>>Hey, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of women in data science, 2022. I'm Lisa Martin. And I'm here with one of the key featured keynotes for this year is with events. So the Aragon, the professor and department of human centered design and engineering at the university of Washington Cecilia, it's a pleasure to have you on the cube. >>Thank you so much, Lisa Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here as well. >>You got an amazing background that I want to share with the audience. You are a professor, you are a data scientist, an aerobatic pilot, and an author with expertise in human centered, data science, visual analytics, aviation safety, and analysis of extremely large and complex data sets. That's quite the background. >>Well, thank you so much. It's it's all very interesting and fun. So, >>And as a professor, you study how people make sense of vast data sets, including a combination of computer science and art, which I love. And as an author, you write about interesting things. You write about how to overcome fear, which is something that everybody can benefit from and how to expand your life until it becomes amazing. I need to take a page out of your book. You were also honored by president Obama a few years back. My goodness. >>Thank you so much. Yes. I I've had quite a journey to come here, but I feel really fortunate to be here today. >>Talk about that journey. I'd love to understand if you were always interested in stem, if it was something that you got into later, I know that you are the co-founder of Latinas in computing, a passionate advocate for girls and women in stem. Were you always interested in stem or was it something that you got into in a kind of a non-linear path? >>I was always interested in it when I was a young girl. I grew up in a small Midwestern town and my parents are both immigrants and I was one of the few Latinas in a mostly white community. And I was, um, I loved math, but I also wanted to be an astronaut. And I remember I, when we were asked, I think it was in second grade. What would you like to be when you grow up? I said, oh, I want to be an astronaut. And my teacher said, oh, you can't do that. You're a girl pick something else. And um, so I picked math and she was like, okay. >>Um, so I always wanted to, well, maybe it would be better to say I never really quite lost my love of being up in the air and potentially space. But, um, but I ended up working in math and science and, um, I, I loved it because one of the great advantages of math is that it's kind of like a magic trick for young people, especially if you're a girl or if you are from an underrepresented group, because if you get the answers right on a math test, no one can mark you wrong. It doesn't matter what the color of your skin is or what your gender is. Math is powerful that way. And I will say there's nothing like standing in a room in front of a room of people who think little of you and you silence them with your love with numbers. >>I love that. I never thought about math as power before, but it clearly is. But also, you know, and, and I wish we had more time because I would love to get into how you overcame that fear. And you write books about that, but being told you can't be an astronaut. You're a girl and maybe laughing at you because you liked Matt. How did you overcome that? And so nevermind I'm doing it anyway. >>Well, that's a, it's a, okay. The short answer is I had incredible imposter syndrome. I didn't believe that I was smart enough to get a PhD in math and computer science. But what enabled me to do that was becoming a pilot and I B I learned how to fly small airplanes. I learned how to fly them upside down and pointing straight at the ground. And I know this might sound kind of extreme. So this is not what I recommend to everybody. But if you are brought up in a way where everybody thinks little of you, one of the best things you can possibly do is take on a challenge. That's scary. I was afraid of everything, but by learning to fly and especially learning to fly loops and rolls, it gave me confidence to do everything else because I thought I appointed the airplane at the ground at 250 miles an hour and waited, why am I afraid to get a PhD in computer science? >>Wow. How empowering is that? >>Yeah, it really was. So that's really how I overcame the fear. And I will say that, you know, I encountered situations getting my PhD in computer science where I didn't believe that I was good enough to finish the degree. I didn't believe that I was smart enough. And what I've learned later on is that was just my own emotional, you know, residue from my childhood and from people telling me that they, you know, that they, that I couldn't achieve >>As I look what, look what you've achieved so far. It's amazing. And we're going to be talking about some of the books that you've written, but I want to get into data science and AI and get your thoughts on this. Why is it necessary to think about human issues and data science >>And what are your thoughts there? So there's been a lot of work in data science recently looking at societal impacts. And if you just address data science as a purely technical field, and you don't think about unintended consequences, you can end up with tremendous injustices and societal harms and harms to individuals. And I think any of us who has dealt with an inflexible algorithm, even if you just call up, you know, customer service and you get told, press five for this press four for that. And you say, well, I don't fit into any of those categories, you know, or have the system hang up on you after an hour. I think you'll understand that any type of algorithmic approach, especially on very large data sets has the risk of impacting people, particularly from low income or marginalized groups, but really any of us can be impacted in a negative way. >>And so, as a developer of algorithms that work over very large data sets, I've always found it really important to consider the humans on the other end of the algorithm. And that's why I believe that all data science is truly human centered or should be human centered, should be human centered and also involves both technical issues as well as social issues. Absolutely correct. So one example is that, um, many of us who started working in data science, including I have to admit me when I started out assume that data is unbiased. It's scrubbed of human influence. It is pure in some ways, however, that's really not true as I've started working with datasets. And this is generally known in the field that data sets are touched by humans everywhere. As a matter of fact, in our, in the recent book that we're, that we're coming out with human centered data science, we talk about five important points where humans touch data, no matter how scrubbed of human influence it's support it's supposed to be. >>Um, so the first one is discovery. So when a human encounters, a data set and starts to use it, it's a human decision. And then there's capture, which is the process of searching for a data set. So any data that has to be selected and chosen by an individual, um, then once that data set is brought in there's curation, a human will have to select various data sets. They'll have to decide what is, what is the proper set to use. And they'll be making judgements on this the time. And perhaps one of the most important ways the data is changed and touched by humans is what we call the design of data. And what that means is whenever you bring in a data set, you have to categorize it. No, for example, let's suppose you are, um, a geologist and you are classifying soil data. >>Well, you don't just take whatever the description of the soil data is. You actually may put it into a previously established taxonomy and you're making human judgments on that. So even though you think, oh, geology data, that's just rocks. You know, that's soil. It has nothing to do with people, but it really does. Um, and finally, uh, people will label the data that they have. And this is especially critical when humans are making subjective judgments, such as what race is the person in this dataset. And they may judge it based on looking at the individual skin color. They may try to apply an algorithm to it, but you know what? We all have very different skin colors, categorizing us into race boxes, really diminishes us and makes us less than we truly are. So it's very important to realize that humans touch the data. We interpret the data. It is not scrubbed of bias. And when we make algorithmic decisions, even the very fact of having an algorithm that makes a judgment say on whether a prisoner's likely to offend again, the judge just by having an algorithm, even if the algorithm makes a recommended statement, they are impacted by that algorithms recommendation. And that has obviously an impact on that human's life. So we consider all of this. >>So you just get given five solid reasons why data science and AI are inevitably human centric should be, but in the past, what's led to the separation between data science and humans. >>Well, I think a lot of it simply has to do with incorrect mental models. So many of us grew up thinking that, oh, humans have biases, but computers don't. And so if we just take decision-making out of people's hands and put it into the hands of an algorithm, we will be having less biased results. However, recent work in the field of data science and artificial intelligence has shown that that's simply not true that algorithmic algorithms reinforce human biases. They amplify them. So algorithmic biases can be much worse than human biases and can greater impact. >>So how do we pull ethics into all of this data science and AI and that ethical component, which seems to be that it needs to be foundational. >>It absolutely has to be foundational. And this is why we believe. And what we teach at the university of Washington in our data science courses is that ethical and human centered approaches and ideas have to be brought in at the very beginning of the algorithm. It's not something you slap on at the end or say, well, I'll wait for the ethicists to weigh in on this. Now we are all human. We can all make human decisions. We can all think about the unintended consequences of our algorithms as we develop them. And we should do that at the very beginning. And all algorithm designers really need to spend some time thinking about the impact that their algorithm may have. >>Right. Do you, do you find that people are still in need of convincing of that or is it generally moving in that direction of understanding? We need to bring ethics in from the beginning, >>It's moving in that direction, but there are still people who haven't modified their mental models yet. So we're working on it. And we hope that with the publication of our book, that it will be used as a supplemental textbook in many data science courses that are focused exclusively on the algorithms and that they can open up the idea that considering the human centered approaches at the beginning of learning about algorithms and data science and the mathematical and statistical techniques, that the next generation of data scientists and artificial intelligence developers will be able to mitigate some of the potentially harmful effects. And we're very excited about this. This is why I'm a professor, because I want to teach the next generation of data scientists and artificial intelligence experts, how to make sure that their work really achieves what they intended it to, which is to make the world a better place, not a worse place, but to enable humans to do better and to mitigate biases and really to lead us into this century in a positive way. >>So the book, human centered data science, you can see it there over Sicily, his right shoulder. When does this come out and how can folks get a copy of it? >>So it came out March 1st and it's available in bookstores everywhere. It was published by MIT press, and you can go online or you can go to your local independent bookstore, or you can order it from your university bookstore as well. >>Excellent. Got to, got to get a copy of, get my hands on that. Got cut and get a copy and dig into that. Cause it sounds so interesting, but also so thoughtful and, um, clear in the way that you described that. And also all the opportunities that, that AI data science and humans are gonna unlock for the world and humans and jobs and, and great things like that. So I'm sure there's lots of great information there. Last question I mentioned, you are keynoting at this year's conference. Talk to me about like the top three takeaways that the audience is going to get from your keynote. >>So I'm very excited to have been invited to wins this year, which of course is a wonderful conference to support women in data science. And I've been a big fan of the conference since it was first developed here, uh, here at Stanford. Um, the three, the three top takeaways I would say is to really consider the data. Science can be rigorous and mathematical and human centered and ethical. It's not a trade-off, it's both at the same time. And that's really the, the number one that, that I'm hoping to keynote will bring to, to the entire audience. And secondly, I hope that it will encourage women or people who've been told that maybe you're not a science person or this isn't for you, or you're not good at math. I hope it will encourage them to disbelieve those views. And to realize that if you, as a member of any type of unread, underrepresented group have ever felt, oh, I'm not good enough for this. >>I'm not smart enough. It's not for me that you will reconsider because I firmly believe that everyone can be good at math. And it's a matter of having the information presented to you in a way that honors your, the background you had. So when I started out my, my high school didn't have AP classes and I needed to learn in a somewhat different way than other people around me. And it's really, it's really something. That's what I tell young people today is if you are struggling in a class, don't think it's because you're not good enough. It might just be that the teacher is not presenting it in a way that is best for someone with your particular background. So it doesn't mean they're a bad teacher. It doesn't mean you're unintelligent. It just means the, maybe you need to find someone else that can explain it to you in a simple and clear way, or maybe you need to get some scaffolding that is Tate, learn extra, take extra classes that will help you. Not necessarily remedial classes. I believe very strongly as a teacher in giving students very challenging classes, but then giving them the scaffolding so that they can learn that difficult material. And I have longer stories on that, but I think I've already talked a bit too long. >>I love that. The scaffolding, I th I think the, the one, one of the high level takeaways that we're all going to get from your keynote is inspiration. Thank you so much for sharing your path to stem, how you got here, why humans, data science and AI are, have to be foundationally human centered, looking forward to the keynote. And again, Cecilia, Aragon. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been a pleasure, >>Likewise versus silly Aragon. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of women in data science, 2022.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Well, hi everybody John Walls here on theCUBE and we're now welcoming Jeremy Wilmot who is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide part of the Postgres movement, you might say or certainly benefiting from the great value that Postgres is providing a number of enterprises across the globe. Jeremy good to see you today and first off, congratulations you are the first guest I've talked to maybe in a year and a half in their office. So good for you. >> Thanks (chuckles) John that's very kind of you John and great to see you and thanks for having me here. Yeah, it's great to be in the office, it really is. I'm here in Miami in South Florida and getting some sort of normalcy back is great for all of us and I'm certainly enjoying it. So thank you before (indistinct) has been. >> I'm sure you are, yeah, congratulations on that front. First off, let's talk about ACI Worldwide for the folks in our audience who aren't familiar with the payments, your role in terms of that payment ecosystem. Tell us a little bit about ACI Worldwide. >> Sure, well, primarily we're a software company. That's ACI, we started 1975 in Omaha, Nebraska built the first debit card system and ATM system for first National Bank of Omaha and over the last 45 years, we've globalized ourselves, we have, we are delivering mission-critical real-time payment systems across the world to banks to merchants to billers, we help them meet the payment needs of their consumers and their corporates. So we process, manage digital payments, we power omni-commerce and e-commerce payments, we present and process bill payments, we manage fraud, we manage the risk all within that and as I said on a global basis 13 of the G20 countries with a leading DDA account or current account payment processing software in those countries and have been for many years. >> So, as the CPO then quite obviously in the financial space your plate is quite full these days in terms of providing for your client base. How would you characterize maybe the evolution in terms of product development that you've been through in the financial world here over the past say, three to five years, where were you back then to where you are now and what role has Postgres played in that journey? >> Sure, yeah. So, specific to the Postgres part of the ecosystem, previously five-plus years ago our previous database solution was complex, it was expensive, it was hard to change and maintain and we leveraged multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors as a result of that. So at that time we looked for an alternative that was simpler and better and we went through a very comprehensive due diligence process, we explored both open source and license models of database to support our solution and when we looked at all of the options we determined that 2ndQuadrant Postgres was the one that provided the most comprehensive solution we were looking for. It had the right mix of capabilities and performance at the right total cost of ownership that we were looking for. And in the payments world as you can imagine, you've got to to be 24/7 365. And we also required a lower cost of ownership than we had before. But we also wanted a greater flexibility and time to market that we could pass on to our customers. And then the last thing I'd say that we were looking for was a multi-deployment capability. And what I mean by that is that we would be able to use this new platform, Postgres platform in our own data centers in our own private cloud, but we could also deploy it in the public cloud, whether we would run it or whether our customers would run it. We wanted that ability to mix and match between these different deployment options. >> So you've talked about a lot of key elements here attributes in terms of availability, accessibility reliability, security obviously. Walk us through those in terms of why you think 2ndQuadrant was addressing your needs in those particular areas or any others for that matter but what it was that checked the box specifically about what Postgres was offering you as opposed to what these other possible solutions and services were that you were looking at. >> Yeah, I think, we're very focused on being able to identify what our customers need and when they're offering services to consumers and to their corporates what is it that they require that's going to enable them to win and compete. And payments industry has a lot of cost pressures within it. It has regulation, it has consumer convenience and the whole movement of digitalization that puts a lot of downward pressure on the cost space. And those who are going to win in the payment space need to be able to address that. So, that is relevant for our banks, for our merchants, for the billers. They all come under very similar regulatory pressure and market pressure and as a result, the ability to reduce dramatically in a very significant way, the total cost of ownership upon which the payment software was going to be operating that was one of the key elements that was very important to us as we made that decision. The second one I think was to enable us to be able to do what we are good at and what our customers expect us to do. And that in turn enables them to focus on their core competencies. We're a software company, we own our own IP we manage our own software for the needs of the 24/7 365 payment requirements and therefore the merchant or the biller or the bank can really focus in on the digital experience for their customers, focusing on their core competencies and what they need to do to win. That was a second key factor for us. I think the third one for us was as well speed to market. Speed to market for ourselves and being competitive to the alternative to ACI, but also more importantly a speed to market for our customers. And there are, the payment world is highly regulated requires significant certification in order to launch new services that's often the long pole in the tent. So we want to be able to get to that point as quickly as possible. And being able to have a public cloud deployment open systems capabilities that would really allow us to pass on that speed to market to those customers. So for example, an acquirer, a payment acquirer moving into a new