(bright upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Special Program series: Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. I'm your host for the series, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome Kesha Williams, senior principal at Slalom who joins me next. Kesha, great to have you. Thank you so much for your time today. >> Thank you for having me Lisa. >> Tell me a little bit about you and your role at Slalom. >> Hi everyone. I've been in tech for 26 years working across several industries like the airline industry, healthcare, hospitality and several government agencies. I really built a solid foundation in the Java software engineering space. A few years ago I added on AWS in the cloud and I really haven't looked back since. Throughout my career, I realized that I had a heart to teach and mentor, and that's what really brought me to Slalom. I currently serve as a program director in our AWS Cloud Residency program, which is a career accelerator for cloud engineers. >> 26 years. So you've had some great experiences and talk along that journey. You've grown your career as well. I love that you have that heart for teaching and mentoring. I think that's fantastic. Talk about, for the audience, some of the tactical recommendations that you have for those watching to be able to follow in your footsteps and grow their careers in tech. >> Well, tech is a very broad category. I always recommend that people really figure out what they enjoy doing to help narrow that focus into a specific domain in technology. For example, do you enjoy coding? Then you would look to be a software engineer. Do you enjoy telling people what to do? Then you may enjoy technical project management, and there are so many disciplines. I also recommend for people just getting started in tech to really consider the cloud. There is a huge demand for cloud engineers and people that are cloud-literate and not enough people to fill that demand. If you're looking to start a career in the cloud, I always recommend starting with learning the foundations, so going after your AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. And once you understand the foundations, then start to build that hands on experience and build that portfolio so that you can speak to what you've developed in the past. And once you have that understanding, start to think about your specialty area. Do you want to specialize in machine learning or security or networking, and then continue to go after those more advanced certifications? >> That is brilliant advice that you really walked the audience through very strategically. I love how you think about it in that sense. I'd love to get into now you've grown your career over 26 years, as you said, some of the success stories that you've had in cloud. Can you share a few of those with us that you think really demonstrate the value of that foundation that you've built? >> Sure. I think a lot about success stories that really hit home and the first one that comes to mind is Georgia State University. That hits home because I'm from Georgia. It also hits home because my son attended Georgia State University. And Slalom joined Georgia State to really help them adopt this serverless approach and implement DevOps practices, and what that brings with serverless, you're able to really think less about the infrastructure management, and focus on building solutions and capabilities in Georgia State's example, really helping students achieve what they're trying to achieve. And I think that just the serverless model helps organizations move faster and deliver faster and innovate faster, and that's what we saw at Georgia State University. I'm happy when I think about that project because now Georgia State is ranked as the fourth most innovative university in the country, and I believe it's because we were able to help them shift and move some of their key applications to the cloud and really realize the benefits of what the cloud brings. >> And so, I love that. The fourth most innovative university in the country. That's a pretty impressive pedigree to be able to have there and you've shown the value of that. There's value across the organization, right? Across the staff, the educators, the students, the prospective students, and of course they have such great technology foundation with which they can use to learn and grow. You've got a second great example at Securian. I'd love to hear that success story and how you really helped that organization transform itself. >> Right. Securian, that case study really speaks to me because I'm all about teaching and mentoring, and empowering people to really realize the benefits of the cloud, and we were able to do that at Securian. We came in and really helped them define their cloud strategy, define that adoption strategy, define how they're going to migrate their applications to the cloud, and then we worked right alongside them to help them do that migration. But as a part of that, we talked about talent development and really help them up level their skills to be able to maintain what we've developed from an ongoing long-term perspective. >> The talent focus, the demand for talent, your focus on that is it can be such a flywheel for organizations in terms of innovation, evolution, that in upskilling is something that every organization I think regardless of industry should be focused on. Talk to me a little bit more about the heart that you have for helping organizations to attract that talent, to retain that talent by being able to be embracing of technology in emerging technologies in their organization, and how does that help them attract talent? >> Well, when you think about the mindset of engineers and the people in tech, we always have this goal to be at the leading edge and keep our skills current and have an opportunity to experiment with the latest and greatest technologies. And there is a huge appetite for cloud engineering skills from an engineer perspective and just from a demand perspective in the industry. So when companies are utilizing these really leading edge technologies that have shifted how we build applications, how we support applications, it really attracts top talent. >> Absolutely, and that should be a focus of every organization. Speaking of talent, one of the things that is talked about tremendously in organizations is diversity. But talk to me about some of the things that you see from a diversity lens through your eyes and what are some of the challenges today? There's so much talk about it, but yet dot dot dot to be continued. >> Right, Right. I am super excited that there is a huge focus on diversity in tech. Like I mentioned before, I've been in tech for 26 years, and I remember when a lot of organizations didn't care about diversity. So I'm appreciative that now there's a huge focus. But with that, there's also a need and a desire to focus on what we call inclusion and equity. So we're seeing organizations hire diverse candidates, but when those people come in, they're not in an environment that's welcoming. They're not in an environment where they feel included. And so there can be a retention problem if there isn't a focus on also inclusion and equity, which I call the other side of diversity. >> Yeah, the other side of the coin there. That's a great point that inclusion and equity are so critical to that diversity piece. In fact, they're really kind of engines to help make it successful so that organizations can attract diverse talent, but also retain them, make them feel welcome. Talk to me about some of the commitments that Slalom has to really a DEI approach. >> Right. At Slalom, we work really hard to build a culture where employees can bring their a authentic selves to work and be authentic, and really enjoy equitable opportunities in a welcoming environment that celebrates authenticity. For example, our employees have access to a multitude of employee resource groups. Those types of groups, we call them ERGs, they really help with a sense of inclusion and a sense of belonging. When I think about the cloud residency, we do the same thing. We have a focus on diversity, so our leadership team is diverse, the residents in the program are diverse. So we have diversity from the bottom to the top. We also practice equity and inclusion in how we staff our residents on projects and how we make sure really I call it an even playing field for everyone, and really think about and understand some of the barriers that people face. And like I said, try to make it an even playing field. >> Wouldn't that be nice one day if there actually is an even playing field and we don't have to focus on this so much? That's kind of a nirvana, I think, for us to get to, but so much productivity comes when people are treated fairly. And to your point, I love that you said getting to be their authentic selves. I think that's what everybody wants in every walk of life, in every aspect of life. Let me being my authentic self and employer, I'm going to be far more productive as a result for you. I just think they're linked like this. >> I totally agree. Like you mentioned, it helps bring retention. And when people have that sense of belonging, that sense of inclusion and they know that the organization they work for really cares and values those those things. >> Speaking of authenticity, the organization needs to be authentic. That's a whole other conversation, Kesha, we could have I'm sure. But I want to ask you a final question. I can't believe you have 26 years experience in tech. Don't look at for one, but you have had- I appreciate that- >> such opportunities to grow and expand your career. You've left our audience with some fantastic strategic advice, tactical recommendations for how they can really climb that ladder. What do you see as next for the evolution in the cloud and where do you think your role is going to go? >> I definitely see this growing demand and need for machine learning. The use of how we're applying machine learning really in every area of life is just exploding. And I see just next this supercharged focus on truly democratizing machine learning and putting it in the hands of everyone: technical people, business people, non-technical people. And when I think about AWS and some of their newer services, it really seeks to do just that. And when I think about my role and in the Cloud Residency and how that role will evolve, it's just very important for me to lead the team to be intentional in building cloud engineers that can quickly jumpstart their machine learning journey to help fill that demand and better serve our clients. I also see my role really evolving into one that truly stays in line with the trends that we're seeing in the tech industry, and bringing those trends back and really preparing our cloud engineers to succeed. >> It's all about being intentional, intentional in DEI, intentional in cloud engineering, intentional in democratizing machine learning. Kesha, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the program, Women of Cloud. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your advice with the audience. I know they appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. >> My pleasure. For Kesha Williams, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this special CUBE program series, Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. We thank you so much for watching and we'll see you soon. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We're live from the show floor here at AWS re:Invent on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson joined by my VIP co-host John Furrier. John, what's your hot take? >> We get wall-to-wall coverage day three of theCUBE (laughing loudly) shows popping, another day tomorrow. >> How many interviews have we done so far? >> I think we're over a hundred I think, (laughing loudly) we might be pushing a hundred. >> We've had a really fantastic line up of guests on theCUBE so far. We are in the meat of the sandwich right now. We've got a full line up of programming all day long and tomorrow. We are lucky to be joined by two fantastic gentlemen on our next segment. Brad, who's a familiar face. We just got to see you in that last one. Thank you for being here, you still doing good? >> Still good. >> Okay, great, glad nothing's changed in the last 14 minutes. >> 'no, we're good. >> Would've been tragic. And welcome, Mark, the CEO of Cloud Saver. Mark, how you doing this morning? >> I'm doing great, thanks so much. >> Savannah: How's the show going for ya'? >> It's going amazing. The turnout's just fantastic. It's record turnouts here. It's been lots of activity, it's great to be part of. >> So I suspect most people know about AMD, but Mark, I'm going to let you give us just a little intro to Cloud Saver so the audience is prepped... >> 'yeah, absolutely. So at Cloud Saver we help companies manage their Cloud spin. And the way that we do it is a little bit unique. Most people try and solve Cloud cost management just through a software only solution but we have a different perspective. There's so many complexities and nuances to managing your Cloud spin, that we don't think that software's enough. So our solution is a full managed service so we can plan our own proprietary technology with a full service delivery team, so that we come in and provide project management, Cloud engineering, FinOps analysts, and we come in and basically do all the cost authorization for the company. And so it's been a fantastic solution for us and something that's really resonated well within our customer base. >> I love your slogan. "Clean up the Cloud with the Cloud Saver Tag Manager'. >> Mark: That's right. >> So yesterday in the Keynote, Adams Lesky said, "Hey if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." So, big focus right now on right sizing. >> That's right. >> I won't say repatriation 'cause that's not kind of of happening, but like people are looking at it like they're not going to, it's not the glory days where you leave all your lights on in your house and you go to bed, you don't worry about the electricity bill. Now people are like, "Okay, what am I doing? Why am I doing it?" A lot more policy, a lot more focus. What are you guys seeing as the low hanging fruit, best practices, the use cases that people are implementing right now? >> Yeah, if you think about where things are at now from a Cloud cost management perspective, there's a lot of frustration in the marketplace because everybody sees their cost continually going up. And what typically happens is they'll say, okay we need to figure out what's going on with this cost and figure out where we can make some changes. And so they go out and get a cost visibility tool and then they're a little bit disappointed because all that visibility tool is completely dependent upon properly tagging your resources. So what a lot of people don't understand is that a lot of their pain that they're experiencing, the root cause is actually they've got a data problem which is why we built a entire solution to help companies clean up their Cloud, clean up their tags. It really is a foundational piece to help them understand how to manage their costs. >> I just.. >> Data is back in the data problem again >> Shocking, right? Not a theme we've heard on the show. Not a theme we've heard on the show at all. I mean, I think with tags it matters more than people realize and it can get very messy very quick. I know that this partnership is relatively new, six months, you told us before this show. Brad what does this partnership mean for AMD customers? >> Yeah, it's critical, they have a fantastic approach to this kind of a full service approach to cost optimization, compete optimization. AMD we're very, extremely focused on providing most cost efficient, most performance, and most energy efficient products on the market. And as Adam talked about, come to the Cloud to tighten your belt. I'll follow up. When you come to the Cloud, your choice matters, right? Your choice matters on what you use and what the downstream impact and cost is. And it also matters in sustainability and other other factors with our products. >> You know, yesterday Zeyess Karvellos one of our analysts on theCUBE, he used his own independent shop. We were talking about this focus and he actually made a comment I want to get your both reaction to, he said "Spend more in the Cloud, save more." Meaning there are ways to spend more on the Cloud and save more at the same time. >> Right. >> It's not just cut and eliminate, it's right side. I don't know what the right word is. Can you guys.. >> No, I think what you're saying is, is that there are areas where you need to spend more so you can be more efficient and get value that way, but there's also plenty of areas where you're spending money unnecessarily. Either you have resources that nobody's using. Let's find those and pull them to the front and center and turn them off, right? Or if you've over provisioned certain areas let's pull those back. So I think having the right balance of where you spend your money to get the value makes total sense. >> John: Yeah >> I like that holistic approach too. I like that you're not just looking at one thing. I mean, people, you're kind of, I'm thinking of you as like the McKinsey or like the dream team that just comes in tidies everything up. Makes sure that people are being, getting that total cost optimization. It's exciting. So who, I imagine, I mean obviously the entire organization benefits, but who benefits most? What types of roles? Who's using you? >> Right, so, Cloud cost management really benefits the entire organization, especially when times get tougher and everybody's looking to tighten their belt with cost. You know.. >> Wait every time when you say that, I'm like conscious, (laughing loudly) of my abdomen. we're in Vegas, there's great food, (laughing loudly) and we got, (laughing loudly) thanks a lot Adam, thanks a lot. (all laughing loudly). >> No, but it really does benefit everybody across the organization and it also helps people to keep cost management kind of front and center, right? No company allows people to have a complete blank check to go out there for infrastructure and as a way to make sure you've got proper checks and balances in place so that you're responsibly managing your IT organization. >> Yeah, and going back to the spend comment, spend more, you know, to save money. You know, look, we're going to be facing a very difficult situation in 23. I think there's going to be a lot of headwinds for a lot of companies. And the way to look at this is it's if you can provide yourself additional operating capital to work, there's other aspects to working with the business. Time to market, right? You're talking about addressing your top line. There's other ways to use applications and the services from AWS to help enable your business to grow even faster in '23 right? So '23 is a time to build, not necessarily a time to hang back and hope everything turns out okay. >> Yeah we can't go over it, (chuckles) We can't go under it, we got to go through it... >> Got to make it work >> Got to make our way through it. I think it's, yeah, it's so important. So as the partnership grows, what's next for you two companies? Brad will go to you first. >> Yeah sure you know, we're very excited to partner with Cloud Saver. It's fantastic company, have great team. And for us it's AMB is entering into the partnership space of this now. So now we've got a great position with AWS. We love their products, and now we're going to try to enable as many partners as we can in some specific areas. And for us cost optimization is priority number one. So you'll see a lot of programs that come out in '23 around this area. We're going to dedicate a lot of sales resources to help as many enterprise customers as we can, working with our close partners like Cloud Saver. >> Next ecosystem developing for you guys. >> Absolutely, absolutely, and you know AMD's they're still fairly new in the Cloud space, right? And this is a journey that takes a long time, and this is the next leg in our growth in the environment. >> Well, certainly the trend is more horsepower, more under the hood, more capabilities, customized >> Oh that's coming. >> Workloads. You're starting to see the specialized instances, you can see what's happening and soon it's going to be like a, it's own like computer in the Cloud >> Right. >> More horsepower. >> You think about this, I mean more than 400 instance types, more than 400 types of services out there in that range. And you think about all the potential interactions and applications. It's incredibly complex, right? >> Yeah that decision matrix just went like this in my brain when you said that. That is wild. And everyone wants to do more, faster, easier but also with the comfort of that cost savings, in terms of your customers priorities, I mean, you're talking to a lot of different people across a lot of different industries both of you are, I'm sure is cost optimization the number one priority as we're going into 2023? >> Yeah. Matter of fact, I have a chance to obviously speak with AWS leadership on a regular basis. Every single, they keep telling me for the past two months, every single CEO they're speaking to right now, it's the very first things out of the mouth. It's top of mind for every major corporation right now. And I think the message is also the same. It's like, great, let's help you do that but at the same time, is it not a bad time to re:Invest with some of those additional savings, right? And I think that's where the value of else comes into play. >> Yeah, and I think what you guys are demonstrating to also is another tell sign of this what I call NextGen Cloud evolution, which is as the end-to-end messaging and positioning expands and as you see more solutions. You know, let's face it, it's going to be more complex. So the complexity will be abstracted away by new opportunities like what you guys are doing, what you're enabling. So you're starting to see kind of platforms emerging across the board as well as more ISVs. So ISVs, people building software, starting to see now more symbiotic relationship, for developers and entrepreneurship. >> Yeah, so the complexity of the Cloud is certainly something that's not going to get any less as time goes on, right? And I think as companies realize that, they see it, they acknowledge it and I think they're going to lean on partners to help them navigate those waters. So that's where I think the combination of AMD and Cloud Saver, we can really partner very well because I think we're both very passionate about creating customer value, and I think there's a tremendous number of ways that we can collaborate together to bring that to the customers. >> And you know what's interesting too you guys are both hitting on this is that this next partner channel whatever you want to call it is very joint engineering and development. It's not just relationships and selling, there's integration and the new products that can come out is a phenomenal, we're going to watch. I think I predict that the ecosystem's going to explode big time in terms of value, just new things, joint engineering, API... >> 'it's so collaborative too. >> Yeah, it's going to be... >> 'well, the innovation in the marketplace right now is absolutely on fire. I mean, it's so exciting to see all the new technologies have on board. And to be able to see that kind of permeate throughout the marketplace is something that's just really fun and excited to be part of. >> Oh, when you think about the doom and gloom that we hear every day and you look around right now, everybody's building, right? And... >> this and smiling. >> And smiling, right? >> Paul: Today, (laughing loudly) >> Until Thursday when the legs start to get out. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, what recession? I mean, it's so crowded here. And again, this is the point that the Amazon is now a big player in this economy in 2008 that last recession, they weren't a factor. Now you got be tightening new solutions. I think you're going to see, I think more agility. I think Amazon and the ecosystem might propel us out the recession faster if you get the tailwind that might be a big thing we're watching. >> I agree. Cloud computing is inevitable. >> Yeah. >> It's inevitable. >> Yeah, it's no longer a conversation, it's a commitment. And I think we all certainly agree with that. So, Brad is versed in this challenge because we did it in our last segment. But Mark, we have a new tradition I should say, at re:Invent here, where we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel, your sizzle your thought leadership hot take on the most important story or theme of the show this year. >> For the show as a whole. Wow, well, I think innovation is absolutely front and center today. I think, of the new technologies that we're seeing out there are absolutely phenomenal. I think they're taking the whole Cloud computing to the next level, and I think it's going to have a dramatic impact on how people develop applications and run workloads in the Cloud. >> Well done. What do you think John? I think you nailed it. >> Nailed it. Yeah, want to go for round two? >> Sure. >> Sure, I'll give a shot, (laughing loudly) So... >> 'get it, Brad. >> So, when in public Cloud choice matters? >> It matters. Think about the instance types you use think about the configurations you use and think about the applications you're layering in there and why they're there, right? Optimize those environments. Take advantage of all the tools you have. >> Yeah, you're going to start tuning your Cloud now. I mean, as it gets bigger and better, stronger you're going to start to see just fine tuning more craft, I guess. >> Mark: Yeah. >> In there, great stuff. >> Paul, and in these interesting times, I'm not committed to calling it a recession yet. I still have a chart of hope. I think that the services and the value that you provide to your customers are going to be one of those painkillers that will survive through this. I mean we're seeing a little bit of the trimming of the fat, of extraneous spending in the tech sector as a whole. But I can't imagine folks not wanting to leverage AMD and Cloud Saver, it's exciting, yeah. >> Saving money never goes out of style right? (laughing loudly) >> Saving money is always sexy. I love that, yeah, (laughing loudly) It's actually really... That's a great line goes on. Mark, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story with us. We really appreciate it, Brad. It's been a fabulous thing. You're just going to stay here all day, right? >> I'll just hang out, yeah. >> All right. >> I'm yours. >> I love that. And thank you all for tuning to us live here from the show floor at AWS re:Invent in fabulous sunny Las Vegas Nevada with John Furrier, I'm Savannah Peterson you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>>Thanks. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of snowflakes. Summit 22 live from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here. I have three guests here with me. We're gonna be talking about Snowflake Ventures and the snowflakes start up Challenge. That's in its second year. I've got Harry Glaser with me. Co founder and CEO of Model Bit Start Up Challenge finalist Damon Bryan joins us as well. The CTO and co founder of Hyper Affinity. Also a startup Challenge Finalists. And Stephane Williams to my left here, VP of Corporate development and snowflake Ventures. Guys, great to have you all on this little mini panel this morning. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Let's go ahead, Harry, and we'll start with you. Talk to the audience about model. But what do you guys do? And then we'll kind of unpack the snowflake. The Snowflakes challenge >>Model bit is the easiest way for data scientists to deploy machine learning models directly into Snowflake. We make use of the latest snowflake functionality called Snow Park for python that allows those models to run adjacent to the data so that machine learning models can be much more efficient and much more powerful than they were before. >>Awesome. Damon. Give us an overview of hyper affinity. >>Yes, so hyper affinity were Decision Intelligence platform. So we helped. Specifically retailers and brands make intelligent decisions through the use of their own customer, data their product data and put data science in a I into the heart of the decision makers across their business. >>Nice Step seven. Tell us about the startup challenge. We talked a little bit about it yesterday with CMO Denise Pearson, but I know it's in its second year. Give us the idea of the impetus for it, what it's all about and what these companies embody. >>Yeah, so we This is the second year that we've done it. Um, we it was really out of, um Well, it starts with snowflake Ventures when we started to invest in companies, and we quickly realised that there's there's a massive opportunity for companies to be building on top of the Lego blocks, uh, of snowflake. And so, um, open up the competition. Last year it was the inaugural competition overlay analytics one, Um, and since then, you've seen a number of different functionalities and features as part of snowflakes snow part. Being one of them native applications is a really exciting one going forward. Um, the companies can really use to accelerate their ability to kind of deliver best in class applications using best in class technology to deliver real customer outcomes and value. Um, so we've we've seen tremendous traction across the globe, 250 applicants across 50. I think 70 countries was mentioned today, so truly global in nature. And it's really exciting to see how some of the start ups are taking snowflake to to to new and interesting use cases and new personas and new industries. >>So you had 200 over 250 software companies applied for this. How did you did you narrow it down to three? >>We did. Yeah, >>you do that. >>So, behind the scenes, we had a sub judging panel, the ones you didn't see up on stage, which I was luckily part of. We had kind of very distinct evaluation criteria that we were evaluating every company across. Um and we kind of took in tranches, right? We we took the first big garden, and we kind of try to get that down to a top 50 and top 50. Then we really went into the details and we kind of across, um, myself in ventures with some of my venture partners. Um, some of the market teams, some of the product and engineering team, all kind of came together and evaluated all of these different companies to get to the top 10, which was our semifinalists and then the semi finalists, or had a chance to present in front of the group. So we get. We got to meet over Zoom along the way where they did a pitch, a five minute pitch followed by a Q and A in a similar former, I guess, to what we just went through the startup challenge live, um, to get to the top three. And then here we are today, just coming out of the competition with with With folks here on the table. >>Wow, Harry talked to us about How did you just still down what model bit is doing into five minutes over Zoom and then five minutes this morning in person? >>I think it was really fun to have that pressure test where, you know, we've only been doing this for a short time. In fact model. It's only been a company for four or five months now, and to have this process where we pitch and pitch again and pitch again and pitch again really helped us nail the one sentence value proposition, which we hadn't done previously. So in that way, very grateful to step on in the team for giving us that opportunity. >>That helps tremendously. I can imagine being a 4 to 5 months young start up and really trying to figure out I've worked with those young start ups before. Messaging is challenging the narrative. Who are we? What do we do? How are we changing or chasing the market? What are our customers saying we are? That's challenging. So this was a good opportunity for you, Damon. Would you say the same as well for hyper affinity? >>Yeah, definitely conquer. It's really helped us to shape our our value proposition early and how we speak about that. It's quite complicated stuff, data science when you're trying to get across what you do, especially in retail, that we work in. So part of what our platform does is to help them make sense of data science and Ai and implement that into commercial decisions. So you have to be really kind of snappy with how you position things. And it's really helped us to do that. We're a little bit further down the line than than these guys we've been going for three years. So we've had the benefit of working with a lot of retailers to this point to actually identify what their problems are and shape our product and our proposition towards. >>Are you primarily working with the retail industry? >>Yes, Retail and CPG? Our primary use case. We have seen any kind of consumer related industries. >>Got it. Massive changes right in retail and CPG the last couple of years, the rise of consumer expectations. It's not going to go back down, right? We're impatient. We want brands to know who we are. I want you to deliver relevant content to me that if I if I bought a tent, go back on your website, don't show me more tense. Show me things that go with that. We have this expectation. You >>just explain the whole business. But >>it's so challenging because the brothers brands have to respond to that. How do you what is the value for retailers working with hyper affinity and snowflake together. What's that powerhouse? >>Yeah, exactly. So you're exactly right. The retail landscape is changing massively. There's inflation everywhere. The pandemic really impacted what consumers really value out of shopping with retailers. And those decisions are even harder for retailers to make. So that's kind of what our platform does. It helps them to make those decisions quickly, get the power of data science or democratise it into the hands of those decision makers. Um, so our platform helps to do that. And Snowflake really underpins that. You know, the scalability of snowflake means that we can scale the data and the capability that platform in tangent with that and snowflake have been innovating a lot of things like Snow Park and then the new announcements, announcements, uni store and a native APP framework really helping us to make developments to our product as quick as snowflakes are doing it. So it's really beneficial. >>You get kind of that tailwind from snowflakes acceleration. It sounds like >>exactly that. Yeah. So as soon as we hear about new things were like, Can we use it? You know, and Snow Park in particular was music to our ears, and we actually part of private preview for that. So we've been using that while and again some of the new developments will be. I'm on the phone to my guys saying, Can we use this? Get it, get it implemented pretty quickly. So yeah, >>fantastic. Sounds like a great aligned partnership there, Harry. Talk to us a little bit about model bit and how it's enabling customers. Maybe you've got a favourite customer example at model bit plus snowflake, the power that delivers to the end user customer? >>Absolutely. I mean, as I said, it allows you to deploy the M L model directly into snowflake. But sometimes you need to use the exact same machine learning model in multiple endpoints simultaneously. For example, one of our customers uses model bit to train and deploy a lead scoring model. So you know when somebody comes into your website and they fill out the form like they want to talk to a sales person, is this gonna be a really good customer? Do we think or maybe not so great? Maybe they won't pay quite as much, and that lead scoring model actually runs on the website using model bit so that you can deploy display a custom experience to that customer we know right away. If this is an A, B, C or D lead, and therefore do we show them a salesperson contact form? Do we just put them in the marketing funnel? Based on that lead score simultaneously, the business needs to know in the back office the score of the lead so that they can do things like routed to the appropriate salesperson or update their sales forecasts for the end of the quarter. That same model also runs in the in the snowflake warehouse so that those back office systems can be powered directly off of snowflake. The fact that they're able to train and deploy one model into two production environment simultaneously and manage all that is something they can only do with bottled it. >>Lead scoring has been traditionally challenging for businesses in every industry, but it's so incredibly important, especially as consumers get pickier and pickier with. I don't want I don't want to be measured. I want to opt out. What sounds like what model but is enabling is especially alignment between sales and marketing within companies, which is That's also a big challenge at many companies face for >>us. It starts with the data scientist, right? The fact that sales and marketing may not be aligned might be an issue with the source of truth. And do we have a source of truth at this company? And so the idea that we can empower these data scientists who are creating this value in the company by giving them best in class tools and resources That's our dream. That's our mission. >>Talk to me a little bit, Harry. You said you're only 4 to 5 months old. What were the gaps in the market that you and your co founders saw and said, Guys, we've got to solve this. And Snowflake is the right partner to help us do it. >>Absolutely. We This is actually our second start up, and we started previously a data Analytics company that was somewhat successful, and it got caught up in this big wave of migration of cloud tools. So all of data tools moved and are moving from on premise tools to cloud based tools. This is really a migration. That snowflake catalyst Snowflake, of course, is the ultimate in cloud based data platforms, moving customers from on premise data warehouses to modern cloud based data clouds that dragged and pulled the rest of the industry along with it. Data Science is one of the last pieces of the data industry that really hasn't moved to the cloud yet. We were almost surprised when we got done with our last start up. We were thinking about what to do next. The data scientists were still using Jupiter notebooks locally on their laptops, and we thought, This is a big market opportunity and we're We're almost surprised it hasn't been captured yet, and we're going to get in there. >>The other thing. I think it's really interesting on your business that we haven't talked about is just the the flow of data, right? So that the data scientist is usually taking data out of a of a of a day like something like Smoke like a data platform and the security kind of breaks down because then it's one. It's two, it's three, it's five, it's 20. Its, you know, big companies just gets really big. And so I think the really interesting thing with what you guys are doing is enabling the data to stay where it's at, not copping out keeping that security, that that highly governed environment that big companies want but allowing the data science community to really unlock that value from the data, which is really, really >>cool. Wonderful for small startups like Model Bit. Because you talk to a big company, you want them to become a customer. You want them to use your data science technology. They want to see your fed ramp certification. They want to talk to your C. So we're two guys in Silicon Valley with a dream. But if we can tell them the data is staying in snowflake and you have that conversation with Snowflake all the time and you trust them were just built on top. That is an easy and very smooth way to have that conversation with the customer. >>Would you both say that there's credibility like you got street cred, especially being so so early in this stage? Harry, with the partnership with With Snowflake Damon, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've been using Snowflake from day one. We leave from when we started our company, and it was a little bit of an unknown, I guess maybe 23 years ago, especially in retail. A lot of retailers using all the legacy kind of enterprise software, are really starting to adopt the cloud now with what they're doing and obviously snowflake really innovating in that area. So what we're finding is we use Snowflake to host our platform and our infrastructure. We're finding a lot of retailers doing that as well, which makes it great for when they wanted to use products like ours because of the whole data share thing. It just becomes really easy. And it really simplifies it'll and data transformation and data sharing. >>Stephane, talk about the startup challenge, the innovation that you guys have seen, and only the second year I can. I can just hear it from the two of you. And I know that the winner is back in India, but tremendous amount of of potential, like to me the last 2.5 days, the flywheel that is snowflake is getting faster and faster and more and more powerful. What are some of the things that excite you about working on the start up challenge and some of the vision going forward that it's driving. >>I think the incredible thing about Snowflake is that we really focus as a company on the data infrastructure and and we're hyper focused on enabling and incubating and encouraging partners to kind of stand on top of a best of breed platform, um, unlocked value across the different, either personas within I T organisations or industries like hypothermia is doing. And so it's it's it's really incredible to see kind of domain knowledge and subject matter expertise, able to kind of plug into best of breed underlying data infrastructure and really divide, drive, drive real meaningful outcomes for for for our customers in the community. Um, it's just been incredible to see. I mean, we just saw three today. Um, there was 250 incredible applications that past the initial. Like, do they check all the boxes and then actually, wow, they just take you to these completely different areas. You never thought that the technology would go and solve. And yet here we are talking about, you know, really interesting use cases that have partners are taking us to two >>150. Did that surprise you? And what was it last year. >>I think it was actually close to close to 2 to 40 to 50 as well, and I think it was above to 50 this year. I think that's the number that is in my head from last year, but I think it's actually above that. But the momentum is, Yeah, it's there and and again, we're gonna be back next year with the full competition, too. So >>awesome. Harry, what is what are some of the things that are next for model bed as it progresses through its early stages? >>You know, one thing I've learned and I think probably everyone at this table has internalised this lesson. Product market fit really is everything for a start up. And so for us, it's We're fortunate to have a set of early design partners who will become our customers, who we work with every day to build features, get their feedback, make sure they love the product, and the most exciting thing that happened to me here this week was one of our early design partner. Customers wanted us to completely rethink how we integrate with gets so that they can use their CI CD workflows their continuous integration that they have in their own get platform, which is advanced. They've built it over many years, and so can they back, all of model, but with their get. And it was it was one of those conversations. I know this is getting a little bit in the weeds, but it was one of those conversations that, as a founder, makes your head explode. If we can have a critical mass of those conversations and get to that product market fit, then the flywheel starts. Then the investment money comes. Then you're hiring a big team and you're off to the races. >>Awesome. Sounds like there's a lot of potential and momentum there. Damon. Last question for you is what's next for hyper affinity. Obviously you've got we talked about the street cred. >>Yeah, what's >>next for the business? >>Well, so yeah, we we've got a lot of exciting times coming up, so we're about to really fully launch our products. So we've been trading for three years with consultancy in retail analytics and data science and actually using our product before it was fully ready to launch. So we have the kind of main launch of our product and we actually starting to onboard some clients now as we speak. Um, I think the climate with regards to trying to find data, science, resources, you know, a problem across the globe. So it really helps companies like ours that allow, you know, allow retailers or whoever is to democratise the use of data science. And perhaps, you know, really help them in this current climate where they're struggling to get world class resource to enable them to do that >>right so critical stuff and take us home with your overall summary of snowflake summit. Fourth annual, nearly 10,000 people here. Huge increase from the last time we were all in person. What's your bumper sticker takeaway from Summit 22 the Startup Challenge? >>Uh, that's a big closing statement for me. It's been just the energy. It's been incredible energy, incredible excitement. I feel the the products that have been unveiled just unlock a tonne, more value and a tonne, more interesting things for companies like the model bit I profanity and all the other startups here. And to go and think about so there's there's just this incredible energy, incredible excitement, both internally, our product and engineering teams, the partners that we have spoke. I've spoken here with the event, the portfolio companies that we've invested in. And so there's there's there's just this. Yeah, incredible momentum and excitement around what we're able to do with data in today's world, powered by underlying platform, like snowflakes. >>Right? And we've heard that energy, I think, through l 30 plus guests we've had on the show since Tuesday and certainly from the two of you as well. Congratulations on being finalist. We wish you the best of luck. You have to come back next year and talk about some of the great things. More great >>things hopefully will be exhibited next year. >>Yeah, that's a good thing to look for. Guys really appreciate your time and your insights. Congratulations on another successful start up challenge. >>Thank you so much >>for Harry, Damon and Stefan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of snowflakes. Summit 22 live from Vegas. Stick around. We'll be right back with a volonte and our final guest of the day. Mhm, mhm

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE special presentation of Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great conversation talking about the future of the infrastructure of Web3, all around domains, non fungible tokens and more. Two great guests, Charlie Brooks with Business Development of Unstoppable Domains, and Michael Williams, Product Leader and Advisor with Unstoppable Domains. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE, Partner Showcase with Unstoppable Domains. >> Thanks John, excited to be here. >> So I love what you guys are doing. Congratulations on all your success. You guys are on the leading edge of what is a major infrastructure. Shift to Web3 is being called, but people who have been doing this for a while know that you see the blockchain, you see decentralization, you see immutability all these future smart contracts. All the decentralized applications are now hitting the scene and NFTs are super hot as you can imagine, you guys in the middle of it. So you guys are in the sweet spot of what I call the Pragmatic pioneers. You guys are the building solutions that are making a difference, like single sign-on you have the login product, let's get into it. What is the path to a digital identity beyond the web? 'Cause we know what web identity is. But now that the web is being abstracted a away by this new Web3 layer, what is digital identity? >> I can take that one. So I think what we're really seeing is this transition away from a purely physical identity. Where your online identity is really just a reflection of the parts of your physical identity. Where you live, where you go to school, all of these things. And we're really seeing this world emerge where your online identity becomes much more of a primary. So if you have a way that you represent yourself in the online world, whether that's an Instagram account, or TikTok, or email address or username, all of these things together make up your digital identity. So congrats, if you have any of those things, you already have one. >> We see that all the time with Linktree, people put their Linktree out there and it's got the zillion handles. We all get up to Instagram. Everyone's got like zillion identities. Is that a problem or an opportunity? >> I think it's just a reality. The fact is our identities are spread across all of these different services and platforms that we use. The problem with something like Linktree is that it is owned by Linktree. If I won the lottery, purchased Linktree and decided I wanted to change your personal website, John, I could easily do that. Moving to the architecture that we have and NFT architecture, changes that significantly. It puts a lot of power back in the hands of the people who actually own those identities. I do a lot of CUBE showcases with folks around talking about machine learning and AI, and the number one conversation that they bring up, the number one issue, is data. And they say, when data's siloed and protected and owned, it is not optimized for machine learning. So I can almost imagine, as you bring NFTs to the digital identity, you mentioned you don't own your identity if someone else is managing the service like Linktree. This is a cultural shift, and infrastructure software shift at the same time. Can you guys expand more about what you guys are doing with the NFT and unstoppable domains with respect to that digital identity, because is that power shifting to the users now? And how does that compare to what's out there today? >> Sure, I think so. Our domains are NFTs, so they are ERC 721 tokens. And if you think about in the past Web2 identities are controlled by the platforms that we use. Twitter, Facebook, whatnot. There's really a lack of data portability there. Our accounts and data live on their servers, they can be deleted any time. So using an NFT to anchor your data identity, really gives you full control over your identity. It can't be deleted, it can't be revoked or edited, or changed without your permission. And really even better, the information you store on your entity domain can be plugged into the services you use, so that you never have to enter the same data twice. So when you go from platform to platform, everything can be tied to your existing domain. You're not going to a new site, entering their ecosystem and providing all this information time and time again, and not really having a clear understanding of how your data's being used and where it's being stored. >> So the innovation here is the NFT is your identity. And a non fungible token NFT is different than say a fungible token. So for the folks out there that's trying to follow the bouncing ball, Michael, what's the difference between an NFT and a fungible token? And why is that important for identity? >> My favorite metaphor here is baseball cards versus dollar bills. So a dollar bill is fungible. If I have a dollar and you have a dollar, we can trade dollars and none of us is richer or poorer. If I have a Babe Ruth and you have a Hank Aaron, and we swap baseball cards, we have changed something fundamental. So the important thing about NFTs is that they are non fungible. So if I have a domain and you have a domain, like I have that identity and you have that identity, they are unique, they're independent, they're owned by each one of us, and then we can't swap them interchangeably. >> And that's why you're seeing NFTs hot with art and artists, because it's like a property. It's a property issue, not so much- >> Absolutely >> Interchangeable or divisible kind of asset. >> Yep, it is ownership rights in digital form, yes. >> All right, so now let's get into what the identity piece. I think find that interesting because if I have something that's an NFT, it's non fungible, it's unique to me, it's property, my property my login, this sounds compelling. So how does login work with the NFT? Can you guys take us through that architecture, what does it do? How does it work? And what's the benefit? >> Good, so the way our login product works is it effectively uses your NFT domain. So Michael.crypto, for example, as the authentication piece of a login session. So basically when I go and I try to log in with my domain, I type in Michael.crypto, I sign it with my wallet which cryptographically proves that I am this human, this is me, I have the rights to log in. And then when I do so, I have the ability to share certain parts of my identity information with the applications that I use. So it really blends the ease of use from Web2 of just a standard like login with Gmail, SSO experience, with all of the security and privacy benefits of Web3. >> How important is single sign-on? Because right now people are used to seeing things like log with your GitHub handle or LinkedIn, or Google, Apple. You seeing people offering login. What's the difference here from those solutions and why does it make sense for the user? >> Sure, the big difference is what we're building is really user first. So if you think about traditional SSOs, you are the product. When you use their product, they're selling your data, they're tracking everything you do. Login with unstoppable handles not only authentication, but data sharing as well. So when you log in a domain owner can choose to share aspects of their online identities, such as first name, preferred language, profile picture, location. So this is a user controlled way of using a sign-on where their permissioning these different of their identity. And really