>>Hi everyone. Welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So, very interesting at pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple, is also really sustainable and the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you see despite so many people saying sustainability huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that, that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals, and that it, of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those CO was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a tip the, to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability and IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. And wanna dig in a little bit to peers, ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, I, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as peer storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time. >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right in, in your entire IT port portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability, your cost, et cetera. And really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and it left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had, demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the, the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>Pleasure speaking with you as well. We wanna thank you so much for watching. This is Pure Storage, the path to sustainable it. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Greetings from Las Vegas, everyone. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Vellante. We are live at HPE Discover 2022 with about 8,000 folks here at The Sands Expo Convention Center. First HPE Discover in three years, everyone jammed in that keynote room, it was standing in only. Dave and I have a couple of exciting guests we're proud to introduce you to. Please, welcome back to "theCUBE," John Schultz, the EVP and general counsel of HPE. Great to have you back here. And Kay Firth-Butterfield, the head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum. Kay, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Fantastic. >> John, we were saying that. >> Fantastic. >> Last time you were on "theCUBE", it was Cube Virtual. Now, here we are back. A lot of news this morning, a lot's going on. The Edge to Cloud Conferences is the theme this year. In today's Edge to Cloud world, so much data being generated at the edge, it's just going to keep proliferating. AI plays a key role in helping to synthesize that, analyze large volumes of data. Can you start by talking about the differences of the two? The synergies, what you see? >> Yeah. Absolutely. And again, it is great to be back with the two of you, and great to be with Kay, who is a leading light in the world of AI, and particularly, AI responsibility. And so, we're going to talk a little bit about that. But really, this synergistic effect between data and AI, is as tight as they come. Really, data is just the raw materials by which we drive actionable insight. And at the end of the day, it's really about insights, and that speed to insight to make the difference. AI is really what is powering our ability to take vast amounts of data. Amounts of data that we'd never conceived of, being able to process before and bring it together into actionable insights. And it's simplest form, right? AI is simply making computers do what humans used to do, but the power of computing, what you heard about frontier on the main stage today, allows us to use technology to solve problems so complex that it would take humans millions of years to do it. So, this relationship between data and AI, it's incredibly tight. You need the right raw materials. You need the right engine, that is the AI, and then you will generate insights that could really change the world. >> So, Kay, there's a data point from the World Economic Forum which really caught my attention. It says the 15.7 billion of GDP growth is going to be a result of AI by 2030, 15.7 billion added. That includes the dilutive effects where we're replacing humans with machines. What is driving this in this incremental growth? >> Well, I think obviously, it's the access to the huge amounts of data that John pointed out. But one of the things that we have to remember about, AI is that actually, AI is pretty dumb unless you give it nice, clean, organized data. And so, it's not just all data, but it's data that has been through a process that enables the AI to gain insights from it. And so, what is it? It's the compute power, the ever increasing compute power. So, in the past, we would never have thought that we could use some of the new things that we're seeing in machine learning, so even deep learning. It's only been about for a small length of time, but it's really with the compute power, with the amount of data, being able to put AI on steroids, for luck of a better analogy. And I think it's also that we are now in business, and society, being able to see some of the benefits that can be generated from AI. Listening to Oakridge talk about the medical science advances that we can create for human beings, that's extraordinary. But we're also seeing that across business. >> That's why I was going to add. As impressive as those economic figures are in terms of what value it could add from a pure financial perspective? It's really the problems that could be solved. If you think about some of the things that happened in the pandemic, and what virtual experience allowed with a phone or with a tablet to check in with a doctor who was going to curate your COVID test, right? When they invented the iPhone, nobody thought that was going to be the use. AI has that same promise, but really on a macro global scale, some of the biggest problems we're trying to solve. So, huge opportunity, but as we're going to talk about a little later, huge risk for it to be misused if it's not guided and aimed in the right direction. >> Absolutely. >> That's okay. Maybe talk about that? >> Well, I was just going to come back about some of the benefits. California has been over the last 10 years trying to reduce emissions. One wildfire, absolutely wiped out all that good work over 10 years. But with AI, we've been developing an application that allows us to say, "Tomorrow, at this location, you will have a wildfire. So, please send your services to that location." That's the power of artificial intelligence to really help with things like climate change. >> Absolutely. >> Is that a probability model that's running somewhere? >> Yeah. Absolutely >> So, I wanted to ask you, but a lot of AI today, is modeling that's done, and the edge, you mentioned the iPhone, with all this power and new processors. AI inferencing at the edge in real time making real time decisions. So, one example is predicting, the other is there's actually something going on in this place. What do you see there? >> Yeah, so, I mean, yes we are using a predictive tool to ingest the data on weather, and all these other factors in order to say, "Please put your services here tomorrow at this time." But maybe you want to talk about the next edge. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think it's not just grabbing the data to do some predictive modeling. It's now creating that end-to-end value chain where the actions are being taken in real time based on the information that's being processed, especially out at the edge. So, you're ending up, not just with predictive modeling, but it's actually transferring into actual action on the ground that's happening... You know, we like to say automagically. So, to the point where you can be making real time changes based on information that continues to make you smarter and smarter. So, it's not just a group of people taking the inputs out of a model and figuring out, okay now what am I going to do with it? The system end-to-end, allows it to happen in a way that drives a time to value that is beyond anything we've seen in the pas- >> In every industry? >> In every industry. >> Absolutely, and that's something we learned during the pandemic, one of the many things. Access to real time data to actually glean those insights that can be acted on, is no longer a nice to have. >> No. >> For companies in any industry they've got to have that now, they've got to use it as their competitive advantage. Where do you see when you're talking with customers, John? Where are they in that capability and leveraging AI on steroids, as I said? >> Yeah. I think it varies. I mean, certainly I think as you look in the medical field, et cetera, I mean, I think they've been very comfortable, and that continues to up. The use cases are so numerous there, that in some ways we've only scratched the surface, I think. But there's a high degree of acceptance, and people see the promise. Manufacturing's another area where automation and relying on some form of what used to be kind of analog intelligence, people are very comfortable with. I would say candidly, I would say the public sector and government is the furthest behind. It may be used for intelligence purposes, and things like that, but in terms of advancing overall, the common good, I think we're trailing behind there. So, that's why things like the partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and some of the other things we're seeing. That's why organizations like the World Economic Forum are so important, because we've got to make sure that this isn't just a private sector piece, It's not just about commercialization, and finding that next cost savings. It really should be about, how do you solve the world's biggest problems and do in a way that's smarter than we've ever been able to do it before? >> It's interesting, you say public sectors is behind because in some respects, they're really advanced, but they're not sharing that because it's secretive. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> That's very fair. >> Yeah. So, Kay, the other interesting stat, was that by 2023 this is like next year, 6.8 trillion will be spent on digital transformation. So, there's this intersection of data. I mean, to me, digital is data. But a lot of it was sort of, we always talk about the acceleration 'cause of the pandemic. If you weren't a digital business you were out of business, and people sort of rushed, I call it the force-march to digital. And now, are people stepping back and saying, "Okay, what can we actually do?" And maybe being more planful? Maybe you could talk about the sort of that roadmap? >> Sure. I think that that's true. And whilst I agree with John, we also see a lot of small... A lot of companies that are really only at proof of value for AI at the moment. So, we need to ensure that everybody, we take everybody, not just the governments, but everybody with us. And one of the things I'm often asked, is if you're a small or medium-sized enterprise, how can you begin to use AI at scale? And I think that's one of the exciting things about building a platform. >> That's right. >> And enabling people to use that. I think that there is also, the fact that we need to take everybody with us on this adventure because AI is so important. And it's not just important in the way it's currently being used. But if we think about these new frontier technologies like Metaverse, for example. What's the Metaverse except an application of AI? But if we don't take everybody on the journey now, then when we are using applications in the Metaverse, or building applications in the Metaverse what happens at that point? >> Think about if only certain groups of people or certain companies had access to wifi, or had access to cellular, or had access to a phone, right? The advantage and the inequality would be manifest, right? We have to think of AI and super computing in the same way, because they are going to be these raw ingredients that are going to drive the future. And if they are not, if there isn't some level of AI equality, I think the potential negative consequences of that, are incredibly high, especially in the developing world. >> Talk about it from a responsibility perspective? Getting everybody on board is challenging from a cultural standpoint, but organizations have to do it as you both articulated. But then every time we talk about AI, we've got to talk about it's used responsibly. Kay, what are your thoughts there? What are you seeing out in the field? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I started working in this in about 2014 when there were maybe a handful of us. What's exciting for me, is that now you hear it on people's lips, much more. But we still got a long way to go. We still got that understanding to happen in companies that although you might, for example, be a drug discovery company, you are probably using AI not just in drug discovery but in a number of backroom operations such as human resources, for example. We know the use of AI and human resources is very problematic. And is about to be legislated against, or at least be set up as a high risk problem use of AI by the E.U. So, across the E.U, we know what happened with GDPR that it became something that lots and lots of countries used, and we expect the AI Act to also become used in that way. So, what you need, is you need not only for companies to understand that they are gradually becoming AI companies, but also that as part of that transformation, it's taking your workers with you. It's helping them understand that AI won't actually take their jobs, it will merely help them with reskilling or working better in what they do. And they think it's also in actually helping the board to understand. We know lots of boards that don't have any clue about AI. And then, the whole of the C-suite and the trickle all down, and understanding that at the end, you've got tools, you've got data, and you've got people, and they all need to be working together to create that functional, responsible AI layer. >> When we think about it, really, when we think about responsible AI, really think about at least three pillars, right? The first off, is that privacy aspect. It's really that data ingestion part, which is respecting the privacy of the individuals, and making sure that you're collecting only the data you should be collecting to feed into your AI mechanism, right? The second, is that inclusivity and equality aspect. We've got to make sure that the actions that are coming out, the insights were generate, driving, really are inclusive. And that goes back to the right data sets. It goes back to the integrity in the algorithm. And then, you need to make sure that your AI is both human and humane. We have to make sure we don't take that human factor out and lose that connection to what really creates our shared humanity. Some of that's transparency, et cetera. I think all of those sound great. We've had some really interesting discussions about in practice, how challenging that's going to be, given the sophistication of this technology. >> When you say transparency, you're talking about the machine made a decision. I have to see how, understand how the machine made a decision. >> Algorithmic transparency. Go ahead. >> Algorithmic transparency. And the United States is actually at the moment considering something which is called the Algorithmic Accountability Act. And so, there is a movement to particularly where somebody's livelihood is affected. Say, for example, whether you get a job, and it was the algorithm that did the pre-selection in the human resources area. So, did you get a job? No, you didn't get that job. Why didn't you get that job? Why did the algorithm- >> A mortgage would be another? >> A mortgage would be another thing. And John was talking about the data, and the way that the algorithms are created. And I think, one great example, is lots of algorithms are currently created by young men under 20. They are not necessarily representative of your target audience for that algorithm. And unless you create some diversity around that group of developers, you're going to create a product that's less than optimal. So, responsible AI, isn't just about being responsible and having a social conscience, and doing things, but in a human-centered way, it's also about your bottom line as well. >> It took us a long time to recognize the kind of the shared interest we have in climate change. And the fact that the things that are happening one part of the world, can't be divorced from the impact across the the globe. When you think about AI, and the ability to create algorithms, and engage in insights, that could happen in one part of the world, and then be transferred out, not withstanding the fact, that most other countries have said, "We wouldn't do it this way, or we would require accountability. You can see the risk." It's what we call the race to the bottom. If you think about some of the things that have happened over the time in the industrial world. Often, businesses flock to those places with the least amount of safeguards that allow them to go the fastest, regardless of the collateral damage. I think we feel that same risk exists today with AI. >> So, much more we could talk about, guys, unfortunately, we are out of time. But it's so amazing to hear where we are with AI, where companies need to be. And it's the tip of the iceberg. You're very exciting. >> Yes. >> Kay and John, thank you so much for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a pleasure. >> We want to thank you for watching this segment. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante for our guests. We are live at HPE Discover '22. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at the Fortinet Championship, the PGA Tour Kickoff to the 2021-2022 FedEx Regular Season Cup. And this is so exciting to be here with Fortinet, to be at an in-person event, and to be talking about a very important topic of cybersecurity. One of our alumni is back with me, Sandra Wheatley is here, the SVP of Marketing, Threat Intelligence, and Influencer Communications at Fortinet. Sandra, it's great to see you. >> You too, Lisa. Thank you for having me. >> This is a great event. >> Yeah, it's awesome, yeah. >> Great to be outdoors, great to see people again, and great for Fortinet for being one of the first to come back to in-person events. One of the things I would love to understand is here we are at the PGA tour, what's the relationship with Fortinet and the PGA Tour? >> Well, first of all, I think the PGA tour is an amazing brand. You just have to look around here and it's extremely exciting, but beyond the brand, there's a lot of synergies between the PGA tour and Fortinet CSR initiatives, particularly around STEM, diversity inclusion, as well as veterans rescaling. And so some of the proceeds from the Fortinet Championship will go to benefit local nonprofits and the local community. So that's something we're very excited about overall. >> Lisa: Is this a new partnership? >> It is a new partnership and we will be the Fortinet Championship sponsor for about the next five years. So we're looking forward to developing this partnership and this relationship, and benefiting a lot of nonprofits in the future. >> Excellent, that's a great cause. One of the things, when you and I last saw each other by Zoom earlier in the summer, we were talking about the cybersecurity skills gap. And it's in its fifth consecutive year, and you had said some good news on the front was that data show that instead of needing four million professionals to fill that gap, it's down to three, and now there's even better news coming from Fortinet. Talk to me about the pledge that you just announced to train one million people in the next five years. >> Absolutely, we're very excited about this. You know, Fortinet has been focused on reducing the skills gap for many years now. It continues to be one of the biggest issues for cybersecurity leaders if you think about it. You know, we still need about 3.1 million professionals to come into the industry. We have made progress, but the need is growing at about 400,000 a year. So it's something that public and private partnerships need to tackle. So last week we did announce that we are committed to training a million professionals over the next five years. We're very excited about that. We're tackling this problem in many, many ways. And this really helps our customers and our partners. If you really think about it, in addition to the lack of skills, they're really tackling cybersecurity surface that's constantly changing. In our most recent FortiGuard's threat report, we saw that ransomware alone went up 10 times over the last year. So it's something that we all have to focus on going forward. And this is our way of helping the industry overall. >> It's a huge opportunity. I had the opportunity several times to speak with Derek Manky and John Maddison over the summer, and just looking at what happened in the first half, the threat landscape, we spoke last year, looking at the second half, and ransomware as a service, the amount of money that's involved in that. The fact that we are in this, as Fortinet says, this work from anywhere environment, which is probably going to be somewhat persistent with the attack surface expanding, devices on corporate networks out of the home, there's a huge opportunity for people to get educated, trained, and have a great job in cybersecurity. >> Absolutely, I like to say there's no job security like cybersecurity, and it is. I mean, I've only been in this industry about, I'm coming up on six years, and it's definitely the most dynamic industry of all of the IT areas that I've worked in. The opportunities are endless, which is why it's a little bit frustrating to see this big gap in skills, particularly around the area of women and minorities. Women make up about 20%, and minorities are even less, maybe about 3%. And so this is a huge focus of ours. And so through our Training Advancement Agenda, our TAA initiative, we have several different pillars to attack this problem. And at the core of that is our Network Security Expert Training or NSC training and certification program. We made that freely available to everybody at the beginning of COVID. It was so successful, at one point we we're seeing someone register every five minutes. And that was so successful, we extended that indefinitely. And so to date, we've had about almost 700,000 certifications. So it's just an amazing program. The other pillars are Security Academy Program, where we partner with nonprofits and academia to train young students. And we have something like 419 academies in 88 countries. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then the other area that's very important to us is our Veterans Program. You know, we have about 250,000 veterans every year, transfer out of the service, looking for other jobs in the private sector. And so not only do we provide our training free, but we do resume building, mentoring, all of these types of initiatives. And we've trained about 2,000 veterans and spouses, and about 350 of those have successfully got jobs. So that's something we'll continue to focus on. >> That's such a great effort. As the daughter of a Vietnam combat veteran, that really just hits me right in the heart. But it's something that you guys have been dedicated for. This isn't something new, this isn't something that is coming out of a result of the recent executive order from the Biden administration. Fortinet has been focused on training and helping to close that gap for a while. >> That's exactly true. While we made the commitment to train a million people on the heels of the Biden administration at Cybersecurity Summit about two weeks ago, we have been focused on this for many years. And actually, a lot of the global companies that were part of that summit happened to be partners on this initiative with us. For example, we work with the World Economic Forum, IBM, and Salesforce offer our NSC training on their training platforms. And this is an area that we think it's really important and we'll continue to partner with larger organizations over time. We're also working with a lot of universities, both in the Bay Area, local like Berkeley, and Stanford and others to train more people. So it's definitely a big commitment for us and has been for many years. >> It'll be exciting to see over the next few years, the results of this program, which I'm sure will be successful. Talk to me a little bit about this event here. Fortinet is 100% partner driven company, more than 300 or so partners and customers here. Tell me a little bit about what some of the interesting topics are that are going to be discussed today. >> Sure, yeah, so we're delighted to bring our partners and customers together. They will be discussing some of the latest innovations in cybersecurity, as well as some of the challenges and opportunities. We are seeing, you know, during COVID we saw a lot of change with regards to cybersecurity, especially with remote working. So we'll discuss our partnership with LYNX that we just announced. We'll also be talking about some of the emerging technologies like CTNA, 5G, SASE, cloud, and really understanding how we can best help protect our customers and our partners. So it's very exciting. In addition to our Technology Summit, we have a technology exhibition here with many of our big sponsors and partners. So it's definitely going to be a lot of dynamic conversation over the next few days. >> We've seen so much change in the last year and a half. That's just an understatement. But one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago, and we're all feeling this is is when we all had to shift to work from home. And here we are using corporate devices on home networks. We're using more devices, the edge is expanding, and that became a huge security challenge for enterprises to figure out how do we secure this. Because for some percentage, and I think John Maddison mentioned a few months ago to me, at least 25% will probably stay remote. Enterprises have to figure out how to keep their data secure as people are often the weakest link. Tell me about what you guys announced with LYNX that will help facilitate that. >> Well, we're announcing an enterprise grade security offering for people who are working remotely. And the nice thing about this offering is it's very easy to set up and implement, so consumers and others can easily set this up. It also provides a dashboard for the enterprise, IT organization to, they can see who's on the network, devices, everything else. So this should really help because we did see a big increase in attacks, really targeting remote workers. As cyber criminals try to use their home as a foothold into the enterprise. So we're very excited about this partnership, and definitely see big demand for this going forward. >> Well, can you tell me about the go-to market for that and where can enterprises and people get it? >> Well, we're still working through that. I know you'll talk with John later on, he'll have more details on that. But definitely, we'll be targeting both of our different sets of customers and the channel for this. And I definitely think this is something that will, it's something that enterprises are definitely looking for, and there'll be more to come on this over the next few months. >> It's so needed. The threat landscape just exploded last year, and it's in a- >> Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. >> Suddenly your home. Maybe your kids are home, your spouse is working, you're distracted, ransomware, phishing emails, so legitimate. >> Sandra: They do. >> Lisa: But the need for what you're doing with LYNX is absolutely essential these days. >> Sandra: Yeah, these threats are so sophisticated. They're really difficult. And the other thing we did in addition to LYNX was as we got into COVID, we saw that, or the most successful organizations were really using this as an opportunity to invest for the longterm in cybersecurity. We also saw that, and this continues to be the case that, the insider threat continues to be one of the biggest challenges, where an employee will accidentally hit on a phishing email. So we did roll out an infosec awareness training, and we made that free for all of our customers and partners. So we're trying to do everything we can to really help our customers through this demanding time. >> Lisa: Right, what are some of the feedback that you're hearing from customers? I'm sure they're very appreciative of the education, the training, the focus effort from Fortinet. >> Sandra: Absolutely, it's definitely huge. And more and more we're seeing partners who want to work with us and collaborate with us on these initiatives. We've had a really positive response from some of the companies that I mentioned earlier, some of the big global names. And we're very excited about that. So we feel like we have some key initiatives on pillars, and we'll continue to expand on those and bring more partners to work with us over time. >> Lisa: Expansion as the business is growing amazingly well. Tell me a little bit about that. >> Sandra: Yeah, I think, in our last quarter we announced our largest billings growth for many, many years. And so, Fortinet, we're been very fortunate over the last few years, has continued to grow faster than the market. We now have half a million customers, and I think our platform approach to security is really being adopted heavily. And we continue to see a lot of momentum, especially around our solutions like SD-WAN. I think we're the only vendor who provides security in SD-WAN appliance. And so that's been a key differentiator for us. The other thing that's increasingly important, especially with the rollout of 5G is performance. And, you know, Fortinet, from the very beginning, created its own customized ASX or SPU, which really provides the best performance in security compute ratings in the industry. So all of this is really helping us with our growth, and we're very excited about the opportunities ahead. >> Lisa: And last question, on that front, what are some of the things that you're excited about as we wrap up 2021 calendar year and go into 2022? >> Sandra: Well, this been very exciting year for Fortinet. And I think we're in a great position to take advantage of many of the different growth areas we're seeing in this new and changing space. And, you know, we're all on board and ready to take advantage of those opportunities, and really fire ahead. >> Lisa: Fire ahead, I like that. Sandra, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about the commitment, the long standing commitment that Fortinet has to training everybody from all ages, academia, veterans, to help close that cybersecurity skills gap. And such an interesting time that we've had. There's so much opportunity, and it's great to see how committed you are to helping provide those opportunities to people of all ages, races, you name it. >> Sandra: Thank you, Lisa, I really appreciate it. >> Lisa: Ah, likewise. For Sandra Wheatley, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube at the Fortinet Championship Security Summit. (soft bright music)

