>> Live from Los Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Los Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Alonte, my cohost here at this segment is Stu Miniman. Jon Siegal is here as the vice president of product marketing, cubulum from Dehli MC. Good to see you again Jon. >> Great to be back as always guys! >> And I love that you brought a customer, Suzan Pickett is here. >> That's what I do, by the way. You realize that, that's my new thing. >> Suzan is the VP and director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome, one of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys. >> Let's start with a customer, if that's okay? >> Absolutely. >> Tell us about your role, you got CI in your title that's interesting. >> I do. >> That's a relatively new trend, explain that. >> Yeah absolutely, so I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. >> You guys have been working together for a while if I understand it Jon, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. >> Absolutely, so a lot going on as you saw today in Dell Tech cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech cloud both as the on-prem manage version as well as, as you heard, the Data Center as a service. So really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve and it's use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So a lot of exciting announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, Converged Infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multiyear agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this, Converged Infrastructure space and with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock as well as HCI, is really built to be a on-prem foundation for the cloud. >> Yeah so, this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of Converged Infrastructure. There were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of lead that trend, and so when you go back to that years ago, that's our storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey. You had to put all that together. Herd some calves. And what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? >> I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more Agile and more DevOps, more software-defined, we're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure but security, developers, networking as well and really being able to deliver that infrastructure's service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. >> Suzan, I love that story because I remember talking to, when this started, you talk to the storage group and they'd say, "Oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job." I'm like, "You know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. These are the types of jobs that we want you to do." I heard you talk about Agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now. >> Sure, well the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team and people looked at us like we're a little crazy to do that and we pull those highly, highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and Hyperconverge, VxFlex. We're now reducing that down to about three days and we anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. >> So John Furry says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure, so are you guys, are you building essentially out on infrastructure as a service platform, where people used to call it private cloud. I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. >> We do, yeah. >> How's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? >> We had a Business Critical Application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers, and now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, networks, security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market, and so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said, "By using our automation with Kubernetes on Hyperconverge VxFlex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story and it's a good one. >> Jon I'd live to hear from what Suzan was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We used to always ask, in the earlier days, it was like, alright how much was I just eliminating sub-silos but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before or have I really gone through some transformation? >> I tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. You look at now, as you see with US Banks, they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? That's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler so we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is let's make infrastructure as simple as possible. Infrastructure service. Make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, wait, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? >> Alright Suzan, I got to ask a question Jon probably doesn't want me to ask you. You're trying to simplify, 'cause you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business, you want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive. Well why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? >> Good question and I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a data breach and that's the real answer but also because we want to, again, lay that foundation for an on-premise, solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs at the business. We can then drive that product taxonomy and they know that they get a good, solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud so as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal ball. I suspect there will be, but again we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation to lay for that. >> You want to have total control over, certainly, your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe put some stuff up. I'm sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well why Dell EMC? >> I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams. We get that back, we get it back from our product teams, so it's not always perfect, and there are competitors out there, but at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell Technologies family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that and standardize. >> We've heard this morning from a lot of folks. Michael Dell talked about it. Jeff Clark talked about it. Companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers, throwing sass forget it, so many apps now. Are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers, or do you still have, in certain cases, where you really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed, for some niche app, or do you want to consolidate suppliers? >> So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed, and so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell Technologies today. VxFlex being one of them and Converged Infrastructure being another. There are use cases for multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. >> Okay Jon, that was a totally loaded question, so can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed and if so, how so? >> Well I think what we are, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like Hyperconverge and Converge, great example of that, and I think what we see at the US Bank is that that porfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all other challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzan's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now. We've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also, I would say that we're really focused on, ultimately, a portfolio with a purpose meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talk to Drew Shulkin. Together with out HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for a HCI environment or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking but that's because we're best of breed and porfolio at the same time. >> Yeah so, I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here, and I want to understand this because as independent observers you get Company A says this, Company B says that, but the customer's ultimately the arbiter. How do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed, what is best of breed to you? >> I look at the technology that's going to make me look good and that's going to make my teams look good and that's not just day one, that's day two and I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us. Stuff breaks, right? Your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the Data Center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is the key differentiator and we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. >> So I'm hearing the breadth, the porfolio. We haven't talked about services but I know that's a key part of it. >> Well, Suzan I hear you talking about day two. CI helped simplify that day one and then, as it matured, it worked more on the day two, and HCI even more. When you talk about the cloud solutions from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model. When you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that that spectrum, I guess, from the, "Okay I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates" to "I don't even think about it anymore." >> Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it, I care. I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years and I think that every year it gets better and as we start extending to that multicloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. >> What is something that you'd like to see Jon do to make your life better? (laughs) Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. >> Alright, cut prices. >> Every year you cut prices. >> Let's talk about that deal. I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the products team, helping us be strategic and also be very tactical. While I have this one last opportunity 'cause I don't know where we are timewise. I just want to shout out to my team. Right, so it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table, it's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. We just keep sharing, we keep collaborating, and we keep iterating. >> Yeah Jon, one of the things, talk about collaboration, my understanding is Suzan's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. >> Yes. >> We always talk about at these shows. Maybe you can share that. >> Yeah so Suzan is actually a new board member for our Converge user group which has been around for several years now and she just joined a few months ago. >> I did. >> And I think that we talk about collaboration and feedback. Suzan is representing not just her own team, she's representing teams around IT around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well, and best practices and tips and tricks. We have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock. I think couple big executives might be there as well, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock. I think it's, at least, our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think exemplifies as much as you've been talking about 'cause that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VxBlocks, now it's about CI, it's about HCI, it's about VxBlock, it's about Dell Tech cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC so I think you see the user group has evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. >> It's a community, it's a mechanism for people to say, "How did you do that" or "How should I do this" or "How do I get my team motivated" or "How do I collaborate with security?" These are tough questions and so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. >> Appearance, problem-solving, sharing ideas. >> Yeah. >> You've been a Converged Infrastructure client, customer for a number of years. >> I have. >> So you've seen pre-acquisition, how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? >> I think in the last year, or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen, and I think now it's found it's feet, right? We're starting to see some announcements in both the Converged and the VxFlex space, and it's really starting to come together and I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there was a little bit of unknown there and so, we just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious but keep doing what we're doing using that best of breed, the best practices that we have on the floor. >> Alright awesome. Suzan, Jon, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman, John Furry's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one, we got wall-to-wall coverage. Tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We got Pat Kelsey going to be on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage, check out thecube.net. This is Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching.

why from Las Vegas it's the cube covering implementing a world 2018 machito by informatica okay welcome back everyone's the cube live here in Las Vegas at the Venetian ballroom is the cubes exclusive coverage of informatica world 2018 I'm John for your host in analyst here with Peter Baris host and analyst here for two days of coverage our next two guests are jitesh guy who's the senior vice president general manager data quality security and governance for informatica and barry green the chief data officer for bank of ireland great to see you attached great to have you on the cube and great to be here so love having two to smart people talking about data GPRS right around the corner and friday you're at the bank of ireland so in the middle of it while you're in you're in this in the territory you're in the heart get any sleep what talk about your role at the bank what are you guys doing I want to get into the GDP RS right on our doorstep it's going to major implications for data as a strategic asset talk about what you do so for me we've created a daily management framework frameworks pretty simple map process get context for data put it into the business data model or sign ownership put data quality over it and then maintain it using a risk model operational risk model now it doesn't matter with GDP our or becbs whatever it is it's about adding value to data understanding day they're using it for them and making sure you've got better customer experience all the good things you know GDP are is important but it's not the only thing you guys are new to managing data and certainly complies your financials bank so it's not a new thing what is how is GDP are being rolled out how is it impacting you guys what are you paying attention to what's the impact so the big thing about GDP are is we're having to understand where our key customer data's sits in the physical systems we're looking at mapping key processes something to see and what it's used for we're assigning ownership to people who own data so we can basically make decisions about it in the future GDP ours a bit like becbs that's going to evolve right you're not going to be GDP are compliant on May 25th you're gonna have to put in place the infrastructure the tooling the governance the management to make sure that as an organization you know you were using data the way it's supposed to be if you want to be a digital organization you have to manage data this is just pushing along they had evolution of data being important to an organization but just as y2k wasn't about making the world safe for mainframes in the year 2000 it forced a separation and understanding of the separation that's required between applications and data so gdpr is another one of those events it's forcing a separation in this case between data and the notion of data assets great so take us through how the thought process of gdpr has catalyzed new thinking within the bank about how we think about data differently as a consequence I think what it's done so we've developed the framework so we can apply it to any problem right I think what it's done is it's raised up data's the risk of data more generally so people talk about data as an asset I've talked about data as a liability right so it's a contingent liability if you think about gdpr it's raise that awareness up that we can't continue to operate and tricked out of the way we have in the past so there's a whole cultural change going on around how we treat data and there's a big understanding training going on about everyone knowing why they use data making sure that they don't use it for the purpose it's not used for and generally it's a big education cultural change very how would you describe the mindset for this new thinking it certainly I agree with you it's at the strategic nature center the center of the center of the value proposition right now on all aspects not just some department what's the mindset that people should be thinking about when they think of data okay should I have access to this data but do I need it for the role I'm undertaking and if it was my data would I be treating it you know how would I shred it how would I want it to be treated even if you're the subject yeah exactly it's almost like you know if I had my data being used for certain thing context is that the way I'd want my data treated there's almost in the old adage you know do unto others as you would have you done to you yeah ethics is important yeah to church talk about the informatics opportunity because you guys really timings pretty awesome for informatica with the catalog you guys have an interesting opportunity right now to come in and do a lot of good things for clients that's that's exactly right we've we've been working very hard with our clients over the last 18 months to help them on this gdpr journey what we you know think of as supporting their privacy and protection and and you mentioned catalog you know our we have our enterprise data catalog powered by Claire our AI machine learning capabilities and metadata and that helps you get an organized view of all your data assets within the enterprise leveraging that same technology we have a security source offering which is effectively a data subject catalog to help our customers understand where exactly is the data subject sensitive data not where the organization's data is but the data subject sensitive data within the organization where their national identifiers information is how where their personal home address email phone etc is and how many occurrences and what systems why so that our customers can take that information and more effectively respond to the data subject if the data subject wants to invoke you know the right to be forgotten or right for data portability etc as well as take that same information and demonstrate to the regulator that they are processing this sensitive data with the appropriate with the appropriate consent from the data subject as well as have the systems I presume to then be able to expose to the subject the reasons why the data may in fact still be part of the asset of the bank correct so I I hadn't heard that before we've had other company cells that they're going to help companies find subject data but you guys are taping us taking a step further and allowing the bank for in this case do we have to look at that data from the subjects perspective exactly right because it's not just with some regulations financial regulations you need to demonstrate the quality and trustworthiness of the data here at to the regulator here it's demonstrating to the data subject themselves the individual themselves how you're processing how you're treating their data how protected or unprotected it is and and how you're using it to market to them how you using to become part of the metadata that's exactly right it's using the same metadata foundation too but focused on the data subject specifically interesting interpret ection aspect of it if I say I want my right to be forgotten and you can hold data for something mean where's the where's the protection aspect for the business and the user is there conflict there how do you guys handle that yes that's interesting there is a conflict so there's a conflict already with an existing regulation so you know um the thing that a lot of people aren't talking about is you can hold data so if someone can't just delete data if you want to hold an account or you know these reasons for using it you got a legitimate use for using it you can still hold it you have to tell a customer why you're using it so there's a lot of context here which they didn't have before so it's giving the customer the power to understand what the data is being used for the context is being used for and so they know it's not gonna be used for sort of spiritless marketing campaigns it's being used for you know the reason that does that extra work for you guys is that automated this is where we start to get into the question next yeah which is a context the context is the metadata and you're going to be able to capture that context explicitly as these data elements have this context in metadata allows you to do that with some degree of certainty and you know relatively low cost I assume it's all about reuse right so a lot of what we've done in the past and on its way at the bank um to me everyone's done in the past is they've understood something and then thrown it away so with Exxon you can record it you know record it then with the metadata you can join the metadata in Exxon so you can do in a high level process understand what data is used at the context is used for who owns that quality all these kind of business relevant things then you put the metadata out and you've got a system view it's very very powerful so the technology is starting to allow us to automate but it's all about gathering it reusing it and making sure you understand it right that's for you know from a from a data subject catalog standpoint you get the technical metadata it tells you across your data landscape where all the sensitive information is for Barry green you marry that up with the business metadata of how is that sensitive information being used in every step of let's say customer onboarding your mission critical business processes within the organization and that's what you demonstrate to a data subject or a regulator if this is how I'm processing it based on this consent now if they invoke the right to be forgotten there's various things you can do there because there's conflicts you can just mask the data using our masking capabilities and then it's true forgotten or you can archive the data and remove it from a particular business process that is marketing or selling to them if that's so yeah choice is it some flexibility correct or or slight maybe slightly differently Mystere forgot that's right you can get work out of that data in an appropriate way so the customer can be forgotten so that this this kind of work now that you cannot apply that data to marketing whatever else it might be for when it comes to understanding better products or building better products whatever else through masking you can apply the data still to that work because it's a legitimate use under the law exactly also think about the fact you've mask key critical data right so the thing about data privacy in general was you know if you can't understand a data subject so if you can hide certain pieces of data and you can't identify them you didn't aggregate it you can it's not personal data anymore so you know there's this some real nuance there's a lot of people aren't talking about these things but these new icers will be surfaced yeah yeah because certainly it's a it's the beginning of a generational shift there gonna be some pain points coming online I mean we're hearing some people complaining here and there you guys are you know used to this some industries are like used to dealing with Brad you know compliance like no big deal some people are fast and loose with their data like wait a minute I said you can't be a digital wanker we can't be a head of digital propositions you don't understand your data you know you and you don't understand it and manage it so this is an opportunity to do this across the enterprise it exposes companies that have not planned for an architected data whether that's investment in data engineering or have staff this is a huge issue and pools and tools that can't support that process I mean if you got a I mean people are looking in their organization going oh man we've really don't have it or they're ready the exciting part is you know organizations have focused on quality and trustworthiness of their data we're now taking that same data and focusing on the privacy and protection and the ethical treatment of it and leveraging the appropriate technologies which happen to be very similar fundamentally for quality and Trust and privacy and protection and and in the absence of a global standard for GDP our we're we're seeing organizations without GDP our as a de facto standard in fact Facebook just announced that they're treating all users data you know that was one of our research predict yes yeah very obvious I mean we'll see how eleven have any teeth or anything but you know Facebook's got their own challenge but it's an opportunity for a clean sheet of paper Friday May 27 I'm sure there's gonna be a ton of class-action lawsuits against Facebook jitesh Barry thanks for coming on great to see you thanks for everything in Ireland we're here on the open and informatica world right and written the solutions expose the cue bringing you all the data right here in the catalog you got the cube dotnet check it out I'm people John free with Peterborough's stay with us for more day to coverage at different Matic world after this short break