apps can use this information to enable new experiences, such as, for example, website might automatically enable high contrast mode for someone visually impaired. It could pre-populate your friends from a decentralized social graph. So, what we're doing is taking the best parts of Web2 SSO and combining them with the best of Web3. So, no more losing your password, entering in the same data hundreds of times depending on other services to keep your information safe. Login with unstoppable really puts you in complete control of your data. And a big part of that is you're not going to have 80 plus usernames and passwords anymore. We have these tools like password managers that exist to put a bandaid on this issue, but it's not really a long term solution. So what we're building is really seamless onboarding where everything can be tied to your domains so that you can navigate to different apps in a much more seamless way. >> Michael, I got to get your thoughts on this because in the product side, it's interesting, my mind's connecting some dots. If I have first of all, great convenience to reduce all those logins. So, check their little pain reduction. But when you just think about what's different, I can now broker my data as well as login. So let's just say, hypothetically, I'm cruising around some dApps and I'm doing things in earning reputation, or attention, or points, or whatever utility tokens. There could be a way for me to control what I own. I'm the product, I own the data. Is that where this is going? >> I think it's definitely a direction it could go, say, for example, if I'm a e-commerce platform and I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to place a new billboard. One of the things that I could request from a user, is their address. I can figure out where they live, what city they're in, that will help inform me the decision that I need to make as a business. And in return, maybe I give that person a dollar off their purchase. We can start to build a stronger relationship between the applications that people use, and the people that use them. And try to optimize that whole experience, and try to just transfer information back and forth to make everyone's lives better. >> What's the roadmap on the business side Charlie, when you see companies adopting it, they're probably taking babies steps they're crawling before they walk, they're walking before they run. I can see decentralized applications in the future where there's FinTech or whatever, having new kinds of marketplaces that take advantage of the paradigm where the script flips to the user first. Okay, so I see that. How do people get started now? What are some of the success momentum points that you're seeing companies do now with unstoppable? >> Sure, so a lot of Web3 apps are very sensitive about respecting the information that their users are providing. So, what we're doing is offering different ways for apps can touch with their users in a way that is user controlled. So, an example there is that a lot of Web3 companies will use WalletConnect to allow users to log in using a wallet address. An issue there is that one person can have hundreds of wallet addresses, and it's impossible for the app to understand that. So, what we do is we use login, we attach an email address, some other pieces to a wallet address so that we can identify who our unique user is. And the app is able to collect that information, they don't have to deal with passwords or PII storage. They have access to a huge amount of new data for an improved UX. It's really simple to maintain as well. So one example there is if you are a DeFi platform and you want to reward your users for coming to their site for the first time, now that they can identify unique user, they can drop a token into that user's wallet. All because they're able to identify that user as unique. So they have a better way of understanding their customers. They enable their customers to share data. A lot of these companies will ask users to follow them on Twitter or Discord when they need to provide updates or bug bounties, all these different things. And login if unstoppable lets them permission email addresses so they can collect emails if they want to do a newsletter. And instead of harvesting data from elsewhere and forcing people to join this newsletter program, it's all user controlled. So each user saying, yes, you can use my email for your newsletter. I'm supporting your project, I want to be kept up to date with bugs or bounties or rewards programs. So really it's just a better way for users to share the data that they're willing to with dAPPs, and dAPPs can use it to create all sorts of incentives and really just understand their users on a different level. >> How is the development Michael, going on the smart contract side of the business? Ethereum has always been heralded as being very developer focused. There's been created innovations, you still got gas fees out there. You still got to do some things. How is the development environment? How are the applications coming? 'Cause I can see the flywheel kicking in as the developer front gets more streamlined, more efficient. And now you got the identity piece nailed down. I just see a lot of dominoes falling at the same time. What's the status on the DEV side. What you're doing. >> Good. The fascinating thing about crypto is how quickly it changes. When I joined Ethereum there was pretty reasonable still for transactions. It was very cheap to get things done very fast. With a look at last summer that things went completely out of control. This is a big reason that unstoppable for a long time has been working on a layer two. And we've moved over to the polygon as our primary source of record, which is built on top of Ethereum. Of course, I think saved well over a hundred million in gas fees for our users. We're constantly keeping an eye on new technologies that are emerging, weighing how we can incorporate those things. And really where of this industry is going to take us. In many ways we are just as much passengers as the other people floating around the ecosystem as well. >> It's certainly getting faster every day, I'm seeing a huge uptake on Ethereum. I heard a stat that most people at the university of California, Berkeley, 30% of the computer science students are dropping out to join Web3 companies. This goes to show you this cultural shift and you're going to see a lot more companies getting involved. So I got to ask you Charlie, on the BizDev front, how are companies getting started? What's the playbook? Are they putting their toe in the water? They jumping in full throttle? What's the roadmap? What's the best practice for people to get started with unstoppable? >> Absolutely. We're lucky that we get a lot of inbound interest from companies Web2 and Web3, because they first want to secure their domains. And we do a ton of work on the back end to protect trademark domains. We want to avoid squatting as much as possible. We don't think that's the spirit of Web3 at all. And certainly not what the original tension of the internet was. So, fair amount of companies will reach out to us to get their domain. And then we can have a longer conversation about some of the other integrations and ways we can collaborate. So certainly visiting our website, unstoppabledomains.com is a great starting point. We have an app submission page where apps can reach out to us, even request a grant. We have a grant program to help developers get started, provide them some resources to work with us and integrate some of our technology. We have great documentation as well on the site. So you can read all about what it takes to resolve domains, if you're a wallet and an exchange, as well as what it takes to integrate login with unstoppable, which is actually a super easy integration as well, which we're really excited about. So yeah, I'd say check out the website, apply for a grant if you think you're a fit there, then of course, people can always reach out to me directly on Twitter, on Telegram, email. We're very reachable and we're always happy to chat with projects and learn more about what they're doing. >> What's the coolest thing you see going on Charlie, with your partners right now? What's the number one use case that's cool that people are jumping on right now to get in and get some success out of the gate? >> Maybe GameFi play to earn is huge. It's blowing up and the gaming community is really passionate, vibrant, just expanding like crazy. Same with DeFi, there's all this cool new stuff you can do with DeFi where no matter how big your portfolio is, you're able to stake and use all these interesting tools to grow your book. So it's super exciting to see and talk to all these projects. And, there's certainly an energy in the community where everyone wants to onboard the general public to Web3. So we're all working on these school projects, but we need everyone to come over from Web2, understand the advantages of DeFi, of GameFi of having an entity domain. So, I'm lucky that I'm one of the first layers there of meeting new projects and helping get access to more users so that they can grow along with us. >> I remember the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we were giving it away. The community mantra was, give a Bitcoin to someone. That was like, >> Right. >> When you can actually give a Bitcoin to someone. What's the word of mouth or organic viral? I won't say growth hack 'cause that's got negative connotations. But what's the community's way of putting forth the mission for unstoppable? Is it just more domains? You guys have any programs got going on? Is it give it away? Obviously you can get domains on your site, but what's the way to get people ingratiated in and getting comfortable? >> So much of what we do is really to solve that question, answer that question. We spend a ton of time and energy just on education and whether that's specifically around domains or just general Web3. We have a podcast which is pretty exceptional, which talks to Web3 leaders from across the space and makes the project that they're working on more accessible. I think we passed over a hundred episodes, not too long ago. There's a ton of stuff that we do that other people do. If anyone has questions, I'm happy to talk about our resources, of course. >> The pod, I think you guys are up to 117, but that's a deep dive. You guys go deep on the podcast. So that's where you go in. What else is new on digital identity? Where do you guys see the future going? Now that you get the baseline identity with the NFT. Makes a lot of sense, create innovation. Good logic, makes sense. Solid technically, what's next? >> I think this really boils down to the way that the internet has grown. Doesn't really feel like the way that the internet should be. Like our data shouldn't live in these wild gardens, controlled by these large companies. Ultimately people should be responsible for their own identities. They should have control over of things that they do online. The data that's shared, the benefit of that data. It's about the world that we are working towards, is very much that. Where we are giving people the ability to be paid for sharing their data with companies. We're giving applications the ability to request information from the people that use those applications to improve their experience. We're really just trying to make connections across the ecosystem through these products, to enable a better experience for everyone. So whether that's the use cases that I mentioned already, or maybe viewing reviews on something like Yelp or Amazon, that just confirm that the person that you are you're looking at is actually a real person, not some bot that's been paid to load a review. The interesting thing about these products is they're so universally applicable. There are so many different ways that we can try to plug them in. So we are- >> A bots is a great example, double-edged sword. You can have a metaverse image and have pre-programmed conversations with liquid audio and the video application. Or it's a real person. How do you know the difference? These are going to be questions around who solves that problem. Now there's time for bots and there's a time not for bots. We all know what happens when you get into the game of manipulation, but also it can be helpful. This is where you got to be smart. And identity's critical in this future. Charlie, what's your reaction to the future of digital identity? So much to look at here on the trajectory. >> I think a big part of it is data portability. If you go to a site like Instagram, you're giving them all this content that's very personal to you, and you can't just pack up and leave Instagram. So we want a future where most of these apps are just a front end and you can navigate from one to the other and bring your data with you. And not be beholden to the companies that operate centralized servers. So, I think data portability is huge and it's going to open up a lot of doors. And just going back to that thought on cleaning up Web2 for a better web three. When I think about the Amazons, the Yelps of the world, there are all these bots, there are all these awful fake reviews. There's a lot of gamification happening that is really just creating a lot of noise. And I want to bring transparency back to the internet where when you see a review, you should know that that's a real human. And blockchain technology is enabling us to do that. And certainly FT domains are going to play a huge part of that. So I think that having an experience where you know and trust the people that you're interacting with is going to be really powerful and just a better experience for everyone. And there's a lot of ramifications with that. politically speaking, we've all seen all the issues with attacking communities and using bots and fake accounts to hit people's pain points, it's sad and certainly not something that we want to see continue happening. So, whatever we can do to give people their digital identity and help people understand that this is a real person on the other end, I think is huge for the future of the internet and really for society as well. >> That's a great call out there Charlie. Cleaning up the mess of Web 2.0, Web2, actually it was 2.0 technically, now Web3 is no point zero in it. But I saw on or listened to the podcast with Matt. This recent one, he had a great metaphor that went back to when I was growing up in the internet, you had IP addresses. And the mess there was, you couldn't find what you want to look. And no one could remember what to type in, 'cause you could type in IP address in the browser back then. And then DNS came out and then keywords that's web. Now that mess, now is fraud, misinformation, bot manipulation, deep fakes, many other kind of unwanted time to innovate. And every year, every time you had these inflection points, there'd be an abstraction on top of it. So, similar thing happening here, is that how you guys see it too? >> I think we're going back to some of the foundational architecture of the internet, DNS. And really bringing that forward about 30, 40 years in terms of technology. So loading in some more cryptography and some other fancy things to help patch some of those issues from the previous versions of the web. >> Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for coming on and the spirit of TikTok, Emily summarizes asking, can you guys give us a quick TikTok moment, short comment on where this is all going, where is login, single sign-on mean and what should people do to steps to secure their digital identity? >> Sure, I'll jump in here. So, it's time for people to secure their digital identity. The great first step is going to sample domains and getting an NFT domain. You can control your data. You can do a lot of cool different things with your domain, including posting your own website that you will own forever, no one can take it away from you. I would certainly recommend that people join our Discord, Telegram communities, check out our podcasts. It's really great especially if you're new to crypto Web3. We do a great job of explaining all the basic concepts and expanding on them. So yeah, I would say, the time is now to get your digital identity and start embracing Web3 because it's really exploding right now. And there's just so many incredible advantages, especially for the user. >> Michael, what's your take? >> But not, have said it better myself. >> Like we always say, if you're not on the next wave, you're driftwood. And this is a big wave that's happening. It's pretty clear guys, it's there, it's happening now. And again, very pragmatic implementations of solving problems. The sign-on, the app integration. Congratulations and we got our CUBE domain too, by the way. So I think we're good. >> Excellent. >> So, we got to put it to use. Appreciate it, Charlie, Michael, thanks for coming on and sharing the update. >> It's pleasure. >> Welcome. >> Okay, this is theCUBE, with Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase I'm John for your host, got a lot of other great interviews. Check them out. We're going to continue our coverage and continue on with this great showcase. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at AWS re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE and we're really excited to have Adam Williams on, he's a senior director of engineering at Iron Mountain. Som Shahapurkar, who's the product engineering of vertical solutions at Iron Mountain. Guys, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you >> Thank you. All right Adam, we know Iron Mountain trucks, tapes, what's new? >> What's new. So we've developed a SaaS platform for digitizing, classifying and bringing out and unlocking the value of our customer's data and putting their data to work. The content services platform that we've developed, goes together with an IDP that we call an intelligent document processing capability to do basic content management, but also to do data extraction and to increase workflow capabilities for our customers. >> Yeah, so I was kind of joking before Iron Mountain, the legacy business of course, everybody's seeing the trucks, but $4 billion company, $13 billion market cap, the stock's been on fire. The pandemic obviously has been a tailwind for you guys, but Som, if you had to describe it to like my mother, what's the sound bite that you'd give. >> Well the sound bite, as everyone knows data is gold today, right? And we are sitting figuratively and literally on a mountain of data. And now we have the technology to take that data partner with AWS, the heavy machinery to convert that into value, into value that people can use to complete the human story of healthcare, of mortgage, finance. A lot of this sits in systems, but it also sits in paper. And we are bridging that paper to digital divide, the physical and digital divide to create one story. >> This has been a journey for you guys. I mean, I recall that when you kind of laid this vision out a number of years ago, I think he made some acquisitions. And so maybe take us through that amazing transformation that Iron Mountain has made, but help the audience understand that. >> Transformations really been going from the physical records management that we've built our business around to evolving with our customers, to be able to work with all of the digital documents and not just be a transportation and records management storage company, but to actually work with them, to put their data to work, allowing them to be able to digitize a lot of their content, but also to bring in already digitized content and rich media. >> One of the problems that always existed, especially if you go back to back of my brain, 2006, the federal rules of civil procedure, which said that emails could now be evidence in a case and everyone like, oh, I don't like, how do I find email. So one of the real problems was classifying the information for retention policies. The lawyers wanted to throw everything out after whatever six or seven years, the business people wanted to keep everything forever. Neither of those strategies work, so classification and you couldn't do it manually. So have you guys solved that problem? How do you solve that problem? Does the machine intelligence help? It used to be, I'll use support vector machines or math or probabilistic, latent, semantic, indexing, all kinds of funky stuff. And now we enter this cloud world, have you guys been able to solve that problem and how? >> So our customers already have 20 plus years of retention rules and guidelines that are built within our systems. And we've helped them define those over the years. So we're able to take those records, retention schedules that they have, and then apply them to the documents. But instead of doing that manually, we're able to do that using our classification capabilities with AI ML and that Som's expertise. >> Awesome, so lay it on me. How do you guys do that? It's a lot of math. >> Yeah, so it can get complicated real fast, but at a simple level, what's changed really from support beta machines of 2006 to today is the scale at which we can do it, right? The scale at which we are bringing those technologies. Plus the latest technologies of deep learning, your conventional neural networks going from a bag of characters and words to really the way humans look at it. You look at a document and you know this is an invoice or this is a prescription, you don't have to even know to read to know that, machines are now capable of having that vision, the computer vision to say prescription, invoice. So we train those models and have them do it at industrial scale. >> Yeah, because humans are actually pretty bad at classifying at scale. >> At scale like their back. >> You remember, we used to try to do, oh, it was just tag it, oh, what a nightmare. And then when something changes and so now machines and the cloud and Jane said, how about, I mean, I presume highly regulated industries are the target, but maybe you could talk about the industry solutions a little bit. >> Right. Regulated industries are a challenge, right. Especially when you talk about black box methodologies like AI, where we don't know, okay, why does it classify this as this and that is that? But that's where I think a combined approach of what we are trying to say, composite AI. So the human knowledge, plus AI knowledge combined together to say, okay, we know about these regulations and hey, AI, be cognizant of this regulations while you do our stuff, don't go blindly. So we keep the AI in the guardrails and guided to be within those lines. >> And other part of that is we know our customers really well. We spent a lot of time with them. And so now we're able to take a lot of the challenges they have and go meet those needs with the document classification. But we also go beyond that, allowing them to implement their own workflows within the system, allowing them to be able to define their own capabilities and to be able to take those records into the future and to use our content management system as a true content services platform. >> Okay, take me through the before and the after. So the workflow used to be, I'd ring you up, or maybe you come in and every week grab a box of records, put them in the truck and then stick them in the Iron Mountain. And that was the workflow. And you wanted them back, you'd go get it back and it take awhile. So you've digitized that whole and when you say I'm inferring that the customer can define their own workflow because it's now software defined, right. So that's what you guys have engineered. Some serious engineering work. So what's the tech behind that. Can you paint a picture? >> So the tech behind it is we've run all of our cloud systems and Kubernetes. So using Kubernetes, we can scale really, really large. All of our capabilities are obviously cloud-based, which allows us to be able to scale rapidly. With that we run elastic search is our search engine and MongoDB is our no SQL database. And that allows us to be able to run millions of documents per minute through our system. We have customers that we're doing eight million documents a day for the reel over the process. And they're able to do that with a known level of accuracy. And they can go look at the documents that have had any exceptions. And we can go back to what Som was talking about to go through and retrain models and relabel documents so that we can catch that extra percentage and get it as close to 100% accuracy as we would like, or they would like. >> So what happens? So take me through the customer experience. What is that like? I mean, do they still... we you know the joke, the paperless bathroom will occur before the paperless office, right? So there's still paper in the office, but so what's the workload? I presume a lot of this is digitized at the office, but there's still paper, so help us understand that. >> Customers can take a couple of different paths. One is that we already have the physical documents that they'd like us to scan. We call that backfile scanning. So we already have the documents, they're in a box they're in a record center. We can move them between different records centers and get them imaged in our high volume scanning operation centers. From there-- >> Sorry to interrupt. And at that point, you're auto classifying, right? It's not already classified, I mean, it kind of is manually, but you're going to reclassify it on creation. >> Correct. >> Is that electronic document? >> For some of our customers, we have base metadata that gives us some clues as to what documents may be. But for other documents, we're able to train the models to know if their invoices or if their contracts commonly formatted documents, but customers can also bring in their already digitized content. They can bring in basic PDFs or Word documents or Google Docs for instance, but they can also bring in rich media, such as video and audio. And from there, we also do a speech to text for video and audio, in addition to just basic OCR for documents. >> Public sector, financial services, health care, insurance, I got to imagine that those have got to be the sweet spots. >> Another sweet spot for us is the federal space in public sector. We achieved FedRAMP, which is a major certification to be able to work with, with the federal government. >> Now, how would he work with AWS? What's your relationship with them? How do you use the cloud? Maybe you could describe that a little bit. >> Well, yeah, at multiple levels, right? So of course we use their cloud infrastructure to run our computing because with the AI and machine learning, you need a lot of computing power, right. And AWS is the one who can reliably provide it, space to store the digital data, computing the processes, extract all the information, train our models, and then process these, like he's talking about, we are talking about eight, 12, 16 million documents a day. So now you need seconds and sub second processing times, right? So at different levels, at the company infrastructure level, also