are not introducing any biases so that people will eliminate themselves immediately, right? But really just if you have the skill set and you feel like you can ramp up to the talent, then just apply for the job. Talk to somebody. You do have a network whether you realize it or not. So leverage that network. But really like there's this expression that my kid taught me saying, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take, right? So if you don't try, you're not gonna make it by default. If you do try, there's a chance to make it right. At the very least, you build a connection with someone who can potentially help you down the line. >>That is one of my absolute favorite sayings. You miss a hundred percent of the shots that you don't take. So encouraging people to raise their hand there, there are stats, data, speaking of data we've been talking about that, that demonstrate that women are far less likely to apply for jobs like on LinkedIn for example, unless they need 100% of the job requirements, which we all know are quite stringent and not necessary in a lot of cases. So I love your advice of just try raise your hand, ask the question. All the can say is no. And at the end of the day, what is that? It's a word but can also be directional and and really guiding for people on their journey to wherever that, if it's an engineering, cloud, engineering, DevOps, whatever happen that happens to be, raise your hand the question. And to your point, you have a network, it is there, open that up. There's so much potential for people that just raise, I think that's to raise their hand and ask the question. >>And the corollary to that though is I would also encourage people who are in leader leadership roles to be strong allies, right? Like we need to be aware of what biases we might be introducing or candidates that we might be leaving on the table because we're being too stringent because we're not expanding our, our our search, right? So definitely that's something that I've started doing about five, six years old shortly after I moved to Austin, which I kind of beat myself up about not having done before, is really contributing to that community, helping out, being a mentor, being a coach, being a guide. Sometimes it's just reviewing somebody's resume. Other times it's talking to 'em about a role that I have and helping them map their current state to that role. But really just being an ally to everyone and anyone who wants to come into this space. >>I love that. I, and I have a feeling, Patty, that you're a great mentor and ally for those in your organization across organizations and those out there that may not know yet. Patty can be an ally for me. I'd love to get your take in our final minutes on a couple things. One, the, what's next in cloud from your perspective, the things that you've seen, what you've been able to achieve, and how do you see your role evolving in the industry at Optum? >>So what's next in cloud, and we've talked about that a lot, is data. How do we manage all this data? How do we catalog this data, how to reuse this data, how to reshift this data? We have data in various different environments. We're a multi-cloud company. So how do we make sure that we don't have the same data everywhere? Or even if we do, how do we reconcile that? So data, data, data, right? And from data, get to information so that we can monetize it and we can share it. So that's the, that's for me is really next step. I mean we, we know the applications that we can build, we know the analytics that we can build, but if we don't have the right data, we're limiting ourselves. So that's definitely one aspect that I know that we wanna drive. And as far as my role, I was fortunate enough to be provided with the leadership of development of a platform for analytics, which yes, involves data. >>So I'm very excited about this, right? Cuz that's, that's next level for me. I've been typically in roles that protect revenue in the DevOps and operations role. And now I'm in a revenue generating role and it has a shift in mindset. But I, I really appreciate it and I'm really taking everything I've learned up to now as a DevOps team. I knew when the bad things came. So now I'm trying to prevent, prevent my team from pushing bad things down the pipe, right? So I'm just really excited about what's, what's, what's to come because there's so many opportunities for improving the products that we build. And I'm so excited to be part of this platform. >>There are the, the horizon of opportunities is really endless, which is exciting. And to your point about data, like I mentioned, for every company, whether it's your grocery store, a retailer, the postal service has to become a data driven company. Cuz as consumers we expect that we bring that into our business lives and we expect to be able to transact in business as easily as we do on the consumer side. And that all requires organizations to not just have access to data, but to be able to build the right data infrastructure, toing insights to act on that, to feed the AI and ML models so that products services can get better, more personalized and meet the demands of the ever demanding consumer, which I know I, one of them. I wanna ask you one more final question and that is, what do you think some of the biggest challenges have been with, with respect to tech innovation in the workforce over the past five years? What are some of those things that, that you've seen that you think we're on the right track moving forward to eliminate some of these? >>That is a good question. I think one of the biggest challenges for me has been not to remain in the status quo, right? Like not to do something because it's what we've been doing, but being in the cloud allows us with so many opportunities where we can fail fast. That let's give it a shot, let's do a quick sprint, let's figure out whether it is a possibility or not. Eliminate it if it's not, and then keep moving, right? Like we don't have the same development methodology before that we had to do three months, five months, six months. You can iterate in two week chunks, get it done, confirm your, your statement or not, or negate it, but at the very least have an answer, right? So that for me is the biggest challenge. We're aware of the thinking we're just not doing. So it'd be very exciting when we, when we pivot from that and really start innovating because we have the time >>Innovating because we have the time, as I mentioned, you know, with the demand of consumers, whether it's consumer in, in on the personal side, business side, those demands are there. But the, the exciting thing is to your point, the innovations are there. The capabilities are there, the data is there. We have a lot of what we need to be able to take advantage of that. So it's gonna be exciting to see what happens over the next few years. Patty, it's been such a pleasure having you on the cube today. Thank you so much for joining. You are clearly a, a leader in terms of women in the cloud. We appreciate what you're doing, your insights, your recommendations, and your insights as to what you see in the future. You've been a great guest. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thank you for having me Lisa. >>My pleasure For Patty Jordan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cubes coverage of Women of the Cloud, brought to you by aws, a special program series. We thank you so much for watching. Take care.

>>When Oracle acquired my SQL via the Sun acquisition, nobody really thought the company would put much effort into the platform preferring to focus all the wood behind its leading Oracle database, Arrow pun intended. But two years ago, Oracle surprised many folks by announcing my SQL Heatwave a new database as a service with a massively parallel hybrid Columbia in Mary Mary architecture that brings together transactional and analytic data in a single platform. Welcome to our latest database, power panel on the cube. My name is Dave Ante, and today we're gonna discuss Oracle's MySQL Heat Wave with a who's who of cloud database industry analysts. Holgar Mueller is with Constellation Research. Mark Stammer is the Dragon Slayer and Wikibon contributor. And Ron Westfall is with Fu Chim Research. Gentlemen, welcome back to the Cube. Always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. >>So we've had a number of of deep dive interviews on the Cube with Nip and Aggarwal. You guys know him? He's a senior vice president of MySQL, Heatwave Development at Oracle. I think you just saw him at Oracle Cloud World and he's come on to describe this is gonna, I'll call it a shock and awe feature additions to to heatwave. You know, the company's clearly putting r and d into the platform and I think at at cloud world we saw like the fifth major release since 2020 when they first announced MySQL heat wave. So just listing a few, they, they got, they taken, brought in analytics machine learning, they got autopilot for machine learning, which is automation onto the basic o l TP functionality of the database. And it's been interesting to watch Oracle's converge database strategy. We've contrasted that amongst ourselves. Love to get your thoughts on Amazon's get the right tool for the right job approach. >>Are they gonna have to change that? You know, Amazon's got the specialized databases, it's just, you know, the both companies are doing well. It just shows there are a lot of ways to, to skin a cat cuz you see some traction in the market in, in both approaches. So today we're gonna focus on the latest heat wave announcements and we're gonna talk about multi-cloud with a native MySQL heat wave implementation, which is available on aws MySQL heat wave for Azure via the Oracle Microsoft interconnect. This kind of cool hybrid action that they got going. Sometimes we call it super cloud. And then we're gonna dive into my SQL Heatwave Lake house, which allows users to process and query data across MyQ databases as heatwave databases, as well as object stores. So, and then we've got, heatwave has been announced on AWS and, and, and Azure, they're available now and Lake House I believe is in beta and I think it's coming out the second half of next year. So again, all of our guests are fresh off of Oracle Cloud world in Las Vegas. So they got the latest scoop. Guys, I'm done talking. Let's get into it. Mark, maybe you could start us off, what's your opinion of my SQL Heatwaves competitive position? When you think about what AWS is doing, you know, Google is, you know, we heard Google Cloud next recently, we heard about all their data innovations. You got, obviously Azure's got a big portfolio, snowflakes doing well in the market. What's your take? >>Well, first let's look at it from the point of view that AWS is the market leader in cloud and cloud services. They own somewhere between 30 to 50% depending on who you read of the market. And then you have Azure as number two and after that it falls off. There's gcp, Google Cloud platform, which is further way down the list and then Oracle and IBM and Alibaba. So when you look at AWS and you and Azure saying, hey, these are the market leaders in the cloud, then you start looking at it and saying, if I am going to provide a service that competes with the service they have, if I can make it available in their cloud, it means that I can be more competitive. And if I'm compelling and compelling means at least twice the performance or functionality or both at half the price, I should be able to gain market share. >>And that's what Oracle's done. They've taken a superior product in my SQL heat wave, which is faster, lower cost does more for a lot less at the end of the day and they make it available to the users of those clouds. You avoid this little thing called egress fees, you avoid the issue of having to migrate from one cloud to another and suddenly you have a very compelling offer. So I look at what Oracle's doing with MyQ and it feels like, I'm gonna use a word term, a flanking maneuver to their competition. They're offering a better service on their platforms. >>All right, so thank you for that. Holger, we've seen this sort of cadence, I sort of referenced it up front a little bit and they sat on MySQL for a decade, then all of a sudden we see this rush of announcements. Why did it take so long? And and more importantly is Oracle, are they developing the right features that cloud database customers are looking for in your view? >>Yeah, great question, but first of all, in your interview you said it's the edit analytics, right? Analytics is kind of like a marketing buzzword. Reports can be analytics, right? The interesting thing, which they did, the first thing they, they, they crossed the chasm between OTP and all up, right? In the same database, right? So major engineering feed very much what customers want and it's all about creating Bellevue for customers, which, which I think is the part why they go into the multi-cloud and why they add these capabilities. And they certainly with the AI capabilities, it's kind of like getting it into an autonomous field, self-driving field now with the lake cost capabilities and meeting customers where they are, like Mark has talked about the e risk costs in the cloud. So that that's a significant advantage, creating value for customers and that's what at the end of the day matters. >>And I believe strongly that long term it's gonna be ones who create better value for customers who will get more of their money From that perspective, why then take them so long? I think it's a great question. I think largely he mentioned the gentleman Nial, it's largely to who leads a product. I used to build products too, so maybe I'm a little fooling myself here, but that made the difference in my view, right? So since he's been charged, he's been building things faster than the rest of the competition, than my SQL space, which in hindsight we thought was a hot and smoking innovation phase. It kind of like was a little self complacent when it comes to the traditional borders of where, where people think, where things are separated between OTP and ola or as an example of adjacent support, right? Structured documents, whereas unstructured documents or databases and all of that has been collapsed and brought together for building a more powerful database for customers. >>So I mean it's certainly, you know, when, when Oracle talks about the competitors, you know, the competitors are in the, I always say they're, if the Oracle talks about you and knows you're doing well, so they talk a lot about aws, talk a little bit about Snowflake, you know, sort of Google, they have partnerships with Azure, but, but in, so I'm presuming that the response in MySQL heatwave was really in, in response to what they were seeing from those big competitors. But then you had Maria DB coming out, you know, the day that that Oracle acquired Sun and, and launching and going after the MySQL base. So it's, I'm, I'm interested and we'll talk about this later and what you guys think AWS and Google and Azure and Snowflake and how they're gonna respond. But, but before I do that, Ron, I want to ask you, you, you, you can get, you know, pretty technical and you've probably seen the benchmarks. >>I know you have Oracle makes a big deal out of it, publishes its benchmarks, makes some transparent on on GI GitHub. Larry Ellison talked about this in his keynote at Cloud World. What are the benchmarks show in general? I mean, when you, when you're new to the market, you gotta have a story like Mark was saying, you gotta be two x you know, the performance at half the cost or you better be or you're not gonna get any market share. So, and, and you know, oftentimes companies don't publish market benchmarks when they're leading. They do it when they, they need to gain share. So what do you make of the benchmarks? Have their, any results that were surprising to you? Have, you know, they been challenged by the competitors. Is it just a bunch of kind of desperate bench marketing to make some noise in the market or you know, are they real? What's your view? >>Well, from my perspective, I think they have the validity. And to your point, I believe that when it comes to competitor responses, that has not really happened. Nobody has like pulled down the information that's on GitHub and said, Oh, here are our price performance results. And they counter oracles. In fact, I think part of the reason why that hasn't happened is that there's the risk if Oracle's coming out and saying, Hey, we can deliver 17 times better query performance using our capabilities versus say, Snowflake when it comes to, you know, the Lakehouse platform and Snowflake turns around and says it's actually only 15 times better during performance, that's not exactly an effective maneuver. And so I think this is really to oracle's credit and I think it's refreshing because these differentiators are significant. We're not talking, you know, like 1.2% differences. We're talking 17 fold differences, we're talking six fold differences depending on, you know, where the spotlight is being shined and so forth. >>And so I think this is actually something that is actually too good to believe initially at first blush. If I'm a cloud database decision maker, I really have to prioritize this. I really would know, pay a lot more attention to this. And that's why I posed the question to Oracle and others like, okay, if these differentiators are so significant, why isn't the needle moving a bit more? And it's for, you know, some of the usual reasons. One is really deep discounting coming from, you know, the other players that's really kind of, you know, marketing 1 0 1, this is something you need to do when there's a real competitive threat to keep, you know, a customer in your own customer base. Plus there is the usual fear and uncertainty about moving from one platform to another. But I think, you know, the traction, the momentum is, is shifting an Oracle's favor. I think we saw that in the Q1 efforts, for example, where Oracle cloud grew 44% and that it generated, you know, 4.8 billion and revenue if I recall correctly. And so, so all these are demonstrating that's Oracle is making, I think many of the right moves, publishing these figures for anybody to look at from their own perspective is something that is, I think, good for the market and I think it's just gonna continue to pay dividends for Oracle down the horizon as you know, competition intens plots. So if I were in, >>Dave, can I, Dave, can I interject something and, and what Ron just said there? Yeah, please go ahead. A couple things here, one discounting, which is a common practice when you have a real threat, as Ron pointed out, isn't going to help much in this situation simply because you can't discount to the point where you improve your performance and the performance is a huge differentiator. You may be able to get your price down, but the problem that most of them have is they don't have an integrated product service. They don't have an integrated O L T P O L A P M L N data lake. Even if you cut out two of them, they don't have any of them integrated. They have multiple services that are required separate integration and that can't be overcome with discounting. And the, they, you have to pay for each one of these. And oh, by the way, as you grow, the discounts go away. So that's a, it's a minor important detail. >>So, so that's a TCO question mark, right? And I know you look at this a lot, if I had that kind of price performance advantage, I would be pounding tco, especially if I need two separate databases to do the job. That one can do, that's gonna be, the TCO numbers are gonna be off the chart or maybe down the chart, which you want. Have you looked at this and how does it compare with, you know, the big cloud guys, for example, >>I've looked at it in depth, in fact, I'm working on another TCO on this arena, but you can find it on Wiki bod in which I compared TCO for MySEQ Heat wave versus Aurora plus Redshift plus ML plus Blue. I've compared it against gcps services, Azure services, Snowflake with other services. And there's just no comparison. The, the TCO differences are huge. More importantly, thefor, the, the TCO per performance is huge. We're talking in some cases multiple orders of magnitude, but at least an order of magnitude difference. So discounting isn't gonna help you much at the end of the day, it's only going to lower your cost a little, but it doesn't improve the automation, it doesn't improve the performance, it doesn't improve the time to insight, it doesn't improve all those things that you want out of a database or multiple databases because you >>Can't discount yourself to a higher value proposition. >>So what about, I wonder ho if you could chime in on the developer angle. You, you followed that, that market. How do these innovations from heatwave, I think you used the term developer velocity. I've heard you used that before. Yeah, I mean, look, Oracle owns Java, okay, so it, it's, you know, most popular, you know, programming language in the world, blah, blah blah. But it does it have the, the minds and hearts of, of developers and does, where does heatwave fit into that equation? >>I think heatwave is gaining quickly mindshare on the developer side, right? It's not the traditional no sequel database which grew up, there's a traditional mistrust of oracles to developers to what was happening to open source when gets acquired. Like in the case of Oracle versus Java and where my sql, right? And, but we know it's not a good competitive strategy to, to bank on Oracle screwing up because it hasn't worked not on Java known my sequel, right? And for developers, it's, once you get to know a technology product and you can do more, it becomes kind of like a Swiss army knife and you can build more use case, you can build more powerful applications. That's super, super important because you don't have to get certified in multiple databases. You, you are fast at getting things done, you achieve fire, develop velocity, and the managers are happy because they don't have to license more things, send you to more trainings, have more risk of something not being delivered, right? >>So it's really the, we see the suite where this best of breed play happening here, which in general was happening before already with Oracle's flagship database. Whereas those Amazon as an example, right? And now the interesting thing is every step away Oracle was always a one database company that can be only one and they're now generally talking about heat web and that two database company with different market spaces, but same value proposition of integrating more things very, very quickly to have a universal database that I call, they call the converge database for all the needs of an enterprise to run certain application use cases. And that's what's attractive to developers. >>It's, it's ironic isn't it? I mean I, you know, the rumor was the TK Thomas Curian left Oracle cuz he wanted to put Oracle database on other clouds and other places. And maybe that was the rift. Maybe there was, I'm sure there was other things, but, but Oracle clearly is now trying to expand its Tam Ron with, with heatwave into aws, into Azure. How do you think Oracle's gonna do, you were at a cloud world, what was the sentiment from customers and the independent analyst? Is this just Oracle trying to screw with the competition, create a little diversion? Or is this, you know, serious business for Oracle? What do you think? >>No, I think it has lakes. I think it's definitely, again, attriting to Oracle's overall ability