>> Welcome to this Cube Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Derek Manky next, the Chief Security Insights and Global Threat Alliances at Fortiguard Labs. Derek, welcome back to the program. >> Hey, it's great to be here again. A lot of stuff's happened since we last talked. >> So Derek, one of the things that was really surprising from this year's Global Threat Landscape Report is a 10, more than 10x increase in ransomware. What's going on? What have you guys seen? >> Yeah so this is massive. We're talking over a thousand percent over a 10x increase. This has been building Lisa, So this has been building since December of 2020. Up until then we saw relatively low high watermark with ransomware. It had taken a hiatus really because cyber criminals were going after COVID-19 lawyers and doing some other things at the time. But we did see a seven fold increase in December, 2020. That has absolutely continued this year into a momentum up until today, it continues to build, never subsided. Now it's built to this monster, you know, almost 11 times increase from, from what we saw back last December. And the reason, what's fueling this is a new verticals that cyber criminals are targeting. We've seen the usual suspects like telecommunication, government in position one and two. But new verticals that have risen up into this third and fourth position following are MSSP, and this is on the heels of the Kaseya attack of course, that happened in 2021, as well as operational technology. There's actually four segments, there's transportation, automotive, manufacturing, and then of course, energy and utility, all subsequent to each other. So there's a huge focus now on, OT and MSSP for cyber criminals. >> One of the things that we saw last year this time, was that attackers had shifted their focus away from enterprise infrastructure devices, to home networks and consumer grade products. And now it looks like they're focusing on both. Are you seeing that? >> Yes, absolutely. In two ways, so first of all, again, this is a kill chain that we talk about. They have to get a foothold into the infrastructure, and then they can load things like ransomware on there. They can little things like information stealers as an example. The way they do that is through botnets. And what we reported in this in the first half of 2021 is that Mirai, which is about a two to three-year old botnet now is number one by far, it was the most prevalent botnet we've seen. Of course, the thing about Mirai is that it's an IOT based botnet. So it sits on devices, sitting inside consumer networks as an example, or home networks, right. And that can be a big problem. So that's the targets that cyber criminals are using. The other thing that we saw that was interesting was that one in four organizations detected malvertising. And so what that means Lisa, is that cyber criminals are shifting their tactics from going just from cloud-based or centralized email phishing campaigns to web born threats, right. So they're infecting sites, waterhole attacks, where, you know, people will go to read their daily updates as an example of things that they do as part of their habits. They're getting sent links to these sites that when they go to it, it's actually installing those botnets onto those systems, so they can get a foothold. We've also seen scare tactics, right. So they're doing new social engineering lures, pretending to be human resource departments. IT staff and personnel, as an example, with popups through the web browser that look like these people to fill out different forms and ultimately get infected on home devices. >> Well, the home device use is proliferate. It continues because we are still in this work from home, work from anywhere environment. Is that, you think a big factor in this increase from 7x to nearly 11x? >> It is a factor, absolutely. Yeah, like I said, it's also, it's a hybrid of sorts. So a lot of that activity is going to the MSSP angle, like I said to the OT. And to those new verticals, which by the way, are actually even larger than traditional targets in the past, like finance and banking, is actually lower than that as an example. So yeah, we are seeing a shift to that. And like I said, that's, further backed up from what we're seeing on with the, the botnet activity specifically with Mirai too. >> Are you seeing anything in terms of the ferocity, we know that the volume is increasing, are they becoming more ferocious, these attacks? >> Yeah, there is a lot of aggression out there, certainly from, from cyber criminals. And I would say that the velocity is increasing, but the amount, if you look at the cyber criminal ecosystem, the stakeholders, right, that is increasing, it's not just one or two campaigns that we're seeing. Again, we're seeing, this has been a record cases year, almost every week we've seen one or two significant, cyber security events that are happening. That is a dramatic shift compared to last year or even, two years ago too. And this is because, because the cyber criminals are getting deeper pockets now. They're becoming more well-funded and they have business partners, affiliates that they're hiring, each one of those has their own methodology, and they're getting paid big. We're talking up to 70 to 80% commission, just if they actually successfully, infect someone that pays for the ransom as an example. And so that's really, what's driving this too. It's a combination of this kind of perfect storm as we call it, right. You have this growing attack surface, work from home environments and footholds into those networks, but you have a whole bunch of other people now on the bad side that are orchestrating this and executing the attacks too. >> So what can organizations do to start- to slow down or limit the impacts of this growing ransomware as a service? >> Yeah, great question. Everybody has their role in this, I say, right? So if we look at, from a strategic point of view, we have to disrupt cyber crime, how do we do that? It starts with the kill chain. It starts with trying to build resilient networks. So things like ZTA and a zero trust network access, SD-WAN as an example for protecting that WAN infrastructure. 'Cause that's where the threats are floating to, right. That's how they get the initial footholds. So anything we can do on the preventative side, making networks more resilient, also education and training is really key. Things like multi-factor authentication are all key to this because if you build that preventatively and it's a relatively small investment upfront Lisa, compared to the collateral damage that can happen with these ransomware paths, the risk is very high. That goes a long way, it also forces the attackers to- it slows down their velocity, it forces them to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new strategy. So that is a very important piece, but there's also things that we're doing in the industry. There's some good news here, too, that we can talk about because there's things that we can actually do apart from that to really fight cyber crime, to try to take the cyber criminals offline too. >> All right, hit me with the good news Derek. >> Yeah, so a couple of things, right. If we look at the botnet activity, there's a couple of interesting things in there. Yes, we are seeing Mirai rise to the top right now, but we've seen big problems of the past that have gone away or come back, not as prolific as before. So two specific examples, EMOTET, that was one of the most prolific botnets that was out there for the past two to three years, there is a take-down that happened in January of this year. It's still on our radar but immediately after that takedown, it literally dropped to half of the activity it had before. And it's been consistently staying at that low watermark now at that half percentage since then, six months later. So that's very good news showing that the actual coordinated efforts that were getting involved with law enforcement, with our partners and so forth, to take down these are actually hitting their supply chain where it hurts, right. So that's good news part one. Trickbot was another example, this is also a notorious botnet, takedown attempt in Q4 of 2020. It went offline for about six months in our landscape report, we actually show that it came back online in about June this year. But again, it came back weaker and now the form is not nearly as prolific as before. So we are hitting them where it hurts, that's that's the really good news. And we're able to do that through new, what I call high resolution intelligence that we're looking at too. >> Talk to me about that high resolution intelligence, what do you mean by that? >> Yeah, so this is cutting edge stuff really, gets me excited, keeps me up at night in a good way. 'Cause we we're looking at this under the microscope, right. It's not just talking about the what, we know there's problems out there, we know there's ransomware, we know there's a botnets, all these things, and that's good to know, and we have to know that, but we're able to actually zoom in on this now and look at- So we, for the first time in the threat landscape report, we've published TTPs, the techniques, tactics, procedures. So it's not just talking about the what, it's talking about the how, how are they doing this? What's their preferred method of getting into systems? How are they trying to move from system to system? And exactly how are they doing that? What's the technique? And so we've highlighted that, it's using the MITRE attack framework TTP, but this is real time data. And it's very interesting, so we're clearly seeing a very heavy focus from cyber criminals and attackers to get around security controls, to do defense innovation, to do privilege escalation on systems. So in other words, trying to be common administrator so they can take full control of the system. As an example, lateral movement, there's still a preferred over 75%, 77 I believe percent of activity we observed from malware was still trying to move from system to system, by infecting removable media like thumb drives. And so it's interesting, right. It's a brand new look on these, a fresh look, but it's this high resolution, is allowing us to get a clear image, so that when we come to providing strategic guides and solutions in defense, and also even working on these takedown efforts, allows us to be much more effective. >> So one of the things that you said in the beginning was we talked about the increase in ransomware from last year to this year. You said, I don't think that we've hit that ceiling yet, but are we at an inflection point? Data showing that we're at an inflection point here with being able to get ahead of this? >> Yeah, I would like to believe so, there is still a lot of work to be done unfortunately. If we look at, there's a recent report put out by the Department of Justice in the US saying that, the chance of a criminal to be committing a crime, to be caught in the US is somewhere between 55 to 60%, the same chance for a cyber criminal lies less than 1%, well 0.5%. And that's the bad news, the good news is we are making progress in sending messages back and seeing results. But I think there's a long road ahead. So, there's a lot of work to be done, We're heading in the right direction. But like I said, they say, it's not just about that. It's, everyone has their role in this, all the way down to organizations and end users. If they're doing their part of making their networks more resilient through this, through all of the, increasing their security stack and strategy. That is also really going to stop the- really ultimately the profiteering that wave, 'cause that continues to build too. So it's a multi-stakeholder effort and I believe we are getting there, but I continue to still, I continue to expect the ransomware wave to build in the meantime. >> On the end-user front, that's always one of the vectors that we talk about, it's people, right? There's so much sophistication in these attacks that even security folks and experts are nearly fooled by them. What are some of the things that you're saying that governments are taking action on some recent announcements from the White House, but other organizations like Interpol, the World Economic Forum, Cyber Crime Unit, what are some of the things that governments are doing that you're seeing that as really advantageous here for the good guys? >> Yeah, so absolutely. This is all about collaboration. Governments are really focused on public, private sector collaboration. So we've seen this across the board with Fortiguard Labs, we're on the forefront with this, and it's really exciting to see that, it's great. There's always been a lot of will to work together, but we're starting to see action now, right? Interpol is a great example, they recently this year, held a high level forum on ransomware. I actually spoke and was part of that forum as well too. And the takeaways from that event were that we, this was a message to the world, that public, private sector we need. They actually called ransomware a pandemic, which is what I've referred to it as before in itself as well too. Because it is becoming that much of a problem and that we need to work together to be able to create action, action against this, measure success, become more strategic. The World Economic Forum were leading a project called the Partnership Against Cyber Crime Threat Map Project. And this is to identify, not just all this stuff we talked about in the threat landscape report, but also looking at, things like, how many different ransomware gangs are there out there. What do the money laundering networks look like? It's that side of the supply chain to map out, so that we can work together to actually take down those efforts. But it really is about this collaborative action that's happening and it's innovation and there's R&D behind this as well, that's coming to the table to be able to make it impactful. >> So it sounds to me like ransomware is no longer a- for any organization in any industry you were talking about the expansion of verticals. It's no longer a, "If this happens to us," but a matter of when and how do we actually prepare to remediate, prevent any damage? >> Yeah, absolutely, how do we prepare? The other thing is that there's a lot of, with just the nature of cyber, there's a lot of connectivity, there's a lot of different, it's not just always siloed attacks, right. We saw that with Colonial obviously, this year where you have attacks on IT, that can affect consumers, right down to consumers, right. And so for that very reason, everybody's infected in this. it truly is a pandemic I believe on its own. But the good news is, there's a lot of smart people on the good side and that's what gets me excited. Like I said, we're working with a lot of these initiatives. And like I said, some of those examples I called up before, we're actually starting to see measurable progress against this as well. >> That's good, well never a dull day I'm sure in your world. Any thing that you think when we talk about this again, in a few more months of the second half of 2021, anything you predict crystal ball wise that we're going to see? >> Yeah, I think that we're going to continue to see more of the, I mean, ransomware, absolutely, more of the targeted attacks. That's been a shift this year that we've seen, right. So instead of just trying to infect everybody for ransom, as an example, going after some of these new, high profile targets, I think we're going to continue to see that happening from the ransomware side and because of that, the average costs of these data breaches, I think they're going to continue to increase, it already did in 2021 as an example, if we look at the cost of a data breach report, it's gone up to about $5 million US on average, I think that's going to continue to increase as well too. And then the other thing too is, I think that we're going to start to see more, more action on the good side like we talked about. There was already a record amount of takedowns that have happened, five takedowns that happened in January. There were arrests made to these business partners, that was also new. So I'm expecting to see a lot more of that coming out towards the end of the year too. >> So as the challenges persist, so do the good things that are coming out of this. Where can folks go to get this first half 2021 Global Threat Landscape? What's the URL that they can go to? >> Yeah, you can check it out, all of our updates and blogs including the threat landscape reports on blog.fortinet.com under our threat research category. >> Excellent, I read that blog, it's fantastic. Derek, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for breaking this down for us, showing what's going on. Both the challenging things, as well as the good news. I look forward to our next conversation. >> Absolutely, it was great chatting with you again, Lisa. Thanks. >> Likewise for Derek Manky, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube Conversation. (exciting music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of HPE's big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition and we're going to dig into transformations, the role of technology and the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, HPE has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years so it makes a great example in case study and with me is Rashmi Kumar who is the senior vice president and CIO at HPE, Rashmi welcome come on inside theCUBE. >> Hi Dave nice to be here. >> Well it's been almost a year since COVID you know changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CIO specifically in generally IT has changed? I mean you got digital, zero trust has gone from buzzword to mandate, digital, everybody was you know complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated, remote work, hybrid, how do you see it? >> Absolutely, as I said in the last Discover that COVID has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the companies. I see CIO's role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running, that's become a table stake. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience, engage with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end of the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the COVID hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another, a global company like HPE had to look into its supply chain differently, had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions, as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, but how do you create the same level of collaboration, coordination, as well as delivery of faster, good and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So CIO and IT's role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to different level of employee experience, as well as enabling day-to-day operations of the companies. CEOs have realized that digital is the way to go forward, it does not matter what industry you are in and now CIOs have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now which is a technology company irrespective you are in oil and gas, or mining, or a technical product, or a car or a mobility company, end of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >> So I want to ask you about that because you've been a CIO at a leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and were, you know non-technical, technology, you know, selling to IT companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together. Everybody's a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the CIO because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between a CIO at a tech company you know what I mean by that and a CIO at sort of every other company is, are those two worlds converging? >> Absolutely and it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma, to entertainment, to utilities and now at a technology company. End of the day the issues that IT deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem even that HPE look I was fortunate at HPE because of Antonio's leadership we had top-down mandate to transform how we did business and I talked about my NextGEN IT program in last year's CUBE interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer, partner's experience from ordering, to order processing, to supply chain, to finance, we decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot, it's pretty common. If it was a technology company or non-technology company. At HPE we were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us. Now we are becoming an as a service or a subscription company and IT played a major role to enable that quote-to-cash experience which is very different than the traditional experience, around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term digital exhaust which results into data, which can result into better insight and you can not only upsell, cross-sell because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, they are pizza sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies. Ikea which is a furniture manufacturer, across the board we have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And remember when HPE says edge to cloud platform as a service, edge is the product, the customers is what we deal with and how do we get that, help them get that data, understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that they sell. >> I think you've been at HPE now I think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades, you know HPE, well HP then HPE is, I feel like it's entering now that sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay we got to figure out how to deal or operate as separate companies, okay, that took some time and then it was okay, now how do we align our resources? And you know what are the waves that we're going to ride? And how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place? And you're all in on as a service and now it's like okay, you know how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So as I mentioned first, your second phase which was becoming a stand-alone company was the NextGEN IT program where we brought in S4 and 60 related ecosystem application where even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 120 billion company, we are a 30 billion company, we need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line, across the globe and we, I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of NextGEN IT transformation. Where we have brought in new customer experience through low-touch or no-touch order processing, a very strong S4 capabilities where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together and I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do order management supply chain and data and analytics platforms, we also made the pivot to go to as a service. Now for as a service and subscription selling, it needs a very different quote-to-cash experience for our customers. And that's where we had bring in platforms like BRIM to do subscription billing, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data analytics platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior as well as how they're using our product real time for our operations teams. >> Well they say follow the money, in theCUBE we love to say follow the data. I mean data is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage, business value, so talk a little bit more about the role of data, I'm interested in where IT fits. You know a lot of companies they'll have a chief data officer, or a CIO, sometimes they're separate sometimes they work, you know for each other, or CDO works for CIO, how do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >> Yeah that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of CEOs, CIOs, chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of technology and platform and data lake within IT. Look the way I see is that I call the term data torture. If they have multiple data lakes, if they have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out to the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights, it's very difficult to have single version of truth. So HPE had two-pronged approach. First one was as part of this NextGEN IT transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity master data and product master data program. These were very, very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from cold stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was effort well spent. At the same time while we were building this master data capability we also invested time in our analytics platform. Because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint, how do we link our data lake to our SAP and Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making and analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data, building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment, that's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization work very, very closely to understand each other needs, sometimes art of the possible, where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies, this model works. Where you have focus on insight and analytics without, because data without insight is of no value. But at the same time you need clean data, you need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional non-functional requirement that our business partners have. And that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently as of now. >> I want to ask you a kind of a harder, maybe it's not a harder question it's a weird question around single version of the truth. 