geographical country they want to compete in they can (indistinct) on their competitors by launching minimum viable products in six to nine months that is five years ago, that could have been a 24 to 30 months endeavor for them to take on. So I, those were important considerations for us as we were choosing a longterm partner for the Postgres world and the public cloud world. >> Obviously, so you've talked a lot about your relationship with your clients and I know you have a really keen awareness of the need to ensure that trust, to ensure that reliability to ensure the collaboration. How about your relationship on the other side with EDB and in terms of all those elements so how has that evolved over a period of time and what kind of service and what kind of value do you think are you deriving from that relationship now? >> So with EDB, first of all, our journey started with 2ndQuadrant and now EDB. And we were specifically looking at the, one area was at the Bi-Directional Replication BDR that we were wanting to support with our solutions particularly in the public cloud. And that was going to enable us to replace multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors. And so we were to create that solution that was right for ACI, it was right for our customers from a functionality and agility and a cost perspective. So technologically with the non-functional requirements and the reliability, availability, serviceability aspects that we were looking for that was in partnership with 2ndQuadrant and EDB, that was a key element. I think the second piece of it is we worked really well with 2ndQuadrant EDB in terms of partnering to meet the needs of the market. It's great to have the right technology in place but then you need your partners really to be able to work with you tactically real-time in order to win in the market and make it work. And I found that they'd been a great partner for us to be able to do that and to be able to react quickly, do the right thing and really enable us to be a great partner to our customers as we deliver real-time payments, as we deliver the acquiring capabilities, as we deliver a modernization for the big banks that we work with as well. >> Now, before I let you go, I'm going to give you a two-part question here. That's always one way to squeeze a little more info (laughing) to the guest. First off advice. You've been through this transformation obviously you're very happy with all that has transpired, so your advice to others who are considering this journey. And then secondly, what can they and you do you think expect in terms of future challenges, opportunities how we might want to frame that with Postgres? Like, where are we going from here, basically? So, two parts, advice and then where do you think this is headed? >> So advice, I certainly learnings from us versus advice is number one, be very thorough in the due diligence that you do and be very clear on what you want and what are your goals that you're looking for. So from an AGI perspective, we were clear that total cost of ownership in terms of the stack that we were going to be providing to our customers. That was very important, number one number two, nonfunctional requirements. So I've talked about the mission criticality of payments 24/7 365. That was a key second piece. And then the third one, ease of deployment. I talked about that, multi-cloud deployment that we were looking for. So we were clear what we wanted and we we took our time from a due diligence point of view. It's a multi-year decision being made so it's not something specifically I think we want to rush into. In terms of looking forward and where do we go from here? Performance is critical so further up performance enhancements, ability for rapid failover availability, near 100% availability that we're looking for five-nines and above, working together with Postgres in order to make those failovers more seamless because they will happen, particularly in the real-time payments world, where we're now seeing billions of transactions happening in a week and soon that will be in a day, they will need to be able to deal with. And for all of this to happen in a public cloud environment, we, I think all understand a lot of the benefits of public cloud and we need to be able to provide this failover availability capability in the public cloud but also in a hybrid cloud environments we're in a multi-cloud environment, so we need to keep working that and make that happen that will make Postgres a payment-grade infrastructure that could power the world's real-time payments and we would love to be able to do that into the future. >> Well, Jeremy thanks for the insights, we appreciate that and once again, congratulations on getting back in that office. I know it's probably a pretty welcomed addition to your regimen now. >> Yeah, John, thank you very much and thanks to everyone who's dialed in for this and John I look forward to welcoming you in the office soon. >> Very good sir, I look forward to that as well. I'll take you up on that in Miami for sure. John Walls here on theCUBE talking with Jeremy Wilmot is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide. part of our Postgres Vision 2021 coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Well, hi everybody John Walls here on theCUBE and we're now welcoming Jeremy Wilmot who is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide part of the Postgres movement, you might say or certainly benefiting from the great value that Postgres is providing a number of enterprises across the globe. Jeremy good to see you today and first off, congratulations you are the first guest I've talked to maybe in a year and a half in their office. So good for you. >> Thanks (chuckles) John that's very kind of you John and great to see you and thanks for having me here. Yeah, it's great to be in the office, it really is. I'm here in Miami in South Florida and getting some sort of normalcy back is great for all of us and I'm certainly enjoying it. So thank you before (indistinct) has been. >> I'm sure you are, yeah, congratulations on that front. First off, let's talk about ACI Worldwide for the folks in our audience who aren't familiar with the payments, your role in terms of that payment ecosystem. Tell us a little bit about ACI Worldwide. >> Sure, well, primarily we're a software company. That's ACI, we started 1975 in Omaha, Nebraska built the first debit card system and ATM system for first National Bank of Omaha and over the last 45 years, we've globalized ourselves, we have, we are delivering mission-critical real-time payment systems across the world to banks to merchants to billers, we help them meet the payment needs of their consumers and their corporates. So we process, manage digital payments, we power omni-commerce and e-commerce payments, we present and process bill payments, we manage fraud, we manage the risk all within that and as I said on a global basis 13 of the G20 countries with a leading DDA account or current account payment processing software in those countries and have been for many years. >> So, as the CPO then quite obviously in the financial space your plate is quite full these days in terms of providing for your client base. How would you characterize maybe the evolution in terms of product development that you've been through in the financial world here over the past say, three to five years, where were you back then to where you are now and what role has Postgres played in that journey? >> Sure, yeah. So, specific to the Postgres part of the ecosystem, previously five-plus years ago our previous database solution was complex, it was expensive, it was hard to change and maintain and we leveraged multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors as a result of that. So at that time we looked for an alternative that was simpler and better and we went through a very comprehensive due diligence process, we explored both open source and license models of database to support our solution and when we looked at all of the options we determined that 2ndQuadrant Postgres was the one that provided the most comprehensive solution we were looking for. It had the right mix of capabilities and performance at the right total cost of ownership that we were looking for. And in the payments world as you can imagine, you've got to to be 24/7 365. And we also required a lower cost of ownership than we had before. But we also wanted a greater flexibility and time to market that we could pass on to our customers. And then the last thing I'd say that we were looking for was a multi-deployment capability. And what I mean by that is that we would be able to use this new platform, Postgres platform in our own data centers in our own private cloud, but we could also deploy it in the public cloud, whether we would run it or whether our customers would run it. We wanted that ability to mix and match between these different deployment options. >> So you've talked about a lot of key elements here attributes in terms of availability, accessibility reliability, security obviously. Walk us through those in terms of why you think 2ndQuadrant was addressing your needs in those particular areas or any others for that matter but what it was that checked the box specifically about what Postgres was offering you as opposed to what these other possible solutions and services were that you were looking at. >> Yeah, I think, we're very focused on being able to identify what our customers need and when they're offering services to consumers and to their corporates what is it that they require that's going to enable them to win and compete. And payments industry has a lot of cost pressures within it. It has regulation, it has consumer convenience and the whole movement of digitalization that puts a lot of downward pressure on the cost space. And those who are going to win in the payment space need to be able to address that. So, that is relevant for our banks, for our merchants, for the billers. They all come under very similar regulatory pressure and market pressure and as a result, the ability to reduce dramatically in a very significant way, the total cost of ownership upon which the payment software was going to be operating that was one of the key elements that was very important to us as we made that decision. The second one I think was to enable us to be able to do what we are good at and what our customers expect us to do. And that in turn enables them to focus on their core competencies. We're a software company, we own our own IP we manage our own software for the needs of the 24/7 365 payment requirements and therefore the merchant or the biller or the bank can really focus in on the digital experience for their customers, focusing on their core competencies and what they need to do to win. That was a second key factor for us. I think the third one for us was as well speed to market. Speed to market for ourselves and being competitive to the alternative to ACI, but also more importantly a speed to market for our customers. And there are, the payment world is highly regulated requires significant certification in order to launch new services that's often the long pole in the tent. So we want to be able to get to that point as quickly as possible. And being able to have a public cloud deployment open systems capabilities that would really allow us to pass on that speed to market to those customers. So for example, an acquirer, a payment acquirer moving into a new geographical country they want to compete in they can (indistinct) on their competitors by launching minimum viable products in six to nine months that is five years ago, that could have been a 24 to 30 months endeavor for them to take on. So I, those were important considerations for us as we were choosing a longterm partner for the Postgres world and the public cloud world. >> Obviously, so you've talked a lot about your relationship with your clients and I know you have a really keen awareness of the need to ensure that trust, to ensure that reliability to ensure the collaboration. How about your relationship on the other side with EDB and in terms of all those elements so how has that evolved over a period of time and what kind of service and what kind of value do you think are you deriving from that relationship now? >> So with EDB, first of all, our journey started with 2ndQuadrant and now EDB. And we were specifically looking at the, one area was at the Bi-Directional Replication BDR that we were wanting to support with our solutions particularly in the public cloud. And that was going to enable us to replace multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors. And so we were to create that solution that was right for ACI, it was right for our customers from a functionality and agility and a cost perspective. So technologically with the non-functional requirements and the reliability, availability, serviceability aspects that we were looking for that was in partnership with 2ndQuadrant and EDB, that was a key element. I think the second piece of it is we worked really well with 2ndQuadrant EDB in terms of partnering to meet the needs of the market. It's great to have the right technology in place but then you need your partners really to be able to work with you tactically real-time in order to win in the market and make it work. And I found that they'd been a great partner for us to be able to do that and to be able to react quickly, do the right thing and really enable us to be a great partner to our customers as we deliver real-time payments, as we deliver the acquiring capabilities, as we deliver a modernization for the big banks that we work with as well. >> Now, before I let you go, I'm going to give you a two-part question here. That's always one way to squeeze a little more info (laughing) to the guest. First off advice. You've been through this transformation obviously you're very happy with all that has transpired, so your advice to others who are considering this journey. And then secondly, what can they and you do you think expect in terms of future challenges, opportunities how we might want to frame that with Postgres? Like, where are we going from here, basically? So, two parts, advice and then where do you think this is headed? >> So advice, I certainly learnings from us versus advice is number one, be very thorough in the due diligence that you do and be very clear on what you want and what are your goals that you're looking for. So from an AGI perspective, we were clear that total cost of ownership in terms of the stack that we were going to be providing to our customers. That was very important, number one number two, nonfunctional requirements. So I've talked about the mission criticality of payments 24/7 365. That was a key second piece. And then the third one, ease of deployment. I talked about that, multi-cloud deployment that we were looking for. So we were clear what we wanted and we we took our time from a due diligence point of view. It's a multi-year decision being made so it's not something specifically I think we want to rush into. In terms of looking forward and where do we go from here? Performance is critical so further up performance enhancements, ability for rapid failover availability, near 100% availability that we're looking for five-nines and above, working together with Postgres in order to make those failovers more seamless because they will happen, particularly in the real-time payments world, where we're now seeing billions of transactions happening in a week and soon that will be in a day, they will need to be able to deal with. And for all of this to happen in a public cloud environment, we, I think all understand a lot of the benefits of public cloud and we need to be able to provide this failover availability capability in the public cloud but also in a hybrid cloud environments we're in a multi-cloud environment, so we need to keep working that and make that happen that will make Postgres a payment-grade infrastructure that could power the world's real-time payments and we would love to be able to do that into the future. >> Well, Jeremy thanks for the insights, we appreciate that and once again, congratulations on getting back in that office. I know it's probably a pretty welcomed addition to your regimen now. >> Yeah, John, thank you very much and thanks to everyone who's dialed in for this and John I look forward to welcoming you in the office soon. >> Very good sir, I look forward to that as well. I'll take you up on that in Miami for sure. John Walls here on theCUBE talking with Jeremy Wilmot is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide. part of our Postgres Vision 2021 coverage. (upbeat music)

>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Here live in Las Vegas for aws reinvent I'm John for a devil on the ads, always extracting the signal from the noise. We're here for 1/7 reinvent of the eight years that they've had at what a wave. One of the biggest waves is the modernization of procurement, the modernization of business, commercial business and the rapid acceleration of public sector. We're here with the chief of public sector for AWS. Teresa Carlson, vice president publics that globally great to have you >>so great to have the Q begin this year. We appreciate you being here, >>so we're just seeing so much acceleration of modernization. Even in the commercial side, 80 talks about transformation. It's just a hard core on the public sector side. You have so many different areas transforming faster because they haven't transformed before. That's correct. This is a lot of change. What's changed the most for you in your business? >>Well, again, I'll be here 10 years this mad that A B s and my eighth reinvent, and what really changed, which was very exciting this year, is on Monday. We had 550 international government executives here from 40 countries who were talking about their modernization efforts at every level. Now again, think about that. 40 different governments, 550 executives. We had a fantastic day for them planned. It was really phenomenal because the way that these international governments or think about their budget, how much are they going to use that for maintaining? And they want to get that lesson last. Beckett for Modernization The Thin John It's a Beckett for innovation so that they continue not only modernized, but they're really looking at innovation cycles. So that's a big one. And then you heard from somewhere customers at the breakfast this morning morning from from a T. F. As part of the Department of Justice. What they're doing out. I'll call to back on firearms. They completely made you the cloud. They got rid of 20 years of technical debt thio the Veterans Administration on what they're digging for V A benefits to educational institutions like our mighty >>nose, and he had on stages Kino, Cerner, which the health care companies and what struck me about that? I think it relates to your because I want to get your reaction is that the health care is such an acute example that everyone can relate to rising costs. So cloud helping reduce costs increase the efficiencies and patient care is a triple win. The same thing happens in public sector. There's no place to hide anymore. You have a bona fide efficiencies that could come right out of the gate with cloud plus innovation. And it's happening in all the sectors within the public sector. >>So true. Well, Cerner is a great example because they won the award at V a Veteran's administration to do the whole entire medical records modernization. So you have a company on stage that's commercial as I met, commercial as they are public sector that are going into these large modernization efforts. And as you sit on these air, not easy. This takes focus and leadership and a real culture change to make these things happen. >>You know, the international expansion is impressive. We saw each other in London. We did the health care drill down at your office is, of course, a national health. And then you guys were in Bahrain, and what I deserve is it's not like these organizations. They're way behind. I mean, especially the ones that it moved to. The clouds are moving really fast. So well, >>they don't have as much technical debt internationally. It's what we see here in the U. S. So, like I was just in Africa and you know what we talked about digitizing paper. Well, there's no technology on that >>end >>there. It's kind of exciting because they can literally start from square one and get going. And there's a really hunger and the need to make that happen. So it's different for every country in terms of where they are in their cloud journey. >>So I want to ask you about some of the big deals. I'll see Jet eyes in the news, and you can't talk about it because it's in protest and little legal issues. But you have a lot of big deals that you've done. You share some color commentary on from the big deals and what it really means. >>Yeah, well, first of all, let me just say with Department of Defense, Jet are no jet. I We have a very significant business, you know, doing work at every part of different defense. Army, Navy, Air Force in the intelligence community who has a mission for d o d terminus a t o N g eight in a row on And we are not slowing down in D. O d. We had, like, 250 people at a breakfast. Are Lantian yesterday giving ideas on what they're doing and sharing best practices around the fence. So we're not slowing down in D. O d. We're really excited. We have amazing partners. They're doing mission work with us. But in terms of some really kind of fend, things have happened. We did a press announcement