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

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here in 2021 as we get through the pandemic and vaccine on the horizon all around the world. It's great to welcome Sandy Carter, Vice President of Partners and Programs with Amazon Web Services. Sandy, great to see you. I wanted to check in with you for a couple of reasons. One is just get a take on the landscape of the marketplace as well as you've got some always good programs going on. You're in the middle of all the action. Great to see you. >> Nice to see you too, John. Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things that's come out of this COVID and as we get ready to come out of the pandemic you starting to see some patterns emerging, and that is cloud and cloud-native technologies and SAS and the new platforming and refactoring using cloud has created an opportunity for companies. Your partner group within public sector and beyond is just completely exploding and value creation. Changing the world's society is now accelerated. We've covered that in the past, certainly in detail last year at re:Invent. Now more than ever it's more important. You're doing some pretty cutting things. What's your update here for us? >> Well, John, we're really excited because you know the heartbeat of countries of the United States globally are small and medium businesses. So today we're really excited to launch Think Big for Small Business. It's a program that helps accelerate public sector serving small and diverse partners. So you know that these small and medium businesses are just the engine for inclusive growth and strategy. We talked about some stats today, but according to the World Bank, smaller medium business accounts for 98% of all companies, they contribute a 50% of the GDP, two-thirds of the employment opportunities, and the fastest growing areas are in minority owned businesses, women, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned, aborigine, ethnic minorities who are just vital to the economic role. And so today this program enables us as AWS to support this partner group to overcome the challenges that they're seeing today in their business with some benefits specifically targeted for them from AWS. >> Can I ask you what was the driver behind this? Obviously, we're seeing the pandemic and you can't look at on the TV or in the news without seeing the impact that small businesses had. So I can almost imagine that might be some motivation, but what is some of the conversations that you're having? Why this program? Why think Big for Small Business pilot experience that you're launch? >> Well, it's really interesting. The COVID obviously plays a role here because COVID hit small and medium businesses harder, but we also, you know, part of Amazon is working backwards from the customers. So we collected feedback from small businesses on their experience in working with us. They all want to work with us. And essentially they told us that they need a little bit more help, a little bit more push around programmatic benefits. So we listened to them to see what was happening. In addition, AWS grew up with a startup community. That's how we grew up. And so we wanted to also reflect our heritage and our commitment to these partners who represent such a heartbeat of many different economies. That was really the main driver. And today we had, John, one of our follow the sun. So we're doing sessions in Latin America, Canada, the US, APJ, Europe. And if you had heard these partners today it was just such a great story of how we were able to help them and help them grow. >> One of the cultural changes that we've been reporting on SiliconANGLE, you're seeing it all over the world is the shift in who's adopting, who's starting businesses. And you're seeing, you mentioned minority owned businesses but it goes beyond that. Now you have complete diverse set entrepreneurial activity. And cloud has generated this democratization wave. You starting to see businesses highly accelerated. I mean, more than ever, I've never seen in the entrepreneurial equation the ability to start, get started and get to success, get to some measurable MVP, minimal viable product, and then ultimately to success faster than ever before. This has opened up the doors to anyone to be an entrepreneur. And so this brings up the conversation of equality in entrepreneurship. I know this is close to your heart. Share your thoughts on this big trend. >> Yeah, and that's why this program it's not just a great I think achievement for AWS, but it's very personal to the entire public sector team. If you look at entrepreneurs like, Lisa Burnett, she's the President and Managing Director of DLZP. They are a female owned minority owned business from Texas. And as you listen to her story about equity, she has this amazing business, migrating Oracle workloads over to AWS, but as she started growing she needed help understanding a little bit more about what AWS could bring to the table, how we could help her, what go to market strategies we could bring, and so that equalizer was this program. She was part of our pilot. We also had John Wieler on. He is the Vice President of Biz Dev from IMT out of Canada. And he is focused on government for Canada. And as a small business, he said today something that was so impactful, he goes, "Amazon never asked me if I'm a small business. They now treat me like I'm big. I feel like I'm one of the big guys and that enables me grow even bigger." And we also talked today to Juan Pablo De Rosa. He's the CEO of Technogi. And it's a small business in Mexico. And what do they do? They do migrations. They just migrate legacy workloads over. And again, back to that equality point you made, how cool was it that here's this company in Mexico, and they're doing all these migrations and we can help them even be more successful and to drive more jobs in the region. It's a very equalizing program and something that we're very proud of. >> You know what I love about your job and I love talking to you about this (Sandy laughs) because it's so much fun. You have a global perspective. It's not just United States. There's a global perspective. This event you're having this morning that you kicked off with is not just in the US, it's a follow the sun kind of a community. You got quite the global community developing there, Sandy. Can you share some insight behind the curtain, behind AWS, how this is developing? How you're handling it? What you're doing to nurture and grow that community that really wants to engage with you because you are making them feel big because (laughs) that's what cloud does. It makes them punch above their weight class and innovate. >> Yeah, that's very correct. >> This is the core thesis of Amazon. So you've got a community developing, how are you handling it? How are you building it? How are you nurturing it? What are your thoughts? >> You know what, John? You're so insightful because that's actually the goal of this program. We want to help these partners. We want to help them grow. But our ultimate goal is to build that small and medium business community that is based on AWS. In fact, at re:Invent this year, we were able to talk about MST which is based out of Malaysia, as well as cloud prime based out of Korea. And just by talking about it, those two CEOs reached out to each other from Korea and Malaysia and started talking. And then we today introduced folks from Mexico, and Canada, and the US, and Bulgaria. And so, we really pride ourselves on facilitating that community. Our dream here, our vision here is that we would build that small business community to be much more scalable but starting out by making those connections, having that mentoring that will be built in together, doing community meetings that advisory meetings together. We piloted this program in 2020. We already have 37 partners. And they told me as I met with them, they already feel like this small and medium business community or family. Family was the word they used, I think, moving forward. So you nailed it. That's the goal here is to create that community where people can share their thoughts and mentor each other. >> And it's on the ground floor too. It's just beginning. I think it's going to be so much larger. And to piggyback off that I want to also point out and highlight and get your reaction to is the success that you've been having and Amazon Web Services in general but mainly in the public sector side with the public private partnership. You're seeing this theme emerge really been a big way. I've been enclose to it and hosting and being interviewing a lot of folks at that, your customers whether it's cybersecurity in space, the Mars partnership that you guys just got on Mars with partnerships. So it's a global and interstellar soon to be huge everywhere. But this is a big discussion because as from cybersecurity, geopolitical to space, you have this partnership with public private because you can't do it alone. The public markets, the public sector cannot do it alone. And it pretty much everyone's agreeing to that. So this dynamic of public sector and partnering private public is a pretty big deal. Unpack that for us real quickly. >> Yeah, it really is a big deal. And in fact, we've worked with several companies. I'll just use one sector. Public Safety and Disaster Response. We just announced the competency at re:Invent for our tech partners. And what we found is that when communities are facing a disaster, it really is government or the public sector plus the private sector. We had many solutions where citizens are providing data that helps the government manage a disaster or manage or help in a public safety scenario to things like simple things you would think, but in one country they were looking at bicycle routes and discovered that certain bicycle routes there were more crashes. And so one of our partners decided to have the community provide the data. And so as they were collecting that data, putting in the data lake in AWS, the community or the private sector was providing the data that enabled the application, our Public Sector Partner application to identify places where bicycle accidents happen most often. And I love the story, John, because the CEO of the partner told me that they measured their results in terms of ELO, I'm sorry, ROL, Return on Lives not ROI, because they save so many lives just from that simple application. >> Yeah, and the data's all there. You just saw on the news, Tiger Woods got into a car accident and survived. And as it turns out to your point that's a curve in the road where a lot of accidents happen. And if that data was available that could have been telegraphed right into the car itself and slow down, kind of like almost a prevention. So he just an example of just all the innovation possibilities that are abound out there. >> And that's why we love our small businesses and startups too, John. They are driving that innovation. The startups are driving that innovation and we're able to then open access to that innovation to governments, agencies, healthcare providers, space. You mentioned Mars. One of our partners MAXR helped them with the robotics. So it's just a really cool experience where you can open up that innovation, help create new jobs through these small businesses and help them be successful. There's really nothing, nothing better. >> Can I ask you- >> Small, small is beautiful. >> Can I asked you a personal question on this been Mars thing? >> Yeah. >> What's it like at Amazon Web Services now because that was such a cool mission. I saw Teresa Carlson, had a post on the internet and LinkedIn as well as her blog post. You had posted a picture of me and you had thumbs were taking an old picture from in real life. Space is cool, Mars in particular, everyone's fixated on it. Pretty big accomplishment. What's it like at Amazon? People high five in each other pretty giddy, what's happening? >> Oh yeah. The thing about Amazon is people come here to change the world. That's what we want to do. We want to have an impact on history. We want to help make history. And we do it all on behalf of our customers. We're innovating on behalf of our customers. And so, I think we get excited when our customers are successful, when our partners are successful, which is why I'm so excited right now, John, because we did that session this morning, and as I listened to Juan Pablo Dela Rosa, and just all the partners, Lisa, John, and just to hear them say, "You helped us," that's what makes us giddy. And that's what makes us excited. So it could be something as big as Mars. We went to Mars but it's also doing something for small businesses as well. It runs the spectrum that really drives us and fuels that energy. And of course, we've got great leadership as you know, because you get to talk to Andy. Andy is such a great leader. He motivates and he inspires us as well to do more on behalf of our customer. >> Yeah, you guys are very customer focused and innovative which is really the kind of the secret sauce. I love the fact that small medium sized business can also be part of the solutions. And I truly believe that, and why I wanted us to promote and amplify what you're working on today is because the small medium size enterprise and business is the heart of the recovery on a global scale. So important and having the resources to do that, and doing it easily and consuming the cloud so that they can apply the value. It's going to change lives. I think the thing that people aren't really talking much about right now, is that the small medium size businesses will be the road to recovery. >> I agree with you. And I love this program because it does promote diversity, something that Amazon is very much focused on. It's global, so it has that global reach and it supports small business, and therefore the recovery that you talked about. So it is I think an amazing emphasis on all the things that really matter now. During COVID, John, we learned about what really matters, and this program focuses on those things and helping others. >> Well, great to see you. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming on and sharing the update, and certainly talking about the small mid size business program. I'm sure you're busy getting ready to give the awards out to the winners this year. Looking forward to seeing that come up soon. >> Great. Thank you, John. And don't forget if you are a small and medium business partner 'cause this program is specifically for partners, check out Think Big for Small Business. >> Think Big for Small Business. Sandy Carter, here on theCube, sharing our insight, of course all the updates from the worldwide public sector partner program, doing great things. I'm John Furrier for theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live coverage here in Toronto for the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit here put on as prior to the big event this week called the Futurist Conference. TheCUBE will be here all week with live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante as we expand our coverage with theCUBE into the blockchain and crypto token economics world. We're here on the ground. We're covering the best events. We started in 2018 initiating CUBE coverage on the sector. Of course we've been covering Bitcoin and blockchain going back to 2011 on SiliconANGLE.com. Dave, we're here to kick off what is the first inaugural event of its kind, combining cloud computing coverage with blockchain, and as we had on our fireside chat last night, we discussed this in detail. Cloud computing and blockchain, either going to be a collision course or it's going to be a nice integration. And we discussed that. This is what this show is all about, is it's really about connecting the dots to the future. The role that cloud computing will play with blockchain and token economics, a variety of different perspectives, but again, this is the first time we in the industry are starting to unpack the mega-trend of cloud computing, which we know is like a freight train powering and disrupting, and we cover it in detail. But blockchain is certainly transforming and reimagining business and process coming together. >> Well, we're here in Toronto, which of course is the birthplace of Ethereum, and it's interesting to see how Toronto has attracted so many developers in the software and engineering space, and there's a huge crypto community here. I'll give you my take on the cloud and blockchain. I don't see them on a collision course. I see blockchain, and we've talked about this, and crypto as a part of this other layer that's emerging. You had the internet, you had the web. On top of that you had cloud, mobile, social, big data, and it was essentially a cloud of remote services. What we're seeing now is this ubiquitous set of digital services of which blockchain is one. And to me it's all about automation, machine intelligence, blockchain being able to do things without middle man. You made that point last night on the fireside chat. And I think it's complementary. You need cloud for scale. Everything's digital, which means data. And you need machine intelligence for automation. And that is the new era that we're entering, and blockchain is playing a big part of that because of its inherent encryption, its immutability, and its ability to show proof of work. So it's a key component of a number of different digital services that are going to transform virtually every industry. >> Certainly, then, that's a tailwind for the industry, and certainly we see that. All the alpha entrepreneurs, alpha geeks, and a lot of the business pros see blockchain and token economics as a dynamic that will certainly change things. Today in Toronto this week, certainly not a good week for pricing of currencies. The crypto market is down, Ethereum and Ripple are at yearly lows. And communities are kind of getting scared. We talked with Matt Roszak, an early investor and founder of BloQ, last night about the price declines, and he said, "I've seen this pattern before. "These price selloffs also kick off "the next wave of growth." So there's a kind of a weeding out, was his perspective. But you can't deny that over the past 24 hours, 30 billion has been erased from the crypto market caps, and the greatest decline is happening under Bitcoin's dominance, and still increased over, still 56% over the year. So Bitcoin seems to be holding more value than, say, Ethereum. Ethereum and Ripple really under a lot of pressure. So the insiders, some are scared, some are like, hey, we've seen this movie before. Waves are a little bit rough right now, but they're in for the long game. So this is a long game going on and then there's also money being lost. >> Well, Matt was saying bet the farm now. He said he's seen this before. Take everything, the mortgage, the house. I'm not sure I would advise doing that, but this is the time, buy low. So just for the numbers, Bitcoin's high last November/December was 19,000, it's down at 6,000 now. So as you say, it's still up almost 50% for the year, but if you compress that timeframe to nine months, it's down 60%, so very, very volatile. Ethereum, on the other hand, last September was trading at around 240, 250, and today it's in the 260s. So back to where it was last September. The curve on Ethereum sort of looks like it did end of last summer, whereas Bitcoin is still almost 70% up from where it was last September. So quite a bit of difference between the two cryptocurrencies. And you mentioned Ripple, IOTA, many of the cryptocurrencies-- >> Ripple's dropping 90% from its 2018 highs. 