'Cause it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications, workloads that require that single version of the truth, the operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR, the Salesforce and clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like, however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever, their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that but I wonder, maybe not the right question for HPE but I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics got to have that nailed down, data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom, they need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? Maybe you can help me put that into context. >> That's a great question Dave and I'm glad you asked it so. I think Tom Davenport, who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality, it's all that, most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving companies' operations incrementally because you have very clean data, you have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing, how my products are doing, how am I meeting my SLAs or how my financials are looking, there's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new wants in customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data, take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space but that's this entire data available to our business leader not real time, because the need is not as real time because they are doing more, what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business units, we educate them, we tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight, insight and foresight, hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >> Great thank you for that. That's an interesting discussion. You know digital transformation it's a journey and it's going to take you know many years. I know a lot of ways, not a lot of ways, 2020 was a forced march to digital you know. If you weren't a digital business you were out of business and so you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay, let's really lean into our strategy, the journey and along the way, there's going to be blind spots, there's bumps in the road, when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? >> That's a great question Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer-term view on this topic, right? And what's top of my mind recently is the whole topic of ESG, environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place right? Because they are either public companies, or they're under some kind of scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or whatnot even if you're a startup you need to do things with our customers and whatnot. It has been there for companies, it continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in place. Now we'll talk about cybersecurity I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space, however we have the setup within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that and not only the bigger companies, leaders at our level I would say that between last March and this year I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity which is also very big objective for HPE and Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in US at the World Economic Forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world to create innovative product and services we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. HPE has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like the momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones as you know in the Bay Area to create better delivery methods of food or products right? But the third piece which is environmental is extremely important as well. As we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental. HPE recently published it's a Living Progress Report, we have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers through those processes. Again, if we don't, if our planet is on fire none of us will exist right? So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report I myself as a person solar panels, battery, electric cars, whatever I can do. But I think something more needs to happen right? Where as an individual I need to pitch in but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof which again creates a different kind of race going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have ESG top of their mind and think of product and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward and you know our customers, our investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause for bigger cross section of companies. And I'm most of the time very happy to share with my CIO cohort around how our HPEFS capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e-waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills, our green lake capabilities, how it reduces the e-waste going forward, as well as our sustainability initiatives which can help other CIOs to be more carbon neutral going forward as well. >> You know that's a great answer Rashmi thank you for that 'cause I got to tell you I hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about ESG but that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think tech companies in particular are, have to lead and are leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber it's, obviously you know escalated in the news the last several months, it's always in the news but, you know 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. And now we realize, hey they're going to get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board-level topic. You know years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh you can't have the SecOps team working for the CIO because that's like the fox watching the hen house that's changed. It's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening so the world is now more virtual, you've got a secure physical assets. I mean any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attacker, they can buy ransomware as a service in the dark web so that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self-forming malware I mean it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the CISO role, the CIO role, the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations? >> Yeah this is a great question and this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's, as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think ESG, it's no more one organization's business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where somebody has compared cyber to 9/11 type scenario that if it happens for a company that's the level of impact you feel on your operations. So, you know all models are going to change where CISO reports to CIO, at HPE we are also into product security and that's why CISO is a peer of mine who I work with very closely, who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from lot of pain in this space going forward and HPE itself is investing enormous amount of efforts and time in coming out of products which are secure and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is CISO role has become extremely critical in every company and a big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why an IT we propagate DevSecOps, as we talk about it we are very, very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cybersecurity architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure. The training not only for individual employees around anti-phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cyber security means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive-ins. We did it for business continuity and disaster recovery before, now it is time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared. As you mentioned and we all say in tech community, it's always if not when. No company can take them their chest and say, "oh we are fully secure," because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic, or a earthquake, or a natural disaster and assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when something like this happens. So I'm huge believer in the framework of protect, detect, govern and respond as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody's aware of the part that they play day to day but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of IT and cyber practices across the company, there is no more differentiation between IT and OT. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of IT and guess what happened? WannaCry and Petya and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So, if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset people need to go with. Invest in education, training, awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customer's operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our product and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens. >> Rashmi you're very generous with your time thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE it was great to have you again. >> Thank you Dave, it was really nice chatting with you. >> And thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover '21. This is Dave Vellante you're watching the virtual CUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage we'll be right back. (bright music)

>>Yeah, >>approximately two years after HP split into two separate companies, antonioni Ranieri was named president and Ceo of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Under his tenure, the company has streamlined its operations, sharpened his priorities, simplified the product portfolio and strategically aligned its human capital with key growth initiatives. He's made a number of smaller but high leverage acquisitions and return the company to growth while affecting a massive company wide pivot to an as a service model. Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte for the cube and it's my pleasure to welcome back Antonio Neary to the program. Antonio it's been a while. Great to see you again. >>Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. >>That's really our pleasure. It was just gonna start off with the big picture. Let's talk about trends. You're a trend spotter. What do you see today? Everybody talks about digital transformation. We had to force marks to digital last year. Now it's really come into focus. But what are the big trends that you're seeing that are affecting your customers transformations? >>Well, Dave, I mean obviously we have been talking about digital transformation for some time uh in our view is no longer a priority is a strategic imperative. And through the last 15 months or so since we have been going through the pandemic, we have seen that accelerated to a level we haven't never seen before. And so what's going on is that we live in a digital economy and through the pandemic now we are more connected than ever. We are much more distributed than ever before and an enormous amount of data is being created and that data has tremendous value. And so what we see in our customer's name, more connectivity, they need a platform from the edge to the cloud to manage all the data and most important they need to move faster and extracting that inside that value from the data and this is where HP is uniquely positioned to deliver against those experiences and way we haven't imagined before. >>Yeah, we're gonna dig into that now, of course you and I have been talking about data and how much data for decades, but I feel like we're gonna look back at 2030 and say, wow, we never, we're not gonna do anything like that. So we're really living in a data centric era as the curves are going exponential, What do you see? How do you see customers handling this? How are they thinking about the opportunities? >>Well, I think, you know, customer realized now that they need to move faster, they need to absolutely be uh much more agile and everything. They do, they need to deploy a cloud experience for all the work clothes and data that they manage and they need to deliver business outcomes to stay ahead of the competition. And so we believe technology now plays even a bigger role and every industry is a technology industry in many ways, every company, right, is a technology company, whether your health care, your manufacturer, your transportation company, you are an education, everybody needs more. It no less. It but at the same time they want the way they want to consumer dave is very different than ever before, right? They want an elastic consumption model and they want to be able to scale up and down based on the needs of their enterprise. But if you recall three years ago, I knew and I had this conversation, I predicted that enterprise of the future will be edge century, cloud enable and data driven. The edge is the next frontier, we said in 2018 and think about it, you know, people now are working remotely and that age now is much more distribute than we imagined before. Cloud is no longer a destination, it is an experience for all your apps and data, but now we are entering what we call the edge of insight, which is all about that data driven approach and this is where all three have to come together in ways that customer did envision before and that's why they need help. >>So I see that, I see the definition of cloud changing, it's no longer a set of remote services, you know, somewhere up there in the cloud, it's expanding on prem cross clouds, you mentioned the edge and so that brings complexity. Every every company is a technology company but they may not be great at technology. So it seems that there are some challenges around there, partly my senses, some of some of what you're trying to do is simplify that for your customers. But what are the challenges that your customers are asking you to solve? >>Well, the first they want a consistent and seamless experience, whatever that application and data lives, so, you know, for them, you know, they want to move away from running it to innovate in our 90 and then obviously they need to move much faster. As I said earlier about this data driven approaches. So they need help because obviously they need to digitize every every aspect of the company, but at the same time they need to do it in a much more cost effective way. So they're asking for subject matter expertise on process engineering. They're asking for the fighting the right mix of hybrid experiences from the edge to cloud and they need to move much faster at scale in deploying technologies like Ai deep learning and machine learning and Hewlett Packard Enterprise uh is extremely well positioned because we have been building an age to club platform where you provide connectivity where you bring computing and storage uh in a softer, define scalable way that you can consume as a service. And so we have great capabilities without HP Point next technology services and advice and run inside. But we have a portfolio with HP Green Lake, our cloud services, the cloud that comes to you that are addressing the most critical data driven warlords. >>Probably about 24 months ago you announced that HP was was going to basically go all in on as a service and get there by by 2022 for all your solutions. I gotta get, I gotta say you've done a good job communicating the Wall Street, I think, I think culturally you've really done a good job of emphasizing that to your, to the workforce. Uh, but but how should we measure the progress that you've made toward that goal? How our customers responding? I I know how the markets responding, you know, three or four year big competitors have now announced. But how should we measure, you know, how you're tracking to that goal? >>Well, I think, you know, the fact that our competitors are entering the other service market is a validation that our vision was right. And that's that's that's good because in the end, you know, it tells us we are on the right track. However, we have to move much faster than than ever before. And that's why we constantly looking for ways to go further and faster. You're right. The court of this is a cultural transformation. Engineering wise, once you state, once you state the North Star, we need to learn our internal processes to think Cloud first and data first versus infrastructure. And we have made great progress. The way we measure ourselves. Dave is very simple is by giving a consistent and transparent report on our pivot in that financial aspect of it, which is what we call the annualized revenue run rate, which we have been disclosed enough for more than a year and a half. And this past quarter grew 30% year over year. So we are on track to deliver a 30-40% Kegel that we committed two years ago And this business going to triple more than uh more than one year from now. So it's gonna be three times as bigger as we enter 2022 and 2023. But in the end, it's all about the experience you deliver and that's why architecturally uh while we made great progress. I know there is way more work to be done, but I'm really excited because what we just announced here this week is just simply remarkable. And you will see more as we become more a cloud operating driven company in the in the next months and years to come. >>I want to ask you kind of a personal question. I mean, COVID-19 is you know, sharpened our sensitivity and empathy to to a lot of different things. Uh and I think uh ceos in your position of a large tech company or any large company, they really can't just give lip service to things like E. S. G. Or or ethical uh digital transformation, which is something that you've talked about in other words, making sure that it's inclusive. Everybody is able to participate in this economy and not get left behind. What does this mean to you personally? >>Well, they remember I'm in a privileged position, right? Leading a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has Hewlett and Packard on the brand is an honor, but it's also a big responsibility. Let's remember what this company stands for and what our purpose is, which is to advance the way people live and work, and in that we have to be able to create a more equitable society and use this technology to solve some of the biggest societal challenge you have been facing The last 18 months has been really hard on a number of dimensions, not just for the business but for their communities. Uh, we saw disruption, we saw hardships on the financial side, we saw acts of violence and hatred. Those are completely unacceptable. But if we work together, we can use these technologies to bring the community together and to make it equitable. And that's one is one of my passion because as we move into this digital economy, I keep saying that connecting people is the first step and if you are not connected, you're not going to participate. Therefore we cannot afford to create a digital economy for only few. And this is why connectivity has to become an essential service, not different than water and electricity. And that's why I have passion and invest my own personal time working with entities like World Economic Forum, educating our government, right, Which is very important because both the public sector and the private sector have to come together. And then from the technology standpoint, we have to architect these things that are commercially accessible and viable to everyone. And so it's uh it's I will say that it's not just my mission. Uh this is top of mind for many of my colleagues ceos that talked all the time and you can see of movement, but at the same time it's good for business because shareholders now want to invest in companies that take care about this, how we make, not just a word more inclusive and equitable, but also how we make a more sustainable and we with our technologies, we can make the world way more sustainable with circular economy, power, efficiency and so forth. So a lot of work to be done dave but I'm encouraged by the progress but we need to do way way more. >>Thank you for that Antonio. I want to ask you about the future and I want to ask you a couple of different angles. So I want to start with the edge. So it seems to me that you're you're building this vision of what I call a layer that abstracts the underlying complexity of the whether it's the public cloud across clouds on prem and and and the edge and it's your job to simplify that. So I as the customer can focus on more strategic initiatives and that's clearly the vision that you guys are setting forth on. My question is is how far do you go on the edge? In other words, it seems to me that Aruba for example, for example, awesome acquisition could go really, really deep into the far edge, maybe other parts of your portfolio, you're kind of more looking at horizontal. How should we think about HP. Es, positioning and participation in that edge opportunity? >>Well, we believe we are becoming one of the merger leaders at the intelligent edge. Right? These edges becoming way more intelligent. We live in a hyper connected world and that will continue to grow at an exponential pace. Right? So today we we may have billions of people and devices pursue. We're entering trillions of things that will be connected to the network. Uh, so you need a platform to be able to do with the scale. So there is a horizontal view of that to create these vertical experiences which are industry driven. Right? So one thing is to deliver a vertical experience in healthcare versus manufacturer transportation. And so we take a really far dave I mean, to the point that we just, you know, put into space 256 miles above the Earth, a supercomputer that tells you we take a really far, but in the end, it's about acting where the data is created and bringing that knowledge and that inside to the people who can make a difference real time as much as possible. And that's why I start by connecting things by bringing a cloud experience to that data, whatever it lives because it's cheaper and it's way more economical and obviously there's aspects of latest in security and compliance. They have to deal with it and then ultimately accelerate that inside into some sort of outcome. And we have many, many use cases were driving today and Aruba is the platform by the way, which we have been using now to extend from the edge all the way to the core into the cloud business. And that's why you HP has unique set of assets to deliver against that opportunity. >>Yes, I want to talk about some of the weapons you have in your arsenal. You know, some people talk about, hey, well we have to win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. I've heard that statement made, certainly HP is in that battle. It's not a zero sum game, but you're a player there. And so when I, when I look at as a service, great, you're making progress there. But I feel like there's more, there's, there's architecture there, you're making acquisitions, you're building out as moral, which is kind of an interesting data platform. Uh, and so I want to ask you how you see the architecture emerging and where H. P. S sort of value add, I. P. Is your big player and compute you've got actually, you've got chops and memory disaggregate asian, you've done custom silicon over the years. How how should we think about your contribution to the next decade of innovation? >>Well, I think it's gonna come different layers of what we call the stock, right? Obviously, uh, we have been known for an infrastructure company, but the reality is what customers are looking for. Our integrated solutions that are optimized for the given world or application. So they don't have to spend time bringing things together. Right? And and spend weeks sometimes months when they can do it in just in a matter of minutes a day so they can move forward innovative on I. T. And so we were really focused on that connectivity as the first step. And Aruba give us an enormous rich uh through the cloud provisioning of a port or a wifi or a one. As you know, as we move to more cloud native applications. Much of the traffic through the connectivity will go into the internet, not through the traditional fixed networks. And that's what we did acquisitions like Silver Peak because now we can connect all your ages and all your clouds in an autonomous softer. The final way as we go to the other spectrum. Right? We talk about one load optimization and uh for us H. P. S my role is the recipe by which we bring the infrastructure and the software in through that integrated solution that can run autonomously that eventually can consume as a service. And that's why we made the introduction here of HP Green like Lighthouse, which is actually a fully optimised stack. They with the push of a bottom from HP Green Lake cloud platform, we can deploy whatever that that is required and then be able to Federated so we can also address other aspects like disaster recovery and be able to share all the knowledge real time. Swarm learning is another thing that people don't understand. I mean if you think about it. So I'm learning is a distributed Ai learning ecosystem and think about what we did with the D. C. Any in order to find cures for Alzheimer's or dementia. But so I'm learning is going to be the next platform sitting on this age to cloud architecture. So that instead of people worrying about sharing data, what we're doing is actually sharing insights And be able to learn through these millions of data points that they can connect with each other in a secure way. Security is another example, right? So today on an average takes 28 days to find a bridge in your enterprise with project Aurora, which we're going to make available at the end of the year by the end of the year. We actually can address zero day attacks within seconds. And then we're work in other areas like disaster recovery when you get attacked. Think about the ransom ramp somewhere that we have seen in the last few weeks, right? You know, God forbid you have to pay for it. But at the same time, recovery takes days and weeks. Sometimes we are working on technology to do it within 23 seconds. So this is where HP can place across all spectrums of the stack And at the same time of course people expect us to innovate in infrastructure layer. That's why we also partner with companies like Intel were with the push of a bottom. If you need more capacity of the court, you don't have to order anything. She's pushed the bottle, we make more calls available so that that warlord can perform and when you don't need it, shut it off so you don't have to pay for it. And last finalist, you know, I will say for us is all about the consumption availability of our solutions And that's what I said, you know, in 2019 we will make available everything as a service by 2022. You know, we have to say as you know, there is no need to build the church for Easter Sunday when you can rent it for that day. The point here is to grow elastically. And the fact that you don't need to move the data is already a cost savings because cost of aggression data back and forth is enormous and customers also don't want to be locked in. So we have an open approach and we have a true age to cloud architecture and we are focusing on what is most valuable aspect for the customer, which is ultimately the data. >>Thank you for that. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, again, another weapon in your arsenal is you mentioned supercomputing before. Up in space, we're on the cusp of exa scale and that's the importance of high performance computing. You know, it used to be viewed as just a niche. I've had some great conversations with DR go about this, but that really is the big data platform, if you will. Uh can I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that fits into the future. Your expertise in HPC, you're obviously a leader in that space. What's the fit with this new vision you're laying out? >>Well, HPC, high performance computing in memory computer are the backbone to be able to manage large data sets at massive scale. Um, and, you know, deployed technologies like deep learning or artificial intelligence for this massive amount of data. If we talked about the explosion of data all around us and uh, you know, and the algorithms and the parameters to be able to extract inside from the day is getting way more complex. And so the ability to co locate data and computed a massive scale is becoming a necessity, whether it's in academia, whether it's in the government obviously to protect your, your most valuable assets or whether it is in the traditional enterprise. But that's why with the acquisition of cray as G. I. And our organic business, we are absolutely the undisputed leader to provide the level of capabilities. And that's why we are going to build five of the top six exa scale systems, which is basically be able to process the billion billion, meaning billion square transactions per second. Can you imagine what you can do with that? Right. What type of problems you can go solve climate problems? Right. Um you know, obviously be able to put someone back into the moon and eventually in mars, you know, the first step to put that supercomputer as an edge computer into the international space station. It's about being able to process data from the images that take from the ice caps of the of the earth to understand climate changes. But eventually, if you want to put somebody in in into the Marks planet, you have to be able to communicate with those astronauts as they go and you know, you can't afford the latency. Right? So this is what the type of problems we are really focused on. But HPC is something that we are absolutely super committed and it's something that honestly, we have the full stack from silicon to software to the system performance that nobody else has in the industry. >>Well, I think it's a real tailwind for you because the industry is moving in that direction and everybody talks about the data and workloads are shifting. We used to be uh I got O. L. T. P. And I got reporting. Now you look at the workloads, there's so much diversity so I'll give you the last word. What what really is the most exciting to you about the future of HPV? >>Well, I'm excited about the innovation will bring it to the market and honestly as the Ceo I care about the culture of the company. For me, the last almost 3.5 years have been truly remarkable. As you said at the beginning, we are transforming every aspect of this company. When I became Ceo I had three priorities for myself. One is our customers and partners. That's why we do these events right to communicate, communicate, communicate. They are our North Star, that's why we exist. Second is our innovation right? We compete and win with the best innovation, solving the most complex problems in a sustainable and equitable way. And third is the culture of the company, which are the core is how we do things in our Team members and employees. You know, I represent my colleagues here, the 60,000 strong team members that had incredible passion for our customers and to make a contribution every single day. And so for me, I'm very optimistic about what we see the recovery of the economy and the possibilities of technology. Uh, but ultimately, you know, we have to work together hand in hand and I believe this company now is absolutely on the right track to not just be relevant, but really to make a difference. And remember That in the end we we have to be a force for good. And let's not forget that while we do all of this, we have some farm with technology. We have to also help some, uh, to address some of the challenges we have seen in the last 18 months and H. P. E. is a whole different company uh, that you knew 3.5 years ago. >>And as you said, knowledge is the right thing to do. It's good. It's good for business Antonio. Neary, thanks so much for coming back to the cube is always a pleasure to see you. >>Thanks for having me. Dave and >>thank you for watching this version of HP discover 2021 on the cube. This is David want to keep it right there for more great coverage. Mm

>>approximately two years after HP split into two separate companies, antonioni Ranieri was named president and Ceo of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Under his tenure, the company has streamlined its operations, sharpened his priorities, simplified the product portfolio and strategically aligned its human capital with key growth initiatives. He's made a number of smaller but high leverage acquisitions and return the company to growth while affecting a massive company wide pivot to an as a service model. Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte for the cube and it's my pleasure to welcome back Antonio. Neary to the program Antonio it's been a while. Great to see you again. >>Dave Thanks for having me. >>That's really our pleasure. I was just gonna start off with >>the big picture. >>Let's talk about trends. You're a trend spotter. What do you see today? Everybody talks about digital transformation. We had to force marks to digital last year now it's really come into focus. But what are the big trends that you're seeing that are affecting your customers transformations? >>Okay. I mean obviously we have been talking about digital transformation for some time uh in our view is no longer a priority is a strategic imperative. And through the last 15 months or so since we have been going through the pandemic we have seen that accelerated to a level we haven't never seen before. And so what's going on is that we live in a digital economy and through the pandemic now we are more connected than ever. We are much more distributed than ever before and an enormous amount of data is being created and that data has tremendous value. And so what we see in our customers need more connectivity, they need a platform from the edge to the cloud to manage all the data and most important they need to move faster and extracting that inside that value from the data and this is where HP is uniquely positioned to deliver against those experiences the way we haven't imagined before. >>Yeah, we're gonna dig into that now, of course, you and I have been talking about data and how much data for decades, but I feel like we're gonna look back at, you know, in 2030 and say, Wow, we never, we're not gonna do anything like that. So we're really living in a data centric era as the curves are going exponential. What do you see? How do you see customers handling this? How are they thinking about the opportunities? >>Well, I think, you know, customer realized now that they need to move faster, they need to absolutely be uh much more agile and everything. They do. They need to deploy a cloud experience for all the war clothes and data that they manage and they need to deliver business outcomes to stay ahead of the competition. And so we believe technology now plays even a bigger role and every industry is a technology industry in many ways. Every company right, is a technology company, whether your health care, your manufacturer, your transportation company, you are an education, everybody needs more. It no less I. T. But at the same time they want the way they want to consumer Dave is very different than ever before, right? They want an elastic consumption model and they want to be able to scale up and down based on the needs of their enterprise. But if you recall three years ago I knew and I had this conversation, I predicted that enterprise of the future will be edge centric cloud enable and data driven. The edge is the next frontier. We said in 2018 and think about it, you know, people now are working remotely and that age now is much more distribute than we imagined before. Cloud is no longer a destination, it is an experience for all your apps and data, but now we are entering what we call the edge of insight which is all about that data driven approach and this is where all three have to come together in ways that customer did envision before and that's why they need help. >>So I see that I see the definition of cloud changing, it's no longer a set of remote services, you know, somewhere up there in the cloud, it's expanding on prem cross clouds, you mentioned the Edge and so that brings complexity. Every every company is a technology company but they may not be great at technology. So it seems that there are some challenges around there, partly my senses, some of some of what you're trying to do is simplify that for your customers. But what are the challenges that your customers are asking you to solve? >>Well the first they want a consistent and seamless experience, whatever that application and data lives. And so um you know for them you know they want to move away from running I. T. to innovate in our 90 and then obviously they need to move much faster. As I said earlier about this data driven approaches. So they need help because obviously they need to digitize every every aspect of the company but at the same time they need to do it in a much more cost effective way. So they're asking for subject matter expertise on process engineering. They're asking for the fighting the right mix of hybrid experiences from the edge to cloud and they need to move much faster as scale in deploying technologies like Ai deep learning and machine learning. Hewlett Packard Enterprise uh is extremely well positioned because we have been building an age to cloud platform where you provide connectivity where you bring computing and storage uh in a soft of the fine scalable way that you can consume as a service. And so we have great capabilities without HP Point next technology services and advice and run inside. But we have a portfolio with HP Green Lake, our cloud services, the cloud that comes to you that are addressing the most critical data driven warlords. >>Probably about 24 months ago you announced that HP was, was going to basically go all in on as a service and get there by by 2022 for all your solutions. I gotta get, I gotta say you've done a good job communicating the Wall Street, I think. I think culturally you've really done a good job of emphasizing that to your, to the workforce. Uh, but but how should we measure the progress that you've made toward that goal? How our customers responding? I know how the markets responding, you know, three or four year big competitors have now announced. But how should we measure, you know, how you're tracking to that goal? >>Well, I think, you know, the fact that our competitors are entering the other service market is a validation that our vision was right. And that's that's that's good because in the end, you know, it tells us we are on the right track. However, we have to move much faster than than ever before. And that's why we constantly looking for ways to go further and faster. You're right. The court of this is a cultural transformation. Engineering wise, once you step, once you state the North Star, we need to learn our internal processes to think cloud first and data first versus infrastructure. And we have made great progress. The way we measure ourselves. Dave is very simple is by giving a consistent and transparent report on our pivot in that financial aspect of it, which is what we call the annualized revenue run rate, Which we have been disclosed enough for more than a year and a half. And this past quarter grew 30% year over year. So we are on track to deliver at 30 to 40% cake or that we committed two years ago And this business going to triple more than uh more than one year from now. So it's gonna be three times as bigger as we enter 2022 and 2023. But in the end it's all about the experience you deliver and that's why architecturally uh while we made great progress. I know there is way more work to be done, but I'm really excited because what we just announced here this week is just simply remarkable. And you will see more as we become more a cloud operating driven company in the next month and years to come. >>I want to ask you kind of a personal question. I mean, COVID-19 has sharpened our sensitivity and empathy to a lot of different things. And I think ceos in your position of a large tech company or any large company, they really can't just give lip service to things like E. S. G. Or or ethical uh digital transformation, which is something that you've talked about in other words, making sure that it's inclusive. Everybody is able to participate in this economy and not get left behind. What does this mean to you personally? >>Well, they remember I'm in a privileged position, right? Leading a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has Hewlett and Packard on the brand is an honor, but it's also a big responsibility. Let's remember what this company stands for and what our purpose is, which is to advance the way people live and work. And in that we have to be able to create a more equitable society and use this technology to solve some of the biggest societal challenge you have been facing Last 18 months has been really hard on a number of dimensions, not just for the business but for their communities. Uh, we saw disruption, we saw hardships on the financial side, we saw acts of violence and hatred. Those are completely unacceptable. But if we work together, we can use these technologies to bring the community together and to make it equitable. And that's one is one of my passion because as we move into this digital economy, I keep saying that connecting people is the first step and if you are not connected you're not going to participate. Therefore we cannot afford to create a digital economy for only few. And this is why connectivity has to become an essential service, not different than water and electricity. And that's why I have passion and invest my own personal time working with entities like World Economic Forum, educating our government, which is very important because both the public sector and the private sector have to come together. And then from the technology standpoint, we have to architect these things. They are commercially accessible and viable to everyone. And so it's uh it's I will say that it's not just my mission. Uh this is top of mind for many of my colleagues ceos that talked all the time and you can see of movement, but at the same time it's good for business because shareholders now want to invest in companies that take care about this. How we make, not just a world more inclusive and equitable, but also how we make a more sustainable and we with our technologies we can make the world way more sustainable with circular economy, power, efficiency and so forth. So a lot of work to be done dave but I'm encouraged by the progress but we need to do way way more. >>Thank you for that Antonio I want to ask you about the future and I want to ask you a couple of different angles. So I want to start with the edge. So it seems to me that you're you're building this vision of what I call a layer that abstracts the underlying complexity of the whether it's the public cloud across clouds on prem and and and the edge And it's your job to simplify that. So I as the customer can focus on more strategic initiatives and that's clearly the vision that you guys are setting forth on. My question is is how far do you go on the edge? In other words, it seems to me that Aruba for example, for example, awesome acquisition can go really, really deep into the far edge. Maybe other parts of your portfolio, you're kind of more looking at horizontal. How should we think about HP es positioning and participation in that edge opportunity? >>Well, we believe we are becoming one of the merger leaders at the intelligent edge. Right. These edges becoming more intelligent. We live in a hyper connected world and that will continue to grow at an exponential pace. Right? So today we we might have billions of people and devices pursue. We're entering trillions of things that will be connected to the network. Uh, so you need a platform to be able to do with the scale. So there is a horizontal view of that to create these vertical experiences which are industry driven. Right? So one thing is to deliver a vertical experience in healthcare versus manufacturer transportation. And so we take a really far dave I mean, to the point that we just, you know, put into space 256 miles above the earth, a supercomputer that tells you we take a really far, but in the end it's about acting where the data is created and bringing that knowledge and that inside to the people who can make a difference real time as much as possible. And that's why I start by connecting things by bringing a cloud experience to that data wherever it lives because it's cheaper and it's where more economical and obviously there is aspects of latest in security and compliance that you have to deal with it and then ultimately accelerate that inside into some sort of outcome and we have many, many use cases were driving today and Aruba is the platform by the way, which we have been using now to extend from the edge all the way to the core into the cloud business and that's why you HP has unique set of assets to deliver against that opportunity. >>Yes, I want to talk about some of the weapons you have in your arsenal. You know, some people talk about a week and we have to win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. I've heard that statement made, certainly HPV is in that balance is not a zero sum game, but but you're a player there. And so when I when I look at as a service, great, you're making progress there. But I feel like there's more, there's there's architecture there, you're making acquisitions, you're building out as moral, which is kind of an interesting data platform. Uh, and so I want to ask you, so how you see the architecture emerging and where H. P. S sort of value add i. P. Is your big player and compute you've got actually you've got chops and memory disaggregate asian, you've done custom silicon over the years. How how should we think about your contribution to the next decade of innovation? >>Well, I think it's gonna come different layers of what we call the stock, right? Obviously, uh, we have been known for an infrastructure company, but the reality is what customers are looking for Our integrated solutions that are optimized for the given workload or application. So they don't have to spend time bringing things together. Right? And and spend weeks sometimes months when they can do it in just in a matter of minutes a day so they can move forward innovative or 90. And so we we are really focused on that connectivity as the first step. And Aruba give us an enormous rich uh through the cloud provisioning of a port or a wifi or a one. As you know, as we move to more cloud native applications. Much of the traffic through the connectivity will go into the internet, not through the traditional fixed networks. And that's what we did acquisitions like Silver Peak because now we can connect all your ages and all your clouds in an autonomous software defined way as you go to the other spectrum, right. We talk about what load optimization and uh for us H. P. S. My role is the recipe by which we bring the infrastructure and the software in through that integrated solution that can run autonomously that eventually can consume as a service. And that's why we made the introduction here of HP Green like lighthouse which is actually I fully optimised stack the with the push of a bottom from HP Green Lake cloud platform we can deploy whatever that that is required and then be able to Federated so we can also address other aspects like disaster recovery and be able to share all the knowledge real time. So I'm learning is another thing that people don't understand. I mean if you think about it. So I'm learning is a distributed Ai learning uh ecosystem and think about what we did with the D. C. Any in order to find cures for Alzheimer's or dementia. But swam learning is gonna be the next platform sitting on this age to cloud architecture so that instead of people worrying about sharing data, what we're doing is actually sharing insights And be able to learn to these millions of data points that they can connect with each other in a secure way. Security is another example, right? So today on an average takes 28 days to find a bridge in your enterprise with project Aurora, which we're gonna make available at the end of the year, by the end of the year. We actually can address zero day attacks within seconds. And then we're work in other areas like disaster recovery when you get attacked. Think about the ransom ramp somewhere that we have seen in the last few weeks, right? You know, God forbid you have to pay for it. But at the same time, recovery takes days and weeks. Sometimes we are working on technology to do it within 23 seconds. So this is where HP can place across all spectrums of the stack. And at the same time, of course, people expect us to innovate in infrastructural layer. That's why we also partnered with companies like Intel, we're with the push of a bottle. If you need more capacity of the court, you don't have to order anything, just push the bottle. We make more calls available so that that will load can perform and when you don't need to shut it off so you don't have to pay for it. And last finalist, you know, I will say for us is all about the consumption availability of our solutions And that's what I said, you know, in 2019 we will make available everything as a service by 2022. You know, we have to say as you know, there is no need to build the church for easter sunday when you can rent it for that day. The point here is to grow elastically and the fact that you don't need to move the data is already a cost savings because cost of aggression data back and forth is enormous and customers also don't want to be locked in. So we have an open approach and we have a through age to cloud architecture and we are focusing on what is most valuable aspect for the customer, which is ultimately the data. >>Thank you for that. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, and again, another weapon in your arsenal is you mentioned uh supercomputing before up in space where we're on the cusp of exa scale and that's the importance of high performance computing. You know, it used to be viewed as just a niche. I've had some great conversations with Dr go about this, but that really is the big data platform, if you will. Uh can I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that fits into the future. Your expertise in HPC, you're obviously a leader in that space. What's the fit with this new vision? You're laying out? >>Well, HPC, high performance computer in memory computer are the backbone to be able to manage large data sets at massive scale. Um and, you know, deployed technologies like deep learning or artificial intelligence for this massive amount of data. If we talked about the explosion of data all around us and uh, you know, and the algorithms and the parameters to be able to extract inside from the day is getting way more complex. And so the ability to co locate data and computed a massive scale is becoming a necessity, whether it's in academia, whether it's in the government obviously to protect your, your most valuable assets or whether it is in the traditional enterprise. But that's why with the acquisition of Cray, S. G. I. And our organic business, we are absolutely the undisputed leader to provide the level of capabilities. And that's why we are going to build five of the top six exa scale systems, which is basically be able to process they billion billion, meaning billion square transactions per second. Can you imagine what you can do with that? Right. What type of problems you can go solve climate problems? Right. Um you know, obviously be able to put someone back into the moon and eventually in mars you know, the first step to put that supercomputer as an edge computer into the international space station. It's about being able to process data from the images that take from the ice caps of the, of the earth to understand climate changes. But eventually, if you want to put somebody in in into the Marks planet, you have to be able to communicate with those astronauts as they go and you know, you can't afford the latency. Right? So this is where the type of problems we are really focused on. But HPC is something that we are absolutely uh, super committed. And it's something that honestly we have the full stack from silicon to software to the system performance that nobody else has in the industry. >>Well, I think it's a real tailwind for you because the industry is moving that direction. Everybody talks about the data and workloads are shifting. We used to be uh, I got LTP and I got reporting. Now you look at the workloads, there's so much diversity. So I'll give you the last word. What what really is the most exciting to you about the future of HPV? >>Well, I'm excited about the innovation, will bring it to the market and honestly, as the Ceo, I care about the culture of the company. For me, the last almost 3.5 years have been truly remarkable. As you said at the beginning, we are transforming every aspect of this company. When I became CEO, I had three priorities for myself. One is our customers and partners. That's why we do these events right to communicate, communicate, communicate. Uh they are our North Star, that's why we exist. Uh, second is our innovation right? We compete to win with the best innovation, solving the most complex problems in a sustainable and equitable way. And third is the culture of the company, which are the core is how we do things in our Team members and employees. You know, I represent my colleagues here, the 60,000 strong team members that have incredible passion for our customers and to make a contribution every single day. And so for me, I'm very optimistic about what we see the recovery of the economy and the possibilities of technology. But ultimately, you know, we have to work together hand in hand. Uh and I believe this company now is absolutely on the right track to not just be relevant, but really to make a difference. And remember that in the end we we have to be a force for good. And let's not forget that while we do all of this, we have some farm with technology. We have to also help some uh to address some of the challenges we have seen in the last 18 months. An H. P. E is a whole different company, uh, that you knew 3.5 years ago. >>And as you said, it's, it's knowledge is the right thing to do. It's good. It's good for business Antonio. Neary. Thanks so much for coming back to the cube. Is always a pleasure to see you. >>Thanks for having me Dave >>and thank you for watching this version of HP discover 2021 on the cube. This is David want to keep it right there for more great coverage. >>Mm