today with Finn Rat, the financial regulatory authority here in the U. S. That regulates markets at this is the largest financial transactions you'll ever see being processed and run on the cloud. And the program is called Cat Consolidated Audit Trail. And if you remember the flash crash and the markets kind of going crazy from 2000 day in 2008 when it started, Finneran's started on a journey to try to understand why these market events were happening, and now they have once have been called CAT, which will do more than 100 billion market points a day that will be processed on the cloud. And this is what we know of right now, and they'll be looking for indicators of nefarious behavior within the markets. And we'll look for indicators on a continuous basis. Now what? We've talked about it. We don't even know what we don't know yet because we're getting so much data, we're going to start processing and crunching coming out of all kinds of groups that they're working with, that this is an important point even for Finn rep. They're gonna be retiring technical debt that they have. So they roll out Cat. They'll be retiring other systems, like oats and other programs that they >>just say so that flash crash is really important. Consolidated, honest, because the flash crash, we'll chalk it up to a glitch in the system. Translation. We don't really know what happened. Soto have a consolidated auto trail and having the data and the capabilities, I understand it is really, really important for transparency and confidence in the >>huge and by the way, thinner has been working with us since 2014. They're one of our best partners and are prolific users of the cloud. And I will tell you it's important that we have industries like thin red regulatory authorities, that air going in and saying, Look, we couldn't possibly do what we're doing without cloud computing. >>Tell me about the technical debt because I like this conversation is that we talk about in the commercial side and developer kind of thinking. Most businesses start ups, Whatever. What is technical debt meet in public sector? Can you be specific? >>Well, it's years and years of legacy applications that never had any modernization associated with them in public sector. You know now, because you've talked about these procurement, your very best of your very savvy now public sector >>like 1995 >>not for the faint of heart, for sure that when you do procurement over the years when they would do something they wouldn't build in at new innovations or modernizations. So if you think about if you build a data center today a traditional data center, it's outdated. Tomorrow, the same thing with the procurement. By the time that they delivered on those requirements. They were outdated. So technical debt then has been built up years of on years of not modernizing, just kind of maintaining a status quo with no new insides or analytics. You couldn't add any new tooling. So that is where you see agencies like a T F. That has said, Wow, if I'm gonna if I'm gonna have a modern agency that tracks things like forensics understands the machine learning of what's happening in justice and public safety, I need to have the most modern tools. And I can't do that on an outdated system. So that's what we kind of call technical death that just maintains that system without having anything new that you're adding to >>their capabilities lag. Everything's products bad. Okay, great. Thanks for definite. I gotta ask you about something that's near and dear to our heart collaboration. If you look at the big successes in the world and within Amazon Quantum Caltex partnering on the quantum side, you've done a lot of collaboration with Cal Cal Poly for ground station Amazon Educate. You've been very collaborative in your business, and that's a continuing to be a best practice you have now new things like the cloud innovation centers. Talk about that dynamic and how collaboration has become an important part of your business model. >>What we use their own principles from Amazon. We got building things in our plan. Innovation centers. We start out piloting those two to see, Could they work? And it's really a public private partnership between eight MPs and universities, but its universities that really want to do something. And Cal Poly's a great example. Arizona State University A great example. The number one most innovative university in the US for like, four years in a row. And what we do is we go in and we do these public sector challenges. So the collaboration happens. John, between the public sector Entity, university with students and us, and what we bring to the table is technical talent, air technology and our mechanisms and processes, like they're working backwards processes, and they were like, We want you to bring your best and brightest students. Let's bring public sector in the bowl. They bring challenges there, riel that we can take on, and then they can go back and absorb, and they're pretty exciting. I today I talked about we have over 44 today that we've documented were working at Cal Poly. The one in Arizona State University is about smart cities. And then you heard We're announcing new ones. We've got two in France, one in Germany now, one that we're doing on cybersecurity with our mighty in Australia to be sitting bata rain. So you're going to see us Add a lot more of these and we're getting the results out of them. So you know we won't do if we don't like him. But right now we really like these partnerships. >>Results are looking good. What's going on with >>you? All right. And I'll tell you why. That why they're different, where we are taking on riel public sector issues and challenges that are happening, they're not kind of pie in the sky. We might get there because those are good things to do. But what we want to do is let's tackle things that are really homelessness, opioid crisis, human sex trafficking, that we're seeing things that are really in these communities and those air kind of grand. But then we're taking on areas like farming where we talked about Can we get strawberries rotting on the vine out of the field into the market before you lose billions of dollars in California. So it's things like that that were so its challenges that are quick and riel. And the thing about Cloud is you can create an application and solution and test it out very rapidly without high cost of doing that. No technical Dan, >>you mentioned Smart Cities. I just attended a session. Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston's, got this 50 50 years smart city plan, and it's pretty impressive, but it's a heavy lift. So what do you see going on in smart cities? And you really can't do it without the cloud, which was kind of my big input cloud. Where's the data? What do you say, >>cloud? I O. T is a big part at these. All the centers that Andy talked about yesterday in his keynote and why the five G partnerships are so important. These centers, they're gonna be everywhere, and you don't even know they really exist because they could be everywhere. And if you have the five G capabilities to move those communications really fast and crypt them so you have all the security you need. This is game changing, but I'll give you an example. I'll go back to the kids for a minute at at Arizona State University, they put Io TI centers everywhere. They no traffic patterns. Have any parking slots? Airfield What Utilities of water, if they're trash bins are being filled at number of seats that are being taken up in stadiums. So it's things like that that they're really working to understand. What are the dynamics of their city and traffic flow around that smart city? And then they're adding things on for the students like Alexis skills. Where's all the activity? So you're adding all things like Alexa Abs, which go into a smart city kind of dynamic. We're not shop. Where's the best activities for about books, for about clothes? What's the pizza on sale tonight? So on and then two things like you saw today on Singapore, where they're taking data from all different elements of agencies and presenting that bad to citizen from their child as example Day one of a birth even before, where's all the service is what I do? How do I track these things? How do I navigate my city? to get all those service is the same. One can find this guy things they're not. They're really and they're actually happening. >>Seems like they're instrumented a lot of the components of the city learning from that and then deciding. Okay, where do we double down on where do we place? >>You're making it Every resilient government, a resilient town. I mean, these were the things that citizens can really help take intro Web and have a voice in doing >>threes. I want to say congratulations to your success. I know it's not for the faint of heart in the public sector of these days, a lot of blockers, a lot of politics, a lot of government lockers and the old procurement system technical debt. I mean, Windows 95 is probably still in a bunch of PCs and 50 45 fighters. 15 fighters. Oh, you've got a great job. You've been doing a great job and riding that wave. So congratulations. >>Well, I'll just say it's worth it. It is worth it. We are committed to public sector, and we really want to see everyone from our war fighters. Are citizens have the capabilities they need. So >>you know, you know that we're very passionate this year about going in the 2020 for the Cube and our audience to do a lot more tech for good programming. This'll is something that's near and dear to your heart as well. You have a chance to shape technology. >>Yes, well, today you saw we had a really amazing not for profit on stage with It's called Game Changer. And what we found with not for profits is that technology can be a game changer if they use it because it makes their mission dollars damage further. And they're an amazing father. And send a team that started game changer at. Taylor was in the hospital five years with terminal cancer, and he and his father, through these five years, kind of looked around. Look at all these Children what they need and they started. He is actually still here with us today, and now he's a young adult taking care of other young Children with cancer, using gaming technologies with their partner, twitch and eight MPs and helping analyze and understand what these young affected Children with cancer need, both that personally and academically and the tools he has He's helping really permit office and get back and it's really hard, Warren says. I was happy. My partner, Mike Level, who is my Gran's commercial sales in business, and I ran public Sector Day. We're honored to give them at a small token of our gift from A to B s to help support their efforts. >>Congratulates, We appreciate you coming on the Cube sharing the update on good luck into 2020. Great to see you 10 years at AWS day one. Still, >>it's day one. I feel like I started >>it like still, like 10 o'clock in the morning or like still a day it wasn't like >>I still wake up every day with the jump in my staff and excited about what I'm gonna do. And so I am. You know, I am really excited that we're doing and like Andy and I say we're just scratching the surface. >>You're a fighter. You are charging We love you, Great executive. You're the chief of public. Get a great job. Great, too. Follow you and ride the wave with Amazon and cover. You guys were documenting history. >>Yeah, exactly. We're in happy holidays to you all and help seeing our seventh and 20 >>so much. Okay, Cube coverage here live in Las Vegas. This is the cube coverage. Extracting the signals. Wanna shout out to eight of us? An intel for putting on the two sets without sponsorship, we wouldn't be able to support the mission of the Cube. I want to thank them. And thank you for watching with more after this short break.

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome back. Good evening from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. As you well know, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. Day two of our coverage of MWC 23. Dave, we've been talking about sexy stuff all day. It's about to get, we're bringing sexy back. >> It's about to get hot. >> It's about to get hot. We've had two guests with us, two senior consultants from the product planning, networking and emerging server solutions group at Dell, Heather Raheel and James Bryan. Welcome guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Really appreciate it. >> Lisa: Dude, you're bringing sexy back. >> I know. We are. We are. We wanted to bring it, yes. >> This is like XR8000 >> We've been talking about this all day. It's here... >> Yes. Yes. Talk to us about why this is so innovative. >> So, actually we wanted to bring this, getting a lot of attention here on site. Matter of fact, we even have a lot of our competition taking pictures of it. And why is it so innovative? So one of the things that we've done here is we've taken a lot of insights and feedback from our customers that are looking at 5G deployments and looking at how do they, basically, bring commercial off the shelf to a very proprietary industry. So what we've done is we've built a very flexible and scalable form factor in the XR8000. And so this is actually a product that we've purposely built for the telecommunications space. Specifically can be deployed for serving a virtual DU or DUC at a cell site for distributed ram. Or it can be put in a local data center, but outside a main data center to support centralized ram. We'll get into it, which is where the really excitement gets is it's sled-based in its design. And so because of that, it enables us to provide both functionality for telecommunications. Could be network, could be enterprise edge as well as being designed to be configured to whatever that workload is, and be cost-optimized for whatever that work. >> Ah, you're killing us! Let's see. Show, show it to us. >> Actually this is where I have to hand it off to my colleague Heather. But what I really want to show you here is the flexibility that we have and the scalability. So, right here what I'm going to show you first is a one U sled. So I'll set that out here, and I'll let Heather tell us all about it. >> Yeah. So XR8000. Let's talk about flexibility first. So the chassis is a two U chassis with a hot swap shared power supply on the right. Within it there are two form factors for the sleds. What James brought out here, this is the one U form factor. Each sled features one node or one CPU first sled. So we're calling the one U the highest, highest density sled right? Cause you can have up to four one node one U sleds in the chassis. The other form factor is a two U sled, on the right here. And that's just really building on top of the one U sled that adds two PCIe sleds on top. So this is really our general purpose sled. You could have up to two of these sleds within the chassis. So what's really cool about the flexibility is you can plug and play with these. So you could have two one Us, two two Us, or mix and match of each of those. >> Talk about the catalyst to build this for telco and some of the emerging trends that, that you guys have seen and said this needs to be purpose-built for the telco. There's so much challenge and complexity there, they need this. >> Want me to take this? So actually that, that's a great question by the way. It turns out that the market's growing. It's nascent right now. Different telecommunication providers have different needs. Their workloads are different. So they're looking for a form factor like this that, when we say flexible, they need to be able to configure it for theirs. They don't all configure the same way. And so they're looking for something that they can configure to their needs, but they also don't want to pay for things that they don't need. And so that's what led to the creation of, of this device the way we've created it. >> How is it specific for edge use cases, though? We think of the edge: it's emerging, it's burgeoning. What makes this so (pause) specific to edge use cases? >> Yeah, let's talk about some of the the ruggedized features of the product. So first of all, it is short depth. So only 430 millimeters. And this is designed for extreme temperatures, really for any environment. So the normal temperatures of operating are negative five to 55, but we've also developed an enhanced heat sink to get us even beyond that. >> Dave: That's Celsius? >> Celsius. Thank you. >> Lisa: Right. So this will get us all the way down to negative 20 boot in operating all the way up to 65 C. So this is one of the most extreme temperature edge offerings we've seen on the market so far. >> And so this is all outside the data center, so not your typical data center server. So not only are we getting those capabilities, but half the size when you look at a typical data center server. >> So these can go into a place where there's a rack, maybe, but definitely not, not doesn't have to be raised for... >> Could be a cell side cabinet. >> Yeah. Okay. >> Heather: Yeah. And we also have AC and DC power options that can be changed over time as well. >> So what can you pack into that one one U sled in terms of CPU cores and memory, just as an example? >> Yeah, great. So, each of the sleds will support the fourth generation of Intel Sapphire Rapids up to 32 corp. They'll also be supporting their new vRAN boost SKUs. And the benefit of those is it has an integrated FEC accelerator within the CPU. Traditionally, to get FEC acceleration, you would need a PCIe card that would take up one of the slots here. Now with it integrated, you're freeing up a PCIe slot, and there's also a power savings involved with that as well. >> So talk about the involvement of, of the telco customer here and then design, I know Dell is very tight with its customers. I imagine there was a lot of communications and collaboration with customers to, to deliver this. >> Interesting question. So it turns out that early on, we had had some initial insight, but it was actually through deep engagement with our customers that we actually redesigned the form factor to what you see here today. So we actually spent significant amount of time with various telecommunication customers from around the world, and they had a very strong influence in this form factor. Even to the point, like Lisa mentioned, we ended up redesigning it. >> Do, do you have a sense for how many of these, or in what kinds of configurations would you deploy in like the typical BBU? So if we're thinking about radio access network literally tran- tower transmitter receiver... somewhere down there (pause) in a cabinet, you have one of these, you have multiple units. I know, I know the answer is "it depends". >> You are right. >> But if, but if someone tells you, well you know, we have 20, 20 cellular sites, and we need (pause) we're we're moving to an open model, and we need the horsepower to do what we want to do. I'm trying to, I'm trying to gauge like what, one of these, what does that, what does that mean? Or is it more like four of these? >> So that, so we'll go >> It depends? >> Yeah it depends, you're absolutely right. However, we can go right there. So if you look in the two U >> Yeah. >> we have three PCIe slots, you know, as Heather mentioned. And so let's say you have a typical cell site, right? We could be able to support a cell site that could have it could have three radios in the configuration here, it could have a, multiply by three, right? It could have up to 18 radios, and we could actually support that. We could support multiple form factors or multiple deployments at a particular cell site. It really then to your point, it does depend, and that's one of the reasons that we've designed it the way we have. For example, if a customer says their initial deployment, they only need one compute node because maybe they're only going to have, you know, two or three carriers. So then, there, you've got maybe six or eight or nine radios. Well then, you put in a single node, but then they may want to scale over time. Well then, you actually have a chassis. They just come in, and they put in a new chassis. The other beauty of that is, is that maybe they wait, but then they want to do new technology. They don't even have to buy a whole new server. They can update to >> Heather: Yeah. the newest technology, same chassis put that in, connect to the radios, and keep going. >> But in this chassis, is it fair to say that most people will be shocked by how much traffic can go through something like this? In the sense that, if a tower is servicing 'n' number of conversations and data streams, going through something like this? I mean somehow blow, it blows my mind to think of thousands of people accessing something and having them all wrapped through something like this. >> It, it'll depend on what they're doing with that data. So you've probably talked a lot about a type of radios, right? Are we going to be massive MIMO or what type of radio? Is it going to be a mix of 4G or 5G? So it'll really depend on that type of radio, and then where this is located. Is it in a dense urban environment, or is it in a rural type of environment at that cell site shelter, but out in a suburban area. So will depend, but then, that's the beauty of this is then, (pause) I get the right CPU, I get the right number of adding cards to connect to the right radios. I purchase whatever, what I need. I may scale to that. I may be (pause) in a growing part of the city, like where we're from or where I'm from or in San Diego where Heather's from where she's in a new suburban, and they put out a new tower and the community