to differentiate not only my SQL heat wave, but its overall portfolio. And I think the fact that they do have the alliance with the Azure in place, that this is definitely demonstrating their commitment to meeting the multi-cloud needs of its customers as well as what we pointed to in terms of the fact that they're now offering, you know, MySQL capabilities within AWS natively and that it can now perform AWS's own offering. And I think this is all demonstrating that Oracle is, you know, not letting up, they're not resting on its laurels. That's clearly we are living in a multi-cloud world, so why not just make it more easy for customers to be able to use cloud databases according to their own specific, specific needs. And I think, you know, to holder's point, I think that definitely lines with being able to bring on more application developers to leverage these capabilities. >>I think one important announcement that's related to all this was the JSON relational duality capabilities where now it's a lot easier for application developers to use a language that they're very familiar with a JS O and not have to worry about going into relational databases to store their J S O N application coding. So this is, I think an example of the innovation that's enhancing the overall Oracle portfolio and certainly all the work with machine learning is definitely paying dividends as well. And as a result, I see Oracle continue to make these inroads that we pointed to. But I agree with Mark, you know, the short term discounting is just a stall tag. This is not denying the fact that Oracle is being able to not only deliver price performance differentiators that are dramatic, but also meeting a wide range of needs for customers out there that aren't just limited device performance consideration. >>Being able to support multi-cloud according to customer needs. Being able to reach out to the application developer community and address a very specific challenge that has plagued them for many years now. So bring it all together. Yeah, I see this as just enabling Oracles who ring true with customers. That the customers that were there were basically all of them, even though not all of them are going to be saying the same things, they're all basically saying positive feedback. And likewise, I think the analyst community is seeing this. It's always refreshing to be able to talk to customers directly and at Oracle cloud there was a litany of them and so this is just a difference maker as well as being able to talk to strategic partners. The nvidia, I think partnerships also testament to Oracle's ongoing ability to, you know, make the ecosystem more user friendly for the customers out there. >>Yeah, it's interesting when you get these all in one tools, you know, the Swiss Army knife, you expect that it's not able to be best of breed. That's the kind of surprising thing that I'm hearing about, about heatwave. I want to, I want to talk about Lake House because when I think of Lake House, I think data bricks, and to my knowledge data bricks hasn't been in the sites of Oracle yet. Maybe they're next, but, but Oracle claims that MySQL, heatwave, Lakehouse is a breakthrough in terms of capacity and performance. Mark, what are your thoughts on that? Can you double click on, on Lakehouse Oracle's claims for things like query performance and data loading? What does it mean for the market? Is Oracle really leading in, in the lake house competitive landscape? What are your thoughts? >>Well, but name in the game is what are the problems you're solving for the customer? More importantly, are those problems urgent or important? If they're urgent, customers wanna solve 'em. Now if they're important, they might get around to them. So you look at what they're doing with Lake House or previous to that machine learning or previous to that automation or previous to that O L A with O ltp and they're merging all this capability together. If you look at Snowflake or data bricks, they're tacking one problem. You look at MyQ heat wave, they're tacking multiple problems. So when you say, yeah, their queries are much better against the lake house in combination with other analytics in combination with O ltp and the fact that there are no ETLs. So you're getting all this done in real time. So it's, it's doing the query cross, cross everything in real time. >>You're solving multiple user and developer problems, you're increasing their ability to get insight faster, you're having shorter response times. So yeah, they really are solving urgent problems for customers. And by putting it where the customer lives, this is the brilliance of actually being multicloud. And I know I'm backing up here a second, but by making it work in AWS and Azure where people already live, where they already have applications, what they're saying is, we're bringing it to you. You don't have to come to us to get these, these benefits, this value overall, I think it's a brilliant strategy. I give Nip and Argo wallet a huge, huge kudos for what he's doing there. So yes, what they're doing with the lake house is going to put notice on data bricks and Snowflake and everyone else for that matter. Well >>Those are guys that whole ago you, you and I have talked about this. Those are, those are the guys that are doing sort of the best of breed. You know, they're really focused and they, you know, tend to do well at least out of the gate. Now you got Oracle's converged philosophy, obviously with Oracle database. We've seen that now it's kicking in gear with, with heatwave, you know, this whole thing of sweets versus best of breed. I mean the long term, you know, customers tend to migrate towards suite, but the new shiny toy tends to get the growth. How do you think this is gonna play out in cloud database? >>Well, it's the forever never ending story, right? And in software right suite, whereas best of breed and so far in the long run suites have always won, right? So, and sometimes they struggle again because the inherent problem of sweets is you build something larger, it has more complexity and that means your cycles to get everything working together to integrate the test that roll it out, certify whatever it is, takes you longer, right? And that's not the case. It's a fascinating part of what the effort around my SQL heat wave is that the team is out executing the previous best of breed data, bringing us something together. Now if they can maintain that pace, that's something to to, to be seen. But it, the strategy, like what Mark was saying, bring the software to the data is of course interesting and unique and totally an Oracle issue in the past, right? >>Yeah. But it had to be in your database on oci. And but at, that's an interesting part. The interesting thing on the Lake health side is, right, there's three key benefits of a lakehouse. The first one is better reporting analytics, bring more rich information together, like make the, the, the case for silicon angle, right? We want to see engagements for this video, we want to know what's happening. That's a mixed transactional video media use case, right? Typical Lakehouse use case. The next one is to build more rich applications, transactional applications which have video and these elements in there, which are the engaging one. And the third one, and that's where I'm a little critical and concerned, is it's really the base platform for artificial intelligence, right? To run deep learning to run things automatically because they have all the data in one place can create in one way. >>And that's where Oracle, I know that Ron talked about Invidia for a moment, but that's where Oracle doesn't have the strongest best story. Nonetheless, the two other main use cases of the lake house are very strong, very well only concern is four 50 terabyte sounds long. It's an arbitrary limitation. Yeah, sounds as big. So for the start, and it's the first word, they can make that bigger. You don't want your lake house to be limited and the terabyte sizes or any even petabyte size because you want to have the certainty. I can put everything in there that I think it might be relevant without knowing what questions to ask and query those questions. >>Yeah. And you know, in the early days of no schema on right, it just became a mess. But now technology has evolved to allow us to actually get more value out of that data. Data lake. Data swamp is, you know, not much more, more, more, more logical. But, and I want to get in, in a moment, I want to come back to how you think the competitors are gonna respond. Are they gonna have to sort of do a more of a converged approach? AWS in particular? But before I do, Ron, I want to ask you a question about autopilot because I heard Larry Ellison's keynote and he was talking about how, you know, most security issues are human errors with autonomy and autonomous database and things like autopilot. We take care of that. It's like autonomous vehicles, they're gonna be safer. And I went, well maybe, maybe someday. So Oracle really tries to emphasize this, that every time you see an announcement from Oracle, they talk about new, you know, autonomous capabilities. It, how legit is it? Do people care? What about, you know, what's new for heatwave Lakehouse? How much of a differentiator, Ron, do you really think autopilot is in this cloud database space? >>Yeah, I think it will definitely enhance the overall proposition. I don't think people are gonna buy, you know, lake house exclusively cause of autopilot capabilities, but when they look at the overall picture, I think it will be an added capability bonus to Oracle's benefit. And yeah, I think it's kind of one of these age old questions, how much do you automate and what is the bounce to strike? And I think we all understand with the automatic car, autonomous car analogy that there are limitations to being able to use that. However, I think it's a tool that basically every organization out there needs to at least have or at least evaluate because it goes to the point of it helps with ease of use, it helps make automation more balanced in terms of, you know, being able to test, all right, let's automate this process and see if it works well, then we can go on and switch on on autopilot for other processes. >>And then, you know, that allows, for example, the specialists to spend more time on business use cases versus, you know, manual maintenance of, of the cloud database and so forth. So I think that actually is a, a legitimate value proposition. I think it's just gonna be a case by case basis. Some organizations are gonna be more aggressive with putting automation throughout their processes throughout their organization. Others are gonna be more cautious. But it's gonna be, again, something that will help the overall Oracle proposition. And something that I think will be used with caution by many organizations, but other organizations are gonna like, hey, great, this is something that is really answering a real problem. And that is just easing the use of these databases, but also being able to better handle the automation capabilities and benefits that come with it without having, you know, a major screwup happened and the process of transitioning to more automated capabilities. >>Now, I didn't attend cloud world, it's just too many red eyes, you know, recently, so I passed. But one of the things I like to do at those events is talk to customers, you know, in the spirit of the truth, you know, they, you know, you'd have the hallway, you know, track and to talk to customers and they say, Hey, you know, here's the good, the bad and the ugly. So did you guys, did you talk to any customers my SQL Heatwave customers at, at cloud world? And and what did you learn? I don't know, Mark, did you, did you have any luck and, and having some, some private conversations? >>Yeah, I had quite a few private conversations. The one thing before I get to that, I want disagree with one point Ron made, I do believe there are customers out there buying the heat wave service, the MySEQ heat wave server service because of autopilot. Because autopilot is really revolutionary in many ways in the sense for the MySEQ developer in that it, it auto provisions, it auto parallel loads, IT auto data places it auto shape predictions. It can tell you what machine learning models are going to tell you, gonna give you your best results. And, and candidly, I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't wanna give up pedantic tasks that are pain in the kahoo, which they'd rather not do and if it's long as it was done right for them. So yes, I do think people are buying it because of autopilot and that's based on some of the conversations I had with customers at Oracle Cloud World. >>In fact, it was like, yeah, that's great, yeah, we get fantastic performance, but this really makes my life easier and I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't want to make their life easier. And it does. So yeah, I've talked to a few of them. They were excited. I asked them if they ran into any bugs, were there any difficulties in moving to it? And the answer was no. In both cases, it's interesting to note, my sequel is the most popular database on the planet. Well, some will argue that it's neck and neck with SQL Server, but if you add in Mariah DB and ProCon db, which are forks of MySQL, then yeah, by far and away it's the most popular. And as a result of that, everybody for the most part has typically a my sequel database somewhere in their organization. So this is a brilliant situation for anybody going after MyQ, but especially for heat wave. And the customers I talk to love it. I didn't find anybody complaining about it. And >>What about the migration? We talked about TCO earlier. Did your t does your TCO analysis include the migration cost or do you kind of conveniently leave that out or what? >>Well, when you look at migration costs, there are different kinds of migration costs. By the way, the worst job in the data center is the data migration manager. Forget it, no other job is as bad as that one. You get no attaboys for doing it. Right? And then when you screw up, oh boy. So in real terms, anything that can limit data migration is a good thing. And when you look at Data Lake, that limits data migration. So if you're already a MySEQ user, this is a pure MySQL as far as you're concerned. It's just a, a simple transition from one to the other. You may wanna make sure nothing broke and every you, all your tables are correct and your schema's, okay, but it's all the same. So it's a simple migration. So it's pretty much a non-event, right? When you migrate data from an O LTP to an O L A P, that's an ETL and that's gonna take time. >>But you don't have to do that with my SQL heat wave. So that's gone when you start talking about machine learning, again, you may have an etl, you may not, depending on the circumstances, but again, with my SQL heat wave, you don't, and you don't have duplicate storage, you don't have to copy it from one storage container to another to be able to be used in a different database, which by the way, ultimately adds much more cost than just the other service. So yeah, I looked at the migration and again, the users I talked to said it was a non-event. It was literally moving from one physical machine to another. If they had a new version of MySEQ running on something else and just wanted to migrate it over or just hook it up or just connect it to the data, it worked just fine. >>Okay, so every day it sounds like you guys feel, and we've certainly heard this, my colleague David Foyer, the semi-retired David Foyer was always very high on heatwave. So I think you knows got some real legitimacy here coming from a standing start, but I wanna talk about the competition, how they're likely to respond. I mean, if your AWS and you got heatwave is now in your cloud, so there's some good aspects of that. The database guys might not like that, but the infrastructure guys probably love it. Hey, more ways to sell, you know, EC two and graviton, but you're gonna, the database guys in AWS are gonna respond. They're gonna say, Hey, we got Redshift, we got aqua. What's your thoughts on, on not only how that's gonna resonate with customers, but I'm interested in what you guys think will a, I never say never about aws, you know, and are they gonna try to build, in your view a converged Oola and o LTP database? You know, Snowflake is taking an ecosystem approach. They've added in transactional capabilities to the portfolio so they're not standing still. What do you guys see in the competitive landscape in that regard going forward? Maybe Holger, you could start us off and anybody else who wants to can chime in, >>Happy to, you mentioned Snowflake last, we'll start there. I think Snowflake is imitating that strategy, right? That building out original data warehouse and the clouds tasking project to really proposition to have other data available there because AI is relevant for everybody. Ultimately people keep data in the cloud for ultimately running ai. So you see the same suite kind of like level strategy, it's gonna be a little harder because of the original positioning. How much would people know that you're doing other stuff? And I just, as a former developer manager of developers, I just don't see the speed at the moment happening at Snowflake to become really competitive to Oracle. On the flip side, putting my Oracle hat on for a moment back to you, Mark and Iran, right? What could Oracle still add? Because the, the big big things, right? The traditional chasms in the database world, they have built everything, right? >>So I, I really scratched my hat and gave Nipon a hard time at Cloud world say like, what could you be building? Destiny was very conservative. Let's get the Lakehouse thing done, it's gonna spring next year, right? And the AWS is really hard because AWS value proposition is these small innovation teams, right? That they build two pizza teams, which can be fit by two pizzas, not large teams, right? And you need suites to large teams to build these suites with lots of functionalities to make sure they work together. They're consistent, they have the same UX on the administration side, they can consume the same way, they have the same API registry, can't even stop going where the synergy comes to play over suite. So, so it's gonna be really, really hard for them to change that. But AWS super pragmatic. They're always by themselves that they'll listen to customers if they learn from customers suite as a proposition. I would not be surprised if AWS trying to bring things closer together, being morely together. >>Yeah. Well how about, can we talk about multicloud if, if, again, Oracle is very on on Oracle as you said before, but let's look forward, you know, half a year or a year. What do you think about Oracle's moves in, in multicloud in terms of what kind of penetration they're gonna have in the marketplace? You saw a lot of presentations at at cloud world, you know, we've looked pretty closely at the, the Microsoft Azure deal. I think that's really interesting. I've, I've called it a little bit of early days of a super cloud. What impact do you think this is gonna have on, on the marketplace? But, but both. And think about it within Oracle's customer base, I have no doubt they'll do great there. But what about beyond its existing install base? What do you guys think? >>Ryan, do you wanna jump on that? Go ahead. Go ahead Ryan. No, no, no, >>That's an excellent point. I think it aligns with what we've been talking about in terms of Lakehouse. I think Lake House will enable Oracle to pull more customers, more bicycle customers onto the Oracle platforms. And I think we're seeing all the signs pointing toward Oracle being able to make more inroads into the overall market. And that includes garnishing customers from the leaders in, in other words, because they are, you know, coming in as a innovator, a an alternative to, you know, the AWS proposition, the Google cloud proposition that they have less to lose and there's a result they can really drive the multi-cloud messaging to resonate with not only their existing customers, but also to be able to, to that question, Dave's posing actually garnish customers onto their platform. And, and that includes naturally my sequel but also OCI and so forth. So that's how I'm seeing this playing out. I think, you know, again, Oracle's reporting is indicating that, and I think what we saw, Oracle Cloud world is definitely validating the idea that Oracle can make more waves in the overall market in this regard. >>You know, I, I've floated this idea of Super cloud, it's kind of tongue in cheek, but, but there, I think there is some merit to it in terms of building on top of hyperscale infrastructure and abstracting some of the, that complexity. And one of the things that I'm most interested in is industry clouds and an Oracle acquisition of Cerner. I was struck by Larry Ellison's keynote, it was like, I don't know, an hour and a half and an hour and 15 minutes was focused on healthcare transformation. Well, >>So vertical, >>Right? And so, yeah, so you got Oracle's, you know, got some industry chops and you, and then you think about what they're building with, with not only oci, but then you got, you know, MyQ, you can now run in dedicated regions. You got ADB on on Exadata cloud to customer, you can put that OnPrem in in your data center and you look at what the other hyperscalers are, are doing. I I say other hyperscalers, I've always said Oracle's not really a hyperscaler, but they got a cloud so they're in the game. But you can't get, you know, big query OnPrem, you look at outposts, it's very limited in terms of, you know, the database support and again, that that will will evolve. But now you got Oracle's got, they announced Alloy, we can white label their cloud. So I'm interested in what you guys think about these moves, especially the industry cloud. We see, you know, Walmart is doing sort of their own cloud. You got Goldman Sachs doing a cloud. Do you, you guys, what do you think about that and what role does Oracle play? Any thoughts? >>Yeah, let me lemme jump on that for a moment. Now, especially with the MyQ, by making that available in multiple clouds, what they're doing is this follows the philosophy they've had the past with doing cloud, a customer taking the application and the data and putting it where the customer lives. If it's on premise, it's on premise. If it's in the cloud, it's in the cloud. By making the mice equal heat wave, essentially a plug compatible with any other mice equal as far as your, your database is concern and then giving you that integration with O L A P and ML and Data Lake and everything else, then what you've got is a compelling offering. You're making it easier for the customer to use. So I look the difference between MyQ and the Oracle database, MyQ is going to capture market more market share for them. >>You're not gonna find a lot of new users for the Oracle debate database. Yeah, there are always gonna be new users, don't get me wrong, but it's not gonna be a huge growth. Whereas my SQL heatwave is probably gonna be a major growth engine for Oracle going forward. Not just in their own cloud, but in AWS and in Azure and on premise over time that eventually it'll get there. It's not there now, but it will, they're doing the right thing on that basis. They're taking the services and when you talk about multicloud and making them available where the customer wants them, not forcing them to go where you want them, if that makes sense. And as far as where they're going in the future, I think they're gonna take a page outta what they've done with the Oracle database. They'll add things like JSON and XML and time series and spatial over time they'll make it a, a complete converged database like they did with the Oracle database. The difference being Oracle database will scale bigger and will have more transactions and be somewhat faster. And my SQL will be, for anyone who's not on the Oracle database, they're, they're not stupid, that's for sure. >>They've done Jason already. Right. But I give you that they could add graph and time series, right. Since eat with, Right, Right. Yeah, that's something absolutely right. That's, that's >>A sort of a logical move, right? >>Right. But that's, that's some kid ourselves, right? I mean has worked in Oracle's favor, right? 