(upbeat pop music) >> Well, hi everyone, John Walls here on "theCUBE" as we continue our CUBE conversations as part of the "AWS Startup Showcase". And we welcome in today Krishna Gade who is the founder and the CEO of Fiddler AI. and Krishna, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on the "theCUBE". >> Hey John, thanks so much for inviting us and I'm glad to be here, and looking forward to our conversation. >> Yeah me two, and first off, I want to say congratulations as I look at your company's, this tremendous roster, this list of awards that just keep coming your way. Most recently recognized by "Forbes" as one of the Top 50 AI Companies To Watch here in 2021. I know Gartner called you one of their Cool Companies not too long ago. World Economic Forum also giving you a shout out. So whatever it is you're doing, you're doing it very well, but it's got to feel good I would think, some validation to get all this kind of recognition. >> Absolutely, I know we've been very fortunate to get all the recognition. You know, part of it is also because of the space we are playing in, right? A lot of companies are, you know, operationalizing AI and therefore, you know, this whole point of, you know, explainability monitoring and governance of AI is like forefront and it's in the news for various different reasons. So there's a lot of, you know, good sort of talk that is going on in the press around how one should bear responsible AI. And we are very fortunate to be, you know, in the space and pioneering, you know, some of the technologies here. >> Right. And talking about machine learning monitoring, obviously, in the AI space, and you mentioned explainability. So let's just talk about that concept broadly first off and explain to our viewers what you mean by explainability in this particular context. >> Yeah, that's a good question. So if you think about an AI system, one of the main differences between it and a traditional software system is that it's a black box in the sense that you cannot open it up and read it's code like a traditional software system. The reason is, you know, the AI systems that are built using data and training models which are represented in this non-human readable format. And you cannot really understand how a model is actually making a prediction at any given point of time. So therefore what happens is when you are deploying these AI systems at scale for a variety of use cases, let's say credit underwriting or, you know, screening resumes, or clinical diagnosis which are extremely, you know, important for general human beings. There is a need to understand how the AI system is working. You know, why did it approve a positive person's loan or reject someone's loan? Or why did it reject someone's, you know, resume from, you know, a job screening pipeline? How is it working overall? Right? And so this is where explainability becomes important because you need to understand the AI system, you need a way to probe it, to interrogate it, to understand how the system is making predictions, how is it being influenced by various inputs you're supplying to the system. And so this gamut of technologies or the algorithms that have come across in the last, you know, few years have really matured to a point where, you know, products like Fiddler are developing them and productizing them for the general enterprise to you know, put it in their machine learning and AI workflows. >> So you're talking about context basically, right? I mean, trying to give everybody an idea. This is, you know, kind of where this inputs coming, this is where the problem is, this is where the bottleneck might be, whatever it is, and and doing that in real time. Very efficient operation here. Well, let's talk about the ML world right now and in terms of how it relates to artificial intelligence and this interaction you know, that we're seeing and the, I guess, the problem that you are trying to fix, if you will, in terms of machine learning monitoring. So let's just deal with that first off. When you look at somebody's architecture and somebody set up, what do you see? What are you looking for? And what kind of problems are you trying to solve for your clients? >> Yeah. So just following up what I said. The two main problems with operationalizing AI is one is the black box nature of AI, which I already talked about. The other problem is that the AI system is fundamentally a stochastic system or a probabilistic system. By that, I mean that its performance, you know, its predictions can change over time based on the data it is receiving. So it's not a deterministic system like traditional software systems where you expect the same output all the time, right? So when you have a system that is stochastic in nature where its performance can vary based on the data it is receiving, then you are in a situation where you have uncertainty, right? You know, you let's say you have an AI system that is deployed for serving a credit underwriting model or a fraud, you know, detection use case. And you see that, okay, sometimes accuracy is up, sometimes accuracy is down. You know, when do you want, when do you trust your predictions, when you're not. How do you know if the model is actually performing in the same manner that you trained it? All of these issues open up the need for continuous monitoring of these AI systems, because without which you may have AI systems making bad predictions for your users, hurting your business metrics, potentially making biased decisions that can put your company into a compliance or a brand reputation risk scenario. To avoid all of these things you can actually monitor these AI systems continuously so that you know exactly if they're performing the way you expect them to be. Do you to retrain them right now, right? Or do you need to shut them down because they are actually not predicting the way that you expect them to be? So this is actually very important. And so that's what Fiddler tries to solve for our customers by helping them operationalize AI with full visibility and explainability, right? So you can essentially install Fiddler in your workflow to continuously monitor your AI systems and analyze and explain them when you have questions about how they're working. >> I mean, you talked about governance earlier a little bit, you know, compliance, obviously a great critical issue, big concern, fraud detection. Security, just in general here, as we know, I mean, we keep almost every day it seems like we're hearing about some kinds of security intrusion. So, in terms of identifying vulnerabilities or in terms of identifying anomalies, whatever it might be, what kind of work are you doing in that space to give your client base the kind of comfort and the peace of mind that everybody's searching for these days? >> Right, I mean, if you step back a little bit, John, we are truly living in the age of algorithms, right? So everything that we interact with on a day-to-day basis, the movies we watch, or when we request an Uber driver, or when we go to a financial institution and request for a loan application or a mortgage, there are algorithms behind the scenes that are processing our requests and delivering the experiences that we have. Now, increasingly these algorithms are becoming AI based algorithms. And when you have these AI based algorithms, they're trained on this data that's available, that an institution may collect from their users, or they may buy from other third parties. And when you develop these AI systems based on this data, if this data is not equally distributed amongst all different ethnicity backgrounds, people coming from different cultures, different religions, different races, different genders, you may actually build systems that can make very different decisions for different individuals based on like this bias that could creep into them. And so this actually needs, this means that at the end of the day, you can actually create a dystopian world where, you know, some people get like really great decisions from your systems, where some people are left out, right? So therefore, you know, this aspect of governing your AI systems so that you're validating what you're building upfront. You're validating the data that you're using to train the systems. You're continuously monitoring the systems there so that they're actually producing the right outcomes for your users. And then you can actually explain if some customer asks you or some regulator or a third party asks you how your system is working. It's very very important. This is an emerging area in industry, certain sectors already have this, for example, financial services. It's in companies like banks, where it is mandated to have model governance, so that every model that they are deploying needs to be validated and needs to be monitored. And we are seeing the emergence of generally AI governance creeping into other sectors as well. And so this is like a broader topic that covers explainability, covers monitoring, covers detecting bias in your AI systems and ensuring that you're building safe and responsible AI for your customers and your organization. >> Yeah, I find the bias point really interesting, actually, because I hadn't really thought about these prejudices or subjectivities, you know, it might bring to our work with us in terms of what we look at, what we ignore, what we process, how we don't. But it's a really interesting point you just raised. So thank you for that. And then there's also the kind of issue with data drift too a little bit, right? It's like, where did it go (laughing)? >> Right. >> What are we doing here? What happened to it? So maybe if you could talk about that a little bit in terms of all this data that's coming in and corralling it, right? Making sure that it stays organized and stays in a way that you can analyze and process it, and then glean insight from. >> Yeah, data drift is one of the main reasons why AI systems deteriorate in performance. So for example, let's say I'm trying to build a recommendation system that predicts the items that you want to buy when you go to an E-commerce website. Now, if I have used data pre-COVID, then the user behavior was very different, right? That kind of items people were probably buying before you know, February, 2020 was like probably much different than the kind of items that people were buying after it. So what happens is when you train your AI systems on datasets that are older but then that data has changed ever since because of an event like COVID-19 has happened, or some other seasonality has kicked in, then your AI systems are seeing different distribution data. For example, you may see that suddenly, you know, people who were shopping, let's say, in March or April last year, people were shopping for all kinds of, you know, toilet paper and all kinds of things to stock up, you know, to be ready for lockdown, right? And maybe they were not buying similar amounts in there previously. So therefore, if you have an inventory management system based on AI or an E-commerce recommendation system based on AI, you know, they would see data drift, because the buying patterns are different. The amount of stuff that people are buying in terms of toilet paper has completely shifted. And so their model is actually, may not be predicting as accurately as it would, right? So therefore identifying this data drift and alerting your AI engineer so that they can be prepared for this is very important. Otherwise, what you would see is if you're an E-commerce company, this has actually happened, you know? Instacart, a grocery delivery company and another company www.etsy.com, they blogged about it where they have seen their models go down in accuracy from 90% to 65% when this data shift happened, you know, especially during COVID-19. And so you need the ability to continuously monitor for drift so that when you can catch these things earlier, and then, you know, save your business from losing, you know, in terms of business metrics like such as number of sales that you may be making, number of bad recommendations that your systems are making to your users. >> So we've talked a lot about these various components of monitoring of which, you know, all of which you do extremely well. And I was reading earlier, just a little bit about the company, and we talked about accountability. We've already talked about that. We talked about fraud detection, we talked about reliability. There was also a point about ethical considerations, you know, and so I was interested in that, hearing from you about that in terms of why that's a pillar of your service or what exactly that was pointed toward in terms of monitoring, and what you can do. >> Right. So, I guess I'll just go back to like a famous quote from Marc Andreessen. He mentioned, you know, a few years ago that software is eating the world, right? Now, what's happening is AI is eating software. All the software that we are consuming is becoming AI based software, because basically at the end of the day some intelligence is being baked into the software to make it, you know, predict more interesting things for you to make those decisions. Instead of rule-based decisions, make it more AI based decisions. And so therefore it is very important that when we are building the software, we need to use ethical practices. You know, we need to know how, where you're collecting the data from. It can be very dangerous if you don't do it and you can land into trouble. And we have seen these incidents many times, right? For example, in 2019, when Apple and Goldman Sachs came up with a credit card, a lot of customers complained about gender bias with respect to the credit card limits that the algorithm was setting. You know, in the same household, the husband and wife were getting 10 times in terms of a difference between the credit limit between a male and a female, right? Even though they probably had similar salary ranges, similar FICO scores, right? So if you do not actually make sure that, you know, you're collecting data from the right sources that your datasets are not outbalanced. If your models, if your algorithms are tested for bias you know, before hand, before you deploy them and then you're continuously monitoring them, these are all ethical practices. These are all the responsible ways of building your AI. You can actually, you know, land into trouble. Your customers will complain about it. You know, you would lose your brand reputation. And at the end of the day you'll be essentially, and instead of actually adding value to the customers, you may be actually hurting them, right? And so this is actually why it's so important, and it's become more important when the more stakes, the higher the stakes are, right? You know, for example, when it's being used for criminal justice scenarios or when it's being used for clinical diagnosis scenarios. Being able to ensure that the system is making unbiased decisions is very, very important. >> Well, before I let you go, too, I like you to touch base on your AWS relationship about, you know, what was the Genesis of that. And currently what it is that you're working on together to provide this great value to your customers. >> Absolutely. So the follow-up to this ethical AI is like Amazon as a company is interested in pursuing, you know, the responsible AI but, you know, they have a lot of AI products. So they are looking for, you know, fostering a community and ecosystem of AI technologies. And in that hypothesis they actually invested in Fiddler last year in terms of enabling us to develop this explainable AI and ethical AI technology. And so we are working with Alexa Fund and also like AWS ecosystem in terms of partnering with how effectively Fiddler can be delivered to other AWS customers through, like, through their marketplace and other sort of areas that we can distribute the software. So it's a great partnership. We are very, very excited about the opportunity to work with Alexa Fund as well as the AWS ecosystem. It increases another opportunity for us to enable a lot more customers than we than we can otherwise. So this is a great win-win situation for both Amazon and Fiddler. >> Well, it sure is. And congratulations on that and developing that partnership. I know it's working well for your clients and it's working well for Fiddler AI obviously by the number of recognitions that have been coming your way. So Krishna, we wish you continued success and thanks for the time here today on "theCUBE". >> Yep. Thank you so much, John. It was a pleasure talking to you today. >> I enjoyed it. Thank you. John Walls here wrapping up our conversation with Fiddler AI's Krishna Gade, talking today about machine learning monitoring on the "AWS Startup Showcase". (upbeat pop music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests from Fortinet with me next talking about an very interesting topic that's something that always piques my interest, cybersecurity, and some of the things going on with respect to that. Sandra Wheatley joins us the SVP of marketing, threat intelligence and influencer communications at Fortinet. Sandra, it's great to see you again. >> Thank you, Lisa. I'm delighted to be here today. >> Lisa: Good and Rob Rashotte is here as well, vice-president, global training and technical field enablement at Fortinet. Rob welcome to the program. >> Hi, great to meet you Lisa. Nice to be here. >> Likewise. So since I last saw Fortinet we've had such a challenging year as we all know, that's an understatement, but one of the things that happened so quickly was the distribution of the workforce. And there were already preexisting gaps in IT Visibility and teams being siloed, security teams being siloed as well exacerbated distinct cybersecurity skills gap. So Sandra I want to start with you. Talk to us about what's going on with the cybersecurity skills gap and how it's impacting organizations today. >> Thank you, Lisa. While the cybersecurity skills gap continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing security organizations today, as you know, the cybersecurity space is very dynamic. It's constantly changing and we saw this even through COVID with more people working from home or being educated from home. Cyber adversaries are using remote workers as a way into the enterprise network. And so security organizations today are facing a lot of complexity. They deal with billions of alerts that come in every day and a lot of these have to be managed manually and they just don't have the professionals to keep up with that. So it continues to be a big issue facing organizations. We have seen some progress about a year ago. It was estimated that we would need 4 million professionals come into the industry to close the gap. We are now at probably a little bit over 3 million. So there is progress being made but we still have a long way to go. >> Yeah, good progress there. But what I mean, one of the things that we saw so quickly was with the distribution center was suddenly, there were tons of trusted devices that were off the network perimeter where all these keep going, "Use your own device at home until we can get you something provisioned on the network." So huge challenge that was almost like a light switch for people in any industry. Rob, talk to me from your perspective the ongoing cybersecurity skills gap. What are some of the things that you were seeing through your lens? >> Yeah, well, I mean it has certainly changed our focus over the last year with the pandemic and the change in workforce and so on. And I think as a cybersecurity vendor, a lot of the times when we talk about training and the skills gap we often tend to think pretty quickly about engineers and technical training and like this has really opened up our eyes too. We need to really broaden our scope when we're talking about training and closing the skills gap, because it's a lot more than just engineers. So we've had to really focus more on really anyone sitting in front of a computer screen and ensure that programs are available for people that are working from home that need to understand, the fact that security is just as big an issue if you're working from home or working from the office. So it's really broadened our scope in terms of who we're delivering training to and within a number of our programs, actually, that has happened. When we're dealing with we have a lot of academic partners that we deliver training with them. And one thing that's happened there is we we've traditionally dealt with engineering schools within our academic partners but now we're starting to see a lot of business schools coming and talking to us about delivering training within MBA programs and so on. So that business leaders can start understand, the need to be addressing cybersecurity in the boardroom for example, not just within the it department. So it's I guess the one thing I would say is it's really broadened our scope in terms of who the audience is for cybersecurity and the skills gap is a, you know it impacts a lot of different areas in the organization. >> Yeah, you brought up a great point there that elevation of security to the board level is critical. As we saw like big spikes and things like Ransomware last year. Ransomware getting much more sophisticated kind of playing on people's concerns for buzzwords like COVID-19 for example, and I talked to a lot of organizations where security is at the board level but the talent gap is another challenge. Sandra talk to us about what Fortinet is doing from a partnership perspective to help shrink that gap. >> Well, it's interesting because if you were to do a survey of people about where the responsibility lies to train more professionals for the industry, you'll see a split about 40% of people feel like academia should be providing the training and the curriculum to bring more professionals into the industry. And then others feel like it's a mix between corporate private public partnerships. And that's something that Fortinet believes in. We are tackling this issue on multiple fronts. We recently launched our TAA initiative or our Training Advancement Agenda, and a lot of the pro programs that Rob manages are part of that agenda like our free NSE training, our security academies, but we're also working with a lot of global partners, corporate partners like Salesforce, and IBM. We're also working with the World Economic Forum on this initiative because we really believe it's a joint effort to really make a difference. And so, for example, with Salesforce we provide some of our curriculum and training for free on their training platform, the same with IBM. And we'll continue to scale these partnerships because with these partners, we can reach more people and accelerate the impact that we can have overall. >> Absolutely that ability to expand it especially as we saw such a change in the cyber threat landscape last year as you said, Sandra you've made great progress needing, you know, a deficit of 4 million folks down to 3 million, but also looking at the opportunity to try to find more folks leveraging partners and to rubs point elevating the conversation or expanding that scope. This isn't just a problem for IT and security folks. This is a challenge across the organization that the board needs to be focused on because we've seen in this rapidly changing last year organizations and enough peril in trying to pivot their businesses. And then you add on some of the cyber threats. Rob can you talk a little bit more about the TAA initiative? I know that about your Network Security Expert program NSE program, you guys also do FortiVet program. Tell us a little bit about some of those programs and maybe some of the things that you've done to broaden the scope during the last year. >> Yeah, it certainly can. I mean, there's a number of programs that make up the agenda and you know we've widened the scope in terms of the audiences that we're looking at. But also as Sandra mentioned, trying to expand our reach as ordinary, obviously we have a reach into our partners and our ecosystem, but the ecosystem of the IBM's and the world economic forums and so on go far beyond our reach. But one of the things that we were able to do as a company almost exactly a year ago, we made the conscious decision that the training curriculum that we've built, we wanted to make it available to as many people as we possibly could. So we we've made approximately 400 hours worth of cybersecurity training available to anyone that wants to sign up and take the training in self-paced format, where they want to take it, when they want to take it. So that was a big commitment on our part and that training continues to be free today and we'll keep it free until we start to see the skills gap closed but that that has resulted I guess it was about a month or two ago when we were tracking numbers that we've exceeded over a million registrations for that training, which really was validation to us that the demand for this training is massive. So that's helped us expand our reach but that training as well we're making it available for free, but we have all sorts of different types of partners who are taking that training and making it three free through their learning portals as well. So it's really expanded the reach in that way. You know, another area that we've really focused on is partnering with nonprofits who are representing underrepresented groups. So you mentioned the veterans program that's been a program we've had for quite a while now, but we've looked at that program and thought, well, you know, we can definitely replicate our efforts there and look at other groups as well and start to see how we can partner with different NGOs to really address the diversity and inclusion, within the cybersecurity industry. 