90%. (both laugh) Some money was made and lost on that one, so again, we always say when the music stops you better be sitting in a chair. Otherwise this is bubble behavior, but you know Matt and others and the insiders are saying they're still bullish because of the pattern. Even though it's a selloff, it's a weeding out process and they see still good deals going on. And again, this is going to come fundamentally down to whose technology's going to be adopted, what kind of application can be written on blockchain, which is seeing some promise in the enterprise. Just yesterday Microsoft announced a blockchain as a service kind of thing with proof of authority and new concepts. IBM, we've been covering IBM with blockchain, their work with the Hyperledger standards. You've got the enterprises. Amazon has kind of telegraphed, they actually put a professional service note out where they are doing some blockchain. The big clouds are getting into the game, so the question is, will the clouds suck all the oxygen out of the blockchain room, and will there be room for other blockchains? Again, this is the big debate. Is it going to be a fragmentation of a series of blockchains, or will there be some sort of set of standards? Again, we don't know what the stack's going to look like because the best thing about blockchain is you could roll it out and implement a portion of the stack and still coexist with whatever standards emerge. So again, these are the questions. >> Well, one of the conversations that of course is going on is actually, the number of transactions that's occurring with Bitcoin is way down, it's probably down 20% year to date. The other conversation is we all know that Bitcoin and Ethereum, the transaction volumes can't really support what we do with Visa or even Amazon. There's a discussion in the industry going around about what if Amazon shows some other coin? Like Ripple, for example, which has much higher transaction volumes. Or what if Amazon tokenized its own business, came up its own cryptocurrency? What would that do to the price of Bitcoin, if all of a sudden you could transact in Prime using AmazonCoin or something like that? And we know that Amazon understands how to scale, it obviously understands cloud. That's why I do see cloud and blockchain as complementary. It's very difficult to predict the future. There are those who say Bitcoin is the standard, it's got the brand. There are those who say that Ethereum, because it's much more flexible and you can program distributed apps with it, have a great future. And then everybody points to the transaction volumes and says, this is just a Petri dish for the future where new technologies will emerge that scale better and can produce. >> What's interesting last night on the, we had a fireside chat with Al Burgio, serial entrepreneur, founder of DigitalBits, and Matt Roszak, obviously founder of BloQ and investor, he's on the Forbes billionaire list, super active, very engaged on a lot of advisors, Binance is one and many other deals he's done, it's interesting, you got two perspectives. Al is the networking guy who knows plumbing, knows how networks work, and Matt's a token economics genius. So the two have interesting perspectives and the battle royal going on right now, in my opinion, is two things. I think token economics is a wonderful thing that's going to happen no matter what the standards are, 'cause token economics really is the value to me of the cryptocurrency that can be applied to new business models and efficiencies. The blockchain is a land grab, and here's why. I think whoever can nail the plumbing and the pipes of the infrastructure reminds me of the early days of the dial-up web, when you had points of presence and you had the infrastructure had to be laid down. Although slow, people can dial up and get the internet, then obviously the internet got faster and faster. Blockchain's struggling from that scalability performance issues, and so the question is, on a public blockchain, you got to have the supernodes, you got to have the core infrastructure plumbing nailed. I think Al Burgio takes that perspective. Then everything else just will flourish from there. So the question is, what do those hurdles look like? And this is where the cloud guys could either be an enabler or they could be a foe against the core community. Like you said, Amazon could just snap their fingers tomorrow and take out the entire industry with one move. Just, we're going to do our own blockchain as a service. Everyone uses it, here's our token, and then a set of sub-tokens would have to be coexisting with that. And that could be a good thing, we don't know. This is the discussion. >> And governments around the world could do the same. US government could do Fedcoin, the Chinese government could do Chinacoin. I mean, what would that do to the prices of cryptocurrencies? I mean, it would send it into a tailspin, you would presume. And it was interesting. Matt Roszak on your panel last night, I asked the question, well, traditional banks lose control of the payment systems. And granted, he's biased, and he was definitive. Yes, absolutely. But the counterargument to that, John, and I'd love your thoughts on this, is the US government and the banks have a lot to lose. And they're kind in bed together and always have been. So one would think, with the backing of the US, its might, its military, et cetera, that they're not just going to let the banks lose control. Now, to his point is, why do you need to pay transaction fees to a bank? But you're paying transaction fees to somebody, even in crypto. >> I think our government in the United States is really asleep at the wheel on this one. And here's why. One of the beautiful things about the internet was it was started through collaboration in the universities in the United States. The United States enabled the internet to happen, and the Department of Commerce managed it. The Domain Name System was managed in a very community-oriented way. Again, community, keyword. As opposed to all this, that history is well-documented. If people aren't familiar with the history of the Domain Name System, DNS, go check out the Wikipedia, research it. It was run by a bunch of people who managed the database of website names. And that became sacred and was distributed. >> And funded by the US government. >> Funded by the US government, but the community managed it. The problem with the US government today is that they are meddling in areas that they actually shouldn't be even playing in. You got the SEC, it's shutting down everything right now just by the threat of subpoenas in the ICO market, which puts the overall country into a handicapped position, because now the innovation of blockchain and the entrepreneurial innovation that's happening is stunted, and it's just shifting outside the United States. So what's happening is the money flow and the energy and the activity is so high that incubation's not happening in the United States, although a lot of people are working on it. There's no funding mechanism. The capital formation of blockchain's different than venture. It's not super different, but somewhat different, but it's happening outside the United States. Certainly the Chinese will be in benefit of this. And if the Chinese wanted to shut down blockchain they would have done it by now. They're actually fostering it, and it's an opportunity for someone on the international stage to get a lever in the United States. So that's one. The second thing is they can enable crypto if they wanted to and I think they really should look at that and I think the banks are central organizations, the World Bank, they're under a lot of pressure. They don't know what to do. So when I talk to people, that's the same answer in so many words, is the government and the regulators really just don't know what to do. >> Well, and Matt made the point last night, Matt Roszak, that when he talks to these banks they're talking about using blockchain and they're very excited because they're going to take hundreds of millions of dollars of cost out of their, you know, infrastructure and their processes that are just not very efficient, and that's going to drop right to the bottom line. And of course they're in the money business, so that gets them very excited. His point was that's really not what it's about. Yeah, that's nice, but it's really about transforming the businesses, and that's why I asked the question about banks losing control of the payment systems. Opens up a whole new opportunities, whether it's financial services, healthcare, automotive. And again, to me, it comes back to digital, which is data, plus machine intelligence plus cloud for scale. You called it. I think at IBM Think, you coined it the innovation sandwich. Data plus machine intelligence plus cloud for scale. Put that together, that is the innovation engine for the next decade plus. >> The innovation sandwich, unlike a wish sandwich, where you wish you had some meat in the middle. You know, this is a good point. Let's end this kickoff and get into some of the interviews here with these really early thought leaders in this new conference. This is the first of its kind, cloud and blockchain, and we're going to certainly continue this in Silicon Valley with theCUBE summit coming up and our events that we do. But let's get some predictions out, because remember, this is theCUBE. Everything's going to be out there, it's going to be on the record, so we can look back and say, hey Dave, remember in 2018 when I asked you what's going to happen? So let's get into a prediction. What do you think's going to happen? I'll start and you can think up an answer. So here's my prediction on this whole blockchain world. Not so much crypto or token economics. It's really two predictions. With respect to blockchain, I think you're going to see an exact movement that the cloud market took, and I think it's going to happen in three phases. Phase one is all the energy's going to go into public blockchain, and public blockchain will be figured out first, and people are going to get excited by the new operation models of blockchain, specifically the decentralization of how that works and the benefits of decentralized blockchain, immutability, no central authority, and all the benefits of blockchain. I think it's going to be very rapid growth in the fixing of blockchain. Speed, scale, that's going to happen very quickly. And it's going to happen publicly. Then you're going to see private blockchains. You're going to see on premises kind of like blockchain. Kind of like the cloud, people have onsite, private. And then you're going to see a hybrid. The hybrid will look like multi-chain solutions. This is almost an exact trajectory that cloud computing took, because blockchain feels like a cousin of cloud or a brother or a sister. So it's related, but not exactly, but I think it's kind of the same trajectory. Public, private, hybrid, which is a multi-chain model, and I think that's going to be the standards. That's going to be the market track. On the token side, I think you're going to see a couple key tokens, like certainly Bitcoin's not going away. I'd be doubling down on Bitcoin under 6,000, like everything on that. That should hit 20,000, in my opinion, over the next timeframe. But there's going to be a lot of token integrations. My token integrates with your token and almost natives and secondary tokens kind of blending together where people with coexist tokens on one platform. So it's just too powerful not to have that happen. So that's my prediction. What do you think? >> I think as it relates to blockchain, I think blockchain becomes, in the enterprise I think it becomes an invisible component of virtually every industry. 'Cause every industry has waste, can improve efficiencies, and blockchain becomes a way to, whether it's supply chain or settlements or shared ledgers, I mean, there's dozens of applications for them and I think blockchain becomes a fundamental component of a digital infrastructure, and it's starting now and I think it's here to stay for many decades and beyond. And you won't even see it. It's just going to be there. It's going to become a fundamental part of how we do business. On the token side, very interesting, obviously, hard to predict. I think that you're going to see continued volatility, of course, I think that's a safe bet. But I also think it's potentially going to get worse before it gets better. I think there's going to be a shakeout. I think you're going to see, there continues to be pump and dump scams going on, the US government's getting more aggressive, a bunch of subpoenas went out, and people are still trying to understand what that all means. So I think it's going to be rocky roads for a while. I think you're going to see a big shakeout, like a big dip, and then I think it's going to power back. I think the crypto is here to stay. And it's very, very hard to time these markets, so my advice is just buy, trickle buys on the way down and hold. HODL, as they say in this world. And I think 10 years from now it's going to be worth a lot. >> Alright, you got it here, theCUBE. We are in Toronto for the first inaugural Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit. Of course, part of the big event here in Toronto, Futurist Conference, which we'll be there live. Wednesday and Thursday, the kickoff is Tuesday night for the opening reception. It's theCUBE coverage continuing for blockchain and crypto markets. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more live coverage here in Toronto.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in Toronto for the Blockchain Cloud Summit, part of the Blockchain Futurist event happening tomorrow and Thursday here in Toronto. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with Gabriel Abed who's the founder of Bitt and also the Digital Asset Fund. Great story he's been there from the beginning. President at creation in the movement that's now changing the world. Blockchain and cryptocurrency certainly. Infrastructure and token economics, changing how things are doing. And rolling out, reimagining everything from infrastructure to value exchanges. Gabriel welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you it's great to be here. >> So we were just talking on camera, you like to go after the big changes. You're an entrepreneur, you have that fire in your belly. You've been very successful. Where are we? I mean, you've been part of the movement, we're now on the cusp of mainstream adoption, there's still work to do. >> Oh, plenty of work. Lots of infrastructure still to build, many regulators and legislators still to educate, lots of laws still to be amended and changed. And, at the end of the day, it's happening and it's happening quickly and beautifully right now. The entire industry is changing. >> One of the things that you've done, you've taken on some big projects and you've made change happen. Regulation is one of the hottest topics we're hearing certainly in the United States, it affects innovation and there's so much entrepreneurial activity happening right now. There's so many entrepreneurs, alpha entrepreneurs really want to do great things, and regulation is just a blocker. It's an antibody for innovation. And you've busted through that. And it's probably going to continue. The old guard is either going to be replaced or adapting to the technology. You've done that, and a lot of people want to do what you've done. What's the secret? What's the secret of your success? How have you taken on these big, incumbent positions and taken them over >> But you're not running from regulators, you're embracing them. >> No, no, I think regulators are important to a responsible and sophisticated market. When my partner and I started Bitt in 2013, 2014, we immediately realized that if we wanted to build a product for the monetary authorities around the world, we needed to have the buy-in from the regulators. So from day one we were regulator-friendly. And it's not to say that we don't believe in a decentralized future, I'm as big of an advocate for decentralization and the freedom of information as anyone else, but I'm also a big believer in if you're a product for a market in the traditional world you have to involve the regulators in order to ensure that product does its job, keeps the consumers safe, and ensures that the economy around it doesn't collapse. So regulators are critical in this field. >> Talk about what you guys have done. Take a minute to explain the project you did, how it worked out, the tenacity, but also, what was the outcome? What were you trying to do in the project and where is it right now? >> It depends on the project you're referring to >> Maybe start at the beginning >> The Caribbean >> Let's start at the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, so, Gabriel Abed, born, raised, educated in Barbados, around the age of 19, I decided I was going to take my computer science education a bit further. I went to Canada, I did a Bachelor of IT, where I majored in network security. In Ontario, the University of Ontario. And, unlike the rest of of my peers, who usually stay in Canada, I decided to go back to my little nation with the education that I had just received. And I took that education home, and started one of the world's first blockchain companies, but at the time I didn't understand blockchain per se, I understood it as a commodity, as a cool investment, I didn't understand the true nature behind the protocol itself. It was only until 2013 that my partner and I ran one of the larger mining operations in the world, that we realized a commodity was actually a protocol. A network tool. A system that you could build on top of. So in 2014, we actually created one of the world's first blockchain assets, on Bitcoin's blockchain. And that a representation of a digital dollar for a central bank. And the notion behind Bitt.com in 2014 was, let's compete with cash, because it's inefficient, it's costly, and it slows down the movement of society. So what we wanted to do is create a digital version of that, that would save economies hundreds of millions of dollars. Cash is expensive to to create, that linen, plastic, paper money, it's easily forged, it can be counterfeited, it's hard to transport, it has an expense to transport, it has an expense to count, it has an expense to secure, and then it has overheads around the entire ecosystem of accountability. Whereas, a blockchain-based digital dollar eliminates all of those efficiencies, and increases the ability for a monetary authority to trace, track, and have a better form of anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing and a better overview of their entire society. So that all, we took that notion, went to the central bank of Barbados, who at the time was being led by Dr. DeLisle Worrell, and our very first meeting he had asked me to excuse his office. And 13 meetings later, and a whole two years, lots of development, building out infrastructure around compliance, around finance, around security, and around regulation, we finally got the nod of approval from Dr. DeLisle Worrell to operate a fiat example of a digital dollar in Barbados. And since then, we have been working with several central banks around the world, bitt.com today is the leading central bank provider for digital dollars. A lot has changed, I've developed other tools since, and other businesses, but bitt.com continues to be the best friend for central banks looking to move and transition into the digital arena. >> Why, I mean other than a closed mindset, why wouldn't every government around the world want to move in this direction? Initiate some kind of FedCoin, for example. >> Education, education, it's the fear that the system may not be scalable, it's the fear that the system could be hacked, it's the fear that they could be cut out, their control, at the end of the day, monetary authorities, like the Federal Reserve, they have a control on the money supply. Whereas, something like decentralized cryptographic currencies, there is nobody in control of the money supply. Hence, inflation versus deflation systems. Then there's the issue of hacking and the threat of digital and cybersecurity. Typically, the head of these monetary authorities are older gentlemen who are traditionally conservative. And who are not (mumbles) with cybersecurity. So the fear of hacking is very real for someone like them, whereas someone like me who is trained as a network security expert, those fears can be mitigated with good policy and procedure, cold wallets, and the right process, to ensuring the environment can run without the risk or the fear of malicious attacks. So it really boils down to education. The educated governors of central banks, like there's one, for example, Timothy Antoine. Dr. Antoine is the governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. And they govern and mandate the currency union of eight islands below them. St. Lucia, Grenada, Antigua, et cetera. Now, he's a governor that gets this and has wrapped his head around it, and understands that this is the future. He gets it so much that he signed an agreement with bitt.com to begin exploring a pilot for his currency union to have a digital dollar implemented in it. You also have governors and presidents like that of Curacao. Or the central bank of Curacao, where we've just signed an agreement to move forward with a phase of looking at the implications of rolling out a digital dollar in a society like Curacao and St. Maarten. What is the ramifications? What is the feasibility study behind that? So, to answer your question, it's not every single regulator, governor, and central bank manager is going to head toward this technology tomorrow. But with more education, and more lobbying, you will see more and more central bank governors moving in this direction, because it's better, cheaper, faster, makes their job easier, gives them more control, gives them more oversight, and provides all the things that they would want as a central bank to continue to do their job for their society. Which is to protect their dollar from alien threats. And to ensure that the dollar remains stable, and to just generally ensure that the society is functioning the way it should. >> Gabriel, what's your vision on what this will enable for the citizens? What's the impact that you see happening? If this continues down the trajectory, what is the adoption look like, impact to people's lives on a everyday basis. >> Well, for a very starting point, you democratize payment. Right now, if I want to make a payment, I have to go through a utility company called a bank. And this bank typically has frictional costs, and frictional overheads and time. That's one of the biggest problems, is that these monopolistic infrastructures hinder the ability for the average participation of a free-flowing payment system. So what you end up having is rather than me being able to make a digital payment in seconds, with no cost, I have to wait days, I have to use manual-based systems whether it's check, cash or the bank's Visa Mastercard system. And then it has frictional costs. So right off the bat, you democratize payment. What does that do for a society in a developing nation? It empowers people. And you're empowered because now as a developer, I can build on this payment system. As an entrepreneur, I can tap in to this payment system. As a merchant, I can utilize this low-cost payment system. As a society, I now have GDP growth because of financial inclusion. The underbanked, who do not have access to banking facilities for one reason or another, maybe they don't like the bank, maybe the banks don't like them. Maybe they don't have two proofs of ID. Maybe they don't have a fixed place of abode. Maybe they don't have the minimum deposit amount. All of these features keep the poor and the underbanked out of the system. Whereas, in developed nations, we have mobile penetration rates that are through the roof. In some cases, like Barbados, over 100 percent. So if you have 100 percent penetration rate of this mobile platform, this thing in my pocket, but I cannot access the banking system, well flip that around, democratize the payment system, allow payments to exist on this mobile phone, and watch how quickly society becomes banked. So what you end up having is full adoption. Why would we not have full adoption when it's cheaper, it's faster, it's more inclusive. >> And the data from that collective intelligence only creates a digital nation >> A more responsible environment. >> Wealth creation environment. >> It creates a more traced, tracked, and accountable society so that the monetary authorities in the government can now start making educated decisions on data. They now know who's buying milk, who's gambling, who's paying their taxes and who's not. >> The downstream benefits of this are massive. >> The downstream benefits are massive, enormous. They're disruptive. This is a brand new fiscal tool, a monetary tool, being given to central banks to start eroding the field of private e-money systems, and to start bringing about a uniform standard towards payments. Plain and simple. We're going to the central banks and introducing a new monetary instrument, that they're in control of. That now the commercial banks, the financial institutions, the corporatocracies, the citizens, and the merchants can all fall under one roof issued by their monetary authority. And this is not a cell phone company or a bank building their own private system that I have to jump through some hoops and some red tape and sign away my first born and give away my left arm to enter. This is a free and open source standard system. >> And it's networked, as you said, penetration is 100 percent on mobile or roughly that, it's a network society that now has digital fabric built into it. This is the future. >> But I played this out in terms of, when you talked about this in your panel, now every device, every thing, every physical asset will be instrumented. >> Yes. >> And as a result, theory can be coconuts. >> You're building the deep infrastructure. I remember we met with World Bank back in 2014 and they coined this term for me. Because they were saying we want to help entrepreneurs and it's important to help entrepreneurs in developing nations because they're the lifeblood of it. But what we are building is the deep infrastructure. And that's exactly what it is. It's the infrastructure that would allow the entrepreneur and the developer to now have a framework that they can build against to provide more uplift. So in essence, it's really going to be exponential growth once systems like this are implemented. The stock market can move digital, and people could buy stocks using digital dollars. E-commerce can occur because I can now buy things online or sell things online with digital dollars. I can now be part of a global, financial ecosystem, with my smartphone and my wallet. >> That's a great use case, congratulations on amazing success, so much is on your plate, you've had great success in this new era, what's on your plate now, what are you working on, what's happening in your world now? >> So in 2017, we realized Bitt was entering a new growth phase. It was no longer a battle of trying to convince regulators and central banks, our product had been proven. Our reputation had been proven. It was time now to scale the company into a professional level of dealing with these regulators around the world. At the end of the day, we would like to digitize cash, wherever cash exists. And to provide those tools for central banks around the world. That would require professional management, and that is not I. >> (laughs) >> So, our investors and shareholders were quite comfortable with our proposal of bringing on that professional management, so in 2017 I resigned as CEO, retained a board position and still single largest shareholder, but with the idea of what other types of infrastructure can I build, now that a deep infrastructure had been put in place. So I've been attacking three major markets, the banking sector, an actual commercial banking enterprise working with a group from the United States towards looking at deploying the future of where we think commercial banking is going. I think that the community, the crypto community in general, there's a lot of noise happening in the chats. And therefore we built a machine learning chat bot to start looking at market sentiments and aggregating market information and of course building common tools for community members. So we've launched a agent called Gabby, the form to gab. My name's Gabriel and my mom calls me Gabby, so it works out quite well. >> You have the gift of gab that's for sure. >> And then I launched a mutual fund with a very sophisticated former managing director of JPMorgan. A guy named Richard Galvin. And we launched the world's first protocol-only fund. We focus only on protocols. And that's called Digital Asset Fund. And we launched that in late 2017 and got full regulatory approval to become a professional fund, that handles 100 percent, solely crypto. And that's basically been my ride, and then outside of that, just your standard consulting, because everybody from World Bank, to IADB, to some government agency to some private organization wants to know about blockchain they want advice, and they need a team of people to give them that advice. So it's just been, all around, looking at how I can be an entrepreneur in this space, while finding great leaders, and partnering with those leaders to build out great companies. While still focusing on ensuring bitt.com becomes the solution for dollars, digital dollars, worldwide. >> Got a great mission, entrepreneur, builder, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Industry's lucky to have you, congratulations. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. >> CUBE coverage here, live in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in concert with the Blockchain Futures Conference happening in the next two days after today. More coverage from theCUBE we're live here, stay with us for more great coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that will be successful in the 21st century [Music] being open is really important because it comes with a lot of trust the open-source community now has matured so much and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation [Music] but what's really exciting is the change that we've seen in our teams not only the way they collaborate but the way they operate in the way they work [Music] I think idea is everything ideas can change the way you see things open-source is more than a license it's actually a way of operating [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome Red Hat president and chief executive officer Jim Whitehurst [Music] all right well welcome to day two at the Red Hat summit I'm amazed to see this many people here at 8:30 in the morning given the number of people I saw pretty late last night out and about so thank you for being here and have to give a shout out speaking of power participation that DJ is was Mike Walker who is our global director of open innovation labs so really enjoyed that this morning was great to have him doing that so hey so day one yesterday we had some phenomenal announcements both around Red Hat products and things that we're doing as well as some great partner announcements which we found exciting I hope they were interesting to you and I hope you had a chance to learn a little more about that and enjoy the breakout sessions that we had yesterday so yesterday was a lot about the what with these announcements and partnerships today I wanted to spin this morning talking a little bit more about the how right how do we actually survive and thrive in this digitally transformed world and to some extent the easy parts identifying the problem we all know that we have to be able to move more quickly we all know that we have to be able to react to change faster and we all know that we need to innovate more effectively all right so the problem is easy but how do you actually go about solving that right the problem is that's not a product that you can buy off the shelf right it is a capability that you have to build and certainly it's technology enabled but it's also depends on process culture a whole bunch of things to figure out how we actually do that and the answer is likely to be different in different organizations with different objective functions and different starting points right so this is a challenge that we all need to feel our way to an answer on and so I want to spend some time today talking about what we've seen in the market and how people are working to address that and it's one of the reasons that the summit this year the theme is ideas worth it lorring to take us back on a little history lesson so two years ago here at Moscone the theme of the summit was the power of participation and then I talked a lot about the power of groups of people working together and participating are able to solve problems much more quickly and much more effectively than individuals or even individual organizations working by themselves and some of the largest problems that we face in technology but more broadly in the world will ultimately only be solved if we effectively participate and work together then last year the theme of the summit was the impact of the individual and we took this concept of participation a bit further and we talked about how participation has to be active right it's a this isn't something where you can be passive that you can sit back you have to be involved because the problem in a more participative type community is that there is no road map right you can't sit back and wait for an edict on high or some central planning or some central authority to tell you what to do you have to take initiative you have to get involved right this is a active participation sport now one of the things that I talked about as part of that was that planning was dead and it was kind of a key my I think my keynote was actually titled planning is dead and the concept was that in a world that's less knowable when we're solving problems in a more organic bottom-up way our ability to effectively plan into the future it's much less than it was in the past and this idea that you're gonna be able to plan for success and then build to it it really is being replaced by a more bottom-up participative approach now aside from my whole strategic planning team kind of being up in arms saying what are you saying planning is dead I have multiple times had people say to me well I get that point but I still need to prepare for the future how do I prepare my organization for the future isn't that planning and so I wanted to spend a couple minutes talk a little more detail about what I meant by that but importantly taking our own advice we spent a lot of time this past year looking around at what our customers are doing because what a better place to learn then from large companies and small companies around the world information technology organizations having to work to solve these problems for their organizations and so our ability to learn from each other take the power of participation an individual initiative that people and organizations have taken there are just so many great learnings this year that I want to get a chance to share I also thought rather than listening to me do that that we could actually highlight some of the people who are doing this and so I do want to spend about five minutes kind of contextualizing what we're going to go through over the next hour or so and some of the lessons learned but then we want to share some real-world stories of how organizations are attacking some of these problems under this how do we be successful in a world of constant change in uncertainty so just going back a little bit more to last year talking about planning was dead when I said planning it's kind of a planning writ large and so that's if you think about the way traditional organizations work to solve problems and ultimately execute you start off planning so what's a position you want to get to in X years and whether that's a competitive strategy in a position of competitive advantage or a certain position you want an organizational function to reach you kind of lay out a plan to get there you then typically a senior leaders or a planning team prescribes the sets of activities and the organization structure and the other components required to get there and then ultimately execution is about driving compliance against that plan and you look at you say well that's all logical right we plan for something we then figure out how we're gonna get there we go execute to get there and you know in a traditional world that was easy and still some of this makes sense I don't say throw out all of this but you have to recognize in a more uncertain volatile world where you can be blindsided by orthogonal competitors coming in and you the term uber eyes you have to recognize that you can't always plan or know what the future is and so if you don't well then what replaces the traditional model or certainly how do you augment the traditional model to be successful in a world that you knows ambiguous well what we've heard from customers and what you'll see examples of this through the course of this morning planning is can be replaced by configuring so you can configure for a constant rate of change without necessarily having to know what that change is this idea of prescription of here's the activities people need to perform and let's lay these out very very crisply job descriptions what organizations are going to do can be replaced by a greater degree of enablement right so this idea of how do you enable people with the knowledge and things that they need to be able to make the right decisions and then ultimately this idea of execution as compliance can be replaced by a greater level of engagement of people across the organization to ultimately be able to react at a faster speed to the changes that happen so just double clicking in each of those for a couple minutes so what I mean by configure for constant change so again we don't know exactly what the change is going to be but we know it's going to happen and last year I talked a little bit about a process solution to that problem I called it that you have to try learn modify and what that model try learn modify was for anybody in the app dev space it was basically taking the principles of agile and DevOps and applying those more broadly to business processes in technology organizations and ultimately organizations broadly this idea of you don't have to know what your ultimate destination is but you can try and experiment you can learn from those things and you can move forward and so that I do think in technology organizations we've seen tremendous progress even over the last year as organizations are adopting agile endeavor and so that still continues to be I think a great way for people to to configure their processes for change but this year we've seen some great examples of organizations taking a different tack to that problem and that's literally building modularity into their structures themselves right actually building the idea that change is going to happen into how you're laying out your technology architectures right we've all seen the reverse of that when you build these optimized systems for you know kind of one environment you kind of flip over two years later what was the optimized system it's now called a legacy system that needs to be migrated that's an optimized system that now has to be moved to a new environment because the world has changed so again you'll see a great example of that in a few minutes here on stage next this concept of enabled double-clicking on that a little bit so much of what we've done in technology over the past few years has been around automation how do we actually replace things that people were doing with technology or augmenting what people are doing with technology and that's incredibly important and that's work that can continue to go forward it needs to happen it's not really what I'm talking about here though enablement in this case it's much more around how do you make sure individuals are getting the context they need how are you making sure that they're getting the information they need how are you making sure they're getting the tools they need to make decisions on the spot so it's less about automating what people are doing and more about how can you better enable people with tools and technology now from a leadership perspective that's around making sure people understand the strategy of the company the context in which they're working in making sure you've set the appropriate values etc etc from a technology perspective that's ensuring that you're building the right systems that allow the right information the right tools at the right time to the right people now to some extent even that might not be hard but when the world is constantly changing that gets to be even harder and I think that's one of the reasons we see a lot of traction and open source to solve these problems to use flexible systems to help enterprises be able to enable their people not just in it today but to be flexible going forward and again we'll see some great examples of that and finally engagement so again if execution can't be around driving compliance to a plan because you no longer have this kind of Cris plan well what do leaders do how do organizations operate and so you know I'll broadly use the term engagement several of our customers have used this term and this is really saying well how do you engage your people in real-time to make the right decisions how do you accelerate a pace of cadence how do you operate at a different speed so you can react to change and take advantage of opportunities as they arise and everywhere we look IT is a key enabler of this right in the past IT was often seen as an inhibitor to this because the IT systems move slower than the business might want to move but we are seeing with some of these new technologies that literally IT is becoming the enabler and driving the pace of change back on to the business and you'll again see some great examples of that as well so again rather than listen to me sit here and theoretically talk about these things or refer to what we've seen others doing I thought it'd be much more interesting to bring some of our partners and our customers up here to specifically talk about what they're doing so I'm really excited to have a great group of customers who have agreed to stand in front of 7,500 people or however many here this morning and talk a little bit more about what they're doing so really excited to have them here and really appreciate all them agreeing to be a part of this and so to start I want to start with tee systems we have the CEO of tee systems here and I think this is a great story because they're really two parts to it right because he has two perspectives one is as the CEO of a global company itself having to navigate its way through digital disruption and as a global cloud service provider obviously helping its customers through this same type of change so I'm really thrilled to have a del hasta li join me on stage to talk a little bit about T systems and what they're doing and what we're doing jointly together so Adelle [Music] Jim took to see you Adele thank you for being here you for having me please join me I love to DJ when that fantastic we may have to hire him no more events for events where's well employed he's well employed though here that team do not give him mics activation it's great to have you here really do appreciate it well you're the CEO of a large organization that's going through this disruption in the same way we are I'd love to hear a little bit how for your company you're thinking about you know navigating this change that we're going through great well you know key systems as an ICT service provider we've been around for decades I'm not different to many of our clients we had to change the whole disruption of the cloud and digitization and new skills and new capability and agility it's something we had to face as well so over the last five years and especially in the last three years we invested heavily invested over a billion euros in building new capabilities building new offerings new infrastructures to support our clients so to be very disruptive for us as well and so and then with your customers themselves they're going through this set of change and you're working to help them how are you working to help enable your your customers as they're going through this change well you know all of them you know in this journey of changing the way they run their business leveraging IT much more to drive business results digitization and they're all looking for new skills new ideas they're looking for platforms that take them away from traditional waterfall development that takes a year or a year and a half before they see any results to processes and ways of bringing applications in a week in a month etcetera so it's it's we are part of that journey with them helping them for that and speaking of that I know we're working together and to help our joint customers with that can you talk a little bit more about what we're doing together sure well you know our relationship goes back years and years with with the Enterprise Linux but over the last few years we've invested heavily in OpenShift and OpenStack to build peope as layers to build you know flexible infrastructure for our clients and we've been working with you we tested many different technology in the marketplace and been more successful with Red Hat and the stack there and I'll give you an applique an example several large European car manufacturers who have connected cars now as a given have been accelerating the applications that needed to be in the car and in the past it took them years if not you know scores to get an application into the car and today we're using open shift as the past layer to develop to enable these DevOps for these companies and they bring applications in less than a month and it's a huge change in the dynamics of the competitiveness in the marketplace and we rely on your team and in helping us drive that capability to our clients yeah do you find it fascinating so many of the stories that you hear and that we've talked about with with our customers is this need for speed and this ability to accelerate and enable a greater degree of innovation by simply accelerating what what we're seeing with our customers absolutely with that plus you know the speed is important agility is really critical but doing it securely doing it doing it in a way that is not gonna destabilize the you know the broader ecosystem is really critical and things like GDP are which is a new security standard in Europe is something that a lot of our customers worry about they need help with and we're one of the partners that know what that really is all about and how to navigate within that and use not prevent them from using the new technologies yeah I will say it isn't just the speed of the external but the security and the regulation especially GDR we have spent an hour on that with our board this week there you go he said well thank you so much for being here really to appreciate the work that we're doing together and look forward to continued same here thank you thank you [Applause] we've had a great partnership with tea systems over the years and we've really taken it to the next level and what's really exciting about that is you know we've moved beyond just helping kind of host systems for our customers we really are jointly enabling their success and it's really exciting and we're really excited about what we're able to to jointly accomplish so next i'm really excited that we have our innovation award winners here and we'll have on stage with us our innovation award winners this year our BBVA dnm IAG lasat Lufthansa Technik and UPS and yet they're all working in one for specific technology initiatives that they're doing that really really stand out and are really really exciting you'll have a chance to learn a lot more about those through the course of the event over the next couple of days but in this context what I found fascinating is they were each addressing a different point of this configure enable engage and I thought it would be really great for you all to hear about how they're experimenting and working to solve these problems you know real-time large organizations you know happening now let's start with the video to see what they think about when they think about innovation I define innovation is something that's changing the model changing the way of thinking not just a step change improvement not just making something better but actually taking a look at what already exists and then putting them together in new and exciting lives innovation is about to build something nobody has done before historically we had a statement that business drives technology we flip that equation around an IT is now demonstrating to the business at power of technology innovation desde el punto de vista de la tecnología supone salir de plataform as proprietary as ADA Madero cloud basado an open source it's a possibility the open source que no parameter no sir Kamala and I think way that for me open-source stands for flexibility speed security the community and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation innovation at a pace that I don't think our one individual organization could actually do ourselves right so first I'd like to talk with BBVA I love this story because as you know Financial Services is going through a massive set of transformations and BBVA really is at the leading edge of thinking about how to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy and kind of modular layered architecture to be successful regardless of what happens in the future so with that I'd like to welcome on stage Jose Maria Rosetta from BBVA [Music] thank you for being here and congratulations on your innovation award it's been a pleasure to be here with you it's great to have you hi everybody so Josemaria for those who might not be familiar with BBVA can you give us a little bit of background on your company yeah a brief description BBVA is is a bank as a financial institution with diversified business model and that provides well financial services to more than 73 million of customers in more than 20 countries great and I know we've worked with you for a long time so we appreciate that the partnership with you so I thought I'd start with a really easy question for you how will blockchain you know impact financial services in the next five years I've gotten no idea but if someone knows the answer I've got a job for him for him up a pretty good job indeed you know oh all right well let me go a little easier then so how will the global payments industry change in the next you know four or five years five years well I think you need a a Weezer well I tried to make my best prediction means that in five years just probably will be five years older good answer I like that I always abstract up I hope so I hope so yah-yah-yah hope so good point so you know immediately that's the obvious question you have a massive technology infrastructure is a global bank how do you prepare yourself to enable the organization to be successful when you really don't know what the future is gonna be well global banks and wealth BBBS a global gam Bank a certain component foundations you know today I would like to talk about risk and efficiency so World Bank's deal with risk with the market great the operational reputational risk and so on so risk control is part of all or DNA you know and when you've got millions of