grows rapidly. Well then, we may, they may put out one and then you may add another one and I can connect to more radios, more carriers. So it really just comes down to the type and what you're trying to put through that. It could edit a stadium where I may have a lot of people. I may have like, video streaming, and other things. Not only could I be a network connectivity, but I could do other functions like me, multi-axis axon point that you've heard about, talked about here. So I could have a GPU processing information on one side. I could do network on the other side. >> I do, I do. >> Go for it >> Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't want to, don't want to hog all of the time. What about expansion beyond the chassis? Is there a scenario where you might load this chassis up with four of those nodes, but then because you need some type of external connectivity, you go to another chassis that has maybe some of these sleds? Or are these self-contained and independent of one another? >> They are all independent. >> Okay. >> So, and then we've done that for a reason. So one of the things that was clear from the customers, again and again and again, was cost, right? Total cost of ownership. So not only, how much does this cost when I buy it from you to what is it going to take to power and run it. And so basically we've designed that with that in mind. So we've separated the compute and isolated the compute from the chassis, from the power. So (pause) I can only deal with this. And the other thing is is it's, it's a sophisticated piece of equipment that people that would go out and service it are not used to. So they can just come out, pull it out without even bringing the system down. If they've got multiple nodes, pull it. They don't have to pull out a whole chassis or whole server. Put one in, connect it back up while the system is still running. If a power supply goes out, they can come and pull it out. We've got one, it's designed with a power infrastructure that if I lose one power supply, I'm not losing the whole system. So it's really that serviceability, total cost of ownership at the edge, which led us to do this as a configurable chassis. >> I was just going to ask you about TCO reduction but another thing that I'm curious about is: there seems to be like a sustainability angle here. Is that something that you guys talk with customers about in terms of reducing footprint and being able to pack more in with less reducing TCO, reducing storage, power consumption, that sort of thing? >> Go ahead. >> You want me to take that one as well? So yes, so it comes at me, varies by the customer, but it does come up and matter of fact one- in that vein, similar to this from a chassis perspective is, I don't, especially now with the technology changing so fast and and customers still trying to figure out well is this how we're really going to deploy it? You basically can configure, and so maybe that doesn't work. They reconfigure it, or, as I mentioned earlier, I purchased a single sled today, and I purchased a chassis. Well then the next generation comes. I don't have to purchase a new chassis. I don't have to purchase a new power supply. So we're trying to address those sustainability issues as we go, you know, again, back to the whole TCO. So they, they're kind of related to some extent. >> Right. Right, right. Definitely. We hear a lot from customers in every industry about ESG, and it's, and it's an important initiative. So Dell being able to, to help facilitate that for customers, I'm sure is part of what gives you that competitive advantage, but you talked about, James, that and, and we talked about it in an earlier segment that competitors are coming by, sniffing around your booth. What's going on? Talk about, from both of your lenses, the (pause) competitive advantage that you think this gives Dell in telco. Heather, we'll start with you. >> Heather: Yeah, I think the first one which we've really been hitting home with is the flexibility for scalability, right? This is really designed for any workload, from AI and inferencing on like a factory floor all the way to the cell site. I don't know another server that could say that. All in one box, right? And the second thing is, really, all of the TCO savings that will happen, you know, immediately at the point of sale and also throughout the life cycle of this product that is designed to have an extremely long lifetime compared to a traditional server. >> Yeah, I'll get a little geeky with you on that one. Heather mentioned that we'll be able to take this, eventually, to 65 C operating conditions. So we've even designed some of the thermal solutions enabling us to go there. We'll also help us become more power efficient. So, again, back to the flexibility even on how we cool it so it enables us to do that. >> So do, do you expect, you just mentioned maybe if I, if I heard you correctly, the idea that this might have a longer (pause) user-usable life than the average kind of refresh cycle we see in general IT. What? I mean, how often are they replacing equipment now in, kind of, legacy network environments? >> I believe the traditional life cycle of a of a server is, what? Three? Three to five years? Three to five years traditionally. And with the sled based design, like James said, we'll be designing new sleds, you know, every year two years that can just be plugged in, and swapped out. So the chassis is really designed to live much longer than, than just three to five years. >> James: We're having customers ask anywhere from seven to when it dies. So (pause) substantial increase in the life cycle as we move out because as you can, as you probably know, well, right? The further I get out on the edge, it, the more costly it is. >> Lisa: Yep. >> And, I don't want to change it if I don't have to. And so something has to justify me changing it. And so we're trying to build to support that both that longevity, but then with that longevity, things change. I mean, seven years is a long time in technology. >> Lisa: Yes it is. >> So we need to be there for those customers that are ready for that change, or something changed, and they want to still be able to, to adopt that without having to change a lot of their infrastructure. >> So customers are going to want to get their hands on this, obviously. We know, we, we can tell by your excitement. Is this GA now? Where is it GA, and where can folks go to learn more? >> Yeah, so we are here at Mobile World Congress in our booth. We've got a few featured here, and other booths throughout the venue. But if you're not here at Mobile World Congress, this will be launched live on the market at the end of May for Dell. >> Awesome. And what geographies? >> Worldwide. >> Worldwide. Get your hands on the XR8000. Worldwide in just a couple months. Guys, thank you >> James: Thank you very much. >> for the show and tell, talking to us about really why you're designing this for the telco edge, the importance there, what it's going to enable operators to achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights and your show and tell. >> Thanks! >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, Spain in Mobile MWC 23. Be back with our sho- day two wrap with Dave Valente and some guests in just a minute. (bright music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back to Sin City, guys and girls we're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and it's ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, post pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky, was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond the IT. >> Excellent. We've got two guests. One of them is an alumni, Scott Mullins joins us, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP, CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Hey guys. >> Hey guys. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah >> Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then. >> Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago. And we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. >> And? Results so far? >> So, I can sit here and say that November 7th so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far. And I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you want to talk about why we did that together. >> Yeah. >> And what we've done together over many years. >> Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. >> So last year before re:Invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem, that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that, you know, consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot, you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like? >> Yeah. And there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. >> Yeah. >> And the Super Cloud designation, what we are is, we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. >> See if Mikey likes it. >> Yeah. >> Penguin off the iceberg thing. >> Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of their early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance >> Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, you know, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious. >> Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet. >> And we're working as fast as we can. - Yes, you are. >> Building in every single location around the planet. >> You're doing a good job. >> So, we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint and we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud. >> And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so, that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along. It's actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully. >> Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? >> We did. >> Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did. >> No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone? And take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we've worked backwards. >> Yep, we did. >> We did. And look, I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you. >> Yeah. >> And for us as well. >> Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done. >> That's awesome. >> The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivative or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about, jointly together. And it took both, it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right, and we did a number of iterations. We're never done. >> Right. >> But we have a final result that says it is better. >> Well, congratulations. - Thank you. >> It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? >> Well, we just came from the partner, the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. >> I know we got to go, but I love this story because it fits so great at the Super cloud but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific, you know, go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations. >> No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. >> Last question and we've got only 30 seconds left. Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. If you had the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say? >> Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, "Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together." >> Very cool. >> Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft music)

>>Hey everyone, welcome back. It's the Cube live in Las Vegas. We've been here since Monday covering the event wall to coverage on the cube at AWS Reinvent 22, Lisa Martin here with Dave Ante. Dave, we're hearing consistently north of 50,000 people here. I'm hearing close to 300,000 online. People are back. They are ready to hear from AWS and its ecosystem. Yeah, >>I think 55 is the number I'm hearing. I've been using 50 for 2019, but somebody the other day told me, no, no, it was way more than that. Right, right. Well this feels bigger in >>2019. It does feel bigger. It does feel bigger. And we've had such great conversations as you know, because you've been watching the Cube since Monday night. We're pleased to welcome from Sumo Logic. Lynn Doherty, the president of Worldwide Field Operations. Lynn, welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. Talk >>To us about what's going on at Sumo Logic. We cover them. We've been following them for a long time, but what's what's new? >>We have a lot going on at Sumo Logic. What we do is provide solutions for both observability and security. And if you think about the challenges that our customers are facing today, everybody as they're doing this digital transformation is in a situation where the data and the digital exhausts that they have is growing faster than their budgets and especially in what looks like potentially uncertain economic times. And so what we do is enable them to bring that together on a platform so that they can solve both of those problems in a really cost effective way. >>What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers in the field where it relates to Sumo logic and aws? What are they asking for? >>They continue to ask for security and, and I think as everybody goes on that journey of digital transformation and, and I think what's going on now is that there are people who are kind of in wave two of that digital transformation, but security continues to be top of mind. And again, as as our customers are moving into potentially uncertain economic times and they're saying, Hey, I've gotta shore up and, and maybe do smarter things with my budget, cybersecurity is one piece of that that is not falling off the table. That their requirements around security, around audits, around compliance don't go away regardless of what else happens. >>How do you fit in the cloud ecosystem generally? AWS specifically? I think AWS is generally perceived as a more friendly environment for the ecosystem partners. We saw CrowdStrike yesterday, you know, stock got crushed. They had a great quarter, but not as great as they thought it could be. Yeah. And one, some of the analysts were saying, well, it could be Microsoft competition at the low end of the market. Okay. AWS is like the ecosystem partners are really strong in security, lot of places to add value. Where does Sumo Logic >>Fit? Yeah, we are all in with aws. So AWS is our platform of choice. It's the platform that we're built on. It's the only platform that we use. And so we work incredibly closely with aws. In fact, last year we were the first ever AWS ISV partner of the year for as Sumo Logic, which we're not as big as some of the other players, but it just is a testament to the partnership that we have with aws. >>When you're out in the field talking with customers, we talked about some of the challenges there, but where are your customer conversations? You talked about security and cyber as is not falling off the table. In fact, it's, it's rising up the stock, it's a board level conversation. So where are the customer conversations that you're having? Are they, are they at the developer level? Are they higher? Are they at the C-suite? What does that look like? >>Yeah, it's, it's actually at both the developer and the C-suite. And so there's really two motions. The first is around developers and practitioners and people that run security operation centers. And they need tools that are easy to use that integrate in their environment. And so we absolutely work with them as a starting point because if, if they aren't happy with the tools that they have, you know, the customer can't go on that digital transformation, can't have effective application usage. But we also need to talk to C-Suite and that to CIO or a CISO who's really thinking often more broadly about how do we do things as a platform and how do we consolidate some of our tools to rationalize what we're using and really make the most of the budget that we have. And so we come at it from both angles. We call it selling above the line and below the line because both of those are really important people for us to work with. >>Above the line being sort of the business executives, >>Business executives and C-suite executives. And then, but below the line are the actual people who are using the product and using a day to day interacting with the tools. >>So how are those above the line and below the line conversations, you know, different? What, what are the, what are the above the line conversations? What are the sort of keywords that, you know, that resonate? Let's start there. >>Yeah, above the line, there's a lot that's around how do we make the most of the investments that we're making. And so there are no shortage of tools, right? You can look around this AWS floor and see that there are no shortage of tools and software products out there. And so above the line it's how do we make use of the budget that we have and get the most out of the investments we've made and do that in a really smart way. Often thinking about platforms and consolidating tools and, and using the tools and getting full value of what they have below the line. I think it's really how do they have really strong ease of use? How do they get the fastest time to value? Because time to value is really important when you're a practitioner, when you're developing an application, when you're migrating and modernizing an application, having tools that are easy to use and not just give you data but give you insights. And so that's what a conversation with a practitioner for us is, is taking data and turning it into insights that they can use. >>You know, and it seems like we never get rid of stuff in it, but there's a big conversation now when you talk to practitioners, okay, well you got some budget pressures, your sales cycles are elongating. What are you doing about, a lot of 'em are saying, well, we're consolidating and nowhere is that more needed probably than insecurity. So how, how are you seeing that play out in the market? Are you able to take advantage of that as Sumo? >>I think there's the old joke that says there is no ciso. Whoever says, if I just had one more tool, I'd be secure. >>And >>Nobody ever says that it's not one more tool. It's having effective tools and having tools that integrate. And so when I think of Sumo Logic in that space, it's number one, we really integrate with so many different tools out there that give, again, not just security information, but security insights. And so that becomes a really important part of the conversation. What, when you talk about tool consolidation, that's absolutely, I think something that has been a journey that a lot of our customers have been on and probably will be on for the foreseeable future. And so that's a place that we can really help because we have a platform that you can leverage our tool on the DevOps side and on the security side. And that's a conversation that we have a lot with our customers. Are >>You helping bridge those two, the security folks, the dev folks? Cause we talk about Shift left and CISO being involved now. Is Sumo Logic helping from a cultural perspective to bridge those two? >>Yeah, well I think it's a really good point that you make. It's, there's part of it that's a technology challenge and then there's part of it that's a cultural challenge and an organization silo challenge that happens. And so it is something that we try to bring our customers together and often start in one area of the business and help move into other areas and bring them together. It, it also comes down to that data growing faster than budgets and customers can no longer afford to keep multiple copies of the same data, the same metrics, and all of that digital exhaust that comes as they move to the cloud and modernize their applications. And so we bring that together and help them get the most use out of it. >>There are a lot of, we've been talking all week in the cube about sort of adjacencies to security. We've talking about data protections now becoming an adjacency. You know, you talk about resilience within an organization, everybody was sort of caught off guard, obviously with the pandemic, not as resilient as they could have been. So it seems like the scope of security is really expanding. You know, they always say it's, it's a team sport, okay, it's a pro mine, but it's true. Right? Whereas it used to be that guy's problem. Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of that evolution? >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think the pandemics force some of that faster than was happening, but it's absolutely something that is going on that cybersecurity is now built in from the ground up and I've been in cyber security for years and it's moved from an afterthought or something that comes after the fact, Hey, let's build the application and then we'll worry about security to, it needs to be a secure application from the ground up. And so that is bringing together that dev and SEC ops a lot because it needs to be built in, the security piece needs to be built in from the ground up on the development side. >>Absolutely. The, the threat landscape has changed so much in the last couple of years. Has the fraudsters, bad actors, whatever you wanna call 'em, are getting far more sophisticated. Yeah. So security can't be an afterthought. Can't be a built on. Yeah, it's gotta be integrated, built in from the ground up for organizations to be able to be, as they've said, resilient. We're hearing a lot about resiliency and the importance of it. For any business. >>For any business, it's important for every business. And if you think about how we interact with companies now, our view of a bank isn't the branch, it's the app, our view of office, it's this, right? It's, it's on the phone, it's on digital devices, it's on a website. And so that is your interaction, that is your experience. And so that plays into, is it up, is it running, is it responsive? That application performance piece, but also the security piece of is it secure? Is my data protected? You know, do I have any vulnerability? >>Yeah, you must have, being in field operations, a favorite customer story that you really think defines the value proposition beautifully of Sumo Logic. What story is that? >>Wow, that's a good question. I have a lot of favorite stories. You know, we have customers, for example, gaming customers that maybe aren't able to predict what their usage looks like. And that's something that we really help our customers with is the peaks and valleys. And so we have gaming customers or retail customers that we're able to take their data sources and they may be at one level and go to 10 x in a day without any notice. And we're able to handle that for them. And I think that's something that I'm really proud of is that we don't make that the customer's problem. They're, they're peaks and valleys, they're spikes that may happen seasonally in retail. It's Black Friday sales that are coming up. It's a new game that gets released. It's a new music piece that gets released and they are going to see that, but they don't have to worry about that because of us. And so that really makes me proud that we handle that and take that problem off of their shoulders. I >>See Pokemon on the website, that's a hugely popular >>Game, Pokemon now. Yes. >>Last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left. If you had a billboard to put up in Denver where you live about Sumo Logic and its impact like an elevator pitch or a phrase that you think really summarizes the impact, what would it >>Say? Yeah, well it's a really good question. I've got it on my shirt. I dunno, it's not for the G-rated, but we fix things faster. Fix shit faster. And so for us that's really, ultimately, it's not just about having information, it's not just about having the data, it's about being able to resolve your problems quickly. And whether that's an application or a security issue, we've gotta be able to fix it faster for our customers and that's what we enable them to do. >>Fix bleep faster. Lynn, it's been a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Awesome step at Sumo Logic. For our guest and for Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Las Vegas, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin here with about 7,000 plus folks, and this next Cube segment, two words, girl power. Please welcome one of our alumni back to the program, Colleen Kapase, SVP, Worldwide Partners and Alliances at Snowflake and Poornima Ramaswamy, EVP of Global Partnerships and Chief of Staff to the CEO. Ladies, welcome to the program! >> Thank you, very happy to be here, amazing event! >> Isn't it? It's so great to see this many people. Yesterday, the keynote, we got in barely, standing room only. I know there was at least one overflow room, maybe two. People are chomping at the bit to hear what Snowflake and its ecosystem has been up to the last three years, since 2019. >> It's been phenomenal! Since the last time we met together, as humans coming together, and then seeing the step function growth three years later, I don't think, we didn't grow gradually. We just jumped three years ahead, and people have just been hungry for the information and the sharing and the joint education, so it's been a phenomenal show. >> It has been, Poornima, talk to us about the Qlik partnership with Snowflake. What's it all about? What's your joint vision, your joint strategy? Give us all that good stuff. >> Sure, so speaking of three years, this relationship has been in existence for the last three years. We were at the last Snowflake Conference in 2019, and I liked what Frank said, even though we were not in-person in life the innovation has continued and our relationship has strengthened over the last three years as well. So it's interesting that everything that Frank and everything that was mentioned at the keynote yesterday is completely in alignment with Qlik's vision and strategy as well. We are focused on making data available for quick decision making, in a timely manner, for in the moment business decisions as such. The world has gone topsy-turvy in the last two years, so you want to know things that are changing as they happen and not one day late, one month late or one quarter late, because then the world's already passed you, that business moment has passed you. That's been our focus. We've got a dual product strategy and portfolio. We collaborate really strongly with Snowflake on both of those to make the most amount of data, made available on the Snowflake platform in the shortest amount of time, so that it's fresh, and it's timely for business decision makers to get access to it, to make decisions as they are dealing with supply chain challenges and people challenges and so on and can make those moments count as such. >> They have to, one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is access to real-time data is no longer a, oh, that's great, nice to have. It's table stakes for businesses in every industry. Consumer expectations have risen to a level we've probably never seen, and let's face it, they're not going to go down. Nobody's going to want less data, slower. (laughs) Colleen, talk about the Qlik partnership from your Snowflake's perspective. >> Yeah, it's been fabulous, and we started on the BI side and keep evolving it, frankly with more technology, more solutions, making that real-time access, not just the the BI side of having the business intelligence and seeing the data but moving beyond that to the governance side, and that's such a huge piece of the relationship as well, and the trustworthy that executives have with the data, who's seeing it and how are we leveraging it, and we keep expanding that too and having some fun too. I know you guys have been making some acquisitions. >> Talk to us about what's going on at Qlik and some news today as well, acquisitions news, what's the deal? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have a dual product strategy, a Qlik data integration platform and a Qlik analytics platform. And we are strengthening, making sure that we align with Snowflake's vision of all workloads, SaaS only and governed. So the announcement today was we do provide real-time data using our Qlik data integration platform into Snowflake, but that real-time data has to make its way into the hands of the business decision makers as well. So we launched what we call as direct query into Snowflake, so as and when data gets into the Snowflake platform, now customers for specific use cases can choose to access that data as it comes in by accessing it directly on Snowflake. And there are other use cases where the data's already been prepared and so on, and they'll continue using the Qlik analytics platform, but this direct query access will make a world of difference in terms of that active intelligence, in-the-moment decision making. The second announcement that we did was the SaaS first and going all into SaaS, so we are doing our data movement investments in our SaaS platform, and one of our first investments is on the Snowflake platform, going direct into Snowflake, and our data ingestion now, our data replication real-time is going to be available natively into the Snowflake platform through our SaaS data transformation investment that we've made. So those are the two big announcements, and governance has been the cornerstone for our platform end-to-end, right from the beginning, and that strength continues, and that's, again, completely in alignment with the vision that Snowflake has as well. >> I couldn't agree more, that native integration, we used to think about bringing the data to the work, and now it's bring the work to the data, because that's the secure environment, the governed environment, and that's what we're seeing with our product roadmaps together and where we're going, and it gives customers just peace of mind. When you're bringing the work to the data, it's more secure, it's more governed, and that real-time access, it's speed, because boy, so many executives have to make real-time decisions quickly. The world is moving faster than it ever has before, and I've never had an executive say, "Oh yeah, I'll just wait and get the data later." That's not a conversation they have. I need it, and I need it now, and I need it at my fingertips, and I need more of my entire organization to have access to that data, what I feel secure and safe to share with them. And so, having Qlik make that possible is just fantastic. >> The security piece is absolutely critical. We've seen such changes to the threat landscape in the last couple of years. It's no longer now a, if we get hit by a cyber attack, it's a matter of when. And the volume of data just keeps proliferating, proliferating, proliferating, which obviously is not going to slow down either. So having the governance factor, the ability to share data securely, leveraging powerful analytics across to customers and partners and ecosystem, it sounds like to me a pretty big differentiator of what Snowflake is delivering to its customers and the ecosystem. >> It is, and I would say one of the things that has held folks back from moving to the cloud before, was governance. Is this just going to be a free for all, Lisa? I'm not feeling secure with that. And so, having the ability to extend our ecosystem and work on that governance together gives executives peace of mind, that they can easily determine who's going to have access to what, which makes a transition to the cloud faster. And that's what we're looking for, because to have our customers experience the benefits of cloud and the moving up and moving down from a data perspective and really getting access to the data cloud, that's where the nirvana is, and so you guys are helping make that possible and provide that peace of mind, so it's amazing. >> You talk about peace of mind, and it's one of those things we think, oh, it's a marketing term or it's a soft term. It's actually not, it's completely measurable, and it's something that I talk to a lot of C-suite, and the statement of "I sleep better at night," is real. There's gravity with it, knowing that they can trust where the data is. The access is governed. It just keeps getting more and more critical every day. >> Colleen: Well, it's a newsworthy event, frankly- >> Absolutely, nobody wants don't to be a headline. >> If things don't go right, that's people's jobs on the line that's reputations, and that's careers, so that is so important, and I think with a lot of our customers that's our conversations directly of how can you ensure that this is going to be a secure experience? And it's Snowflake and some of our superpowers, and frankly, some of our partners superpowers too, together it's better. >> I can bring this home with a customer example, a couple of customer examples. So Urban Outfitters, I think they're a well-known brand. They've got about 650 stores, to your point on governed autonomy is what I call it. But then it's not just about helping with decision making at the top. You want to be able to make decision making at all levels, so we speak about data democratization. It's about not just strategic decisions that you make for a two-year timeframe or a five-year timeframe. It's about decisions that you want to make today in the first half of the day versus the second half of the day. So Urban Outfitters is a common customer, and during the pandemic they had to change their in-stores into distribution centers. They had to look at their supply chain landscape, because there were supply chain bottlenecks that are still happening today. So, with the power of both Qlik data integration and Qlik analytics, but then the combined power of Qlik and Snowflake, the customer actually was able to make insights available to their in-store managers, to their distribution centers, and from a time perspective, what used to take them days, or, in fact, sometimes even weeks, they're now able to get data in 15 minutes refresh time for their operational decision makers, their distribution centers and their order taking systems, so they're able to make decisions on which brands are moving, not moving. Do they need to change the product position in their stores? Do they need to change their suppliers today? Because, for what's going to be in their inventory one month later, because they are foreseeing, they're able to predict the supply chain bottlenecks that are coming in. They're able to do all of that today because that power of a governed autonomous environment that we've built but real-time data making fresh data available through Snowflake and easy-to-use dashboards and visualization through the analytics platform that we've got. And another customer ABB, 37 different SAP source systems being refreshed every two minutes, worldwide for B2B transactions to be able to make all of those decisions. >> And what you're talking about there, especially with their Urban Outfitters example, I think that's one that everybody as a consumer of clothing and apparel, what you just described, what Qlik and Snowflake enabled there, that could have very well saved that organization. We saw a lot of retailers that were not able to make that pivot. >> Poornima: Yep, no, and it did. >> You are exactly right. I think the differentiation on a lot of our core customers together of combing through, not just surviving but thriving through the pandemic, access to data and supply chain management, and it's these types of solutions that are game changing, and that's why Snowflake's not being sold just to the IT department, it's the business decision makers where they have to make decisions, and one of the things that surprised us the most was we had the star schema COVID data up on our data marketplace and the access to that, that we had our customers to determine supply chain management. What's open? What are the rules per state, per region? Where should we put supply? Where should we not? It was phenomenal. So when you have tools like what Qlik offers together with that data coming through the community, I think that's where a lot of executives experience the power of the data cloud, and that's what we want to see. And we're helping real businesses. We say we want to drive outcomes. Supply chain management was a massive outcome that we helped over the last two years. >> And that was critical, obviously we're still in that from a macro economic perspective. It's still a challenge for a lot of folks, but it was life and death. It was, initially, how do we survive this? And to your point, Colleen, now we've got this foundation, now we can thrive, and we can leave the competition who wasn't able to move this fast in the dust behind us. >> A foreseen function for change, really, and then that change wasn't just different, it was better. >> Yeah, it is better, and it now sets the foundation for the next stage of innovation, which is auto ML and AI ML. You're looking back, you're saying, "Okay this is all the data, "so these are the decisions I had to make in the moment." But then now they can start looking at what are the midterm and the long term strategic decisions I have to make, because I can now predict what are the interconnectedness or the second secondary level and the tertiary level impact for worldwide events. There's a pandemic. We are passed the pandemic. There's flood somewhere. There's fire somewhere. China shuts down every so often. You need new suppliers. How do you get out of your way in terms of making daily decisions, but start planning ahead? I think auto ML, AI ML, and data's going to be the foundation for that and real-time data at that. So what Snowflake's doing in terms of the investment in that space, and Qlik has acquired companies in the auto ML space and driving more automation, that time-to-business value and time-to-predictive insights is going to become very key. >> Absolutely key and also really a lifeline for organizations to be able to do that. >> And I have to say, it's a source of pride for us to see our partners growing and thriving in this environment too. Like some of these acquisitions they're making, Lisa, in the machine learning space, it's awesome. This is where customers want to go. They've got all this fabulous data. They now know how to access it real time. How do I use queries to make me smarter? How do I use this machine learning to look at a vast amount of data in a very real time fashion and make business decisions from? That's the future, that's where we're going. So to see you guys expand from BI, to governance, to machine learning, we're really, Lisa, watching companies in our ecosystem grow as we grow, and that's the piece I take a lot of personal pride in, and it's the fun part of the job, frankly. >> Yeah, as you should take part in that, and that's something too, that's been thematic the last... We were recovering this show yesterday and today that the growth and the substance of the Snowflake ecosystem. You see it, you feel it, and you hear it. >> Yeah, well in Frank Slootman's book, "Amp It Up," there's actually a section that he talks about, because I think he has some amazing lifelong advice on his journey of growth, and he tells us that, "Hey you can attach your company, "your personal career energy to an elevator going up "and a company and a high growth story "or a flat or declining." And it's harder in a flat and declining space, and Snowflake we certainly see as an elevator skyrocketing up and these organizations surrounding us with their technologies and capabilities to have joint outcomes, they're doing fantastic too. I've heard this story over and over again this week. I love seeing this story too with Qlik, and it's just amazing. >> I bet, Ladies, thank you so much for joining me, talking about the Snowflake-Qlik partnership, the better together power, and also, you're just scratching the surface. The future, the momentum, you can feel it. >> Yeah, I love it. >> We appreciate your insights and your time and good luck! >> Thank you, thank you. >> And let's let the girl bosses go! (laughs) >> Exactly! (laughs) For my girl boss guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'll be right back with my next guest. (bright music)

>> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>> Man Offscreen: Standby. Dave is coming you in 5, 4, 3, 2. >> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