'Cause, you know, I think one thing that's interesting here is because of the skill shortage, a lot of hiring managers have had to start to look at recruiting through non traditional streams. And that that can be, you know, looking at if we have policies that say, we must hire people with four year degrees. Well, maybe we want to take a look at that and see well is that really necessary for all the jobs that we're looking at? Maybe we could look at shorter programs even high school students but then also looking at underrepresented groups it is a great way for us to take a look at this skills gap in cybersecurity and align it with our diversity and inclusion initiatives, internally within our organizations and see how we can bring that to bear on problem and really start to have the same time, create a much more diverse workforce within cybersecurity while we're trying to close that skills gap. >> I love that what a great opportunity to expand upon that. I wanted to ask you just really quickly, Rob she said 400 hours of free cyber training available over a million registrations so far. You're right, that definitely shows the demand. I'm curious when we think of backgrounds we think are these, you know need to be IT folks. Is that curriculum broad enough so that somebody with a marketing degree or somebody that doesn't have a degree could kind of get in on level one and start learning their way up the security stack? >> Yeah, it is a very broad scope. When we look at the catalog, it is multiple levels. And in fact our network security expert program it's an eight level program. And the first couple of levels of that program are applicable to anyone that needs an awareness of cybersecurity and the issues. So, yeah, it's perfect. And `in fact the level one of that program is something that we've integrated into a new service offering which is our Cybersecurity Awareness Program that companies can implement internally to provide that base level of cybersecurity awareness to all of their employees. And then as you go up to level two, three, four and five, and so on, it gets more and more technical right up to the NSE level or we're talking about, you know, architects engineers are developing very large critical cyber security infrastructures. >> Lisa, you bring up a very important point that I'd like to make a comment on. There's this misconception that you need a degree in Computer Science or some other technical degree to be in cyber security. And that's absolutely not the case. In fact, half the people in cybersecurity don't have a degree in any Computer Science program, et cetera, but you know there's a lot of skillsets and backgrounds that really map well to cybersecurity. And it's a very broad industry. There was new roles coming all of the time. So I would encourage people to not let that be a barrier to getting into this industry. And in fact our Veteran's program has been extremely successful because people coming out of the defense forces have a lot of the skills that match very well to cyber security like attention to detail, situational awareness, the ability to work under pressure. So it's definitely a misconception that the industry needs to correct. >> I couldn't agree more, especially as the daughter of a Vietnam Combat Veteran and I love what you guys are doing with veterans but you're right. There's so many other skills that people have that are so transportable and transferable that, and it's such an exciting industry. I mean, we all have a million devices scattered around. I think with those new Apple tags that if I put one on my dog's collar, my dog's going to be a connected device. There's so many opportunities to learn but there's also more exposure. The more people that have different backgrounds I think just that with that thought diversity alone, organizations in any industry can benefit. Sandra talk to us about how partners are taking some of these programs and rolling them into their own to help kind of open that door wider as you say, to make sure that barrier isn't there and also get more folks aware of what they can learn. >> Yeah, the encouraging thing is I just see a lot more creativity around this issue. If you think about it, the lack of diversity in IT has been a challenge for everyone that the issue in cybersecurity is just a manifestation of that. And one of the reasons is that it's particularly cybersecurity. A lot of people don't understand how to get into the industry, or they have a lack of awareness about the different types of roles. And we see this in particular with women and young females as well as underserved minority groups. In fact, the veterans program is one way to bring more of that diversity into the industry. And if you think about it today, women make up about 24%. I think it's single digits for underrepresented groups. So we have a huge opportunity there. And I think somehow working with our partners we're doing a lot of different things. Not only are we providing our curriculum and our training and the technical support, but we're also done a lot of work around mapping roles and the steps you need to take to, to achieve those roles. So we've created that for different roles, and we've shared that with some of our training partners and they provide that information on their training platforms. We also regularly have done a lot of different podcasts and interviews with women and minorities have gone through the industry and been very successful talking about how they did that and how they got there. We're working with lots of nonprofits like Women in Cybersecurity speaking to people out there providing them the support. So it's a multi-phase approach. And I do think that private industry need to be doing things like creating entry level kinds of roles to bring more people in the industry and recruit differently. But the good news is there's a huge amount of awareness around this, and you definitely see companies doing a lot more, as well as our partners. >> Well if I could just touch on something there, well Sandra is talking about the different career roles and so on. The industry can get pretty complicated pretty quickly when we're talking about different roles. And there's a lot of buzzwords. And you know when people are looking at this and say, well, how do I even get into this industry? It sounds very technical complicated. And, you know, there are a number of different career patching tools that you can find out there around cyber security but when there's too many of those that even gets confusing. So the career paths that we've developed, we've done that in conjunction with NICE and there's an initiative called the NICE Framework which stands for National Initiative for Cyber Security Education. And so the pathways that we've developed map to that. So, you know, that's one thing I'd like to encourage other organizations to make sure that we're all following that framework so that as we're providing these career paths to people we're using the same terminology. We're using the same titles and career paths and so on. So it just makes it a little bit more understandable for people to pick a path that they want and then start their journey. >> I also think exposing students earlier in their education about cyber security is really important. In fact, we're just released a book called "Cyber Safe" and it's targeting elementary school children and their parents and making them more aware of cybersecurity, the risks, how they should behave online. It talks about cyber bullying and it also helps has guidance in there for parents. And this is a book that we're making freely available to underserved schools and it can easily be accessed online. We've had great reviews, but it's all part of our TAA efforts to educate and make people more aware about the opportunities on the industry overall. >> I love that, Sandra our SVP of marketing. Is there a URL that you can give our audience where they can find that free resource? >> Yes, you can find that I believe on our NSE training page. You can just go to fortinet.com NSE and or TAA and you will find information about how to get the book. >> Excellent so fortinet.com search TAA or NSE you'll find that information. I'm going to check that out myself 'cause maybe you know, for adult children of parents who also need some cybersecurity help I think I might check that out for myself. >> You can (indistinct) copy Lisa. >> Thank you, excellent. It's been great talking to you guys. This is such an interesting topic. I love the efforts that Fortinet is doing to close those gaps and also what you're doing to bridge that with the diversity and inclusion efforts brought out. That's a great effort, Sandra, Rob thank you for joining me today. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you, Lisa >> For Sandra Wheatley and Rob Rashotte. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation with Fortinet. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit 2020. Sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Welcome to CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by a CUBE alum, Karthik Narain. He is Accenture's senior managing director and lead Accenture Cloud First, welcome back to the show Karthik. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> Always a pleasure. So I want to talk to you. You are an industry veteran, you've been in Silicon Valley for decades. I want to hear from your perspective what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, what are you hearing from clients? What are they struggling with? What are their challenges that they're facing day to day? >> I think COVID-19 has been a eye-opener from various facets, first and foremost, it's a health situation that everybody's facing, which not just has economic bearings to it. It has enterprise and organizational bearing to it, and most importantly, it's very personal to people because they themselves and their friends, family, near and dear ones are going through this challenge from various different dimension. But putting that aside, when you come to it from an organizational enterprise standpoint, it has changed everything, the behavior of organizations coming together, working in their campuses, working with each other as friends, family, and near and dear colleagues, all of them are operating differently. So that's one big change to get things done in a completely different way from how they used to get things done. Number two, a lot of things that were planned for normal scenarios, like their global supply chain, how they interact with their client, customers, how they co-innovate with their partners, and how their employees contribute to the success of an organization, they're all changed. And there are no data models that give them a hint of something like this for them to be prepared for this. So we are seeing organizations that have adapted to this reasonably okay, and are launching to innovate faster in this, and there are organizations that have started with struggling, but are continuing to struggle. And the gap between the leaders and laggards are widening. So this is creating opportunities in a different way for the leaders with a lot of pivot in their business, but it's also creating significant challenge for the laggards, as we defined in our future systems research that we did a year ago, and those organizations are struggling further. So the gap is actually widening. >> So you just talked about the widening gap. You've talked about the tremendous uncertainty that so many companies, even the ones who have adapted reasonably well in this time. Talk a little bit about Accenture Cloud First and why now? >> I think it's a great question. We believe that for many of our clients COVID-19 has turned cloud from an experimentation aspiration to an urgent mandate. What I mean by that is everybody has been doing something on the other end cloud. There's no company that says "We don't believe in cloud," or "We don't want to do cloud." It was how much they did in cloud. And they were experimenting, they were doing the new things in cloud, but they were operating a lot of their core business outside the cloud or not in the cloud. Those organizations have struggled to operate in this new normal, in a remote fashion, as well as their ability to pivot to all the changes the pandemic has brought to them. But on the other hand, the organizations that had a solid foundation in cloud were able to pivot faster and are actually gone into the stage of innovating faster and driving a new behavior in the market, new behavior within their organization. So we are seeing that this pandemic has actually fast forwarded something that we always believed was going to happen, this movement to cloud over the next decade, it has fast forwarded it to happen in the next three to five years. And it's created this moment where it's a once in an era, really replatforming of businesses in the cloud that we are going to see. And we see this moment as a cloud-first moment where organizations will use cloud as the canvas, as the foundation with which they're going to reimagine their business after they were born in the cloud. And this requires a whole new strategy. And at Accenture, we are doing a lot in cloud, but we thought that this is the moment where we bring all of that capabilities together because we need a strategy for addressing movement to cloud or embracing cloud in a holistic fashion. And that's what Accenture Cloud First brings together, a holistic strategy, a team that's 70,000 plus people that's coming together with rich cloud skills, but investing to tie in all the various capabilities of cloud to deliver that holistic strategy to our clients. >> So I want you to delve into a little bit more about what this strategy actually entails. I mean, it's clearly about embracing change and being willing to experiment, and having capabilities to innovate. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this strategy entails? >> Yeah. The reason why we say there is a need for strategy is like I said, cloud is not new. There's almost every customer client is doing something with the cloud, but all of them have taken different approaches to cloud and different boundaries to cloud. Some organizations say, "I just need to consolidate my multiple data centers to a small data center footprint and move the rest to cloud." Certain other organizations say that "Oh, I'm going to move certain workloads to cloud." Certain other organizations said, "Oh, I'm going to build this greenfield application or workload in cloud." Certain others said, "I'm going to use the power of AI/ML in the cloud to analyze my data and derive insights." But a cloud-first strategy is all of this tied with the corporate strategy of the organization with an industry specific cloud journey. To say, if in this current industry, if I were to be reborn in the cloud, would I do it in the exact same fashion that I did it in the past, which means that the products and services that they offer need to be reimagined, how they interact with their customers and partners need to be revisited, how they build and operate their IT systems need to be reimagined, how they unearth the data from all the systems under which they are trapped need to be liberated so that you could derive insights. A cloud-first strategy hence is a corporate-wide strategy, and it's a C-suite responsibility. It doesn't take the ownership away from the CIO or CDIO, but the CIOs and CDIOs felt that it was just their problem and they were to solve it, and everyone else being a customer. Now the center of gravity is elevated to it becoming a C-suite agenda on everybody's agenda, where probably the CDIO is the instrument to execute that. That's a holistic cloud-first strategy. >> And it's a strategy, but the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's also a mindset and an approach, as you were saying, this idea of being reborn in the cloud. So now how do I think about things? How do I communicate? How do I collaborate? How do I get done what I need to get done? Talk a little bit about how this has changed the way you support your clients and how Accenture Cloud First is changing your approach to cloud services. >> Wonderful. You know, I did not cover one very important aspect in my previous question, but that's exactly what you just asked me now, which is, to do all of this, I talked about all the variables an organization or an enterprise is going to go through, but the good part is they have one constant. And what is that? That is their employees, because if those employees are able to embrace this change, if they are able to change themselves, pivot themselves, retool and train themselves, to be able to operate in this new cloud-first world, the ability to reimagine every function of the business would be happening at speed. And cloud-first approach is to do all of this at speed, because innovation is directly proportional to the rate of probability on experimentation. You need to experiment a lot, for any kind of experimentation, there's a probability of success, and organizations need to have an ability and a mechanism for them to be able to innovate faster, for which they need to experiment a lot. The more they experiment and the lower cost at which they experiment is going to help them experiment a lot, and experiment them at speed, fail fast, succeed more. And hence, they're going to be able to operate this at speed. So the cloud-first mindset is all about speed. I'm helping the clients fast track their innovation journey, and this is going to happen, like I said, across the enterprise in every function, across every department, and the agent of this change is going to be the employees who have to embrace this change through new skills and new tooling, and new mindset that they need to adapt to. >> So Karthik, what you're describing, it sounds so exciting. And yet for a pandemic-weary workforce that's been working remotely, that may be dealing with uncertainty for their kid's school and for so many other aspects of their life, it sounds hard. So how are you helping your clients, employees get onboard with this? And because the change management is often the hardest part. >> Yeah, I think it's, again, a great question. A bottle has only so much capacity. Something got to come out for something else to go in. That's what you're saying, it's absolutely right. And that is again, the power of cloud. The reason why cloud is such a fundamental breakthrough technology and capability for us to succeed in this era, because it helps in various forms. What we talked so far is the power of innovation that we could create, but cloud can also simplify the life of the employees in an enterprise. There are several activities and tasks that people do in managing their complex infrastructure, complex IT landscape. They used to do certain jobs and activities in a very difficult and a roundabout way, cloud has simplified and democratized a lot of these activities, so that things which had to be done in the past, like managing the complexity of the infrastructure, keeping them up all the time, managing the obsolescence of the capabilities and technologies and infrastructure, all of that could be offloaded to the cloud, so that the time that is available for all of these employees can be used to further innovate. Every organization is going to spend almost the same amount of money, but rather than spending activities, by looking at the rear view mirror, on keeping the lights on, they're going to spend more money, more time, more energy, and spend their skills on things that are going to add value to their organization. Because every innovation that an enterprise can give to their end customer need not come from that enterprise. The world of platform economy is about democratizing innovation. And the power of cloud is to get all of these capabilities from outside the four walls of the enterprise. >> It will add value to the organization, but I would imagine also add value to that employee's life because the employee will be more engaged in his or her job and therefore bring more excitement and energy into his or her day-to-day activities too. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is a normal evolution we would have seen, everybody would have seen in their lives, that they keep moving up the value chain of what activities that gets performed by those individuals. And this is, you know, no more true than how the United States, as an economy has operated where this is a powerhouse of innovation, where the work that's done inside the country keeps moving up the value chain and US leverages the global economy for a lot of things that is required to power the United States. And that global economic phenomenon is very true for an enterprise as well. There are things that an enterprise needs to do themselves, there are things an employee needs to do themselves, but there are things that they could leverage from the external innovation and the power of innovation that is coming from technologies like cloud. >> So at Accenture, you have long, deep stand, sorry, you have deep and long standing relationships with many cloud service providers, including AWS. How does the Accenture Cloud First strategy, how does it affect your relationships with those providers? >> Yeah. We have great relationships with cloud providers like AWS. And in fact, in the cloud world, it was one of the first capability that we started about 13 years ago, when we started developing these capabilities. But five years ago, we hit a very important milestone where the two organizations came together and said that we are forging a formal partnership with joint investments to build this partnership, and we named that as Accenture AWS Business Group, AABG, where we co-invested, brought skills together and developed solutions. And we will continue to do that, and through that investment, we've also made several acquisitions that you would have seen in the recent times, like Enimbos and Gekko that we made acquisitions in Europe. But now we're taking this to the next level. What we are saying is through cloud-first and the $3 billion investment that we are bringing in through cloud-first, we are going to make specific investment to create unique joint solution and landing zones, foundation cloud packs, with which clients can accelerate their innovation or their journey to cloud-first. And one great example is what we are doing with Takeda, a global pharmaceutical giant, with whom we've signed a five-year partnership. And it was out in the media just a month ago or so, where the two organizations are coming together, we have created a partnership as a power of three partnership where the three organizations are jointly holding hands and taking responsibility for the innovation and the leadership position that Takeda wants to get to. With this, we are going to simplify their operating model and organization by providing it flexibility. We're going to provide a lot more insights. Takeda is a 230 year old organization. Imagine the amount of trapped data and intelligence that is there. How about bringing all of that together with the power of AWS and Accenture and Takeda to drive more customer insights, come up with breakthrough R and D, accelerate clinical trials, and improve the patient experience using AI, ML, and edge technologies. So all of these things that we will do through this partnership with joint investment from Accenture Cloud First, as well as partner like AWS, so that Takeda can realize their gain. And their CEO actually made a statement that five years from now, every Takeda employee will have an AI assistant that's going to make that Takeda employee move up the value chain on how they contribute and add value to the future of Takeda, with the AI assistant making them even more equipped and smarter than what they could be otherwise. >> So, one last question to close this out here. What is your future vision for Accenture Cloud First? What are we going to be talking about at next year's Accenture Executive Summit? >> Yeah, the future is going to be evolving, but the part that is exciting to me, and this is a fundamental belief that we are entering a new era of industrial revolution, from industrial first, second, and third industrial, the third happened probably 20 years ago with the advent of silicon and computers and all of that stuff that happened in the Silicon Valley. I think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be in the cross section of physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And there's a great article in World Economic Forum that your audience can Google and read about it. But the reason why this is very, very important is we are seeing a disturbing phenomenon that over the last 10 years, we are seeing a plateauing of the labor productivity and innovation, which has dropped to about 2.1%. And when you see that kind of phenomenon over that long a period of time, there has to be breakthrough innovation that needs to happen to come out of this barrier and get to the next base camp, as I would call it, to further this productivity lag that we are seeing, and that is going to happen in the intersection of the physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And I think cloud is going to be the connective tissue between all of these three, to be able to provide that, where it's the edge, especially is going to come closer to the human lives. It's going to come from cloud. Pictorally in your mind, you can think about cloud as central, either in a private cloud, in a data center, or in a public cloud, everywhere. But when you think about edge, it's going to be far-reaching and coming close to where we live and where we work and where we get entertained and so on and so forth. And there's going to be intervention in a positive way in the field of medicine, in the field of entertainment, in the field of manufacturing, in the field of mobility, when I say mobility, human mobility, people, transportation, and so on and so forth, with all of this stuff, cloud is going to be the connective tissue and the vision of cloud-first is going to be plowing through this big change that is going to happen. And the evolution that is going to happen where, you know, the human race of mankind, or personkind, being very gender neutral in today's world, cloud-first needs to be that beacon of creating the next generation vision for enterprises to take advantage of that kind of an exciting future. And that's why in Accenture we say "Let there be change" as our purpose. And I genuinely believe that cloud-first is going to be in the forefront of that change agenda, both for Accenture as well as for the rest of the world. >> Excellent. Let there be change indeed. Thank you so much for joining us Karthik. A pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you so much, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.