10 x 20 x, the amount of r and d, which is in the MyQ space, has been poured at trying to snatch workloads away from Oracle by starting with IBM 30 years ago, 20 years ago, Microsoft and, and, and, and didn't work, right? Database applications are extremely sticky when they run, you don't want to touch SIM and grow them, right? So that doesn't mean that heat phase is not an attractive offering, but it will be net new things, right? And what works in my SQL heat wave heat phases favor a little bit is it's not the massive enterprise applications which have like we the nails like, like you might be only running 30% or Oracle, but the connections and the interfaces into that is, is like 70, 80% of your enterprise. >>You take it out and it's like the spaghetti ball where you say, ah, no I really don't, don't want to do all that. Right? You don't, don't have that massive part with the equals heat phase sequel kind of like database which are more smaller tactical in comparison, but still I, I don't see them taking so much share. They will be growing because of a attractive value proposition quickly on the, the multi-cloud, right? I think it's not really multi-cloud. If you give people the chance to run your offering on different clouds, right? You can run it there. The multi-cloud advantages when the Uber offering comes out, which allows you to do things across those installations, right? I can migrate data, I can create data across something like Google has done with B query Omni, I can run predictive models or even make iron models in different place and distribute them, right? And Oracle is paving the road for that, but being available on these clouds. But the multi-cloud capability of database which knows I'm running on different clouds that is still yet to be built there. >>Yeah. And >>That the problem with >>That, that's the super cloud concept that I flowed and I I've always said kinda snowflake with a single global instance is sort of, you know, headed in that direction and maybe has a league. What's the issue with that mark? >>Yeah, the problem with the, with that version, the multi-cloud is clouds to charge egress fees. As long as they charge egress fees to move data between clouds, it's gonna make it very difficult to do a real multi-cloud implementation. Even Snowflake, which runs multi-cloud, has to pass out on the egress fees of their customer when data moves between clouds. And that's really expensive. I mean there, there is one customer I talked to who is beta testing for them, the MySQL heatwave and aws. The only reason they didn't want to do that until it was running on AWS is the egress fees were so great to move it to OCI that they couldn't afford it. Yeah. Egress fees are the big issue but, >>But Mark the, the point might be you might wanna root query and only get the results set back, right was much more tinier, which been the answer before for low latency between the class A problem, which we sometimes still have but mostly don't have. Right? And I think in general this with fees coming down based on the Oracle general E with fee move and it's very hard to justify those, right? But, but it's, it's not about moving data as a multi-cloud high value use case. It's about doing intelligent things with that data, right? Putting into other places, replicating it, what I'm saying the same thing what you said before, running remote queries on that, analyzing it, running AI on it, running AI models on that. That's the interesting thing. Cross administered in the same way. Taking things out, making sure compliance happens. Making sure when Ron says I don't want to be American anymore, I want to be in the European cloud that is gets migrated, right? So tho those are the interesting value use case which are really, really hard for enterprise to program hand by hand by developers and they would love to have out of the box and that's yet the innovation to come to, we have to come to see. But the first step to get there is that your software runs in multiple clouds and that's what Oracle's doing so well with my SQL >>Guys. Amazing. >>Go ahead. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>For example, >>Amazing amount of data knowledge and, and brain power in this market. Guys, I really want to thank you for coming on to the cube. Ron Holger. Mark, always a pleasure to have you on. Really appreciate your time. >>Well all the last names we're very happy for Romanic last and moderator. Thanks Dave for moderating us. All right, >>We'll see. We'll see you guys around. Safe travels to all and thank you for watching this power panel, The Truth About My SQL Heat Wave on the cube. Your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John fur, host of the cube here at our headquarters on the west coast in Palo Alto, California. Got a great news guest here. Matt McGill, Wayne managing director of Madrona venture group is here with me on the big news and drone raising their record 690 million fund and partnering with their innovative founders. Matt, thanks for coming on and, and talking about the news and congratulations on the dry powder. >>Well, Hey, thanks so much, John. Appreciate you having me on the show. >>Well, great news here. Oley validation. We're in a new market. Everyone's talking about the new normal, we're talking about a recession inflation, but yet we've been reporting that this is kind of the first generation that cloud hyperscale economic scale and technical benefits have kind of hit any kind of economic downturn. If you go back to to 2008, our last downturn, the cloud really hasn't hit that tipping point. Now the innovation, as we've been reporting with our startup showcases and looking at the results from the hyperscalers, this funding news is kind of validation that the tech society intersection is working. You guys just get to the news 430 million in the Madrona fund nine and 200. And I think 60 million acceleration fund three, which means you're gonna go stay with your roots with seed early stage and then have some rocket fuel for kind of the accelerated expansion growth side of it. Not like late stage growth, but like scaling growth. This is kind of the news. Is that right? >>That's right. You know, we, we've had a long time strategy over 25 years here in Seattle of being early, early stage. You know, it's like our friends at Amazon like to say is, well, we're there at day one and we wanna help build companies for the long run for over 25 years. We've been doing that in Seattle. And I think one of the things we've realized, I mean, this is, these funds are the largest funds ever raised by a Seattle based venture capital firm and that's notable in and of itself. But we think that's the reason is because Seattle has continued to innovate in areas like consumer internet software cloud, of course, where the cloud capital of the world and increasingly the applications of machine learning. And so with all that combination, we believe there's a ton more companies to be built here in the Pacific Northwest and in Seattle in particular. And then through our acceleration fund where we're investing in companies anywhere in the country, in fact, anywhere in the world, those are the kinds of companies that want to have the Seattle point of view. They don't understand how to work with Amazon and AWS. They don't understand how to work with Microsoft and we have some unique relationships in those places and we think we can help them succeed in doing that. >>You know, it's notable that you guys in particular have been very close with Jeff Bayo Andy Jesse, and the success of ABUS as well as Microsoft. So, you know, Seattle has become cloud city. Everyone kind of knows that from a cloud perspective, obviously Microsoft's roots have been there for a long, long time. You go back, I mean, August capital, early days, funding Microsoft. You remember those days not to date myself, but you know, Microsoft kind of went up there and kind of established it a Amazon there as well. Now you got Google here, you got Facebook in the valley. You guys are now also coming down. This funding comes on the heels of you appointing a new managing director here in Palo Alto. This is now the migration of Madrona coming into the valley. Is that right? Is that what we're seeing? >>Well, I think what we're trying to do is bring the things that we know uniquely from Seattle and the companies here down to Silicon valley. We've got a terrific partner in Karama Hend, Andrew he's somebody that we have worked together with over the years, co-investing in companies. So we knew him really well. It was a bit opportunistic for us, but what we're hearing over and over again is a lot of these companies based in the valley, based in other parts of the country, they don't know really how to best work with the Microsoft and Amazons are understand the services that they offer. And, you know, we have that capability. We have those relationships. We wanna bring that to bear and helping build great companies. >>What is your expectation on the Silicon valley presence here? You can kind of give a hint here kind of a gateway to Seattle, but you got a lot of developers here. We just reported this morning that MEA just open source pie, torch to the Linux foundation again, and Mary material kind of trend we are seeing open source now has become there's no debate anymore has become the software industry. There's no more issue around that. This is real. I >>Think that's right. I mean, you know, once, you know, Satya became CEO, Microsoft, and they started embracing open source, you know, that was gonna be the last big tech holdout. We think open source is very interesting in terms of what it can produce and create in terms of next generation, innovative innovation. It's great to see companies like Facebook like Uber and others that have had a long track record of open source capabilities. But what we're also seeing is you need to build businesses around that, that a lot of enterprises don't wanna buy just the open source and stitch it together themselves. They want somebody to do it with them. And whether that's the way that, you know, companies like MongoDB have built that out over time or that's, you know, or elastic or, you know, companies like opt ML and our portfolio, or even the big cloud, you know, hyperscalers, you know, they are increasingly embracing open source and building finished services, managed services on top of it. So that's a big wave that we've been investing in for a number of years now and are highly confident gonna >>Continue. You know, I've been a big fan of Pacific Northwest for a while. You know, love going up there and talking to the folks at Microsoft and Amazon and AWS, but there's been a big trend in venture capital where a lot of the, the later stage folks, including private equity have come in, you seen tiger global even tiger global alumni, that the Cubs they call them, you know, they're coming down and playing in the early state and the results haven't been that good. You guys have had a track record in your success. Again, a hundred percent of your institutional investors have honed up with you on this two fund strategy of close to 700 million. What's this formula says, why aren't they winning what's is it, they don't have the ecosystem? Is it they're spraying and praying without a lot of discipline? What's the dynamic between the folks like Madrona, the Neas of the world who kind of come in and Sequoia who kind of do it right, right. Come in. And they get it done in the right way. The early stage. I just say the private equity folks, >>You know, I think that early stage venture is a local business. It is a geographically proximate business when you're helping incredible founders, try to really dial in that early founder market fit. This is before you even get to product market fit. And, and so the, the team building that goes on the talking to potential customers, the ITER iterating on business strategy, this is a roll up your sleeves kind of thing. It's not a financial transaction. And so what you're trying to do is have a presence and an understanding, a prepared mind of one of the big themes and the kinds of founders that with, you know, our encouragement and our help can go build lasting companies. Now, when you get to a, a, a later stage, you know, you get to that growth stage. It is generally more of a financial, you know, kind of engineering sort of proposition. And there's some folks that are great at that. What we do is we support these companies all the way through. We reserve enough capital to be with them at the seed stage, the series B stage the, you know, the crossover round before you go public, all of those sorts of things. And we love partnering with some of these other people, but there's a lot of heavy lifting at the early, early stages of a business. And it's, it's not, I think a model that everybody's architected to do >>Well, you know, trust becomes a big factor in all this. You kind of, when you talk about like that, I hear you speaking. It makes me think of like trusted advisor meets money, not so much telling people what to do. You guys have had a good track record and, and being added value, not values from track. And sometimes that values from track is getting in the way of the entrepreneur by, you know, running the certain meetings, driving board meetings and driving the agenda that you see to see that trend where people try too hard and that a force function, the entrepreneur we're living in a world now where everyone's talking to each other, you got, you know, there's no more glass door it's everyone's on Twitter, right? So you can see some move, someone trying to control the supply chain of talent by term sheet, overvaluing them. >>You guys are, have a different strategy. You guys have a network I've noticed that Madrona has attracted them high end talent coming outta Microsoft outta AWS season, season, senior talent. I won't say, you know, senior citizens, but you know, people have done things scaled up businesses, as well as attract young talent. Can you share with our audience that dynamic of the, the seasoned veterans, the systems thinkers, the ones who have been there done that built software, built teams to the new young entrepreneurs coming in, what's the dynamic, like, how do you guys look at at those networks? How do you nurture them? Could you share your, your strategy on how you're gonna pull all this together, going forward? >>You know, we, we think a lot about building the innovation ecosystem, like a phrase around here that you hear a lot is the bigger pie theory. How do we build the bigger pie? If we're focusing on building the bigger pie, there'll be plenty of that pie for Madrona Madrona companies. And in that mindset says, okay, how are we gonna invest in the innovation ecosystem? And then actually to use a term, you know, one of our founders who unfortunately passed away this year, Tom Aber, he had just written a book called flywheel. And I think it embodies this mindset that we have of how do you create that flywheel within a community? And of course, interestingly enough, I think Tom both learned and contributed to that. He was on the board of Amazon for almost 20 years in helping build some of the flywheels at Amazon. >>So that's what we carry forward. And we know that there's a lot of value in experiential learning. And so we've been fortunate to have some folks, you know, that have worked at some of those, you know, kind iconic companies, join us and find that they really love this company building journey. We've also got some terrific younger folks that have, you know, some very fresh perspectives and a lot of, a lot of creativity. And they're bringing that together with our team overall. And you know, what we really are trying to do at the end of the day is find incredible founders who wanna build something lasting, insignificant, and provide our kind of our time, our best ideas, our, our perspective. And of course our capital to help them be >>Successful. I love the ecosystem play. I think that's a human capital game too. I like the way you guys are thinking about that. I do wanna get your reaction, cause I know you're close to Amazon and Microsoft, but mainly Jeff Bezos as well. You mentioned your, your partner who passed away was on the board. A lot of great props on and tributes online. I saw that, I know I didn't know him at all. So I really can't comment, but I did notice that Bezos and, and jazz in particular were complimentary. And recently I just saw Bezos comment on Twitter about the, you know, the Lord of the rings movie. They're putting out the series and he says, you gotta have a team. That's kinda like rebels. I'm paraphrasing, cuz these folks never done a movie like this before. So they're, they're getting good props and reviews in this new world order where entrepreneurs gotta do things different. >>What's the one thing that you think entrepreneurs need to do different to make this next startup journey different and successful because the world is different. There's not a lot of press to relate to Andy Jassey even on stage last week in, in, in LA was kind of, he's not really revealing. He's on his talking points, message, the press aren't out there and big numbers anymore. And you got a lot of different go-to market strategies, omnichannel, social different ways to communicate to customers. Yeah. So product market fit is becomes big. So how do you see this new flywheel emerging for those entrepreneurs have to go out there, roll up their sleeves and make it happen. And what kind of resources do you think they need to be successful? What are you guys advocating? >>Well, you know, what's really interesting about that question is I've heard Jeff say many times that when people ask him, what's gotta be different. He, he reminds them to think about what's not gonna change. And he usually starts to then talk about things like price, convenience, and selection. Customer's never gonna want a higher price, less convenience, smaller selection. And so when you build on some of those principles of, what's not gonna change, it's easier for you to understand what could be changing as it relates to the differences. One of the biggest differences, I don't think any of us have fully figured out yet is what does it mean to be productive in a hybrid work mode? We happen to believe that it's still gonna have a kernel of people that are geographically close, that are part of the founding and building in the early stages of a company. >>And, and it's an and equation that they're going to also have people that are distributed around the country, perhaps around the world that are some of the best talent that they attract to their team. The other thing that I think coming back to what remains the same is being hyper focused on a certain customer and a certain problem that you're passionate about solving. And that's really what we look for when we look for this founder market fit. And it can be a lot of different things from the next generation water bottle to a better way to handle deep learning models and get 'em deployed in the cloud. If you've got that passion and you've got some inkling of the skill of how to build a better solution, that's never gonna go away. That's gonna be enduring, but exactly how you do that as a team in a hybrid world, I think that's gonna be different. >>Yeah. One thing that's not changing is that your investor, makeup's not changing a hundred percent of your existing institutional investors have signed back on with you guys and your oversubscribed, lot of demand. What is your flywheel success formula? Why is Tron is so successful? Can you share some feedback from your investors? What are they saying? Why are they re-upping share some inside baseball or anecdotal praise? >>Well, I think it's very kind to you to frame it that way. I mean, you know, it does for investors come back to performance. You know, these are university endowments and foundations that have a responsibility to, to generate great returns. And we understand that and we're very aligned with that. I think to be specific in the last couple years, they appreciated that we were also not holding onto our, our stocks forever, that we actually made some thoughtful decisions to sell some shares of companies like Smartsheet and snowflake and accolade in others, and actually distribute capital back to them when things were looking really, really good. But I think the thing, other thing that's very important here is that we've created a flywheel with our core strategy being Seattle based and then going out from there to try to find the best founders, build great companies with them, roll up our sleeves in a productive way and help them for the long term, which now leads to multiple generations of people, you know, at those companies. And beyond that we wanna be, you know, partner with and back again. And so you create this flywheel by having success with people in doing it in a respectful. And as you said earlier, a trusted way, >>What's the message for the Silicon valley crowd, obviously bay area, Silicon valley, Palo Alto office, and the center of it. Obviously you got them hybrid workforce hybrid venture model developing what's the goals. What's the message for Silicon valley? >>Well, our message for folks in Silicon valley is the same. It's always been, we we're excited to partner with them largely up here again, cause this is still our home base, but there'll be a, you know, select number of opportunities where we'll get a chance to partner together down in Silicon valley. And we think we bring something different with that deep understanding of cloud computing, that deep understanding of applied machine learning. And of course, some of our unique relationships up here that can be additive to what the they've already done. And some of them are just great partners and have built, you know, help build some really incredible companies over >>The years. Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview, given them big news. I guess the question on everyone's mind, certainly the entrepreneur's mind is how do I get some of that cash you have and put it into work for my opportunity. One what's the investment thesis can take a minute to put the plug in for the firm. What are you looking to invest in? What's the thesis? What kind of entrepreneurs you're looking for? I know fund one is seed fund nine is seed to, to a and B and the second one is beyond B and beyond for growth. What's the pitch. What's the pitch. >>Yeah. Well you can, you can think of us as you know, any stage from pre-seed to series seed. You know, we'll make a new investment in companies in all of those stages. You know, I think that, you know, the, the core pitch, you know, to us is, you know, your passion for the, for the problem that you're trying to, trying to get solved. And we're of course, very excited about that. And you know, at, at, at the end of the day, you know, if you want somebody that has a distinct point of view on the market that is based up here and can roll up their sleeves and work alongside you. We're, we're, we're the ones that are more than happy to do that. Proven track record of doing that for 25 plus years. And there's so much innovation ahead. There's so many opportunities to disrupt to pioneer, and we're excited to be a part of working with great founders to do that. >>Well, great stuff. We'll see you ATS reinvent coming up shortly and your annual get together. You always have your crew down there and, and team engaging with some of the cloud players as well. And looking forward to seeing how the Palo Alto team expands out. And Matt, thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks very much, John. Appreciate you having me look forward to seeing you at reinvent. >>Okay. Matt, Matt here with Madrona venture group, he's the partner managing partner Madrona group raises 690 million to fund nine and, and, and again, and big funds for accelerated growth fund. Three lot of dry powder. Again, entrepreneurship in technology is scaling. It's not going down. It's continuing to accelerate into this next generation super cloud multi-cloud hybrid cloud world steady state. This is the cubes coverage. I'm John for Silicon angle and host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone to Cube's live coverage, VMware Explorer, 2022 formerly world. I've been saying now I gotta get that out. Dave, I've been sayingm world. It just kind of comes off the tongue when I'm tired, but you know, wall to wall coverage, again, back to back interviews all day two sets. This is a wrap up here with the analyst discussion. Got one more interview after this really getting the analyst's perspective around what we've been hearing and seeing, observing, and reporting on the cube. Again, two sets blue and green. We call them here on the show floor on Moscone west with the sessions upstairs, two floors of, of amazing content sessions, keynote across ed Moscone, north and south SBI here, cloud strategists with the cube. And of course, what event wouldn't be complete without SBE weighing in on the analysis. And, and, and I'm, you know, all kidding aside. I mean that because we've had great interactions around, you know, digging in you, you're like a roving analyst out there. And what's great about what you do is you're social. You're communicating, you're touching everybody out there, but you're also picking up the puzzle pieces. And we, you know, of course we recognize that cuz that's what we do, but you're out, we're on the set you're out on the floor and you know your stuff and, and you know, clouds. So how you, this is your wheelhouse. Great to see you. Good to >>See you. I'm good guys. Thank you. Thank you for having >>Me. So I mean, Dave and I were riffing going back earlier in this event and even before, during our super cloud event, we're reminded of the old OpenStack days. If you remember, Dave OpenStack was supposed to be the open source version of cloud. And that was a great ambition. And the cloud AATI at that time was very into it because it made a lot of sense. And the vision, all the infrastructure was code. Everything was lined up. Everything was religiously was on the table. Beautiful cloud future. Okay. 20 2009, 2010, where was Amazon? Then they just went off like a rocket ship. So cloud ended up becoming AWS in my opinion. Yeah. OpenStax then settled in, did some great things, but also spawns Kubernetes. Okay. So, you know, we've lived through thiss we've seen this movie. We were actually in the trenches on the front lines present at creation for cloud computing. >>Yeah. I was at Rackspace when the open stack was open sourced. I was there in, in the rooms and discussions and all that. I think OpenStack was given to the open source like prematurely. I usually like we left a toddler on the freeway. No, the toddler >>Got behind the wheel. Can't see over the dashboard. >>So we have learned over the years in last two decades, like we have seen the open source rise of open source and we have learned quite a few lessons. And one lesson we learned from there was like, don't let a project go out in the open, tell it mature enough with one vendor. So we did that prematurely with NASA, NASA and Rackspace gave the, the code from two companies to the open source community and then likes of IBM and HPE. No. Now HPE, they kind of hijacked the whole thing and then put a lot of developers on that. And then lot of us sort of second tier startup. >>But, but, but I remember not to interject, but at that time there wasn't a lot of pushback for letting them it wasn't like they infiltrated like a, the vendors always tried to worry about vendors coming in open source, but at that time was pretty people accepted them. And then it got off the rails. Then you remember the great API debate. You >>Called it a hail Mary to against AWS, which is, is what it was, what it was. >>It's true. Yeah. Ended up being right. But the, the battle started happening when you started seeing the network perimeters being discussed, you starting to see some of the, in the trenches really important conversations around how to make essentially cross cloud or super cloud work. And, and again, totally premature it continue. And, and what does that mean today? So, okay. Is VMware too early on their cross cloud? Are they, is multi-cloud ready? >>No >>For, and is it just vaporware? >>No, they're not too early, actually on, on, on, on that side they were premature to put that out there, but this is like very mature company, like in the ops area, you know, we have been using, we VMware stuff since 2000 early 2000. I, I was at commerce one when we started using it and yeah, it was for lab manager, you know, like, you know, put the labs >>Out desktop competition. >>Yeah, yeah. Kind of thing. So it, it matured pretty fast, but now it it's like for all these years they focused on the op site more. Right. And then the challenge now in the DevOps sort of driven culture, which is very hyped, to be honest with you, they have try and find a place for developers to plug in on the left side of the sort of whole systems, life cycle management sort of line, if you will. So I think that's a, that's a struggle for, for VMware. They have to figure that out. And they are like a tap Tansu application platform services. They, they have released a new version of that now. So they're trying to do that, but still they are from the sort of get ups to the, to the right, from that point to the right on the left side. They're lot more tooling to helpers use as we know, but they are very scattered kind of spend and scattered technology on the left side. VMware doesn't know how to tackle that. But I think, I think VMware should focus on the right side from the get ups to the right and then focus there. And then how in the multi-cloud cross cloud. >>Cause my sense is, they're saying, Hey, look, we're not gonna own the developers. I think they know that. And they think they're saying do develop in whatever world you want to develop in will embrace it. And then the ops guys, we, we got you covered, we got the standards, we have the consistency and you're our peeps. You tend then take it, you know, to, to the market. Is that not? I mean, it seems like a viable strategy. I >>Mean, look at if you're VMware Dave and start, you know, this where they are right now, the way they missed the cloud. And they had to reboot that with jazzy and, and, and Raghu to do the databases deal. It's essentially VMware hosted on AWS and clients love it cuz it's clarity. Okay. It's not vCloud air. So, so if you're them right now, you seeing yourself, wow. We could be the connective tissue between all clouds. We said this from day one, when Kubernetes was hitting in the scene, whoever can make this, the interoperability concept of inter clouding and connect clouds so that there could be spanning of applications and data. We didn't say data, but we said, you know, creating that nice environment of multiple clouds. Okay. And again, in concept, that sounds simple, but if you're VMware, you could own that abstraction layer. So do you own it or do you seed the base and let it become a defacto organization? Like a super layer, super pass layer and then participate in it? Or are you the middleware yourself? We heard AJ Patel say that. So, so they could be the middleware for at all. >>Aren't they? The infrastructure super cloud. I mean, that's what they're trying to be. >>Yeah. I think they're trying, trying to do that. It's it's I, I, I have said that many times VMware is bridged to the cloud, right? >>The sorry. Say bridge to >>The cloud. Yeah. Right. For, for enterprises, they have virtualized environments, mostly on VMware stacks. And another thing is I wanna mention touch on that is the number of certified professionals on VMware stack. There it's a huge number it's in tens of thousands. Right? So people who have got these certifications, they want to continue that sort of journey. They wanna leverage that. It's like, it's a Sunco if they don't use that going forward. And that was my question to, to during the press release yesterday, like are there new certifications coming into the, into the limelight? I, I think the VMware, if they're listening to me here somewhere, they will listen. I guess they should introduce a, a cross cloud certification for their stack because they want to be cross cloud or multi-cloud sort of vendor with one sort of single pane. So does actually Cisco and so do many others. But I think VMware is in a good spot. It's their market to lose. I, I, I call it when it comes to the multi-cloud for enterprise, especially for the legacy applications. >>Well, they're not, they have the enterprise they're super cloud enabler, Dave for the, for the enterprise, cuz they're not hyperscaler. Okay. They have all the enterprise customers who come here, we see them, we speak to them. We know them will mingle, but >>They have really good relationships with all the >>Hyperscale. And so those, those guys need a way to the cloud in a way that's cloud operation though. So, so if you say enterprises need their own super cloud, I would say VMware might wanna raise their hands saying we're the vendor to provide that. Yes, totally. And then that's the middleware role. So middleware isn't your classic stack middleware it's middle tissue. So you got, it's not a stack model anymore. It's completely different. >>Maybe, maybe my, my it's >>Not a stack >>Industry. Maybe my industry super cloud is too aspirational, but so let's assume for a second. You're not gonna have everybody doing their own clouds, like Goldman Sachs and, and capital one, even though we're seeing some evidence of that, even in that case, connecting my on-prem to the cloud and modernizing my application stack and, and having some kind of consistency between your on-prem and it's just call it hybrid, like real hybrid, true hybrid. They should dominate that. I mean, who is who, if it's not it's VMware and it's what red hat who else? >>I think red hat wants it too. >>Yeah. Well, red hat and red, hat's doing it with IBM consulting and they gotta be, they have great advantage there for all the banks. Awesome. But what, what about the other 500,000 customers that are >>Out there? If VMware could do what they did with the hypervisor, with virtualization and create the new thing for super cloud, AKA connecting clouds together. That's a, that's a holy grail move right >>There. But what about this PA layer? This Tansu and area which somebody on Twitter, there was a little SNAR come that's V realized just renamed, which is not. I mean, it's, it's from talking to Raghu unless he's just totally BSing us, which I don't think he is. That's not who he is. It's this new federated architecture and it's this, their super PAs layer and, and, and it's purpose built for what they're trying to do across clouds. This is your wheelhouse. What, what do you make of that? >>I think Tansu is a great effort. They have put in lot of other older products under that one umbrella Tansu is not a product actually confuses the heck out of the market. That it's not a product. It's a set of other products put under one umbrella. Now they have created another umbrella term with the newer sort of, >>So really is some yeah. >>Two >>Umbrella on there. So it's what it's pivotal. It's vRealize it's >>Yeah. We realize pivotal and, and, and older stack, actually they have some open source components in there. So, >>So they claim that this ragus claim, it's this new architecture, this new federated architecture graph database, low latency, real time ingestion. Well, >>AJ, AJ that's AJ's department, >>It sounded good. I mean, this is that >>Actually I think the newer, newer stuff, what they announced, that's very promising because it seems like they're building something from scratch. So, >>And it won't be, it won't be hardened for, but, but >>It won't be hardened for, but, >>But those, but they have a track record delivering. I mean, they gotta say that about yeah. >>They're engineering focus company. They have engineering culture. They're their software engineers are top. Not top not, >>Yes. >>What? >>Yeah. It's all relatives. If they, if the VMware stays the way they are. Well, >>Yeah, >>We'll get to that a second. What >>Do you mean? What are you talking >>About? They don't get gutted >>The elephant in the room if they don't get gutted and then, then we'll see it happens there. But right now I love, we love VMware. We've been covering them for 12 years and we've seen the trials, not without their own issues to work on. I mean, everyone needs to work on stuff, but you know, world class, they're very proud of their innovation, but I wanna ask you, what was your observations walking around the floor, talking to people? What was the sense of the messaging? Is it real in their minds? Are they leaning in, are they like enthused? Are they nervous, apprehensive? How would you categorize the attitude of the folks here that you've talked to or observed? >>Yeah. It at the individual product level, like the people are very confident what they're building, what they're delivering, but when it comes to the telling a cohesive story, if you go to all the VMware booth there, like it's hard to find anybody who can tell what, what are all the services under tens and how they are interconnected and what facilities they provide or they can't. They, I mean, most of the people who are there, they can are walking through the economic side of things, like how it will help you save money or, or how the TCR ROI will improve. They are very focused on because of the nature of the company, right. They're very focused on the technology only. So I think that that's the, that's what I learned. And another sort of gripe or negative I have about VMware is that they have their product portfolio is so vast and they are even spreading more thinly. And they're forced to go to the left towards developers because of the sheer force of hyperscalers. On one side on the, on the right side, they are forced to work with hyperscalers to do more like ops related improvements. They didn't mention AI or, or data. >>Yeah. Data storage management. >>That that was weak. That's true. During the, the keynote as well. >>And they didn't mention security and their security story, strong >>Security. I think they mentioned it briefly very briefly, very briefly. But I think their SCO story is good actually, but no is they didn't mention it properly, I guess. >>Yeah. There wasn't prominent in the keynote. It was, you know, and again, I understand why data wasn't P I, they wanted to say about data, >>Didn't make room for the developer story. I think this was very much a theatrical maneuver for Hawk and the employee morale and the ecosystem morale, Dave, then it had to do with the nuts bolt of security. They can come back to get that security. In my opinion, you know, I, I don't think that was as bad of a call as bearing the vSphere, giving more demos, which they did do later. But the keynote I thought was, was well done as targeted for all the negative sentiment around Broadcom and Broadcom had this, the acquisition agreement that they're, they are doing, they agree >>Was well done. I mean, >>You know, if I VMware, I would've done the same thing, look at this is a bright future. We're given that we're look at what we got. If you got this, it's on you. >>And I agree with you, but the, the, again, I don't, I don't see how you can't make security front and center. When it is the number one issue for CIOs, CSOs, CSOs boards or directors, they just, it was a miss. They missed it. Yeah. Okay. And they said, oh, well, there's only so much time, but, and they had to put the application development focus on there. I get that. But >>Another thing is, I think just keynote is just one sort of thing. One moment in this whole sort of continuous period, right. They, I think they need to have that narrative, like messaging done periodically, just like Amazon does, you know, like frequent events tapping into the practitioners on regional basis. They have to do that. Maybe it's a funding issue. Maybe it is some weakness on the, no, >>I think they planning, I talked to, we talked to the CMO and she said, Explorer is gonna be a road show. They're gonna go international with, it's gonna take a global, they're gonna have a lot of wood behind the arrow. They're gonna spend a lot of money on Explorer is what, they're, what we're seeing. And that's a good thing. You got a new brand, you gotta build it. >>You know, I would've done, I would've had, I would've had a shorter keynote on day one and doing, and then I would've done like a security day, day two. I would've dedicated the whole morning, day two keynote to security cuz their stories I think is that strong? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. And I don't know the developers side of things. I think it's hard for VMware to go too much to the left. The spend on the left is very scattered. You know, if you notice the tools, developers change their tools on freaking monthly basis, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard to sustain that they on the very left side and the, the, the >>It's hard for companies like VMware to your point. And then this came up in super cloud and ins Rayme mentioned that developers drive everything, the patterns, what they like and you know, the old cliche meet them where they are. You know, honestly, this is kind of what AJ says is the right they're doing. And it's the right strategy meeting that develops where they are means give them something that they like. They like self-service they like to try stuff. They like to, they don't like it. They'll throw it away. Look at the success that comes like data, dog companies like that have that kind of offering with freemium and self-service to, to continue the wins versus jamming the tooling down their throat and selling >>Totally self-serve infrastructure for the, in a way, you know, you said they missed cloud, which they did V cloud air. And then they thought of got it. Right. It kind of did the same thing with pivotal. Right. It was almost like they forced to take pivotal, you know, by pivotal, right. For 2 billion or whatever it was. All right. Do something with it. Okay. We're gonna try to do something with it and they try to go out and compete. And now they're saying, Hey, let's just open it up. Whatever they want to use, let 'em use it. So unlike and I said this yesterday, unlike snowflake has to attract developers to build on their unique platform. Okay. I think VMware's taken a different approach saying use whatever you want to use. We're gonna help the ops guys. And that, to me, a new op >>Very sensitive, >>The new ops, the new ops guys. Yes. Yes. >>I think another challenge on the right right. Is on, on the op site is like, if, if you are cloud native, you are a new company. You just, when you're a startup, you are cloud native, right. Then it's hard for VMware to convince them to, Hey, you know, come to us and use this. Right. It's very hard. It is. They're a good play for a while. At least they, they can prolong their life by innovating along the way because of the, the skills gravity, I call it of the developers and operators actually that's their, they, they have a loyal community they have and all that stuff. And by the way, the name change for the show. I think they're trying to get out of that sort of culty kind of nature of the, their communities that they force. The communities actually can force the companies, not to do certain things certain way. And I've seen that happening. And >>Well, I think, I think they're gonna learn and they already walked back their messaging. Not that they said anything overtly, but you know, the Lori, the CMO clarified this significantly, which was, they never said that they wanted to replace VM world. Although the name change implies that. And what they re amplified after the fact is that this is gonna be a continuation of the community. And so, you know, it's nuanced, they're splitting hairs, but that's, to me walking back the, you know, the, the loyalty and, and look at let's face it. Anytime you have a loyal community, you do anything of change. People are gonna be bitching and moaning. Yeah. >>But I mean, knew, worked, explore, >>Work. It wasn't bad at all. It was not a bad look. It wasn't disastrous call. Okay. Not at all. I'm critical of the name change at first, but the graphics are amazing. They did an exceptional job on the branding. They did, did an exceptional job on how they handled the new logo, the new name, the position they, and a lot of people >>Showed >>Up. Yeah. It worked >>A busy busier than all time >>It worked. And I think they, they threaded the needle, given everything they had going on. I thought the event team did an exceptional job here. I mean, just really impressive. So hats up to the event team at, at VMware pulling off now, did they make profit? I don't know. It doesn't matter, you know, again, so much going on with Broadcom, but here being in Moscone west, we see people coming down the stairs here, Dave's sessions, you know, lot of people, a lot of buzz on the content sold out sessions. So again, that's the ecosystem. The people giving the talks, you know, the people in the V brown bag, you know, got the, the V tug. They had their meeting, you know, this week here, >>Actually the, the, the red hat, the, the integration with the red hat is another highlight of, of, they announced that, that you can run that style >>OpenShift >>And red hats, not here, >>Red hat now here, but yeah, but, but, but >>It was more developers, more, you know, >>About time. I would say, why, why did it take so long? That should >>Have happened. All right. Final question. So what's the bottom line. Give us the summary. What's your take, what's your analysis of VMware explore the event, what they did, what it means, what it's gonna mean when the event's over, what's gonna happen. >>I think VMware with the VMware Explorer have bought the time with the messaging. You know, they have promised certain things with newer announcements and now it, it, it is up to them to deliver that in a very sort of fast manner and build more hooks into other sort of platforms. Right? So that is very important. You cannot just be closed system people. Don't like those systems. You have to be part of the ecosystem. And especially when you are sitting on top of the actually four or four or more public clouds, Alibaba