(digital music) >> Welcome back to VeeamON 2022. We're in the home stretch, actually, Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante here. Daniel Fried is the general manager and senior vice president for EMEA and Worldwide Channel. Daniel, welcome to theCUBE. You got a big job. >> No, I don't have a big job. I have a job that I love. (chuckles) >> Yeah, a job you love. But seriously Veeam, all channel. I mean it has been. >> Yeah, I mean, it's something which just, just a few seconds on, on that piece here, the channel piece, it's something that I love because the ecosystem of partners, an ecosystem of partners, is something which is spending its time moving and developing and changing. You've got a lot of partners changing their roles, their missions, the type of services, type of product that they offer. They all adapt to what the market needs and all the markets around the world are very different because of all these different cultures, languages, and everything. So it's very interesting. In the middle of all that, you know, these tens of thousands of partners and you try to create and try to understand how you can organize, how you can make them happy. So this is fantastic. >> So you're a native of the continent in Europe, obviously. We heard Anton, today, who couldn't be here or chose not to be here, cause he's supporting family and friends in Ukraine. What's the climate like now? Can you share with us what's it like Europe? Just the overall climate and obviously the business climate. >> So the overall climate, the way I see it or I feel it, and obviously there may be some different opinions, that I will always appreciate as also very good opinions. My view is that it seems in Europe that there are a distinction between what people do for businesses, Their thinking for the business, which may be impacted by the situations that we know in Europe between, because of obviously the issues between Ukraine, because of Russia, let's put it this way. And then there is the personal view, which is okay. That happens from time to time, but life continues and we just continue pushing things and enjoying life, and getting the families together and so on and so forth. So, this is in most of the countries in Europe. Obviously, there are a number of countries, which are a little bit more sensitive, a little bit more impacted. All the ones who are next to Russia, or Belarus, so on and so forth. From an emotional standpoint, which is totally understandable. But overall, I'm pretty impressed by how the economy, how people, how the businesses are, you know, continue to thrive in Europe. >> Has Brexit had any...? What impact, if any, has it had? >> So for us Veeam, the impact is... So first there is an impact which is on the currencies. So all the European currencies are no, have slowed down and, and the US dollar is becoming much stronger. >> Despite its debt. >> Right. >> Shouldn't be, but yeah. >> But that doesn't impact on the business. I just... >> Yeah. Right. >> So everything which is economical, macroeconomical is impacted. We have the inflation also, which has an impact, which also has increased because of the oil, because of the gas of everything that they have been stuck, to be stuck. But people get used to it. As Veeam from a business standpoint, one of the big things is we stopped sales, selling into Russia and into Belarus and we are giving our technology, our product, our solutions for free to Ukraine. And that was a piece of the business that we were doing, within EMEA, which was non-neglectable. So it's, I would say a business hole, now that we need to try to fill with accelerating the business service in the other countries of Europe. >> I mean, okay. So thank you for that but we really didn't see it in last quarter's numbers that you guys shared with I mean, IBM. Similarly IBM said, it's noticeable, but it's not really a big impact on our business, but given the cultural ties that you had to Russia and the affinity, I mean you knew how to do business in Russia. It's quite remarkable that you're able to sort of power through that. How about privacy in, around data, in Europe, particularly versus the US? it seems like Europe is setting the trend on things like privacy, certainly on things like acquisitions, we saw the arm acquisition fail. >> Yeah. So there is a big difference. Effectively, there is a big difference between, I would say North America and the rest of the world. And I would say that EMEA, and within EMEA would say the EU is leading very much on what we call server sovereign cloud. So data privacy, which in other words, data is to as much as possible is to remain within either the EU or better within each of the countries, which means that there is again... It's I would say for in EMEA it's good, I would say for the business, for the partners, because then they have to develop around the cloud a number of functions to ensure that because of this data privacy, because of this GDPR or rules and things, all the data remains and resides in a given geographical environment. So it's, which is good because it creates a number of opportunities for the partners. It makes obviously the life of customers and their self a bit more difficult. But again, I think it's good. It's good. It's part of all the way we structure and we organize. And I think that it's going to expand because data is becoming so key, a key limit, a key asset of companies that we absolutely need to take care of it. And it is where Veeam plays a big role in that because we help paying companies managing their data and secure the data in sort of way. >> Yeah. Ransomware has been a big topic of conversation this week. Do you sense that the perception of that as a threat is universal? Are there, are there differences between North America and the EU and other parts of the world? Universal? >> Yeah, it is universal. We see that everywhere. And I think this is a good point, a good question too, is that it's very interesting because we need to get acquainted to the fact that we are going to ever. And so we are going to be attacked. No way out, no. There... Anybody the morning, is waking up, is going on emails and click clicking on an email. Too late. Was a run somewhere. What can you do against that? You know, all humans make mistakes. You can't so it'll happen, but where, where it's absolutely very important and where Veeam plays a big role and where our partners are going to play an even bigger role with our technology is that they can educate the customers to understand that, to have run somewhere is not an issue. What has, what happened is not a problem. What they have to do is to organize so that if they have run somewhere, their letter is safe. And this is where our place a big place. A couple hours back, I was, I was doing a kind of bar with something else. It's totally crazy, but that's okay. I'm going to say it. It's about the COVID. What, no, what do we do? Do we have, do we have something against COVID? No. People were going to get COVID, certainly many people still doing it, but what is important is to be capable of not being too sick. So it is the prevention, which is important. It's the same thing here. So there is this mindset we have psychologically with the partners and they have, they have to provide that services to their customers on how to organize their data using the technology of Veeam in order to be safe, if anything happens. >> So another related question, if I may. When Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA and divulged that the NSA was listening to all the phone calls, there was seemed to be at the time, as I recall, a backlash sentiment in Europe, particularly toward big tech and cloud providers and skepticism toward the cloud. Has the pandemic and the reliance on cloud and the rise of ransomware changed that sentiment? Had the sentiment changed before then? Obviously plenty of Cloud going on in Europe. But can you describe that dynamic? >> Yeah, no, I think that's... Yeah. I think that people were too... You know, as usual. It absolutely reminds me when I was at VMware, when we went from the physical boxes to the virtual machines. I remember the IT people in the company said, "No, I want to be capable of touching." Something here. When you talk about cloud, you talk about something which is virtual, but virtual outside, even outside somewhere. So there is a resistance, psychological resistance to where is my data? How do I control my data? And that is, I think that is very human. Then you need to, you know, it takes time. And again, depending on the cultures, you need to get acquainted to it. So that's what happened be before the pandemic, but then the pandemic took place. And then there was a big problem. There was nobody anymore in the data centers because they couldn't work there and then people were starting to, to work remotely. So the IT needed to be organized to compensate for all these different changes. And cloud was one of them where the data could be stored, where the data could reside, where things could happen. And that's how actually it has accelerated at least in a number of countries where people are a bit leg out to accept the adoption of cloud, cloud-based data. >> So is there a difference in terms of the level of domination by a small group of hyperscale clouds versus smaller service providers? You know, in theory, you have EU behaving in a unified way in sort of the same way that the United States behaves in sort of a federated way. Do you have that same level of domination or is there more, is there more market share available for smaller players in cloud? Any regional differences? >> Yeah. There are big differences. There are big differences again, because of this sovereignty, which is absolutely approved very much in Europe. I'm tell you, I'm going... I'm giving you an example that it was in, I think in October last year, somewhere. The French, the French administration said, "We don't want anymore. Any administration investing in Microsoft 365, because the data is in Azure. The data is out in the cloud." That's what they said. So now these last days, this last week that has changed because Microsoft, you know, introduced a number of technologies, data centers in France, and so on and so forth. So things are going to get better. But the sovereignty, the fact that the data, the privacy of data, everything has to remain in the countries is doing something like the technology of the hyperscalers is used locally wrapped by local companies like systematic writers, local systematic writers, to ensure that the sovereign is set and that the privacy of the data is for real and according to GDPR. So again, it's a value add. It makes things more complex. It doesn't mean that the Google, the Google cloud, the Azure, or the AWS are not going to exist in Europe, but there are going to be a number of layers between them and the customers in order to make sure that everything is totally brought up and that it complies with the EU regulations. >> Help us understand the numbers, Daniel. So the number of customers is mind-boggling it's over 400,000 now, is that right? >> Yeah. Correct. >> Yes. Comparable to VMware, which is again, pretty astounding and the partner ecosystem. Can you help us understand the scope of that? Part one. part two is how do you service and provide that partnership love to all those companies? >> The partners. So yeah, we have about 35,000 around the world, 35,000 partners, but again, it's 10 times less than Microsoft, by the way. So, and this is very interesting. I often have the questions, how do we manage? So first of all, we do tiering, like anybody does. >> Sure. >> We have an organization for that. And we have a two chair sales motion. That means that we use the distributors to take care of the mass, the volume of the smaller, smaller partners. We help the distributors, we help. So it's a leverage system. And we take care obviously more directly, of the large partners or the more complex partners or the ones of interest. But we don't want to forget any of those because even the small one is very important to us because he has these customers maybe in the middle of nowhere, but he's got a few of them. And again, to have a few of these customers, when you adapt, you know, it makes.. At the end, it makes a big business. You know, one plus one plus 1 million times makes, you know, makes huge things. And plus we are in the recurring business now, now that we've introduced three, four years ago, our subscription licenses, which means that it's only incremental. So it's just like the know the telephony, know the telephony business, where the number, the cell phone plans, you know, it's always grabbing as many as possible consumers in this case. So it was the same thing or I have the same, the same kind of, I do a parallel with the French, the French bakery, the French Boulangerie where I say they do their business with the baguette. And then from time to time, they sell the patisserie or they sell the cake, cookie or something, but the same of small things makes a big things. So it is important to have all these small partners everywhere that, that have their small customers or big customers, and that can serve them. So that's that's way. We segment by geography and what we do now is, it is something which is new. We segment by competencies. So it's what I call the soft segmentation. Because if not, we will have a lot of these partners competing to each other, just to sell Veeam. Veeam being number one in many countries, that is what is taking place. And we want them to be happy. We want, we don't want them to fight against each other. So what we do is we do soft segmentation and soft segmentation is this partner is competent in this field with that kind of use case doing this or this or this or this. It's just like you, when you go to the restaurant, you want the restaurant next to your place. So you click for the geography and then you want to, to go for Indian food. So you click restaurant Indian food, and then you want something. So we want to give that possibility to the customers to say, "Yeah, I think I know what I want." And then you can just click and get the partners or the list of partners, which are the most suited for, for his needs. So it's what I call the soft segmentation. The other thing which is important is the network. It's very interesting because when we look at a lot of companies, it's not the network. You've got VARs, you've got cloud and service providers. You've got SARs, you've got all the things. But if you take each of those individually, they don't have the competencies to answer all the request of the customer. So the networking is partnering with partner. That means to have the, the connection so that the partner A who has his customer, but these customer's are requests that this partner cannot fulfill because it's not its competency. That it's going to find the partners or the other partners that can feel this competency and work together. And then it's between them to have the model that they want so that together they can please the customer with their requests. >> Do you ever want to have VeeamON... I mean, I'm happy it's in the US and I like going to Europe, but you, have you ever want to have VeeamON in Europe? >> Yeah, we have VeeamON. We have many VeeamONs in Europe. >> Yeah. The mini ones. Okay. >> VeeamON tours. >> Globally. So where do you have them? >> Europe in APJ, that's what we do. Yes. >> Where do you do it in a APJ? In Japan, obviously in... >> Yeah. I don't know all the locations, tens and tens of them. >> A lot of them. Okay. >> The small ones. What we do, replicate what is done here on one day and then it goes. >> And you'll do that in UK. France, Germany. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Local. >> And also small countries in Saudi, in South Africa, in Israel, in Bulgaria, in all these countries. Because, you know, we can be virtual. That's nice. >> Oh, right. >> But I love to be having a breakfast or a lunch or drink next to a partner or a customer because you learn so much more. The informal information is so important to understand how the business and how the market develops and what the needs are of customers and so on and so forth. >> How was the European attendance this year? It must have been down. It's hard to get into US. It's actually easier to go back to Europe. >> Virtually I, don't have the numbers, but I- >> No. Virtual. I'm sure it was huge. Yeah. But physical. >> Physical here, we've got about 300, 300 Europeans. >> Yeah. Okay. Out of, do we know? What are the numbers here? Do we know? Have we heard numbers? >> I know 45 was supposed to be around 45K combined. >> That's hybrid. >> So, yeah. >> It's hard to get into the US. We're still figuring that out. So I'm not surprised, but now you... >> But it's complimentary. Yeah. >> Do you go to 'em all? >> No >> You can't. >> No. That's not possible. I cannot. I actually, I would love... >> But some, yes. >> I would love to be capable of duplicate myself, but- >> You go to the one. >> I'm unique. >> You go to the one in France, obviously. Yeah? >> Yeah. Usually in France. Well... >> Depends if you're home. >> Yeah. You know, that is interesting is, the way we organize, the way we organize in Europe is I really want the local leaders to be the ones managing the countries. I'm there to support. I'm not there to be, you know? Yeah. The big boss is coming, he showing. No. It is not that. Again, if they request me to come, if they want me to pass a message to certain type of customer partners, I'll do that. But I don't want to run the show. It's not the way I manage that. >> Yeah. I get that. You want to respect that as if you show up in France and that's your home country, it's like rat man showing up here. It's like taking over the stage. You'll be like, you know, it's our turn. >> But it's just like, you know, I give you another example. So obviously we have... It's even the headquarters, the EMEA headquarters is in France. Right? But it is the French office. And I don't go there. I try not to be there because it is the place for the French people taking care of the French market. And for the French manager, if I go there, everybody's going to come and ask me questions and ask me to make decisions and things. No, they have to run their business. >> So where do you spend, where and how do you spend your time? >> In airports and in planes. (indistinct) What are you asking? >> Of course. >> Do you have another question? >> Actually, if we have time really quickly on just on that subject of sovereignty, we are here in Nevada just across the border, California. People in California have no problem at all, replicating things here for disaster recovery, because it's in the US. Now, is there sort of a cultural sense that tearing down those borders from a sovereignty perspective within Europe would fundamentally change the business climate and maybe tilt things in favor of the AWS and GCPs of the world instead of local regional business? The joke that I heard recently from someone, I thought it was funny. I don't know if it would offend either Germans or French, but it was that it was that AWS was confused and they were planning on putting a data center in Strasbourg, because they thought it was in Germany and it was- >> A joke. >> But the point is, the point is it's like, it's a gum bear. >> Is it true? >> No. But it was a dumb American joke. This was told by a French person basically saying... >> But this person was certainly not from- >> Yes. Right. >> Tell you, because I would've been a very bad way. >> But the point is this idea that you have these mega hyper clouds coming in and saying, "Okay, boom, we're putting one here and you're going to use us regardless of the country you're in." How does that, you know... Is there a push within the EU to tear those barriers down? Or are those sovereignty walls enjoyed by the majority because of the way that it changes the business climate? Any thoughts from that perspective? >> Oh yeah. Yeah. To me, it's very simple. It is a hybrid thing. That means that these big hyperscalers are there, not going to be used but what they do is they're going to partition themselves and work with these local people. So that their big thing appears as being independent, smaller data centers. That's the only thing, you know. You build a house and then you put walls between the different, between the different rooms. That's the only thing that happens. So it's not at all, no. At all to Azures or Google cloud. No, it's not that. It just means that there is a structure and organization that has to be put in place in order that the data resides in given geographical locations using their infrastructures, their technologies. That make, does it make sense? >> Yeah. Except that it puts them in the position of having to have a physical presence in each place, which is advantageous in one way and maybe less efficient in another. >> Yeah. But there are some big markets. >> Yeah. And they eventually got to get there. Right. I mean... >> Yeah. >> They started it. One patient in the world where they restarted was in ANZ. And that's what they did. You know, what, 5, 6, 7 years ago. They put their data centers over there because they wanted to gain the Australian market and the New Zealand market. >> So build it and they will come. Daniel, thanks so much for coming to the theCUBE. Very interesting conversation. >> Pleasure. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we're wrapping up. Day two at VeeamON 2022. Keep it right there. Dave and I will be back right after this break. (vibrant music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference, WiDS 2022, live from Stanford Uni&versity. I'm Lisa Martin. I have a guest next here with me. Maggie Wang is here, Autonomy Engineer at Skydio. Maggie, welcome to the program. >> Thanks so much. I'm so happy to be here. >> Excited to talk to you. You are one of the event speakers, but this is your first WiDS. What's your take so far? >> I'm really excited that there's a conference dedicated to getting more women in STEM. I think it's extremely important, and I'm so happy to be here. >> Were you always interested in STEM subjects when you were growing up? >> I think I've always been drawn to STEM, but not only STEM, but I've always been interested in arts, humanities. I'm getting more interested in the science as well. And I think STEM robotics was really my way to express myself and make things move in the real world. >> Nice. So you've got interests, I was reading about you, interests in motion planning, control theory, computer vision and deep learning. Talk to me about those interests. It sounds very fascinating. >> Yeah. So I think what really drew me into robotics was just how interdisciplinary the subject is. So I think a lot goes into creating a robot. So not only is it about actually understanding where you are in the world, it's also about seeing where you are in the world. And it's so interesting, because I feel like humans, you know, we take this all for granted, but it's actually so difficult to do that in an actual robot. So I'm excited about the possibilities of robotics now and in the future. >> Lots of possibilities. And you only graduated from Harvard last May, with a Bachelor's and a Masters? >> Yeah. >> Tell me a little bit about what you studied at Harvard. >> Yeah, so I studied Physics as my undergrad degree. And that was really interesting, because I've always been interested in science. And, actually, part of what got me interested in STEM was just learning about the universe and astrophysics. And that's what gets me excited. And I think I also wanted to supplement that with computer science and building things in the real world. And so that's why I got my Masters in that. And I always knew that I wanted to kind of blend a lot of different disciplines and study them. >> There's so much benefit from blending disciplines, in terms of even the thought diversity alone, which just opens up the opportunities to be almost endless. So you graduated in May. You're now at Skydio. Autonomy Engineer. Talk to me a little bit, first of all, tell me a bit about Skydio as a company, the products, what differentiates it, and then talk to me about what you're doing there specifically. >> So Skydio is a really amazing company. I'm super-fortunate to work there. So what they do is create autonomous drones, and what differentiates them is the autonomy. So in typical drones, it's very difficult to actually make sure that it has full understanding of the environment and obstacle avoidance. So what happens is we fly these drones manually, but we aren't able to harness the full potential of these drones because of lack of autonomy. So what we do is really push into this autonomous sphere, and make sure that we're able to understand the environment. We have deep learning algorithms on the drone, and we have really good planning and controls on the drone as well. So yeah, our company basically makes the most autonomous drones in the market. >> Nice. And tell me about your role specifically. >> Yeah. So as an autonomy engineer, I write algorithms that run on the drone, which is super-exciting. I can create some algorithms and design it, and then also fly it in simulation, and then fly it in the real world. So it's just really amazing to see the things I work with actually come to life. >> And talk to me about how you got involved in WiDS. You were saying it was your first WiDS, and Margot Gerritsen found you on LinkedIn, but what are some of the things that you've heard so far? I mean, I was in one of the panels this morning before we came out to the set, and I loved how they were talking about the importance of mentors and sponsors. Talk to me about some of your mentors along the way. >> Yeah, I had so many great mentors along the way. I definitely would not be here had it not been for them. Starting from my parents, they're immigrants from China, and they inspire me in so many ways. They're very hard-working, and they always encourage me to fail, and just be courageous, and, you know, follow my passions. And I think beyond that, like in high school, I had great mentors. One was an astrophysics professor. >> Wow. >> Yeah. So it was very amazing that I was able to have these opportunities at a young age. And even in high school, I was involved in all girls robotics team. And that really opened my eyes to how technology can be used and why more women should be in STEM. And that, you know, STEM should not be only for males. And it's really important for everyone to be involved. >> It is, for so many reasons. If we look at the data, and the workforce is about 50-50, but the number of women in STEM positions is less than 25%. It's something that's new to the tech industry. What are some of the things that... Do you see that, do you feel that, or are you just really excited to be able to focus on doing the autonomous engineering that you're doing? >> Well, I think that it's kind of easy to try to separate yourself and your identity from your work, but I don't necessarily agree with that. I think you need to, as best as possible, bring yourself to the table and bring your whole identity. And I think part of growing up for me was trying to understand who I was as a woman and also as an Asian American, and try to combine all of my identities into how I bring myself to the workplace. And I think as we become more vulnerable and try to understand ourselves and express ourselves to others, we're able to build more inclusive communities, in STEM and beyond. >> I agree. Very wise words. So you're going to be talking on the career panel today. What are some of the parts of wisdom are you going to leave the audience with this afternoon? >> Well, wisdom. I think everyone should be able to know, and have intuitive understanding of what they actually bring to the table. I think so many times women shy away from bringing themselves and showing up as themselves. And I think it's really important for a woman to understand that they hold a lot of power, that they have a voice that need to be heard. And I think I just want to encourage everyone to be passionate and show up. >> Be passionate and show up. That's great advice. One of the things that was talked about this morning, and we talk about this a lot when we talk about data or data science, is the inherent bias in data. Talk to me about the importance of data in robotics. Is there bias there? How do you navigate around that? >> Yeah, there's definitely bias in robotics. There's definitely a lot of data involved in robotics. So in many cases right now in robotics, we work in specialized fields, so you can see picking robots that will pick in specific factory locations. But if you bring them to other locations, like in your garage or something, and make it clean up, it's really difficult to do so. So I think having a lot of different streams of data and having very diverse sets of data is very important. And also being able to run these in the real world I think is also super-important, and something that Skydio addresses a lot. >> So you talked about Skydio, what you guys do there, and some of the differentiators. What are some of the technical challenges that you face in trying to do what you're doing? >> Well, first of all, Skydio's trying to run everything on board on the drone. So already there's a lot of technical challenges that goes into putting everything in a small form factor and making sure that we trade off between compute and all of these different resources. And yeah, making sure that we utilize all of our resources in the best possible way. So that's definitely one challenge. And making sure that we have these trade-offs, and understand the trade-offs that we make. >> That's a good point. Talk to me about why robotics researchers and industry practitioners, what should be some of the key things that they're focusing on? >> Yeah, so I think right now, as I said, a lot of robotics is in very specialized environments, and what we're trying to do in robotics is try to expand to more complex real world applications. And I think Skydio's at the forefront of this. And trying to get these drones in all different types of locations is very difficult, because you might not have good priors, you might not have good information on your data sources. So I think, yeah, getting good, diverse data and making sure that these robots can work in multiple environments can hopefully help us in the future when we use robots. >> Right. There's got to be so many real world a applications of that. >> Yeah, for sure. >> I imagine. Definitely. So talk to me about being a female in the drone industry. What's that like? Why do you think it's important to have the female voice in mind in the drone industry? >> Well, I think first of all, I think it's kind of sad to see not many women in the drone space, because I think there's a lot of potential for drones to be used for good in all the different areas that women care about. And for instance, like climate change, there's a lot of ways that drones can help in reducing waste in many different ways. Search and rescue, for instance. Those are huge issues, and potential solutions from drones. And I think that if women understand these solutions and understand how drones can be used for good, I think we could get more women in and excited about this. >> And how do you see your role in that, in helping to get more women excited, and maybe even just aware of it as a career opportunity? >> Yeah. So I think sometimes robotics can be a very niche subject, and a lot of people get into it from gaming or other things. But I think if we come to it as a way to solve humanity's greatest problems, I think that's what really inspires me. I think that's what would inspire a lot of young women, is to see that robotics is a way to help others. And also that it may not, if we don't consciously make it so that robotics helps others, and if we don't put our voices into the table, then potentially robotics will do harm. But we need to push it into the right direction. >> Do you feel it's going in the right direction? >> Yes, I think with more conferences like this, like WiDS, I think we're going in the right direction. >> Yeah, this is a great conference. It's one of my favorite shows to host. And you know, it only started back in 2015 as a one-day technical conference. And look at it now. It's a global movement. They found you. You're now part of the community. But there's hundreds of events going on in 60 countries. You have the opportunity there to really grow your network, but also reach a much bigger audience, just based on something like what Margot Gerritsen and the team have done with WiDS. What does that mean to you? >> It means a lot. I think it's so amazing that we're able to spread the word of how technology can be used in many different fields, not just robotics, but in healthcare, in search and rescue, in environmental protection. So just seeing the power that technology can bring, and spreading that to underserved communities, not just in the United States, I love how WiDS is a global community and there's regional chapters everywhere. And I think there should be more of this global collaboration in technology. >> I agree. You know, every company these days is a technology company, or a data company, or both. You think of even your local retailer or grocery store that has to be a technology company. So for women to get involved in technology, there's so many different applications of that. It doesn't have to be just coding, for example. You're doing work with drones. There's so much potential there. I think the more that we can do events like this, and leverage platforms like theCUBE, the more we can get that word out there. >> I agree. >> So you have the career panel. And then you're also doing a tech vision talk. >> Yeah, a tech talk. >> What are some of the things you're going to talk about there? >> Yeah, so I'm going to talk about... So at the career panel, just advice in general to young people who may be as confused and starting off their career, just like I am. And at the tech talk, I'll be talking about some different aspects of Skydio, and a specific use case, which is 3D scanning any physical object and putting that into a digital model. >> Ooh, wow. Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, so 3D scan is one of our products, and it allows for us to take pictures of anything in the physical world and make sure that we can put it into a digital form. So we can create digital twins into digital form, which is very cool. >> Very cool. So we're talking any type of physical object. >> Mm hm. So if you want to inspect a building, or any crumbling infrastructure, a lot of the times right now we use helicopters, or big snooper trucks, or just things that could be expensive or potentially dangerous. Instead, we can use a drone. So this is just one example of how drones can be used to help save lives, potentially. >> Tremendous amount of opportunity that drones provide. It's very exciting. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to this year? We are very early in calendar year 2022, but what are you excited about as the year progresses? >> Hmm. What am I excited about? I think there's a lot of really interesting drone-related companies, and also a lot of robotics companies in general, a lot of startups, and there's a lot of excitement there. And I think as the robotics community grows and grows, we'll be seeing more robots in real life. And I think that's just extremely exciting to me. >> It is. And you're at the forefront of that. Maggie, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing what you're doing at Skydio, your history, your past, and what you're going to be encouraging the audience to be able to go and achieve. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much. >> All right. From Maggie Wang. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference, WiDS 2022. Stick around. I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of the Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, coming to you live from Stanford University. I'm pleased to welcome fresh from the main stage, Tina Hernandez-Boussard the Associate Professor of medicine here at Stanford. Tina, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you so much for this opportunity. I love being here and I've been coming to WIDS for many years, so it's exciting to be part of this and participate. >> It is exciting, it's one of my favorite events since I was telling you before we went live. And if you think about, they only started back in 2015. And how it's now, it was a one day technical conference and now it's this worldwide- >> It's amazing >> Phenomenon in 60 countries, and Just 200 different local events. Talk to me about, I caught part of the panel that you were on this morning. And one of the things that I love that you were talking about was mentors and sponsors. Talk to me about what you guys were talking about on the panel overall and some of who your mentors were as you came up in your career. >> Yeah, so mentorship is so important and really it makes a difference in people's careers. So I come from first generation family. No one in my family has had any higher education. So having a mentor, an academic mentor just made all the difference in the world for me. So I started undergraduate and I was immediately paired with somebody, a mentor because I was first generation. And this person, he's no longer with us today, but he believed in me and he opened doors for me. And he opened my eyes to all of these different opportunities. And having somebody who believes in you and really can help you pursue these other ideas, it's so important. And so we talked about in the panel, we talked about the importance of having a mentor but we also talked about the importance of being a mentor. And you know, helping people and students coming into the field, find that place and develop the confidence that this is for everybody. There's something for everybody here. And you've got to try, you've got to put your name out there. And having support is really important. >> Oh, it's critical. Even some interviews I was doing last week for International Women's Day which is tomorrow, I was surprised at the number of women that I talked to who said, well, I was told no, no you can't study computer science. No, you can't study physics and talking- >> This is a really difficult field, are you sure you want to pursue this? Well, yeah. You know, yeah. >> So having those mentors and that encouragement to help build that confidence from within is a game changer. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Tell me a little bit about your research. >> Yeah, so we use electronic health data, all types of different health data to really define and predict prognose healthcare outcomes. We develop AI algorithms, tools to analyze the data and we really try, and one incorporate the patient's voice in the tools we develop. And two, we try and get those back to point of care. So I think a lot of emphasis has been about model development and model performance, and we really focus on, okay, that's great but it's only useful if we can get it back to the hands of the clinician, back to the patients to really improve health outcomes. And so that's a big piece of what we do. And as part of that, understanding patient values and patient preferences is really a big, important aspect of developing optimal treatment and optimal models. >> That's good involving them in the process. How can data science promote health equity? First of all, what is health equity, and how can data science help drive it? >> So health equity is really an important topic and there's a lot of different definitions about what is health equity. Health equity, what we want is we want equal outcomes and that's not equal resources. And so a lot of times, there's this contingency behind, you know are we trying to have equal resources for every patient or is it equal outcomes? And so we really focus on equal outcomes. We want everyone to have the opportunity to have the same outcomes. So health equity requires that we really think about different populations and their different needs, different preferences, et cetera. So that's what we focus on. And so to your question about how data science can promote health equity, one of the things we've been working on is really thinking about the gold standard of clinical care which is the clinical trial, right? So a clinical trial is our gold standard for what treatments work, in what situation and for what populations. However, a lot of the clinical trials are developed in a non-represented population, right? So we have to have patients who can come into the care setting at multiple times during a period, they can't have particular diseases, They can't, you know, for example, in one particular trial we were looking at, they had to have a specific BMI, they couldn't have diabetes they couldn't have all of these other healthcare conditions which at the end of the day it doesn't really represent the community at risk. And so when we develop these models using clinical trial data, a lot of times it's not generalizable to routine care. And so AI can really help that. AI can help us understand, how we can better identify patients to include in trials, what patients are going to be more likely to complete the trials. And so there's a lot of opportunity there to think about how we diversify clinical trials and also how we can start thinking stimulating and doing pragmatic clinical trials if we don't have enough data to represent certain populations. >> Right, one of the, the exciting things about data science is all the things that it's informing. It's also, there's pros and cons. >> Absolutely, right. >> But when we talk about AI, we always talk about ethics. How is it being used in healthcare? How are you seeing it being used? Ethically and effectively in healthcare to really turn the table on some of those biases... >> Exactly. >> To your point, weren't representing some of the most vulnerable part of the community. >> Right. And I think we've been taking this holistic approach of the AI life cycle. So not just focusing on the data we capture, but the whole life cycle. So what does that mean? That means, you know where's the data coming from, who's capturing it, and in what setting, right. If we're only looking at the healthcare setting, well, we're missing another large population. It is only collected via a mobile device. There's another population we're missing. So thinking about where the data's coming from, and then thinking about who it represents and who's missing from that. The next step is really thinking about the questions we're asking. I'll give you a good example. We can ask, you know, can I use AI to predict a no-show appointment? Or can I use AI to identify barriers for this patient to access care? So really even thinking about how we can flip that question to make it more equitable, make it more diverse is really important. And then there's been a lot of work in model development and algorithm fairness, and so there's a lot of research on that. But then there's another piece that we don't really see a lot on, and that's model deployment. So what are the biases when you introduce this into the healthcare system? The clinicians, how do they understand the data we're giving them, the tools. How do they use that to make clinical decisions? And then also, what systems can actually deploy these AI algorithms because they're very resource intensive. So we think about the AI and equity along all of those aspects of the AI life cycle. And it really helps us get a more holistic view because each of these components intersects. >> They do, you're right. Tell me, I'm curious a little bit about your background. You are associate professor of medicine here at Stanford. Give the audience an overview of the path that you took to get where you are. >> Yeah, so not a straight path, which is often typical that we're hearing today. So I started getting a Master's in Epidemiology and Public Health. And from there, I was like, you know, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I applied to medical school, but I'm like, I'm not sure that's what I want to do. So I went and got a PhD in Computational Biology. I'm always data savvy. And so thinking about how I could use data and I was interested in healthcare. And so I got my PhD in Computational Biology. And from there, I was thinking about, well, I was really interested in the application of data science to the healthcare field. So then I got a Master's in Health Services Research. So it's the combination of all these different degrees that make me really have, I think, a diverse view. I really understand the need for multidisciplinary teams and how we need opinions and viewpoints from so many different disciplines to really create something that's equitable and fair and something that is feasible and usable. >> Thought diversity is so important. >> Oh, it is. >> In every aspect of life, whether we're talking about business life, personal life and without it, there's bias. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And so we see this, we'll have a clinician maybe come to us with a question and then we'll have, you know the health economists think about it. We'll have the other people think about it. And we kind of work it and we massage it to get to something that's meaningful and something that we can really use that's going to change care for patients or particular patients. And so it really important to have that diversity. >> Absolutely, talk to me about your team that you're working with. >> Yeah, so my team is very diverse and I'm very proud of that. We have diversity across every aspect. So we have racial-ethnic diversity. We're probably about 80% female on my team. And so interestingly, one of my members was like, wow, I didn't realize I'm such a minority on your team. It was a male. And so I'm like, and I'm very proud of that. But we also have very diverse disciplines. So we have a lot of medical students, medical faculty we have computer scientists, engineers, epidemiologists, health policy experts. And so it's very, very diverse. And what I like to do is I like to pair people up in teams. So I might put a health economist with a computer scientist and watch them go. And it's just amazing how they can learn from each other and the directions they go in. It's just, it's really incredible. >> Well, and the opportunities that that interdisciplinary relationship builds I mean, opportunities and possibilities must be endless. >> Yeah, and it also allows students to understand how to speak to different groups because we don't speak the same language, we really don't. And equity is a good example. So equity to me might have a certain meaning, but equity to the health policy expert might have a different meaning. And so even understanding how we speak to other groups is so important and being able to translate something in a simple language that other people get is really key. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, now here we are, tomorrow was International Women's Day- >> Exciting. >> It is exciting and Women's History Month, we get a whole month to ourselves, which is fantastic. But one of the things, you know, when we look at the at the data, the workforce 50- 50 males to females, but the STEM positions are still so low, right? Below 25%. Are you seeing, obviously WIDS is a positive step in that direction to start shifting that. But what do you tell the younger set in terms of- >> Yeah, it is a challenge. It is a challenge to really, and this is the example I always give. As a woman, we've all walked into these rooms that are all male. >> Lisa: Oh, yes. >> We've all walked into these rooms where you're sitting at the table. Oh, can you take notes? And it's hard, it's really hard. But you know what, it takes courage. So again, that mentorship being able to speak up, being able to set your place at that table I think is really important. And we're doing better. We're doing better. But it really is through consistent mentorship, consistent confidence building, et cetera. >> It is. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And this, this event is fantastic for that. It's going to reach about 100,000 people annually. >> Amazing. >> Yeah. Men and women of all, of all ages, of all different career backgrounds, which is fantastic. But the International Women's Day theme tomorrow, is "Breaking the Bias." Hashtag breaking the bias. Where do you think we are on that? >> I think we have a lot of ways to go. And so there's bias in our teams, there's bias in the way we think, there's bias in our data. And there's been a lot of publicity and hype about the bias in the data. And it is so true and certainly in healthcare systems. And, you know, it's important to understand that when we're developing AI and all these machine learning or data-driven models, they learn from the data we give it. So if we're giving it a biased data sample, or an unrepresented data sample, it's going to learnt those characteristics. And so I think it's important that we think about, you know how do we do a better job at capturing data, diversity, voices from different populations? And it's not just using the same tools and technology we have today and going to another community and saying, okay, here's what I have. You know, it's not working that way. So I think we need to think outside of the box. To think how do these people want to communicate with us? How do they want to share our data? It's about trust too, because trust is a big issue with that. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there to just further develop that. Do you think there really is going to be such a thing one of these days of an a non-biased unbiased set of data? >> I don't think so. I don't think so because the more we dig, the more biases we find and while we're making great strides in race and ethnicity, diversity in our data sets, there's other biases. You know, male, female, age biases, disease biases, et cetera. So just the more we dig into this, the more we identify. But it's great because when we find these gaps in our data or gaps, we take steps to address that and to mitigate those biases. So we're, we're moving in the right direction for sure putting the spotlight on it and being transparent about it, I think is key to move forward. >> I agree that transparency is critical. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And, you know, we often say she can't be what she can't see. Right, and so from a transparency perspective in data and also in the visibility of the leaders and the mentors and the sponsors, that transparency is table stakes. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we hopefully move out of the pandemic and to the end- I can imagine with the Masters in public health you have in MPH. Yes, your prospect must be so interesting on living through it during the pandemic. >> It is, and, and it's interesting because we've gone through the pandemic and now it's turning into this endemic, right? And so how do we deal with that? And one of the things I think that is really important is we find way to still meet and collaborate face to face, share ideas. This conference is amazing where we can share ideas, we can meet new people, we can learn new perspectives and being able to continue to do that is so important. I think that during the pandemic, we really took a big hit in the transfer of learning in our labs and in our teams. And now it's funny because my team they're like let's go to lunch, let's do a happy hour. Let's, you know, they just want that social interaction. And it's more to better understand the perspectives of where they're coming from with their questions, better understanding of the skills they bring to the table. But it's just this wonderful opportunity to think about how we move forward now in our new world, right? >> Yes. We're getting there slowly, but surely. Well, Tina, thank you for joining me talking about your role, what you're doing, the importance of mentors and sponsors, and the opportunity for data science in healthcare. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. >> You're welcome. >> Excellent. >> Thank you, For Tina Hernandez-Boussard, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Women In Data Science Worldwide Conference 2022. Stick around, my next guest will join me shortly. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is here, live at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. theCUBE has two sets today, two, not one, two, two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program at this event, it's a lot, talking about the next generation of cloud innovation with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners and we are pleased to welcome Walton Smith to the program, the public sector, director of strategic partnerships for Worldwide Technology, Walton welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's really amazing to be here and look forward to a great conversation. Isn't it great to be in person again? >> It's so nice to be in person, I mean I'm glad everybody's being safe and, and checking vaccine status and whatnot, but it's good to get back and, and, and work with people cause we can really drive innovation when, when we get together. >> Those hallway conversations or those conversations here at events that you just can't replicate by video conferencing, right? Not replicate that, you getting grabbed in the hall and say, hey, have you thought about leveraging XYZ to do something? To me that's what makes this conference great. >> Talk to me about what's going on at WWT. What are some of the, the things that you guys have been working on? >> It's a really exciting time at Worldwide, we're really working closely with AWS to drive innovation to the edge. We're excited about their outpost offering, we actually have one in our data center, Sandy announced it today in a partnership with Intel to, to allow our customers to try to work out use cases, to, to kick the tires, so to speak, to see how it works as well as our partners to get their ISV products certified on the outpost platform. >> So I'm familiar with your ATC in St. Louis, is that what you're referring to? >> That's correct. >> Give us a little, give us a little insight into what goes on there, I know it's pretty amazing from a customer perspective because you are agnostic. because you are agnostic. >> Walton: Correct. >> You're there to serve the customer, but tell me, tell me what happens in the ATC. >> We say we're agnostic, but we have our, our, our preferences because we know- >> sure, sure, okay. what actually works. But our ATC is our crown jewel, it's about a $600 million data center that we built solely for proof of concepts for our customers. So our, our top customers come in and say, I have this problem, how can I solve it? And so with us being the single biggest reseller of just about every ISV is out there, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, Dell compute next to NetApp storage with Cisco router on top of it to replicate what my customer has at the VA, for example, and then to be able to plug in an outpost to show how leveraging the outpost can give them a single pane of glass to be able to work on their workload, so the training that our FSI, Federal System Integrators have put into their staff or our government customers on the Amazon platform can now be driven into their data center, so it's really taking the cloud down to where the data is. >> In terms of public sector, what are some of the prominent use cases that you guys are helping customers to solve, especially given the tumultuous times that we're still living in? Sure, so what we saw during COVID especially was how most of the government agencies had the capability to allow say 5% to 10% of their workforce to work remotely. And then with COVID, they went to 95% to a 100% workforce. So, a lot of the time we've spent over the last year is how do we securely allow our government employees to get access to the information, because as we know, the government was more valuable than ever to get us through this pandemic, we had to give them the tools that they needed to be able to make the decisions to, to move the country forward. >> Talk about security if you will for a second, we have seen such a dramatic change in the security landscape, the threat landscape, ransomware as a service, it's, you know, the cyber criminals, lot of money in it, they're becoming far more brazen. What are some of the things that you're seeing specifically with respect to security use cases? >> It's, it's gone from, let me just buy everything that's out there and that'll give me security to, I need to have visibility into my environment, because if, if you look at target, it's a great case studies around that, they had all the tools, they just didn't tie it all together. And so as more and more nation state actors And so as more and more nation state actors try to attack our government, or it's a great way to make money, I mean, in, in this, in the presentation, Sandy's today, they talked about, if you looked at the GDP of what's been taken in ransomware, it's like the 10th biggest country in the world, I mean, it's scary and staggering how much money is lost. So what we think, going back to our ATC, we can stand up their environment, we can work with the top security providers in the world to show those customers how we can give them that visibility, the, the, the protection and the ability to get back up, because there's really only two types of organizations, those who've been hacked and those who don't know they've been hacked, they're going to get in, it's how do we mitigate the damage, how do we get them back up and running and how we protect my customers or have some of the most sensitive data in the world, how do we protect that so our government can keep us safe and keep us moving forward. >> Yeah, cause these days it's a matter of when we get hacked, not if. And of course we are only hearing about the large attacks. >> Walton: Correct. We don't hear about- all of the ones that go on day in and day out, I think, I think I saw a stat recently that a ransomware attack happens like once every 11 seconds. >> Correct, I mean, just walking through here, how many text messages you've gotten? You want a free iPad click here, I mean, they're, they're down to the individual level. It's a whole lot cheaper to give a couple people, really powerful laptops, pizza and beer, and have them go attack, than it is to, to set up a real business and so, unfortunately, as long as there's money in it, there's going to be bad actors out there. We think partnering with AWS and other partners can help build solutions. >> You know, WWT has had an interesting history because you didn't start with the dawn of cloud. >> Walton: Right. So you've been in the business of AT for a long time So you've been in the business of AT for a long time and logistics out of St. Louis in a lot of ways. What does that look like in terms of navigating that divide? You know, there's a, there's a whole storied history of companies that were not able to cross the divide from the mainframe era to the client server era, let alone to cloud. You seem to have, you seem to be doing that pretty well. >> I, I appreciate that, I mean, we're the biggest company no one's ever heard of. We're 14, $15 billion privately held firm, the same two guys that founded it, still run it today and all they want to do is do cool things, they want it to be truly the best place to work. So from day one, they've invested in training our staff, building the ATC to give us the tools we need to be successful and then because we're a trusted partner with Amazon Intel and our other partners out there, they're investing in us to help build solutions, so we have over 6,000 engineers, they get up every day, how do I build something that can help our customers really drive change and innovation? So it's been a really fun ride and the, the best is yet to come. >> Talk to me about your customer focus, you know, when we talk, here we are at reinvent, we always talk with AWS about their, you know, Dave, we talked about this customer obsession, the fact that they're working backwards from the customer, do you share that sort of philosophy? Does WWT share that philosophy with AWS? >> 100%?, if you go to WWT.com we've published everything that we have so you can get full access to our lab to learn about x ISV and go deep to learn about x ISV and go deep and see the million and a half labs we've built around, say Red Hat and go and get access to it. So we think that if we educate our customers, there are going to be customers for life, and they're going to come to us with their biggest problems. And that what's, is what's exciting and what enables us to, to really continue to grow. >> And how did the customers help you innovate? And that's one of the things we, I was thinking yesterday with, with this AWS flywheel of when Adam was introducing, and now we have a, now we have, and it was because he would say, we did this, but you needed more, but you being the customer needed more. >> 100%, it, it's we want our customers to come to us with their biggest problems, because that's when we, the exciting innovation works. And so the ability to sit down with the foremost expert in, in virus control and be able to, in, in virus control and be able to, what are the tools that she need to be able to get ahead of the next change to COVID? How can we give them the tools to do that? That's what we want to do, the scalability, the ability to reach out to others is what Amazon brings. So we can bring the data science, we can bring the understanding of the storage, the security, and the network and then AWS gives that limitless scalability to solve those problems and to bring in someone from Africa, to bring in someone from the European Union to, to work together to solve those problems, that's what's, what's exciting and then coming back to the outpost, to be able to put that in the data center, we know the data center is better than just about anybody out there, so it would be the ability to add innovation to them, to bring those part ISV partners together. It's really exciting that Intel is funding it because they know that if, if customers can see the art of the possible, they're going to push that innovation. >> One of the things we've also sort of thematically Dave and I with guests, and the other has been talking about this week is that every company has to be a data company, whether it's public sector, private sector, if you're not, or if you're not on your way, there's a competitor right here in the rear view mirror ready to take your place. How do you help public sector organizations really develop, embrace an execute a data full course strategy? >> So we have a cadre of over 125 data scientists that work every day to help organizations unlock their most valuable asset, that data, their people and be able to put the data in the right place at the right time and so by investing in those data scientists, investing in the networking folks to be able to look at the holistic picture is how we can bring those solutions to our customers, because the data is the new oil of, of the environment and sorry for my Southern twang on the oil, but it, but it truly is the most valuable asset they have and so, how do we unlock that? How do they pull that data together, secure it? Because now that you're aggregating all that data, you're making it a treasure trove for those bad actors that are out there, so you've got to secure it, but then to be able to learn and, and automate based on, on what you learned from that data. >> You know I, I think with hindsight, it's easy to, it's easy to say, well, of course WWT is where WWT is today. Five years ago, though, I think it would have been an honest question to ask, how are you going to survive in the world of cloud? And here we are, you've got outposts. >> Walton: Sure. >> And, and of course it makes sense because you're focused on customers, sounds like I'm doing a commercial for you, But I'm a fan- >> I'll gladly apreciate that- because I, I, I've worked with you guys in a variety of roles for a long time, seems like yesterday we were testing a bunch of different storage arrays of the ATC and now you've got outposts in cloud and you're integrating it together. It's really more of the same, I'm sure if we had your founders here, they'd tell you, Dave, it's all the same. >> Walton: Correct. It's all the same. >> It's AT, it's where, where's the compute, where's the storage, how do you get access to it and the cloud has given the ability to, to scale and do things you could never imagine. I think it's the reason we're here is because our leadership continues to invest and pushing that envelope to give people the freedom to go out with that crazy idea, what if we did this? And having the tools and the ability to do that is, is what, what drives our innovation and that's what we bring to our customers and our partners, that ability to innovate to, that ability to innovate to, to tackle that next problem. >> So what's the tip of the spear right now for you guys? What are you, what's, what's, what's kind of, what's next? What are you waiting to have delivered to the ATC to racket, stack and cable up? >> Lot's of stuff that I can't tell you about because there, there's things that Amazon is, is always working on that we work with before it, it's, it's made public, so there's a lot of really cool stuff in the pipeline, because the, as you think about moving to the data center, that's one thing, moving to truly to the edge, where you can help that war fighter, where you can help that mission, where you can do disaster recovery, leveraging the snowball family, the outpost family, and custom built tools that really allow for quick response and custom built tools that really allow for quick response to whatever that problem is, is that next front and that's where we've been for a long time, helping our, our war fighters and folks do what needs to be done. Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS to build the models, push it down to the edge because you don't have time or the bandwidth to get it back into the big cloud, to be able to put that compute and storage and analytics on the edge to make real time decisions, is what we have to do to stay relevant and that's where the joint partnership is really exciting. >> It's what you have to do to stay relevant, it's also what your customers need, cause one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that real-time data and access to it is no longer, longer a nice to have, this is business critical for everything. >> Correct and even if you have a fat pipe to get it, you need to make real time decisions and if you're in a really sandy space, excuse me, making hard decisions, you've got to get the best information to that soldier when, when they need it to, to save our lives or to save the other people's lives so it's, it's, it's not just a nice to have, it's mission critical. >> It is mission critical, Walton, thank you so much, we're out of time, but thank you for joining Dave and me talking about- >> Really enjoyed it. all the stuff going on with, with worldwide, the partnership with AWS, how you're helping really transform the public sector, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much, have a great conference. >> Thanks, you too. >> Okay, thanks. >> All right, from my buddy, Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. 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(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMB customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)