the AI and machine learning algorithms levels, AWS has great, like Tesseract is one the ones that everyone knows but there is others purpose-built model APIs that we utilize. And then we'll put our secret sauce on top of that to build that pathway up and make it really compelling. >> And the secret sauce is obviously there's a workflow and the flexibility of the workflow, there's the classification and the machine learning and intelligence and all the engineering that makes the cloud work you manage. What else is there? >> Knowledge graphs, like he was saying, right, the domain. So mortgage is not that a document that looks very similar in mortgage versus a bank stated mortgage and bank statement in healthcare have different meanings. You're looking at different things. So you have something called a knowledge graph that maintains the knowledge of a person working in that field. And then we have those created for different fields and within those fields, different applications and use cases. So that's unique and that's powerful. >> That provides the ability to prior to hierarchy for our customers, so they can trace a document back to the original box that was given to us some many years ago. >> You got that providence and that lineage, I know you're not go to market guys, but conceptually, how do you price? Is it that, it's SaaS? Is it licensed? Is it term? Is it is a consumption based, based on how much I ingest? >> We have varying different pricing models. So we first off we're in six major markets from EU, Latin America, North America and others that we serve. So within those markets, we offer different capabilities. We have an essentials offering on AWS that we've launched in the last two weeks that allows you to be able to bring in base content. And that has a per object pricing. And then from there, we go into our standard edition that has ability to bring in additional workflows and have some custom pricing. And then we have what we call the enterprise. And for enterprise, we look at the customer's problem. We look at custom AI and ML models who might be developing and the solution that we're having to build for them and we provide a custom price and capability for what they need. >> And then the nativists this week announced a new glacier tier. So you guys are all over that. That's where you use it, right? The cheapest and the deepest, right? >> Yeah, one of the major things that AWS provides us as well is the compliance capabilities for our customers. So our customers really require us to have highly secure, highly trusted environments in the cloud. And then the ability to do that with data sovereignty is really important. And so we're able to meet that with AWS as well. >> What do you do in situations where AWS might not have a region? Do you have to find your own data center to do that stuff or? >> Well, so data privacy laws can be really complex. When you work with the customer, we can often find that the nearest data center in their region works, but we also do, we've explored the ability to run cloud capabilities within data centers, within the region that allows us to be able to bridge that. We also do have offerings where we can run on-premise, but obviously our focus here is on the cloud. >> Awesome business. Does Iron Mountain have any competitors? I mean like... >> Yeah. >> You don't have to name them, but I mean, this is awesome business. You've been around for a long time. >> And we found that we have new competitors now that we're in a new business. >> They are trying to disrupt and okay. So you guys are transforming as an incumbent. You're the incumbent disruptor. >> Yes. >> Yes, it's self disruption to some extent, right. Saying, hey, let's broaden our horizon perspective offering value. But I think the key thing is, I want to focus more on the competitive advantage rather than the competitors is that we have the end to end flow, right? From the high volume scanning operations, trucking, the physical world, then up and about into the digital world, right? So you extract it, it's not just PDFs. And then you go into database, machine learnings, unstructured to structured extraction. And then about that value added models. It's not just about classification. Well, now that you have classified and you have all this documents and you have all this data, what can you glean from it? What can you learn about your customers, the customers, customers, and provide them better services. So we are adding value all throughout this chain. And think we are the only ones that can do that full stack. >> That's the real competitive advantage. Guys, really super exciting. Congratulations on getting there. I know it's been a lot of hard work and engineering and way to go. >> Thank you. >> It's fun. >> Dave: It's good, suppose to have you back. >> Thanks. >> All right and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Oh, well, the back to the cubes coverage of ADA bus reinvent, 2021 executive seminar, I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. We've got a great segment here on the modernization. We were ringing in the success with Amazon web services, Vodafone digital in the UK, an example of modern engineering examples using Amazon, the cloud, looking at where we're cloud native is actually changing the game two great guests, Ben Collie, head, head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, managing director of center. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube and sharing the story. >>Thanks, John. Appreciate it. So >>I gotta, I gotta ask you guys one of the main themes that we've been covering all year and even even pre pandemic, we, we saw the cloud native wave coming pretty hard containers. Great for modernization sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes and now serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization shift left all great for business, but you have to, you have to kind of take care of things under the, under the covers a little bit, the infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has, um, that brought about this transformation? >>Yeah, sure. Um, so we we've been on this transformation for around four years, but you're absolutely right. The, uh, the pandemic has been a real catalyst for, for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. Uh, so we were really driving a digital first agenda for quite a long time. Uh, and that, that came as, as you just said, John, it, it really did start with the, uh, the cloud hosted, uh, and then, uh, and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the, to the cloud and really leveraging the services, uh, like AWS, um, in order to really drive pace, uh, and, and the outcomes that we needed for the business. Uh, we've seen a huge change over the last, uh, purely over the last 18 months, really. Um, our daily traffic, uh, these days is as it was on our highest ever, uh, uh, like an iPhone launch day, for example, um, before the pandemic, is I a daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the, the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >>You know, back in the old days, uh, Maynard, you know, it's oh yeah, black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible. Agile elastic, you know, scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you, you really ain't going to be behind the curve, but the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value, but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's kind of, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new system was mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that >>Thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes, and only for launch with something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it, but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems, um, where any production, uh, they were on prime actually tasks. This is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on premises on prime, and therefore we can't lastingly scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with, uh, an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or back Friday, any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >>So you're saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions that the innovation here, can you just summarize and unpack a little bit of what is the innovation, what problems did you solve together with essentially those and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? Yes. >>I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where, um, at the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native has been, just touched on what the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fraction. So you can't, for example, push you to load into, uh, an on-prem backend system and, and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations architecting something that is robust scales, we usable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago. And turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >>And I want to get your reaction to this because, you know, you're, you're the you're on the, on the front line saying, Hey, be more agile at Basel saying, be agile, do different left, take that hill. Um, it's, it's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Can you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective showing? >>And as I just said, that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone. For example, as a event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. Uh, and we watched things scale and, and, and then down again, gracefully, um, and really do celebrate the, the another level up, if you like the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to, to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all that things will, will flex like that. But you're absolutely right, that, that the changes and the demands of us as a, as a team, but also the, the expectations of our stakeholders, uh, have been changing for quite a long time now. Uh, and we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing. >>Yeah. So the guys say said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub. Everyone's happy having a good day. >>Uh, >>Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on with the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through, what's the state of the art of the, of the solution? Sure. >>Well, uh, as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate, um, a few, uh, uh, started about 18 months ago. Um, and that really has, um, freed us up in, into all kinds of, um, uh, scalability, uh, measures, but also really about, about reusing and applying this across much more than just the, the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone, where we, where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda, uh, and that's, that's informed all kinds of things, the ability to scale and flex like that, and the architecture beneath us, um, and the containerization and orchestration that that goes along with that has really enabled us to, um, to flex that, uh, ability to, to reuse it across other areas. And because of that, now it's driven our hiring policy or tooling and, uh, technical, uh, our procedural approaches, uh, it all now leverages that ability to move a patient, to be able to scale, uh, not just in, um, uh, infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. Uh, and this is all now informed on our direction. I think, as an organization, >>It's interesting, you mentioned far you far gate than a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities as a chain reaction from that. Um, talk about the impact to the staff and the operations, because you almost, it's motivating at some level you get new things happening, but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >>Yeah. Uh, well, the, the impact is one, uh, because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation, really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors, uh, we're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been particularly engaging. One with, we've also been part of, uh, a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new, uh, roles, uh, joining our team across Europe and that these are engineering roles, um, driving more of the same, uh, behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. Uh, and that really is fueled by our, our ability to experiment and try, but become cloud native and, and, uh, employ these services in the way that they're designed to be >>Maynard. I'd like to get your take on this and, and, and shift to a topic around how, what this all means. Um, if you zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid. Now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here. This is over here. These legacy systems were built around the notion of things when nicely segmented. Um, now you have this whole kind of mashup, if you will, of how you just want to work, right. There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least, you know, not as, uh, stable, maybe not scalable, but what's your take on this? What's the big picture what's all happening. >>I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other particles is under the covers. A lot of the work's been done has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys, but, you know, running the containers. And so that, that opens up an omni-channel future that starts to move away from saying actually businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it, is it online that additional and so on, and actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys come and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup. >>And the ability to experiment has been iteratively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's, that's a, that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago, uh, or the, you know, our quality has improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that, because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big one, >>You know, what's interesting Ben, and let's get your reaction on this. And if you don't mind to just add a little color to this, this is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just replatforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business, uh, with, with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on one, you see the efficiencies and new doors open up new things are happening. People are getting excited, good, some good Mo morale boosting things are becoming clear, but then there's actually new business, new business value being created or new propositions engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint, because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper, and better, and then create new opportunities, new propositions, what's your >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Uh, being able to, as, as may not says, uh, moving from a world, uh, two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months, uh, this is a website once every two or three months where we were, uh, to now it's happening all the time every day. Uh, it's, it's, it's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also trial and error. What we already know, uh, or expects to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently, very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days, and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers. Um, we, we learn constantly about because of that. And it's, uh, it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they worked and are much more experimental initiative. Uh, we, most of the propositions we know about, but also to the experiments, um, and unknowns in our future. Um, that also now unlocked, >>That's a great point. You mentioned about the whole timing of, you know, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff, uh, Maynard. And if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting, but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak, right? So, you know, some people are actually, you know, putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting, but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions and they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around the sensor. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects is seeing more and more of these, these kinds of partnerships, uh, and the value is there. Can you guys share your, your, uh, opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >>I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? And we can talk about dev ops and moving to cloud native, and actually some of the, some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine. And so the other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create of that. So the, the, the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about the whole set of data points that I'm pinning up. And so I'll take two parts is know the, the journey we've been on here is, is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that quality team. But the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day-to-day >>Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what's it look, it's the end game, >>All of those things, yes. I'd say it's, um, more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey. It is, it is daunting. And, and of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way, uh, have built up a lot of, uh, protection mechanisms for doing, for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is, is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations that is real, but I'll deal with it. Um, but the, the real, um, success behind, uh, the real, I think the reasons behind a lot of our success has been beat by being able to quickly prove value to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. Um, and then to build on those and iterate on it. And as, as I said, it's, it's about being able to move at pace for us in Vodafone. It's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization. Um, and we're, we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do just lean on that scale more than we have them. Yeah, that's really about iterating, as I said, and, and, um, finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can, uh, is what I would say for us. >>It's interesting. You mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. You know, so every environment is a bit different, but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of, you hear from folks that make you happy? When about the results? I think saying, Hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore, or, wow. This is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >>Yeah. It's, uh, I'd say it's mainly an R there's two things I would say, uh, the ability to rely less on it delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. Uh, but also the, the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, uh, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Um, just the sheer amount of things we can release to production, uh, in, in sorts of short space, space of time really does bring to life, our ability to now trial and error, to AB test a Canary deploy. Things like that is really, um, it's been a real superpower for our, um, transformation, I think yes. >>Kind of kidding about can't make time to go to the pub, but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower shifting that value. >>Yeah. Whereas as you mentioned, Johnny, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations and, um, by being more connected, by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, uh, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. You know, if it's six months between writing a line of code and seeing it in production by up no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, um, then, uh, I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to, to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural, >>Yeah. I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was a sea of AWS on stage and talked about that dynamic of the teamwork, people rowing in the right direction. Um, feeling part of it may know this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know center I've covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different, but successful built on the cloud. So a lot of replatforming refactoring you're in the front lines, working with, uh, companies that essentially what's the pattern that you see that's that's happening right now. What's the, what's your view of the current market? >>Um, I mean, I think there's a huge shift to this, that this journey too has been part of the move from being on the cloud to being proud nature. I'm really getting that value because there's a, um, a kind of, almost a example. I see there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us too, because they have a functional requirement or because something's broken. When we get into the model of that, I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of. That's not leave. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if, if I look more generally that cultural shift is it is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions. If you like that tend to sit around, uh, you know, supporting Pete pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, a load with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave, which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the, >>Yeah. And you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the cloud for many, many years. We've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on the cube, a head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Uh, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing your story. Maynor thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS. Thank you. Thanks John. The cube coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 executive summit. I'm John furry, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the modernization, where we're ringing in the success with Amazon Web Services and Vodafone Digital in the UK. An example of modern engineering, examples using Amazon, the cloud. Looking at where cloud-native is actually changing the game. We got two great guests, Ben Connolly, Head of Digital Engineering at Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, Managing Director of Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing the story. >> Thanks John, appreciate the invite. >> So I got to ask you guys, one of the main themes that we've been covering all year, and even pre-pandemic, we saw the cloud-native wave coming pretty hard. Containers, great for modernization, sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes, and now Serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization, shift left, all great for business, but you have to kind of take care of things under the covers a little bit. The infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has that brought about this transformation? >> Yeah, sure. So we we've been on this transformation program for years, but you're absolutely right. The pandemic has been a real catalyst for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. So we were really driving digital first agenda for quite a long time. And that that came as you just said John, it really did start with the cloud hosted and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the cloud and really leveraging the services like AWS in order to really drive pace and the outcomes that we needed for the business. We've seen a huge change purely over the last 18 months really. Our daily traffic these days is as it was on our highest ever like an iPhone launch day, for example, before the pandemic is daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >> You know, back in the old days, Maynard oh yeah, Black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible, agile, elastic. The scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you're really going to be behind the curve. But the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's going to, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new systems mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that. >> Yeah, I think the thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes. And iPhone launch was something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems where we're in production they're on prime actually tests is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on-premises or on-prem, and therefore we can't elastically scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or Black Friday or any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >> So you saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions. Is that the innovation? Can you just summarize and unpack a little bit, what is the innovation? What problems did you solve together with Accenture and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? >> Yes well, I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native, as Ben just touched on, when at the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on-prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fashion. So you can't, for example, push you to load into an on-prem backend system and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations, architecting something that is robust scales, reusable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago and turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >> And I want to get your reaction to this because you're on the front line saying, hey, be more agile, the boss that says, be agile, do different left, take that hill. It's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Could you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective? >> Sure, and Maynard just said that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone For example, as a non event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. And we watched things scale and then down again gracefully and really do celebrate the level up if you like, the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all confident that things will flex like that. But you're absolutely right that the changes and the demands of us as a team, but also the expectations of our stakeholders have been changing for quite a long time now. And we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing it. >> Yeah, so the guy said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub, everyone's happy. Having a good day. Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on under the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through what's the state of the art of the of the solution? >> Sure. Well as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to Serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate a few, it started about 18 months ago and that really has freed us up into all kinds of scalability measures but also really about reusing and applying this across much more than just the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda and that's informed all kinds of things. The ability to scale and flex like that and the architecture beneath us and the containerization and orchestration that goes along with that has really enabled us to flex that ability to reuse it across other areas. And because of that now it's driven our hiring policy, our tooling and technical, our procedural approaches, and it all now leverages that ability to move a pace and to be able to scale, not just in infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. And this is all now informed on our direction I think, as an organization. >> It's interesting, you mentioned you far gate then a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities, there's a chain reaction from that. Talk about the impact to the staff in the operations because you almost it's motivating. At some level, you got new things happening but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >> Yeah, well, the impact is one because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors. We're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been a particularly engaging one, we've also been part of a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new roles joining our team across Europe. And these are engineering roles driving more of the same behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. And that really is fueled by our ability to experiment and try but become cloud native and employ these services in the way that they're designed to be. >> Maynard, I'd like to get your take on this and shift to a topic around what this all means. You zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here, this is over here, these legacy systems were built around the notion of things were nicely segmented. Now you have this whole kind of mashup if you will, of how you just want to work, right? There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access, identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least not as a stable maybe not scalable. But what's your take on this? What's the big picture? What's all happening? >> I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other part of this is under the covers. A lot of the work has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys that run in the containers and so that opens up an Omni-channel feature that starts to move away from saying actually, businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it online, additional and so on? And actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys can and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup and the ability to experiment has been intuitively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago or that our quality is improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big step forward. >> You know, what's interesting, Ben and let's get your reaction on this and if you don't mind to just add a little color to this. This is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just re-platforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on. One, you see the efficiencies, new doors open up, new things are happening, people are getting excited, get some good morale boost, things are becoming clear, but then this actually new business value being created or new propositions, engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper and better and then create new opportunities, new propositions. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, it's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Being able to, as Maynard says, moving from a world two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months. This is a website once every two or three months, it's where we were. And so now it's happening all the time every day. It's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also to trial and error what we already know or expect to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently. Very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers, we learn constantly because of that and it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they work to now much more experimental initiative. That way both to the propositions we know about but also to the experiments and unknowns in our future that also now unlocked for us. >> That's a great point you mentioned about the whole timing of, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff. Maynard, if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak. So some people are actually putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions? And they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around Accenture. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects and seeing more and more of these kinds of partnerships and the value is there. Can you guys share your opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >> I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? We could talk about DevOps and moving to cloud native and actually some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine and so on. The other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create out of that. So the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about a whole set of data points that underpin it. And so I'd say two parts. It's the journey we've been on here is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that are routine but the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day to day. >> Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what is its the end game? >> All of those things, yes. I'd say it's more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey and it is daunting. And of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way and built up a lot of protection mechanisms for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations it is real and we will all deal with it. But the success behind, I think the real reasons behind a lot of our success has been by being able to quickly prove value, to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. And then to build on those and iterate on it. And as I said, it's about being able to move at pace. For us in Vodafone it's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization, and we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do lean on that scale more than we have them. We're really about iterating, as I said and finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can is what I would say for us. >> It's interesting you mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. So every environment's a bit different but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of you hear from folks that make you happy, what about the results? I think saying, hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore or wow this is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >> Yeah, I'd say it's mainly there's two things I would say, the ability to rely less on IT delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. But also the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Just the sheer amount of things we can release to production in sorts of short space of time really does bring to life our ability to now trial and error, to AB test Canary deploy, things like that is really, it's been a real superpower for our transformation. >> Yeah, kind of kidding about having time to go to the pub but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower and shifting that value. >> Yeah, as you mentioned John, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations. And by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. If it's six months between rising line of code and seeing it in production, I have no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, then I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural journey as well. >> Yeah, I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was the CEO of AWS on the stage and talked about that dynamic of the team where people run in the right direction, feeling part of it. Maynard, this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know Accenture have covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different but a successful built on the cloud. So a lot of re-platforming refactoring. You're in the front lines working with companies at Accenture. What's the pattern that you see that's happening right now? What's your view of the current market? >> I mean, I think there's a huge shift in this journey too has bankrupted the move from being on the cloud to being cloud native. I'm really getting that value because there's a kind of almost example I see, there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us to cause they have a functional requirement or because something's broken when we get into the model of but I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of that's not alive. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if I look more generally that cultural shift is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into that kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions if you like, that tend to sit around supporting peak pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, aligned with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the cloud. >> Yeah and you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the Cloud for many, many years we've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, a head of Digital Engineering, Vodafone UK. Great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Thanks for coming on theCUBE sharing your story. Maynard, thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS, thank you. >> Thanks John, great to be here. >> It's theCUBE coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well, there's no question these days that in the world of business, it's all about data. Data is the king. How you harvest data, how you organize your data, how you distribute your data, how you secure your data, all very important questions. And certainly a leader in the data replication business is HVR. We're joined now by their CEO, Anthony Brooks-Williams, and by Diwakar Goel, who is the Global Chief Data Officer at GE. We're going to talk about, you guessed it, data. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Good to have you here on theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you. Thanks, John. >> Yeah, well, listen, >> Thanks, John. >> first off, let's just characterize the relationship between the two companies, between GE and HVR. Maybe Diwakar, let's take us back to how you got to HVR, if you will and maybe a little bit about the evolution of that relationship, where it's gone from day one. >> No, absolutely. It's now actually a long time back. It's almost five and a half years back, that we started working with Anthony. And honestly it was our early days of big data. We all had big, different kind of data warehousing platforms, but we were transitioning into the big data ecosystem and we needed a partner that could help us to get more of the real-time data. And that's when we started working with Anthony. And I would say, John, over the years, you know we have learned a lot and our partnership has grown a lot. And it's grown based on the needs. When we started, honestly just being able to replicate a lot sources and to give you context like GBG, we have the fifth largest Oracle ERP. We have the seventh largest SAP ERP. They just, just by the nature of just getting those systems in was a challenge. And we had to work through different, different solutions because some of the normal ones wouldn't work. As we got matured, and we started using data over the last two, three years, specifically, we had different challenges. The challenges was like, you know is the data completely accurate? Are we losing and dropping some data? When you're bringing three billion, five billion rows of data, every five to six hours, even if you've dropped 1% you've lost like a huge set of insights, right? So that's when you started working with Anthony more around like the nuances as to, you know what could be causing us to lose some data, or duplicate some datasets, right? And I think our partnership's been very good, because some of our use cases have been unique and we've continuously pushed Anthony and the team to deliver that. With the light of, you know these use cases are not unique, in some cases we were just ahead, just by the nature of what we were handling. >> Okay. Anthony, about then the HVR approach, Diwakar, just took us through somewhat higher level of how this relationship has evolved. It's started with big data, now, it's gone (mumbles) in terms of even fine tuning the accuracy, that's so important. Latency is obviously a huge topic too from your side of the fence. But how do you address it then? Let's take GE for example, in terms of understanding their business, learning their business, their capabilities, maybe where their holes are, you know where their weaknesses were, and showing that up. How did you approach that from the HVR side? >> Yeah. Do you mean wanting back a few years? I mean, obviously it starts, you get in there, you find an initial use case and that was moving data into a certain data warehouse platform, whether it be around analytics or reporting such as Diwakar mentioned. And that's, I mean, most commonly what we see from a lot of customers. It's, the typical use case is real-time analytics, and moving the data to an area for consolidated reporting. It's either most (indistinct) in these times, it's in the cloud. But GE you know, where that's evolved and GE are a top customer for us. We work across many of their business units of their different BUS. GE had another arm Predix, which is the industrial IOT platform that actually OEM must as well for a solution they sell to other companies in the space. But where we've worked with GE is, you know the ability one, just to support the scale, the complexity, the volume of data, many different sources systems, many different BUS, whether it be, you know, their aviation division or our divisions, or those types, to sending that data across. And the difference being as well where we've really pushed us and Diwakar and team pushed us is around the accuracy to the exact point that Diwakar mentions. This study is typically financial data. This is data that they run their business off. This is data that the executing CEOs get dashboards on a daily basis. It can't be wrong. You may not only do businesses these days, you want to make decisions on the freshest data that they can, and specifically over the last year, because that's a matter about survival. Not only is it about winning, it's about survival and doing business in the most cost-effective way. But then that type of data, that we're moving, the financial data, the financial data lags we built for GE that is capturing this out of SAP systems, where we have some other features benefits, you know that's where that really pushed us around the accuracy. And that's whereby you mean, you can't really, these, you can't ever, but especially these days, have a typical just customer tab vendor approach. It has to be a partnership. And that was one other thing Diwakar and I spoke a while ago. It was about, how do we really push and develop a partnership between the two companies, between the two organizations? And that's key. And that's where we've been pushed. And there's much new things we're working on for them based on where they are going as a business, whether it be different sources, different targets. And so that's where it's worked out well for both companies. >> So Diwakar, about the margin of error then, in terms of accuracy, 'cause I'm hearing from Anthony that this is something you really pushed them on, right? You know, and 96, 97%, doesn't cut it, right? I mean, you can't be that close. It's got to be spot on. At what point in your data journey, if you will, did it come to roost that the accuracy, you know had to improve or, you know you needed a solution that would get you where you needed to operate your various businesses? >> I think John, it basically stems down to a broader question. You know, what are you using the data for? You know, a lot of us, when we're starting this journey we want to use the data for a lot of analytical use cases. And that basically means you want to look at a broad pattern and say, okay, you know what, do I have a significant amount of inventory sitting on one plant? Or, you know, is there a bigger problem with how I'm negotiating with a vendor, and I want to change that? And for those use cases, you know getting good enough data gives you an indicator as to how do you want to work with them, right? But when you want to take your data to a far more fidelity and more critical processes, whether, you know you're trying to capture from an airplane, the latest signal, and if you had five more signal, perhaps you solve the mystery of the Malaysian Med Sync plan, or when you're trying to solve and report on your financials, right? Then the fidelity and the accuracy of data has to be spot on. And what you realize is, you know you unlock a certain set of value with analytical use cases. But if you truly want to unlock what can be done with big data, you have to go at the operational level, you have to run your business using the data real-time. It's not about like, you know, in hindsight, how can I do things better? If I want to make real-time decisions on, you know, how, what I need to make right now, what's my healthcare indicator suggesting, how do I change the dosage for a customer or a patient, right? It has to be very operational. It has to be very accurate. And that margin of error then almost becomes zero, because you are dealing with things. If you go wrong you can cost lives, right? So that's where we are. And I think honestly being able to solve that problem has now opened up a massive door of what all we can do with data. >> Yeah. Yeah, man. I think I would just build on that as well. I mean, one, it's about us as a company. We are in the data business, obviously. Sources and targets. I mean that's the table stakes stuff. What do we support? It's our ability to bridge these modern environments and the legacy environments, that we do. And you see that across all organizations. A lot of their data source sits in these legacy top environments, but that will transition to other either target systems or the new world ones that we see, more modern bleeding edge environments. So we have to support those but they're not the same time. It's building on the performance, the accuracy of the total product, versus just being able to connect the data. And that's where we get driven down the path with companies like GE, with Diwakar. And they've pushed us. But it's really bridging those environments. >> You know, it also seems like with regard to data that you look at this almost like a verb tense, what happened, what is happening, what will happen, right? So in looking at it to that person, Diwakar, if you will, in terms of the kind of information that you can glean from this vast repository of data as opposed to, you know, what did happen, what's going on right now, and then what can we make happen down the road? Where does HVR factor into that for you in terms of not only, you know, making those, having those kinds of insights, but also making sure that the right people within your organization have access to the information that they need. And maybe just, they only need. >> No, you're right, John. It's funny, you're using a different analogy but I keep referring to as taillights versus headlights, right? Gone are the days you can refer back as to what's happening. You need to just be able to look forward, right? And I think real-time data too is no longer a question or believe, it's a necessity. And I think one of the things we often miss out is real-time data is actually a very collaborative piece of how it brings the various operators together. Because in the past, if you think, if you just go a little bit old school, people will go and do their job. And then they will come back and submit what they did, right? And then you will accumulate what everybody did and make sense out of it. Now, as people are doing things live, you are hearing about it. So for example, if I am issuing payments across different, different places I need to know how much balance I need to keep in the bank, it's the simplest example, right? Now I can keep the math, I can always stack my bank with a ton of money, then I'm losing money because now I'm blocking my money. And especially now, if you think about GE which has 6,000 bank account. If I keep stacking it, I will practically go bankrupt, right? So if I have an inference of what's happening every time a payment card issued by anybody, I am knowing it real-time. It allows me to adjust for optimal liquidity. As simple as it sounds, it saves you a hundred billion dollars if you do it right, in a year, right? So I think it is just fundamentally changes. We need to think about real-time data is no longer, it's just how you need to operate. It's no longer an option. >> Yeah. You may, we see, what we've seen as posture, we were fortunate. We had a great 2020. Just under a hundred percent year-over-year growth. Why? It's about the immediacy of data, so that they can act accordingly. You mean these days, it's table stakes. You mean, it's about winning and, or just surviving compared to, you know, years ago when day old data, week old data, that was okay. You mean, then largely these legacy type (mumbles) technologies, well it was fine. It's not anymore. You mean exactly what Diwakar was saying. It's table stakes. It's just what, that's what it is. >> And I think John, in fact, I see actually it's getting further pushed out, right? Because what happens is I get real-time data from HVR but then I'm actually doing some stuff to get real-time insights after that. And there is a lag from that time to when I'm actually generating insights on which I'm acting on. Now, there is more and more of a need that how do I even shorten that cycle time, right? I actually, from it, we are getting, not only data when it's getting refresh, I actually get signals when I need to add something. So I think in fact, the need of the future is going to be also far more event-driven, where every time something happens that I need to act on, how can technologies like HVR even help you with understanding those? >> Anthony: Yes. >> Anthony, what does scale do to all this? Diwakar touched on it briefly about accuracy and all of a sudden, if you know, if you have a, if you've got a, you know a small discrepancy on a small dataset, no big deal, right? But all of a sudden, if there are issues down the road and you're talking about, you know, millions and millions and millions of inputs, now we've got a problem. So just in terms of scale and with an operation the size of GE, what kind of impacts does that have? >> Yeah. Massive. You mean, it's part of the reason why we went, why we've been successful. We have the ability to scale very well from this highly distributed architecture that we have. And so that's what's been, you know, fortunate for us over the last year, as we know. What does the stat mean? 90% of the world's data was generated over the last two years or something like that. And that just feeds into more, human scale is key. Not only complexity at scale is a key thing, and that's where we've been fortunate to set ourselves apart on that space. I mean we, GE push us and challenge us on a daily basis. The same we do with another company, the biggest online e-commerce platform, massive scale, massive scale. Then that's, we get pushed the whole time and get pushed to improve all the time. But fortunately we have a very good solution that fits into that, but it's just, and I think it just doesn't get, worse is the wrong word. It's just, it's going to continue to grow. The problem is not going away. You know, the volumes are going to increase massively. >> So Diwakar, if I could, before we wrap up here, I'm just curious from your, if you put on your forward-thinking glasses right now, in terms of the data capabilities that HVR has provided you, are they driving you to different kinds of horizons in terms of your business strategy or are your business strategies driving the data solutions that you need? I mean, which way is it right now in terms of how you are going to expand your services down the road? >> It's an interesting question. I think, and Anthony keep correcting me on this one, but today, you know because if you think about big data solutions, right? They were largely designed for a different world historically. They were designed for our IOT parametric set of data sets in different kind of world. So there was a big catch up that a lot of these companies had to do to make it relevant even for the other relational data sets, transactional data sets and everything else, right? So a big part of what I feel like Anthony and other companies have been focusing on is really making this relevant for that world. And I feel like companies like HVR are now absolutely there. And as they are there they are now starting to think about solving or I would say focusing on people who are early in their stage, and how can they get them up and quick, you know, efficient early, because that's a lot of the challenges, right? So I would say, I don't know if Anthony's focuses me in, right? So it should not be me, but it's, I think like where they're going, for example like how do they connect with all the different cloud vendors? So when a company wants to come live and if they're using data from, you know the HR Workday solution or Concord Travel solution, they can just come pitch. We are plug and play. And say, okay, enable me data from all of these and it's there. Today what took us six months to get there, right? So I think rightly so, I think Anthony and the team are focusing on that. And I think we have been partnering on with Anthony more, I would say, perhaps pushing a little more on you know, getting not only accurate data but also now on the paradigm of compliant data. Because I think what you're going to also start seeing is as companies, especially in like different kind of industries, like financial, healthcare and others, they would need data certification also of various kinds. And that would require each of these tool to meet compliance standards that were very, they were not designed for again, right? So I think that's a different paradigm, that again Anthony and the team are really doing great in helping us get there. >> Yeah. I think there's, that was good Diwakar. There's quite a bit to unpack there, you know. With companies such as GE, we've been on a journey for many years. And so that's why we deployed across the enterprise. And let's start off with, I have this source system, I'll move my data into their target system. These targets systems you know, become more frequently either data lakes or environments that were on-premise to running in the cloud, to newer platforms that are built for the cloud, like we've seen the uptake in companies like Snowflake and those types. And you mean, we see this from you know big query from Google and those type of environments. So we see those. And that's things we've got to support along the way as well. But then at the same time, more and more data starts getting generated in your non-traditional trial platforms. I mean, cloud-based applications and those things which we then support and build into this whole framework. But at the same time to what Diwakar was saying, the eyes, you know, the legal requirements, the regulator requirements on the type of data that is now being used. Before you would never typically have years ago companies moving their most valuable or their financial data into these cloud-based type environments. Well, they are today. It happens. And so with that comes a whole bunch of regulation in security. And we've certainly seen particularly this last year the uptake in when these transactions have another level of scrutiny when you're bringing in new products into these environments. So they go through, you know, basically the security and the legal requirements are a lot longer and more depth than they used to be. And that's just the typical of the areas that they're deploying these technologies in as well, and where you're taking some technologies that weren't necessarily built for the modern world that they are now adopt in the modern world. So it's quite complex and a lot to unpack there, but it's, you've got to be on top of all of that. But that's where you then work with your top customers, like at GE, that future roadmap, that feeds where one, you obviously make a decision and you go, this is where we believe the market's going, and these are the things we need to go, we know we need to go support, no matter that no customer has asked us for it yet. But the majority of it is still where customers that are pushing, bleeding edge, that are pushing you as well, and that feeds the roadmap. And, you know, there's a number of new profile platforms GE even pushed us to go support and features that Diwakar and the team have pushed us around accuracy and security and those types of things. So it's an all encompassing approach to it. >> John, we could like-- >> Actually, I think we've set up an entirely new CUBE Conversation we're going to have down the road, I think. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> Hey, gentlemen, thank you for the time. I certainly appreciate it. Really enjoyed it. And I wish you both a very happy and importantly, a healthy 2021. >> Great. >> Thank you both. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Anthony. Bye bye. >> Bye bye. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hey, is Keith Townsend, principal at CTO Adviser, and you're watching the Cube virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm really excited whenever we get toe talk to actual end users. Builders. The conversation is dynamic. This is no exception. Back on the show, Al Vanish despondent head off architectures at logic I've been ish. Welcome back to the show. >>Thanks, Kate. Good to be here >>and on the other side of my screen or how you depend on how you're looking at it is Anthony Brooks Williams C E O off HBR Anthony, Welcome back to the Cube. I know your kind of tired of seeing us, but the conversation is gonna be good, I promise. >>Thanks very much. Look forward to being here and great as you said to talk about a use case for the customer in the real world. >>So I'll be let's start off by talking about lodge attacking. What are you guys doing in a W s in general? I mean, e no. Every company has public cloud, but Logitech and AWS and Public Cloud doesn't naturally come to mind. Help educate the audience. What do you guys doing? >>Sure, so traditionally, audience knows Logitech as the Mice and keyboard company, but we do have a lot of brands which are cool brands off logic tech If you know about gaming, Logitech G is a huge brand for us. We are in video collaboration space. We compete with the likes off Ciscos of the world, where we have hardware that goes on bond works with Zoom Google as well as Microsoft ecosystems. That has been a huge success in a B two b well for us. Beyond music industry gaming as an Astro gaming Jay Bird head phones for athletes. We are also in security system space. On top of that were also in the collaboration space off streaming as in stream labs so a Z can see logic has grown toe where that a lot off use cases, apart from just peripherals, is out there. We connected devices, so we're also looking to move towards a cloud ecosystem where we could be in on on our toes, toe provisioning information on DNA, make sure we are computing to the best of the world. So we are in AWS. We do a lot more in AWS now, compared to what we used to do in the past last five years has seen a change and a shift towards more cloud public cloud usage pure SAS environments in the ws as well And we provisioned data for analysis and essentially a data driven enterprise. Now more so on V as we move towards more future >>and Anthony talked to me about not necessarily just largest heck, but the larger market. How are you seeing companies such as logic? Heck take advantage off A W s and Public cloud. >>Yeah, but I think you mean ultimately we've seen it accelerated the show. Me Castle's just looking for a better way to connect with their prospects, you know, and leverage data in doing so. And we've seen this this driver around digital transformation and that's just being sped up the shirt, given what we've seen around covert and so a lot more companies have really pushed forward and adopting, you know, the infrastructure and the availability off systems and solutions that you find in a platform such as AWS on bets that we've seen grand deduction from our side of customers doing that, we provide the most efficient way of protesters to move data to so platforms such as I don't yes, and that's what we've seen. A big uptick picture. >>So let's focus the conversation around data data, the new oil. We've heard the taglines. Let's put some meat on the bone, so to speak and talk through How are you at logic Tech using real time data in the public cloud? >>Sure, Yeah. I mean, traditionally, if you look at it, uh, logic could selling hardware. Andi hope it >>works for >>the end consumer. Uh, we would not necessarily have an insight into how that product is being used. I think come fast forward. Today's world. It's a connected devices environment. You want to make sure when you sell something, it is working for that consumer. You would want them to be happy about that product, ensuring a seamless experience. Eso customer experience is big. You might want to see a repeat customer come about right. So So the intent is to have a lot off. It is connected experience where you could provisional feedback loop to the engineering team toe to ensure stability off the product, but also enhancements around that product in terms off usage patterns. And and we play a big role with hardware in what you're gaming, for example. And as you can see, that whole industry is growing toe where everything is connected. Probably people do not buy anything, which is a static discussing thing. It's all online gaming. So we want to ensure we don't add Leighton. See in the hardware that we have, ensuring a successful experience and repeat customers right? The essential intent is at the end of the day, to have success with what you sell because there's obviously other options on the market and you want to make sure our customers are happy with the hardware they are investing. Maurin that hardware platform and adding different, very fills along with it so that seamless experiences where we wanna make sure it's connected devices to get that insight. We also look at what people are saying about our products in terms off reviews on APS are on retail portals to ensure we we hear the wise off customer on channel. How's that energy in a positive way to improve the products as well as trying to figure out if there are marketing opportunities were you could go across sailing up cells, so that's essentially driving business towards that success, and at the end of it, that would essentially come up with a revenue generation model >>for us. So Anthony talked to me about how HBR fits into this, because when I look at cloud big, that can be a bit overbearing, like, where's where's the starting point? >>So I mean, for us, you mean the starting point Answer questions around. Acquiring the data data is generated in many places across organizations in many different platforms and many systems. And so we have the ability to have a very efficient technique in the way we go acquire data the way we capture data through this technique called CBC Chinese share the capture where you're feeding incremental updates off off the data across the network. That's the most efficient way to move this data. Firstly, across a wide area network cloud is an endpoint. Uh, you mean off that, And so, firstly, we specializing in supporting many different source systems and so we can acquire that data very efficiently, put it into our into a very scalable, flexible architecture that we have. That's that's a great foot for this modern world of great foot for the cloud. So not only can we capture data from many different source systems, their complexities and a lot of these type of the moments that customers have, we could take the data and move it very efficiently across that network at scale. Because we know, as you've said, data is the new oil that's the lifeblood of organizations today. So we can move that data efficiently at scale across the network and then put it into a system such a snowflake running in AWS like we do for a hobby and a larger taken. So that's really where we fit. I mean, we can, you know, we support data taken from many sources, too many different target systems. We make sure that data is highly accurate. When we move that data across that matches what was in the source of matches, what's in the in the target system. And we do that in this particular use case and what we see predominantly today, the source systems are capturing the data typically today. Still generated on Prem could be data that's sitting in an SFP environment. Unpack that data. Decode that data is to be complex to get out and understand it on moving across and put it in their target system, that predominance sitting in the cloud for all the benefits that we see that the cloud brings around elasticity and efficiency and operational costs the most type of things. And that's probably human in where we fit into this picture. >>You know, I think if I add a little bit there, right, So to Anthony's point for us, we generate a lot of data. You're looking at billions off rolls a day from the edge where people like you and I are using logic devices and we also have a lot off prp transactions That going so the three V s Typically that they call about big data is like the variety off data volume of data at velocity that you want to consume it. So the intent is if you need to be data driven, the data should be available for business consumption as it is being generated very near real time, and that the intent for some of these platforms like H we are, is How efficiently could you move that data, whether it's on Prem or a different cloud into AWS on giving it for business consumption of business analysis in near real time. So you know we strive, Toby Riel time. Whether it's data from China in our factory, on the shop floor, whether it's being generated from people like you and I playing a game for eight hours on generating so many events, we're gonna ensure all that data is being available for business analysis and gone out of those days where we would load that data once a day. And in the hope that we do a weekly analysis right today, we do analysis on make business decisions on that data as the data is being generated. And that's the key to success with such platforms, where we want to make sure we also look at build vs buy rather than us doing all that core and trying toe in just that data we obviously partner with which we are in certain application platforms to ensure stability off it. And they have proven with their experience the I P or the knowledge around how to build those platforms, which even if we go build it, we might need bigger teams to build that. I would rather rely on partners for that capability. And I bring more business value by enabling and implementing such solutions. >>So let's put a little color around that skill whenever I talk to CDOs. Chief data officers, data architects One of the biggest problems that they have in these massive systems you're talking about getting data from E. AARP uh, Internet of things devices, etcetera is simple data transformation. E t l data scientists spend a good droid at a time, maybe sometimes 80% of their time on that data transformation process that slows down the ability to get answers to critical business. Analytic questions. How is HBR assistant you guys and curling down at time for detail? >>Absolutely. So we we do not. We went to cloud about five years back, and the methodology that you talk about e t. L is sort of a point back in the day when you would do, you know, maybe a couple of times a day ingestion. So it's like in the the transition off the pipeline. As you are ingesting data, you would transform and massage the return, enhance the data and provisioned it for business consumption. Today we do lt we extract loaded into target and natively transform it as needed from business consumption. So So we look at each. We are, for example, is, uh, we're replicating all off our e r P data into snowflake in the cloud for real time ingestion and consumption. Uh, if you do all of this analysis on article side to it, typically you would have ah, processing where you would put put in a job toe, get that data out, and analysis comes back to you in a couple of hours out here, you could be slicing and dicing the data as needed on it's all self serve on provisioning. We do not build analysis foreign users. Neither do we do a lot off the data science. But we want to make sure when businesses using that data they can act on that as it's available on the example is we had a processing back in the day with demand forecasting, which we do for every product off logic for 52 weeks, looking ahead for for every week, right, and it will run for a couple of days that processing today with such platforms on in public Lot. We do that in an hour's time. Right now That's critical for business success because you want to know the methodologies you feel need Tofail or have challenges. You probably wanna have them now rather than wait a couple of days for that process in the show up, and then you do not have enough time to, at just the parameters are bringing back some other business process toe augmented. So that's what we look at. The return on investment for such investment are essentially ensuring business continuity and success outfront on faster time to deliver. >>Yeah, >>so, Anthony, this seems like this would really change the conversation within enterprises. The target customer or audience really changes from kind of this IittIe centric movement tome or strategic move. We talked to me about the conversations you've had, what customers and how this has transformed their business. >>Yeah, a few things to unpack there, um, one. You mean, obviously, customs wanna make decisions on the freshest data, so they typically relied on in the past on these batch orientated tough data movement techniques, which which will be touched on there and how we're able to reduce that that time window. Let them make decisions on the freshest data where that takes, you, choose into other parts of organizations. Because, Azzawi said, already, I mean, we know that is the lifeblood of them. There was many, I would say, Typically, I t semi, but let's call it data. Seven people sitting in the both side of organizations, if not Mawr, than used to sit in the legacy I t side. They want access to this data. They want to be able to access their daily easy. And so one of these things cloud based system SAS based systems have made that a lot easier for them. And the conversations. We have a very much driven from not only the chief data officers, but the CEOs. Now they know in order to get the advantage to win. To survive in today's times, they need to be data driven organizations, and it sounds cliche. We hear these digital transformation stories and data driven taglines. They get thrown out there, but what we've seen is where it's really it's been put to toss this year it is happening. Projects that would happen 9 12 months have been given to month Windows to happen because it's a matter of survival and so that's what's really driven. And then you also have the companies that benefit as well. You mean we're fortunate that we are able as a company globally, with composer of all to work from her very efficiently. But then support customers like Obvious who or providing these work from home technology systems that can enable another? The semester It's really moved. That's driven down from being purely I t driven to its CEO, CEO, CEO driven because its's what they've got to do. It z no longer just table stakes. >>I >>think the lines are great, right way we roll up into CEO and like I work for the CEO at at large detect. But we strive to be more service oriented than support. So I t was traditionally looked at as a support our right. But we obviously are enabling the enterprise to be data driven, so we strive to be better at what we do and how we position ourselves. As as more off service are connected to business problem, we understand the business problem and the challenge that they have on and ensuring we could find solutions and solution architectures around that problem to ensure success for that, right? And that's the key to it. Whether we build, vs, buy it. It's all about ensuring business doesn't have toe find stopgap solutions to be successful in finding a solution for their problem. >>Avi Anthony, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to peel back the layers and help the audience understand how to take thes really abstract terms and make them rial for getting answers on real time data and kind of blowing away these concepts of E t l and data transformations and how toe really put data toe work using public cloud resource sources against their real time data assets. Thank you for joining us on this installment of the Cube virtual as we cover A W s re event, make sure to check out the portal and Seymour great coverage off this exciting area off data and data analysis

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. We got a really cool company that we're going to introduce you to, and Anthony Brooks Williams is here. He's the CEO of that company, HVR. Anthony, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey Dave, good to see you again, appreciate it. >> Yeah cheers, so tell us a little bit about HVR. Give us the background of the company, we'll get into a little bit of the history. >> Yeah sure, so at HVR we are changing the way companies routes and access their data. And as we know, data really is the lifeblood of organizations today, and if that stops moving, or stop circulating, well, there's a problem. And people want to make decisions on the freshest data. And so what we do is we move critical business data around these organizations, the most predominant place today is to the cloud, into platforms such as Snowflake, where we've seen massive traction. >> Yeah boy, have we ever. I mean, of course, last week, we saw the Snowflake IPO. The industry is abuzz with that, but so tell us a little bit more about the history of the company. What's the background of you guys? Where did you all come from? >> Sure, the company originated out of the Netherlands, at Amsterdam, founded in 2012, helping solve the issue that customer's was having moving data efficiently at scale across all across a wide area network. And obviously, the cloud is one of those endpoint. And therefore a company, such as the Dutch Postal Service personnel, where today we now move the data to Azure and AWS. But it was really around how you can efficiently move data at scale across these networks. And I have a bit of a background in this, dating back from early 2000s, when I founded a company that did auditing recovery, or SQL Server databases. And we did that through reading the logs. And so then sold that company to Golden Gate, and had that sort of foundation there, in those early days. So, I mean again, Azure haven't been moving data efficiently as we can across these organizations with it, with the key aim of allowing customers to make decisions on the freshest data. Which today's really, table stakes. >> Yeah, so, okay, so we should think about you, as I want to invoke Einstein here, move as much data as you need to, but no more, right? 'Cause it's hard to move data. So your high speeds kind of data mover, efficiency at scale. Is that how we should think about you? >> Absolutely, I mean, at our core, we are CDC trades that capture moving incremental workloads of data, moving the updates across the network, you mean, combined with the distributed architecture that's highly flexible and extensible. And these days, just that one point, customers want to make decisions on us as much as they can get. We have companies that we're doing this for, a large apparel company that's taking some of their not only their core sales data, but some of that IoT data that they get, and sort of blending that together. And given the ability to have a full view of the organization, so they can make better decisions. So it's moving as much data as they can, but also, you need to do that in a very efficient way. >> Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Snowflake, so what I'd like to do is take my old data warehouse, and whatever, let it do what it does, reporting and compliance, stuff like that, but then bring as much data as I need into my Snowflake, or whatever modern cloud database I'm using, and then apply whatever machine intelligence, and really analyze it. So really that is kind of the problem that you're solving, is getting all that data to a place where it actually can be acted on, and turned into insights, is that right? >> Absolutely, I mean, part of what we need to do is there's a whole story around multi-cloud, and that's obviously where Snowflake fit in as well. But from our point of views of supporting over 30 different platforms. I mean data is generated, data is created in a number of different source systems. And so our ability to support each of those in this very efficient way, using these techniques such as CDCs, is going to capture the data at source, and then weaving it together into some consolidated platform where they can do the type of analysis they need to do on that. And obviously, the cloud is the predominant target system of choice with something like a Snowflake there in either these clouds. I mean, we support a number of different technologies in there. But yeah, it's about getting all that data together so they can make decisions on all areas of the business. So I'd love to get into the secret sauce a little bit. I mean we've heard luminaries like Andy Jassie stand up at last year at Reinvent, he talked about Nitro, and the big pipes, and how hard it is to move data at scale. So what's the secret sauce that you guys have that allow you to be so effective at this? >> Absolutely, I mean, it starts with  how you going to acquire data? And you want to do that in the least obtrusive way to the database. So we'll actually go in, and we read the transaction logs of each of these databases. They all generate logs. And we go read the logs systems, all these different source systems, and then put it through our webs and secret sauce, and how we how we move the data, and how we compress that data as well. So, I mean, if you want to move data across a wide area network, I mean, the technique that a few companies use, such as ourselves, is change data capture. And you're moving incremental updates, incremental workloads, the change data across a network. But then combine that with the ability that we have around some of the compression techniques that we use, and, and then just into very distributed architecture, that was one of the things that made me join HVR after my previous experiences, and seeing that how that really fits in today's world of real time and cloud. I mean, those are table stakes things. >> Okay, so it's that change data capture? >> Yeah. >> Now, of course, you've got to initially seed the target. And so you do that, if I understand you use data reduction techniques, so that you're minimizing the amount of data. And then what? Do you use asynchronous methodologies, dial it down, dial it up, off hours, how does that work? >> Absolutely, exactly what you've said they mean. So we're going to we're, initially, there's an initial association, or an initial concept, where you take a copy of all of that data that sits in that source system, and replicating that over to the target system, you turn on that CDC mechanism, which is then weaving that change data. At the same time, you're compressing it, you're encrypting it, you're making sure it's highly secure, and loading that in the most efficient way into their target systems. And so we either do a lot of that, or we also work with, if there's a ETL vendor involved, that's doing some level of transformations, and they take over the transformation capabilities, or loading. We obviously do a fair amount of that ourselves as well. But it depends on what is the architecture that's in there for the customer as well. The key thing is that what we also have is, we have this compare and repair ability that's built into the product. So we will move data across, and we make sure that data that gets moved from A to B is absolutely accurate. I mean people want to know that their data can move faster, they want it to be efficient, but they also want it to be secure. They want to know that they have a peace of mind to make decisions on accurate data. And that's some stuff that we have built into the products as well, supported across all the different platforms as well. So something else that just sets us apart in that as well. >> So I want to understand the business case, if you will. I mean, is it as simple as, "Hey, we can move way more data faster. "We can do it at a lower cost." What's the business case for you guys, and the business impact? >> Absolutely, so I mean, the key thing is the business case is moving that data as efficiently as we can across this, so they can make these decisions. So our biggest online retailer in the US uses us, on the biggest busiest system. They have some standard vendors in there, but they use us, because of the scalability that we can achieve there, of making decisions on their financial data, and all the transactions that happen between the main E-commerce site, and all the third party vendors. That's us moving that