>> From "The Cube studios" in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This, is a cube conversation. >> Welcome to this Cube Virtual conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm excited to be talking to one of our cube alumni again, very socially distant, Derek Manky joins me the chief security insights and global for alliances, Fortinet's FortiGuard labs, Derek it's great to see you, even though virtually >> Yep, better safe better safe these days, right? But yeah, it's great to see you again and um I'm really looking forward to a great conversation, as always. >> Yeah! So Wow Has a lot changed since I last saw you? I-I think that's an epic understatement.. But each year we talk with you about the upcoming What's coming up in the threat landscape, what you guys are seeing Some of the attack trends. What are some of the things that you've seen in this very eventful year since we last spoke? >> Yeah.. a lot of a lot of things.. um.. Obviously.. uh.. with the pandemic there has been this big shift in landscape, right? So particularly uh Q3 Q4. So the last half of the year uh now we have a lot of things that were traditionally in corporate safeguards um you know, actual workstations, laptops that were sitting within networks and perimeters of-of organizations, that have obviously moved to work from home. And So, with that, comes a lot of new a-attack opportunities Um We track as, you know, threat until at 40 minutes, so 40 guard labs on a daily basis. And.. uh.. we are clearly seeing that and we're seeing a huge rise in things like um IOT targets, being the number one attacks, so consumer grade routers, um IOT devices, like printers and network attached storage. Those are um some of the most, favorite attack vehicles that cyber criminals are using to get into the-those devices. Of course, once they get in those devices, they can then move, laterally to compromise the..uh corporate laptop as an example. So those are-are very concerning The other thing has been that email that traditionally has been our number one um Another favorite attack platform always has! It's not going away but for the first time this year in.. um in about September, the second half, we saw a web based attacks taking priority for attackers and that's because of this new working environment. A lot of people I'm serving the websites from Again, these devices that were, not, were previously within Um you know, organizations email security is centralized a lot of the times but the web security always isn't. So that's another another shift that we've seen. We're now in the full-blown midst of the online shopping season um action and shopping season is almost every day now (laughter) since this summer >> Yep.. Yep.. >> And we've clearly seen that And we- Just from September up to October we saw over a trillion, not a billion, but a trillion new flows to shopping websites uh In just one month Um So that can- than number continues to rise and continues to rising quickly. >> Yeah. So the- the expanding threat landscape I've talked to a number of Companies the last few months that we're in this situation where it's suddenly It was a maybe 100% onsite workforce now going to work from home taking uh either desktops from uh their offices or using personal devices and that was a huge challenge that we were talking about with respect to endpoint and laptop security But interesting that you- you're seeing now this web security, I know phishing emails are getting more personal but the fact that um That website attacks are going up What are some of the things that you think, especially yo-you bring up a point we are we are now and maybe even s- more supercharged e-commerce season. How can businesses prepare a-and become proactive to defend against some of these things that, since now the threat surface is even bigger? >> Yeah. Multi-pronged approach. You know, Lisa, like we always say that, first of all, it's just like we have physical distancing, cyber distancing, just like we're doing now on this call. But same thing for reuse. I think there's always a false sense of security, right? When you're just in the home office, doing some browsing to a site, you really have to understand that these sites just by touching, literally touching it by going to the URL and clicking on that link you can get infected that easily. We're seeing that, there's a lot of these attacks being driven So, education, there's a lot of free programs. We have one on Fortinet information security awareness training. That is something that we continually need to hone the skills of end users first of all, so that's an easy win I would say, to my eyes in terms of organizations, but then this multi-pronged approach, right? So things like having EDR endpoint detection response, and being able to manage those end users while they're on on their devices at home Being able to have security and making sure those are up to date in terms of patches. So centralized management is important, two factor authentication, or multi-factor authentication Also equally as important. Doing things like network segmentation. For end users and the devices too. So there's a lot of these Things that you look at the risk that's associated The risk is always way higher than the investment upfront in terms of hours, in terms of security platforms. So the good thing is there's a lot of Solutions out there and it doesn't have to be complicated. >> That's good because we have enough complication everywhere else. But you bring up a point, you know, about humans, about education. We're kind of always that weakest link, but so many of us, now that are home, have distractions going on all around. So you might be going, "I've got to do some bill pay and go onto your bank" without thinking that that's that's now a threat landscape. What are some of the things that you're seeing that you think we're going to face in 2021, which is just around the corner? >> Yeah so So we're just talking about those IOT devices They're the main culprit right now. They can continue to be for a while We have this new class of threat emerging technology, which is edge computing. So people always talked about the perimeter of the perimeter being dead in other words, not just building up a wall on the outside, but understanding what's inside, right? That's been the case of IOT, but now edge computing is the emerging technology The main difference You know, we say, is that the edge devices are virtual assistant is the best example I could give, right? That, that users will be aware of in-home networks. Because these devices, traditionally, have more processing power, they handle more data, they have more access and privilege to devices like things like security systems, lights, as an example Beyond home networks, these edge devices are also As an example, being put into military and defense into critical infrastructure, field units for oil and gas and electricity as an example. So this is the new emerging threat, more processing power, more access and privilege, smarter decisions that are being made on those devices Those devices, are going to be targets for cyber criminals. And that's something, I think next year, we're going to see a lot of because it's a Bigger reward to the cyber criminal if they can get into it. And So targeting the edge is going to be a big thing. I think there's going to be a new class of threats. I'm calling these, I haven't heard this coined in the industry yet, but I'm calling these or "EAT"s or "Edge Access Trojans" because that's what it is, they compromise these devices. They can then control and get access to the data. If you think of a virtual assistant, and somebody that can actually compromise that device, think about that data. Voice data that's flowing through those devices that they can then use as a cleverly engineered, you know, attack a social engineering attack to phish a user as an example. >> Wow! I never thought about it from that perspective before Do you think, with all the talk about 5G, and what's coming with 5G, is that going to be an accelerator of some of these trends? Of some of these "EAT"s that you talk about? >> Yeah, definitely. Yeah So 5G is just a conduit. It's an accelerator. Absolutely um Catalyst called, if you will, It's here. Um, it's been deployed, not worldwide, but in many regions, it's going to continue to be 5G is all about, um, speed.. Um right? And so if you think about how swiftly these attacks are moving, you be abl- you need to be able to keep up with that from a defense standpoint, um Threats move without borders, they move without Uh, uh, Unfortunately, without restriction a lot of the time, right? Cyber crime has no borders. Um, the-they don't have rules, or if they have, they don't care about rules (laughter) So break those rules. So they are able to move quickly, right? And that's th- the problem with 5G, of course, is that these devices now can communicate quicker, they can launch even larger scale things like "DDOS", "Distributed Denial Of Service attacks". And That is, is a very big threat. And it also allows the other thing about 5G, Lisa, is that it allows.. um.. Peer to peer connectivity too. Right? So it's like Bluetooth, Um, Bluetooth's um enhanced in a sense, because now you have devices that interact with each other as well, by interacting with each other Um that also uh, you know, what are they talking about? What data are they passing? That's a whole new security inspection point that we need to And that's what I mean about this.. Um that's just It reconfirms that the.. Perimeters that. >> Right. Something we've been talking about, as you said for a while, but That's some pretty hard hitting evidence that it is, indeed, a thing of the past Something that we've talked to you about - with you in the past is Swarm attacks. Ho- What's, What's going on there? How are they progressing? >> Yeah, so this is a real threat, but there's good news, bad news. The Good news is this is a long progressing threat, which means we have more time to prepare. Bad news is we have seen developments in terms of weaponizing this, It's like anything.. Swarm is a tool. It can be as good.. DARPA, as an example, has invested a lot into this from military research, it's all around us now in terms of good applications things like for redundancy, right? Robotics, as an example, there's a lot of good things that come from Swarm technology, but.. There's use for If it's weaponized, It can have some very scary prospects. And that's what we're starting to see. There's a new botnet that was created this year. It is called the "HTH" this is written in Golang. So it's a language that basically allows it to infect any number of devices. It's not just your PC Right? It's the same, it's the same virus, but it can morph into all these different platforms, devices, whether it's a, an IOT device, an edge device But the main, characteristic of this is that it's able to actually have communication. They built a communication protocol into it. So the devices can pass files between each other, talk to each other They don't have a machine learning models yet, so in other words, they're not quote-in-quote "smart" yet, but that's coming. Once that intelligence starts getting baked in, then we have the weaponized Swarm technology And what this means, is that you know, when you have those devices that are making decisions on their own, talking to each other >> A: they're harder to kill. You take one down, another one takes its place. >> B: um They are able to move very swiftly, especially when that piggybacking leveraging on things like 5G. >> So . the I'm just blown away at all these things that you're talking about They are so So talk about how companies, and even individuals, can defend against this and become proactive. As we know one of the things we know about 2020 is all the uncertainty, we're going to continue to see uncertainty, but we also know that we- there's expectation.. globally, that a good amount of people are going to be working from home and connecting to corporate networks for a very long time. So, how can companies and people become proactive against these threats? >> Yes People process procedures and technology. So, we talked, as I really looked at this as a stacked approach, first of all, threats, as it is said, they're becoming quicker, the attack surface is larger, you need threat intelligence visibility This comes down to security platforms from a technology piece. So a security driven networking, AI driven security operations Centers These are new. But it's, it's becoming, as you can imagine, when we talked about critical, to fill that gap, to be able to move as quickly as the attackers you need to be able to use intelligent technology on your end. So people are just too slow. But we can still use people from the process, you know, making sure You know, Trying to understand what the risk is. So looking at threat intelligence reports, we put out weekly threat intelligence briefs as an example of as Fortiguard Labs, to be able to understand what the threats are, how to respond to those, how to prioritize them and then put the proper security measures in place. So, there are absolutely relevant technologies that exist today, And in fact now I think is the time to really get those in deployment before this becomes worse, as we're talking about. And then as I said earlier, there's also free things that can be just part of our daily lives, right? So we don't have this false sense of security. So understanding that that threat is real following up on the threat and being on doing education There's phishing services Again, phishing can be a good tool when it's used in a non-malicious way, to test people's skills sets as an example. So all of that combined is But the biggest thing is definitely relying on things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, to be able to work at speed with these threats. >> Right. So, you also have global threat alliances under your portfolio. Talk to me about how 40 net is working with global Alliance partners to fight this growing attack surface. >> Yeah. So this is the ecosystem. Every, every organization, whether it's private or public sector, has a different role to play in essence, right? So you look at things in the public sector, you have law enforcement, they're focused on attribution, so when we look at cyber crime, and if we find It's the hardest thing to do, but if we find out who these cyber criminals are, we can bring them to justice. Right? Our whole goal is to make it more expensive for the cyber criminals to operate, So by doing this, if we work with law enforcement and it leads to a successful arrest and prosecution, because we've done it in the past, that takes them off line to hit somewhere it hurts Law enforcement will typically work with intelligence leads to freeze assets, as an example from maybe ransom attacks that are happening. So that's one aspect, but then you have other things like working with national computer emergency response. So disrupting cyber crime, we work with national series. If we know that, you know, the bad guys are hosting stolen data or communication infrastructure in public, you know, servers, we can work with them to actually disrupt that, to take those servers offline. Then you have the private space. So this, you know Fortinet we're a founding member of the Cyber Threat Alliance. I'm on the steering committee there. And this is working with even competitors around in our space where we can share quickly up-to-date intelligence on, on attackers. We remain competitive on the technology itself, but, you know, we're working together to actually share as much as we know about the bad guys. And recently we're also a founding member of the "Center for Cyber Security", "C for C" with World Economic Forum. And This is another crucial effort that is basically trying to bridge all of that. To mend all of that together, right? Law enforcement, prosecutors, security vendors, intelligence organizations, all under one roof because we really do need that. It's an entire ecosystem to make this an effective fight. So it's, it's interesting because a lot of people, I don't think see what's happening behind the scenes a lot of the times, but there is a tremendous effort globally that's happening between all the players. So that's really good news. And the industry piece is something close to my heart. I've been involved in a lot of time and we continue to support. >> That's exciting. And that's something that is, you know, unfortunately, so very, very needed and will continue to be as emerging technologies evolve and we get to use them for good things. And to your point, that bad actors also get to take advantage of that for nefarious things as well. Derek it's always great to have you on the program, any particular things on the 40 net website that you would point viewers to to learn more about like the 20, 20 front landscape? >> Sure. You can always check out our blogs, So it's on blogged@fortynet.com, under "Threat Research", As I said on 40 guard.com, we also have our playbooks on there. We have podcasts, we have our updated threat intelligence briefs too. So those are always great to check out and just be rest assured that, you know, everything I've been talking about, we're doing a lot of that heavy lift on the backend. So by having working with managing security service providers and having all this intelligence baked in, organizations don't have to go and have a huge OPEX by you know, hiring, you know, trying to create a massive security center on their own. I mean, it's about this technology working together and that's that's what we're here for, its we can ask what do you guard lapse? >> Awesome Derek, thank you so much for joining me today in this Cube Conversation. Lots of exciting stuff going on at 40 net and 40 guard labs as always, which we expect, it's been great to have you. Thank you. >> It's a pleasure. Thanks Lisa. >> For Derek Manky. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Virtual Cube.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host of the Cube, our 11th year covering V emeralds. Not in person. It's virtual. I'm with my coast, Dave. A lot, of course. Ah, guest has been on every year since the cubes existed. Sanjay Putin, who is now the chief operating officer for VM Ware Sanjay, Great to see you. It's our 11th years. Virtual. We're not in person. Usually high five are going around. But hey, virtual fist pump, >>virtual pissed bump to you, John and Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Here's a virtual hug. >>Well, so >>great. Back at great. >>Great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending the emerald this year because it's virtual again, it doesn't have the face to face. It is a community and technical events, so people do value that face to face. Um, but it is virtually a ton of content, great guests. You guys have a great program here, Very customer centric. Kind of. The theme is, you know, unpredictable future eyes is really what it's all about. We've talked about covert you've been on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? >>Ah, yeah. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We we felt as we thought, about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. You know, a virtual show of this kind and program of this kind. We all are becoming experts at many Ted talks or ESPN. Whatever your favorite program is 60 minutes on becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp, and everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. You know, Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content were reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes in something that is but 60 minutes. You you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynote an incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp and compelling. Thekla's piece of it needed also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible, made it a goal that if you're gonna do a break out session that has to be incorporate or lead with the customer, so you'll see not just that we have some incredible sea level speakers from customers that have featured in in our pattern, Mikey notes like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike or Lorry beer C I, a global sea of JPMorgan Chase partner Baba, who is CEO of Zuma Jensen Wang, who is CEO of video. Incredible people. Then we also had some luminaries. We're gonna be talking in our vision track people like in the annuity. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or Bryan Stevenson, the person who start in just mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a really key fighter for social justice and criminal. You know, reform and jails and the incarceration systems. And Malala made an appearance. Do I asked her personally, I got to know her and her dad's and she spoke two years ago. I asked her toe making appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting until we get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. >>So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VM. Where, uh, props to you guys, Where does this all tie together for in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on in a highly accelerated rate. You know, cov were not in person, but Cove in 19 has proven, uh, customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world, a lot. Lots changing. Multi cloud has been on the radar. You got security. All the things you guys are doing, you got the AI announcements that have been pumping. Thean video thing was pretty solid. That project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and and with VM where? What is the main theme? What what's their call to action? What's what do they need to be doing? >>I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is, as they think about everything in infrastructure, serves APS as they think about their APS. We want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their athletic applications. And we think that whole initiative off how you modernized applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college C, C plus, plus Java and then emerge, these companies have worked on J two ee frameworks. Web Logic, Be Aware logic and IBM Web Street. It made the development off. Whatever is e commerce applications of portals? Whatever was in the late nineties, early two thousands much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more Micro service based now with containers. We've been talking about kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise, contain a platform making some incredible investments, but we want to not just broaden this platform. We simplified. It is You've heard everything in the end. What works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t shirt sizing small, medium, large. So we now have tens Ooh, in the standard. The advanced the enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind that. That makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense it's sort of like an extra small. In addition to the small medium large so tends to and everything around at modernization, I think would be message number one number two alongside modernization. You're also thinking about migration of your workloads and the breadth and depth of, um, er Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve, not just use cases, you are traditionally done, but also new ai use cases. Was the reason Jensen and us kind of partner that, and I mean what a great company and video has become. You know, the king maker of these ai driven applications? Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet? Remember, that's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers. You know automotive banking fraud detection is a number of AI use cases that now get our best and we want it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the B c f e m A Cloud Foundation proposition to smart Knicks on Dell, HP Lenovo are embracing the in video Intel's and Pen Sandoz in that smart make architectural, however, that so that entire world of multi cloud being operative Phobia Macleod Foundation on Prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or Smart Knicks or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure, Google Multi Cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon that's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from, uh, Microsoft Azure about azure BMR solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside of modernization on the third priority, gentlemen would be security. It's obviously a topic that I most recently taken uninterested in my day job is CEO of the company running the front office customer facing revenue functions by night job by Joe Coffin has been driving. The security strategy for the company has been incredibly enlightening to talk, to see SOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to end point and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together MAWR capabilities with NSX and Z scaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, Lassiter wouldn't cover all of this. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those the three things I want them to take away what BMR is doing in the future of APS what you're doing, the future of a multi cloud world and how we're making security relevant for distributed workforce. >>I know David >>so much to talk about here, Sanjay. So, uh, talk about modern APS? That's one of the five franchise platforms VM Ware has a history of going from, you know, Challenger toe dominant player. You saw that with end user computing, and there's many, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. Let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are, uh, and but critical to that modern APS. Focus is developers, and I think it's fair to say that that's not your wheelhouse today, but you're making moves there. You agree that that is, that is a critical part of modern APS, and you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there. >>Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point, David. We way seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VM Ware is completely earned anyplace off rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. You know, we have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years 70 million virtual machines. But we have toe earn that right and containers, and I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers is their virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it will be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why, Why VM Where and why do you think we can win in their long term. What are we doing with developers Number one? We do think there is a container capability independent of virtual machine. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. You know, many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly pivotal and FDR now what's called Tan Xue have I mean the the case. Studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible. When I listen to them, you take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside, pick up a lot of the world. Now the pandemic is doing e commerce and curbside pick up people are going to the store, That's all based on Tan Xue. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact, tracing app. Some of the diagnostic tools built without they were the lab services and on the 10 zoo platform banks. Large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector. The U. S. Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are not public about how they're modernizing dams, and I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spend a significant part of my life is you know, it s a P and increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical. Use case in banking, public sector, telco manufacturing, CPG retail top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tan Xue portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that s a P type of dialogue because we're having an apse dialogue in the in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes Notice I haven't talked at all about kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or public sector or whatever have you now from a developer audience, which was the second part of your question? Dave, you know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know, as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with about two or three million from from the spring community and two or three million from the economic community. So think of those five million people who don't know us because of two acquisitions we don't. Obviously spring was inside Vienna where went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. A few weeks ago, we had spring one. You guys are aware of that? That conference record number of attendees okay, Registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000, which is, you know, much bigger than the physical event. And then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one, and we're really going to take care of that, That that community base of developers as they care about Java Manami also doing really, really well. But then I think the rial audience it now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation. That coupon at AWS re invent at ignite not just the world, I mean via world is not gonna be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're gonna have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's gonna be a multiyear effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today Kate or two on then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers AWS, Microsoft and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and remembers including that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community, takes a village to approach and an appeal to those developers. I think there will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to >>come. Santa, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the Web days and how the development environment change and how the simplicity came along very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys were doing pre and now during and Post Cove it. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi cloud. You guys were expanding your into end you had acquisitions, you mentioned a few of them. And then cove it hit. Okay, so now you have Everything is changing you got. He's got more complex city. You have more solutions, and then the customer psychology is change. You got to spectrums of customers, people trying to save their business because it's changed, their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from Cove it, whether it's a modern app, you know, coming like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, you know, they're trying to save down, modernized or or or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently, how you implement and how you support customers, because you already had kind of the whole multi cloud going on with the modern APS. I get that, but Cove, it has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business on re factor or double down and continue >>John. Great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February 1st week of March, actually back up, even in January, my last trip on a plane. Ah, major trip outside this country was the World Economic Forum in Davos. And, you know, there were thousands of us packed into the small digits in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. Little did we know. A month later, everything would change on DWhite. We began to do in late February. Early March was first. Take care of employees. You always wanna have the pulse, check employees and be in touch with them. Because the health and safety of employees is much more important than the profits of, um, where you know. So we took care of that. Make sure that folks were taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately not lost anyone to death. Covert. We had some covert cases, but they've recovered on. This is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation off skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, and it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I began to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know you, I run customer operations, all of the go to market field teams reporting to me on. I felt it was important for me to be showing up, not just in the big company meetings. We do that and big town halls where you know, some fractions. 30,000 people of VM ware attend, but, you know, go on, do a town hall for everybody in a virtual zoom session in Japan. But in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, uh, then do one in China and Australia kind of almost travel around the world virtually, and it's not long calls 25 30 minutes, where 1st 10 or 15 minutes I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries, the world encouraging them to focus on a few priorities, which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10 15 minutes and be, uh and then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier, because every one of us is going to resume button going from call to call the call. We're tired of T. There's also mental, you know, fatigue that we've gotta worry about. Mental well, being long term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. You know, 40 50%. My life has travel. It takes a day out of your life on either end, your jet lag. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or Beijing or to Bangalore or the London, getting between sites of these customers is like a 45 minute, sometimes in our commute. Now I'm able to do many of these 25 30 minute call, so I set myself a goal to talk to 1000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CEOs and CFOs from my times at S A P and VM ware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CEO or report directly to the legal counsel on accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,002,000 people we called email them. Man, I gotta tell you, people willing to talk to me just coming, you know, into this I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I have probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question, which is what do we tell the customer in terms about portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy on dial, kind of get scared of two things from the portfolio perspective. I think we began to don't notice two things. One is Theo entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I describe that as you know, for example, moving to Amazon is a migration opportunity to azure modernization. Is that whole Tan Xue Eminem? Migration of modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed data center spending might be on hold on freeze as people kind of holding till depend, emmick or the GDP recovers. But migration of modernization is accelerating, so we wanna accelerate that part of our portfolio. One of the products we have a cloud on Amazon or Cloud Health or Tan Xue and maybe the other offerings for the other public dog. The second part about portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security work from home work from anywhere. And that's that combination off workspace, one for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, common black envelope loud and the announcements we've now made with Z scaler for, uh, distributed work for security or what the analysts called secure access. So message. That's beautiful because everyone working from home, even if they come back to the office, needs a very different model of security and were now becoming a leader in that area. of security. So these two parts of the portfolio you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And the final thing, I would say, Guys, just on a soft note. You know, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy. You know what, 67 months into this pandemic to burn out? Ah, now I've encouraged my team. We've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you wanna do that will make your life better through this pandemic. That in practice is that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I began biking with my kids and during the summer months were able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often, and I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often, even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family or with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. >>So, Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with CSOs. I mean, I have a Well, maybe not not 1000 but dozens. And they're such smart people. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. Scott Stricklin on who is the C. C so of Wyndham? He was talking about the security club. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity, access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CSOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? >>Yeah. You know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year, maybe the year before, and what we were trying to do in security was really simplified because the security industry is like 5000 vendors, and it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy. You gotta have 5000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So ah, grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins and vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy and security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles. Uh, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of million's off workspace, one of carbon black endpoints that we manage and secure its incumbent enough to take security and making a lot more part of the infrastructure. Reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools. Andi, eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tool. So that's one other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be apart off that education off security professionals were both investing in ah, lot of off, you know, kind of threat protection research on many of our folks you know who are in a threat. Behavioral analytics, you know, kind of thread research. And people have come out of deep hacking experience with the government and others give back to the community and teaching classes. Um, in universities, there are a couple of non profits that are really investing in security, transfer education off CSOs and their teams were contributing to that from the standpoint off the ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also a treasure. So I think is we think about this. You're going to see us making this a long term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have, you know, a billion dollar plus of security is probably just two or three, and some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress sport. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity, and we think we need to do this both in building great product satisfying customers. But then also investing in the learning, the training enable remember, one of the things of B M worlds bright is thes hands on labs and all the training enable that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform. We in world in a variety of about the virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professional. >>So >>that's gonna be exciting, Because if you look at some of the evaluations of some of the pure plays I mean, you're a cloud security business growing a triple digits and, you know, you see some of these guys with, you know, $30 billion valuations, But I wanted to ask you about the market, E v m. Where used to be so simple Right now, you guys have expanded your tam dramatically. How are you thinking about, you know, the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets, and then, you know, saying, Okay, now we're gonna go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. >>Yeah, I think. Dave, listen, you know, I like davinci statement. You know, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and I think you've touched on something that which is cos we get bigger. You know, I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies. s a P and B M where the bulk of my last 15 plus years And if something I've learned, you know, it's very easy. Both companies was to throw these TLS three letter acronyms, okay? And I use an acronym and describing the three letter acronyms like er or s ex. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company. You know, Carol Property, for example. We just hired her from Google. Is our CMO her first comments like, My goodness, there is a lot of off acronyms here. I've gotta you need a glossary? I had the same reaction when I joined B. M or seven years ago and had the same reaction when I joined the S A. P 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have toe constantly. It's like an accordion like you expanded by making it mawr of luminous and deep. But as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders and I this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have this communication being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video off our five franchise pill. It's just so that the casual person didn't know VM where it could understand on. Then, when I'm on your shore and when on with Jim Cramer and CNBC, I try to simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify because the more you can talk and analogies and pictures, the more the casual user. I mean, of course, and some other audiences. I'm talking to investors. Get it on. Then, Of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or feeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Putin on my team is like, you know, empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We could go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels off that, and that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our borough come sort of Jeffrey Moore, Andi in the Jeffrey more context. You think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that what the Jason sees that are closest to you, that your customers are asking you to advance into on that, either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in the previous dialogue about the framework of build partner and by, and we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance and any of the moves we've made six years ago, seven years ago and I joined the I felt VM are needed to make a move into mobile to really cement opposition in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should by Air One, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we've ever done. Okay. Similarly, I'm sure prior to me about Joe Tucci, Pat Nelson. We're thinking about nice here, and I'm moving to networking. Those were too big, inorganic moves. +78 years of Raghu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to the make the move in the public cloud myself. Rgu pack very involved in the decision. Their toe partner with Amazon, the change and divest be cloud air and then invested in organic effort around what's become the Claudia. That's an organic effort that was an acquisition fast forward to last year. It took me a while to really Are you internally convinced people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in carbon black and endpoint security cement the security story that we're talking about? Rgu did a similar piece of good work around ad monetization to justify that pivotal needed to come back in. So but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, Is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner like you don't see us get into the hardware game we're partnering with. Obviously, the players like Dell and HP, Lenovo and the smart Knick players like Intel in video. In Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacent seas, for example, last year into app modernization up the stack and into security, which I'd say Maura's adjacent horizontal to us. We're now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, We then have to go and tell our customers. Right? And this entire effort of talking to CSOs What am I doing is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplified to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it. Received feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually, some of the moves were now making this year around our partnership in distributed Workforce Security and Cloud Security and Z scaler. What we're announcing an XDR and Security Analytics. All of the big announcements of security of this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last year. Well, you know, keynote around security, and now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. >>Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. So now we have a couple minutes left. But we did pull the audience and the community to get some questions for you, since it's virtually wanted to get some representation there. So I got three questions for you. First question, what comes after Cloud and number two is VM Ware security company. And three. What company had you wish you had acquired? >>Oh, my goodness. Okay, the third one eyes gonna be the turkey is one, I think. Listen, because I'm gonna give you my personal opinion, and some of it was probably predates me, so I could probably safely So do that. And maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else is no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think clouds gonna be with us for a long time. First off this multi cloud world, you just look at the moment, um, that AWS and azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible on I think this that multi cloud from phenomenon. But if there's an adapt ation of it, it's gonna be three forms of cloud. People are really only focus today in private public cloud. You have to remember the edge and Telco Cloud and this pendulum off the right balance of workloads between the data center called it a private cloud. The public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end. I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. Three other part that I think comes as a sequel to Cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities a serverless functions but also containers that you know. Obviously the one could think of that a sister topics to cloud but the entire world of containers. The other seat, uh, then cloud a cloud native will also be topics, but these were all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company? Absolutely. We you know, we aspire to be one of the leading companies in cyber security. I don't think they will be only one. We have to show this by the wealth on breath of our customers. The revenue momentum we have Gartner ranking us or the analysts ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants being viewed as an innovator simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking of the security conferences years ago. Now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and Cloud Security. The three Coppola's a lot more coming in Security analytics, Cloud Security distributed workforce Security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, BMR persist through this, we're planning for multi your five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course I mean, the competition is smaller. Companies that don't have the breadth and depth of the n words are Andy muscle and are going market. We just have to keep building great products and serving customer on the third man. There's so many. But I mean, I think Listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered this is before I joined so I could say the summit speculatively on. Don't you know, make this This is BMR. Sorry. This is Sanjay one's opinion. Not VM. I gotta make very, very clear. Well, listen, I would have if I was at BMO in 2012 or 2013. I would love to about service now then service. It was a great company. I don't even know maybe the company's talk, but then talk about a very successful company at that time now. Maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting Now I think that was during the time of Paul Maritz here and and so on. So for them, maybe there were other priorities the company need to get done. But at that time, of course, today s so it's not as big of a even slightly bigger market cap than us. So that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would have at that time fit very well with VM Ware. And then there's probably we don't look back and regret we move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made the big ones. Okay, Nice era air watch pop in black. Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership. Amazon. What? We're announcing this This, you know, this week within video and Z scaler. So you never look back and regret. You always look for >>follow up on that To follow up on that from a developer, entrepreneurial or partner Perspective. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm Where where where can people partner and play. Whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture back, funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with Govind, where's the white spaces with them? >>I think that, you know, there's gonna be a number off places where the Tan Xue platform develops, as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant toe all of that ecosystem around the C I. C. D type apply platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like, get lab, You know, all of the ways in which open source communities, you know will play alongside that Hash E Corp. Jay frog there number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to tend to, and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. You're going to hear more about that coming up from us on. Then there's the set of data companies, you know, con fluent. You know, of course, you've seen a big I p o of a snowflake. All of those data companies, we'll need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware is always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce. And Data and analytics placed on top of the modern day middleware, which is containers I think it's gonna be now does VM or play physically is a data company. We don't know today we're gonna partner very heavily. But picking the right set of partners been fluent is a good example of one on. There's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see us partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think, as you see us certainly produce out the VM Ware marketplace for developers. I think this is gonna be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those five million developers and work with the leading companies. You know, I use the example of get Lab is an example get help there. Others that appeal to developers tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset. With that, you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village off multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described. It's like, Listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience of all those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this on if you do that over many years, just like the security topic. This is a multi year pursuit for us to be relevant. Developers. We feel good about the future being bright. >>David got five minutes e. >>I thought you were gonna say Zoom, Sanjay, that was That was my wildcard. >>Well, listen, you know, I think it was more recently and very fast catapult Thio success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, sweet spot of the anywhere. I mean, you know, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and, well, back someone you always have to think about what's in the in the bailiwick of what's closest to us, but zooms a great partner. Uh, I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Erica, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time magazine Top 100. But what he's done is phenomenon. I think he could build a company that's just his important, his Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him. Don't sell, keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And you know, I'm as an immigrant. He's, you know, China. Born now American, I'm Indian born, American, assim immigrants. We both have a similar story. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him, from on speed on speed and how to move fast, he tells me he learns a thing to do for me on scale. We teach each other. It's a beautiful friendship. >>We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. One more zoom integration >>for a final word or the zoom that is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, Sanjay, Thank >>you for connecting with us. Virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. Um, it's gonna change. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. We're changing how you serve customers with new chief up commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys were flexing with the market and you got a tailwind. So congratulations, >>John and Dave. Always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership. Also with you. Congratulations of Successful Cube. And in its new digital format, Thank you for being with us With VM world here on. Do you know all that you're doing to get the story out? The guests that you have on the show, they look forward, including the nonviable people like, Hey, can I get on the Cuban like, Absolutely. Because they look at your platform is away. I'm telling this story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. >>I'm gonna bring more community. And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VM World story here of the emerald 2020. Sanjay Poon in the chief operating officer here on the Cube I'm John for a day Volonte. Thanks for watching Cube Virtual. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this episode of "CXO Insights." As you know, we've been grabbing the perspectives of leaders throughout this pandemic and assessing their tips for managing in a crisis and of course, managing in good times as well. But now, as we enter the post-isolation economy, we really want to look at not just how you manage through the crisis but how you manage beyond the crisis. And I'm really excited to have Chris Riley here. He's the newly minted Chief Revenue Officer at Automation Anywhere. Chris, my friend, how you doing? I hope you and the family are well. >> Thank you, David. I wish the same for you. I think getting by as most folks are, it's the new normal, we're all getting used to it but I'm happy to be here and happy to be at Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, I want to talk about that in detail. Eddie Walsh calls it the new abnormal but so congratulations on the new role. I want to start with your career. I met you in 1987, which ironically was the same year I met Dave Donatelli, the same year I met Michigan I. and Saul Koi, talk about great timing. And then, you came into the industry at a time, really different time. It was, the IBM people don't remember this but IBM was the dominant player and you guys unseated them amazing 12-year career at EMC and then you kind of went to the .com boom. That was amazing. You relive that ride, did a stint at HP and really turned that business around and then came back to Dell, top go to market executive. One of the top in the industry that I know and now, of course at Automation Anywhere we're going to talk about. My first question to you is, a lot of changes have occurred since 1987. What has changed the most? Now we're talking diversity, we're talking all kinds of your different sales models. From your career looking back, what's changed the most? >> I think everything has changed and candidly for the better, Dave. You just led with one of the key areas in an area I'm deeply passionate about and that is diversity and inclusion and I think there's no stronger time, at least in our country's history where the inequalities that exist have been so exposed. So I view this as an opportunity, as I did at Dell to make a difference, lead from the front and make this a destination and a company whose culture really supports and drives diversity and inclusion. So I'd say that's one area, and I know it's very passionate for you as well. The others, it was a time before laptops, desktops. I think Ken Olsen once said, who would ever need a laptop in their home and boy, the world has changed. So I think some of the things though that haven't changed and this is why I'm so excited about Automation Anywhere. At the manual processes we have our workers doing and I think there is a real opportunity. I've lived through explosive growth at EMC, top company performing stock during the 90s, I get to see VMware firsthand. I've seen what's happened with ServiceNow and I believe this RPA space, as to you is in its infancy. It's seeing 30% compounded annual growth and we're just at the beginning and I think it's going to change the way people work and really lead to that digital transformation that so many of us have been talking about for the last decade. >> Yeah and you know kind of my position. Quick aside, I don't know if you saw the Netflix announcement this morning and I've been wondering as a small business, what can we do? What more can we do for inclusion and diversity? Netflix announced they're going to take 2% of their cash and put it into banks, financial institutions that support black causes and I just talked to our CFO. I said, look, why don't we take some of our cash, let's take 2% and stick it into banks, community banks. There's 30 million small businesses in the United States. If just 1% puts 10 grand in each, that's $3 billion that go into black community. So I'm going to start a mission and I just thought I'd share that 'cause I know it's a passion of yours. >> Yeah, and we all need to be in a position to provide equal opportunity for employment and that is reaching out into those communities and starting early on in creating the opportunities for advancement professionally, mentorship and just the path forward. And I'm excited to see what Netflix is doing. I'm sure you'll come up with the right answer for your company and I think all of us are searching, what's the right answer for our respective companies? >> Yeah, so now let's get into it. You're a month in and I want to talk about this project. I've learned a lot about not only RPA but about automation. I've just had a deep dive with your team and it really brought some things into focus. Guys, if you bring up the first slide, I want to get some thoughts on the table here. So this is a chart that sort of came into my focus with a friend of mine, Dave Moschello, who really big thinker on this stuff and he pointed out, this is data from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics and the EU and it shows the lackluster productivity that's going on in the past decade. So you can see, we had the boost in the 80s and the 90s, we had this sort of productivity uptick from laptops but now, look what's happened since 2007. And the point that Moschello made on the right hand side is we have all these huge issues that we face, whether it's climate change, we have this massive debt, healthcare, an aging population, feeding everyone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and his point was, there's no way we're going to be able to solve all these problems by throwing humans at the problem. So I've really begun to sort of think about this just in terms of machines and the roles that machines will play. I think overnight, Chris, we've gone from, wow, I'm afraid that machines are going to take my job to you can't operate if you're not digital. >> Yeah, well digital transformation is not a new term. I think it's meant something different each year for the last 10 years and I look at this as an opportunity. The World Economic Forum projected that IA and RPA will create 58 million new jobs. It's an astounding number. What COVID-19 has exposed is this work from home phenomenon that really exposes the risk of manual processes within the enterprise. So I think those two things combined is almost a perfect storm and I think what it'll do is accelerate the adoption of RPA and IPA. So something that might've taken years or decades to really be adopted in force, in this new normal, I think is going to be accelerated quite dramatically. >> So, the combination of your go to market execution, you managed complex sales motions before. Automation Anywhere obviously has some great product capabilities. Guys, I want to bring up the next slide and Chris, you might have seen this in some of the stuff that I wrote but this is data from ETR Enterprise technology research. They're a data partner of ours. Now it's clear that Automation Anywhere has the right product market fit and you can see on this chart, this is a methodology that we use. ETR goes out and they ask people, are you adopting a platform new? Are you increasing spending relative to last year? Are you flat, decreasing or replacing? And you can see here, there is zero churn in the Automation Anywhere base. And so obviously you got product market fit. Churn is the silent killer, obviously of SAS companies and so, you've picked a winner and I'm learning more about this. At first I thought the team office is quite large, I sized it. I actually think it's bigger than I originally thought. Chris, I thought this was going to be a winner-take-all type of market. I'm really rethinking that after, especially the deep dive I've had with your team in terms of how you guys go to market with an end-to-end sort of life cycle approach as opposed to sort of putting point products in. So I wonder if that narrative that I just laid out, resonates with you, is it sort of consistent with what you're seeing and then maybe some of the reasons why you joined Automation Anywhere? >> Yeah, I would say the most aggressive software growth that I've seen in the last decade or so, and two companies stand out for me. That's VMware and ServiceNow. They don't have a point product, they have a platform and that's what attracted me to Automation Anywhere is this platform approach. And Dave as you know, I've spent most of my career calling on the enterprise' strong relationships with those types of companies and they aren't looking to develop a point product solution and then cobble together lots of disparate islands of solutions. They're looking for a platform that can grow as they grow. They can extend from the back office to the front office but all centered around workforce, transformation, productivity and just as importantly, resiliency. And as we start to develop more and more capabilities that will be delivered through this platform approach, I think we're going to see explosive growth as the industry goes through its explosive growth. >> Well, I know your approach and your approach is to stay very close to customers. So as you were doing your due diligence on Automation Anywhere and as you enter your sort of first part of your 100-day journey here, I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers. What are they telling you? What are the big takeaways right now that you're hearing? >> Yeah, so I think some of the data you pointed out with 4,000 customers in essence, zero churn, the opportunity to upsell those customers with more products and solutions clearly is there. New account acquisition has been a tremendous source of growth for the company in a strong professional services organization that actually is able to deliver the outcomes that our customers expect. From an enterprise perspective, I couldn't have come into a better situation with 4,000 customers, 50% of the fortune 500, 2 million bots deployed, those types of strategic relationships are going to be more and more critical as this company continues to accelerate its growth. Most of the RPA solutions really got in through the back office and candidly, really weren't even a component of an IT solution. Now, as you go to the front of the house, where you're looking at customer facing applications and worker productivity, these are CEO, CFO, COO and IT initiatives. So I really believe we're coming into our own, at the front of the house with senior executives that really want to create a better working environment for their employees and de-risk a lot of these manual processes that have existed for years. >> So I know why you chose Automation Anywhere. My question is, why did Automation Anywhere choose Chris Riley? I know your capabilities but obviously when somebody hires a executive like yourself, they say, "Hey, Chris, we want you to help us "get to the next level," but what does that mean? Are we talking about changes in the go to market? Are we talking about your ability to recruit and coach, to manage complex of sales motions? What is it that you want to bring to Automation Anywhere? >> I think it's all those, Dave. Having built a reputation throughout my 30 plus year career around a people-centric focus, a customer-centric focus and those two things kind of aren't interchangeable. When you look at customers, they put their faith and confidence in people and they put their faith and confidence in companies. And what I see here at Automation Anywhere is that the ability to kind of expand upon the great culture that the company already has but do it with someone whose role in a company at scale globally and can put a lot of the best practices and disciplines in place to do that 'cause it is difficult but also, how do we start to do larger, more complex deals and build relationships with the CIO, the CFO, the CEO? And I think a big reason why I'm here is, that experience in doing that, doing large complex multi-year opportunities but also being able to deliver upon the outcomes that we told our customers we could achieve and do that together with our customers and again we have a strong professional services organization and an incredible ecosystem of partners that have demonstrated year over year, the company's ability to actually deliver upon its promise. >> That was my next question to you, was the ecosystem. One of the big changes from when you started in this business, was it used to be just belly to belly, hardcore, direct sales, the importance and leverage that you get from a partner ecosystem. You point out VMware. In fact ServiceNow, it's interesting. When we first started covering ServiceNow, one of the things we said is we want to see as an indicator of success, the partner ecosystem evolve and then sure enough, it exploded with the SIs and all the kinds of developers. So maybe talk about AA's ecosystem, The Partner System. You obviously have a lot of experience there in your career, how do you see that as a leverage point? >> Yeah, it's huge. This market is far larger than we can cover with a direct sales organization and requires substantial services engagements that go well beyond the kind of professional services organization we want to build out organically in the company. So when you look at that, the company today has 1,900 partners. The global systems integrators are key, especially those with VPO type practices, the regional SIs and candidly, the regional VARs who've built out a strong service malpractice, a strong VMware practice and have the professional services capabilities to do some of these complex automation or automation type work that have also built the trust and confidence of their customers. So, in partnership with these types of companies, we believe we can expand our reach. We believe we can offer a more comprehensive outcome and solution to our customers and we, what I'm going to be looking at is, how do we enhance our channel programs to be the kind of company that the channel partners want to engage with, built upon the reputation of the company, the leadership position we have in the technology and also our willingness to go after this space together. >> So I got to go but last question is, what can you share with us about your 100-day plan? Where are you going to focus? >> On the people. There is a strong culture here, there's incredible sales talent and there's talent throughout the organization. I think Dave, you've seen for me over the years, a clarity of our mission, keep things simple and try and drive a repetitive process to deliver results. I'm very accountability focused. So I think what I'm going to look to assess is where the organization is today, how to get more out of the great talent we have, build stronger and deeper relationships with our customers and really scale and grow through our ecosystem of channel partners. >> Well, Chris, I'm super excited for you. A great hire by Automation Anywhere obviously got my attention. I think it'll get the industry's as well. Best of luck, and of course we'll be watching. >> Good, always great to see you, Dave, take care. >> Yeah, ditto, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it here because this month we're going to be really digging into the ETR data we've been reporting on that horse race between Automation Anywhere and UI Path. The ETR data is in the field and we'll be reporting on that. So look for that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)