customers you know efficiency efficiency is a must so I think there's no problem with all these foundations they problem the problem analyze the problems appears when when banks translate these foundations is valued into technology so risk control or risk management avoid risk usually means by the most expensive proprietary technology in the market you know from one of the biggest software companies in the world you know so probably all of you there are so those people in the room were glad to hear you say that yeah probably my guess the name of those companies around San Francisco most of them and efficiency usually means a savory business unit as every department or country has his own specific needs by a specific solution for them so imagine yourself working in a data center full of silos with many different Hardware operating systems different languages and complex interfaces to communicate among them you know not always documented what really never documented so your life your life in is not easy you know in this scenario are well there's no room for innovation so what's been or or strategy be BES ready to move forward in this new digital world well we've chosen a different approach which is quite simple is to replace all local proprietary system by a global platform based on on open source with three main goals you know the first one is reduce the average transaction cost to one-third the second one is increase or developers productivity five times you know and the third is enable or delete the business be able to deliver solutions of three times faster so you're not quite easy Wow and everything with the same reliability as on security standards as we've got today Wow that is an extraordinary set of objectives and I will say their world on the path of making that successful which is just amazing yeah okay this is a long journey sometimes a tough journey you know to be honest so we decided to partnership with the with the best companies in there in the world and world record we think rate cut is one of these companies so we think or your values and your knowledge is critical for BBVA and well as I mentioned before our collaboration started some time ago you know and just an example in today in BBVA a Spain being one of the biggest banks in in the country you know and using red hat technology of course our firm and fronting architecture you know for mobile and internet channels runs the ninety five percent of our customers request this is approximately 3,000 requests per second and our back in architecture execute 70 millions of business transactions a day this is almost a 50% of total online transactions executed in the country so it's all running yes running I hope so you check for you came on stage it's I'll be flying you know okay good there's no wood up here to knock on it's been a really great partnership it's been a pleasure yeah thank you so much for being here thank you thank you [Applause] I do love that story because again so much of what we talk about when we when we talk about preparing for digital is a processed solution and again things like agile and DevOps and modular izing components of work but this idea of thinking about platforms broadly and how they can run anywhere and actually delivering it delivering at a scale it's just a phenomenal project and experience and in the progress they've made it's a great team so next up we have two organizations that have done an exceptional job of enabling their people with the right information and the tools they need to be successful you know in both of these cases these are organizations who are under constant change and so leveraging the power of open-source to help them build these tools to enable and you'll see it the size and the scale of these in two very very different contexts it's great to see and so I'd like to welcome on stage Oh smart alza' with dnm and David Abraham's with IAG [Music] Oh smart welcome thank you so much for being here Dave great to see you thank you appreciate you being here and congratulations to you both on winning the Innovation Awards thank you so Omar I really found your story fascinating and how you're able to enable your people with data which is just significantly accelerated the pace with which they can make decisions and accelerate your ability to to act could you tell us a little more about the project and then what you're doing Jim and Tina when the muchisimas gracias por ever say interesado pono true projecto [Music] encargado registry controller las entradas a leda's persona por la Frontera argentina yo sé de dos siento treinta siete puestos de contrôle tienen lo largo de la Frontera tanto area the restreamer it EEMA e if looool in dilute ammonia shame or cinta me Jonas the tránsito sacra he trod on in another Fronteras dingus idea idea de la Magneto la cual estamos hablando la Frontera cantina tienen extension the kin same in kilo metros esto es el gada mint a maje or allege Estancia kaeun a poor carretera a la co de mexico con el akka a direction emulation s 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calidad de vida de atras de mettre personas SI y meet our que el delito perform a trois Natura from Dana's Argentine sigue siendo en favor de esto SI temes uno de los países mess Alberto's Allah immigration en Latin America yah hora con una plataforma mas segunda first of all I want to thank you for the interest is played for our project the National migration administration or diem records the entry and exit of people on the Argentine territory it grants residents permits to foreigners who wish to live in our country through 237 entry points land air border sea and river ways Jim dnm registered over 80 million transits throughout last year Argentine borders cover about 15,000 kilometers just our just to give you an idea of the magnitude of our borders this is greater than the distance on a highway between Mexico City and Alaska our department applies the mechanisms that prevent the entry and residents of people involved in crimes like terrorism trafficking of persons weapons drugs and others in 2016 we shifted to a more preventive and predictive paradigm that is how Sam's the system for migration analysis was created with red hats great assistance and support this allowed us to tackle the challenge of integrating multiple and varied issues legal issues police databases national and international security organizations like Interpol API advanced passenger information and PNR passenger name record this involved starting private cloud with OpenShift Rev data virtualization cloud forms and fuse that were the basis to develop Sam and implementing machine learning models and artificial intelligence our analysts consulted a number of systems and other manual files before 2016 4 days for each person entering or leaving the country so this has allowed us to optimize our decisions making them in real time each time Sam is consulted it processes patterns of over two billion data entries Sam's aim is to improve the quality of life of our citizens and visitors making sure that crime doesn't pierce our borders in an environment of analytic evolution and constant improvement in essence Sam contributes toward Argentina being one of the leaders in Latin America in terms of immigration with our new system great thank you and and so Dave tell us a little more about the insurance industry and the challenges in the EU face yeah sure so you know in the insurance industry it's a it's been a bit sort of insulated from a lot of major change in disruption just purely from the fact that it's highly regulated and the cost of so that the barrier to entry is quite high in fact if you think about insurance you know you have to have capital reserves to protect against those major events like floods bush fires and so on but the whole thing is a lot of change there's come in a really rapid pace I'm also in the areas of customer expectations you know customers and now looking and expecting for the same levels of flexibility and convenience that they would experience with more modern and new startups they're expecting out of the older institutions like banks and insurance companies like us so definitely expecting the industry to to be a lot more adaptable and to better meet their needs I think the other aspect of it really is in the data the data area where I think that the donor is now creating a much more significant connection between organizations in a car summers especially when you think about the level of devices that are now enabled and the sheer growth of data that's that that's growing at exponential rates so so that the impact then is that the systems that we used to rely on are the technology we used to rely on to be able to handle that kind of growth no longer keeps up and is able to to you know build for the future so we need to sort of change that so what I G's really doing is transform transforming the organization to become a lot more efficient focus more on customers and and really set ourselves up to be agile and adaptive and so ya know as part of your Innovation Award that the specific set of projects you tied a huge amount of different disparate systems together and with M&A and other you have a lot to do there to you tell us a little more about kind of how you're able to better respond to customer needs by being able to do that yeah no you're right so we've we've we're nearly a hundred year old company that's grown from lots of merger and acquisition and just as a result of that that means that data's been sort of spread out and fragmented across multiple brands and multiple products and so the number one sort of issue and problem that we were hearing was that it was too hard to get access to data and it's highly complicated which is not great from a company from our perspective really because because we are a data company right that's what we do we we collect data about people what they what's important to them what they value and the environment in which they live so that we can understand that risk and better manage and protect those people so what we're doing is we're trying to make and what we have been doing is making data more open and accessible and and by that I mean making data more of easily available for people to use it to make decisions in their day-to-day activity and to do that what we've done is built a single data platform across the group that unifies the data into a single source of truth that we can then build on top of that single views of customers for example that puts the right information into the into the hands of the people that need it the most and so now why does open source play such a big part in doing that I know there are a lot of different solutions that could get you there sure well firstly I think I've been sauce has been k2 these and really it's been key because we've basically started started from scratch to build this this new next-generation data platform based on entirely open-source you know using great components like Kafka and Postgres and airflow and and and and and then fundamentally building on top of red Red Hat OpenStack right to power all that and they give us the flexibility that we need to be able to make things happen much faster for example we were just talking to the pivotal guys earlier this week here and some of the stuff that we're doing they're they're things quite interesting innovative writes even sort of maybe first in the world where we've taken the older sort of appliance and dedicated sort of massive parallel processing unit and ported that over onto red Red Hat OpenStack right which is now giving us a lot more flexibility for scale in a much more efficient way but you're right though that we've come from in the past a more traditional approach to to using vendor based technology right which was good back then when you know technology solutions could last for around 10 years or so on and and that was fine but now that we need to move much faster we've had to rethink that and and so our focus has been on using you know more commoditized open source technology built by communities to give us that adaptability and sort of remove the locking in there any entrenchment of technology so that's really helped us but but I think that the last point that's been really critical to us is is answering that that concern and question about ongoing support and maintenance right so you know in a regular environment the regulator is really concerned about anything that could fundamentally impact business operation and and so the question is always about what happens when something goes wrong who's going to be there to support you which is where the value of the the partnership we have with Red Hat has really come into its own right and what what it's done is is it's actually giving us the best of both worlds a means that we can we can leverage and use and and and you know take some of the technology that's being developed by great communities in the open source way but also partner with a trusted partner in red had to say you know they're going to stand behind that community and provide that support when we needed the most so that's been the kind of the real value out of that partnership okay well I appreciate I love the story it's how do you move quickly leverage the power community but do it in a safe secure way and I love the idea of your literally empowering people with machine learning and AI at the moment when they need it it's just an incredible story so thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] you know again you see in these the the importance of enabling people with data and in an old-world was so much data was created with a system in mind versus data is a separate asset that needs to be available real time to anyone is a theme we hear over and over and over again and so you know really looking at open source solutions that allow that flexibility and keep data from getting locked into proprietary silos you know is a theme that we've I've heard over and over over the past year with many of our customers so I love logistics I'm a geek that way I come from that background in the past and I know that running large complex operations requires flawless execution and that requires great data and we have two great examples today around how to engage own organizations in new and more effective ways in the case of lufthansa technik literally IT became the business so it wasn't enabling the business it became the business offering and importantly went from idea to delivery to customers in a hundred days and so this theme of speed and the importance of speed it's a it's a great story you'll hear more about and then also at UPS UPS again I talked a little earlier about IT used to be kind of the long pole in the tent the thing that was slow moving because of the technology but UPS is showing that IT can actually drive the business and the cadence of business even faster by demonstrating the power and potential of technology to engage in this case hundreds of thousands of people to make decisions real-time in the face of obviously constant change around weather mechanicals and all the different things that can happen in a large logistics operation like that so I'd like to welcome on stage to be us more from Lufthansa Technik and Nick Castillo from ups to be us welcome thank you for being here Nick thank you thank you Jim and congratulations on your Innovation Awards oh thank you it's a great honor so to be us let's start with you can you tell us a little bit more about what a viet are is yeah avatars are a digital platform offering features like aircraft condition analytics reliability management and predictive maintenance and it helps airlines worldwide to digitize and improve their operations so all of the features work and can be used separately or generate even more where you burn combined and finally we decided to set up a viet as an open platform that means that we avoid the whole aviation industry to join the community and develop ideas on our platform and to be as one of things i found really fascinating about this is that you had a mandate to do this at a hundred days and you ultimately delivered on it you tell us a little bit about that i mean nothing in aviation moves that fast yeah that's been a big challenge so in the beginning of our story the Lufthansa bot asked us to develop somehow digital to win of an aircraft within just hundred days and to deliver something of value within 100 days means you cannot spend much time and producing specifications in terms of paper etc so for us it was pretty clear that we should go for an angel approach and immediately start and developing ideas so we put the best experts we know just in one room and let them start to work and on day 2 I think we already had the first scribbles for the UI on day 5 we wrote the first lines of code and we were able to do that because it has been a major advantage for us to already have four technologies taken place it's based on open source and especially rated solutions because we did not have to waste any time setting up the infrastructure and since we wanted to get feedback very fast we were certainly visited an airline from the Lufthansa group already on day 30 and showed them the first results and got a lot of feedback and because from the very beginning customer centricity has been an important aspect for us and changing the direction based on customer feedback has become quite normal for us over time yeah it's an interesting story not only engaging the people internally but be able to engage with a with that with a launch customer like that and get feedback along the way as it's great thing how is it going overall since launch yeah since the launch last year in April we generated much interest in the industry as well from Airlines as from competitors and in the following month we focused on a few Airlines which had been open minded and already advanced in digital activities and we've got a lot of feedback by working with them and we're able to improve our products by developing new features for example we learned that data integration can become quite complex in the industry and therefore we developed a new feature called quick boarding allowing Airlines to integrate into the via table platform within one day using a self-service so and currently we're heading for the next steps beyond predictive maintenance working on process automation and prescriptive prescriptive maintenance because we believe prediction without fulfillment still isn't enough it really is a great example of even once you're out there quickly continuing to innovate change react it's great to see so Nick I mean we all know ups I'm still always blown away by the size and scale of the company and the logistics operations that you run you tell us a little more about the project and what we're doing together yeah sure Jim and you know first of all I think I didn't get the sportcoat memo I think I'm the first one up here today with a sport coat but you know first on you know on behalf of the 430,000 ups was around the world and our just world-class talented team of 5,000 IT professionals I have to tell you we're humbled to be one of this year's red hat Innovation Award recipients so we really appreciate that you know as a global logistics provider we deliver about 20 million packages each day and we've got a portfolio of technologies both operational and customer tech and another customer facing side the power what we call the UPS smart logistics network and I gotta tell you innovations in our DNA technology is at the core of everything we do you know from the ever familiar first and industry mobile platform that a lot of you see when you get delivered a package which we call the diad which believe it or not we delivered in 1992 my choice a data-driven solution that drives over 40 million of our my choice customers I'm whatever you know what this is great he loves logistics he's a my choice customer you could be one too by the way there's a free app in the App Store but it provides unmatched visibility and really controls that last mile delivery experience so now today we're gonna talk about the solution that we're recognized for which is called site which is part of a much greater platform that we call edge which is transforming how our package delivery teams operate providing them real-time insights into our operations you know this allows them to make decisions based on data from 32 disparate data sources and these insights help us to optimize our operations but more importantly they help us improve the delivery experience for our customers just like you Jim you know on the on the back end is Big Data and it's on a large scale our systems are crunching billions of events to render those insights on an easy-to-use mobile platform in real time I got to tell you placing that information in our operators hands makes ups agile and being agile being able to react to changing conditions as you know is the name of the game in logistics now we built edge in our private cloud where Red Hat technologies play a very important role as part of our overage overarching cloud strategy and our migration to agile and DevOps so it's it's amazing it's amazing the size and scale so so you have this technology vision around engaging people in a more effect way those are my word not yours but but I'd be at that's how it certainly feels and so tell us a little more about how that enables the hundreds of thousands people to make better decisions every day yep so you know we're a people company and the edge platform is really the latest in a series of solutions to really empower our people and really power that smart logistics network you know we've been deploying technology believe it or not since we founded the company in 1907 we'll be a hundred and eleven years old this August it's just a phenomenal story now prior to edge and specifically the syphon ishutin firm ation from a number of disparate systems and reports they then need to manually look across these various data sources and and frankly it was inefficient and prone to inaccuracy and it wasn't really real-time at all now edge consumes data as I mentioned earlier from 32 disparate systems it allows our operators to make decisions on staffing equipment the flow of packages through the buildings in real time the ability to give our people on the ground the most up-to-date data allows them to make informed decisions now that's incredibly empowering because not only are they influencing their local operations but frankly they're influencing the entire global network it's truly extraordinary and so why open source and open shift in particular as part of that solution yeah you know so as I mentioned Red Hat and Red Hat technology you know specifically open shift there's really core to our cloud strategy and to our DevOps strategy the tools and environments that we've partnered with Red Hat to put in place truly are foundational and they've fundamentally changed the way we develop and deploy our systems you know I heard Jose talk earlier you know we had complex solutions that used to take 12 to 18 months to develop and deliver to market today we deliver those same solutions same level of complexity in months and even weeks now openshift enables us to container raise our workloads that run in our private cloud during normal operating periods but as we scale our business during our holiday peak season which is a very sure window about five weeks during the year last year as a matter of fact we delivered seven hundred and sixty-two million packages in that small window and our transactions our systems they just spiked dramatically during that period we think that having open shift will allow us in those peak periods to seamlessly move workloads to the public cloud so we can take advantage of burst capacity economically when needed and I have to tell you having this flexibility I think is key because you know ultimately it's going to allow us to react quickly to customer demands when needed dial back capacity when we don't need that capacity and I have to say it's a really great story of UPS and red hat working you together it really is a great story is just amazing again the size and scope but both stories here a lot speed speed speed getting to market quickly being able to try things it's great lessons learned for