cloud was, they were saying that they're the only VMware is only VMware based offering in mainland China on top of the Alibaba. And they, they can go to other ones as well. So I think, especially when they're sitting on top of other cloud providers, they have to build hooks into other platforms. And if they can build a marketplace of their own, that'll be even better. I think they, >>And they've got the ecosystem for it. I mean, you saw it last night. I mean, all the, all the parties were hopping. I mean, there was, there's >>A lot of buzz. I mean, I pressed, I pressed them Dave hard. I had my little, my zingers. I wanted to push the buttons on one question that was targeted towards the answer of, are they gonna try to do much more highly competitive maneuvering, you know, get that position in the middleware. Are they gonna be more aggressive with frontal competitiveness or are they gonna take the, the strategy of open collaborative and every single data point points to collaborative totally hit Culbert. I wanna do out in the open. We're not just not, we're not one company. So I think that's the right play. If they came out and said, we're gonna be this, you know? >>Yeah. The one, the last thing, actually, the, the one last little idea I'm putting out out there since I went to the Dell world, was that there's a economics of creation of software. There's economics of operations of software. And they are very good on the operation economics of operations side of things that when I say economics, it doesn't mean money only. It also means a productivity practitioner, growth. Everything is in there. So I think these vendors who are not hyperscalers, they have to distinguish these two things and realize that they're very good on the right side economics of operations. And, and that will go a long way. Actually. I think they muddy the waters by when DevOps, DevOps, and then it's >>Just, well, I think Dave, we always we've had moments in time over the past 12 years covering VMware's annual conference, formally world now floor, where there were moments of that's pat Gelsinger, spinal speech. Yeah. And I remember he was under a siege of being fired. Yeah. There was a point in time where it was touch and go, and then everything kind of came together. That was a moment. I think we're at a moment in time here with VMware Dave, where we're gonna see what Broadcom does, because I think what hop 10 and Broadcom saw this week was an EBI, a number on the table that they know they can probably get or squeeze. And then they saw a future value and net present value of future state that you could, you gotta roll back and do the analysis saying, okay, how much is it worth all this new stuff worth? Is that gonna contribute to the EBITDA number that they want on the number? So this is gonna be a very interesting test because VMware did it, an exceptional job of laying out that they got some jewels in the oven. You >>Think about how resilient this company has been. I mean, em, you know, EMC picked them up for a song. It was 640 million or whatever it was, you know, about the public. And then you, another epic moment you'll recall. This was when Joe Tuchi was like the mafia Don up on stage. And Michael Dell was there, John Chambers with all the ecosystem CEOs and there was Tucci. And then of course, Michael Dell ends up owning this whole thing, right? I mean, when John Chambers should have owned the whole thing, I mean, it's just, it's been incredible. And then Dell uses VMware as a piggy bank to restructure its balance sheet, to pay off the EMC debt and then sells the thing for $60 billion. And now it's like, okay, we're finally free of all this stuff. Okay. Now Broadcom's gonna buy you. And, >>And if Michael Dell keeps all in stock, he'll be the largest shareholder of Broadcom and own it off. >>Well, and that's probably, you know, that's a good question is, is it's gonna, it probably a very tax efficient transaction. If he takes all stock and then he can, you know, own against it. I mean, that's, that's, >>That's what a history we're gonna leave it there. Start be great to have you Dave great analysis. Okay. We'll be back with more coverage here. Day two, winding down after the short break.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of snowflake summit. 22 live from Las Vegas. We're at Caesar's forum, Lisa Martin, with Dave ante. We've been having some great conversations over the last day and a half. This guy just came from main stage interviewing the CEO, Franks Lubin himself, who joins us after our next guest here, we're gonna be talking customers and successes with snowflake Rosemary Hua joins us the global head of retail at snowflake and Patrick Kelly, the VP of product management at their customer 84 51. Welcome to the program guys. >>Thank you. It's nice to be here. So >>Patrick, 84 51. Talk to us about the business, give the audience an overview of what you guys are doing. And then we'll talk about how you're working with snowflake. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you both for, uh, the opportunity to be here. So 84 51 is a retail data science insights and media company. And really what that means is that we, we partner with our, uh, parent company Kroger, as well as consumer packaged goods or brands and brokers and agencies, really to understand shoppers and create relevant, personalized, and valuable experiences for shoppers in source and grocery stores. >>That relevance is key. We all expect that these days, I think the last couple of years as everyone's patience has been wearing. Yeah, very thin. I'm not, I'm not convinced it's gonna come back either, but we expect that brands are gonna interact with us and offer us the next best offer. That's actually relevant and personalized to us. How does AB 4 51 achieve that? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And you're right. That expectation is only growing. Um, and it takes data analytics, data science and all of these capabilities in order to deliver it on that promise, uh, you know, big, a big part of the relationship that retailers and brands have with consumers is about a value exchange. And it's, again, it's about that expectation that brands and retailers need to be able to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers. Uh, whether that be introducing new brands or offering the right price points or promotions or ensuring you meet them where they are, whether it be online, which has obviously been catalyzed by, um, the pandemic over the last two years or in store. So a deep understanding of, of the customer, which is founded in data and the appropriate analytics and science, and then the collaboration back with the retailers and, and the brands so that you can bring that experience to life. Again, that could be a price point on the, on the shelf, um, or it could be a personalized email or, um, website interaction that delivers the right experience for the co for the consumer. So they can see that value and really build loyalty >>In the right time in real time. That's >>One of the most Marrit I'm in real time. That's right. One goes, Mary, I love the concept of the, the actual platform of the retail data cloud. Yes. It's so unique for a technology company. Snowflake's a technology company, you see services companies do it all the time, but yeah, but to actually transform what was considered a data warehouse in the cloud to a platform for data, I call it super cloud. Yeah. Tell us how this came about, um, how you were able to actually develop this and where you are in that journey. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's been a big focus on data sharing. We saw that that's how our customers are interacting with each other is using our data sharing functionality to really bring that ecosystem to life. So that's retailers sharing with their consumer products companies selling through those retailers. And then of course the data service companies that are kind of helping both sides and that data sharing functionality is the kind of under fabric for the data cloud, where we bring in partners. We bring in customers and we bring in tech solutions to the table. Um, and customers can use the data cloud, not only with the powered by partners that we have, but also the data marketplace, getting that data in real time and making some business value out of that data. So that's really the big focus of snowflake is investing in industry to realize the business value >>And talk about ecosystem and how important that is, where, where you leave off and the ecosystem picks up and how that's evolving. >>Absolutely. And I'm sure you can join in on this, but, um, definitely that collaboration between retailers and CPGs, right? I mean, retailers have that rich first party customer data. They see all those transactions, they see when people are shopping and then the brands really need that first party data to figure out what their, how their customers are interacting with their brand. And so that collaborative nature that makes up the ecosystem. And of course, you've got the tech partners in the middle that are kind of providing enrich data assets as well. You guys at 84 51 are a huge part of that ecosystem being, you know, one of the key retailers in, in the United States. Um, have you been seeing that as well with your brands? Yeah, >>Absolutely. I mean data and data science has always been core to the identity of 84 51. Um, and historically a lot of the interaction that we have with brands were through report web based applications, right. And it's a really great seamless way to, to deliver insights to non-technical users. But as the entire market has really started to invest in data and data science and technology and capabilities, you know, we, we launched a collaborative cloud last year and it was really an opportunity for us to reimagine what that experience would look like and to ensure that we are meeting the evolving needs of the industry. And as Rosemary pointed out, you know, data sharing is, is table stakes, right? It's a capability that you don't wanna have to think about. You wanna be thinking about the strategic initiatives, the science that you're gonna create in order to drive action and personalize experiences. So what we've found at 84 51 is really investing in our collaborative cloud, um, and working with leading technology providers like snowflake to make that seamless has been, you know, the, the, the UN unlock to ensure that data and data science can be a competitive advantage for our clients and partners, not just, you know, the retailer in 84 51 >>Is the collaborative cloud built on snowflake. >>Yeah. So the collaborative cloud is really about, um, ensuring that data sharing through snowflake is done seamlessly. So we've really, we've invited our clients and partners to build their own science on 84 51 S first party data asset through Kroger. And our, our data is represents 60 million households, half of the United States, 2 billion transactions annually, the robustness of that data asset. And it's it's it's analysis ready is so impactful to the investment that brands can make in their own data science efforts, because brands wanna invest in data science, not to do data work, not to do cleaning and Muning and, and merging and, and standardizing. They wanna do analysis. That's gonna impact the strategies and ultimately the shopper's lives. So again, we're able to leverage the capabilities of snowflake to ensure data sharing is not part of our day to day conversation. Data sharing is something we can take for granted so that we can talk about the shopper and our strategies. >>So this is why I call it super cloud. So Jerry Chen wrote an article of castles in the cloud. And in there he said, he called it sub clouds. And I'm like, no, it's, uh, by the way, great article. Jerry's brilliant. But so you got AWS, you built on top of AWS. That's right. You got the snowflake data called you're building on top of that. And I was sitting at the table and my kid goes, this is super, I'm like, ah, super clouds. So I didn't really even coin it, but, and then I realized somebody else had use it before, but that is different. It's new, it's around data. It's around vertical industries. Yes. Um, I, I get a lot of heat for that term, but I feel like this look around this industry, everybody's doing that that's that is digital transformation. That's don't you see that with your customers? >>Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of different industry trends where you can't use your own historical first party data to figure out what customers are doing. I mean, with COVID customers are behaving totally differently than they used to. And you can't use your historical data to predict out of stocks or how the customer's gonna be interacting with your brand anymore. And you need that third party macroeconomic data. You need that third party COVID data or foot traffic data to enrich what your businesses are doing. And so, yes, it, it is a super cloud. And I think the big differentiator is that we are cloud agnostic, meaning that, like you said, you can take the technology for granted. You don't have to worry about where the other person has their tech stack. It's all the same experience on the snowflake super cloud as he put it. So, >>So Patrick, talk about the, the, the impact that you have been able to have during COVID. I mean, everybody had supply chain issues, but, you know, if you took, if you took away the machine learning and the data science that you are initiating, would life have been harder? Do you have data on that? You know, the, the, what if we didn't have this capability during the >>Challenges? No, it's, it's a fantastic question. And I'll actually build on the example that Rosemary, um, offered around COVID and better understanding COVID. So, um, in the past, you know, when we talk about data sharing data collaboration, it's basically wasn't possible, right? What's your tech stack, what's mine. How do we share data? I don't wanna send you my data without go releasing governance. It was a non-starter and, you know, through technology like snowflake, as we launched the collaborative cloud, we actually had a pilot client start right at the beginning of 2020. Um, we, we had, you know, speced out it onto use cases that really impactful for their, for their organization. But of course, what happened is, uh, a pandemic hit us and it became the biggest question, CEO executive team, all the way down is what is happening, what is happening in our stores? >>How are shoppers behaving and what, what that client of ours came to realize is while we, we actually, we have access to the E 4 51 collaborative cloud. We can see half of America's behavior last week down to the basket transaction UPC level. Let's get going. So again, the conversation wasn't about, you know, what data sources, how do we scramble? How do we get it together? What technologies, how do we collaborate? It was immediately focused on building the analysis to better understand that. And, and the outcomes that drove actually were all the way from manufacturing impact to marketing, to merchandising, because that brand was able to figure out, Hey, our top selling products, they're, they're not on the shelves. What are shoppers doing? Are they going to a, another brand? Are they not buying it all together? Are they going to a different size? Are they staying within our product portfolio? Are they going to a competitor? And those insights drove everything again from what do we need to manufacture more to, how do we need to communicate and incent our, our, our shoppers, our, our loyal shoppers also what's happening to our non loyals. Are they looking for an, you know, an alternative that a need that we can serve that level of, of shopper and customer understanding going all the way up to a strategic initiatives is something that is enabled through the Supercloud >><laugh>. How do you facilitate privacy as we're seeing this proliferation of privacy legislation? Yeah. I think there's now 22 states that have individual, and California's changing to CPR a at the beginning of yes, January 23. How do you balance that need that ability to share data? Yeah. Equitably fast, quickly, but also balance consumer privacy requirements. >>I mean, I could take a stab first. I mean, at snowflake, right, there is no better place to share your data that in a governed way than with snowflake data sharing, because then you can see and understand how the other side is using your data. Whereas in traditional methods, using an API or using an FTP server, you wouldn't be able to actually see how the other side is using your data. But in addition to that, we have the clean room where you can actually join on that underlying PII data without exposing it, because you can share functions securely on, on both sides. So I think there is no better place to do it than here at snowflake. Um, and because we deeply understand those policies, I think we are kind of keeping up with the times trying to get in front of things so that our data sharing capabilities stay up to date. When you have to expunge records, identify records with CCPA and, and GDPR and, and all the rest that are coming. Um, and so, so, I mean, I think especially with 84 50 ones, um, you know, collaborative cloud also building on top of the clean room, um, in, in further road in the further roadmap, I think, uh, you're gonna see some of that privacy compliant, data sharing, coming to play as well. You >>Know, what's interesting, Patrick is we were just in that session with the Frank Q and a, and he was very candid about when he was talking about, uh, Apache, uh, I'm sorry. Apache iceberg. Yeah. Yes. And he, he basically flat out said, look, you know, you gotta put it into the snowflake data cloud. It's, it's better there, but people might, you know, want to put it outside, not get locked in, et cetera. But what I'm, I'm listening to you saying it's so much easier for you today that could evolve something open source. And, and how do you think about that in terms of placing your bets? >>Yeah, it, it's a great question and really to go back to privacy, um, as a total topic, I mean, you're right. It's extremely relevant topic. It's, it's, you know, very ever changing right now at 84 51. Privacy is, is first it's the foundation. Um, it it's table stakes and that's from a policy that's from a governance, it's from a technology capability standpoint. And it's part of our, our culture because, um, it, it, because it has to be, uh, and, and so when we, when we think about, you know, the products that we're gonna build, how we want to implement, it's, it's a requirement that we leverage technologies that enable us to secure the governance and ensure that we're privacy compliant. Um, the customer data asset that we have is, is, you know, is extremely valuable as we've talked about in this interview, it's also responsibility. And we take that very, very seriously. And so, you know, Dave, back to your question about, you know, decisions to go, you know, open source or leverage for technologies. So there's always a balance. You know, we, we love to push the, the bounds of innovation and, and we wanna be on the forefront of data, sharing data, science, collaboration for this industry. But at the same time, we balance that with making sure that our technology partners are the right ones, because we are not willing to compromise our governance and our fir and our, our privacy, uh, priorities. >>That's gonna be interesting to see how that evolves. And I, I loved that. Frank was so candid about it. I think the key for any cloud player, including a super cloud is you gotta have an ecosystem without an ecosystem. Forget it. And you see a lot of companies. I mean, we were at Dell tech world. They're kind of, they're at the beginnings of that, but the ecosystems, nothing like this, right. Which is amazing, nothing against, against Dell, they're just kind of getting started and you have to be open. You have to have optionality. Yep. You know, so I, I don't know if we'll see the day where they're including data, bricks, data lakes inside of the snowflake cloud. That will be amazing. <laugh> but you know, you never say never in the world of cloud, >>Do you stranger things, Rosemary and Patrick, thank you so much for joining us talking about what 84 51 is doing powered by snowflake and also the rise of the snowflake retail cloud and what that's doing. We'll have to have you back on to hear what's going on as I'm sure the adoption will continue to increase. Absolutely. Thank you so much to both for having us, our pleasure. You appreciate this for our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. He's Dave ante stick around Dave will be back with Frankman CEO of snowflake. Next. You won't wanna miss it.