data across there as efficiently as they can. And first we look at it as pretty much it's subscription based, and it's all connection based type pricing as well. >> Okay, I want to ask you about pricing. >> Yeah. >> Pricing transparency is a big topic in the industry today, but how do you how do you price? Let's start there. >> Yeah, we charge a simple per connection price. So what are the number of source systems, a connection is a source system or a target system. And we try to very simply, we try and keep it as simple as possible, and charge them on the connections. So they will buy a packet of five connections, they have source systems, two target systems. And it's pretty much as simple as that. >> You mentioned security before. So you're encrypting the data. So your data in motion's encrypted. What else do we need to know about security? >> Yeah, you mean, that we have this concept and how we handle, and we have this wallet concept, and how we integrate with the standard security systems that those customers have already, in the in this architecture. So it's something that we're constantly doing. I mean, there's there's a data encryption at rest. And initially, the whole aim is to make sure that the customer feels safe, that the data that is moving is highly secure. >> Let's talk a little bit about cloud, and maybe the architecture. Are you running in the cloud, are you running on prem, both, across clouds. How does that work? >> Yeah, all of the above. So I mean, what we see today is majority of the data is still generated on prem. And then the majority of the talks we see are in the cloud, and this is not a one time thing, this is continuous. I mean, they've moved their analytical workload into the cloud. You mean they have these large events a few times a year, and they want the ability to scale up and scale down. So we typically see you mean, right now, you need analytics, data warehouses, that type of workload is sitting in the cloud, because of the elasticity, and the scalability, and the reasons the cloud was brought on. So absolutely, we can support the cloud to cloud, we can support on prem to cloud, I think you mean, a lot of companies adopting this hybrid strategy that we've seen certainly for the foreseeable next five years. But yeah, absolutely. The source of target systems considered on prem or in the cloud. >> And where's the point of control? Is it wherever I want it to be? >> Absolutely. >> Is it in one of the clouds on prem? >> Yeah absolutely, you can put that point of control where you want it to be. We have a concept of agents, these agents search on the source and target systems. And then we have the, it's at the edge of your brain, the hub that is controlling what is happening. This data movement that can be sitting with a source system, separately, or on target system. So it's highly extensible and flexible architecture there as well. >> So if something goes wrong, it's the HVR brain that helps me recover, right? And make sure that I don't have all kinds of data corruption. Maybe you could explain that a little bit, what happens when something goes wrong? >> Yeah absolutely, I mean, we have things that are built into the product that help us highlight what has gone wrong, and how we can correct those. And then there's alerts that get sent back to us to the to the end customer. And there's been a whole bunch of training, and stuff that's taken place for then what actions they can take, but there's a lot of it is controlled through HVR core system that handles that. So we are working next step. So as we move as a service into more of an autonomous data integration model ourselves, whichever, a bunch of exciting things coming up, that just takes that off to the next levels. >> Right, well Golden Gate Heritage just sold that to Oracle, they're pretty hardcore about things like recovery. Anthony, how do you think about the market? The total available market? Can you take us through your opportunity broadly? >> Yeah absolutely, you mean, there's the core opportunity in the space that we play, as where customers want to move data, they don't want to do data integration, they want to move data from A to B. There's those that are then branching out more to moving a lot of their business workloads to the cloud on a continuous basis. And then where we're seeing a lot of traction around this particular data that resides in these critical business systems such as SAP, that is something you're asking earlier about, what are some core things on our product. We have the ability to unpack, to unlock that data that sits in some of these SAP environments. So we can go, and then decode this data that sits between these cluster pool tables, combine that with our CDC techniques, and move their data across a network. And so particularly, sort of bringing it back a little bit, what we're seeing today, people are adopting the cloud, the massive adoption of Snowflake. I mean, as we see their growth, a lot of that is driven through consumption, why? It's these big, large enterprises that are now ready to consume more. We've seen that tail wind from our perspective, as well as taking these workloads such as SAP, and moving that into something like these cloud platforms, such as a Snowflake. And so that's where we see the immediate opportunity for us. And then and then branching out from there further, but I mean, that is the core immediate area of focus right now. >> Okay, so we've talked about Snowflake a couple of times, and other platforms, they're not the only one, but they're the hot one right now. When you think about what organizations are doing, they're trying to really streamline their data pipeline to get to turn raw data into insights. So you're seeing that emerging organizations, that data pipeline, we've been talking about it for quite some time. I mean, Snowflake, obviously, is one piece of that. Where's your value in that pipeline? Is it all about getting the data into that stream? >> Yeah, you just mentioned something there that we have an issue internally that's called raw data to ready data. And that's about capturing this data, moving that across. And that's where we building value on that data as well, particularly around some of our SAP type initiatives, and solutions related to that, that we're bringing out as well. So one it's absolutely going in acquiring that data. It's then moving it as efficiently as we can at scale, which a lot of people talk about, we truly operate at scale, the biggest companies in the world use us to do that, across there and giving them that ability to make decisions on the freshest data. Therein lies the value of them being able to make decisions on data that is a few seconds, few minutes old, versus some other technology they may be using that takes hours days. You mean that is it, keeping large companies that we work with today. I mean keeping toner paper on shelves, I mean one thing that happened after COVID. I mean one of our big customers was making them out their former process, and making the shelves are full. Another healthcare provider being able to do analysis on what was happening on supplies from the hospital, and the other providers during this COVID crisis. So that's where it's a lot of that value, helping them reinvent their businesses, drive down that digital transformation strategy, is the key areas there. No data, they can't make those type of decisions. >> Yeah, so I mean, your vision really, I mean, you're betting on data. I always say don't bet against the data. But really, that's kind of the premise here. Is the data is going to continue to grow. And data, I often say data is plentiful insights aren't. And we use the Broma you said before. So really, maybe, good to summarize the vision for us, where you want to take this thing? Yeah, absolutely so we're going to continue building on what we have, making it easier to use. Certainly, as we move, as more customers move into the cloud. And then from there, I mean, we have some strategic initiatives of looking at some acquisitions as well, just to build on around offering, and some of the other core areas. But ultimately, it's getting closer to the business user. In today's world, there is many IT tech-savvy people sitting in the business side of organization, as they are in IT, if not more. And so as we go down that flow with our product, it's getting closer to those end users, because they're at the forefront of wanting this data. As we said that the data is the lifeblood of an organization. And so given an ability to drive the actual power that they need to run the data, is a core part of that vision. So we have some some strategic initiatives around some acquisitions, as well, but also continue to build on the product. I mean, there's, as I say, I mean sources and targets come and go, there's new ones that are created each week, and new adoptions, and so we've got to support those. That's our table stakes, and then continue to make it easier to use, scale even quicker, more autonomous, those type of things. >> And you're working with a lot of big companies, the company's well funded if Crunchbase is up to date, over $50 million in funding. Give us up right there. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean a company is well funded, we're on a good footing. Obviously, it's a very hot space to be in. With COVID this year, like everybody, we sat down and looked in sort of everyone said, "Okay well, let's have a look how "this whole thing's going to shake out, "and get good plan A, B and C in action." And we've sort of ended up with Plan A plus, we've done an annual budget for the year. We had our best quarter ever, and Q2, 193% year over year growth. And it's just, the momentum is just there, I think at large. I mean obviously, it sounds cliche, a lot of people say it around digital transformation and COVID. Absolutely, we've been building this engine for a few years now. And it's really clicked into gear. And I think projects due to COVID and things that would have taken nine, 12 months to happen, they're sort of taking a month or two now. It's been getting driven down from the top. So all of that's come together for us very fortunately, the timing has been ideal. And then tie in something like a Snowflake traction, as you said, we support many other platforms. But all of that together, it just set up really nicely for us, fortunately. >> That's amazing, I mean, with all the turmoil that's going on in the world right now. And all the pain in many businesses. I tell you, I interview people all day every day, and the technology business is really humming. So that's awesome to hear that you guys. I mean, especially if you're in the right place, and data is the place to be. Anthony, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and summarizing your thoughts, and give us the update on HVR, really interesting. >> Absolutely, I appreciate the time and opportunity. >> Alright, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at our Palo Alto studio today. And we're kind of taking advantage of this opportunity to reach out to the community, as we're going through this COVID crisis, to talk to leaders, get their tips and tricks and advice. As you know, everyone is going through this thing together. It's really a unique situation that everybody has a COVID story, where were you in March of 2020. So we're excited to have our next guest. He's Corey Williams. He's the VP of strategy and marketing for Idaptive. Cory, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, I was just thinking the last time that we saw, was late February, it was February 25th. At the RSA conference, 40,000 people I think was the last big show, that I attended for sure, and kind of snuck in, before everything got shut down. It's just amazing, you know, kind of how quick this light switch moment happened to really force first, everybody home, and then you know, kind of all these collateral impacts of that in terms of digital transformation. >> Yeah, it is amazing. I remember that RSA show very well, shaking dozens of people's hands, eating from a buffet, sitting in a crowded room. It's amazing how quickly things have transformed, and how our mindset about, just about everything, but especially what we do for a living and how we interact with each other, had just changed overnight. >> Yeah and it's fascinating too, because when the stay at home, what started to come out, you know, nobody really had time to plan. And you know, and I would argue even if you had, I don't know, six months to plan, nine months to plan, a year to plan, for kind of this cutover, it would still have been a difficult situation. So just to be, you know, kind of thrown in and it's ready said go. Here we are, really unique challenge for people, but also for the infrastructure providers, also for the technology providers, in the space that you operate in, which is security, very different challenge and it wasn't, you know, we're going to plan and get everybody's VPN is all hooked up and configured and tested. It's like, don't come to the office tomorrow. >> Yeah and it literally happened that quickly. It wasn't a matter of being able to plan this, like a normal transition. But it was literally, today we're working in the office, tomorrow, please don't come in, we'll let you know when it's going to change. And I think it really did catch a lot of companies off guard, even those that were used to supporting a remote workforce at least in part. >> Yeah, because it's interesting people been talking about new way to work and work from home and this for a very long time. But you know, this was an incredible forcing function. So let's talk about you know, kind of what you do for the people that aren't familiar with Idaptive. Give us kind of the quick, the quick overview. >> Sure, Idaptive is what's called an identity and access management company. What we do is we make it easier for end users to get access to all their applications, and for organizations to provide that access in more secure manner. As you know, all these cloud applications and devices that we need to have access to, are typically just secured by a password and they all have different passwords, and those passwords often get reused and shared among different employees, and it creates a big problem, for not only for the security of the company, but even for the IT Helpdesk who's got to support account lockouts and password resets and so, Idaptive is one of the leaders in this space. >> As you talk about the password reset and I didn't think really kind of from the IT support side if you don't have a teenager hopefully close by in the room you know, that creates all kinds of challenges, but it's real and the password situation was bad before. Now as you said we've got all kinds of internal applications, you've got all types of access control to your inside stuff, you have all your cloud applications. A lot of times you said passwords are stored in queues or they're stored in caches, or they're stored in your Chrome browser. You guys have written extensively about passwords and getting kind of past passwords to better ways to authenticate people, whenever you can actually written quite a bit recently on blog posts. Talk about your kind of strategy and how you help customers kind of rethink access. >> Yeah, there's sort of two main strategies that I've been writing about. And then our company has been talking to our customers about. The first one we call Next-Gen Access, which is essentially a combination or layers of technology like Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, provisioning, and analytics provide some user behavior and risk. All of that is intended to provide a more secure experience where we can put additional factors besides just a password, in front of the user, but only do it, when the risk is high, so that we can preserve the user experience. And so that we call a Next-gen access approach. But ultimately, the reason you want to do that is to arrive at a zero trust state of mind. That sort of approach allows you to say that, hey, I've verified every user, that is on my network. I know the device they're using is something that I trust and is in good shape. And I've limited their access to just what they need in order to do their job. >> Now, do you find that most people in this situation are still accessing via a VPN or some secure network or as most of it, you know, it's public internet access, and you're relying really on the applications and the access and the protocols and the two factor to make sure people can only get what they're supposed to get? >> Yeah, I think you kind of bring up a good point. The vast majority of businesses are what I've referred to hybrid enterprises, they still have on-premise applications, they still have their own applications that they build. But they also are in the process of adopting cloud applications like Office 365. And you know, all of the different kind of productivity apps, that are very popular. And so most companies are stuck in this situation where they can't simply be completely virtual company overnight. They still have to provide access to on-premise systems and applications in order to do their business. And so many of them just had the option of saying, okay, here's VPN access for everyone. But as as we know, VPN access is a very blunt instrument. First of all you have it has to be able to scale to a lot of users. Second of all, it gives you access to the whole network from a remote location, both of which are situations that are difficult, especially when you have to turn it on overnight. >> You're right. So you and one of the articles that I saw in getting ready for this, has some really specific as straightforward advice to people, to help them enable their remote workers. I wonder if you could go through some of those key points with us? >> Sure, I think, you know, when you think about remote access or having a remote workforce, you think about a few different things. One is be able to provide them easy kind of friction, free discovery of their applications and providing access. So, having something like a portal of all the applications that you're supposed to have access to whether they're on-premise or in the cloud, and have one click access to those protected in a way that is common to all those applications, using something like a second factor of authentication. That provides some of the immediate convenience of getting people up and productive, even if they're outside the network at home. The second thing we think about is, how do we give access to those on-premise applications? You can use VPN, it's quick, I can tell you that our customers are telling us two things. One is they didn't prepare for that much capacity. So their VPN connections don't scale. So they're having to ration the use of it, which limits the productivity. But also, they haven't necessarily rolled out multi-factor authentication to all of these users who don't typically use VPN. And so they are forced with either having to dial down, the security level, or to scramble and try to find a way to secure that access. So in my writings, we've been talking about providing alternatives to a VPN, something like an application gateway, which would can give you access to just the apps you need, without having to have full network access, and having those apps just be published through the gateway. >> So there's really some kind of creative ways to restructure the access beyond just simply having better access more secure access and as you said VPN and multi-factor cause in fact, you might not be able to implement those things just in the timely manner which you have, as we said, this was a light switch moment. >> Yeah I think definitely the it's something to think about in these emergency light switch moments, what is the easiest way and there's three parties involved. You've got the security folks who are concerned about maintaining a level of continuity with the access to their data. But you also have the end user and they have to do their job. It has to be easy enough for them to be able to do, without having to have a lot of special training. And let's not forget the IT Helpdesk, either. They are getting overwhelmed with requests for about basic technology use and about getting access to the basic resources. The last thing you want to do is pile on a whole bunch of new lockouts. And, you know, barriers have been put in front of users, that can overwhelm them. So you kind of have to think about all three parties, when you're developing a solution for remote workforce. >> All right, and I presume the bad guys are not taking holiday, seeing this opportunity as again, we're constantly talking about this increasing attack surface. It just got a whole lot bigger for the bad guys. >> It certainly did. I mean, if you think about the attack surface, it used to be that if they could get past your network barrier, then they were in. And so he was very concentrated around securing the network. As you start adopting more mobile and cloud applications, now your attack surface becomes all the resources are out in the cloud. Now, when you take all of your workers and disperse them to home, each one of their own systems and networks becomes an extension of that attack surface. And so anything you can do to narrow and lessen the attack surface by making sure you have good user verification, device validation, and other layers of intelligence to help you monitor that access. It reduces the scope to everyone on Earth, from any device on Earth, to just the people that you you trust and if identified, and that's why we talked to our our customers about is putting these layers in that can balance that security, but also provide a more friction free user experience and that's the real trick. >> All right, so I'm just curious to get your take you've been in the business for a long time. And kind of the state of passwords, you know, is this just something we're stuck with forever? Do you see in the not too distant future? Or medium future? Passwords going away? I mean, we've got biometric stuff now, you can touch your phone, you can read your iris, but those things can be spoofed as well. Where do you see, you know, kind of the passwords evolving and what's going to take its place? >> You know, it's a little bit like the clothes in the back of my closet, you can never quite get rid of everything. And I think passwords are will always be with us in some form, because they're baked into technology that's been around forever. As a side note, you've probably heard about these IRS checks going out. And there being problems in some states because these stimulus checks are dependent on systems that were built 50 years ago. And so technology kind of lives forever in some form. So we can't necessarily get rid of passwords, but there are two things we can do, one is we can never depend on passwords alone to secure access, we can layer on, multi-factor authentication and artificial intelligence to determine risk level and put an additional set of factors in front of the user. But we can also develop new applications and technologies, with more of what is being known as a password list experience, which is sort of an ideal thing. And we have some experience with modern technology like facial recognition on our iPhone or a fingerprint on our PC. Those types of experiences can be built in and before COVID happened, I'd say that one of the big trends of 2020 was this idea of password list access. And we have actually recently announced some of our own password capabilities, but it was a hot trending topic. And I think will continue to be because not only is it a more secure experience, but it's also much easier for end users and they would prefer to have a one click access rather than having to remember a complex string that they have changed in 90 days. >> I was going to say, do you think it's an accelerant? Or in terms of having this alternative access method? Or is it a pullback because people are hunkering down, but it sounds on those two attributes, that it's a better thing. >> I think definitely in >> The more secure that seems pretty straightforward. >> Yes, I think definitely, in the medium and long term, this will accelerate the trend. In the short term, yes. Everything is being focused on just enabling those remote users. There was a actually a recent survey done by Mayfield, with their collection of CSOs and CTOs, asking them what the top priorities were in the short term. And of course, the number one priority for IT leaders is enabling that remote workforce. But number two in the short term is actually security enabling that says not only enabling users to work from home productively, but making sure that security is keeping track. So I don't think they've lost sight even in the short term, although I think they're focused on very tactical goals related to scaling out the solutions and supporting their end users. In the medium term and in the long term, this is going to have lasting effects. We know that the remote workforce trend was accelerated and there's no turning back. Companies are going to be more remote, they're going to be more comfortable with remote models. And so having better stronger, better experiences and stronger authentication experiences will be part of how we do things going forward. >> Well, Cory, in everywhere we go, security has to get baked into everything. So it's no longer a bolt in is, as you well know, and so it's not surprising that that's right in there with supporting those remote people cause they got access to the keys to the kingdom. You just can't let that get out there. So give you the final word once we come out of COVID and in terms of, you know, looking directly at what that's driving in terms of priorities. What are some of the other priorities that you hope to get back to, once we kind of get through this period? >> Well, I mean, I think clearly, we're seeing the effect on certain industries like travel and hospitality and others, we certainly and we tell,, we certainly hope that those businesses are able to come back strong. So those are some of the things we're looking forward to. But we know a lot of our customers are really wanting to not just respond to the current activities that are happening, but they want to build their businesses. They want to build better user experiences, they want to put out new digital experiences. We know from the survey as well, from Mayfield that increasing acceleration towards adopting cloud, and towards the digital transformation of user and business processes is going to be key. And so that's what we see the future is not just in providing security to prevent the bad guy, but to enable these new digital experiences and to accelerate these trends like move to cloud, identity and access management is fundamental to all of those efforts. And we see that as being a very positive thing. And hopefully this will end up serving as a catalyst to spurred and acceleration of those adoptions. >> Well, I think there's no doubt about it. I mean, we're not going to go back and the longer this thing goes on, the more new habits are formed, and people aren't just going to want to go back to the old ways. So I think there's no doubt about it. And I really appreciate you sharing your insights. Again, Cory has written a ton of stuff. There's blogs all over the place, do a quick search on Cory Williams with an E, and you'll find some of his blog posts and thanks for taking a few minutes with us here today, Cory. >> You bet, thank you, Jeff. >> All right, he's Corey, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios. Stay safe out there, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>live from Stanford University. It's the queue covering Stanford women in Data Science 2020. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're live at Stanford University, covering the fifth annual Woods Women in Data Science conference. Joining us today is Tilapia Williams, who's the associate professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and host of Nova Wonders at PBS to leave a welcome to the Cappy to be here. Thanks for having me. So you have a lot of rules. So let's first tell us about being an associate professor at Harvey Mudd. >>Yeah, I've been at Harvey Mudd now for 11 years, so it's been really a lot of fun in the math department, but I'm a statistician by training, so I teach a lot of courses and statistics and data science and things like that. >>Very cool. And you're also a host of API s show called Novo Wonders. >>Yeah, that came about a couple of years ago. Folks at PBS reached out they had seen my Ted talk, and they said, Hey, it looks like you could be fund host of this science documentary shows So, Nova Wonders, is a six episode Siri's. It kind of takes viewers on a journey of what the cutting edge questions and science are. Um, so I got to host the show with a couple other co host and really think about like, you know, what are what are the animals saying? And so we've got some really fun episodes to do. What's the universe made of? Was one of them what's living inside of us. That was definitely a gross win. Todo figure out all the different micro organisms that live inside our body. So, yeah, it's been funded in hopes that show as well. >>And you talk about data science and AI and all that stuff on >>Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, one of the episodes. Can we build a Brain was dealt with a lot of data, big data and artificial intelligence, and you know, how good can we get? How good can computers get and really sort of compared to what we see in the movies? We're a long way away from that, but it seems like you know we're getting better every year, building technology that is truly intelligent, >>and you gave a talk today about mining for your own personal data. So give us some highlights from your talk. Yeah, >>so that talks sort of stemmed out of the Ted talk that I gave on owning your body's data. And it's really challenging people to think about how they can use data that they collect about their bodies to help make better health decisions on DSO ways that you can use, like your temperature data or your heart rate. Dina. Or what is data say over time? What does it say about your body's health and really challenging the audience to get excited about looking at that data? We have so many devices that collect data automatically for us, and often we don't pause on enough to actually look at that historical data. And so that was what the talk was about today, like, here's what you can find when you actually sit down and look at that data. >>What's the most important data you think people should be collecting about themselves? >>Well, definitely not. Your weight is. I don't >>want to know what that >>is. Um, it depends, you know, I think for women who are in the fertile years of life taking your daily waking temperature can tell you when your body's fertile. When you're ovulating, it can. So that information could give women during that time period really critical information. But in general, I think it's just a matter of being aware of of how your body is changing. So for some people, maybe it's your blood pressure or your blood sugar. You have high blood pressure or high blood sugar. Those things become really critical to keep an eye on. And, um, and I really encourage people whatever data they take, too, the active in the understanding of an interpretation of the data. It's not like if you take this data, you'll be healthy radio. You live to 100. It's really a matter of challenging people to own the data that they have and get excited about understanding the data that they are taking. So >>absolutely put putting people in charge of their >>own bodies. That's >>right. >>And actually speaking about that in your Ted talk, you mentioned how you were. Your doctor told you to have a C section and you looked at the data and he said, No, I'm gonna have this baby naturally. So tell us more about that. >>Yes, you should always listen to your medical pressures. But in this case, I will say that it was It was definitely more of a dialogue. And so I wasn't just sort of trying to lean on the fact that, like, I have a PhD in statistics and I know data, he was really kind of objectively with the on call doctor at the time, looking at the data >>and talking about it. >>And this doctor was this is his first time seeing me. And so I think it would have been different had my personal midwife or my doctor been telling me that. But this person would have only looked at this one chart and was it was making a decision without thinking about my historical data. And so I tried to bring that to the conversation and say, like, let me tell you more about you know, my body and this is pregnancy number three like, here's how my body works. And I think this person in particular just wasn't really hearing any of that. It was like, Here's my advice. We just need to do this. I'm like, >>Oh, >>you know, and so is gently as possible. I tried to really share that data. Um, and then it got to the point where it was sort of like either you're gonna do what I say or you're gonna have to sign a waiver. And we were like, Well, to sign the waiver that cost quite a buzz in the hospital that day. But we came back and had a very successful labor and delivery. And so, yeah, >>I think >>that at the time, >>But, >>you know, with that caveat that you should listen to what, your doctors >>Yeah. I mean, there's really interesting, like, what's the boundary between, Like what the numbers tell you and what professional >>tells me Because I don't have an MD. Right. And so, you know, I'm cautious not to overstep that, but I felt like in that case, the doctor wasn't really even considering the data that I was bringing. Um, I was we were actually induced with our first son, but again, that was more of a conversation, more of a dialogue. Here's what's happening here is what we're concerned about and the data to really back it up. And so I felt like in that case, like Yeah, I'm happy to go with your suggestion, but I could number three. It was just like, No, this isn't really >>great. Um, so you also wrote a book called Power In Numbers. The Rebel Women of Mathematics. So what inspired you to write this book? And what do you hope readers take away from it? >>A couple different things. I remember when I saw the movie hidden figures. And, um, I spent three summers at NASA working at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And so I had this very fun connection toe, you know, having worked at NASA. And, um, when this movie came out and I'm sitting there watching it and I'm, like ball in just crying, like I didn't know that there were black women who worked at NASA like, before me, you know, um and so it felt it felt it was just so transformative for me to see these stories just sort of unfold. And I thought, like, Well, why didn't I learn about these women growing up? Like imagine, Had I known about Katherine Johnsons of the world? Maybe that would have really inspired Not just me, but, you know, thinking of all the women of color who aren't in mathematics or who don't see themselves working at at NASA. And so for me, the book was really a way to leave that legacy to the generation that's coming up and say, like, there have been women who've done mathematics, um, and statistics and data science for years, and they're women who are doing it now. So a lot of the about 1/3 of the book are women who were still here and, like, active in the field and doing great things. And so I really wanted to highlight sort of where we've been, where we've been, but also where we're going and the amazing women that are doing work in it. And it's very visual. So some things like, Oh my gosh, >>women in math >>It is really like a very picturesque book of showing this beautiful images of the women and their mathematics and their work. And yes, I'm really proud of it. >>That's awesome. And even though there is like greater diversity now in the tech industry, there's still very few African American women, especially who are part of this industry. So what advice would you give to those women who who feel like they don't belong. >>Yeah, well, a they really do belong. Um, and I think it's also incumbent of people in the industry to sort of recognize ways that they could be advocate for women, and especially for women of color, because often it takes someone who's already at the table to invite other people to the table. And I can't just walk up like move over, get out the way I'm here now. But really being thoughtful about who's not representative, how do we get those voices here? And so I think the onus is often mawr on. People who occupy those spaces are ready to think about how they can be more intentional in bringing diversity in other spaces >>and going back to your talk a little bit. Um uh, how how should people use their data? >>Yeah, so I mean, I think, um, the ways that we've used our data, um, have been to change our lifestyle practices. And so, for example, when I first got a Fitbit, um, it wasn't really that I was like, Oh, I have a goal. It was just like I want something to keep track of my steps And then I look at him and I feel like, Oh, gosh, I didn't even do anything today. And so I think having sort of even that baseline data gave me a place to say, Okay, let me see if I hit 10 stuff, you know, 10,000 >>steps in a day or >>and so, in some ways, having the data allows you to set goals. Some people come in knowing, like, I've got this goal. I want to hit it. But for me, it was just sort of like, um and so I think that's also how I've started to use additional data. So when I take my heart rate data or my pulse, I'm really trying to see if I can get lower than how it was before. So the push is really like, how is my exercise and my diet changing so that I can bring my resting heart rate down? And so having the data gives me a gold up, restore it, and it also gives me that historical information to see like, Oh, this is how far I've come. Like I can't stop there, you know, >>that's a great social impact. >>That's right. Yeah, absolutely. >>and, um, Do you think that so in terms of, like, a security and privacy point of view, like if you're recording all your personal data on these devices, how do you navigate that? >>Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, because you are giving up that data privacy. Um, I usually make sure that the data that I'm allowing access to this sort of data that I wouldn't care if it got published on the cover of you know, the New York Times. Maybe I wouldn't want everyone to see what my weight is, but, um, and so in some ways, while it is my personal data, there's something that's a bit abstract from it. Like it could be anyone's data as opposed to, say, my DNA. Like I'm not going to do a DNA test. You know, I don't want my data to be mapped it out there for the world. Um, but I think that that's increasingly become a concern because people are giving access to of their information to different companies. It's not clear how companies would use that information, so if they're using my data to build a product will make a product better. You know we don't see any world from that way. We don't have the benefit of it, but they have access to our data. And so I think in terms of data, privacy and data ethics, there's a huge conversation to have around that. We're only kind >>of at the beginning of understanding what that is. Yeah, >>well, thank you so much for being on the Cube. Really having you here. Thank you. Thanks. So I'm Sonia to Gary. Thanks so much for watching the cube and stay tuned for more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's the theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Alright, welcome to theCUBE coverage here at RSA Conference in San Francisco and Moscone Halls, theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, in a cyber security is all about encryption data and also security. We have a very hot startup here, that amazing guest, Dr. Ellison Anne Williams, CEO and Founder of Enveil just recently secured a $10 million Series A Funding really attacking a real problem around encryption and use. Again, data ,security, analytics, making it all secure is great. Allison, and thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> So congratulations on the funding before we get started into the interview talking about the hard news, you guys that are around the funding. How long have you guys been around? What's the funding going to do? What are you guys doing? >> Yeah, so we're about three and a half years old as a company. We just announced our Series A close last week. So that was led by C5. And their new US Funds The Impact Fund and participating. Other partners included folks like MasterCard, Capital One Ventures, Bloomberg, Beta 1843, etc. >> So some names jumped in C5 led the round. >> For sure. >> How did this get started? What was the idea behind this three years you've been actually doing some work? Are you going to production? Is it R&D? Is it in market? Give us a quick update on the status of product and solution? >> Yeah, so full production. For production of the product. We're in fact in 2.0 of the release. And so we got our start inside of the National Security Agency, where I spent the majority of my career. And we developed some breakthroughs in an area of technology called homomorphic encryption, that allows you to perform computations into the encrypted domain as if they were in the unencrypted world. So the tech had never existed in a practical capacity. So we knew that bringing seeds of that technology out of the intelligence community and using it to seed really and start the company, we would be creating a new commercial market. >> So look at this, right? So you're at the NSA, >> Correct >> Your practitioner, they're doing a lot of work in this area, pioneering a new capability. And did the NSA spin it out did they fund it was the seed capital there or did you guys bootstrap it >> No. So our seed round was done by an entity called Data Tribe. So designed to take teams in technologies that were coming out of the IC that wanted to commercialize to do so. So we took seed funding from them. And then we were actually one of the youngest company ever to be in the RSA Innovation Sandbox here in 2017, to be one of the winners and that's where the conversation really started to change around this technology called homomorphic encryption, the market category space called securing data in use and what that meant. And so from there, we started running the initial version of a product out in the commercial world and we encountered two universal reaction. One that we were expecting and one that we weren't. And the one that we were expecting is that people said, "holy cow, this actually works". Because what we say we do keeping everything encrypted during processing. Sounds pretty impossible. It's not just the math. And then the second reaction that we encountered that we weren't expecting is those initial early adopters turned around and said to us, "can we strategically invest in you?" So our second round of funding was actually a Strategic Round where folks like Bloomberg beta,Thomson Reuters, USA and Incue Towel came into the company. >> That's Pre Series A >> Pre Series A >> So you still moving along, if a sandbox, you get some visibility >> Correct. >> Then were the products working on my god is you know, working. That's great. So I want to get into before I get into some of the overhead involved in traditionally its encryption there always has been that overhead tax. And you guys seem to solve that. But can you describe first data-at-rest versus data-in-motion and data-in-user. data at rest, as means not doing anything but >> Yeah, >> In flight or in you so they the same, is there a difference? Can you just tell us the difference of someone this can be kind of confusing. >> So it's helpful to think of data security in three parts that we call the triad. So securing data at rest on the file system and the database, etc. This would be your more traditional in database encryption, or file based encryption also includes things like access control. The second area, the data security triad is securing data- in- transit when it's moving around through the network. So securing data at rest and in transit. Very well solution. A lot of big name companies do that today, folks like Talus and we partner with them, Talus, Gemalto, etc. Now, the third portion of the data security triad is what happens to that data when you go use or process it in some way when it becomes most valuable. And that's where we focus. So as a company, we secure data-in-use when it's being used or processed. So what does that mean? It means we can do things like take searches or analytics encrypt them, and then go run them without ever decrypting them at any point during processing. So like I said, this represents a new commercial market, where we're seeing it manifest most often right now are in things like enabling secure data sharing, and collaboration, or enabling secure data monetization, because its privacy preserving and privacy enabling as a capability. >> And so that I get this right, the problem that you solved is that during the end use parts of the triad, it had to be decrypted first and then encrypted again, and that was the vulnerability area. Look, can you describe kind of like, the main problem that you guys saw was that-- >> So think more about, if you've got data and you want to give me access to it, I'm a completely different entity. And the way that you're going to give me access to it is allowing me to run a search over your data holdings. We see this quite a bit in between two banks in the areas of anti-money laundering or financial crime. So if I'm going to go run a search in your environment, say I'm going to look for someone that's an EU resident. Well, their personal information is covered under GDPR. Right? So if I go run that search in your environment, just because I'm coming to look for a certain individual doesn't mean you actually know anything about that. And so if you don't, and you have no data on them whatsoever, I've just introduced a new variable into your environment that you now have to account for, From a risk and liability perspective under something like GDPR. Whereas if you use us, we could take that search encrypt it within our walls, send it out to you and you could process it in its encrypted state. And because it's never decrypted during processing, there's no risk to you of any increased liability because that PII or that EU resident identifier is never introduced into your space. >> So the operating side of the business where there's compliance and risk management are going to love this, >> For sure. >> Is that really where the action is? >> Yes, compliance risk privacy. >> Alright, so get a little nerdy action on this one. So encryption has always been an awesome thing depending on who you talk to you, obviously, but he's always been a tax associate with the overhead processing power. He said, there's math involved. How does homeomorphic work? Does it have problems with performance? Is that a problem? Or if not, how do you address that? Where does it? I might say, well, I get it. But what's the tax for me? Or is your tax? >> Encryption is never free. I always tell people that. So there always is a little bit of latency associated with being able to do anything in an encrypted capacity, whether that's at rest at in transit or in use. Now, specifically with homomorphic encryption. It's not a new area of encryption. It's been around 30 or so years, and it had often been considered to be the holy grail of encryption for exactly the reasons we've already talked about. Doing things like taking searches or analytics and encrypting them, running them without ever decrypting anything opens up a world of different types of use cases across verticals and-- >> Give those use case examples. What would be some that would be low hanging fruit. And it would be much more higher level. >> Some of the things that we're seeing today under that umbrella of secure data sharing and collaboration, specifically inside of financial services, for use cases around anti-money laundering and financial crimes so, allowing two banks to be able to securely collaborate with with each other, along the lines of the example that I gave you just a second ago, and then also for large multinational banks to do so across jurisdictions in which they operate that have different privacy and secrecy regulations associated with them. >> Awesome. Well, Ellison, and I want to ask you about your experience at the NSA. And now as an entrepreneur, obviously, you have some, you know, pedigree at the NSA, really, you know, congratulations. It's going to be smart to work there, I guess. Secrets, you know, >> You absolutely do. >> Brains brain surgeon rocket scientist, so you get a lot of good stuff. But now that you're on the commercial space, it's been a conversation around how public and commercial are really trying to work together a lot as innovations are happening on both sides of the fence there. >> Yeah. >> Then the ICC and the Intelligence Community as well as commercial. Yeah, you're an entrepreneur, you got to go make money, you got shareholders down, you got investors? What's the collaboration look like? How does the world does it change for you? Is it the same? What's the vibe in DC these days around the balance between collaboration or is there? >> Well, we've seen a great example of this recently in that anti-money laundering financial crime use case. So the FCA and the Financial Conduct Authority out of the UK, so public entity sponsored a whole event called a tech spread in which they brought the banks together the private entities together with the startup companies, so your early emerging innovative capabilities, along with the public entities, like your privacy regulators, etc, and had us all work together to develop really innovative solutions to real problems within the banks. In the in the context of this text spread. We ended up winning the know your customer customer due diligence side of the text brand and then at the same time that us held an equivalent event in DC, where FinCEN took the lead, bringing in again, the banks, the private companies, etc, to all collaborate around this one problem. So I think that's a great example of when your public and your private and your private small and your private big is in the financial services institutions start to work together, we can really make breakthroughs-- >> So you see a lot happening >> We see a lot happening. >> The encryption solution actually helped that because it makes sense. Now you have the sharing the encryption. >> Yeah. >> Does that help with some of the privacy and interactions? >> It breaks through those barriers? Because if we were two banks, we can't necessarily openly, freely share all the information. But if I can ask you a question and do so in a secure and private capacity, still respecting all the access controls that you've put in place over your own data, then it allows that collaboration to occur, whereas otherwise I really couldn't in an efficient capacity. >> Okay, so here's the curveball question for you. So anybody Startup Series today, but you really got advanced Series A, you got a lot of funding multiple years of operation. If I asked you what's the impact that you're going to have on the world? What would you say to that, >> Over creating a whole new market, completely changing the paradigm about where and how you can use data for business purposes. And in terms of how much funding we have, we have, we've had a few rounds, but we only have 15 million into the company. So to be three and a half years old to see this new market emerging and being created with with only $15 million. It's really pretty impressive. >> Yeah, it's got a lot of growth and keep the ownership with the employees and the founders. >> It's always good, but being bootstrap is harder than it looks, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> Or how about society at large impact. You know, we're living global society these days and get all kinds of challenges. You see anything else in the future for your vision of impact. >> So securing data and your supplies horizontally across verticals. So far we've been focused mainly on financial services. But I think healthcare is a great vertical to move out in. And I think there are a lot of global challenges with healthcare and the more collaborative that we could be from a healthcare standpoint with our data. And I think our capabilities enable that to be possible. And still respecting all the privacy regulations and restrictions. I think that's a whole new world of possibility as well. >> And your secret sauce is what math? What's that? What's the secret sauce, >> Math, Math and grit. >> Alright, so thanks for sharing the insights. Give a quick plug for the company. What are you guys looking to do? Honestly, $10 million in funding priorities for you and the team? What do you guys live in to do? >> So priorities for us? privacy is a global issue now. So we are expanding globally. And you'll be hearing more about that very shortly. We also have new product lines that are going to be coming out enabling people to do more advanced decisioning in a completely secure and private capacity. >> And hiring office locations DC. >> Yes. So our headquarters is in DC, but we're based on over the world, so we're hiring, check out our web page. We're hiring for all kinds of roles from engineering to business functionality >> And virtual is okay virtual hires school >> Virtual hires is great. We're looking for awesome people no matter where they are. >> You know, DC but primary. Okay, so great to have you gone. Congratulations for one, the financing and then three years of bootstrapping and making it happen. Awesome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for coming ,appreciate it. So keep coming to your RSA conference in Moscone. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching more after this short break (pop music playing)