all of us the importance of being able to operate at a fundamentally different clock speed so thank you all for being here very much appreciated congratulate thank you [Applause] [Music] alright so while it's great to hear from our Innovation Award winners and it should be no surprise that they're leading and experimenting in some really interesting areas its scale so I hope that you got a chance to learn something from these interviews you'll have an opportunity to learn more about them you'll also have an opportunity to vote on the innovator of the year you can do that on the Red Hat summit mobile app or on the Red Hat Innovation Awards homepage you can learn even more about their stories and you'll have a chance to vote and I'll be back tomorrow to announce the the summit winner so next I like to spend a few minutes on talking about how Red Hat is working to catalyze our customers efforts Marko bill Peter our senior vice president of customer experience and engagement and John Alessio our vice president of global services will both describe areas in how we are working to configure our own organization to effectively engage with our customers to use open source to help drive their success so with that I'd like to welcome marquel on stage [Music] good morning good morning thank you Jim so I want to spend a few minutes to talk about how we are configured how we are configured towards your success how we enable internally as well to work towards your success and actually engage as well you know Paul yesterday talked about the open source culture and our open source development net model you know there's a lot of attributes that we have like transparency meritocracy collaboration those are the key of our culture they made RedHat what it is today and what it will be in the future but we also added our passion for customer success to that let me tell you this is kind of the configuration from a cultural perspective let me tell you a little bit on what that means so if you heard the name my organization is customer experience and engagement right in the past we talked a lot about support it's an important part of the Red Hat right and how we are configured we are configured probably very uniquely in the industry we put support together we have product security in there we add a documentation we add a quality engineering into an organization you think there's like wow why are they doing it we're also running actually the IT team for actually the product teams why are we doing that now you can imagine right we want to go through what you see as well right and I'll give you a few examples on how what's coming out of this configuration we invest more and more in testing integration and use cases which you are applying so you can see it between the support team experiencing a lot what you do and actually changing our test structure that makes a lot of sense we are investing more and more testing outside the boundaries so not exactly how things must fall by product management or engineering but also how does it really run in an environment that you operate we run complex setups internally right taking openshift putting in OpenStack using software-defined storage underneath managing it with cloud forms managing it if inside we do that we want to see how that works right we are reshaping documentation console to kind of help you better instead of just documenting features and knobs as in how can how do you want to achieve things now part of this is the configuration that are the big part of the configuration is the voice of the customer to listen to what you say I've been here at Red Hat a few years and one of my passion has always been really hearing from customers how they do it I travel constantly in the world and meet with customers because I want to know what is really going on we use channels like support we use channels like getting from salespeople the interaction from customers we do surveys we do you know we interact with our people to really hear what you do what we also do what maybe not many know and it's also very unique in the industry we have a webpage called you asked reacted we show very transparently you told us this is an area for improvement and it's not just in support it's across the company right build us a better web store build us this we're very transparent about Hades improvements we want to do with you now if you want to be part of the process today go to the feedback zone on the next floor down and talk to my team I might be there as well hit me up we want to hear the feedback this is how we talk about configuration of the organization how we are configured let me go to let me go to another part which is innovation innovation every day and that in my opinion the enable section right we gotta constantly innovate ourselves how do we work with you how do we actually provide better value how do we provide faster responses in support this is what we would I say is is our you know commitment to innovation which is the enabling that Jim talked about and I give you a few examples which I'm really happy and it kind of shows the open source culture at Red Hat our commitment is for innovation I'll give you good example right if you have a few thousand engineers and you empower them you kind of set the business framework as hey this is an area we got to do something you get a lot of good IDs you get a lot of IDs and you got a shape an inter an area that hey this is really something that brings now a few years ago we kind of said or I say is like based on a lot of feedback is we got to get more and more proactive if you customers and so I shaped my team and and I shaped it around how can we be more proactive it started very simple as in like from kbase articles or knowledgebase articles in getting started guys then we started a a tool that we put out called labs you've probably seen them if you're on the technical side really taking small applications out for you to kind of validate is this configured correctly stat configure there was the start then out of that the ideas came and they took different turns and one of the turns that we came out was right at insights that we launched a few years ago and did you see the demo yesterday that in Paul's keynote that they showed how something was broken with one the data centers how it was applied to fix and how has changed this is how innovation really came from the ground up from the support side and turned into something really a being a cornerstone of our strategy and we're keeping it married from the day to day work right you don't want to separate this you want to actually keep that the data that's coming from the support goes in that because that's the power that we saw yesterday in the demo now innovation doesn't stop when you set the challenge so we did the labs we did the insights we just launched a solution engine called solution engine another thing that came out of that challenge is in how do we break complex issues down that it's easier for you to find a solution quicker it's one example but we're also experimenting with AI so insights uses AI as you probably heard yesterday we also use it internally to actually drive faster resolution we did in one case with a a our I bought basically that we get to 25% faster resolution on challenges that you have the beauty for you obviously it's well this is much faster 10% of all our support cases today are supported and assisted by an AI now I'll give you another example of just trying to tell you the innovation that comes out if you configure and enable the team correctly kbase articles are knowledgebase articles we q8 thousands and thousands every year and then I get feedback as and while they're good but they're in English as you can tell my English is perfect so it's not no issue for that but for many of you is maybe like even here even I read it in Japanese so we actually did machine translation because it's too many that we can do manually the using machine translation I can tell it's a funny example two weeks ago I tried it I tried something from English to German I looked at it the German looked really bad I went back but the English was bad so it really translates one to one actually what it does but it's really cool this is innovation that you can apply and the team actually worked on this and really proud on that now the real innovation there is not these tools the real innovation is that you can actually shape it in a way that the innovation comes that you empower the people that's the configure and enable and what I think is all it's important this don't reinvent the plumbing don't start from scratch use systems like containers on open shift to actually build the innovation in a smaller way without reinventing the plumbing you save a lot of issues on security a lot of issues on reinventing the wheel focus on that that's what we do as well if you want to hear more details again go in the second floor now let's talk about the engage that Jim mentioned before what I translate that engage is actually engaging you as a customer towards your success now what does commitment to success really mean and I want to reflect on that on a traditional IT company shows up with you talk the salesperson solution architect works with you consulting implements solution it comes over to support and trust me in a very traditional way the support guy has no clue what actually was sold early on it's what happens right and this is actually I think that red had better that we're not so silent we don't show our internal silos or internal organization that much today we engage in a way it doesn't matter from which team it comes we have a better flow than that you deserve how the sausage is made but we can never forget what was your business objective early on now how is Red Hat different in this and we are very strong in my opinion you might disagree but we are very strong in a virtual accounting right really putting you in the middle and actually having a solution architect work directly with support or consulting involved and driving that together you can also help us in actually really embracing that model if that's also other partners or system integrators integrate put yourself in the middle be around that's how we want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the original business problem trust me reducing the hierarchy or getting rid of hierarchy and bureaucracy goes a long way now this is how we configured this is how we engage and this is how we are committed to your success with that I'm going to introduce you to John Alessio that talks more about some of the innovation done with customers thank you [Music] good morning I'm John Alessio I'm the vice president of Global Services and I'm delighted to be with you here today I'd like to talk to you about a couple of things as it relates to what we've been doing since the last summit in the services organization at the core of everything we did it's very similar to what Marco talked to you about our number one priority is driving our customer success with red hat technology and as you see here on the screen we have a number of different offerings and capabilities all the way from training certification open innovation labs consulting really pairing those capabilities together with what you just heard from Marco in the support or cee organization really that's the journey you all go through from the beginning of discovering what your business challenge is all the way through designing those solutions and deploying them with red hat now the highlight like to highlight a few things of what we've been up to over the last year so if I start with the training and certification team they've been very busy over the last year really updating enhancing our curriculum if you haven't stopped by the booth there's a preview for new capability around our learning community which is a new way of learning and really driving that enable meant in the community because 70% of what you need to know you learned from your peers and so it's a very key part of our learning strategy and in fact we take customer satisfaction with our training and certification business very seriously we survey all of our students coming out of training 93% of our students tell us they're better prepared because of red hat training and certification after Weeds they've completed the course we've updated the courses and we've trained well over a hundred and fifty thousand people over the last two years so it's a very very key part of our strategy and that combined with innovation labs and the consulting operation really drive that overall journey now we've been equally busy in enhancing the system of enablement and support for our business partners another very very key initiative is building out the ecosystem we've enhanced our open platform which is online partner enablement network we've added new capability and in fact much of the training and enablement that we do for our internal consultants our deal is delivered through the open platform now what I'm really impressed with and thankful for our partners is how they are consuming and leveraging this material we train and enable for sales for pre-sales and for delivery and we're up over 70% year in year in our partners that are enabled on RedHat technology let's give our business partners a round of applause now one of our offerings Red Hat open innovation labs I'd like to talk a bit more about and take you through a case study open innovation labs was created two years ago it's really there to help you on your journey in adopting open source technology it's an immersive experience where your team will work side-by-side with Red Hatters to really propel your journey forward in adopting open source technology and in fact we've been very busy since the summit in Boston as you'll see coming up on the screen we've completed dozens of engagements leveraging our methods tools and processes for open innovation labs as you can see we've worked with large and small accounts in fact if you remember summit last year we had a European customer easier AG on stage which was a startup and we worked with them at the very beginning of their business to create capabilities in a very short four-week engagement but over the last year we've also worked with very large customers such as Optim and Delta Airlines here in North America as well as Motability operations in the European arena one of the accounts I want to spend a little bit more time on is Heritage Bank heritage Bank is a community owned bank in Toowoomba Australia their challenge was not just on creating new innovative technology but their challenge was also around cultural transformation how to get people to work together across the silos within their organization we worked with them at all levels of the organization to create a new capability the first engagement went so well that they asked us to come in into a second engagement so I'd like to do now is run a video with Peter lock the chief executive officer of Heritage Bank so he can take you through their experience Heritage Bank is one of the country's oldest financial institutions we have to be smarter we have to be more innovative we have to be more agile we had to change we had to find people to help us make that change the Red Hat lab is the only one that truly helps drive that change with a business problem the change within the team is very visible from the start to now we've gone from being separated to very single goal minded seeing people that I only ever seen before in their cubicles in the room made me smile programmers in their thinking I'm now understanding how the whole process fits together the productivity of IT will change and that is good for our business that's really the value that were looking for the Red Hat innovation labs for us were a really great experience I'm not interested in running an organization I'm interested in making a great organization to say I was pleasantly surprised by it is an understatement I was delighted I love the quote I was delighted makes my heart warm every time I see that video you know since we were at summit for those of you who are with us in Boston some of you went on our hardhat tours we've opened three physical facilities here at Red Hat where we can conduct red head open Innovation Lab engagements Singapore London and Boston were all opened within the last physical year and in fact our site in Boston is paired with our world-class executive briefing center as well so if you haven't been there please do check it out I'd like to now talk to you a bit about a very special engagement that we just recently completed we just recently completed an engagement with UNICEF the United Nations Children's Fund and the the purpose behind this engagement was really to help UNICEF create an open-source platform that marries big data with social good the idea is UNICEF needs to be better prepared to respond to emergency situations and as you can imagine emergency situations are by nature unpredictable you can't really plan for them they can happen anytime anywhere and so we worked with them on a project that we called school mapping and the idea was to provide more insights so that when emergency situations arise UNICEF could do a much better job in helping the children in the region and so we leveraged our Red Hat open innovation lab methods tools processes that you've heard about just like we did at Heritage Bank and the other accounts I mentioned but then we also leveraged Red Hat software technologies so we leveraged OpenShift container platform we leveraged ansible automation we helped the client with a more agile development approach so they could have releases much more frequently and continue to update this over time we created a continuous integration continuous deployment pipeline we worked on containers and container in the application etc with that we've been able to provide a platform that is going to allow for their growth to better respond to these emergency situations let's watch a short video on UNICEF mission of UNICEF innovation is to apply technology to the world's most pressing problems facing children data is changing the landscape of what we do at UNICEF this means that we can figure out what's happening now on the ground who it's happening to and actually respond to it in much more of a real-time manner than we used to be able to do we love working with open source communities because of their commitment that we should be doing good for the world we're actually with red hat building a sandbox where universities or other researchers or data scientists can connect and help us with our work if you want to use data for social good there's so many groups out there that really need your help and there's so many ways to get involved [Music] so let's give a very very warm red hat summit welcome to Erica kochi co-founder of unicef innovation well Erica first of all welcome to Red Hat summit thanks for having me here it's our pleasure and thank you for joining us so Erica I've just talked a bit about kind of what we've been up to and Red Hat services over the last year we talked a bit about our open innovation labs and we did this project the school mapping project together our two teams and I thought the audience might find it interesting from your point of view on why the approach we use in innovation labs was such a good fit for the school mapping project yeah it was a great fit for for two reasons the first is values everything that we do at UNICEF innovation we use open source technology and that's for a couple of reasons because we can take it from one place and very easily move it to other countries around the world we work in 190 countries so that's really important for us not to be able to scale things also because it makes sense we can get we can get more communities involved in this and look not just try to do everything by ourselves but look much open much more openly towards the open source communities out there to help us with our work we can't do it alone yeah and then the second thing is methodology you know the labs are really looking at taking this agile approach to prototyping things trying things failing trying again and that's really necessary when you're developing something new and trying to do something new like mapping every school in the world yeah very challenging work think about it 190 countries Wow and so the open source platform really works well and then the the rapid prototyping was really a good fit so I think the audience might find it interesting on how this application and this platform will help children in Latin America so in a lot of countries in Latin America and many countries throughout the world that UNICEF works in are coming out of either decades of conflict or are are subject to natural disasters and not great infrastructure so it's really important to a for us to know where schools are where communities are well where help is needed what's connected what's not and using a overlay of various sources of data from poverty mapping to satellite imagery to other sources we can really figure out what's happening where resources are where they aren't and so we can plan better to respond to emergencies and to and to really invest in areas that are needed that need that investment excellent excellent it's quite powerful what we were able to do in a relatively short eight or nine week engagement that our two teams did together now many of your colleagues in the audience are using open source today looking to expand their use of open source and I thought you might have some recommendations for them on how they kind of go through that journey and expanding their use of open source since your experience at that yeah for us it was it was very much based on what's this gonna cost we have limited resources and what's how is this gonna spread as quickly as possible mm-hmm and so we really asked ourselves those two questions you know about 10 years ago and what we realized is if we are going to be recommending technologies that governments are going to be using it really needs to be open source they need to have control over it yeah and they need to be working with communities not developing it themselves yeah excellent excellent so I got really inspired with what we were doing here in this project it's one of those you know every customer project is really interesting to me this one kind of pulls a little bit at your heartstrings on what the real impact could be here and so I know some of our colleagues here in the audience may want to get involved how can they get involved well there's many ways to get involved with the other UNICEF or other groups out there you can search for our work on github and there are tasks that you can do right now if and if you're looking for to do she's got work for you and if you want sort of a more a longer engagement or a bigger engagement you can check out our website UNICEF stories org and you can look at the areas you might be interested in and contact us we're always open to collaboration excellent well Erica thank you for being with us here today thank you for the great project we worked on together and have a great summer thank you for being give her a round of applause all right well I hope that's been helpful to you to give you a bit of an update on what we've been focused on in global services the message I'll leave with you is our top priority is customer success as you heard through the story from UNICEF from Heritage Bank and others we can help you innovate where you are today I hope you have a great summit and I'll call out Jim Whitehurst thank you John and thank you Erica that's really an inspiring story we have so many great examples of how individuals and organizations are stepping up to transform in the face of digital disruption I'd like to spend my last few minutes with one real-world example that brings a lot of this together and truly with life-saving impact how many times do you think you can solve a problem which is going to allow a clinician to now save the life I think the challenge all of his physicians are dealing with is data overload I probably look at over 100,000 images in a day and that's just gonna get worse what if it was possible for some computer program to look at these images with them and automatically flag images that might deserve better