>>Hi everybody. This is Dave Volante. Welcome to this cube conversation where we're going to go back in time a little bit and explore the early days of Kubernetes. Talk about how it formed the improbable events, perhaps that led to it. And maybe how customers are taking advantage of containers and container orchestration today, and maybe where the industry is going. Matt Provo is here. He's the founder and CEO of storm forge and Chandler Huntington hoes. Hoisington is the general manager of EKS edge and hybrid AWS guys. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Thanks. So, Jenny, you were the vice president of engineering at miso sphere. Is that, is that correct? >>Well, uh, vice-president engineering basis, fear and then I ran product and engineering for DTQ masons. >>Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you were there in the early days of, of container orchestration and Matt, you, you were working at a S a S a Docker swarm shop, right? Yep. Okay. So I mean, a lot of people were, you know, using your platform was pretty novel at the time. Uh, it was, it was more sophisticated than what was happening with, with Kubernetes. Take us back. What was it like then? Did you guys, I mean, everybody was coming out. I remember there was, I think there was one Docker con and everybody was coming, the Kubernetes was announced, and then you guys were there, doc Docker swarm was, was announced and there were probably three or four other startups doing kind of container orchestration. And what, what were those days like? Yeah. >>Yeah. I wasn't actually atmosphere for those days, but I know them well, I know the story as well. Um, uh, I came right as we started to pivot towards Kubernetes there, but, um, it's a really interesting story. I mean, obviously they did a documentary on it and, uh, you know, people can watch that. It's pretty good. But, um, I think that, from my perspective, it was, it was really interesting how this happened. You had basically, uh, con you had this advent of containers coming out, right? So, so there's new novel technology and Solomon, and these folks started saying, Hey, you know, wait a second, wait if I put a UX around these couple of Linux features that got launched a couple of years ago, what does that look like? Oh, this is pretty cool. Um, so you have containers starting to crop up. And at the same time you had folks like ThoughtWorks and other kind of thought leaders in the space, uh, starting to talk about microservices and saying, Hey, monoliths are bad and you should break up these monoliths into smaller pieces. >>And any Greenfield application should be broken up into individuals, scalable units that a team can can own by themselves, and they can scale independent of each other. And you can write tests against them independently of other components. And you should break up these big, big mandalas. And now we are kind of going back to model this, but that's for another day. Um, so, so you had microservices coming out and then you also had containers coming out, same time. So there was like, oh, we need to put these microservices in something perfect. We'll put them in containers. And so at that point, you don't really, before that moment, you didn't really need container orchestration. You could just run a workload in a container and be done with it, right? You didn't need, you don't need Kubernetes to run Docker. Um, but all of a sudden you had tons and tons of containers and you had to manage these in some way. >>And so that's where container orchestration came, came from. And, and Ben Heineman, the founder of Mesa was actually helping schedule spark at the time at Berkeley. Um, and that was one of the first workloads with spark for Macy's. And then his friends at Twitter said, Hey, come over, can you help us do this with containers at Twitter? He said, okay. So when it helped them do it with containers at Twitter, and that's kinda how that branch of the container wars was started. And, um, you know, it was really, really great technology and it actually is still in production in a lot of shops today. Um, uh, more and more people are moving towards Kubernetes and Mesa sphere saw that trend. And at the end of the day, Mesa sphere was less concerned about, even though they named the company Mesa sphere, they were less concerned about helping customers with Mesa specifically. They really want to help customers with these distributed problems. And so it didn't make sense to, to just do Mesa. So they would took on Kubernetes as well. And I hope >>I don't do that. I remember, uh, my, my co-founder John furrier introduced me to Jerry Chen way back when Jerry is his first, uh, uh, VC investment with Greylock was Docker. And we were talking in these very, obviously very excited about it. And, and his Chandler was just saying, it said Solomon and the team simplified, you know, containers, you know, simple and brilliant. All right. So you guys saw the opportunity where you were Docker swarm shop. Why? Because you needed, you know, more sophisticated capabilities. Yeah. But then you, you switched why the switch, what was happening? What was the mindset back then? We ran >>And into some scale challenges in kind of operationalize or, or productizing our kind of our core machine learning. And, you know, we, we, we saw kind of the, the challenges, luckily a bit ahead of our time. And, um, we happen to have someone on the team that was also kind of moonlighting, uh, as one of the, the original core contributors to Kubernetes. And so as this sort of shift was taking place, um, we, we S we saw the flexibility, uh, of what was becoming Kubernetes. Um, and, uh, I'll never forget. I left on a Friday and came back on a Monday and we had lifted and shifted, uh, to Kubernetes. Uh, the challenge was, um, you know, you, at that time, you, you didn't have what you have today through EKS. And, uh, those kinds of services were, um, just getting that first cluster up and running was, was super, super difficult, even in a small environment. >>And so I remember we, you know, we, we finally got it up and running and it was like, nobody touch it, don't do anything. Uh, but obviously that doesn't, that doesn't scale either. And so that's really, you know, being kind of a data science focused shop at storm forge from the very beginning. And that's where our core IP is. Uh, our, our team looked at that problem. And then we looked at, okay, there are a bunch of parameters and ways that I can tune this application. And, uh, why are the configurations set the way that they are? And, you know, uh, is there room to explore? And that's really where, unfortunately, >>Because Mesa said much greater enterprise capabilities as the Docker swarm, at least they were heading in that direction, but you still saw that Kubernetes was, was attractive because even though it didn't have all the security features and enterprise features, because it was just so simple. I remember Jen Goldberg who was at Google at the time saying, no, we were focused on keeping it simple and we're going from mass adoption, but does that kind of what you said? >>Yeah. And we made a bet, honestly. Uh, we saw that the, uh, you know, the growing community was really starting to, you know, we had a little bit of an inside view because we had, we had someone that was very much in the, in the original part, but you also saw the, the tool chain itself start to, uh, start to come into place right. A little bit. And it's still hardening now, but, um, yeah, we, as any, uh, as any startup does, we, we made a pivot and we made a bet and, uh, this, this one paid off >>Well, it's interesting because, you know, we said at the time, I mean, you had, obviously Amazon invented the modern cloud. You know, Microsoft has the advantage of has got this huge software stays, Hey, just now run it into the cloud. Okay, great. So they had their entry point. Google didn't have an entry point. This is kind of a hail Mary against Amazon. And, and I, I wrote a piece, you know, the improbable, Verizon, who Kubernetes to become the O S you know, the cloud, but, but I asked, did it make sense for Google to do that? And it never made any money off of it, but I would argue they, they were kind of, they'd be irrelevant if they didn't have, they hadn't done that yet, but it didn't really hurt. It certainly didn't hurt Amazon EKS. And you do containers and your customers you've embraced it. Right. I mean, I, I don't know what it was like early days. I remember I've have talked to Amazon people about this. It's like, okay, we saw it and then talk to customers, what are they doing? Right. That's kind of what the mindset is, right? Yeah. >>That's, I, I, you know, I've, I've been at Amazon a couple of years now, and you hear the stories of all we're customer obsessed. We listened to our customers like, okay, okay. We have our company values, too. You get told them. And when you're, uh, when you get first hired in the first day, and you never really think about them again, but Amazon, that really is preached every day. It really is. Um, uh, and that we really do listen to our customers. So when customers start asking for communities, we said, okay, when we built it for them. So, I mean, it's, it's really that simple. Um, and, and we also, it's not as simple as just building them a Kubernetes service. Amazon has a big commitment now to start, you know, getting involved more in the community and working with folks like storm forage and, and really listening to customers and what they want. And they want us working with folks like storm florigen and that, and that's why we're doing things like this. So, well, >>It's interesting, because of course, everybody looks at the ecosystem, says, oh, Amazon's going to kill the ecosystem. And then we saw an article the other day in, um, I think it was CRN, did an article, great job by Amazon PR, but talk about snowflake and Amazon's relationship. And I've said many times snowflake probably drives more than any other ISV out there. And so, yeah, maybe the Redshift guys might not love snowflake, but Amazon in general, you know, they're doing great three things. And I remember Andy Jassy said to me, one time, look, we love the ecosystem. We need the ecosystem. They have to innovate too. If they don't, you know, keep pace, you know, they're going to be in trouble. So that's actually a healthy kind of a dynamic, I mean, as an ecosystem partner, how do you, >>Well, I'll go back to one thing without the work that Google did to open source Kubernetes, a storm forge wouldn't exist, but without the effort that AWS and, and EKS in particular, um, provides and opens up for, for developers to, to innovate and to continue, continue kind of operationalizing the shift to Kubernetes, um, you know, we wouldn't have nearly the opportunity that we do to actually listen to them as well, listen to the users and be able to say, w w w what do you want, right. Our entire reason for existence comes from asking users, like, how painful is this process? Uh, like how much confidence do you have in the, you know, out of the box, defaults that ship with your, you know, with your database or whatever it is. And, uh, and, and how much do you love, uh, manually tuning your application? >>And, and, uh, obviously nobody's said, I love that. And so I think as that ecosystem comes together and continues expanding, um, it's just, it opens up a huge opportunity, uh, not only for existing, you know, EKS and, uh, AWS users to continue innovating, but for companies like storm forge, to be able to provide that opportunity for them as well. And, and that's pretty powerful. So I think without a lot of the moves they've made, um, you know, th the door wouldn't be nearly as open for companies like, who are, you know, growing quickly, but are smaller to be able to, you know, to exist. >>Well, and I was saying earlier that, that you've, you're in, I wrote about this, you're going to get better capabilities. You're clearly seeing that cluster management we've talked about better, better automation, security, the whole shift left movement. Um, so obviously there's a lot of momentum right now for Kubernetes. When you think about bare metal servers and storage, and then you had VM virtualization, VMware really, and then containers, and then Kubernetes as another abstraction, I would expect we're not at the end of the road here. Uh, what's next? Is there another abstraction layer that you would think is coming? Yeah, >>I mean, w for awhile, it looked like, and I remember even with our like board members and some of our investors said, well, you know, well, what about serverless? And, you know, what's the next Kubernetes and nothing, we, as much as I love Kubernetes, um, which I do, and we do, um, nothing about what we particularly do. We are purpose built for Kubernetes, but from a core kind of machine learning and problem solving standpoint, um, we could apply this elsewhere, uh, if we went that direction and so time will tell what will be next, then there will be something, uh, you know, that will end up, you know, expanding beyond Kubernetes at some point. Um, but, you know, I think, um, without knowing what that is, you know, our job is to, to, to serve our, you know, to serve our customers and serve our users in the way that they are asking for that. >>Well, serverless obviously is exploding when you look again, and we tucked the ETR survey data, when you look at, at the services within Amazon and other cloud providers, you know, the functions off, off the charts. Uh, so that's kind of an interesting and notable now, of course, you've got Chandler, you've got edge in your title. You've got hybrid in, in your title. So, you know, this notion of the cloud expanding, it's not just a set of remote services, just only in the public cloud. Now it's, it's coming to on premises. You actually got Andy, Jesse, my head space. He said, one time we just look at it. The data centers is another edge location. Right. Okay. That's a way to look at it and then you've got edge. Um, so that cloud is expanding, isn't it? The definition of cloud is, is, is evolving. >>Yeah, that's right. I mean, customers one-on-one run workloads in lots of places. Um, and that's why we have things like, you know, local zones and wavelengths and outposts and EKS anywhere, um, EKS, distro, and obviously probably lots more things to come. And there's, I always think of like, Amazon's Kubernetes strategy on a manageability scale. We're on one far end of the spectrum, you have EKS distro, which is just a collection of the core Kubernetes packages. And you could, you could take those and stand them up yourself in a broom closet, in a, in a retail shop. And then on the other far in the spectrum, you have EKS far gate where you can just give us your container and we'll handle everything for you. Um, and then we kind of tried to solve everything in between for your data center and for the cloud. And so you can, you can really ask Amazon, I want you to manage my control plane. I want you to manage this much of my worker nodes, et cetera. And oh, I actually want help on prem. And so we're just trying to listen to customers and solve their problems where they're asking us to solve them. Cut, >>Go ahead. No, I would just add that in a more vertically focused, uh, kind of orientation for us. Like we, we believe that op you know, optimization capabilities should transcend the location itself. And, and, and so whether that's part public part, private cloud, you know, that's what I love part of what I love about EKS anywhere. Uh, it, you know, you shouldn't, you should still be able to achieve optimal results that connect to your business objectives, uh, wherever those workloads, uh, are, are living >>Well, don't wince. So John and I coined this term called Supercloud and people laugh about it, but it's different. It's, it's, you know, people talk about multi-cloud, but that was just really kind of vendor diversity. Right? I got to running here, I'm running their money anywhere. Uh, but, but individually, and so Supercloud is this concept of this abstraction layer that floats wherever you are, whether it's on prem, across clouds, and you're taking advantage of those native primitives, um, and then hiding that underlying complexity. And that's what, w re-invent the ecosystem was so excited and they didn't call it super cloud. We, we, we called it that, but they're clearly thinking differently about the value that they can add on top of Goldman Sachs. Right. That to me is an example of a Supercloud they're taking their on-prem data and their, their, their software tooling connecting it to AWS. They're running it on AWS, but they're, they're abstracting that complexity. And I think you're going to see a lot, a lot more of that. >>Yeah. So Kubernetes itself, in many cases is being abstracted away. Yeah. There's a disability of a disappearing act for Kubernetes. And I don't mean that in a, you know, in an, a, from an adoption standpoint, but, uh, you know, Kubernetes itself is increasingly being abstracted away, which I think is, is actually super interesting. Yeah. >>Um, communities doesn't really do anything for a company. Like we run Kubernetes, like, how does that help your bottom line? That at the end of the day, like companies don't care that they're running Kubernetes, they're trying to solve a problem, which is the, I need to be able to deploy my applications. I need to be able to scale them easily. I need to be able to update them easily. And those are the things they're trying to solve. So if you can give them some other way to do that, I'm sure you know, that that's what they want. It's not like, uh, you know, uh, a big bank is making more money because they're running Kubernetes. That's not, that's not the current, >>It gets subsumed. It's just become invisible. Right. Exactly. You guys back to the office yet. What's, uh, what's the situation, >>You know, I, I work for my house and I, you know, we go into the office a couple of times a week, so it's, it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's a crazy time. It's a crazy time to be managing and hiring. And, um, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's definitely a challenge, but there's a lot of benefits of working home. I got two young kids, so I get to see them, uh, grow up a little bit more working, working out of my house. So it's >>Nice also. >>So we're in, even as a smaller startup, we're in 26, 27 states, uh, Canada, Germany, we've got a little bit of presence in Japan, so we're very much distributed. Um, we, uh, have not gone back and I'm not sure we will >>Permanently remote potentially. >>Yeah. I mean, w we made a, uh, pretty like for us, the timing of our series B funding, which was where we started hiring a lot, uh, was just before COVID started really picking up. So we, you know, thankfully made a, a pretty good strategic decision to say, we're going to go where the talent is. And yeah, it was harder to find for sure, especially in w we're competing, it's incredibly competitive. Uh, but yeah, we've, it was a good decision for us. Um, we are very about, you know, getting the teams together in person, you know, as often as possible and in the safest way possible, obviously. Um, but you know, it's been a, it's been a pretty interesting, uh, journey for us and something that I'm, I'm not sure I would, I would change to be honest with you. Yeah. >>Well, Frank Slootman, snowflakes HQ to Montana, and then can folks like Michael Dell saying, Hey, same thing as you, wherever they want to work, bring yourself and wherever you are as cool. And do you think that the hybrid mode for your team is kind of the, the, the operating mode for the, for the foreseeable future is a couple of, >>No, I think, I think there's a lot of benefits in both working from the office. I don't think you can deny like the face-to-face interactions. It feels good just doing this interview face to face. Right. And I can see your mouth move. So it's like, there's a lot of benefits to that, um, over a chime call or a zoom call or whatever, you know, that, that also has advantages, right. I mean, you can be more focused at home. And I think some version of hybrid is probably in the industry's future. I don't know what Amazon's exact plans are. That's above my pay grade, but, um, I know that like in general, the industry is definitely moving to some kind of hybrid model. And like Matt said, getting people I'm a big fan at Mesa sphere, we ran a very diverse, like remote workforce. We had a big office in Germany, but we'd get everybody together a couple of times a year for engineering week or, or something like this. And you'd get a hundred people, you know, just dedicated to spending time together at a hotel and, you know, Vegas or Hamburg or wherever. And it's a really good time. And I think that's a good model. >>Yeah. And I think just more ETR data, the current thinking now is that, uh, the hybrid is the number one sort of model, uh, 36% that the CIO is believe 36% of the workforce are going to be hybrid permanently is kind of their, their call a couple of days in a couple of days out. Um, and the, the percentage that is remote is significantly higher. It probably, you know, high twenties, whereas historically it's probably 15%. Yeah. So permanent changes. And that, that changes the infrastructure. You need to support it, the security models and everything, you know, how you communicate. So >>When COVID, you know, really started hitting and in 2020, um, the big banks for example, had to, I mean, you would want to talk about innovation and ability to, to shift quickly. Two of the bigger banks that have in, uh, in fact, adopted Kubernetes, uh, were able to shift pretty quickly, you know, systems and things that were, you know, historically, you know, it was in the office all the time. And some of that's obviously shifted back to a certain degree, but that ability, it was pretty remarkable actually to see that, uh, take place for some of the larger banks and others that are operating in super regulated environments. I mean, we saw that in government agencies and stuff as well. >>Well, without the cloud, no, this never would've happened. Yeah. >>And I think it's funny. I remember some of the more old school manager thing people are, aren't gonna work less when they're working from home, they're gonna be distracted. I think you're seeing the opposite where people are too much, they get burned out because you're just running your computer all day. And so I think that we're learning, I think everyone, the whole industry is learning. Like, what does it mean to work from home really? And, uh, it's, it's a fascinating thing is as a case study, we're all a part of right now. >>I was talking to my wife last night about this, and she's very thoughtful. And she w when she was in the workforce, she was at a PR firm and a guy came in a guest speaker and it might even be in the CEO of the company asking, you know, what, on average, what time who stays at the office until, you know, who leaves by five o'clock, you know, a few hands up, or who stays until like eight o'clock, you know, and enhancement. And then, so he, and he asked those people, like, why, why can't you get your work done in a, in an eight hour Workday? I go home. Why don't you go in? And I sit there. Well, that's interesting, you know, cause he's always looking at me like, why can't you do, you know, get it done? And I'm saying the world has changed. Yeah. It really has where people are just on all the time. I'm not sure it's sustainable, quite frankly. I mean, I think that we have to, you know, as organizations think about, and I see companies doing it, you guys probably do as well, you know, take a four day, you know, a week weekend, um, just for your head. Um, but it's, there's no playbook. >>Yeah. Like I said, we're a part of a case study. It's also hard because people are distributed now. So you have your meetings on the east coast, you can wake up at seven four, and then you have meetings on the west coast. You stay until seven o'clock therefore, so your day just stretches out. So you've got to manage this. And I think we're, I think we'll figure it out. I mean, we're good at figuring this stuff. >>There's a rise in asynchronous communication. So with things like slack and other tools, as, as helpful as they are in many cases, it's a, it, isn't always on mentality. And like, people look for that little green dot and you know, if you're on the you're online. So my kids, uh, you know, we have a term now for me, cause my office at home is upstairs and I'll come down. And if it's, if it's during the day, they'll say, oh dad, you're going for a walk and talk, you know, which is like, it was my way of getting away from the desk, getting away from zoom. And like, you know, even in Boston, uh, you know, getting outside, trying to at least, you know, get a little exercise or walk and get, you know, get my head away from the computer screen. Um, but even then it's often like, oh, I'll get a slack notification on my phone or someone will call me even if it's not a scheduled walk and talk. Um, uh, and so it is an interesting, >>A lot of ways to get in touch or productivity is presumably going to go through the roof. But now, all right, guys, I'll let you go. Thanks so much for coming to the cube. Really appreciate it. And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Alante and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music playing) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE Mary Roth, VP of Engineering Operations with Couchbase is here for Couchbase ConnectONLINE. Mary. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> Love the fire in the background, a little fireside chat here, kind of happening, but I want to get into it because, Engineering and Operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, engineers and developers have been good, working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general, across the organizations. How did the Couchbase engineering team adapt to the remote work? >> Great question. And I actually think the Couchbase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the Couchbase journey. I joined in February, 2020 after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid, in-office remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in Almaden Valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the East Coast, and so throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5:00 AM in the morning, I quickly learned and quickly adapted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at 5:00 AM in the morning, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4:30 AM to go in. I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive there, doing think time work, and I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. This hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined Couchbase, I joined a company that was all about being in-person and instead of a four minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was going to be a really big transition for me, but I was excited enough by Couchbase and what it offered, that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February, 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in-person only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. We were switching to a remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch Couchbase and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. A remote work model does have its challenges, that's for sure, but it also has its benefits, better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time just to think. We just did a retrospective on a major product release, Couchbase server 7.0, that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. >> Well, great story. I love the come back and now you take leverage of all the best practices from the IBM days, but how did they, your team and the Couchbase engineering team react? And were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that? >> The initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person, people had to be in in-person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really helps a lot. Over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections, that was very difficult. But with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. And probably the key. >> What's the DNA of the company there? I mean, every company's got the DNA, Intel's Moore's Law, and what's the engineering culture at Couchbase like, if you could describe it. >> The engineering culture at Couchbase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing the next generation. Now database technology started in the late sixties, early seventies, with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackled and solved really hard problems with elegant solutions, long before anybody knew they were going to be necessary. Now, those original key players, people like Jim Gray, Bruce Lindsay, Don Chamberlin, Pat Selinger, David Dewitt, Michael Stonebraker. They just love solving hard problems. And they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike Carey's and the Mohan's and the Lagerhaus's of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging, and advocating for the next, I was really lucky to grow up in that culture. And I've advanced my career as a result, as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well here. Our two fundamental values on the engineering side, are merit and mentorship. >> One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, on the database questions. I remember, back in the old glory days, you mentioned some of those luminaries, you know, there wasn't many database geeks out there, there was kind of a small community, now, as databases are everywhere. So you see, there's no one database that has rule in the world, but you starting to see a pattern of database, kinds of things are emerging, more databases than ever before, they are on the internet, they are on the cloud, there are none the edge. It's essentially, we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases because they're everywhere. (laughing) So, I mean, this is kind of where we are at. What's your reaction to that? >> You're absolutely right. There used to be a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years, but the fundamental problems are the same, data integrity, performance and scalability in the face of distributed systems. Those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solved back in the sixties and seventies. They're not new problems. They're still there. And they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. >> That's pretty exciting. I love that. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers. And this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and a big conversation here at the, at the event is the powering of these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in RAM, all these kinds of different memory, you got centralization, you got all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the main core thing happening right now? If you had to describe it. >> Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. We have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley, back, right out of college. And at the time I think it was, it probably still is, but at the time it was the best run IT shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another, to get it to the SEC are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high-speed Datacom links. Today, it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. >> Yeah, the key, there has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews and why I got you. I want to ask you if you don't mind, career advice that you give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science. What do you wish you knew when you started your career? And if you could be that person now, what would you say? >> Yeah, well, a lot of things I wish I knew then that I know now, but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I became a math major is a little convoluted. As a girl, I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had to major in it. That's actually how I got my start, but I've had a great career. And I think there are really two key aspects. First, is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit. As I had mentioned earlier, engineers are notoriously detail-oriented and most are, perfectionists. They love elegant, well thought-out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage if you're always prepared and you always bring your A-game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation, you have build up respect among your team, simply through merit. While that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on, say, in your graduate career or when you're starting, over time others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your A-game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect. And that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. >> That's awesome advice. >> That's... >> All right, continue. >> Thank you. So my second piece of advice that I wish I could give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposely working with each. I like to break it down into three types of influencers, managers, mentors, and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success. And particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as, say, you're sixth grade math teacher. You know, you getting an A in the class and advancing to seventh grade. They own you for that. But whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or getting to Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your long-term success, maybe by your relationship with him or her, or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals. Whether it be the company success or helping more women achieve leadership positions or getting more kids into college on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career. And they give great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside the sphere of influence in your current position. And while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. That's the role of the third type of influencer. Somebody that I call an advocate. An advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career, and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who, when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge, or we need to move in a new direction, I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career. And they're often the most overlooked. People early on often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advancement. Managers change on a dime, but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul. And that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, you know, Mike Carey as my father and Mike Stonebraker as my grandfather, and Jim Gray as my great-grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. >> That's like a schema and a database. You got to have it all right there, kind of teed up. Beautiful. (laughing) Great advice. >> Exactly. >> Thank you for that. That was really a masterclass. And that's going to be great advice for folks, really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have and the situation, and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you Mary, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side. Couchbase Capella was launched in conjunction with the event. What is the bottom line for that as, as an Operations and Engineering, built the products and rolled it out. What's the main top line message for about that product? >> Yeah. Well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed and automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath, and the operational database management efforts that come with it. As I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a DBA and it was one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in IT because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, taking that job away from me. I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. >> That's great stuff. Well, great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on the company and the public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on theCUBE here. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. Mary Roth, VP of Engineering Operations at Couchbase part of Couchbase ConnectONLINE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music playing)

>>And welcome to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, Mary Roth, VP of engineering operations with couch basis here for Couchbase connect online. Mary. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. >>Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >>Love the fire in the background, a little fireside chat here, kind of happening, but I want to get into shooting, you know, engineering and operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, you know, engineers and developers have been good working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general, across the organizations. How did the Couchbase engineering team adapt to the remote work? >>Uh, great question. Um, and I actually think the Couchbase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the couch space journey. I joined in February, 2020 after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid in-office rewrote remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in almond and valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the east coast and SU. So throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5:00 AM in the morning, I quickly learned and quickly adopted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at >> 5: 00 AM in the morning, um, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4:30 AM to go in. >>I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive. They're doing think time work. And I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. These hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined Couchbase I joined a company that was all about being in-person and instead of a four minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was going to be a really big transition for me, but I was excited enough by couch facing what it offered that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February, 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in person only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. >>We were switching to a remote remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch cow's face and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. Our remote work model does have its challenges that's for sure, but it also has its benefits better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time, just to think we just did a retrospective on a major product release Couchbase server 7.0 that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. >>Well, great story. I love the, um, the, uh, you come back and now you take leverage all the best practices from the IBM days, but how did the, your team and the Couchbase engineering team react and were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that, >>Uh, the, the initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person people had to be in person in person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but the, there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really, really helps a lot over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections, that was very difficult. But with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. >>What's the DNA of the culture. What's the DNA. Every company's got the DNA entails Moore's law. Um, and at what's the engineering culture at Couchbase like if you could describe it. >>Uh, the engineering culture at Couchbase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing. The next generation. Now database technology started in the late sixties, early seventies with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackle it and solve really hard problems with elegant solutions long before anybody knew they were going to be necessary. Now, those original key players, people like Jim gray, Bruce Lindsey, Don Chamberlin, pat Salinger, David Dewitt, Michael Stonebraker. They just love solving hard problems. And they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike caries and the Mohans and the lower houses of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging and advocating for the next, I was really lucky to grow up in that culture. And I've advanced my career as a result, as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well, here are two fundamental values on the engineering side, our merit and mentorship. >>One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, on the database questions. I remember, you know, back in the old glory days, you mentioned some of those luminaries, you know, there wasn't many database geeks out there, Zuri kind of small community now is databases are everywhere. So you see there's no one database that's ruling the world, but you starting to see a pattern of database kinds of things, and more emerging, more databases than ever before. They're on the internet, they're on the cloud. There are none the edge it's essentially we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases cause they're everywhere. So, I mean, this is kind of where we're at. What's your reaction to that? >>Uh, you're absolutely right there. There used to be a, a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years, but the fundamental problems are the same data, integrity, performance and scalability. And in the face of district distributed systems, those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solve back in the sixties and seventies. They're not, they're not new problems. They're still there. And they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. >>It's pretty exciting. I love that. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers. And this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and a big conversation here at the, at the event is the powering, these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in Ram, all these kinds of different memory, you got decentralization and all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the, what's the, what's the main core thing happening right now? If you had to describe it? >>Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. Um, we have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for, for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley back, um, right out of college. And at the time I think it was, it probably still is, but at the time it was the best run it shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another, to get it to the sec, um, are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high-speed data comm links today, it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. >>You know, the key has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews on why I got you. I want to ask you, uh, if you don't mind, um, career advice that you give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science, what do you wish you knew when you started your career? And you could be that person now, what would you say? >>Yeah, well, there are a lot of things I wish I knew then, uh, that I know now, but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I, I became a math major is a little convoluted. Is it as a girl, I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had to major in it. That's actually how I got my start. Um, but I've had a great career and I think there are really two key aspects first. And is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit. As I had mentioned earlier, engineers are notoriously detail oriented and most of our perfectionist, they love elegant, well thought out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage if you're always prepared and you always bring your a game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation you have build up respect among your team, simply through merit. While that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on say, in your graduate career or when you're starting over time, others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your a game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect. And that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. That's awesome. >>That's >>Fine. Continue. Thank you. So my second piece of advice that I wish I could give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposely working with each. I like to break it down into three types of influencers, managers, mentors, and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success. And particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as say, you're sixth grade math teacher. You know, you're getting an a in the class and advancing to seventh grade. >>They own you for that. Um, but whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or getting to Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your longterm success, maybe by your relationship with him or her, or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals. Whether it be the company success or helping more women achieve, we do put sip positions or getting more kids into college, on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career. And they gave great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside of the sphere of influence in your current position. And while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. >>That's the role of the third type of influencer. Somebody that I call an advocate, an advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place, great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career, and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who, when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge, or we need to move in a new direction. I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career. And they're often the most overlooked people early on, often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advanced managers, change on a dime, but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul. And that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, you know, Mike Carey is my father and Mike Stonebraker is my grandfather. And Jim gray is my great-grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. >>That's like a scheme and a database. You got to have it all white. They're kind of teed up. Beautiful, great advice. >>Thank you for that. That was really a masterclass. And that's going to be great advice for folks really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have a and the situation and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you Maira, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side Couchbase Capella was launched, uh, in conjunction with the event. What is, what is the bottom line for that as, as an operations and engineering, you know, built the products and roll it out. What's the main top line message for about that product? >>Yeah, well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed in an automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath and the operational database management efforts that come with it. Uh, as I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a UVA and it was one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in it because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, you know, taking that job away from me, I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. >>That's great stuff. Well, great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate congratulations on the company and public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on the QPR. Thank you. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay. Mary Ross, VP of engineering operations at Couchbase part of Couchbase connect online. I'm John furry host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Live the cube. Yes, it's live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave Alante, we are covering UI path forward for very excited to be here, talking with customers, UI path, employees, partners, lots of great conversations going on about automation and the acceleration that we're seeing, especially in the last 18 months. We've got two guests here with me today to talk about emerging technologies, specifically continuous process discovery. Please welcome Paula Katikia VP of product management at UI path and Layla Deleage CIO and digital officer at Coca Cola. Ladies, welcome to >>The program. Thank you. It's great to be here. So let's >>Talk about public. Let's start with you. Continuous process discovery. Define that for us. What does that mean? >>So process discovery has been, um, a concept that's been around for awhile, right? It's enterprises have a bunch of processes that are deployed and people are following them. Um, the concept of discovery has existed. What we're trying to do with continuous process discovery is enable you to identify the processes, figure out how to optimize them and then automate them once they're automated, we want to monitor them and then keep doing that cycle over and over again, using technology rather than having fill in, having people fill in paperwork and then having those processes go out of, um, out of, um, status, like right away, because they're just becoming stale with continuous process discovery. They don't become stale. You're getting that real time feedback loop and you're getting the processes to work and to end continuously. >>So I wonder if I could follow up on that because I remember when you guys made the acquisition of process gold. And so as somebody who's heavily involved in product management, how did you go about, I mean, it's been, sounds like it's seamless, but it never is. Right. But how did you go about integrating and making it appear as though it's just kind of part of the platform? >>I mean, there's a lot goes into that right. Process gold was a great technology to begin with. So it wasn't a huge stretch for us to take it and integrate it and make it part of the platform. Um, typically when we acquire companies, we look for product market fit. We look for a technology fit. We look for people fit and we had that with process gold. The other thing to add there is a process discovery, um, specifically with Parsis gold and automation go hand in hand, you can't having one without the other is kind of leaving half of your solution on the table and just focusing on understanding and not focusing on implementation. And so it was very easy to take that technology and make it part of the hyper automation platform. >>Well, the reason why I asked that question is because it sort of coincides with a customer's journey where you go from sort of a individual department. And then now you're saying, I always say pave the cow path. And I kind of take a process that I know I'll just implement that even might not be the best I'm going to repeat and takes you to a new realm. And so this is, to me, this is all about how incumbent companies, a hundred plus year old companies can actually be digital disruptors as opposed to being disrupted themselves. Right? A lot of smart people running these big companies. So last time we talked, you were relatively new inside of a year. So how's the journey going. And, and how does it tie in to some of the advancements that UI path has made? Yeah, >>Absolutely. So the journey is going great. I like to work to use accelerate. So I'm here to accelerate and transform and why we have to do it is so that we don't become obsolete and we continue to be relevant for our customers, for our employees. They're important and for our community. So the are doing a lot of finished running a lot of initiatives. When you look at being relevant for the customer, that means we have to transform the way we operate and our business models. We have to generate new revenue streams now that are enabled and based on data and technology, while you do that, you have to create efficiency internally. You cannot create great experiences with customers and you work with very monolithic and very old school, traditional processes or based off working and systems. So you have to make sure that you adapt and change and transform the way you work internally to meet the customer's needs and demand and generate these new business models. >>So our starting position was automation. We have to automate at an extreme speed, but we also wanted to go really far without automation, not just fast and hit with task automation and just automate these traditional 50, 60 year old processes, but have Doobie identify what else is there? There's a wealth of opportunity when you look at an end to end process. So that's where process mining as Polak described, comes into play. And actually we started affiliating with process mining during process gold. So your question around how the integration went, we actually went through that. I think the UI pads, one key value that they have, and they should never use is listening to the customer. So the got to get her with iPads. And we said, there's more to what we can do with automation. And we implemented process mining for one end to end process, amazing results, just one country, one end to end process, amazing results. But it's because of the partnership. We know what we need to achieve, but we have to do, and they know how to help us to get the technology up and running or adapt to technology and improve the technology. So that's where we are achieving outcomes. We are generating new business model, new revenue stream, automating internally re-skilling and up-skilling our people, which is extremely important that comes along with automation that redesign exciters sorry, but that redesign a work is >>Very important in the CEO's role is very important in that as well. I wanted to talk though about something that you just said with respect to the listening piece that you have is so good at this morning in the keynote. Mary said too, you know, all that, which was standing room only, which was amazing to see, um, in this day and age, but that they wanted to hear from customers. What are we doing? Right? What are we not doing that you want to see more of? What do you want to see less of? Talk to me about the direction and advice that you, as the CIO of Coca-Cola is able to provide to flock and the team about where you I've had this going, right. It's really on a very fast cadence. >>Absolutely. So as Coca-Cola TJ, we started the journey with two iPad, three years of work. Exactly. I was on the job and the second big technology decision I made was the iPad. And since then it was fear consistently think. But during our cab meeting, Daniel said something, he said, I'm not welcoming the request. He said, we welcome. He said, no, no, sorry. I am not welcoming. I'm requesting you to give us insight. And I think that's very critical. That's what we want to hear. At the end of the day, we are technologists. We are total leaders, but the are better taught leaders with our technology partners. So we want technology partners to show us the way sometimes. And with low code, no code type of approaches. And the evolution of the technology that UI path is, has been running since the past three years is helping us remove so many barriers. >>When it comes to people, they are listening to us in terms of the roadmap and what should be implemented and what should be prioritized VR, providing with them, our roadmap, our vision on where we want to go in automation and hugged battle. We want to integrate with other ecosystem and environments that we have. They are listening to us in terms of, for the existing products, what can be improved, what can work better? And we don't need a cab actually for you iPad to listen to us. We work hand in hand with two iPad team continuously be coil, you know, eight sometimes. So, and that's what we want them to continue to do. They are great technologists, as long as they continue to listen to us, they're going to be greater technology. >>Yeah. And I'll share my perspective on this, this, this, you know, these partnerships actually make us build better products, right? We get to, this is how we stay ahead of the curve by listening to our customers, because they're the ones who are doing the implementations. They understand how our product works. We can design it, we can test it. But that's the extent to which we can go once they implement it is when we know what's working, what's not working. And how do we take that feedback and make better products. So it's a two-way street. We love hearing from them constantly. >>You have to decode what the customer is saying sometimes, right? Like Steve jobs said, yeah, if you just ask the customer what they want, you'll never build, you know, something that's game changing the world changing. And so, so you have to talk to Layla, you get the input from COVID, Coca-Cola maybe many and then other customers to figure out, okay, how can I apply this? So that actually can scale and meet the needs of many customers. Not just so, because otherwise you end up being, you know, a custom development shop, which ironically is what you guys were 20 years ago. Right? So it's kind of some art involved in the science of listening. Isn't it? >>There is definitely, I mean, most of our job as product managers is to design the product, right? It's very much art and the feedback that we get from Layla and others, it really just helps us focus on a vision. But, you know, keeping up with new technology trends, figuring out how to figuring out how to, um, bring AI into our product vision and looking beyond what we're being told and asked for and looking forward at what the next trends are going to be in technology is what helps us continue to innovate. So it's both, it's the balance of what we're hearing, but also technologies. And what's possible with what's available >>Question for you. You said three years ago, you guys brought in UI path, right after you joined the company as it's CIO, why U I path, clearly you looked at some of the other folks, you mentioned that company that they acquired, but what in your mind differentiates what they're able to deliver on the partnership side and the technology side? >>Yeah. Very important question. We have a definition for a technology partner for us, the technology partner needs to meet criteria of innovating. So how much do you invest in innovation? And Daniel says, I don't even know the number, right? So because we want them to be on the forefront. Sometimes they have to pull us and sometimes we have to pull them. The second one is very important for a company to be successful in automation or in any advanced technology, you have to build intellectual property within your enterprise. And we did not want to art source technology. We wanted to insource technology and we asked you, I pad, if they would be reeling to co-innovate, co-develop collaborate with us. They were the only ones who allowed us to build the intellectual property within my enterprise, because that's the way I'm going to innovate. And that's the way I'm going to help product leaders like Pollock to create better products. Right? So, and the third one is just building expertise. Low-code no-code the technology company needs to, you know, wait where they remove some of the barriers for me to find the skills or develop talent, how easy it is to find the talent and skills to develop this technology. Right. And what, what does the technology company do to develop skills? So these are a few criteria that we have, and then when the company takes all of those, they are in, >>I'm interested in, um, to kind of shift the conversation. If I may, in your, your role, it's not uncommon to see a CIO and a chief digital officer together, but it's quite uncommon at a, at a large firm like Coca-Cola. And, and I'm wondering, is that how the company, cause your group sees information in digital? Is that how the company's organized? You know, that you plug into somebody who has that to a role. Can you talk about, >>Yeah, absolutely. So cocoli too. Jake is within the Coca-Cola system. We are one of the leading butlers within the Coca-Cola system. The reason I merged the two roles is to be successful in the digital era. When you have the digital and it separated. If it goes a little slower, you can not be successful in digital and you cannot be successful in generating new revenue streams or new business models. So you have to orchestrate that evolution and transformation of it and the rest of the business together. And that's why I merged the two roles. We are unique as Coca-Cola >>Merged them. You say you merged those roles, like, did you come at it from the, where you digital first and then CIO first >>Digital first. Okay. Great point. I built from scratch and started with the digital strategy. And then we went into defining what roles, what skills do we need? And then we redefined, what are the improvements we need on the it side? But it was all digital product based >>Because I think, uh, I think it would be much harder for a CIO, let alone a woman CIO, no offense, but I don't think there's any offense there, but oh, she's trying to do a land grab. I could see that happening, but the digital officer title, because that's the hot title and it's the visionary. Right. And it's a lot of times it's undefined. Yeah. So that's that and that, and that that's the structure of the organization. So you roll up into it. >>Uh, so yeah, because I came into the ex-con role. I had the privilege to kind of shape it from scratch. >>Exactly. And >>Like Shankar was talking about hidden brain and all the change this morning, it was a change in terms of how are we going to approach digital? It was a change in terms of all the people who are part of the company and people who have been in technology or it before right now, the expectations are very different. You have to be product organization, you have to be outcome centric. You have to generate the revenue streams. So it's very different from the world of it. I think any it or any technology leader can do this, if they are willing to transform themselves first and then their organization, and then they can transform the rest of the company, >>Chief digital officer data is a big part of your role. You're not the chief data officer, >>The organization, that's >>Part of your, okay, so the CDL reports into, okay, and that individual sure is responsible for governance and compliance. >>Well look, the data management, data governance, the foundation, and all the database solutions, I think >>You got it right. I think this idea of creating stovepipes, it just it's, it's not as productive and it's harder to make decisions that are aligned with the organization's goals, >>Boulder. So we're going to disrupt further. Our goal now is to create platforms and then democratize the platforms. So our operating partners can learn the new skills and they can develop their own use cases on the platforms. And that way they'll go much, further and much faster in terms of the generational new revenue, streams, changing, operating models, data and technology. I call it the new operating system of any business and everybody must learn >>Well. And that's what I want to ask you about, because if you think about, uh, uh, a company and incumbent, like Coca-Cola your processes over the years have in your data, maybe they were organized around the bottlers or the distribution channel, et cetera. And that might not be the best process. So you have to take a look at that and then use process mining to say, actually, what is the best process, reinvent yourself? Okay. >>Absolutely VRD and re-engineering and reinventing in a lot of places. Process mining helped us in short order to cash cycle. Everybody, every company has ordered to cash process. We took an order to cash process, which we recently standardized, by the way we thought we did. And every process mining told us that very few times you go through the happy path. Most of the times you go out of the happy path. So gave us a lot of tangible outcomes where we improve the cycle time. And it's an interesting process because you touch the customer it's impacts your delivery and your commitments to the customer. And it makes life easier for the employees. When you improve the process, this is only one piece VR also transforming the way we are interacting with our customers using digital means and digital channel. But one thing is very valuable with us while we do all of this staying hybrid is very important. Like with everything else, they do that human touch and personal relationship with our customers and consumers is invaluable. So we going to keep that doesn't matter how digital we go or how much technology we implement. They're going to keep the customer and consumer connect the most valuable asset that we have. >>Absolutely. It is. I'll go ahead. >>I was going to say, this is the one thing that, that we think about when we're designing our products, right? It's how can process my mining help you optimize your workflows, such that you can spend more time with the customer such that you can spend more time and get back to them faster. >>Yeah, that's critical. They, I always say the employee experience is inextricably linked to the customer experience. And so what you just talked about, you talked about so much stuff that I'd love to unpack. We probably don't have time, but coming in as with a transformation mindset, one being, you mentioned, you know, leaders need to be willing to embrace that. Obviously you were, but as a CIO, >>Working with UI path, you're really helping to redefine work. And also that customer experience, to an extent, how's your iPod helped facilitate that. So because they are listening and they are willing to partner with, and I think the most importantly, they're going to be part of our outcomes. They care about our outcomes. And going back to your question, how do we select a technology partner? That was one of the critical items. Outcomes are very critical. If there's no outcome, there's no point in it are not doing technology for the sake of doing it. We are, yes. We are all excited with what technology can bring and removing barriers very important, which is a huge, another huge topic. But if you don't generate an outcome it's meaningless and you AIPAC is willing to understand the outcome we are generating. So it's less of a commercial discussion, more of a technology and outcome conversation. >>So whether it's an customer outcome or an employee outcome or a cash outcome, financial outcome, I think that's why we have been successful. And they have been on the journey with you, iPad process mining. I think they are one of the very few clients, right? Customers of UI path who are using it. And because we are very progressive organization, you AIPAC is listening to our feedback and implementing back to your earlier question, you have so many customers who do you listen, right? So when you are progressive and when you really know what you are doing, you're also pulling your iPad, a big technology company into a direction that is more meaningful. So they listen to us in terms of what to improve with process mining. And that's why we were able to achieve the outcomes. And now they are listening to us further on further improvements on process mining so that we can capitalize on further outcomes and benefits of process mining >>In order to cash is common use cases. So what, what, uh, were there any diamonds in the rough, or do you suspect there are with, >>We already realized, yes. We realized multiple tangible outcomes. We discussed this with Polak earlier today. One of them is some very interesting, I'm not able to share, but the most critical one is be focused on improving cash cycle. It's scent. You can imagine extremely full flow business, even within FMCG, right? We as Coca-Cola system, we are an extremely flow business. It's an instant consumption business. Hence your delivery and cash cycles are very different compared to other industries. So we said, we want to improving cash. We discovered that the improved, the invoice due date change, which impacts the payment terms by 20%, we improved credit limits approvals by 5% by removing unnecessary approval steps. We realized there were unnecessary approvals. These two are directly impacting our customers as well because it's waiting in somebody's queue to handle those approvals. And the customer is not getting to delay delivery because it's payment, payment and delivery go hand in hand. >>And the third one is, and I'm not able to articulate it exact outcome, but it's a very critical day, every day gain on getting cash. So it's a cash game. The next big outcome is the cycle time improvements. So we significantly improve the cycle time of the process. And this means efficiency for our employees. We are making life easier for them. The last one is again, a tangible one 30,000 hours back in terms of productivity, one process, one country, 30,000 hours. And that translates into exactly that translates into benefit for the customer. You increase customer satisfaction, you increase employee satisfaction. 'cause you remove all the non-available for it. So going back to Pollock's point around continuous discovery, that's why we love it. It's like good old lean six Sigma lean six Sigma is exactly that you continuously, you want to continuously improve the process. You don't do it once with process mining. We don't want to do it once. We want to do it continuously, but this time with automation, >>But before we go, I'm the lone male on the panel. So I have to ask. So, so you CIO seat, chief digital role, very uncommon, let alone uncommon for a woman. Big time product management person. Okay. That's cool check. Right? You've been in the industry for a while now, a celebrity on the, on the cube and elsewhere. So has the pandemic, how has the pandemic affected the whole women in tech trend? Has it slowed it down? Has it accelerated? We were talking earlier about the working moms feeling like way stressed out more than the working dads, double 30% versus 15%. Has the pandemic in your minds altered in any way, was women in tech meme? How so positive. Negative. >>So we are trying to turn the negative into a positive. It is negative. Absolutely. I think it's impacted everybody, all, all women in all industries and in all areas of operation and workforce women in technology is already a very slim, right? It's a very tiny layer within any company and out there in the society. And unfortunately the challenges that came with COVID impacted and some of them had to leave and they couldn't stick around. Right. So we are trying to turn that into positive. As a digital function, we have a big give back initiative. It's a priority of the digital team. I'll be talking about that very in, in, and our technology removes barriers. So we have to turn this into a positive, yes, COVID has impacted everybody personally and directly or indirectly. But now with technology, we can remove barriers. We have now flexible working and hybrid working models, being ramped up across all geographies and all industries and all companies, technology removes barriers. >>We can teach technology to a lot of people and our communities and they can join because we have huge skill gaps in technology that would sat is we have huge scarcity of skills in technology. And we have very few people, but we are talking about women dropping out or any type of minor to dropping out, right? So we can leverage and improve and turn it around. I hope we'll accomplish to do that. We started doing that in our company and in Turkey. And we are trying to expand that across multiple other countries with NGO partnerships, helping women to gain certain skills so that they can join the economy again from wherever they are. >>And from my point of view, I think there are two aspects to it. As Layla said, it has affected women a little bit more, but I've also seen, in some cases it has leveled the playing field a little bit because there's, you know, everybody's on zoom. The kids show up on zoom cameras for men, just as much as they do for women. So it helps shine a light on things that we would normally go through that nobody would know about. And I thought that was a really cool outcome to some degree of this. You know, my manager prom has little kids and they'd be in his background all the time, just as my little kids would be by background. And I'm like, oh wow. So you know how it feels to be the caregiver at home. And I thought, I thought that was a positive outcome of the whole being a female in technology. I liked that >>That's something that I hadn't thought about in terms of leveling the playing field like that there's in this situation, there are both positives and negatives. I like how you're seeing the playing field level a bit more and how you're at. Coca-Cola looking to, how can we turn this negative into a positive lots of opportunities there we uncovered a lot in the last, I'm going to guess 20 minutes talking about continuous process discovery, all the way to women in technology, how you're each doing that and what your perspectives are. I wish we had more time. We could keep going, but ladies, thank you for joining David. >>It's been a pleasure >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for it. We'll be right back.