attention Chris on the surface seems pretty simple but underneath Chris has a lot going on in the past year I've seen Chris Foreman community and a space usually dominated by proprietary software I think Chris can change medicine as we know it today [Music] all right with that I'd like to invite on stage dr. Ellen grant from Boston Children's Hospital dr. grant welcome thank you for being here so dr. grant tell me who is Chris Chris does a lot of work for us and I think Chris is making me or has definitely the potential to make me a better doctor Chris helps us take data from our archives in the hospital and port it to wrap the fastback ends like the mass up and cloud to do rapid data processing and provide it back to me in any format on a desktop an iPad or an iPhone so it it basically brings high-end data analysis right to me at the bedside and that's been a barrier that I struggled with years ago to try to break down so that's where we started with Chris is to to break that barrier between research that occurred on a timeline of days to weeks to months to clinical practice which occurs in the timeline of seconds to minutes well one of things I found really fascinating about this story RedHat in case you can't tell we're really passionate about user driven innovation is this is an example of user driven innovation not directly at a technology company but in medicine excuse me can you tell us just a little bit about the genesis of Chris and how I got started yeah Chris got started when I was running a clinical division and I was very frustrated with not having the latest image analysis tools at my fingertips while I was on clinical practice and I would have to on the research so I could go over and you know do line code and do the data analysis but if I'm always over in clinical I kept forgetting how to do those things and I wanted to have all those innovations that my fingertips and not have to remember all the computer science because I'm a physician not like a better scientist so I wanted to build a platform that gave me easy access to that back-end without having to remember all the details and so that's what Chris does for us is brings allowed me to go into the PAC's grab a dataset send it to a computer and back in to do the analysis and bring it back to me without having to worry about where it was or how it got there that's all involved in the in the platform Chris and why not just go to a vendor and ask them to write a piece of software for you to do that yeah we thought about that and we do a lot of technical innovations and we always work with the experts so we wanted to work with if I'm going to be able to say an optical device I'm going to work with the optical engineers or an EM our system I'm going to work with em our engineers so we wanted to work with people who really knew or the plumbers so to speak of the software in industry so we ended up working with the massive point cloud for the platform and the distributed systems in Red Hat as the infrastructure that's starting to support Chris and that's been actually a really incredible journey for us because medical ready medical softwares not typically been a community process and that's something that working with dan from Red Hat we learned a lot about how to participate in an open community and I think our team has grown a lot as a result of that collaboration and I know you we've talked about in the past that getting this data locked into a proprietary system you may not be able to get out there's a real issue can you talk about the importance of open and how that's worked in the process yeah and I think for the medical community and I find this resonates with other physicians as well too is that it's medical data we want to continue to own and we feel very awkward about giving it to industry so we would rather have our data sitting in an open cloud like the mass open cloud where we can have a data consortium that oversees the data governance so that we're not giving our data way to somebody else but have a platform that we can still keep a control of our own data and I think it's going to be the future because we're running of a space in the hospital we generate so much data and it's just going to get worse as I was mentioning and all the systems run faster we get new devices so the amount of data that we have to filter through is just astronomically increasing so we need to have resources to store and compute on such large databases and so thinking about where this could go I mean this is a classic feels like an open-source project it started really really small with a originally modest set of goals and it's just kind of continue to grow and grow and grow it's a lot like if yes leanest torval Linux would be in 1995 you probably wouldn't think it would be where it is now so if you dream with me a little bit where do you think this could possibly go in the next five years ten years what I hope it'll do is allow us to break down the silos within the hospital because to do the best job at what we physicians do not only do we have to talk and collaborate together as individuals we have to take the data each each community develops and be able to bring it together so in other words I need to be able to bring in information from vital monitors from mr scans from optical devices from genetic tests electronic health record and be able to analyze on all that data combined so ideally this would be a platform that breaks down those information barriers in a hospital and also allows us to collaborate across multiple institutions because many disorders you only see a few in each hospital so we really have to work as teams in the medical community to combine our data together and also I'm hoping that and we even have discussions with people in the developing world because they have systems to generate or to got to create data or say for example an M R system they can't create data but they don't have the resources to analyze on it so this would be a portable for them to participate in this growing data analysis world without having to have the infrastructure there and be a portal into our back-end and we could provide the infrastructure to do the data analysis it really is truly amazing to see how it's just continued to grow and grow and expand it really is it's a phenomenal story thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] I really do love that story it's a great example of user driven innovation you know in a different industry than in technology and you know recognizing that a clinicians need for real-time information is very different than a researchers need you know in projects that can last weeks and months and so rather than trying to get an industry to pivot and change it's a great opportunity to use a user driven approach to directly meet those needs so we still have a long way to go we have two more days of the summit and as I said yesterday you know we're not here to give you all the answers we're here to convene the conversation so I hope you will have an opportunity today and tomorrow to meet some new people to share some ideas we're really really excited about what we can all do when we work together so I hope you found today valuable we still have a lot more happening on the main stage as well this afternoon please join us back for the general session it's a really amazing lineup you'll hear from the women and opensource Award winners you'll also hear more about our collab program which is really cool it's getting middle school girls interested in open sourcing coding and so you'll have an opportunity to see some people involved in that you'll also hear from the open source Story speakers and you'll including in that you will see a demo done by a technologist who happens to be 11 years old so really cool you don't want to miss that so I look forward to seeing you then this afternoon thank you [Applause]

I'm from San Juan Puerto Rico it's the cube covering coin agenda brought to you by silicon angle hello everyone welcome to special cube covers we're here exclusive conversations at coin agenda we just had blockchain unbound Puerto Rico is where we're at and we'll covering all the trends and latest news and analysis and cryptocurrency blockchain decentralized internet my next guest is Dan Bates founder and president of impact PPA Dan great to have you on thanks John glad to be here so one of the trends I'm noticing is a couple things flight to quality on the ico side first of all lot of the Deadwood's being pushed aside by the community still some stuff out there that you know might not have a business model but good entrepreneurs doing it then you start to see real use cases emerging I interviewed Green Chain they're disrupting how produce grains movement between suppliers and buyers and other impact mission driven stuff like how do you solve the energy crisis right we're in Puerto Rico right the grids half alive everyone knows that you're doing something really compelling take a minute to explain what you guys are doing is you have a token up and running what are you guys doing what's your value proposition so what we do is we've created a system by which you can now have renewable energy delivered to developing nations and we've taken the intermediary out of the equation whereby the world bank historically would take years to fund a project if they would do that they're big trepidation was how do you get paid at the end of the day so what we've done is we've come up with a solution that allows for generation of rent you know with the energy using renewables and track it all the way through to a payment rail if you will that a user can now prepay for energy on their mobile device it's m-pesa if you know what end pace is in Africa 70% of the transactions in Africa are done on a mobile device we are decentralized and pace up for energy so ok mobile app I get out you everyone can think about BRR and all the benefits and Airbnb brings you just have stuff happened talk about what's under the hood what's actually disruptive about what you guys are doing give some specifics because you're tying into Isis and jittering energy using the blocks you have a token how does it all work okay so what we do is in in the in the ability to fund the project getting the World Bank getting USA USA ID out of the equation what we now allow for is the community typically we are very liberal or tend to skew liberal right we actually believe that climate change is real and we want to help support these economies and these new types of you know betterment of the planet right but we don't expect that to be a philanthropic effort so people will buy the impact token which will fund projects that will then create what we're doing right now it's an AR C 20 of what we call a gen credit not a secondary token it's a credit that allows people to access the ledger so a guy will go down to the store just like he does right now and he charges his phones with more minutes or with a data plan it's fiat to a plan a digital currency we do the same thing it's now fiat into a gen credit we call it that allows them and transact with the blockchain so we get identity we get reputation we get trust and honesty about those transactions using the blockchain okay so where does the energy come from because the energy sources now are interesting because you're seeing people do great amazing things solar panels wind farming they see an Asia top of the apartment buildings there's a lot of wind yeah generally but how do they move that power into the market all right so what we do is right now we're using wind and solar rooftop or micro grid for instance we just finished a project in Haiti doing 150 kilowatts for a town called les a wha they haven't had power in two years a hurricane matthew prior to Hurricane Maria coming through Puerto Rico Puerto Rico's in a similar situation right so we created this micro grid using their existing infrastructure of transmission to distribution then we put smart meters on the home that smart meter connects to the blockchain and now people can have power at their homes pay-as-you-go awesome so what I've been to some of the hurdles you guys have had obviously to me it's a no-brainer of energy being tokenized is that makes such sense why wouldn't you want to do that obviously these regulatory issues that are incumbent legacy Dogma or or specific legislation of paperwork what not where's the efficiencies being automated away with the blockchain and what are some of the hurdles that you guys have gone through to get to this point all right so we work in the emerging economies of the world oftentimes there is not the kind of regulation that we have in the US or in the developed world like the EU something like that so when we go out to remote we go out to remote places like you know in Kenya and Ethiopia Latin America wherever it might be we don't have some of the Institute's that you would have if you were trying to set this up in Palo Alto I don't have to worry about PG&E and an interconnect and an off take and all that so what we do is that we'll go out set up a micro grid we're giving power to people who may have never had it before so all those regulatory layers are stripped away they're grateful for it that can they pay for it yes they can't afford to go buy a solar panel and a wind turbine on batteries and inverters nor would they know how to hook it all up yeah but they know that if they can buy power on a cellphone like they're already doing for other goods and services now we've got a game-changer Dan talk about the token economics I get this the payment rail piece mobile app no-brainer I get that check okay easy to use now I want to as a buyer of energy there's a token I some children there where's the other side of the marketplace how does that token economics work do you just take us through a use case and walk us through that example sure so as I said the impact token is our base token that will be the the value token that purchasers will buy in order to fund projects once we go beyond that and we now have what we call a Jen credit it may not be a token in the traditional sense or a coin it's a credit that allows us to transact with the ledger that way we can know about these people one of the greatest opportunities that we feel that we have in the marketplace is identity and reputation you have a billion two people who don't have a connection what if we could learn about those billion too and understand how they use power and where they use power so Jen credits kind of off chain management that you're doing you write to the ledger for in term util access right for that Tran action I got to ask you about things like spoofing why can't I just take your energy this is where the tokens become interesting because I mean it should solve the spoofing problem well right and you know energy energy needs to be passed down copper it's got to go on a wire that doesn't mean somebody's not going to cut the wire and bootleg it and all that stuff smoothing is not going to be the problem in this case it is a physical connection that needs to be made our smart meters allow for us to turn on or off let that connection by the user right if he doesn't pay you don't forget it yeah you know there's vandalism they're stuffed all over the world and we have methods in place to try and mitigate that as much as possible you you saw our platform that we're building we're tokenizing our media business amazing you liked it was good thanks for the plug there I was an aspirin and we were talking last night about our you know generational gap between us and our kids and you have your son here and your son's working with you my sons Alex working with us we have a young team as well I want you to talk about someone who's so experienced in the business you've done a lot of variety adventures from you know film to entertainment technology us older veterans it's the polite way to say it have seen the movie before they've seen the waves this is a huge way but this wave is gonna be can surf a few of them hang ten on our boards but this wave is really gonna be powered and led by the younger generation what's your thoughts share your vision of the role that the younger generation has to take here and what makes them capable in your mind okay so I'm gonna answer that question two ways first of all I'm so enamored with what the younger generation is trying to do with this corruption let's change the existing paradigm and make something better that's what blockchain allows for all sorts of industries goods and services right it's gonna be amazing what these guys come up with that's one of the things I love about doing this thing right I'm an old guy and I get to hang around these young people makes me feel young again yeah but the other thing that we have and I think you share it as well as we have to offer to these young guys experience right it's not like we're gonna go out to a market that we don't know about and try and explore it for success you know I've been in the renewables business for ten years delivering projects to 35 countries I got my boots on the ground I got my hands dirty doing this for 10 years now and I think the other part of that building this project and making it successful is the team that we've put together behind it we have an advisor who advises presidents dr. Michael Dorsey that's really important that's valuable that he understands the global marketplace the way he does the other one is Vinay Gupta who has been in blockchain since the 90s and has always wanted to work in the developing world with a block came distributed ledger technology that's really important I think I want to just double down and we amplify that point this is not a young man's game only exclusively it's such this markets attracting alpha entrepreneurs older veterans because as you said earlier it disrupts every vertical that's right so experience and mentorship bringing people together that can help that's right celebrate the disruption that's right driven by the young guys cool I love that but it's not like Zuckerberg made this one comment oh if you're not under the age of 30 then you don't know such delivery he got his ass handed to him on that but in this case this market is open and willing to learn and the disruptions the mission that's right and this team matters that's our experience the makeup of your board makeup of your advisors since a roll for everybody look experiences capital right it is its own virtual currency having been in all these countries having worked with presidents having worked in the 90s you know since the 90s and what that is valuable it's intangible but it is valuable dan I think we just invented a new category in the ico category an advisor tokens [Laughter] cottage industry believe tokens anyway but imagine if you could actually measure an advisor yeah the quality of adviser and the roles that they play absolutely as a token that's coming up next in our our next I see oh hey I really appreciate what you're doing I love how you work with your son father-son team you recognize the role of how the generations can shift together love it love your mission thank you thanks for sharing the news coverage here in Puerto Rico been here on the island all week getting the best stories the best people sharing them with you were open content that's the cube doing our part here at coin agenda for one day we're not gonna be you tomorrow go to Vegas just came back from watching unbound great stuff John let me give you the the URL if you don't mind no problem please if you want to go learn more about us impact PPI calm great job impact PBA calm is the cube live coverage here in Puerto Rico more after this short break

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It's International Women's Day 2018, there's stuff going on all around the world. We're up at the Accenture event at downtown San Fancisco. 400 people at the Hotel Nikko, lot of great panels, a lot of interesting conversations, a lot of good energy. Really about diversity and inclusion and not just cause it's the right thing to do, but it actually drives better business outcomes. Hm, how about that? So we're really excited to have our next guest, it's Vivienne Ming. She's a founder and chair of Socos Labs, Vivienne, welcome. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Yeah, so what is Socos Labs? >> So, Socos Labs is a think tank, it's my fifth company, because apparently, I can't seem to take a hint. And we are using artificial intelligence and neuroscience and economic theory to explore the future of what it means to be human. >> So who do you work with? Who are some of your clients? >> So we partner with enormous and wonderful groups around the world, for example, we're helping the Make A Wish Foundation help kids make better wishes, so we preserve what's meaningful to the child, but try and make it even more resonant with the community and the family that's around them. We've done wonderful work here with Accenture to look at what actually predicts the best career and life outcomes, and use that to actually help their employees. Not for Accenture's sake, but for the 425,000 people get to live better, richer lives. >> Right, right. That's interesting, cause that's really in line with that research that they released today, you know, what are these factors, I think they identified 40 that have a significant impact, and then a sub set of 14 within three buckets, it's very analytical, it's very center, it's great. >> I love numbers. I'm you know, by training, I'm a theoretical neuroscientist, which is a field where we study machine learning to better understand the brain, and we study the brain to come up with better machine learning. And then I started my first company in education, and to me, it's always about, not even just generating a bunch of numbers, but figuring out what actually makes a difference. What can you do? In education, in mental health, in inclusion, or just on the job, that will actually drive someone to a better life outcome. And one of those outcomes is they're more productive. >> Right, right. >> And they're more engaged on the job, more creative. You know, a big driver behind what I do is the incredible research on how many, it's called the Lost Einsteins Research. >> The Lost Einsteins. >> Lost Einsteins. >> So a famous economist, Raj Chetty at Stanford just released a new paper on this, showing that kids from high wealth backgrounds, are 10 times as likely as middle class peers to, for example, have patents or to have that big impact in people's lives. In our research, we find the same thing, but on the scales of orders of magnitude difference. What if every little kid in Oakland, or in Johannesburg, or in a rural village in India, had the same chances I had to invent and contribute. That's the world I want to live in. It's wonderful working with a group like Accenture, the Lego Foundation, the World Bank, that agree that that really matters. >> Right, it's just interesting, the democratization theme comes up over and over and over, and it's really not that complicated of a thing, right? If you give more people access to the data, more people access to the tools, it'd make it easier for them to manipulate the data, you're just going to get more innovation, right? It's not brain surgery. >> You get more people contributing to what we sometimes call the creative class, which you know, right now, probably is about 1.5% of the world population. Maybe 150, 200 million people, it sounds like a big number, but we're pushing eight billion. What would the world be like not if all of them, just imagine instead of 200 million people, it was 400. Or it was a billion people, what would the world be like if a billion people had the chance to really drive the good in our lives. So on my panel, I had the chance to throw out this line that I was quoted as saying once. "Ambitious men have been promising us rocket ships and AI, "and self-driving cars, "but if every little girl had been given the reins "to her own potential, we'd already have them". And we don't talk not just about every little girl, but every little kid. >> Right, right. >> That doesn't have the chance. You know, if even one percent of them had that chance, it would change the world. >> So you must be a happy camper in the world though, rendering today with all the massive compute, cloud delivery and compute and store it to anyone, I mean, all those resources asymptotically approaching zero cost and availability via cloud anywhere in this whole big data revolution, AI and machine learning. >> I love it. I mean, I wouldn't build AI, which that's, I'm a one trick pony in some sense. I do a lot of different work, but there's always machine learning under the hood for my companies. And my philanthropic work. But I think there is something as important as amazing a tool as it is, the connectivity, the automation, the artificial intelligence as a perhaps dominant tool of the future, is still just a tool. >> Jeff: Right. >> These are messy human problems, they will only ever have messy human solutions. But now, me as a scientist can say, "Here's a possible solution". And then me as an entrepreneur, or a philanthropist, can say, "Great. "Now with something like AI, we can actually share that "solution with everybody". >> Right. So give us a little bit of some surprise insights that came out of your panel, for which I was not able to attend, I was out here doing interviews. >> So you know, I would say the theme of our panel was about role modeling. >> So I was the weirdo outlier on the panel, so we had Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, we had the CFO of the Warriors, Jennifer was great, and we talked about simply being visible, and doing the work that we do in AI, in sports, in politics. That alone changes people's lives, which is a well studied phenomenon. The number one predictor of a kid from an underrepresented population, taking a scholarship, you know, believing they can be successful in politics is someone from their neighborhood went before them and showed them that it was possible. >> And seeing somebody that looks like them in that role. >> And so seeing a CFO of the Warriors, one of the great sports teams in the world today... >> Right. >> Is you know, this little Filipino woman, to put it in the way I think other people would perceive her and realize no, she does the numbers, she drives the company, and it's not despite who she is, it's because she brought something unique to the table that no one else had, plus the smarts. >> Jeff: Right. >> And made a difference to see Libby Schaaf get up there, with a lot of controversy right now, in the bigger political context. >> Jeff: Yes, yes. >> And show that you can make a difference. When people marginalize you, when I went out and raised money for my first company, I had venture capitalists literally pat me on the head and treat me like a little girl, and what I learned very quickly is there are always going to be some one that's going to see the truth in what I can bring. Go find those people, work with them, and then show the rest of the world what's possible. >> Right. It's pretty interesting, Robin Matlock is a CMO at VMware, we do a lot of stuff with VMware, and they put in a women in tech lunch thing a couple years ago, and we were talking, and I was interviewing her, she said, you know, I'd never really took the time to think about it. I was just working my tail off, and doing my thing, and you know, suddenly here I am, I'm CMO of this great company, and then it kind of took her a minute, and somebody kind of said, wait, you need to either take advantage of that opportunity in that platform to help others that maybe weren't quite so driven or are looking for those role models to say, "She looks kind of like me, "maybe I want to be the CMO of a big tech company". >> Well part of what's amazing you know, I get to work in education and work force, and part of what's amazing, whether you're talking about parents or the C Suite, or politicians is... A lot of that role modeling comes just from you being you. Go out, do good work in the world. But for some people, you know, there's an opportunity that doesn't exist for a lot of others. I'm a real outlier. I was not born a woman. I went through gender transition, it was a long time ago, and so for most people like me, being open about who you are means losing your job, it means not being taken seriously in any way, I mean, the change over the last couple of years has been astonishing. >> Jeff: It's been crazy, right? >> But part of my life is being able to be that person. I can take it. You know, my companies have made money, my inventions I've come up with have literally saved lives. >> Right. >> No one cares, in a sense, who I am anymore. That allows me to be visible. It allows me to just be very open about who I am and what I've experienced and been through, and then say to other people, it's not about me, it's not about whether I'm happy. It's about whether I'm serving my purpose. And I believe that I am, and does anything else about me really matter in this world? >> Right. It really seems, it's interesting, kind of sub text of diversity inclusion, not so much about your skin color or things that are easy to classify on your tax form, but it's really more just being your whole you. And no longer being suppressed to fit in a mold, not necessarily that's good or bad, but this is the way we did it, and thank you, we like you, we hired you, here you go, you know? Here's your big stack of rags, here's your desk, and we expect you to wear this to work. But that to me seems like the bigger story here that it's the whole person because there's so much value in the whole versus just concentrating on a slice. >> You know, it's really interesting, again, this is another area where I get to do hard numbers research, and when I do research, I'm talking looking at 122 million people. And building models to explain their career outcomes, and their life outcomes. And what we find here is one, everybody's biased. Everybody. I can't make an unbiased AI. There are no unbiased rats. The problem is when you refuse to acknowledge it. And you refuse to do something about it. And on the other side, to quote a friend of mine, "Everybody is covering for something. "Everybody has something in their life that they feel like "compromises them a little bit". So you know, even if we're talking about you know, the rich white straight guy, everyone's favorite punching bag. And I used to be one of them, so I try and take it easy. It is, the truth is, every one of them is covering for something, also. And if we can say again, it's not about me, which amazingly, actually allows you to be you. It's not about what other people think of me, it's not about whether they always agree with everything I say, or that I agree with what my boss says. It is about whether I'm making a difference in the world. And I've used that as my business strategy for the last 10 years of my life, and even when it seems like the worst strategy ever, you know, saying no to being chief scientist after you know, Fortune 50 company, one after another. Every time, my life got better. And my success grew. And it's not just an anecdote. Again, we see it in the data. So you build companies around principles like that. Who are you? Bring that person to work, and then you own the leadership challenge up, and I'm going to let that person flourish. And I'm going to let them tell me that I'm wrong. They got to prove it to me. But I'm going to let 'em tell it me, and give them the chance. You build a company like that, you know, what's clear to me is over the next 10 years, the defining market for global competition will be talent. Creative talent. And if you can't figure out how to tap the entire global work force, you cannot compete in that space. >> Right. The whole work force, and the whole person within that work force. It's really interesting, Jackie from Intel was on the panel that I got to talk, to see if she talked about you know, four really simple things, you know? Have impact. Undeniable, measurable impact, be visible, have data to back it up, and just of course, be tenacious, which is good career advice all the time, but you know. >> It's always good. >> Now when you know, cause before, a lot of people didn't have that option. Or they didn't feel they had the option to necessarily be purpose driven or be their old self, because then they get thrown out on the street and companies weren't as... Still, not that inclusive, right? >> Vivienne: I get it, believe me. >> You get it. So it is this new opportunity, but they have to because they can't get enough people. They can't get enough talent. It's really about ROI, this is not just to do the right thing. >> If even if you look at it from a selfish standpoint, there is the entire rest of the professional world competing for that traditional pipeline to get into the company. So being different, being you, it's a-- I mean, forgive me for putting it this way, but it's a marketing strategy, right? This is how you stand out from everyone else. One of my companies, we built this giant database of people all over the world, to predict how good people were at their job. And our goal was to take bias out of the hiring process. And when I was a chief scientist of that company, every time I gave a talk in public, 50 people would come up afterwards and say, "What should I do to get a better job?" And what they really meant was, what should I write on my resume, you know, how should I position myself, what's the next hot skill? >> Right. >> And my advice, which I meant genuinely, even though I don't think they always took it as such, was do good work and share it with the world. Not just my personal experience. We see it again and again in these massive data sets. The people that have the exceptional careers are the ones that just went out there and did something because it needed to get done. Maybe they did it inside their last job, maybe they did it personally as a side project, or they did a start up, or philanthropy. Whatever it was they did it, and they did it with passion. And that got noticed. So you know, again, just sort of selfishly, why compete with the other 150 million people looking for that same desirable job when the person that you are, I know it's terrifying, it is terrifying to put yourself out there. But the person you are is what you are better at than everyone else in the world. Be that person. That is your route to the best job you can possibly get. >> By rule, right? You're the best you you can be, but by rule, you're not as good at being somebody else. >> It sounds like a corny line, but the science backs it up. >> That's great. All right Vivienne, I could go on for a very long time, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. I really enjoyed the conversation. >> It was a lot of fun. >> And thanks for spending a few minutes with us. All right, she's Vivienne, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from the Accenture Women in Tech event in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, It's The Cube. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco, everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Scott Dietzen is here, the CEO of Pure Storage, hot off the keynote. Scott, great to see you. >> Great to be back on The Cube. >> So I love the nickname. I grew up in a town where everybody had a nickname. We got Dietz, we got Hat, we got Danzig, we got Kicks, I dunno. You can call me V. He's, I guess, just S-tu. >> V works. >> I mean, that's it, you know. So, again, great show here, I love the venue. How'd you guys pick this place? >> So I can't say I was involved in the choice and this place has a really illustrious history. I mean, it goes back to the 1800's. And actually they manufactured steel here during World War II. I think they were turning out two battleships a week. But another piece of history that maybe isn't as nice is this is the last time this venue's going to be used. So it is scheduled to be brought down to make way for new condos I guess. So we really wanted to celebrate the venue and its history. It's just a great industrial feel to it. >> And they're tearing down a bunch, the new Warriors facility is going to be in Dogpatch, right? >> Yes, and so, yeah, we can't feel too bad about it because we are indeed celebrating the Warriors success. >> You needed a bigger house for all those trophies. (Scott laughs) >> I think they're poised to have a really good run. But I think Cleveland's going to be there contending with them for the next several years to come and it's really exciting. >> Well, hopefully my Celtics will get there in the next four or five years with some draft picks. So, I want to talk about sort of the ascendancy of Pure. When we first met you, you had a pretty simple message. It was like, look, we think we can deliver way better performance for lower cost. I mean, boom. It wasn't the same cost. I remember you were very forced. I said, "About the same, right?" You said, "No, no, lower. "We have the best data reduction technology "in the business." I remember talking to you at Oracle OpenWorld about that. >> Yep. >> And that's fundamentally what happened. And you attacked the legacy and stall base. And you won that game. But you're not resting on that, you've got to take it now to a next level. Talk about that next level. Well, talk about where you came from and then the next level of data and beyond just sort of public cloud. >> You guys have talked about this too, right. If you look at the curb of Moore's law. I mean, mechanical disk doesn't follow Moore's law. And so the cost reduction curbs, we did the math and we said, look, we're going to be able to drive down the cost of storage. We're going to be able to drive up the density and power cooling space. Simplicititly you can dramatically reduce the cost of storage. But Flash is going to help us, right? You know, we've gotten to the point where Flash is, you know, even with a tighter component market, it's cheaper to buy raw than fast disks. And way cheaper to deploy. World Bank talked about saving millions of dollars by deploying Pure Storage and getting a 5x performance boost at the same time. So if we can help customers pay for their storage both in terms of cost savings as well as new business value, that's a great outcome. >> Wikibon's been on the right side of that prediction since early on. >> That's very true, I've used your data. >> We're very aggressive about that. But the thing that excited us most was the second thing you said. Which was the business impact, the business value. So I want to come back a little bit and get a history. It used to be I would buy EMC for block and NetApp for file. You're sort of attacking that premise. Talk about that. >> Well, so we started in the performance end of the storage market, which is dominated by block. Because we knew that one was going to be the first to shift to all Flash. And we've already seen that play out. I mean, even the legacy vendors and their install base are inclined to use Flash. Cause it's actually cheaper than 15k disk to put in. That tech is about to hit a wall because as SSD's get bigger. You know, we've grown SSD's almost 400 fold since Pure got started. But we haven't changed the pipe, right? So if you make a vessel 400 times larger but you have the same pipe going in and out of it you're losing a lot of access to data. This is this new sea change to new protocols where we're shedding all of the disk. And I think the second big change is we're bringing the same wave to big data. Right, so we've been playing in the block market now we're playing in the file and object market. Because big data workloads, especially those that require deep learning, you just need massively parallel storage. And you're never going to be able to get that with, you know, 20-plus year old storage designs. >> So, Scott, when you talk to your customers, especially when you're talking to C-suite, how does storage fit into that discussion? I loved in the keynote, there's a lot of discussion of, you know, next generation applications. Everything from the, you know, buzzwords of the AI and ML type pieces out there. But, you know, what are the big challenges that your customer's facing? And how much is it a storage discussion? How much is it kind of a digital transformation? >> Yeah, I think we see all of it. We'll talk to customers that find that they can't innovate quickly, right? And they want to get so much more value from their data. One of the studies we cited in the keynote today was 80% of companies think they can make 20% more on the top line if they can just get insights out of their current data. I mean, that's a staggering statistic. 20% top line for every company if they could just get more out of their data. We want to make that possible. Their constrained with very expensive legacy technologies. That they simply can't give them the access to the data. They don't have the performance to mind those insights. And the infrastructure is so cumbersome, they just can't evolve and move their business forward. And so providing that recipe, you know, giving customers the ability to get dramatically more value out of their data and do it for lower cost is working. >> Yeah, and it's been interesting to watch kind of the data center to the cloud, and now cloud to the edge. And you've got solutions that are spanning across them. How do you see that maturing in really the vision to expand where Pure fits in the discussion. >> So, you know, from early on we targeted the cloud market. Because we knew that this is where the future lies, right? Even traditional enterprises still want all the benefits of the cloud inside of their own icy environments. >> And when you say cloud, you're meaning SaaS providers, service providers, as well as, you know? >> Yeah. We talk about the model that the big three are using. But, you know, this is very popular in many other clouds. The world is not moving to three data centers. Companies like Apple and Facebook are very committed to their own data center investment. And we seek to be a supplier to that consumer internet. The softwares of service and infrastructures service of providers. Because that's where the data center's going. But, you know, what we've seen recently with the proliferation of internet of things in sensor data is customers are just growing these huge data footprints that are just too big to move across public networks. So we talked about, in the keynote, in three years only one, out of every 20 bites that's generated, can fit on the internet that year. >> 2.5 out of 50, I think was the number. >> 2.5 out of 50 zettabytes. 50 zettabytes will be produced that year but only 2.5 is going to be transferred across the internet for the entire year. So we've got to get better as an industry at helping customers capture that data where it's generated, right? We call that edge. Sometimes it'll be on the devices, or it'll be in data centers that are close to the edge. And they've got to mine insights from it right there. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> One of the exciting demos we're showing here is actually AI co-processing with the public cloud. So we've got an edge data center that we're running deep learning in. But then we're selecting particular data sets through the deep learning to transfer it up to the public cloud for more machine learning. >> Those key nuggets, the needles maybe you transfer. Cause otherwise it's too expensive to transfer all the data. >> You can't transfer all of it. So if it's a self-driving car, you know, if I'm just routinely driving along, no big deal, you keep the data. But if I slam on the breaks because a dog's in the crosswalk that's the thing you want to do the training on. >> That can't be an asynchronous operation, right? So, okay, you're already getting the hook, I can't believe it, he just got here. (Scott laughs) Cube is a comfortable place but we got to throw some hard questions at you. So >> Please. >> Stu asked me the other day, or, actually, today, "Who's going to reach a billion dollars first?" And you don't have to predict, you can leave that to us. "Nutanix or Pure?" Okay, so talk about HCI. You made some comments up on stage about hyper-converged. Said that, you know, it's good for its own specific use cases. What's your point of view on that? >> So first of all, Nutanix has built a great business. >> Dave: Awesome, yeah, sure. >> We're absolutely fans. I will say, in the markets, those two new markets that we're playing in, in the cloud market and in the next gen applications and deep learning, we don't see hyper-converged infrastructure. We do see hyper-converged in business and enterprises. But it's usually the smaller scale deployments. The reason is, at scale, you don't want to collocate applications, data, and storage all in a single tier. It limits the ability to easily scale independently. You know, if you need more capacity you need more application compute versus data compute. You want to be able to flex those independently. Which is why all the big clouds and enterprise data centers run converged rather than hyper-converged. But the change that's coming is fast networks are changing this even more. So what I believes going to turn hyper-converged inside out is it's now more efficient to access remote storage than it is the same storage on your local chassis. And that's because we're offloading compute to the server net cards on there. So these new protocols NVMe over fabrics are actually making the network finally really the computer. There's no longer a chassis that's even meaningful. >> Big fan of that infrastructure and NVMe over fabric. Okay, next tough question is the narrative, from the big guy, EMC in particular, Pure is small, they're losing money. And your return narrative is tell EMC they're large, they're slow, they're outdated and confused. Okay, we love that, you know, it gets a little juices flowing. But here's my question. A lot of customers are large and slow and outdated and confused. So how do you get that fat middle to move faster and become a tailwind for you guys? >> So I think it's happening. I mean, customers just want technology to be made easily. I mean, one of the disrupters that's really helped is the AWS user experience, right? AWS has reset the bar for IT everywhere because people are like, why am I paying for consultants to visit my data center and take care of this mainframe or client server error technology that used to be so expensive. You know, consultants coming along with it. And permanently staying with it was okay. That's not okay, right? The world needs to move to self-driving infrastructure and they need radically better performance if they're going to use these new techniques. And so I think the key motivation is customers need to get more value from their data and they need to drive down costs. And we're in the sweet spot of being able to provide it. And these 20-plus year old designs can't. There's no way. >> So it's inevitable is really what I'm taking away from that. And you've got a lead that you can sustain in your view. >> You know, it's been very interesting to watch our competitors talk about the new FlashArray//X. With all NVMe and the new FlashBlade. They've said these are science projects that won't be real for three years. And, yet, we've won one of the biggest AI platforms in the world. You know, 25% or more of our business is coming from cloud customers. So, you know, from where we sit, things are going exactly as we'd hoped. >> Love it, we're talking about the edge, you're pushing the envelope at the edge. Alright, Scott, we'll give you the last word. I know you're super busy, but give us the wrap up. The bumper sticker on Accelerate 2017. >> Oh, it's such a phenomenal group coming together to talk about innovation. We've already shipped the hardware form factors this year, with our new FlashArray and the new FlashBlade. But the thing that I'm so excited about is we've got more than two years of software innovation teed up that we've been very quite about. So when you can bring two years of innovation and pack it into six months like we have this year, it makes things really exciting. >> Well congratulations on getting to this point. We're really excited about the future. Scott Dietz Dietzen, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great to see you again. >> Thank you, always good to be on the cube. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Pure Accelerate, live from San Fancisco. We'll be right back. (soft electronic music)